Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'm not sure what kind of shape my body will be in for the next day or two or three. Remember that I'm not working full-time because my body won't handle it with the fibromyalgia -- so even a mere eight hours is a LONG DAY for D'Glenn; something to pay off in pain afterwards. So keep that in mind as I take you through this mess that has so far been twenty hours without any real downtime...

Okay, so I had a long and frustrating day. First there was the complete change of plans because I spent the day getting details sorted out for stuff I had to do, followed by driving off into rush hour, as described in my last entry. (That entry was posted at the seven hour mark, after a night of only four hours of sleep, so even though I hadn't left the house yet, I was already feeling it when I made that post.) I was supposed to get hugs and massage and conversation; instead I was playing phone-tag and waiting for email and printing stuff out. Well I did get an address for the second radio station, but the person answering phones had no idea how to give directions for someone coming from Baltimore. (Note that there are exits from the Baltimore Beltway labelled "Glen Burnie", so it's not like I was asking how to get there from Richmond or Frederick -- I just wanted to know where to go after taking one of the Glen Burnie exits.) Fortunately, I had a road atlas, and thus a clue. Well, as it turns out, two thirds of a clue. For some reason I was not able to get MapQuest (which is usually quite useful) to load in my browser before leaving. Harumph!

Well, I found out that there are two 8th Avenues in Glen Burnie, not that this important detail was mentioned before I'd gotten lost once. And I found out that the building numbers on the correct 8th Avenue are not arranged in any sane pattern! I found numbers higher and lower than the one I was looking for, and evens and odds traded sides of the street willy-nilly, but I couldn't find the number I sought. I was running out of time to get to the other radio station, so I bailed on Glen Burnie and skedaddled to Annapolis. I'm still a little confused by some of the roads that changed after I graduated high school, but once I got far enough out along Forest Drive, it started looking familiar again.

I made it to radio station in Annapolis, then (silly me) I decided to run back to Glen Burnie instead of going directly to Bowie. I finally found the place -- it was not between the lower numbers and the higher numbers, and it's invisible from the road if you're moving more than about five miles per hour -- you have to be perfectly lined up with a long downhill driveway, and looking hard left as you pass it.

Then I did aim for Bowie, to help my brother as he'd asked. Except that just before I got to Crofton, Route 3 stopped. Then it inched forward a few feet at a time for a [expletive]ing hour until I managed to get to an intersection I could use to get around the stoppage. (Accident investigation. I understand why the road had to be closed. I'm not criticizing, but boy am I going to whine.) So I finally made it to Bowie about the time I should have been at rehearsal in Silver Spring. But I figured I had to pass Mom's house anyhow, I really needed to get Out Of The Car for a little while, I was hoping to raid the fridge just a little bit, and helping my brother right then meant I didn't have to put on boyclothes again for a second trip over there right away.

I was somewhat less helpful than I think either of us would've liked, but I hope I was helpful enough. Mom was on the phone the whole time, so I didn't get to talk to her, but she did indicate that she'd left me a check to help with bills. (I hadn't expected that, since I had no idea whether she'd seen the email I'd sent earlier yet.) I did nibble some feta cheese and orange juice, but not enough to convince my body it was a meal. Then it was time to try to make it to the last third of rehearsal.

My [expletive] car started flaking out. Every so often the "Check Engine" light would come on and the car would hiccup. Past experience with this problem has taught me that if I fail to keep the RPMs high enough, it'll die. So I got on Route 50, extricated myself from an annoying pack, and put the hammer down so as to keep going at all. Almost immediately, somebody in a Large Sedan started tailgating me. Turned out to be an unmarked police car. (Why tailgating, dammit? Yeah, the cops are well trained and well practiced, but physics is still physics, and neurology is still neurology, and eight feet is too damned close at ninety bleeping miles per hour! A one-second following distance -- still tailgating but not as dangerous as eight feet -- would have gotten my attention every bit as effectively without making me fear that braking to maintain the two+ second distance in front of me would result in the destruction of my guitar in the trunk.) I got out of the way, he went past and then slowed to pace me at a bit under eighty for a while, just to make sure I Got The Point, while I waited for him to actually pass me so I could get over to the shoulder, since slowing down had shot any chance I'd had of making it to Silver Spring without having to pop the hood and jiggle wires. So much for making decent time on the Bowie to Silver Spring leg of today's too-long journey.

I had to stop two more times to poke at the wires that go through the fan cowling in before I made it to Silver Spring. And I had to dodge really annoying people to get off the (Washington) Beltway. ("Get out of my way!" is impatience and egotism. "Please don't do something stupid in front of / next to me!" is more of a prayer for safety. These folks, well it was almost as though they were trying to make it difficult.) At least I could back off on the gas pedal a bit once I'd finally gotten my car's electrical system to behave so that I only had my being in a hurry to deal with rather than the peculiarities of keeping my engine running.

