Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The day (uh, "logical Monday", which in this case is from whenever I got up Monday morning through about ten minutes from now when I try again to go to sleep) has been a mixed bag. Made some major progress on a work assignment. (Need my boss to answer a couple of questions before I can do the next bit.) Got sleepy and tried to go to sleep but leg pain kept waking me -- eventually realized it wasn't just cramps/restless-leg that magnesium would help, and that my calf muscles were messed up in a different way, so I gave up and took serious pain meds. I'd really been hoping to do two days in a row without using those. (Not just my usual drug stubborness -- I'm worried about running out before I can come up with money to pay my HMO premium, and not being able to get a refill.) But knocking the pain down a notch made me feel more alert, so instead of sleeping, I got a bunch of work done. Unfortunately I spent a lot of the working time waiting for my computer to scroll, echo what I typed, switch windows, etc. Either Opera or Windows NT is really bad at garbage collection -- even after I closed nearly all my browser windows and every other application, physical RAM was maxed out and the swap drive was thrashing. Not one of my favourite sounds. Took me more than an hour to save enough of the state of my desktop to be able to reboot without losing track of what I'd been doing. This is what I get for letting the BoyGeorge (the NT box) run more than two days without a reboot. (RuPaul, the 95 machine, doesn't seem to have that problem. And the Linux and UNIX machines, of course, are quite happy with long uptimes.)

I've got a big drip coffeemaker, a tiny drip coffeemaker, and a single-cup filter holder. Usually when I make coffee, I make a single cup at a time -- the tiny coffeemaker (nominally a 4-cup one) only makes a smidgen more than two of the size of coffee mug I usually use, and if I don't drink the second one right away, evaporation does nasty things to it very quickly. The large coffeemaker makes more coffee than I usually drink in a day even when I'm in a coffee mood, and once it gets below about half-full, evaporation speeds up in that one too. And if I turn off either coffeemaker, the coffee cools right quick (and never tastes quite right if I microwave it). Well my youngest brother gave me a pump-thermos for Christmas and suggested it'd help with my coffee problem.

Today I drank rather a lot of (decaf) coffee. I took the thermos and small jars containing milk and sugar, and put them in the office. I knew a decent vacuum-bottle thermos would keep hot things hot longer than the ones I had in school as a child, but I didn't realize just how well a good one works. After eight hours, the coffee was a little cooler than when I filled the thermos, but it was still steaming hot. And the pump design is really convenient. It was nice not having to run downstairs to the kitchen when I wanted a refill, and not having to brew a cup from scratch each time or drink another cup before I really wanted it to keep it from getting ruined. The pump thermos is a big win.

Another minus: I found something I'd forgotten to deal with which needed to be done about three weeks ago; not sure whether it's too late or not. Another plus: between having the cassette deck, and the radio behaving itself unusually well, I had a good mix of music to listen to without having to pull my head out of what else I was doing to swap CDs in and out. When the CDs or tape ran out, I just flipped to the radio until I felt like managing media again. And it's quicker to flip a tape into the player than to deal with unloading and reloading the CD changer and making sure the CDs I take out get back into the right cases.

I also tried recording some guitar onto RuPaul. Since I haven't gotten around to finding mixing/editing software, all I've got is the barebones Sound Recorder program that I found in the Multimedia folder of my Start menu when the OS was installed. It did occur to me that I can ping-pong between the computer and the cassette deck and build things up a track at a time. It won't leave me any room for changing my mind about the mix, but it might let me put together trial versions of some ideas I've got, or a "this is sort of how it's supposed to sound" copies of some of my songs to put on the web. I'll play with it more when I have more free time.

Like I said, a mixed bag. I still haven't started catching up on other folks' posts that I want to comment on (and at this rate everyone but me will have forgotten them by the time I do comment) or replies to comments other people have made to some of my posts. I tossed out a couple of comments that popped out quickly, but there's still a huge list of ones that I want to have time to really think about when I write them. But I did toss a few more URLs into the editor buffer where my next "link sausage" post is accumulating.