Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

As long as I'm up ... Some recent day-to-day stuff:

Last Sunday I didn't do very much -- watched the Baltimore Ravens on television, filled out that regional English meme, and moaned about how badly my right elbow hurt (which it still does).

Monday I got to see anniemal. We'd been meaning to get together since before Samhain, but one thing after another got in the way. My not having wheels. Her getting sick. My being busy. My getting sick. Her being busy. My having gigs and recording sessions. Her pets needing care. My being so depressed from the theft that I simply faile to deal ... or communicate. And so forth. That was way too long. Finally we saw each other (too briefly) when she came up early Monday afternoon and spent the night, but couldn't stay longer. I greeted her at the door wearing the Hallowe'en costume she'd said sounded cute when I'd described it to her, that she'd said she wished she could see sometime. She was amused, which made me happy. Seeing each other should be a bit easier once I've got reliable wheels of my own again. Over a month between visits is a long time.

We spent a while looking at the results of the dialect survey ot of Harvard, comparing the MD and VA results to NY, and talking about our own answers. (I'd love to see MD and VA results broken down by county, because I'd get more out of comparing Baltimore, Annapolis, Frederick, and parts of the Eastern Shore to each other and to the national results, than I got out of comparing "Maryland all averaged together" with VA, NY, and the national results, as much fun as that was.) We each learned some new words and phrases.

Tuesday I made it to Bowie to help my brother study for a test that wasn't his final (that's this week). We got distracted by other matters, but I did get to help a little with his math before I ran off to Thrir Venstri Foetr rehearsal. Apparently just enough. It felt like I wasn't doing much other than restating what was in his textbook, but I guess all he needed was a slightly different presentation. That's one of the things I've always found so much easier about tutoring than classroom teaching, by the way: different students will grok different examples and different "ways of getting to the explanation" and different wordings of the concepts, and one-on-one I can back up and try again when my first approach doesn't get through; and I can learn that student's patterns, so that I've got a good chance of presenting future concepts in an effective way on the first try. In a classroom, one still backs up and goes over the concepts again, but there isn't as much time to do that as many times as it sometimes takes to reach each student in the class. Anyhow, after five minutes a lightbulb went on, and after ten minutes he said he felt comfortable handling the rest of the material on his own. But I still got to rehearsal late. (By about half an hour.)

Mom had some things for me from my uncle Ted's estate. One rather important item was a small brass crocodile whose tail flattens out into a letter opener. I saw the cast brass, looked at Mom, and asked, "Is this one of Granddad's pieces?" It is.

My grandfather made a bunch of cast-metal things before I was born, many of which were given to my father and his brothers too long ago for me to remember. But many pieces he kept. All the grandchildren remember seeing (and playing with) some of those items. When he died, the only things I remember hearing of any tension and deal-making over were Granddad's castings. My dad and my uncles managed to sort it all out without anybody become anybody else's enemy. There were, of course, some pieces I coveted, but a lot of my relatives like the same ones. (I think most of my cousins like the same iron housefly doorknocker (the wings move) that I do. And I know there was a lot of interest in the brass dog.) I don't know whether uncle Ted got the crocodile after Granddad died, or much earlier. The thing is, as much as I would've loved to wind up with certain favourites, I was much more attached to the idea of just owning something my grandfather had cast.

Now I've got one. Not one I remembered particularly well (though as I think about it, it was probably the subject of some "alligator or crocodile" arguments that I can fuzzily recall from when my siblings and I were all much shorter than we are now), not one I'd looked at and said, "I wish I could have that one," but when I pick it up and look at it, I get a warm feeling: it's a piece of my grandfather's brass, a tangible, solid, durable piece of his history, of my family's history. Something my father's father made. I've got a bit of him to hold onto. And as much as I want the fly (which as far as I know has never been attached to a door), the more important thing is that I have something he made.

I started to write a digression on my relationship to metal here, but it got longer and longer and I wanted to include more ideas in it, so I'm chopping that out to be a separate post, instead.

Mom said to hold on to her van for a little longer. There's a longer-term solution to my transportation troubles in the works.

Wednesday, I was struggling to get out the door to go to Homespun Ceilidh Band rehearsal, again having been hit with a nap-attach in early evening, when I got email from Mike's cell phone telling me rehearsal was cancelled because too few people were able to attend. (It turned out Mike was still on his way home from Maine. My guess is that John called his cell to tell him about rehearsal, and mentioned that he couldn't reach me (because I ran out of prepaid airtime and haven't been able to afford another Verizon card yet), so Mike sent an SMS message to my main email address. And so it was a good thing I was fifteen or twenty minutes behind schedule and thus still home to see the email.)

Thursday, puzzledance dropped by, bringing food (spanakopita and salad, plus candy bars), and we hung out way longer than we meant to, enjoying one of those conversations that goes every which way topic-wise. I got very tired, but kept not wanting to break off the conversation.

