( 'Paid attention in high school' quizmeme )
Today's an achy day. *sigh* Fortunately I was feeling well enough yesterday to pick up a few essentials at the drug store (yow, when I have to buy my OTC meds, including Prilosec, things add up in a right hurry -- quite a hit to the bank account), so I don't desperately need to hike anywhere tonight or tomorrow. I did manage to get in a couple hours of practice for a gig at Pennsic and get ahold of my mother by phone to hear how her trip to China with my sister had gone (I now have a newly-adopted niece).
Last night I fit a temporary nut in the electric mandolin (to replace
the one that broke
Friday. I figured I might get away with wood since there's a
"zeroth fret", but the narrow spacing between the paired strings of
each course makes for awfully fragile fingers of wood separating
the strings of each pair. Sure enough, despite trying to avoid
imposing any lateral stresses while installing it, I knocked off
the bit of wood between the A strings. So those two strings are
currently being held apart by a folded-up piece of cardboard. If
it holds until I can get the bone nut blank cut in half and shaped
(most likely after Pennsic, though if I can get it cut to the right
size before Pennsic, shaping it and cutting the grooves will be a
reasonable while-sitting-around-camp-shooting-the-b
I did tune up one of the other mandolins, a round-back, but the neck started tilting forward and opened a gap where it attaches to the body ... I think I can get enough glue into the gap, but I haven't yet figured out how to clamp or weight the thing while the glue sets. If I can solve that problem before the end of tomorrow, I can leave it to set and cure and dry very thoroughly while I'm off at Baitcon. I'm hoping that this style can be repaired effectively at that spot, since it was a similar failure that did in the mandolin that I really liked (it was much easier to play than the electric). Of course, then I get to worry whether the dry, cracked soundboard on the round-back will hold up.
Hmm. I wonder whether the instrument that appears to be a triple-strung mandolin is actually built strong enough to withstand the tension of twelve strings ... and whether there's enough room on that fingerboard to play it that way. I should've picked up extra strings last week when I was out in Catonsville. (It looks like a late-19th/early-20th Century style round-back mandolin body (I don't think this specific instrument is that old), with an elongated head and six-on-a-side tuners like a 12-string guitar, and a very shallow wooden nut with twelve faint grooves in four sets of three. At the moment it has six ancient strings on it and the broken ends of two more.
I still want a mandola and a solid-body electric mandolin someday (I've seen a Fender solid-body but it only had four strings rather than eight), but at the moment I'll settle for getting one of the ordinary mandolins into proper condition. (The electric with the nut problem is a regular modern teardrop arched-top-and-back design with f-holes -- i.e. not a bowl-back but not a Flatiron or a Flatiron-clone -- with a coil pickup and a couple of knobs, and an extra-thick soundboard (to reduce feedback, I presume) which makes it difficult to get much volume out of when it's not plugged in. I'm counting it as an "ordinary mandolin" because it's basically a modified modern acoustic mandolin, and that's what it sounds like plugged in or unplugged.)
While I'm thinking of instrument repairs and instruments-needing-repair, I should go downstairs and take the oud out of the winter coat that serves as its case, and check whether the repairs that I made just before Conterpoint are still holding up.
And while I'm thinking about broken-things, I'll take a moment to natter about the frustration of having broken my box-cutter today[*]. It's on my fretting hand, so it won't affect my playing (I also refer to it as my "spare nail"), but I always forget, until I've had to cut it off, just how often I use it without thinking. I just tried to check something on my PDA, which was lying next to my left hand, and rather than bothering to take out the stylus for a mere couple of taps, I automatically tried to use my thumbnail. The thumb-tip doesn't work as well as the thumb-nail, not precise enough. Feh. But the guitar-picks are all intact, and that matters a whole lot more.
I'm still thinking about what I didn't like about the doctor I saw last week and what I should try to make clear to the doctor who will become my regular physician when I see her for the first time just after Pennsic.
This weekend, Baitcon; then a short week to get everything lined up to be ready for Pennsic.
While I was finishing this up, I heard an Arabber go by, up Fulton Ave. I'm not used to seeing them right around here (usually farther north or east) but this makes three times in the last month and a half that I've noticed. This time he was singing. If one has made my intersection part of his route home, I'll have to start keeping an eye out, especially while I'm without a car. (I didn't get a good look at what he had. I saw bananas and maybe canteloupes, no watermelons this time, and I'm not sure what else. I would've gone and bought a canteloupe, but I would've had to pause to throw on clothes -- hey, it was a hot day and I gotta maximize the effect of the electric fans blowing across my skin, don't I? -- and he was on his way someplace (presumably the stable), not stopping to set up and sell. But he must have a selling-spot not too terribly far from here in the afternoons.)
