Today is a day of mixed emotion.

Today, in Massachusetts, same-sex couples began receiving marriage certificates. Gay couples are lining up to tie the knot, and aside from a few snot-nosed punks from Westboro Baptist Church, the protests have been civil. Even the opponents have said, "what they're doing is legal, even if it's not moral; let them have their happiness," which I think is really big of them considering how hard they fought against this.

Today, an insurance agent told me that despite being legally married to Jessie, we're not "a couple" for insurance purposes because we're both women. Aetna has defined a couple in their guidelines as "one man and one woman with a marriage license," and the fact that we have one of those conditions doesn't mean we meet them both. I mentioned the whole Boston thing, and she said "Yes, ma'am, but that's not Pennsylvania, and the underwriters in
Pennsylvania have opted at this time to ignore the social progress happening in Massachusetts, though they reserve the right to change their minds later." At least she didn't shut me out completely, but it's still
highly irritating to be told that we may be married, but we're not a couple for purposes of insurance underwriting.

Today, I explained to a recruiter for the nth time that I lost my job for reasons I don't really understand. Thursday, April 22nd, I was an employee in good standing. Friday, Apreil 23rd, I was out on the street. I got a performance-based salary increase in November, and I got an out-of-cycle performance-based bonus in January. I never received a formal warning of any sort about my job performance, either written or verbal, prior to being let go. The company then fired the Director of Technology a week later for "performance issues" two weeks after he finished migrating a fifty-machine server room plus the rest of a major office space. Every recruiter to whom I've told all of this has been incredibly sympathetic, but none of them have jobs open for someone with my skillset
right now.

Today, the chair of the department of CIS at DeVry told me she wants to schedule an interview "some time in the next four weeks" for an adjunct teaching position. She was impressed enough with my perl and my database skills to pull me in to teach a class on programming and SQL, but it sounded like she didn't think I had enough meat on my proficiencies to be a full-time professor. It's still income, just not as much as I'd like. With any luck, though, I could do that part-time and get a full-time job elsewhere, which would be enough to keep me in the black.

Today, I made arrangements to rent a truck to go pick up some furniture that Tanya's uncle is donating, and then move the rest of the contents of the apartment into the house we've owned without use for five months now. The
doors are all off the hinges because the place had hardwood and now it has carpet, and the doors weren't meant for carpet, so they all have to be shaved to fit, but hopefully the repair crews are taking care of that detail as well. I won't know for sure until I hear back from the company, though, which should be tomorrow.

Today, I realized just how much packing and cleaning I have to do in three days. Despite all the boxes we've moved into the new place already, it feels like there's no way we're going to get everything moved in time on the
schedule I want to move by. My only hope now, really, is to clean and sort as much as possible between now and Friday and plan on picking up boxes from Tanya's workplace—since she works for a grocery store and they have all the boxes they want—and packing into the boxes when they show up, meaning we have to pack and move and then at least unload all over the same two days. This weekend is going to be painful.

Today, I found out that in four months, insurance companies consider me middle-aged.

Today, I reread all my old letters from my transition, the letters from my therapist and my clinical observer clearing the path for me to become legally and physically female, or at least the best approximant thereof possible in the World of Today.

Today is the greatest day I've ever known.

Today, I learned that the income I thought I would have by June 1, I won't have for some time afterwards, meaning I don't have enough to make ends meet unless I get a job real-damn-fast or I live on the credit card. I'm not angry about it, any more than I'm angry at losing my job in the first place, but I wish I had known things would go that way in the beginning so I could plan accordingly. This is going to require emergency measures to correct.

Today, I wondered where my home was.