Friday ... WTF did I do Friday? [scratches head] Oh yeah, I ran out to the Post Orifice to mail film to Canada, where someone I know from a mailing list had offered to get several rolls developed for me as a Christmas present -- I won't see it until sometime in January, but y'know, I'm just going to be so glad to see what I've got, some of it from 2001, that it'll feel like Christmas whenever it does get back to me. Earlier in the week I'd thawed out the bag of film in the freezer so I could pull out the rolls to send; now I've got to stick the rest of it back into doubled ZipLoc bags and into the freezer. It's a kind of scary quantity when it's all sitting in front of me. (Hmm. I guess I should take a photo of that before I put it away, huh?) Anyhow, I hit a grocery on the way home and picked up basics -- eggs, bread, milk, root beer, potatoes, onions, cheese. Couldn't afford much in the variety or convenience categories (well, bananas count as convenience food), but I can feed myself again. And I had that encounter in the checkout line that I wrote about.

Yesterday Sheepie and I had plans to go to the Baltimore Aquarium because they were having a one-dollar weekend. We had some missed-communication early on, but she did come up, and we trundled off to the harbour. We wound up parking in Little Italy, unsurprisingly, and walking back. We ran into another Thrir Venstri Foetr person in line, got introduced to a few more people, and eventually got all the way inside. I liked the idea of not having to spend seventeen dollars to be there (I'd wanted to go for a couple years, but hadn't been able to afford it), but the day had a few big problems.

First, I was feeling kind of marginal physically even before I got dressed yesterday, so I wasn't in the best shape to enjoy the trip, nor did I have the energy to stay on my feet that long.

Second, it was way too crowded (no surprise, mind you, but still a problem), and since I was having trouble coping with my own body, I was handicapped in coping with the crowd. And fibromyalgia sometimes does some funny things to one's hearing, so all those voices echoing off all those walls and glass tanks in such close quarters really started bothering me. It wasn't just the high-pitched children and babies, or the steady background babble of mothers trying to keep their children acting civilized; the men's voices were bothering me too, because anytime anybody said anything loud enoug to be heard by someone not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them, it echoed off at least two walls and into my skull. (It's a funny kind of hyperacuity coupled with the normal filters in the brain not working quite the same as they do when I'm feeling well. Sounds get oppressive, and some are physicaly quite painful.)

And for the record, the vast majority of the children present were reasonably well behaved. Not Perfect Little Ladies And Gentlemen, but reasonably behaved for the situation of really wanting to see the displays in far too dense a crowd. And there wasn't much screaming. So any complaints I have about the children are not with the children themselves, but rather with the overwhelming number of children (along with too many adults as well), and the problems my own auditory system was having with normal children's voices in an enclosed space. And as I mentioned, even low voices were bothering me after a while. The children did get in my way a lot, because as much as I wanted to get close to some of the displays, I couldn't bring myself to push past a clump of children being enraptured by something educational and scientific. Just can't do it. I see young'uns engrossed in something like that, and their interest seems too important to my worldview for me to interrupt it. Frustrating, and sometimes I decided I just couldn't stand waiting for a Glenn-sized opening to form and just skipped a display, or settled for looking over their heads (and between their parents' heads) from five rows back, and if I'd been feeling fit and energetic when I walked in, I might have had more patience for waiting for gaps between groups of families, but yesterday there just wasn't much I could do about the situation.

Third, I was having a bad day photographically. I had wanted to photograph the fish for a long time, and had some Big Plans for how to do so, but some of the equipment I was going to use for that is gone (including the rubber lens hoods that I bought specifically for putting up against glass tanks and blocking out reflections of the people behind me or (more importantly) my flash, and the big flashes I was going to use if the folks who worked there told me it wouldn't hurt the fish. The two cameras I had ready to go were loaded with film too slow for the aquarium, and one was unfamiliar, so I was learning the camera as I went. Add to that the fact that half the time I couldn't get close enough to shoot and the rest of the time I felt like I was in the way of the next batch of kids behind me when I did try for a shot, and that there was no room for a tripod or a monopod without tripping people, and it was basically a frustration camera-wise. I did shoot some birds in the tropical rain forest environment on the top level. I figured I could safely use my flash there (not worried about whether it would harm the birds, and no glass for it to reflect off of), but I'm not sure whether the teeny tiny flash I was using reached far enough. I tried to find someone with a digicam using their built-in flash so I could check their results, but the digital folks I spotted weren't using flash and the flash point-and-shoot users were shooting film. And I'm not sure how well I managed to compensate for backlighting in the unfamiliar camera.

I am glad we went, even though it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped and I was in Much Pain by the time we got out of there (legs, back, ribs, elbow, feet). And I made mental notes of what film and lenses I need to bring if I ever do get there on a less-crowded day with time to shoot properly. (Oh what magic I could work with a large-format camera and permission to set up a black screen around me to block reflections. Couldn't get any fast or medium-speed fish that way, but I bet I could get some amazing shots of the critters that stay in one place for a while.) I'm pretty sure that if I go in there with the right tools and the time to do it right, I can do better than the digital seahorse photo on the construction-fence in front of the aquarium that's blown up so large the pixels are an inch across. Someday.

Today my plan is to try to get a little further on email, responding to LJ comments, and catching up on my friends list (I'm between 36 and 48 hours behind at the moment), then complain about how on one of the rare days that they're showing the Redskins on Baltimore television stations, the Redskins are playing at the same time as the Ravens (both at 16:00), so I still don't get to watch both. Assuming I don't get a nap attack and fall asleep. And maybe I'll carve some brass.