Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

In hindsight, a black skirt is not the best choice of clothing for transport-the-cat day. A stressed, overheated, medium-hair tabby can render an awful lot of her environment a fluffy grey, including a couple of parking lots we stopped in along the way.

Fluffy fluffy fluffy
Tufts hang in the air
In the absence of any breeze.
Fur refusing to fall
Because it would be less decorative on the ground.

Seriously. Clouds of grey fur just hanging there around head height after Perrine had been petted a bit by anniemal while I ran into a store to buy cat litter.

A meteor crashes into a moon, sending a spray of stone and dust forth ...

A volcano erupts, tossing lava and pumice and ash yonder ...

Springtime strikes, and surprisingly cohesive tufts of fur fly off my cat.

So here's the video I was trying to turn into an animated LJ icon:

The icon version is smaller than the full 100x100 pixels allowed, with fewer frames than I would have liked for a smooth animation, and I had to trim a lot of frames before and after the yawn so it loses the "oh, just a picture of a cat -- wait, it's moving" effect at the start and turns into one of those annoying constant-motion images. If I can figure out how to set different delay times for different frames, I'll try to put the long pause back in at the start that way. [Thanks, redaxe.]

So I guess the image embedded in this entry is subject to improvement and may no longer match this text if I'm successful. And, uh, if any of y'all with real Photoshop/ImageMagick/GIMP/etc. chops wanna show off how much better at this you are than I am, I'll happily make the original 3GP file or the separated JPEG frames available for you to play with -- all the more so if you think you can describe what you do well enough for me to learn from.

I wish to lodge a formal complaint. I should not be dealing with "wake up feeling like I'm drowning in snot" levels of pollen at the same time as I am needing to keep track of my gloves because my fingers get cold when I go outside. This is simply wrong.

In other news, there's tonight's dinner ... The burrito, about four-fifths eaten, decided to attempt to fight back by launching a last-ditch counteroffensive against my face and shirt. Fortunately I headed off the shirt attack at my chin and ultimately emerged victorious with the burrito inside me. The shirt is safe and the burrito has been defeated devoured.

My cell phone vibrates when it rings or sounds a calendar alarm.

It just^[1] sounded the "move the car for street cleaning" alarm.

While Perrine was sitting on it.

[1] For some reason, the original attempt to post this, at 11:26, isn't showing up. But I didn't notice until now, 16:29. I may go backdate the entry later, but I'm going to leave it "current" for now.

"I am now completely of the opinion that if a marching band does not have a drag queen cheerleader with them, then they just don't matter." -- muzikmaker21, March 2007 (locked entry, quoted with permission)

I hear cars spinning their tires, trying to get moving again after stopping for the traffic light. It sounds as though some are having real problems with that. I also hear voices shouting to each other, and go to the window to see what's going on ...

There are children playing with snow shovels. One is scooping random swaths of the sidewalk across the street (yes, the snow did eventually start sticking there) and flinging shovelfuls of snow willy-nilly, while the other two are -- more entertaingly than effectively -- shovelling the middle of the street. At one point they were facing each other with their shovels slightly offset, looking almost like a strange twist on a hockey face-off.

I went out to clear my sidewalk earlier, hoping to keep it from gathering too many turn-to-ice footprints (it's that type of snow here), but it's still snowing too heavily, and my work was covered nearly as quickly as I cleared it. Too early.

An empty semi is a curious sort of drum. Instead of striking the top or side with hands or sticks, one plays it from beneath by lifting it up and slamming it against the ground, using a bump in the road to do so.

A striking feature of the eighteen wheeled drum is its usefulness for generating sond effects. While it is probably a bit unwieldy for a Foley artist to use, a truck of the proper dimensions can sound exactly like a small cannon (such as the kind fired at some college football games after a touchdown by the home team).

So unless there is a handgun that literally sounds like a cannon, I was jolted rather painfully awake after far too little sleep earlier this morning by a truck exceeding the speed limit going north on Fulton Ave. hitting the dip in the intersection at Lombard and bouncing twice. (I heard three shots in quick succession, too quickly to reload a cannon, so if it was actual cannon, it had to have been three of them. Three people both boneheaded enough to fire a cannon in broad daylight in the middle of SoWeBo and able to obtain cannon in the first place, all choosing to roll their guns down the sidewalk in a group artillery outing, strikes me as sufficiently unlikely to say that ol' Willie of O. would have concluded pretty quickly that a commonplace lorry traveling unusually fast is a more likely explanation.)

I haven't heard shouting, nor sirens, so I'm blaming an anonymous truck-driver for how much my back hurts from being jolted awake like that and how crappily underslept I feel.

I did warn y'all I might be extra cranky for a few days, right?