[*] Well, not just a box-cutter, obviously. I recall the time I startled my boss by using it to cut drywall[**] -- it was her own suggestion, but she'd meant it as a joke; I looked at my hands, realized my thumbnail was long enough to be useful, and jabbed it into the drywall and started sawing. Basically, it's the "everything I don't want to risk damaging one of my guitar-picks on" nail. The other nails on my left hand have to be short for fretting.
[**] A slightly unpleasant sensation, yes, but not anything like nails-on-a-chalkboard intense, and I only needed to cut a few inches. And yes, my nails are naturally that strong -- I've got acrylic on the three that take the most wear from strumming and thin spots near the tips of the other two that show why the acrylic is needed; the left thumbnail is the one that shows my natural nail thickness.
There are things I don't like as much about the nearest (more important detail: within walking distance) grocery as I do about more distant stores from other chains, but only one aspect that really puzzles me.
How can a grocery store not carry any chili peppers in the produce section? I could understand (however much I'd grumble) stocking only a single type, such as jalapeños, but no hot peppers at all? Once, and I figure they're just out of stock; twice and I think I'm unlucky; time after time seeing nothing more closely related than green sweet bell peppers, and it finally sinks in that the grocery store within walking distance simply does not meet my Capsicum needs. (I didn't notice so much when I was able to dash off to other stores in my own car, and thus only hit this particular store occasionally.) Can there really be so few local residents who eat chili peppers and rely on that store?
Made it to pharmacy. Made it to nail salon after very annoying wait for wrong bus due to misinformation. Stopped at Appalachian Bluegrass for a nut blank because the slot for the bottom string on the mandolin I was practicing on while waiting for buses crumbled. (Blank is way bigger than I need; gonna have to cut it lengthwise. Anybody local have a band saw and not mind the smell of bone dust too badly?) Stopped at grocery on the way back. Am very tired.
Especially annoying numbers of rude, immature people out and about today. Funny thing, when I hear people laughing and turn around and see a cameraphone pointed at me (with such an exaggerated gesture that it seems my seeing them is half the point), and I bring an SLR to my eye pointed back at them, people freak out. Dayum, either it's acceptable behaviour or it's not, idjits; make up your minds! But suddenly I go from curiosity to something-to-flee once the lens is aimed at them.
Have lined up rides for tomorrow. Tried to avoid pushing myself so hard today that I'll be too beat to cope tomorrow, but with the amount of walking required because of where the bus lines do and don't go, and just being Out And Active fort so long, I'm pretty darned beat. Hope I didn't push toooo hard. Gotta manage to be functional Sunday as well!
Want ABC 2.0 <-> MusicXML converter. Found an ABC 1.6-> MusicXML tool, but a) it dropped three measures when I tested it, b) it barfs on V: tags, and c) the source seems to have been lost and the author is unreachable. Half a mind to start banging one out in C (and wondering whether I could to the MusicXML->ABC direction as a 'sed' script), but already have Too Many Projects in the queue so should try a little longer to find existing tool maintained by Somebody Not Me. Also want shareware or o-s OMR (aka 'music OCR'); closest I've found is 30-day free evaluation of $190 program. Will try that, but will try to time the start of the eval period to maximize usefulness. (Probably worth $190, if I had the spare dough for that sort of thing.
Have found annoying amounds of ABC FUD on chat boards while Googling for tools, as well as an awful lot of "since I don't need that, I can't imagine it's of use to anyone else on the planet either; they should just all use the same proprietary notation tool that I do" attitudes. Feh.
Doh! Should remember to ask about XML conversion on ABC mailing list!
Tentative lead on Volvo wagon. More news ifwhen more news exists.
Difference between now and the long-tiny-nested-paren paragraph before, is today I realize I'm this tired.
Perrine is much more tolerant than I thought she'd be, of the "cat-on-keyboard bad, so if you choose to occupy keyboard zone, it's keyboard-on-cat" rule I've instituted. Though her acceptance or disgusted departure depends somewhat on my typing speed.
I do wish she'd tell me where she hid the mouse I can smell rotting. *sigh*
The good and bad: I finally
felt well enough to go to the doctor. That's mostly good,
but it means I'm now incredibly exhausted on a rehearsal
night.Oh. Never mind. My ride to rehearsal
tonight fell through -- I got the phone call while I was
writing this.
