hudebnik

We got back from a camping SCA event at 9:30 PM Sunday, unloaded the car but mostly just piled things in the kitchen. Monday morning I put away most of the stuff in the kitchen. Walked dogs in the park. Cleaned and oiled my use-knife. Oiled my ankle-boots. Cleaned and oiled the treenware plates we used at the event. Emptied the dishwasher. Watered plants on the porch. Started a batch of sourdough bread. Eventually shalmestere got out of bed and we both did some gardening: she weeded things while I picked the first two wild strawberries of the season, and adjusted the bird-net over the cherry tree. While I was trimming dead raspberry canes in the back yard, the next door neighbor said he had a mail-order box that had arrived for us over the weekend, he went and got it, and we had a good conversation about working at Google Maps. His wife works at an organization that needs data about the footprints and heights of individual buildings, so they might be a good client for the Maps Platform.

Had a dream about reading and writing music/software that depended on writing words in cursive, rotating them 180°, and reinterpreting them: for example, "lookup" becomes "dpngooy", more or less.

We were about to get married all over again, to fix the mistakes of the first time, and we were making a whole bunch of new mistakes. Scheduled to get married on Monday, after spending Saturday and Sunday out of town at an SCA or LBC event, and it had just occurred to me on Friday to get some couples counseling through my employer, so (without an appointment) I showed up at the counselor's office on Friday to see what we could schedule. A gay-male couple that I knew were already there, about to have their session. It occurred to me to ask shalmestere whether we had the site reserved for the wedding three days hence. And that's all I remember.

Diagnosis: pretty obviously, anxiety over being underprepared and underplanned.

I was rolling out some kind of software fix, and trying to figure out the right sequence of events to roll it out without breaking anything. However, shalmestere and I were also at some kind of large event (a concert, or an SCA event, or something), and we heard an announcement "Guards are to be on high alert", followed a few minutes later by "Guards are to report immediately to <location>; bring helmets," and everybody there looked at one another and said things like "it's going down now. The violence is starting now. I thought we would have longer."

I was at an airport, checking in for my flight. The pleasant young man behind the ticket counter asked for all the usual information, then said "May I see your carry-ons?" I showed him my day-pack, including the laptop case, and he wanted to examine the laptop. It had a separate keyboard, in addition to the charger and charger cord and I don't remember what else, so it made a rather unwieldy package, and he warned me that the security people were not treating such packages well. "I can build you a tower for... 375."

Huh? "Where's the decimal point in that?"

"$3.75"

This didn't sound entirely kosher, but I figured if he could get things into a neater bundle while I watched, it would be worth it to learn how. "Sure, I'll pay for the show. I warn you, though, the guy at the Apple Store wasn't able to get it any neater than this."

But I was getting more and more uncomfortable with what appeared to be a "side hustle", and eventually said "Let's forget it, just give me my boarding pass."

"Boarding passes are very much a... situational thing," he said with that ever-pleasant smile.

"ARE YOU GOING TO GIVE ME A BOARDING PASS OR NOT?" I shouted. Another airline employee, middle-aged female, came up from behind me and said "Is there a problem here?" And I woke up.

I was taking some kind of chemistry class, aimed at self-motivated, interested adults already out of college. In a previous class [this dream had the feel of a continuation of a dream on previous nights, although I don't remember having such a dream] we had done some kind of experiment comparing measurements of several elements on the same row of the periodic table, and the teacher reminded us that the deadline for our 30-40-page reports was tomorrow, and he was looking forward to reading our intelligent, sophisticated analysis. I had done the experiment and written down the results, which were pretty much as expected, but I really didn't think there was that much to say about them. On the other hand, I didn't want to disappoint him, so I was about to tell D. I had a bunch of homework to do tonight, then decided "No, that was just a dream."