I'd better follow up on the somewhat alarming entry I posted from my cell phone earlier: yes, the sky really was green at least to the west and south (it shaded to dark dark blue to the east, as you'd expect for evening twilight), but it wasn't the, ah, fecal-green of an approaching Texas dust storm or the kind of green I've seen associated with tornadoes (with the caveat that I've had extremely limited exposure to tornadoes, but with the reinforcing evidence of local news radio not saying anything alarming during the weather forecast). Rather, it was the freakiest damned sunset I've seen (having captured that title from the heavily pollution-enhanced purple one I watched in Texas a long time ago).

The sky in the direction of the just-set sun was varying shades of blue-green, greenish-blue, and greyish-green, with the narrowest band of rose limning the horizon itself as I started composing that message. (I wrote that on I-95 during pauses in the slow rush-hour traffic (not as bad as a non-holiday weekday at that hour, not even as bad as Saturday's backup, but definitely a lot slower than the times of day I'm usually on the highway, and there was a stretch where things weren't moving much), so it took me several minutes to thumb in instead of the few seconds it would have taken if most of my attention had not been on the much more important task; by the time I sent it the wisp of rose and the aquamarine had gone and there was a lot more of the greyish-green. Given the circumstances, I'm sure those of you willing to excuse my posting it at all will excuse the extremely abbreviated nature of the description I posted at the time.) I checked other directions to make sure my brain hadn't suddenly decided to remap all my colours, and the sky to the east (and by the time I sent that message, even overhead and to the north) was the expected dark, dark blue that it gets as the sunset fades, before it becomes too dark to have colour to it any more.

So ... for all those times when I was a child, when my mother teased me for looking out the window to check when asked what colour the sky was ... and all the times I've heard (or (*cough*) used) the line, "What colour is the sky on your planet?" ... this evening, in Baltimore and between Baltimore and Washington, the sky was green.

A rather pretty, but damned startling collection of greens.

"What's this? It has a feather on it and it rattles, so it's probably a cat-toy, but I'm not sure."

*sniff* *sniff*

"Well, it's on the floor so it's probably mine, whatever it is."

[pause to sit in front of it, looking regal ...]

"Does it do anything interesting?" *poke* "Maybe I can get Glenn to throw that coffee-stirrer again. That was fun to pounce on."

[Glenn thinks, 'At some point she'll notice how much noise it makes bumping down a flight of stairs, and that'll make up her mind.']

*kick*

"Ooh! It rattles and clunks and tocks and seems really interesting if I knock it off the stairs!" *chase*

[a few minutes later] "Hey, will you throw this for me?"

<large diesel motor sound> [cra-splash-jangle-ash] *jingletinklecrash* <idling large diesel motor sound>

Huh-wha? That's a very different noise than I'm used to hearing. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[run to window] Ah. An 18-wheeler wedged in the intersection, mostly on the wrong side of Lombard but angled back into Fulton ... and the lamppost on the corner lying all smashified along the sidewalk. (The semi was trying to turn right from Fulton onto Lombard, a turn that would have been illegal a couple of years ago before they made my section of Lombard two-way, and which I can testify is a damned tricky turn to make in a helluva lot smaller truck than that!) Fortunately the lamppost comes before the fireplug, and fortunately my car is still farther along than that.

Okay, now I know what that sounds like. It sounds a lot more like a dump truck full of nickle-plated steel chains dumping its load on the street^[**] than like other accident sounds I know.^[***]

[*] But so important to try, n'est-ce pas?

[**] (Or at least what I imagine that would sound like -- or maybe the chains, with link sizes ranging from 2cm to 6.5cm, y'know, still in the lots-of-high-frequency-tinkle range with a little bit of clank and a fair amount of clatter, would have to be dropped from something holding them a little apart from each other instead of just sliding out of a dump truck in one mass, but you get the idea, right? Anyhow, a shitload of nickle-plated or chromed chain hitting the pavement was the very strong filled-in-by-my-brain visual that accompanied the sound when I heard it, and sufficiently unlikely-seeming that I just had to go look and see what had really produced the noise.)

[***] I guess I'm sort of collecting sounds -- or knowledge of sounds -- as a hobby. Those scenes in police procedural shows on the telly where an audio expert boosts the background of a recording and says, "That sounds like a Jaguar with a V12 engine at 15,000 RPM, with a bad clutch, going past an open window that has to be about five meters from the street, on an overcast day; I think the car is green," seem less and less unlikely all the time. But some sounds really are pretty distinctive -- consider that Volkswagon put a bunch of effort into trying to make the new Beetle sound as much like the old air-cooled Beetle as they could (or so I'm told), and that I've never heard another airship (or another motor at all, for that matter) that sounds anything like the Goodyear blimps. Anyhow, this kind of feels like, "Oh, I just added another sound to the collection in my brain."