The inconvenient: Lots and lots and lots of walking and a bunch of mis-guesses regarding bus routes (the system map on the MTA web site is in Flash, which the computer I've mostly been using doesn't handle well, and when I can look at it I have to zoom in so far to see street names that I lose any sense of where on the map I'm looking -- lose, lose, lose -- so I just started walking and asking folks who were sitting on their front steps where the nearest north/south bus was). And when I got to the clinic, the doctor wasn't in today, but they're transferring all their patients with diabetes and/or hypertension to a better-equipped facility anyhow (not that I'm sure I need the special docs anyhow, at least not yet -- the glucose tolerance test says I'm diabetic but every glucometer reading (and my A1C) gets a reaction of, "oh, that's nothing" from medical professionals).
The dunno-whether-good-or-bad: Being transferred to a different provider ... The clinic I'd been going to provided the best health care I've had since I was a child. Much better funded / better equipped outfits, such as Kaiser, seemed to treat patients as an unfortunately nessecary inconvenience to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible (and to collect as many copayments from as possible, so if you have two problems / questions, they want you to make two visits). The clinic, which started as a city-funded free clinic until the state's new health-care-for-poor-people program changed the whole game (they're now affiliated with one of the larger providers that has a contract with the state) seemed to be full of people interested in keeping me healthy. So it is with some trepidation that I deliver myself to a larger commercial enterprise, but hey, who knows, maybe they'll turn out to be good too, eh? (Still, there's the whole getting used to each other, getting them familiar with my chart, etc., to face.)
A silver lining: City buses, which I spent quite a lot of time on today, are air conditioned. Much cooler than my house. (I tried to post that observation from my cell phone while I was riding a bus, but it appears to have not gotten through.)
The convenient: The new place I'll be going to is closer to my house -- a long walk on a day when I'm feeling well (though I have absolutely no clue how to get there by bus on a day when I'm feeling well enough to go out but not well enough for that long a walk). And they have their own pharmacy, which means I have a walking-distance alternative to the Rite Aid that royaly botched a prescription a few months ago.
The oops-oh-well: I wish I'd thought to clip on a pedometer before I set out this morning.
The somewhat-almost-clever: Knowing I'd be
spending time walking and waiting at bus stops, I took a mandolin
with me so I could practice. (And I remembered, for a change, to
bring a book to read on the bus and in waiting rooms -- one that
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siderea
recommended. Of course, now that I've started it and gotten
sucked into the story, I'll have to finish it tonight or
tomorrow.)
So ... saw a doctor (who was filling in for the absent doctor I got transferred to instead of the also-absent doctor I'd expected to see), got a month worth of prescriptions and instructions to come back within a month to see the doctor who will become my regular doctor (Pennsic interferes, so it'll be a month and three days ... a little bit of drug-stretching will be needed, but only a little), got confirmation that I did not, in fact, absolutely fuck up my toe by not going to the ER when I sliced the end nearly off or by not limping to a doctor in the weeks following (it looks a little funny now, but the doctor's reaction was that it was about as expected for that type of injury at that stage of healing) and that slathering it with Neosporin and trying not to think about it too much seems to have been about right. (Though when the nurse, having asked me why I was there, heard "foot injury" after seeing in my chart that I'm diabetic, she looked like she was bracing for much, much worse. Hey, I did look at it every couple of days, and sniff the old bandage when I changed it to be alert for Ominous Sick/Rotting Odors ... I would've asked someone for a ride if it had started scaring me. I've been down to a Band-Aid with a finger-cot to help hold it in place for the past several days; no longer making "armoured bandages" for it.) And I answered too many queries about the way I dress. I don't mind explaining things every so often, but when everybody asks on the same day -- as when breaking in a new health care provider and their staff, or riding unfamiliar mass transit routes, or walking through unfamiliar neighbourhoods (today was three for three) -- I get tired of it.
I have to go back to that pharmacy tomorrow afternoon (they were out of one of the drugs) and manage to get out to the nail salon before Saturday's gig. Let's see whether I can feel well enough to get out on the bus and on foot two days in a row, or if I spend tomorrow recovering from today.
And now there's some sheet music beckoning to me that I should attend to.
Got home from rehearsal. Walking into the house, the difference was immediately obvious: though the thermometers (in my bedroom and my housemate's bedroom) both read the same temperatures as before we left, 91°F and 95°F respectively, the humidity has gone up from 39% to 56%. World of difference. *sigh*
In other news, it appears that catnip is at least a partial remedy for absolutely-disgusted-with-the-heat syndrome, for one member of the household.
Ugh. Pain meds wearing off. Fall down soon.
My house usually gets insanely hot in the summer, refusing to cool down once it's heated up, and often winding up warmer than outdoors.
Today the temperature reported on the news is insanely hot, but, as they noted on the telly, we're getting a break on the humidity. My bedroom is only 91°F and it didn't break 90 until fairly late, and the humidity is low enough (for, ah, local values of 'low') that perspiring actually does some good. And therefore fans help, as do gentle breezes wafting through the windows. I can't really say it's super comfortable, but it's definitely not miserable. And both the weather forecast and past observations of this house predicted miserable. *whew*!