Possible inspiration: D. found on YouTube a bunch of episodes of "Head of the Class", a 1980's sitcom about a class of gifted and talented high school students, and we've watched a number of them together in the last week or two. I don't think I had ever seen the show before, as I didn't own or live with a television for most of the 1980's.


There was another interesting dream last night too, having something to do with four-part musical harmony, but it's gone now.

I was in a library, and a nebbishy young guy sitting at a table asked me "What's a mode? I keep hearing about them in music; what are they?"

I have taught a two-hour class on the theoretical side of "what's a mode", and taken a week-long hour-a-day hands-on course about what each mode "feels" like and what's distinctive about each one, and I really didn't want to get into that much detail while whispering in a library, not to mention I had my own stuff to do there. But I started on the few-sentence explanation, involving playing only white keys on the piano.

At which point a female friend of the nebbishy guy (slender, probably in her 40's or 50's) walked over and said "And why can't he find any books about sets?"

Umm... there are LOTS of books about sets, and one can spend semesters or years of one's life studying them, but I wasn't about to get into that. So I said "Well, it helps if you text-search" [I mimed typing on a keyboard] "rather than asking aloud, or people will think you're looking for something else." About which there are even more books available.


Probably inspired variously by attending my friend Alec's "medieval music jam" last Thursday, at which he taught a little bit of "what's a mode", and by my visit to the farmers' market yesterday where I asked "What kinds of apples do you have?" and the young guy standing next to me said "There are different kinds of apples? I thought they were all just apples."

I was in a Popeye-and-Olive-Oyl cartoon, playing the role of a mutual friend of theirs. In this world, it was possible for a woman to produce a key ("the key to my heart", ideally spoken in an Olive Oyl accent) from her navel, which when inserted into the navel of her boyfriend, would psychically tie them together, even at a distance. The effects were small: they would each have a vague notion of the other's whereabouts and emotional state, things like that. And Popeye and Olive Oyl made such a tie.

I learned in the course of the cartoon that there was an upgraded version ("the affinity key" or some name like that) that tied them more closely together and additionally gave each of them physical bonuses in running, combat, etc. Since they both seemed to get into a lot of physical scrapes, I recommended that they take the upgrade. Popeye thought it was a good idea, so I took his key-to-my-heart, went to find Olive Oyl, gave it back to her, and told her the advantages of the upgrade, explaining that "it's on the 'I have to save my bay-bee!' theory" (somewhat apologetically, since I knew they didn't have a baby). So Olive Oyl produced such a key and tested it by sitting on the back of a pickup truck that was rolling down a hill, then jumping off and stopping the truck by physical force. It worked, and she was convinced.

And then I woke up. I'm sure this says something profound about our marriage, but I'm not sure what....

For some reason I was involved in an SCA battle, which would be conducted in two stages, and before each stage each team would have the opportunity to re-arm itself from a wagon of miscellaneous (rubber or boffer) weapons and armor. For the first stage, I happened to be the first one from my team to climb onto the wagon, which was full of straw with various things buried in the straw. I found a little paper hat, which I put on, and a bagpipe, which I figured would be useful for the second stage but not the first, but I kept finding things that seemed irrelevant. As the wagon gradually emptied, I turned back to my team, who were standing outside the wagon waiting for me to give them some armor and weapons, and said apologetically "I haven't found a single piece of armor except this hat, nor a single weapon of any kind."

One of the battle organizers, down on the ground, stepped forward with a several-inch-long rubber dagger and explained "Your colleague happens to have climbed into the instrument wagon." [I didn't know there were any other wagons, nor apparently did my team!]. "But fear not! Here's a dagger for one of you, and I have some more." A few bigger weapons, or shields or armor, would have been nice, but the team wasn't going in entirely unarmed.

Following up on this post...

We've made some progress on both the homemade oval tent and the mail-order circular tent.

