hudebnik

After two rainy days in Córdoba, we checked out of our room and walked in the rain to the parking lot, where the car was intact and not flooded (although the lot was, as expected, even muddier than before). Drove in the rain to Antequera, where the stone gate had indeed been rolled aside and we were able to visit the dolmens, variously 4000-6000 years old. The two in town, Viera and Menga, have a slick modern visitor's center, QR codes to download detailed descriptions, etc. while the one a few km outside town, El Romeral (next to a shipping-pallet warehouse) has bathrooms and a couple of tour guides standing around. Viera is oriented, conventionally, so that its inner chamber is illuminated by the rising sun on either the equinoxes or the summer solstice (I forget which). The other two are more unusual: El Romeral, which we visited first, is unique in Europe in that its entry passage points west: specifically, it points at the highest point of a nearby mountain range.

And Menga's entry passage points south-southeast, at the highest point of a lone mountain which, seen from here, has the shape of a human facial profile. Although of course we couldn't actually see it through the rain and fog. Which are also why I don't have a bunch of pictures from yesterday.

Then we drove in the rain to Granada, parked at an underground lot, dragged our suitcases outside in the rain, caught a taxi in the rain, walked a block or two in the rain to the same Granada hotel we were at last week, and checked in. Hung things up to dry, put the room's climate-control system in "dehumidify" mode, and fell down in bed, about 3 PM.

We appear to have left a bag of Easter chocolate and related goodies in the hotel at Málaga, so we needed to replenish the supply before Easter was over. So after an hour or two of resting and drying off, we headed out (in slightly less-driving rain) to the downtown shopping district where the fancy chocolate- and candy-stores are. Then stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner: shalmestere had gnocchi with some kind of Calabrian-pepper sauce, while I had lasagna bolognese (which seemed appropriately warming and hearty for the weather). By the time we finished, the rain had stopped, and we walked two blocks back to the hotel.

Turned on local TV to see what we could understand. Watched a few minutes of a hunting-and-fishing show, a few more minutes of an action drama involving a lot of people shooting one another and blowing up train cars, then stumbled into the Spanish-dubbed version of one of the "Shrek" movies that we hadn't seen (Shrek is in an alternate universe where none of his friends, nor his wife, recognize him). Which is good visual humor even if you can't make out all the words, so we watched that to the end. Next on the same channel was a show about a couple of teenaged friends who work in a garishly-colored video-game store, and at the end of every scene they metamorphose from live-action to frames in a comic book. Again, largely visual humor (the female protagonist had mistakenly put on a customer's boots, couldn't get them off, ended up borrowing a bucket of Italian dressing from their friend who works at the pizzeria next door and pouring it down the boots to lubricate her feet enough to extricate them... and then they return the boots to the wrong customer and have to retrieve them... and then there's a plot thread about the male protagonist having, then losing, the high score on a particular video game and trying to regain his title).

My scratchy throat of a few days ago has mostly gone away, but the occasional coughing fits continue, and today I added occasional sneezing fits to the mix. Which was a problem while I was driving in the rain; fortunately I didn't actually hit anything. Slept with a bunch of pillows under my head, getting up every few minutes to drink water or blow my nose or pee. Not the most pleasant of nights, but we both eventually got some sleep.

The good news: the long-term forecast for our remaining week in Spain shows no rain whatsoever in the places we'll be, on the days we'll be there. In particular, our Alhambra tour this afternoon and our Sevilla tour tomorrow should both be rain-free.

When it stopped raining yesterday, we went outside and planted some bulbs. And I edged the front edge of the yard with decorative bricks. And replaced the low fencing around the front sublawn. There are more bulbs to be planted, and there are still some gaps left behind by the front-walk construction, so I think we need to buy a couple of bags of topsoil, and probably some mulch -- I hope we can find some that aren't water-saturated, after the past few days of rain. And I need to bake bread today.

[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]

I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.

Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.

About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.

So the plan was

• leave the dogs at a boarding kennel today,


• drive to the Washington, DC area tonight,


• participate in a living-history show at Catholic University tomorrow (including a half-hour main-stage musical performance by shalmestere and me),


• attend a concert by the Folger Consort tomorrow (music from the early 14th-century Roman de Fauvel),


• attend our adult niece's confirmation Sunday, and


• drive home Sunday afternoon.

In particular, for the Catholic University demo we were preparing a set presenting the four seasons through 14th-15th-century English music -- none of that French, German, Flemish, or Italian stuff. This is tricky because an awful lot of written music (and other written material) in England got burned in successive waves of violence and looting: the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the English Civil War, etc. And it used to be taught that England was the musical backwater of Europe until Dowland in the late 16th century. But we now know, by extrapolating from surviving tables of contents and textual references to English songs, that a lot of music was happening in medieval England. So the set list includes well-known English pieces that survive with music, such as "Miri It Is" and "Sumer Is Icumen In", as well as musical pieces that survive with only an English incipit such as "Wynter", instrumental pieces in sources with medieval English provenance, and English lyrics that survive without music but which shalmestere has re-set to tunes known in medieval England.

But on Tuesday, while walking the dogs, shalmestere twisted her ankle on some broken and uneven sidewalk: her ankle is now swollen and discolored, she can barely walk, and she's spent much of the past three days elevating and icing it. So we've called off the trip to DC for the weekend.

It was good to have a deadline forcing us to prepare this ambitious musical set, and it's disappointing to not perform that set tomorrow, but I'm sure we'll find an opportunity to do it somewhere.

... was Wednesday morning. I had been warned of "flu-like symptoms" after the second shot of Moderna, but I went to bed Wednesday evening feeling just fine.

About noon on Thursday I developed a persistent headache, which developed over the next few hours into general body aches, fatigue, and dyspepsia. I told $EMPLOYER I was taking a sick day, and slept most of the afternoon and evening.

By 11 PM I was feeling slightly better, and with some misgivings joined shalmestere in walking the dogs around the block. This morning I'm feeling perfectly normal.

So, to summarize... about twelve hours of "flu-like symptoms". Very unpleasant at the time, but manageable and (apparently) time-limited.

I was at a music concert at my usual Google office building. There were dozens of people on stage singing, a couple of people sitting off to one side playing in a brass quartet, and dozens more people milling around eating steam-table food. And my reaction, in the dream, was shock: why are there so many people so close together, none of them wearing masks?

Yesterday morning shalmestere visited the web site for our "major shopping trip" grocery store (the one that's a 15-minute drive, rather than a 5-10-minute walk) and managed to score a same-day delivery slot! (Most of her attempts have offered deliveries well into May.) So about noon, a car pulled up in front of the house and two masked-and-gloved store employees delivered a good-sized load of groceries to our front porch, which buys us perhaps another week before grocery shopping again. Which should make marchforth2 happier....

They didn't have whole-milk Greek yogurt, but we got some nonfat. They didn't have silken tofu (which we use in milkshakes). But the majority of things on the shopping list were available in stock -- in particular, salad greens, milk, and butter, all of which were running out.