Very quiet Friday

Predictably, I started the day a little slowly.  I processed data from home, thinking I would go out in the afternoon and look again for shoes and a bathroom scale, but I never even did that.  Alyson got home around six, we made dinner, listened to the radio, and now she’s sleeping.  No crazy Halloween party.  Tomorrow maybe…

Queer word of the day:  Panda bear:  Asian bear.  I heard a friend use that term yesterday and I loved it instantly.

Dinner:  Pumpkin pie appetizer, chicken breast with rice and salad.

Exercise:  getting dressed was about the most I exerted myself today.

Diet

Ok, so various forces (Carla!) are making me feel increasingly guilty for not writing.  So… here is a public entry, if devoid of any real content.

Food today:

Lunch:  Baba Ghannouj wrap and orange-carrot juice from Falafel Corner in Harvard Square.

Dinner:  At home.  Edamame appetizer, broccoli cauliflower cheese soup I whipped up, with a roll left over from yesterday’s Hi-rise tuna salad (minus a bite stolen by Queso), one little extra slice of sharp vermont cheddar cheese, and a slice of pumpkin pie for dessert.

Later:  Beer at Joe Sent Me.

Weight:  I shopped for a bathroom scale today, I really did.  I want the $50 model that does the RF BMI sensing thing, but I’ve done that before and probably don’t need to pay for the novelty again.  There’s a $15 model that has an easy to read scale…  It should do.

Sizes 6-10 M only

Just got back from an unsucessful expedition to find shoes.   Yes, there are any number of size 10s I could have gotten, but I’ve been squeezing my feet into 10s for the last year and I’m tired of it.  I want 11s.  Also I’ve had a number of Payless shoes recently and I’m tired of cheap thin-soled shoes.  I want something nicer.

I’m shoe shopping because I’m down to one pair of wearable shoes, and those are cheap thin little flats that won’t last long with my daily commute on the sidewalk. I went to put on my Converse-clones (by Levi) yesterday and found a finger size hole under the ball of the foot. You’d think Levi could make a shoe that would wear a little longer. Yes, I wore them almost every day this summer, but still, they only lasted one summer. Why don’t I have more shoes? Most of my shoes I never recovered after the last move. To condense them and make them easier to move (and store) I dumped them all in a big wash tub. Presumably the wash tub was moved and is over at Stacy’s place somewhere. I don’t have a way to get them easily. Maybe I’ll take my suitcase over there and fill it with shoes and bring it back on the bus… I could use the two pair of boots that I got last winter in KC for sure. Not sure what else is there that is wearable. Maybe that’s all.

Food:  Tuna salad from Hi-Rise for lunch, homemade tacos for dinner.  Oh, and edamame appetizer.

Exercise:  30 minutes walking plus hiking all over Downtown Crossing and Harvard Square looking for shoes.  My feet hurt.

Still here

…still in limbo.  There’s no special reason to write today.  It’s a random wet autumn day.

Yesterday:  Lied in bed late, sat at the computer, then dragged myself to the office around 3pm.  Rushed to get the important work finished by the end of the day so I could make it to a meeting of people working on transgender history in Boston.

The meeting was thoroughly depressing.  It’s a wonderful project but I came away feeling that I have absolutely nothing to contribute.  I feel like I should drop out.

Hungry after the meeting, I had Border Cafe on the brain because Alyson had eaten there yesterday and I had declined to go because I was running late.  I was thinking of their shrimp and crayfish salad, thinking that would be good for my diet that I started yesterday.  Border, though, turned out to be mobbed.  I got a beer at the bar and waited to see if a place to sit would open up, but no, just more and more people keep gushing in the door.  A short leap got me to Charlie’s, where it was the quiet hour with plenty of seating.  Still thinking seafood, I ordered a fish and garbanzo sandwich concoction from their seasonal menu.  Lisa asked how it was.  She hadn’t tried it yet and was probably genuinely interested, but I answered with my immediate condition of the sandwich falling apart in my hand, saying “I recommend eating it with a fork.”  Really it was nice.  The chick peas went well with fish and there was a little bit of seasoning stirred in as well.