"Anyway, while blindly swinging the big stick of learning at various piñatas of data, I thought it might be interesting to share what I learn as it bursts forth like a shower of candy. Of course, not everyone thinks of information as candy. But I am addicted to both sugar and information [...]" -- Kelly J. Cooper (kjc007), "What The Hell Is Literary Criticism?", Comixpedia, January 2006 (thanks to miss_chance for pointing it out)

[It was a tough decision, whether to rearrange the queue to share it with everyone as soon as possible after reading it (months ago!), or to make it a start-of-the-school-year quote.]

Sitting next to anniemal on the end of her bed, and Jamie (black poodle) and Mel (fluffy black cat) just walked in, side by side, stood next to each other facing us, and looked as though they were about to say, "The union has discussed some matters which we wish to bring to management's attention."

Then they changed their minds (or realized they don't speak English) and asked for scritches instead.

I can't recall the time limit in silmaril's quick picture challenge from ... well I can't remember how long ago, either [edit: found it.] ... but I'm pretty sure I exceeded it while figuring out how to do this. But I did wind up fully awake by the time I finished, having started from a state of "lemmecheckmyemail'nfallbackasleep" and not seeing the screen clearly. Which fits.

Waking Up

Since what I tried to do was a fade-to-transparent, I guess this will either be much more interesting or terribly scrozzled for those of you who have non-default backgrounds for your friends-pages.

[Edited to add: ] The effect is a little more pronounced on a page with a grey background, such as the pics.livejournal.com page the image above links to. I still haven't looked at it over a patterned background yet.

It's not just the trees, of course, that change colour. The ivy-covered wall of the house behind mine is quite striking, with a big dark red splotch accompanied by yellow, orange, and green stripes. The grapes in my back yard are a cute colour; not yet ripe. I thought they ripened (and transformed overnight into bird poop) earlier in the year than this -- maybe I've misremembered, maybe the weather has confused the vine, maybe this is an extra crop. Not sure.

Today's being a yo-yo day, but with less extreme fatigue-swings than the last couple. Getting things done in small bites; trying not to bite off too much at a time.

A shortage in my house: electrical cords for computers. For a while I've been raiding cords from machines on the repair pile, but as I get more computers running I'm out of spares. If any of my friends has a surplus that they keep tripping over and need to get out of the way ...? I'm also under-supplied with working VGA monitors, but those are more of a "wait for someone to upgrade" item than a "see whether anybody has a bunch of spares" thing. (I've also got about four Ethernet cables too few, but seeing as I have a crimp tool, at least eight conectifiers, and a fair quantity of Cat5 on hand, that's one shortage I can rectify on my own later. Or maybe I can trade Ethernet cables for power cords?)

Goofed off briefly with ( a silly quiz -- gee, I'm a geek, who'd-a thunk? )

Found the check I lost earlier ... only to realize that "earlier" was months earlier, and the small print says "not valid after 90 days". Not an insurmountable problem, just a minor annoyance to deal with. It would seem a lot more significant on some day when it was the last straw or something. Anyhow: whoops.

In the most recent package of malta I bought, one of the (glass) bottles was dented. I mean, it looks just like a dented tin can would look if it were a bottle, except that it really is a bottle. (Oy, my writing skills today. Feh.) This amuses me. In my current state I cannot tell whether my degree of amusement is in keeping with the degree of silliness of the dented bottle, but I'm pretty darned amused.

(Gee, look at that -- while looking for a link for folks who might be unfamiliar with one of my favourite soft drinks, I also stumbled across a recipe. Can this possibly make up for getting someone hooked on it who lives in a place where the stuff isn't sold?)

Estimated probability of my actually getting to rehearsal tonight: about 60%. Don't hold your breath, but do wish me luck.

Today is a fluffy day. And looking up, I found myself imagining that there ought to be, among that vast array of bright puffballs, a smaller, mostly golden brown cloud with a pointy nose, herding the cumulus flock and growling menacingly at approaching cold fronts.

Big black cat in a sunbeam
Left too long, he's started to melt
Soggy, semisoft cat
He'll probabably congeal again
When he hears food poured into his dish

[Or when the poodle nearly steps on him.]

Today: similar to yesterday. Tried hoarding spoons to save up for rehearsal. Didn't work. Started to fade around 15:00, perked up a little around 20:45, that didn't last long and I was all the way to "oughtn't be standing up" by 21:30. Feh.

Couple of thoughts to cut the whining ratio some:

Cat fur; like glitter, but not as shiny.

At the house of syntonic_comma and anniemal, the beasties don't seem inclined to drink out of the toilet, but they all drink out of the vacuum cleaner. (Except the lizard, who can't get to it from his tank.)