Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

... At least I hope it's all the excitement for the day.

I'd been taking care of some photography-related record-keeping, printing out next month's DayRunner pages, assembling the next chunk of link sausage, and checking email, and getting slower and slower at everything I was doing, so I figured it was time to crawl into bed. Then I heard a loud thumpy noise, loud voices, and lots of loud footsteps. I thought someone was running up the fire escape next door, so I went for my phone and a window. (Just as anniemal was calling me, so I hit "ignore" and made a mental note to call her back when the fuss was over.) Didn't see anyone but did hear voices; couldn't get an accurate direction on the voices, so I figured I'd poke my head out the back door, and if the voices still sounded like they were coming from the boarded-up house, I'd call 911. Grabbed a camera because there was a loaded one between me and the kitchen. Heard the helicopter go overhead while I walked through the dining room.

Opened the door, phone in hand, to find two uniformed cops, two or three plainclothes cops, and a guy being handcuffed, in the middle of my back yard.

After they hauled the guy off, they spent a while kicking at the weeds and trying to see the ground. I offered them my weed-cutter ("blade on a stick") if it'd help their search, for whatever the suspect had thrown/dropped, and they did swipe at an area before dropping the tool on the porch and leaving. I went out to see whether the gate (which had been locked) was damaged. To get there, I had to hack at the weeds covering the steps. The tongue of the latch is severely bent -- I can get it to sort of latch, but not securely, and it's too stiff to straighten by hand, so I'll take a hammer to it later.

On the way back in, I noticed that one of the weeds had a curious, bright purple pattern on its leaves. I looked closer and realized it was blood. The parts that were still red made such an interesting colour composition with the green, that I had to go get the camera again, and a macro lens, and shoot several frames. Is that morbid? The big round droplets that still had volume and shinyness were so pretty, despite the cultural-voice repeating, "Dude, that's blood, you're not supposed to think it's cool," in my skull. The way the surface tension molded a side of a drop to the curl of the edge of a leaf was cool. Too bad I didn't have any right in a bright sunbeam.

Now I need to try that "going to bed" trick again. May or may not show up at 3LF rehearsal tonight, depending on whether or not I sleep.

The "not right here" excitement in Baltimore this morning is a) a major chain-reaction accident involving a dump druck, a semi, and at least one car, closing three lanes of the beltway at Catonsville (three people taken to hospitals, two to shock/trauma, "none life threatening" according to the telly); and b) a bus full of school kids on their way from Martinsburg to DC for a field trip overturned on I-70 after the bus swerved to avoid a car that had swerved to avoid a gas can that had fallen off the back of a pickup truck (driver and one student treated and released; nobody else hurt; probably a whole lot of parents absolutely scared shitless when they first heard about it). They're talking about what to charge the driver of the pickup truck with if they find him.

Right. Sleep.