I got to rehearsal an hour and forty five minutes into a two hour rehearsal. Played two sets. (Butterfly / Foxhunter's Jig / Foxhunter's Reel, and Nine Points of Roguery / The Gravel Walk / The High Reel.) Had to fumble a bit to remember the right chord progressions. (Gee, did we miss that many rehearsals in a row due to weather?) Fortunately I remembered just in time that I start Butterfly on melody (doubling the dulcimer) nowadays, instead of chords. (I switch to chords partway through Foxhunter's Jig.) My fingers like that tune, but I need to practice more to make sure I don't miss any opportunities to let an open string keep ringing, something I've been working on since Jim opened my eyes to how effective that is in that tune. As folks packed up, we discussed the scheduling of a television appearance. I got more details about the radio stations I'd dropped off CDs and info sheets at. Jim gave me some fruit juice and a banana, which I greatly appreciated. Felicia gave me demo CDs (just four of the tracks from Spinning Reels, full contact information in the insert and on the label, black and white photo of the band on the cover ... y'know, demos) that I need to deliver to the Baltimore World Trade Center in the morning. (Yes, the building I got detained for not quite taking a picture of (the builiding is to the right of the photo), where The Homespun Ceilidh Band is performing on the 15th.) Playing for fifteen minutes wasn't a big enough deal to warrant all the extra trouble it took to get there, but I needed to pick up those demo CDs.

Then it was a dash from inside-the-Beltway Silver Spring, through outside-the-beltway Silver Spring, to Wheaton. Managed (with some backtracking) to remember how to get to the current LUMSFS restaurant so I could hand off a stack of CDs (Spinning Reels, not the demos) to be sold on consignment at Blue Moon. I got there before the person I needed to see had left. *whew* Then to one of my credit union's ATMs to deposit Mom's check so I can go downtown tomorrow and pay my BGE bill so that my electricity doesn't get cut off...

...and to get sideswiped by a pickup truck on the way there. Oooh, a whole post-of-its-own worth of story right there, but here's the quick synopsis: heading down US 1 at a sane speed (Really Fast is for controlled-access highways, not places with sidewalks and traffic lights) when a pickup on a cross street made a left turn across the center left-turn lane and plopped into my lane Way Too Close to my front bumper; I quickly switched lanes to avoid rear-ending him, and he started pulling into the right lane while I was beside him. I braked and beeped at the same time, clipped the curb with my tires, and simultaneously got a nudge from the truck just before he jerked back into his own lane. Figured we should check for damage and exchange information, and he pulled in behind me, so I turned into a parking lot ... and he kept on going. I got back on Route 1 to give chase, and he was doing weave-in-and-out in-a-hurry dodge-em stuff, so I thought he was trying to lose me. Fortunately those techniques don't buy you that much advantage over responsible driving in the kind of traffic that was in College Park at 23:00, so I found him in a parking lot, diagonally across two spaces in front of a drug store. Jotted down the tag number and the name of the company on the door. Noticed that my side-view mirror was askew (it looked broken but it turned out to have been saved by the "people might bump into this so we'll design it to move funny if that happens" feature that ToyAuto Toyota had included, but it does indicate that I didn't imagine the contact). Wasn't sure whether the scratches on my rear left door were fresh or not. Didn't see anything worth Making A Fuss about, but was pretty pissed off at the "fleeing the scene" bit. Driver came out and got in the truck apparently not even seeing me standing there, so I knocked on his window. He had no clue we'd bumped, and only knew I'd ever been in that lane because he heard my horn. He was very apologetic, but I'm not entirely certain he was exactly sober. *sigh* So not much to report in the drama & damage department, but still a fair heart-stopping moment followed by annoyance.

Now the events of the morning and afternoon had pretty much drained my prepaid-cellular airtime, so I stopped at a Seven-Eleven to buy more minutes after I deposited the check from Mom. The cashier was confused about what I was asking for, but he did bring over a Verizon FreeUp thingie, which I pointed to and told him how much I wanted to buy. He had to call over someone else to make sense of the instructions on the machine, but eventually was able to take my money and hand me the card, which I stuffed in my wallet so I could go home.

Figured all I had left was to 1) buy gas, 2) unload the car, 3) pay the most urgent of my overdue bills, 4) check my email, and 5) fall over (in bed), hoping to somehow be well enough in the morning to drive to Arlington. I did more than half of those, butt now comes the curseworthy part:

I was about to crawl into bed, when I pulled the card out of my wallet to remind me to deal with adding the airtime to my account in the morning. I glanced at the back and it looked wrong. I looked closer...

They'd handed me a goddamned Seven-Eleven PREPAID LONG DISTANCE card instead of a Verizon prepaid cellular card!!! So now my phone is almost out of airtime, and I have to deal with trying to convince them to exchange a very expensive thing that I cannot use for the expensive thing I actually need, and I have no idea whether they have any way to verify that I haven't used the card yet so that it can be returned. Even with the money from Mom, I cannot fucking afford to have $50 go *poof* because of a fucking stupid mistake (They Showed Me The VERIZON Selection And I Pointed Out Exactly What I Wanted And Then They Gave Me Something Completely Different And I Am Tired And Frustrated Enough That I Am Not In The Mood To Be Charitable About It) that I failed to catch at the register because of the Long, Tiring, Crappy Day that I have had.

And that is what got me so upset that I had to go back to the computer and get it off my chest before I can get that much needed sleep I've been wanting since [expletive]ing NOON.

Right now I don't care whether anybody else had an even worse day that should give me Perspective -- my day was Bad Enough, and I bleeping well get to whine about it!