Lyn's Journal

For Tina
I wrote a triolet years ago for my sister-in-law J, who was going through a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. She did in fact survive because of a radical new treatment, if somewhat the worse for wear, but the same does not seem likely for Tina Marsh, who is currently in the last stages of cancer herself.

Tina has lent her beautiful singing voice more than once to the concerts of the Blue Lapis Light aerial dance troupe, and has many loving friends in the Austin area. Here, in her honor, is the triolet I wrote for J -- I'm sure she won't mind sharing.

They say your song must soon be still.
I know it, but cannot believe.
Immortal bright, untouched by ill
They say your song must soon be. Still,
If love could hold you here by will,
I would. No, all things take their leave;
They say your song must, soon. Be still -
I know it -- but cannot believe.

Pseudo Celebrity
Yesterday at the grocery store I noticed two of the store employees looking at me and whispering to each other, smiling. Under normal circumstances this might have made me self-conscious, or caused me to wonder if my fly was open. Not this time, though, because I was wearing... THE SANDALS.

THE SANDALS are a pair of Roman gladiator sandals that reach halfway up my calves, decorated in the front with little metal medallions. They're not especially high in quality; I've owned two pairs so far, and have had to glue both back together multiple times, starting within a few weeks of starting to wear them. They're not made of leather, though it's a fairly decent imitation if you don't look too closely. They cost me about $35 on eBay, both times.

But, wearing them gives me a little taste of what it must be like to be a celebrity. People notice me, compliment me on them, approach me shyly to ask where I got them. It's not uncommon for these things to happen 3-4 times in the same day. I have no idea whether any of these people remember my face, but they definitely know that they've encountered... THE SANDALS.

Ugh, the unrelated sequel
KaffKaffKaff*cough**cough*KaffKaffKaffKaffKaff.

I jumped off the building for tonight's rehearsal anyway. Take that, microbes.

Bah

Two weeks ago yesterday I was rear-ended in a minor accident that turned out, halfway home, to have disabled my car. (Translation: I was able to drive away from the scene, but the car started shimmying and pulling to one side, then declined to move forward at all.) I ended up having to have it towed home.

Fast forward two weeks: the Miata is still sitting on its crumpled butt in the driveway. My insurance company can't do much to help, since we haven't been carrying collision coverage, so I'm having to work directly with the other company. This experience has taught me several things that I didn't know before:

1. If you absolutely have to be in an accident, and you don't carry collision insurance, you should try to be hit by someone with the same insurance company as your own.

2. If this can't be managed, the next best bet is for the company to be one that someone besides the insured driver has ever heard of. (Due to a failure on this point, yours truly got to spend most of a morning trying to track down the "Statewide" of the other driver's insurance card.)

3. Be sure to get a license plate number, make and model of the other vehicle, and an ID and phone number on the other driver. Don't content yourself with the name, address and policy number from their insurance card, especially if you didn't pull off (1) or (2), above. (Side note: for thinking of and/or remembering all this, it really helps not to have hit your head during the accident.)

4. If there's any chance of failure on any of the points above, or even if there isn't, go ahead and call the police. Don't let any thoughts of simplifying things for yourself or of cutting the other driver a break deter you. A police report is a very useful thing when trying to get an insurance company to take action.

Alas, due to my complete failure on all four points, I'm looking at the probability of waiting for several weeks while the fly-by-night, farm-everything-out-to-subcontractors company tries (so far in vain) to even get hold of the other driver successfully, let alone complete their investigation.

At least I have some idea how to manage better next time. Bleah.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Kitten medics
For the last ten days we've been nursing both kittens through a bad cold -- plus, in Nicky's case, conjunctivitis that swelled her eye almost shut. If there's anything less fun than giving a cat antibiotics for ten days, it's giving two cats (even small ones) antibiotics for ten days, especially when you have to add eye drops to the regime for one of them.

But have you ever heard an eight-inch kitten have a coughing, sneezing fit? It's cute and pathetic and funny all at once. Even at two in the morning.....

No idea? No problem!

This morning while

chikuru was taking his traditional birthday walkabout (a solitary hike for a few miles of the Greenbelt), I went in search of another of our traditions: the occasional small gift jar of caviar. There's a shop in South Austin that specializes in fancy foods and wines at reasonable prices, so I stopped in to see what they had to offer. It was a good guess -- they had one of the widest selections I've seen in Austin, ranging from the "black lumpfish" with the indefinite shelf life to Osetra sturgeon caviar imported from Russia for three figures per ounce.

There were also a few selections between these extremes, including one I hadn't encountered before, a black "bowfin" caviar. I asked the man behind the counter what he could tell me about it. The ensuing conversation was not without humor value:

ME: What can you tell me about the bowfin caviar?

