From: Not a valid Answer <hondavtx18@yahoo.com>

To: “egypt@urnash.com” <egypt@urnash.com>

i just read a post you wrote in 2012 about your medications and effects it had on your penis. can i see a pic of that?

DEAR INTERNET, HELP ME CHOOSE MY REPLY:

A: I’m sorry, in 2014 I had it replaced with a set of lights that flashes in patterns known to trigger epilepsy in 95% of humanity.

B: Here you go. [picture taken from the profile of Twitter user @hondavtx18]

C: [no response]

D: [leave suggestion in comments]

“Let's go to Monument Valley for a weekend”, I said. “It'll be neat.” I looked at the forecast: cold but sunny. I bought plane tickets for me and Nick; we made reservations. The plan was to fly into Salt Lake City, spend the night, then rent a car and drive down to the southernmost edge of Utah, spend a couple nights at a lodge by Monument Valleh, look at pretty rocks, then drive back to SLC and fly home.

Well, we got as far as Monument Valley without any major incidents. The GPS we rented with the car refused to charge, so it conked out just before a crucial turn. We realized our error before driving off to somewhere in the desert, and were able to navigate via my phone, an external battery, and some paper maps. We made it to the lodge and thought we were home free.

But then it started snowing. It hasn't stopped. The weather app is telling me there's a winter storm warning in effect for the area, until Monday.

Our room is supposed to have a view of Monument Valley. Right now it has a view of a couple of roads and buildings, then a featureless expanse of white.

That's not all. Flying, then spending a night at high altitudes, then spending six hours driving, did terrible things to Nick's sinuses and various muscles of the neck and head. He barely got any sleep last night due to the ensuing headache. It finally calmed down when the lodge's gift shop opened, and I was able to acquire some aspirin there. He's spent most of the day asleep. I spent most of the day worrying about him,

For a while we were worried he'd contracted something worse. We'd stopped in a Wal-Mart on the drive down for a few supplies – water, an audio cable to play music in the car, and the emergency kit he'd promised his mom he'd get, though we opted not to bother with that last. We both hit the bathroom; there was a guy in the men's room vomiting profusely, and Nick worried he'd gotten it. In fact, reminding him of that early this morning made his body decide to barf a couple of times, just in case. If he DID catch something it's pretty inevitable I've been exposed to it. We will see.

So it looks like we will be changing the flight back and extending our stay. The roads are unlikely to be safe to drive in time for us to make our flight. And it would also be nice to, you know, actually stick around for a day of sunshine and go look at the damn rocks that are the reason for this trip.

He's got his laptop; he'll get some work done. Me? I decided this would be A Vacation, and left mine at home. I won't be working on Rita much this week. I have a sketchbook and a handful of markers; I'll draw… Something. Maybe some fan art, I never draw fan art. Maybe play with designs for Drowning City, maybe just draw whatever and see if anything comes together.

Those rocks ain’t gonna look at themselves.

That was a pretty good valentine’s day.

Nick came over; we slouched in the living room and watched “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf”. Which is about a really complicated relationship; there’s a lot of embittered hatred in the dialogue, but there’s also a ton of chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that kind of turns it into something I see as a relationship I’d like to be in.

We MST3K’d it, since we’d both seen it before. We constructed an alternate version of it in which Martha and George get a lot of their aggression out by sublinating it through her hyena fursona and his WoW Death Knight character. I am tempted to draw caricatures of them as just that.

The next morning, we sprawled in the living room playing some video games – Sony was having a valentine’s day sale on couch multiplayer games, and I’d picked up Geometry Wars, Rayman, and Guilty Gear Xrd Sign. We played a chunk of Geometry Wars and had a great time once he started to get a decent grasp of the basics; it was a lot of fun helping him learn that.