When I'm in a room without a fan, I definitely notice when I step out of the path of the breeze from the nearest window. It's probably not the best day for heavy lifting or too many trips up and down the stairs in a short time or wearing much clothing, but it's not one of those "brain baking, eyeballs melting, gonna burst into flame" days like we had a bunch of a couple weeks ago.
39% relative humidity versus 70%. Yowza.
Alas, I didn't sleep enough last night so I'm feeling a little brain-fried for reasons other than the weather, and I'm moving kinda slowly in general, but the day has not been a complete loss to sleep-deprivation: I finished the other half of a tune that I had started last month, and I'm feeling rather pleased with it. I should start practicing it on guitar -- I wrote it on mandolin (and it's pretty distinctly a mandolin tune, though I'm counting on the fiddlers to make it sound better on a real violin than the MIDI I generated). The middle section wound up being somewhat recorder-unfriendly, alas (though I did see fingerings online for notes that high recently, so recorder is not out of the question -- er, except for one insane note, a harmonic on the violin).
I have a clutter problem, partly from having too many activities
with associated stuff that I want to have all "on top" at
once for easy access when I switch gears, partly from just running out of
spoons before I accomplish enough any straightening-up,
and partly because I say too often, "but I might need this later".
Folks who know me personally may be relieved to hear that I noticed a probably useful thinking-shift this afternoon. While sorting through a box of papers, dividing them into stacks for "trash", "maybe read later", "file", "whoops that's months late now", and "oh that's where that got to", I caught myself repeatedly thinking, "I want to scan and OCR this, and throw away the paper."
Alas, I'm not yet set up to do that (I need to upgrade the nearly-full hard drive in my file server and make sure one of the scanners I've got will talk to Linux happily), but the mental shift here is probably way overdue. Of course, I need to get better about keeping my computer files organized too, but being able to have the same file appear in two different places at once without making another copy of it can be a big help there.
I still need to get my hands on a music-OCR program. Or get around to writing one.
And I want a pony librarian. (To help me
work out the most useful organization scheme for my data.)
My plans for last night got rained out, but for a while, watching out the back window upstairs, I could see lightning bolts and fireworks in the same quadrant of the sky at the same time. (The weather pulled the Baltimore fireworks below the tree line for me, but the various displays to the south, southwest, and west seemed to be launching 'em up nice and high.)
Hmm. Wherever all those sirens are headed to is definitely upwind of here. (I've counted at least five times sirens have gone by with a few minutes between them, but a couple of those were multi-vehicle groups; one sounded different so it may have been an ambulance or the fire chief's SUV, and I'm guessing the rest were all pumpers and ladder trucks.) Can't see a smoke column from my window, though there's a faint smudge in the sky where the skyrockets finally stopped exploding (I understand the enthusiam and impatience that lead to so many explosions starting in late June and persisting until Independence Day, but fercryinoutloud, skyrockets at two-[expletive]ing-ay-em? Why?) I'm not sure whether the end of the pops&booms and the start of the sirens was mere coincidence or a shared cause -- the fire engines sounded like they were going farther north than where I'd seen the couple of bursts I managed to see the ends of, but I didn't catch the trajectory so I don't know the direction of the launch point. (The rockets were exploding nearby enough that at first I thought they were mere firecrackers being set off on my street in the next block, but I couldn't see anyone about. Then I eventually made it back to the window after one of the bangs in time to see the falling gold sparkles of a rocket over the houses catty-corner from me.)
Definitely smells like wood smoke, and my eyes are burning, but as I said, nothing visible from here yet.
Hmm. No more sirens since I started typing this. Better look for the earplugs just in case though.
[Aaaaaand, this turns out to be the 42nd entry in my GJ. This morning's QotD will be the 42nd entry in my IJ. Unless I can't get back to sleep and decide to finish the entry I started editing earlier.]
Argh -- gorgeous weather today, the most comfortable we've had here in Baltimore for a while, and I'm feeling too headachy and run-down to go take advantage of it. :-( Going to see whether I can manage a nap and feel well enough to accomplish anything this evening (dunno whether I'll get to HCB rehearsal or not; need to try to get out to nail salon as well).
Something that has irked me for ages is the human tendency to create false dichotomies, and to try to interpret the world in dichotomies in general. Many things that I consider overlapping, unrelated, or subsets of a larger spectrum, get sorted into two lists presented as "opposites" and then tied to other things that are really unrelated just to have two neat columns. So, for example, myriad traits get classified as "masculine" and "feminine" just for the sake of list-making and interpreting the world as binary, when many of those traits have nothing to do with gender.