The oval tent is currently on track to be up-settable in four different ways: with only guy lines, with hub-and-spokes, with a semirigid spreader hoop at the shoulder, and with both spokes and a spreader hoop. The first is of course the simplest, but the others have advantages too. We'll have to try all four and see how well each works in practice. Anyway, I attached all the spoke pockets, and all the loops at the shoulder to attach guy lines (one at each seam, and two in between each pair of seams for crow's-feet), then started on the shoulder valence. shalmestere thought it should be at least a foot wide, and didn't want to bother with a fringe, but I wasn't sure, so I looked at a bunch of pictures of 14th- and 15th-century tents. Most of them had valences, most of the valences had a fringe edge (some of the valences were nothing but fringe), and the valences were narrow: almost all less than 1/10 the height of the shoulder. So she mail-ordered some fringe (which is not "just for pretty" -- it helps to shed water by giving it defined points to drip from), and I cut out a strip of canvas 8" wide including seam allowances, enough to go all the way around the tent. Haven't attached the fringe to it yet, nor attached it to the roof. Still need to do those things, and attach loops on the inside of the shoulder to hang walls from, and make walls, and attach loops to the tops of the walls to hang from the shoulder, and attach loops to the bottoms of the walls to attach stakes, and cut and attach a sleeve to cover the raw edges of shoulder seams and hold a spreader hoop, and put reinforced holes in the roof peak, and cut a ridge pole, and cut and tie guy lines, and cut and tie stake loops, and make hubs and spokes, and find the finials we mail-ordered years ago, and... I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

Both: Went to Home Depot to get longer pieces of plumbing pipe so the center poles are taller. Home Depot had the pipe, but the pipe-cutting machine was out of order. I guess I could have bought a 10' length of pipe, gotten it home somehow, and cut it myself with a hacksaw, but that would take a long time and probably damage my shoulder and/or elbow. So I called another nearby Home Depot; same story. I called a third nearby Home Depot, and was told that their pipe-cutting machine was working, and they had the pipe in stock. So Friday afternoon after work, shalmestere and I went to this third Home Depot and got some pipe. Oddly, "pipe cut to length" is priced by the foot (not "the price of the pipe by the foot, plus a price per cut", which would make sense to me), and much more expensive than pre-cut lengths: two 3' pipes cost me over twice as much as a 10' length would have. But I bought them anyway.

The circular tent: I also bought a dozen 8' lengths of pine 2x2 for perimeter poles. This was a Web order, so I didn't get to pick out specific pieces, which is why I ordered some spares -- a good idea, since two of them are pretty badly warped. Anyway, I cut the remaining ten to 6'6" each, drilled a hole in one end of each, and drove a 10" steel rod into each hole, so I now have a full complement of perimeter poles. They're probably slightly too long -- the tent manufacturer says 1.85m, which is 6'2" -- but I figured this would be in the right ballpark, and it's easier to cut off a few inches than to add more. Besides, if we're setting up at Pennsic, the ground won't be level anyway; perhaps I'll leave a few of them long for the downhill side of the tent.

Anyway, we now have, theoretically, everything we need to set up the circular tent. It'll look better with crow's-feet or a spreader hoop or something, but those will need more surgery. We probably want to put a grommet in the roof peak so we can put a finial and external storm-guys on top -- the storm-guys not only protect against uprooting but make it easier to set up -- but that can be skipped if we run out of time. Now to find a 30' diameter circular space where we can set it up to confirm that it works, check the perimeter-pole and center-pole heights, and all that.

I was Bilbo Baggins, and the conflict between Sauron and Saruman had spilled into the Shire. A brigade of dwarves working for one or the other marched into town, and the defenseless townsfolk all braced for rape and pillage. I lay in my bed, trying very hard Not to Be Seen, figuring that was my only hope. But one of the heavily-armed dwarves did see me, apparently: he walked by my bed, put a hand on the bed-frame, said something confusing (with a number of "tirree, tirree"s interjected as flavoring particles), and then walked away without doing me any harm. And I was left trying to decipher what he had said, on the theory that he was actually on our side and it was a secret message.