Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"No, I don't think shows should do more meta-jokes that cater to the online bloggers, and I'm sure that everyone at televisionwithoutpity.com agrees with me." -- Josh (aka 'whojackie' on TWOP), one of the people Earl has to try to make things right with, on the NBC television show My Name Is Earl, in the episode "Kept a Guy Locked in a Truck" (aired 2007-01-18)

I've been alternating days of feeling halfway decent other than the usual pain and early fatigue-after-not-having-done-very-much, and barely-get-out-of-bed days -- which I suppose is a pretty normal spell, for me. I made it to Darkover (four performances -- two with HCB and two with pick-up dance bands) but was too wiped out to stick around for the filking either night or to return on Sunday for a day at the con without obligations and schedules. I made it to a rehearsal for a recorder group to see just how rusty my reading has gotten lately, and to 3LF rehearsal (well, about the second half of it). I wasn't in great shape Wednesday but I got where I needed to get to. Saturday I played at a Madrigal Feast where I felt awfully under-rehearsed but things went pretty well in general anyhow. (I think -- I hope -- most of my mistakes were covered up by the rest of the band, especially by the other bass recorder player (I stayed on bass recorder all night), but alas the band as a whole fell apart on one of my favourite tunes, "Riu Riu Chiu". I'm pretty sure the audience did notice that, but it is the nature of audiences of live music to quickly forget the embarrassing train-wrecks if you nail the next couple of tunes.) I'll be doing that again -- same event, different location -- this coming Saturday (last I checked there were still three $65 tickets left ...). They're not feeding the musicians, so we bring sandwiches and stuff to nibble while the actors have long bits to do without us. This coming Saturday, I may wind up playing bowed psaltery on one tune.

There's supposed to be a HCB performance this Wednesday night, but , er, there's something about a leak and six feet of water and the building condemned, or something, and we're still waiting to hear whether that gig will actually be happening or not, and exactly where if so.

As might have been expected, I was pretty useless for anything yesterday. Today I've got a to-do list a kilometer long, but will try to pace myself so that I don't get too tired today to be able to go to 3LF tomorrow and HCB Wednesday if we do turn out to have a place to play. There's always the sheer randomness of fibromyalgia to screw up any care I take in trying to schedule my downtime, but I can at least try to keep the odds tipped my way. I've already decided to punt the to-do items that involve getting dressed and going anywhere today, with the possible exception of a run to a hardware store late to buy new mounting brackets for the railing on the back stair -- since my tumble from the top of that staircase started with the top bracket breaking off, I think I want to replace all three with sturdier ones. anniemal gave me a new wooden railing to replace the one that broke off so dramatically; it just needs to be cut down a little to fit, and maybe get a coat of paint (and, ideally, get sanded smooth), so all I'll need to buy are the brackets and maybe paint. Picking a day when I have the energy to dive into a hands-on project is the bigger obstacle. Needs to be done though.

So far I've been trying to manage my capable-of-doing-stuff days with only my performance schedule in mind. I haven't even begun to take party announcements/invitations into consideration. I really need to start doing that too, as some social time would do me good. I mostly see people at rehearsals, not random hanging out or parties. So I've been very bad about keeping up face-to-face relationships (for oh, several years now, at least). Wanna fix that.

Today, I'll see how much paperwork I can get through, including scary government forms (scary mostly because they're government forms, and I get twitchy worrying about whether I'm translating from bureaucratese to plainspeech (or Glenn-idiolect) correctly when I run into questions that seem to include unstated assumptions). And practice the bowed psaltery. Later in the week maybe I'll try to deal with OS installation/upgrades on a couple of machines. (I already did battle with Debian's 'apt-get' and 'aptitude' and fought it to ... an inconclusive result, possibly considered a draw but less straightforward than that sounds. It did involve use of a Red Hat rescue CD, and while a current kernel is installed, I cannot boot it (and 'apt-get' seems to be telling me it can't complete configuration of the new kernel because the new kernel isn't configured yet -- huh?); and I have X back, and the terminal program I'd been using, but I was without anything X-related for a while and my menus have been rearranged and my screen resolution changed, so I'm not sure whether I'm ahead or behind on the GUI front. Methinks I'll live with what I've got for a few days and focus on the aforementioned paperwork. And (*sigh*) phone calls.

It did occur to me that I missed an opportunity for a bit of schtick this past Tuesday -- I should have brought the broken-off piece of railing with me and carried it into rehearsal. Then when somebody asked me why I was holding it, I would've explained, "Oh, holding onto this is supposed to prevent my falling down the stairs." Might have gotten a laugh, I dunno.

My mother fell recently too, which I found out when I called her last night. It sounds like she got hurt a lot worse than I did. I'm hoping to get out to visit her sometime this week. I hope my brother who lives with her is being helpful.

I'm a week and a half to two weeks behind on television watching (and that's not counting a few shows I haven't watched any episodes of yet this season, hoping I can find the videocassettes in the right order when I get around to them, such as Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars); the only things I'm current on are Heroes and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. And I'm only current on the television portion of Heroes; I haven't even looked at the comic book/webcomic/whatever yet -- and is there something about character blogs that I'm missing, too? I'm about two weeks behind on LJ as well and kinda random about recent email -- I've peeked at my 'busy' and 'newsish' filters a few times, but have not really done more than a quick skim each time, so I feel like I'm behind even on those portions of my friendslist. (I did pay enough attention to note the juxtaposition of an entry claiming that "illegal aliens murder 12 Americans daily" almost immediately below an entry linking to an article about how "entirely made-up statistics being quoted all over the place, against immigrants" which starts off by showing the 12-murders-daily statistic is bullshit.