So this
quote from a comment by
velvetpage
on
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xtian_trackback
(2006-10-27) caught my attention:
The mysogyny can be traced in part to medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. They brought into the church the works of certain Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who philosophized extensively about dualisms and opposites - man/woman, light/dark, good/evil, etc, etc. It was a parlour game in learned circles to come up with as many of these opposites as possible.
I can't help wondering how some of our socially-ingrained ways of thinking about classifications would be different, if that medieval parlour game had been organized in threes instead of twos, as a few similar modern (and snarky) ones are. Or in fives.
So, the clouds finally burst and the long-threatened thunderstorm has arrived. It feels like a breath, held too long, has been released. On the other hand, between the thunderclaps and the rain sounds, I won't be able to hear stumbling, shambling hordes coming from as far away.
The good news is that the temperature in my house is now down to 77°F (thanks, I presume, to that tropical storm somewhere south of here), which means that I can be comfortable as long as I do not move, and have a fan blowing on me.
The bad news is that the humidity is up to 70%, so the moment I expend a Joule more than what I dissipate resting (say, by standing up, for example, or bending over to pick something up) or interfere with the airflow (by putting on a bathrobe or other clothing), I'm instantly dripping with sweat again, which doesn't want to evaporate.
*sigh* At least it's cool enough for Perrine to hang out with me in the bedroom again.
Okay, just a couple more things left to do, then a quick shower to rinse off the sweat and a retreat into immobility to try to cool off again. Take out the trash, check the laundry, check the buckets under the leak in the roof. And maybe I'll stay asleep longer than fifteen minutes on my next attempt.
Tonight's decision: watch the television program I'd planned to watch, or listen to my physicist housemate try to remember enough relativity to explain how a wormhole can be turned into a time machine and why that turns out not to be useful anyhow.
Okay, that wouldn't have been a difficult decision even if I hadn't already programmed the VCR to tape the show in question, but it still illustrates why I have the VCR record even the shows I expect to watch in real time. You just can't depend on life to be boring at predictable times.
[*] As a representative member of the class of video recording devices capable of capturing broatcast signals, not specifically in preference to other, even more convenient recording devices such as TiVo and MythTV.
About an hour ago I heard a loud snapBANG, rather firecracker-like, and voices. Looking out the window I saw about a half-dozen schoolkids run down the sidewalk, pausing to throw small, white rocks at windows, then disappear around the corner before I could get the camera ready.
I was about to head downstairs to check the condition of my ground-floor windows, when I heard my next-door neighbour's voice. (The same neighbour whose Miata got smooshed back in February in the same imcident that totaled my Accord.) My windows are intact; one of his is not. Two holes (one all the way through both panes), and bright-white rocks (as my neighbour pointed out, probably from somebody's garden, as they look like the sort that would be used decoratively) here and there on the sidewalk where they'd bounced, and one inside his house, on the windowsill among the broken glass. He said they'd pounded on his door before throwing the rocks at the window.
Grrr. I do not understand the mindset that does such things intentionally. The police have been called, not that we expect much good to come of that. I wish I'd gotten a photo. And I wonder where they took the rocks from and how much damage they'd already done between wherever that was and here. There are interesting signs that this block is getting nicer ... and then there's pointless destruction by a bunch of kids.
Today's pleasant surprise: the double bass fits into a 1989 Mazda 626 sedan more easily than into a 1990 Honda Accord sedan. The trunk of the 626 looks a whole lot smaller than the Accord's, so fewer guitars will probably fit there, but the opening uncovered by folding down the rear seat is wider so the bottom of the bass can go entirely into the trunk -- which means that the neck of the bass sits between the front seats as it does in a hatchback, instead of over the front passenger seat as it did in the Accord, so if I get a 626 I'll be able to carry the bass and a passenger at the same time. Maneuvering the instrument into the car is still awkward (I couldn't get it to fit in through the trunk so it still had to go in through a rear door) but marginally easier to accomplish than with the Accord.
Today's somewhat less pleasant surprise: some idiot had slashed a bunch of tires in the apartment complex where the 626's owner lives, including one of the tires on the 626, so I couldn't test drive it. But it's supposed to have a new tire on it later this afternoon, so the plan is to head back out to White Marsh then and see how the car feels, then (probably) sort out how to deal with getting it inspected. It's going to need a muffler, and probably a front turn signal lens, but the windshield is fine and I didn't notice any significant rust. I don't know whether Maryland inspections care about the hole in the trunk lid where half the 'M' in "Mazda" is broken off (a hole that's supposed to be filled by one of the mounting pins of the logo). I presume a right front turn signal lens is the kind of thing I ought to be able to find cheaply at Crazy Ray's, right? (I've never been there, just heard lots about it from various friends.)