COUNTERMAN: It comes in black and red.

ME (having read the labels): Uh, isn't the red one the salmon roe?

COUNTERMAN: Right.

ME: But what can you tell me about the bowfin?

COUNTERMAN: People seem to like to buy the black more often. We have several types.

(hands me a jar of something that looks similar to the bowfin, but costs 1/10 as much)

COUNTERMAN: The prices range from this all the way up to the Russian stuff for $200 a tin, but there's no real difference -- they all taste the same.

ME (knowing quite well that this isn't true): What's the difference between the bowfin and this stuff that costs 1/10 as much?

COUNTERMAN: It's the waters they come from.

ME (again reading the label): Not to mention the fact that it's from an entirely different fish.

COUNTERMAN: Uh, that too. We also have some of the kinds with a shelf life over in the non-refrigerated section.

ME (evidently in slow learner mode): What's the difference between the types that require refrigeration and the ones that don't?

COUNTERMAN: It's the waters they come from...

(I decided to take a chance on the bowfin rather than prolonging the conversation.)

Change in plans

Today I got sort-of fired from a job I had already sort-of quit. So, the sabbatical I was planning to take anyway will now be starting a month early. Which is actually good news, once I get over the initial shock and ego blow. No, it's not really being fired when you've already announced you're leaving and they simply decide to go ahead and cut the ties, but when you get the news at 4:45 in the afternoon of your last day, and are told no, you can't put in one last hour to tie up one more loose end, this is it, buh-bye, it sure FEELS like being fired. Although I wasn't going to stay, I didn't expect them to move on so fast.

(Is this reminding anybody besides me of high-school breakup drama? "No, I didn't want to date him any more, but couldn't he pine just a little?" :) )

I was planning to post about the Austin Chronicle Adult Spelling Bee tonight, but it seems to me that

chikuru and

fraeuleinchen have covered it pretty thoroughly between them. Besides, it wasn't a banner year for me, as I missed words on both preliminary tests that I should have gotten, and squeaked into the finals by the skin of my teeth -- then missed my first final round word (another I should have known). It wasn't my worst spelling bee ever (one year I didn't make the finals) but I usually do better.

On the good side, my nineteenth-place prize pack was more fun than my third place (?) one was last time. We did get the usual assortment of tee shirts, drink cozies and bumper stickers, but some of the local movie theaters also donated passes as prizes! So, I now have a pass each to the IMAX (non-feature-film), the Paramount, and two other theaters. This was definitely more exciting than the Scrabble set and paperback dictionary from last time; they were a nice thought, but we already own several of each.

End of an era
I think I'm done with my Miata.

Sure, it's cute. It's a sexy little convertible, and even gets reasonably good gas mileage. I can slide it into tiny parking places, and get the top up and down easily. So, one might ask, what's the problem?

It's this: the damn thing's invisible.

In the four years I've owned it, it has been hit three times by larger vehicles. All three times the other driver has admitted blame, and apologetically explained that he or she just didn't see me. Now, although this car has several features including a CD player, power windows and a working air conditioner, it does not, so far as I know, come with a Romulan cloaking device. Too bad -- if it did, I could turn it off.

The first time I got hit, only a month or two after I acquired the car, I was rear-ended by an SUV at a traffic light. There was nothing I could have done; I was stopped, and the car ahead of me was stopped, there was nowhere for me to go. But, the light turned green, some of the other traffic moved, and so did the SUV -- right into my rear bumper. So sorry -- he didn't see me.

The second time, I was stopped at a stop sign, and another SUV came around the corner with a sloppy cut into my lane. Now, many drivers do that at that intersection, and it's usually harmless, but in this case I was in my lane, and so the left front corner of my car was clipped -- much to the consternation of my passenger, a baby possum that I was transporting to Wildlife Rescue at the time. Oops, sorry, she didn't see me either.

The third time was the day before yesterday. Admittedly, my complete blamelessness was not as well established in this case. There was some road work being done, and I overlooked the changed signs and cone placement that eliminated my merge lane until the last moment, when I had to brake hard and suddenly. I did, however, stop in time -- but the pickup truck behind me didn't. WHAM! You guessed it -- he didn't see me.

So anyway, this was just the last straw. Especially since I didn't escape completely unscathed this time: I was bounced in my seat and hit my head on the car roof. (Uh, Lyn, isn't the Miata a soft-top?) (Well, yes, but have you ever noticed how that soft top keeps its shape? Hint: a metal bar is involved.)

Granted, I wasn't seriously damaged, but my remaining patience with cute little invisible cars is at an end. If the insurance company decides it isn't totaled and elects to fix it, I think I'll be selling it in favor of something, well, taller.

