Beowabbit

This is plumtreeblossom cross-posting to beowabbit's LJ, since our f'lists are not the same.

beowabbit is unwell right now. It began with increasing pain at the base of his skull over the past few days, limiting is mobility and and eventually eliminating his ability to drive or lay down comfortably in any position for long. When pain with swallowing became a thing yesterday morning, it was time to go to MIT Urgent Care to see a doctor.

A seed of fear had been planted in us about menengitis or other spinal/brain stem infection, but he examining doctor at MIT Medical ruled that out for now. It seems to be a serious muscle issue, possibly brought on by a too-tight CPAP mask strap, but we really just don't know how it came about. He has a bad reaction to the muscle relaxant he was prescribed (Cyclobenzaprine). It was as if he had been "roofied." A call to MIT Medical took him off that drug and onto regular Ibuprophen. Itwas a rough night, and I slept downstairs so that he could have the whole bed to find (semi) comfortable positions to lay in.

He's not well enough for visitors, but I know he would love to get messages and comments from friends. We're doing what we can to get him through this.

As I posted yesterday, auditions for PMRP’s Hallowe’en special featuring “Ghost Hunt” and my adaptation of “Night of the Living Dead” are this coming Monday and Tuesday. The sides and other files (availability forms, etc.) are now up! Everything relevant is linked from the main auditions page, but in case you have trouble finding the links, here are the role descriptions (and an explanation of what being a Foley artist and performing live sound effects entails), and PDFs of the sides and other forms are available by clicking on the slightly misleading “Download PDF File” link on the “Documents & Files” page (which takes you to a page with a list of files which you can download or add to your Google Drive if you use that).

It would be great if you could print out your own copies of the forms (and either print out or have on a phone or tablet the sides) in advance if you can, but we’ll have copies if you don’t.

Hope to see a bunch of you at auditions!

This is a web game that has you clicking through Google Street View images and guessing where you are. I got my first three two guesses in the right country, at least, and the second one I got in the right republic of Russia (although I may have cheated by using the Googles to figure out where the mosque I was looking at was).

GeoGuessr - Let's explore the world!

Congratulations to the cast and crew of PMRP’s Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular on a great opening night! Y’all were awesome, on stage, at the Foley table, and at the boards. Special thanks to the Them! cast for making my first time directing so amazing!

Two performances today, then performances next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and a special matinée on Sunday, April 21, at the MIT Museum. Details on the event page. Come see it!

It was quite the ordeal. I can now say that I've dug my car out of the snow on the interstate. And the windshield spontaneously cracked on the way here. And oh my holy blessed virgin mother of pearl, the hours-long ordeal of finding a place I could park (thanks, usernamenumber and preraphaelite). But I'm here safe and warm in Somervile with plumtreeblossom. And so is Chickenfinger, although she's been hiding for hours and we don't know where she is. And I just got out of an ecstatically wonderful hot shower. Life is good.

(There are some indications that power may be on again in my neighborhood in Quincy. Hard to be certain, though. And no way I am going out in that again tonight.)

I had a mild cold for some of the show two-and-three weekends ago, but I thought I was solidly over it by the end of the run. Unfortunately, it came back, with new symptoms, early last week. (Or perhaps I picked up something new to replace it in the green room — a bunch of the cast were sick, some of them pretty badly.)

Anyway, that got worse over the course of the week, and I ended up going home early on Thursday, and staying home on Friday.

Friday night plumtreeblossom came over to take care of me. (We’d already had a date planned, but we decided that with my hacking cough a nice dinner at a restaurant with lots of other diners was maybe not the best idea, so we picked up some take-out.)

After eating, we looked for something to watch on Netflix. plumtreeblossom said she was interested in something historical, and I asked if Shakespeare counted as historical. She said it did, and we ended up watching Great Performances’ 2010 production of Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart as Macbeth. The text was all Shakespeare, but the setting evoked a mid-20th-century fascist state with Macbeth as mad dictator. It was just spectacular. Although clearly done on a pretty low budget, it was visually stunning. The cinematography was wonderful. The acting was amazing — Stewart’s, of course, but also that of the other actors, none of whom we recognized. I felt like you could subtract the Shakespeare play and still be left with a great work of art. plumtreeblossom posted her own review of it here. See it if you can. It’s available on Netflix streaming and Amazon Instant Video.

This morning, we had a social event planned that we were supposed to be hosting, but I was clearly too sick, and unfortunately it was clear that plumtreeblossom was coming down with this too. :-/ So we scrambled in the morning to get in touch with some of the other attendees, and we hope it went off all right without us. plumtreeblossom went home, and I’ve had a quiet day at home watching more Netflix with my kitty and puttering around on the internet. I’m generally feeling better, but the coughing fits have gotten more violent (although less frequent). I really want to just wash my lungs out with warm water. (The vaporizer seems to be helping quite a bit.)

Power: on
Water: flowing and potable
Trees: standing
House: warm
Basement: dry
Cat: sleeping

My work is closed today, and the Boston subway shut down at 2:00pm, but all is well so far in Quincy. I hope things are going as well for everybody reading this.

No time to do it justice, but plumtreeblossom and I saw Theatre@First’s production of Bent last night, and it was incredibly powerful and moving and truly spectacular. It’s about gay men in Nazi Berlin and Dachau, and it’s just as intense as you might imagine. The acting was stunning. You may not be able to sit through the whole thing, but you should try.

The New England Theater Geek has a review. If you’re not sure whether you can handle it, Wikipedia has a summary of the plot (with spoilers, of course).

So I ended up having to speed up the mail server migration because of what might either be a failing hard drive or a garbled filesystem. (I discovered that the filesystem was corrupt and the old machine wasn't functioning properly *as* I was synchronizing data, and rather than wait and do a final synch today as I had planned, I went ahead and stayed up to finish everything overnight.) More gory details are in this post, which is mainly of interest to other people who read their mail on aq.org. But the short version is that (1) mail delivery to me (and/or from me) may be flaky today, (2) I am going to bed now.

My darling plumtreeblossom just got an Android phone (not yet set up), and that spurred me to take some time to update my list of Android apps. It’s crazy-long, so unlike last time, I’m not going to post the whole list to LJ; it’s at

• Jay’s big list of Android apps

Currently, it’s a partial list of what’s on my phone, sorted into categories, with most apps annotated with a short description, and the ones I particularly recommend starred and boldfaced.