The big questions at this point, of course, are "do I feel safe driving it?" and "how much are tho repairs needed to pass inspection going to cost?" The price is low enough to leave a little room for repairs, but not a whole lot. If a muffler isn't too expensive and there are no surprises on the inspection, this car may be it. Wish me kuck,
In the meantime, this humidity is killing me. You know how folks love to say, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity," and they're often full of crap (that is, sometimes the heat's enough, and more often it's the combination of the two)? Well today I dare say it really is the humidity, not the heat. The Meteorological Oppressiveness Factor was up into the miserable range well before the thermometer broke 80°F (the probe hanging outside my bedroom window is currently reporting 84°F -- I had a reading of over 50% relative humidity this morning when the temperature indoors and out was in the 70s (F), and at the moment the indoor numbers for the bedroom are 78°F and 44%).
Having some sort of adjustment period between the chilly weather and the muggy weather (like, perhaps, the season known in past years as "Spring") might have been nice. I'm feeling drained and wilted and a bit sticky. Bleah. (I wonder how my typo rate changes when I feel like this. I'll proofread this when it's cooler and count 'em up.)
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate car shopping?
I'm going to take a break from a) the various things I ought to be doing and b) the more difficult political entry I'm in the middle of working on (which I want to phrase very carefully, and which I've started and abandoned three times in the past couple months), to toss out something easy to write: a complaint about my local Post Office.
Different letter carriers do the route my house is on on different days -- I'm not sure whether there's a pattern or not. At least one is conscientious, helpful, and friendly and goes out of her way to make things work right -- like seeing a pink reminder slip for a parcel waiting for me at the post office, and telling the sorter, "Oh just give me the package -- I know he'll be home today". At least one other is friendly and conscientious and does what he's supposed to do regarding parcels, and I've no idea whether he goes out of his way or simply does his job cheerfully. And at least one is a lazy clown who tries to avoid ever delivering a parcel.
I was home all day Friday, and while it is possible that I slept through the doorbell, that's rather unlikely. Still, I'll give whichever carrier left the pink "sorry we missed you" slip that day the benefit of the doubt even though I know that in the past those slips have been left without even the pretense of reaching for the doorbell button (God forbid the mailman should ever have to actually ascend anybody's front stair to reach the bell!). So I simply filled in the "please redeliver on..." section, asking for delivery today (because with the whole ride situation over the weekend I wasn't sure whether I'd be home yesterday at that point), and left it tucked into the edge of the mail slot where it could be collected when Saturday's mail was delivered. I didn't even snark about the carrier's failure to fill in the "sender" box on the slip to give me a clue what parcel it might be.
Saturday's mail was pushed right past the slip, which was still there when the rain started, and got rather beaten up by the weather. (I've had this happen before; one of the carriers on my route goes to great lengths to avoid disturbing a "please redeliver the parcel" slip while pushing letters and bills and magazines past it.)
Monday, the slip was torn and bits were missing but there was enough to make out what it was. (Breno brought it in when he came home for lunch, not realizing what it was at first.) So I sandwiched the pieces between layers of cellophane tape and attached it to a piece of stiff paper on which I wrote a note explaining that I'd left the slip there before the rain started and it had been ignored when Saturday's mail was delivered. I was careful not to make personal accusations because I didn't know whether the lazy clown was delivering mail yesterday, or one of the carriers who actually does their job. Alas, Monday's mail arrived while I was taping the slip back together, but fortunately the mail truck was still in sight. So I stuck the note to the outside of the windshielt, facing in, in front of the driver's seat, so that it could not possibly be ignored even intentionally. And I made a point to be up and ready to answer the doorbell today.
(Interestingly, more mail arrived late yesterday, hours after the first delivery. I suspect, but do not know, that a neighbour found mis-delivered mail in his mailbox and ran it over to my mail slot in the evening. The amount of mis-delivered mail that shows up here is orders of magnitude above the USPS' national average, even once you filter out the mis-sorted mail that some facility upstream of our local office has routed to the wrong zip code.)
A few minute ago I looked downstairs and saw that mail had come, though there'd been no doorbell yet. I thought that perhaps the carrierhad decided to deliver everyone's envelopes and magazines at once without carrying any parcels, then make a second trip just to houses that were getting parcels -- I've seen 'em do that sometimes.
As it turned out, the parcel was sitting just outside my front door, on my top step, where I would not have been able to see it through the door if I hadn't leaned forward a bit while picking up the flat mail from the floor. No doorbell, just dropped the package right there.