Urk! And I've gotten behind on collecting quotes for my quote of the day; the scheduled quotes run out on Wednesday -- eek! (I do have a bunch of unscheduled-yet quotations in the file, so worst-case I'll just use up a bunch of those. But I was saving some of them for particular holidays, anniversaries, or times when specific topics come up in Congress and the newspapers again -- and some are in the "still deciding whether I really want to use this" category.) Maybe I'll make time for quote-mining my friendslist tonight if my sleep-meds fail again.

I think that's about the right amount of procrastination. Now on to filling out forms.

One of those days, one of those nights. I got my day started very, very slowly; took care of an errand outside the house; came back to prepare for other things, like heading to Virginia, but wound up feeling crashy; lay down for an early sleep; dozed for about an hour, and woke up again feeling not at all rested. Argh. So I figured I'd do this Tarot personality-quizmeme since I'm feeling too discombobulated for much else.

Oh, wait; I have a couple more scratch files with blogmemes in them from other nights like this, that I never got around to posting...

What struck me as odd was the number of shows I'd seen two episodes of but not thee.

This last one is just a 35-item word-association thingie (I'm not sure it'd properly be called a "test" ... how about "game"?) that I filled in a couple of weeks ago and forgot about.

Obviously, I spent a lot more time on the layout and the babble than I did on answering the thing. It was more entertaining than tossing and turning and muttering curses under my breath ... (that was a really bad night for my legs).

I'm not a serious Dr. Who fan, and when I channel-surf past it I only get sucked in to watching the rest of the episode about a quarter of the time, but I've seen enough to have a basic idea what's going on and why so many of my friends like it, and I've enjoyed some episodes while getting bored with others.

I noticed that the episode showing on MPT at midnight is "The Three Doctors". I've heard of this episode -- it's one I recall friends mentioning by title in conversations both heard and overheard. But I don't remember what was said about it.

So here's my question: given what I described in the first paragraph, is this an episode I should go out of my way to watch (that is, set he VCR to grab it for whenver I start catching up on television again)? Or should I just treat it as any other episode, letting it go by or possiby getting sucked in if I happen to have the set turned on then, with no special effort one ay or t'other?

By the time I stopped feeling too dizzy to drive last night, I fell asleep. Woke this morning feeling wrecked -- feeling a lot like when I have a high fever, minus the actual fever itself and the sound of sand sliding across a sheet of tin. Took me an hour of "I'm awake and uncomfortable and Perrine is staring at me waiting to be fed" to finally manage to move more than one limb at a time and get my eyes to focus. Drank some of the magic tea, and now my hypersensitivity to sound is reduced to the point that car horns and truck engines are painful but quiet cars and loud conversations on the far side of the intersection aren't any more. *whew* Experienced an odd neurological phenomenon during the worst of the audio hyperacuity though: a police siren made the fingers of my left hand twitch. Strange feeling.

So today's a day that requires medication, I guess. But I'm feeling more alert now. Awake enough to accuse juuro of eloquence, not alert enough to parse his rejoinder correctly at first.

Checking my email, I fumbled a keystroke and opened some spam I was about to delete, so I saw the bit where a diet aid was described as working, "because of this new element that was extracted from a plant in Africa, out of a cactus I think actually." I dunno, any new element discovered is gonna have a pretty short half-life, unless it's heavy enough to be in the next "island of stability", and either way I'm sure I don't want it in my body. (Besides, a discovery like that would be all over my friendslist long before anybody isolated a large enough quantity to sell.) And are there cacti in Africa? [Edit: Wikipedia says there are. But my dismissive tone is for the "new element" bit, the cactus-in-Africa part being an "oh, I should look that up" thing.] Sheesh. Of course, it was also one of those conversational "try to look like it was accidentally misdelivered" spams.

Since I failed to get out the door to 3LF rehearsal last night, I did see about two thirds of CSI:U.S.Navy, a show that I'd heard about from various people who like it a lot, but had never gotten around to peeking at until a month ago. I'm not all "oooh, gotta watch this" about it (which is a good thing, since there are two other shows I do want to catch in that time slot and I don't have that many working VCRs, so I only see it if I miss rehearsal), but I do enjoy it. Uh ... admittedly a large part of my enjoyment is the Cute Goth Geek (the actress so totally inhabits that character that it's hard to imagine her not being her character in real life -- it's going to be a brain-bender when I recognize her in some other role sometime -- and that's gotta be a fun character to play), but other characters get a lot of fun lines too.

Okay, perhaps "CSI:U.S.Navy" isn't entirely fair of me. but come on: it's a show on CBS about a forensics team. Can you blame me? Though yeah, one episode I've seen so far was more action/adventure oriented than forensics/crime-drama, and the pattern of relationships between the characters differs more from any of the CSI shows than CSI, CSI:Miami, and CSI:NY differ from each other. Still, I'm having trouble ignoring the parallels. NCIS resembles the CSI shows more than it does Crossing Jordan or Quincy.

Yeah, I'm just killing time here while I wait for the meds to work.

Argh! VCR screwup (luser-error this time, not hardware issues or power failure -- I carefully programmed it then forgot to turn it off, and didn't notice until today). Uh, anybody feel like giving me Sunday's Charmed and Crossing Jordan on VHS or DVD (or VCD)? (Not sure whether I got Saturday's CSI or not. I probably missed that as well.) I'd be happy to send a blank tape or CD-R in trade, or reimburse the cost of a DVD-R (I don't have a stash of those).