I didn’t stick around after eating.  While I’d gotten the important asteroid work done earlier, there was still a pile more.  I went back to the office and processed data until 12:30.  Home at 1am, I snuggled up to Alyson and slept.

Weight (at some point over the weekend): 170
Food yesterday:  1/4 pumpkin pie, fish sandwich, fries, 2 beers.
Exercise:  about 70 minutes walking.

Peak color

Supposedly the weekend of peak foliage color in the Boston area, and the weather Sunday was beautiful, warm and sunny.  I hadn’t taken hardly any foliage photos this year so this was the day to do it.  Except…the fact that I hadn’t taken any indicates my lack of motivation and inspiration.  I piddled indoors until there were only a couple of hours of daylight left before finally getting out the door.

I walked in the woods on a trail I had never tried, and took photos.  All bad.  Photography was going badly, but before long I was loving being in the woods.  The new trail was amazing and full of surprises.  I walked to the end thinking there would be a way to cut over to the trail that I knew and come home that way, which was considerably more direct.  There wasn’t.  Seeing I was going to have to backtrack, and that the sun was on the horizon, I thought I had better run, rather that walk, to avoid being on an unfamiliar trail in the dark.  Running was fun.  Twilight was enough to recognize the path I had just come down and I flew through the woods and was at the head of the trail in no time.

Walking out into the open then, a deer follows me right out of the woods.  She passed me on the path, like one pedestrian would pass another who slowed down in front of them, walked to some tall grass a little bit in front of me, and started eating.  This would have been photoworthy, except the sunset had been casting amazing colors in the clouds, and my plan on getting out of the woods was to shoot the sunset.  I shot the sunset, taking multiple exposures to stack on the computer later, and the silly deer was still there, daring me to take her photo.  Ok, fine.

 

Shy Pose

I take one picture, and start to take another when her boyfriend shows up.

Camera ham

I never like my sunset photo, or any of the foliage shots.  They didn’t make the Flickr cut.

Boob badges

Saturday, Alyson and I are sitting around Diesel Cafe and a woman hands us a flyer for a party. It’s the Harvard Law School Lambda Association’s 18th annual “Outlaw” party. Apparently an event just to invite interested people from the Boston area to party with HLS queers. I think it’s perfect! We had no plans for the evening, and Alyson, new GLAD employee, plausably could have an interest in socilizing with law students.

Outlaws

The weather is bad. It’s warm, but pouring rain. Alyson is sure that there will be no one there. Wrong.

Omg, this photo doesn’t begin to convey the size of the crowd. In the photo here is the grand ballroom at the Sheraton Commander. It was packed, the adjacent dinning room was full, a conference room down the hall was full of people seeking a shorter drink line, and the hotel lobby was packed with people milling around and socializing at the HLS Lambda table.

We got drinks and waded into the throng in the ballroom.  There was a DJ and a dance floor but people were more into talking at this point.  Alyson was amused at my insistance to forge deeper and deeper into the crowd.  “Just to people watch” I told her.  Really I was sure that at least one of us would find someone we knew, but that never happened.  Looking back to the entrance stairway, it was a waterfall of people still pouring into the room.  We got second drinks and squished our way back out on to the dance floor.  By now we found a few people dancing.  We took advantage of the great DJ and danced a bit ourselves before retreating to the balcony upstairs.

Well, it was fun just to see the party and to be able to say we were there.  On the way out, I stopped at the now abandoned Lambda table in the lobby, moved a few papers around, and uncovered a sheet of stickers, pink triange stickers that some people were sporting.  I guessed they were for actual Lambda association members, but I couldn’t resist stealing a couple of them.  Half way through the night I saw a woman wearing the sticker, not on her clothing, but stuck directly to her breast.  It was so eye catching that the meme rapidly spread and before long lots of stickers had migrated to bare skin.  I had to have one.