In this neighbourhood.
I've lived in places -- suburbs -- where that was a reasonable way to deliver a package that didn't require a signature. Where a parcel so placed would not be obvious to every passerby on the street, and where the general tenor of the neighbourhood was such that petty theft of parcels by someone who did happen to spot them seemed unlikely.
But this is the city. Any pedestrian walking on my side of Lombard Street -- and we get a non-trivial amount of pedestrian traffic -- has to pass within two paces of my door, and is likely to pass within arm's reach of where the package was. Where any driver who happens to glance sideways has a clear vies of my front steps. Not a place where I think leaving a package in th open without even ringing the bell to alert me that I should come take it inside seems even the least bit reasonable. Hey, if the letter carrier is in a hurry and doesn't want to stick around, I can deal with a sixty second window of vulnerability between their ringing my bell and my reaching the front door, but whichever carrier delivered my mail today was too lazy to even ascend five steps (actually, they could probably reach the button from the fourth steps) to ring the bell.
The USPS as a whole has a remarkable record. Some individual post offices, on the other hand, are truly abysmal. 21223, despite the presence of two or three competent employees, is one of them. (And the local postmaster is completely dismissive of customer complaints.) I'm also not terribly impressed with the sorting facility downtown, which keeps putting 21223 bar codes on stuff addressed to E. Lombard St, so they wind up being sent to W. Lombard St. I've no idea how much of my own mail has gotten delivered to the other side of town.
And then there's the problem of misdelivered mail that I write a correction on and instructions to please redeliver to the correct address, or return to sender (depending on the nature of the error), getting re-delivered to my house three or four times, even after I've blacked out the bar code to avoid having an automatic sorting machine just drop it back in a bundle aimed here. Systemic problem, or local? Well I don't get them back so often if I drop them off in some other zip code instead of nearby...
Completely unrelated, but as long as I'm posting at all I should probably reassure folks inclined to worry about me: today I'm doing much better than yesterday or the day before. Not exactly well, since I'm functioning only with the assistance of painkillers, but today the painkillers work well enough to enable me to walk down the stairs instead of lurching forward one or two steps at a time grunting and grimacing and trying to steel myself for the next step. Yesterday the pain was more than the drugs were able to compensate for. (A good day is one when just my regular morning & evening doses of ibuprofen + Ultram are enough to allow me to function reasonably. I still entertain some hope of experiencing one of those later this week.)
I need a collective noun for illegal dirt bikes.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
realinterrobang suggested
"a herd of iron horses", to which I commented that these are more
like iron ponies than iron horses ... but at the moment I'm leaning
toward a "pod" of illegal dirt bikes (though I can't put my finger
on why).
(Hmm. They're loud, so maybe a "loud" word. A "crash" of illegal dirt bikes?)
Suggestions?
I kept going longer than I thought I would. I took care of some
errands, got the bass back, got Secret Magical Honda-Specific Power
Steering Fluid, super-glued a paper napkin to the crack in the power
steering reservoir (intentionally), ate lunch ... uh, not in that
order. Got to chat with muzikmaker21 over lunch, which
was nifty (the conversation was much niftier than the lunch, though
the lunch wasn't bad).
The long-sleeved top that fit the weather so well when I left the house to go to court this morning, became far too warm for the way the afternoon warmed up. Go figure. You'd think it was spring or something ...
I painted my nails today. But, uh, with real paint, not nail polish. And, uh, not evenly, kinda spots and smudges. And, well, not just my nails, but other parts of my fingers. And, yeah, not intentionally. Maybe I should've slept first, before marking stuff with a really old (but surprisingly not dried-out!) paint-pen.
Feeling more than a little dead now.
Oh my. Lots and lots and lots and LOTS of sirens while I was writing this. And two (2) helicopters. (I'm gussing that the one too far to see the markings on is television; the nearer one is police. Who has a black or Very Dark Blue helicopter? Would that be WBAL?) I feel as though I should put my clothes back on, grab a camera, and go see what happened. But I'm not sure I'm really awake enough to deal with that. I think I need to just fall over now.
Er ... after I program the VCRs, 'cause sleeping through prime-time does not seem unlikely.
Oh! The second helicopter was WJZ (channel 13). They just showed an arial view on the telly, It's a fire in a rowhouse. They almost never bother to send cameras -- heck, they rarely even bother to mention -- when a house catches fire in southwest Baltimore (as opposed to some other parts of town). I wonder what's special about this one.
Now to see what else of my to-do list I can manage to handle despite feeling creaky and tired and having a wobbly stomach, since I'm already up and dressed and once I stop moving I'll probably not get back up again.
