That's why they call it "tear gas".

In the wake of my post last night, I left the square and began to walk towards my apartment - and found out the hard way that the atmosphere around Constitution Square and the Parliament building was still saturated with tear gas.

How to describe it? It's a bit like a purely physical version of an emotional trauma. Your eyes tear up, the gas must somehow get into the tears meaning you've got a tear gas solution ripping at your eyes, the pain gets bad enough that the more you resist rubbing your eyes the worse the urge becomes to start clawing at your eyes...

A bit like getting shot down in a particularly brutal fashion, except that the depression and the knife-twisting-in-the-ribs sensation is replaced with the sensation of your eyes being boiled in your skull.

For about five, ten minutes, I was pretty much blind - and starting to worry that I might lose my bearings and stumble out into the street and get hit by a bus, but at the same time needing to stay in motion, to get the hell out of the cloud.

I've got an awful feeling this won't be the last time I experience that sensation.

Minor silver lining

My grandmother's condition, last I heard, was unchanged. I haven't heard anything today about that. My mother arrived in Athens about 10am EET, to be with her.

Feels petty to mention it, but my new laptop crossed the Atlantic in her luggage. With Cortana becoming more and more problematic, the arrival is none too soon.

And as another aside, I'm trying to rack my brains for a name. At the moment, my plan is to label the new machine Cortana II, but I'm open to suggestions. (It's not just for whimsy's sake; it's likely I'll have to network the new machine to the old one to get settings transferred over, and I'll end up with a small home network in my apartment, if and when I ever get the phone line and the DSL line in place.)