Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Long day.

My house has been chirping. Despite the amazing human mechanisms for locating the direction of a sound source, there are certain sounds it is very difficult to get a direcitonal fix on. (As an extreme case of this, I recall being in a fast-food restaurant with madbodger, standing at the counter when the French-fry machine started beeping. At the first beep, a worker started to turn toward the machine. The second beep was nearly matched for pitch and timing by madbodger, and the worker looked slightly confused. The third and successive beeps were matched for pitch, timing, attack, and probably phase, and the fast food worker's eyes went wide as he looked around the place trying to get the direction of this now Coming From Every Direction sound. He eventually decided that even though it didn't sound like it was coming from the direction of the fry machine, it was the fry machine noise so it had to be that. But I digress. That wasn't what I sat down to write about at all. I just wasn't sure when else I'd have such an excuse to tell that story.)

My house has been chirping. It's a chirp that's hard to catch the direction of, and at such long intervals that an impression of the direction of the sound never has a chance to build up.

My house has five smoke detectors. Well, five that I've found anyhow. I just went through all five of them trying to figure out which one was chirping -- I only had one set of batteries handy. My house also has high ceilings, but fortunately most of the smoke detectors can be reached from a stair (if you're nearly as tall as I am, anyhow). I'd been to all three floors before I remembered there was a smoke detector in the basement.

I started loading the car sometime fifteenish in the afternoon, and got to the site for the gig a little after sixteen o'clock. A couple of hours later we had the knobs all twiddled correctly on the sound system, and it was time to start performing. Oops, no nap. We played at various times during the event, and (with the dancers) bookended the feast. We couldn't do all the teardown and packup immediately afterwards because of the ceremony that followed the feast. I pulled out of the parking lot to go home about half past midnight, and by the time I finished unloading the car and trying to figure out where to set things down such that I'd still be able to walk from one end of my house to the other, it was a third past one.

Long day. Very tired musician. I've got some thoughts about how the evening went to express, which I may or may not get around to writing later.

Kitty in the window and a rat on the sidewalk. I think the rat was out of Perine's field of view most of the time I watched it. Got undressed, fed the cat, hunted the chirping smoke detector, sat down to write this, dozed off in my chair, woke up again, decided to call this finished whether it is or not... Much of me hurts. This was a long day.