After all, when the average driver looks "both ways", neither of those ways is down.

Gack.

Somewhat impaired

I will post about getting rear-ended in my car tomorrow, and about the Adult Spelling Bee the day after. Today I am a little sluggish/impaired, probably due to a muscle relaxant I was prescribed after the accident, and in spite of which I actually made the finals of the spelling bee (though I went down in the first round with a word I should have known).

(See how neatly I tied that back together?)

See

chikuru 's blog if you want to hear about the spelling bee before I get to it. He did great, coming in fifth!

How to spend a rainy Saturday
How to spend a rainy Saturday:

Get up before it starts raining, and go blading on the Veloway. For extra bonus points, get a flat on one of your skate wheels. (Strange to say, this actually is possible, as chikurudiscovered this morning.)
Find yourself with an hour to kill and discover a crepe restaurant being run out of a trailer on a little back street. If you're not in the mood for lemon curd and blueberries, try the ham and gruyere. Or one of the two dozen or so other options. Yum.
Finish breakfast just before the rain really starts coming down.
Go down to the town animal shelter and adopt a pair of KITTENS!
Take them home, find them a nice little room in which to become acquainted with their catbox.
Run out for supplies, mostly kitten food and a sturdy scratching post.
Play with the KITTENS!
Go out to dinner with some friends.
Introduce them to the KITTENS!
Wind down with a couple of episodes of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.
Visit the KITTENS! one more time before bed.
...zzzz....

The courtyard of the Federal Building is still warm from the afternoon sun as I lie on my back during a rehearsal break around 8:00pm. There are cables strung overhead, two of them dangling long white scarves each of which held a graceful duet of aerial dancers not long before.

Every aerial dance that we rappelers participate in has its own special magic, but none has so far surpassed the 2006 phenomenon that was REQUIEM. This new one might have a shot. It wll be fun to find out.

The Star Trek Movie
If you ever loved Star Trek, see it. If you never loved Trek but love a good sci-fi action movie, see it. If you just want a good ride with some touching scenes and some funny dialogue, see it.

If you can't stand William Shatner, see it. He's not in it.

Of course, I may be the wrong person to ask. I saw it in IMAX, and the combination of sensory overload , delight in the lovely dialogue and characterizations (and possibly also an empty stomach) hit me like a drug. I think I was hyperventilating for most of the last hour, and I literally had to ask

chikuru to help me up the stairs on the way out of the theatre. Bizarre -- I've never had quite such a spectacularly visceral reaction to a movie before. So I may not be the most objective of reviewers.

Mind you, the movie doesn't fit 100% as an origin story to the original canon, but it doesn't really have to -- within the first few minutes it becomes clear that the central (interesting, tragic, crazy) villain is a time traveler, so the whole thing works nicely as an alternate timeline. Further, it reads like an alternate timeline that will converge fairly closely (though not exactly) with the original Trek universe. The conflicts and camaraderie between Kirk, Spock and McCoy are very believable as an early beginning to the central triad that defined the original TV series.

Sure, OK, McCoy's eyes are brown instead of blue, Spock gets along a little too well with his father, and Uhura has a force of personality more in keeping with the command officer of the movie franchise than the kittenish communications officer of the TV series. You won't care. Trust me.

Tale of a Tail
For anyone who has wondered, yes, Shawn the squirrel is still with us. She's gotten quite cheeky, occasionally approaching us when we're outside on the deck or tapping on the door for a handout. She usually gets one -- we keep a large bag of raw peanuts near the back door just for her, and she is still willing to take them from our hands. I also sometimes leave a large handful out to keep her from raiding the bird feeder, but it doesn't always work.

I am a little concerned by the fact that her tail has gotten very ratty, literally. A lot of the fur seems to come out of it, especially along the back, and the exposed tail does look rather like a rat's. She seems healthy otherwise, still bright-eyed and agile, so I'm not sure what to make of this. Certainly her appetite isn't suffering.

Does anybody out there know what causes hair loss in the tail of an otherwise healthy (as far as we can tell) squirrel?

Um...
Six minutes until deadline, and this is clearly going to be another one of THOSE evenings. In a life that I find satisfying and not at all boring, you'd think I'd be able to come up with something to write about.

Of course, it helps when you start thinking about your post for the day before 11:49pm.

OK, in lieu of nothing, here goes: I have two new games on my IPhone. One is an interactive fiction engine with several text adventure plug-ins. The other is a game where you roll a ball, jumping over obstacles and picking up gems. There are adversaries, but they can be defeated by jumping on them.

Which is the more satisfying acquisition? Honestly, I think it's the ball. The text adventures are intriguing, but since many of them don't tell you your objective, you're often left wondering whether you're still missing the path to success, or whether there isn't one and you're just wandering around in some college kid's Kafka-esque fantasy.