I caught up with Alyson then, patiently waiting for me outside the front entrance, stuck one sticker on her and one on me.  The night was young, we were happy, the rain had slowed, and we stopped in Charlie’s to finish the night.  Upstairs, where there is the jukebox, and since the bar was crowded, we sat at a table, talked, reviewed pictures on my camera, and snapped a couple more.

Alyson, me

Weird awkwardness

Friday I…went over to someone’s house. This was someone I met in my early crazy fun days of cross dressing. We met, bar hopped, danced, had sex, all on one night. He’d contacted me on and off since, and I’d always had excuses for not seeing him. We ran into each other in a bar recently and he emailed me shortly after and asked if I’d like to “chat.”

I did kind of want to see him and catch up on things. I asked Alyson if she would be too jealous if I went out with him. She looked at me like I had pushed her in a mud puddle, but said no, that would be fine. Weird awkwardness.

It’s a little vague. Did he mean chat online? I first assumed something broader, that he would like to see me face to face. How broad? Does chat mean sex? I asked if he would like to “meet sometime.” We didn’t address sex. I cautioned him I “can’t promise much,” but nevertheless, in a couple of email exchanges I agreed to come over for “pleasant chat”, wine, and maybe a movie.

Well, we had pleasant chat and wine (and strawberries!) and watched an interesting movie and then he wanted to make out and presumably have sex. No, I pushed him away. I had a lame excuse of having a cough, but also explained that I hadn’t been doing that (implying casual sex) and that I was kind of involved with someone.  He looked like I had pushed him in a mud puddle and then broke his thermos.  I tried to apologize but it seemed to make no sense.  I had to just leave.  Weird awkwardness.  I’m a jerk and an idiot.

Alyson was surprised to see me home early.

Lucy

Lucy emailed me some time back telling that she was coming to Boston and would like to see me.  Like I do so often, I read the email and let it drift out of my mind.  I didn’t think of her again until she had already been in town for a few days, at which point I desperately emailed her to find out if we could still make plans.  We set up dinner and band on a Monday.  For dinner I picked Jose’s, a Mexican place I walk by on the way to work every day.  For music afterward, I picked Toad, a little bar, again, within walking distance, that schedules live music every night.  Dinner was nice.  We sat at a table in the middle of the room, ordered specialties of the house, drank Modelo, talked, and ate without watching the clock.  Nevertheless, we arrived at Toad before the first band started.  The scheduled opening artist had canceled and another band was filling in.  These guys were artisans.  It was a short and sweet fill-in opening act, it was way cool, and then it was over.  The second band, I at least have the name of:  Jen Kearney & The Lost Onion.

Jen Kearney & The Lost Onion

Jen needs both her voice and keyboard to express all the music she has inside.  She steps back and picks up a guitar when the song calls for it.  She writes all of the music, and the rest of the band is awesome as well.  The the bass player was amazing.  Not shown in my photo here is the horn section, a trumpet player and a sax player.  Lucy and I drank more beers, talked more, and left before it got too late.

That was supposed to be our night out, except Lucy spilled that she was meeting Sheila the next night for dinner at Legal Seafood before going to Natick.  I couldn’t resist.  I love seafood, Legal is great, and Sheila is guaranteed fun.  I invited myself to their party.  Neither seemed to mind a bit.  Dinner was a blast.  Sheila flirted it up with our waiter, practically making me blush at times.  The food–well, my food anyway–was great.  I had swordfish, since I had just made swordfish at home within the last week.  I wanted to compare, and predictably, Legal’s preparation put mine to shame.

When we got to Natick, there were pleasant surprises in seeing everyone there.  I had a good talk with Daphne, and when someone mentioned Flickr at some point, I remembered how I needed someone to buy my Flickr Pro for me.  (Not having bank accounts, I can’t do online transactions.)  I asked Daphne and she was happy to take my $25 and do this favor for me.  Natick really is a little treasure.  I’m always happy when I go there.  Lucy brought me home at the end of the night and that was our visit.  I know I say this about all of my friends, but she’s really a wonderful friend.