Now he is gone and I am going to do my homework: after a quick attempt at one round of GGXrdS, I need to go through its very extensive tutorials to actually learn how to play a modern fighting game. Wish me luck…

Things I do: A pile of unused cardboard boxes left over from the last Kickstarter, plus a cushion, becomes a highly adjustable seat upon which to rest most of my weight while trying to stretch my legs out towards splits. There is a long way to go before I can even begin to support myself with my hands on the ground while spreading my legs; doing it this way seems like it will both let me slowly descend as I stretch further over time, and keep myself from boredom by using my hands to manage turning the pages of an e-book.

(The boxes are still folded flat, of course, so they’re just a convenient pile of hard-to-crush cardboard for me to sit on.)

Today was pretty useless otherwise; all I really did was play Sunless Sea. I suspect I am recovering from the huge amount of work I made my body do on Wednesday evening at aerial class. It never complains the next day after a lot of exertion; it’s always two days after. Bodies are weird.

I should figure out what I want for food tonight.

I’ve been using “smart” bulbs to provide some color to the white box of an apartment I live in. I keep on feeling like the weakest link in this is the software.

Because what I want, as someone trying to design her lighting, is multiple playlists. One playlist might be for the studio: blue/green at 8am, to make me happy, awake, and energetic when I work; change this to something orangey/reddish around 6pm to suggest that maybe it’s time to quit working, and then deepen towards a very dim red as bedtime approaches. And then there might be another playlist for the studio for when I want to sit in the reading chair and read: lots of bright white near that chair, reds elsewhere in the room from 8am-7pm, then everything starts getting dimmer as night approaches. And other playlists for different moods.

(And other tricks like the foyer: during the day, I’d love for it to have a few different colors based on the outside temperature, so I can quickly decide which coat I want, then fade to red in the evening.)

(And of course I also want some kind of location awareness: turn the lights on and off when my phone goes in and out of the house, staying aware of the current playlist…)

A bulb, I think, should store the current playlist on itself; when it’s turned on at the wall switch, or turned on by software, it should check the current time and pick the appropriate color from the playlist. Simple, integrates with the existing wall switches. (LIFX bulbs store the current color across a power cycling; Hues do not.)

What I get in all the software I’ve tried is a series of arbitrary time triggers. At this point in time, set these bulbs to these colors. If they’re on at the wall switch. If I want to change to a different mood of decor throughout the whole day, it’s a laborious process of changing triggers. Less laborious than repainting every wall would be, sure. But still enough work that it’s not something I’m going to do lightly.

I dunno. It really just feels like all the software is thinking at too low a level for me. It’s closer to useful than it was back in the 70s or something, when my dad’s studio had individually controlled sets of red, green, and blue incandescent bulbs, but it’s still just not automating a lot of the stuff I find myself doing. “Oh I’m up and want to work, let’s see is it a cloudy day or a normal day.”

It doesn’t help, of course, that there are really not any standards. Everyone has to build their software pretty much from scratch. Maybe HomeKit will help unify this for me, though I’m really not holding my breath.

The past few days have involved:

• My ex-with-benefits visiting for a couple of days instead of the usual evening/night/morning after.
• Circus strength and flexibility class.
• Going to the aquarium with some friends.

When I came home after the aquarium visit yesterday, I had some plans to draw stuff, what with feeling guilty about not touching Rita at all for the past few days. But I ended up falling asleep in the living room for a while instead, and opting to spend the evening re-reading Stations of the Tide.

I feel this was a wise choice. I actually got some stuff DONE on Rita this morning, and should be getting more done before haring off to Introductary Aerial class.

—-

I decided to re-read Stations of the Tide after contemplating an article from someone who’s read one Wodehouse novel and Hamlet a hundred times. I doubt I will ever get to this sort of intimacy with any particular text; I think I’ve maybe read Stations four or five times at most. But there’s something important to me lurking in there; it’s one of the few prose books I bothered getting a new copy of after Katrina, and bothered to keep through a cross-country move. If something happens to my copy I suspect I’ll probably buy a new one despite most of my prose reading being digital.