Technically, I have now posted. Signing off now.

Sometimes you just know what's coming...

...and sometimes you don't.

I had to go down to the central police station to get my fingerprints taken so that I could get my volunteer badge for the APD crisis team. I was lucky enough to find an open parking meter just down the street, and I fed it modestly because, hey, how long can being fingerprinted take?

Heh.

When I got to the fingerprinting office, I spent a few minutes standing at the window before being helped. I was then asked to sign in and hand over my ID, then left standing for a few minutes more. Then my ID was returned to me and I was asked to take a seat. More minutes passed. And more. And then a couple more. Finally I was invited back to do the deed, which apparently involved taking three full sets of prints and part of a fourth. By the time I washed all (well, most of) the ink off my fingers and got out, at least 40 minutes had passed and my meter was long expired. Right outside the police station. And two officers were walking toward the building from the direction of my car.

How lucky was I feeling?

Before I had gotten halfway to my car, I saw that my parking meter now had one of those "Do not park here -- permit only" hoods over it. So much for the chance that no one had noticed my car in all its unmetered glory. By this time I was almost sure I would find a ticket on the windshield, though I was still crossing my fingers.

Sure enough, as soon as I reached the car I saw a printed slip of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. I pulled it resignedly off and looked at it to find out what the damages were. Here is what I saw:

THIS VEHICLE IS LEGALLY PARKED
DO NOT TOW

Sometimes I love being wrong.

Eye Update
My left eye stopped hurting from PRK surgery sometime around Sunday afternoon, and my vision in that eye has been slowly improving since. I gather this is normal for this type of surgery, as the cornea has to heal and smooth out before the final results are evident.

At this point, though, I think the vision in that eye is pretty close to 20/20 -- maybe 20/25 or so. My other eye is the same as it ever was (the better to read fine print with, my dear!) and the overall effect is very much what I hoped for. In most lights, I just seem to see clearly; the discrepancy between my eyes is not obvious unless something blocks my left eye. Fluorescent light makes me more aware of it, but not unmanageably -- and fluorescent light is weird anyway, even for uncorrected eyes. In my opinion, anyway.

No, the thing that takes getting used to is not having to remove a contact lens. (That's not a typo -- I've been wearing only one for some time now in order to make sure that monovision correction would work well for me.) Because I can see clearly, I catch myself thinking "I'd better not forget to remove my lens before bed," and only then remember that I'm not wearing one. I'm also reluctant to rub my left eye, not because of the pain that isn't there any more, but for fear of displacing the contact lens that also isn't there any more.

Five upsides to the swine flu scare:

1. Distracts from those pesky mundane matters like the economy, two wars, and climate change.

2. Humor: http://www.doihavepigflu.com.

3. Huge sales on bacon and pork tenderloin any minute now.

4. Slows media layoffs for awhile.

5. Keeps people busy thinking about more important things than whether I can count.

Seriously, though, it sounds like a grim situation down in Mexico. This is easy to lose sight of in light of the fact that it's also been (fortunately, but puzzlingly) an ongoing anticlimax everywhere else it's broken out. I wonder whether there will ever be a definitive explanation for that, or whether it will just be one of those historical curiosities that graduate students still speculate about fifty years from now.

Class Ending
Today we had another APD Victim Services volunteer training session. As usual, we covered some of the types of crimes/events that the crisis teams are summoned to, and did some role-playing. In addition, we had a talk and q/a session by a 16-year veteran police sergeant[*], which I found very interesting for its insights into the mindset of dedicated patrol officers. We also had a session on sexual harassment that was clearly geared toward a different audience: it was mostly common sense and common knowledge; certainly nothing that a roomful of volunteers for a gig that requires both empathy and at least a little counseling experience were likely to find surprising or informative.

That last sentence got away from me a little, but I hope it made at least some sense.

Tomorrow is the last day of the class. There has been surprisingly little attrition; we've only lost 7 of our original 24, which surprises me: the material isn't difficult, but it is emotionally demanding, and the time commitment (two entire weekends) isn't trivial either. I suspect that there may be a little tactful weeding going on as well; two of our classmates expressed some distressingly uncompassionate views on different occasions, and both failed to return the next day. I would not have felt comfortable talking to either of them if I were in crisis, but I think I would be OK with any of the ones who remain at this point.

All in all, I think it's an impressive program.

[*] Betcha didn't picture a woman when I said "16-year veteran police sergeant", but she was.

Bah
I'm tired, and my left eye feels like it has a bit of broken glass in it. I still think it's worth it, but I'm not going to try to write a full-length blog entry with one eye shut. Catch y'all tomorrow.

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