My head hurts. Fortunately the next court date will be an afternoon session. (Well, fortunate for me and at least one or two other witnesses; less fortunate for the police officer, who has the same problem with afternoons as I do with mornings -- worst possible point in his normal sleep/wake cycle, because he works midnights. Though he presumably doesn't have all the extra repercussions that fibromyalgia imposes on me from such scheduling, I am sympathetic. (But I am still glad that I won't have to get up so early that day.))
Okay, I heard the forecast -- flood warnings, winter weather advisories, "wintry mix", all after the late-spring/early-summer temos we had a few days ago -- but it didn't quite sink in. I heard rain earlier and knew to wonder whether it was freezing rain; I heard the sound change subtly and thought maybe it was just as well that I wasn't trying to limp my wounded car out to Glen Burnie in whatever slickness was falling from the heavens; and then I heard the sound change to distinctly that of sleet.
So I expected the front walk to be a little icy, and was going to throw salt on it.
I just opened the front door and stuck a foot out. It's not as slippery as I'd expected, but it's thick and will likely turn into a solid, thick sheet overnight.
I'm going to have to shovel the darned sleet. That's a new one for me. Now I wish I'd gotten out with a camera while we still had afternoon light.
[Added after scraping the sidewalk: It turned out not to be as thick everywhere else as it was on the top step, so no, not an inch generally; maybe 3/16 or 1/4. Easily scraped aside, though it's falling fast enough that I'm not sure whether I'll be any better off tomorrow for having done it. I'm worried about people trying to navigate the sidewalk encountering a nearly uniform sheet of ice and sliding all the way to the far end of the block on their asses. If the weather doesn't get too far below melting overnight, the salt I threw down ought to make it safe. I've got to remember to buy more salt when I have any money again.]
I had a kinda busy/kinda productive couple of days (with help from a couple of people). But I can't shake the feeling that there was something planned for today that I forgot to write down.
I know my VCRs won't automagically switch to Daylight Spending Time[1] tonight, but I think that one of them will try to do so on the old date and need to be set back then. I'm not sure which of my computers will/won't automatically spring forward; most won't, but at least one got a batch of OS upgrades installed that may or may not have included a DST patch. I'm not sure whether to expect next year to be on the new schedule or the old schedule, so I hven't decided whether to patch the ones that need to be patched by hand, or just stay up tonight to set their clocks manually.
There's been a major flurry of activity on the lowest floor of the house across the street, ripping out the bricked-up windows, installing widowsills, patching the mortar in the outside wall, redoing some of the masonry inside, fixing up the floor. I've lost track of what permits the owner has gotten -- it sounds as though the first round or permits were to allow him to do the work that was required to apply for the second round of permits, or something -- but the coffee shop he wants to open seems to be back on track. He said his proposed paint and signage sailed through the community associating meeting easily (it's a historical district, and there are a bunch of rules related to that regarding what is allowed on the street-facing sides[2] of houses here). There's no glass in the windows yet, and there's a couple of big storefront window openings still bricked up that I'd never noticed until he pointed them out, saying they'd let in a lot more light when he opens those up.
Why do I feel funny about setting up a computer in a tower-style case on its side? I never hesitated a moment in setting up a desktop-style case on end. And I can't think of a mechanical reason[3] not to put a tower case on its side. It just ... feels wrong, and the fact that it feels wrong and I don't know why feels even more wrong. (It's not quite a strong enough feeling to stop me from doing it, to fit computers into the rack, but it'll take me a little while to get used to seeing them that way.)
Now if only I could either shake this feeling of having forgotten something, or remember what it is I've forgotten ...
[1] vvalkyri
pointed out
an
interview on NPR about daylight saving time, in which it was
pointed out that a) DST doesn't actually save energy because what
we save on lighting is more than offset by gasoline used to get to
various events taking advantage of the evening light, and b) the
main proponents of DST have been business interests because the
main effect of DST is that people spend more time shopping
when they have extra daylight after work! So it occurs to me that
since we are not "saving daylight" (there are still the same
number of daylit hours) nor saving energy, the name ought to reflect
the true purpose: spending. Hence "daylight spending time", which
fortunately uses the same abbreviation as the official name.
[2] I know, the "street-facing side" is usually referred to more concisely as the "front". But the storefront in question across the street is actually the side of the house it's under; the front of the house is on Fulton Ave.
[3] I've heard that hard disks don't like to be formatted in one orientation and then used in a different one, but a) I don't know whether that claim is legitimate, b) if it doesn't turn out to be completely bogus, I don't know whether it applies generally or only to particular generations of drives, and c) for most of the spare drives I've got lying around waiting to be stuck into computers, I have no idea what orientation they were used in by their previous owners anyhow.
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