0004 Jevera 02: Divided

When I migrated from my old site to Blogger, I originally did so because I had a dream, at some far distant point in the future, of being able to monetize my stories, like some other authors have. It was a pipe dream, but it was still a valid dream to follow, so I went with it. I couldn't put ads on LiveJournal. DreamWidth didn't exist. I didn't feel like trying to host my own WordPress site. It seemed the right way to go about it.

Then I asked myself, "Well, if I'm moving my stories over to a new site, why not move my whole diary over?" It sounded like a reasonable question. I'd kept the old site up for eight or nine years, but I was getting tired of the maintenance, and I was also honestly frustrated with the lack of feedback on my diary updates. I assumed, and had a few people suggest, that the reason why nobody ever said anything to my posts was because despite the link from LiveJournal back to my diary, people didn't like having to hit the back button to comment. Having taken a class in HCI in graduate school, I could believe this.

I should, at this point, diverge long enough to state that the idea of me taking and passing a class in human-computer interfaces ought to either titillate or frighten people. I was the Problem Child who told the teacher I ran my monitor at 132×43 and used vi out of personal preference. That was one of the few grades I didn't earn so much as negotiate.

At any rate, I jumped ship, moving everything over to Blogger. The stories went to the Nail, and the diary came to the Ranch. I started porting over the back catalog of posts on my site so I could finally decommission it, and I started putting up my old catalog of stories.

Then I discovered something problematic.

Back when I started my original diary, I went into it with the idea that, if I wasn't comfortable talking about it with the whole world, then it wasn't worth discussing. I said to myself that I was going to just let my freak flag fly, and anybody who had a problem with it could just deal. I was tired of hiding. I was tired of sneaking around in the darkness.

Then, I actually had a couple of things happen that, for very good reason, didn't warrant wider conversation, but did need to be brought out for more than just my eyes to study.

Now, all of a sudden, I had a problem that, until this point, I had no need to solve, simply because I really didn't have any good topics of conversation that fell into that weird middle ground of "not completely private but not really public either." Having already made the leap to Blogger, I started surfing around it for options, and... I found something distressing. Namely, that while Google does support the idea of a private blog, with restricted access, it doesn't really have any concept of a private post, with individual elements in a blog restricted to specific people.

One might think that, like any reasonable or sane person, I would simply slink back to LJ, which is, after all, where all my friends hang out and post. And, you'd be perfectly justified in thinking of this as an option. Unfortunately, past events have left me extremely skittish dealing with SixApart's administration, especially on subjects such as frank discussions of sex and sexuality. It's not that I assume they'll ban me if I talk about it. It's that... well, they've already done it in the past, and I don't feel like courting disaster.

DreamWidth, now available, seemed like a good option. Very LJ-like, and with some new features that sold me relatively quickly... only... still no good way to put up my writing blog there. I suppose I could simply copy the posts and host them on DW, but they're very new and I have no idea how they feel about foreign ads on their sites. I suppose I could ask, but it feels a little like inviting the same kind of disaster as putting the sexy talk on LJ.

So, a conundrum, one that plagues me even now. See, the Nail, for all that I don't do what I said I was going to do with it, needs to remain on Blogger, or else go to WordPress, assuming that I'm not interested in rolling my own; it's the only place I can really host ads alongside the content, assuming I ever get enough content in place that anybody would want to put ads there; that, sadly, is its own topic. The Ranch could go to DreamWidth and consolidate with the Spiral, which would be fine, but it doesn't "solve the problem" of two separate hosts to handle my stuff. I could move DreamWidth's content to Blogger, but I'd have to have... um... three or four separate blogs, each with its own access list... no. Not happening.

Really, it's like my requirements for blogging software really come down to two major points:

• I want to host ads on the writing blog at some point.
• I want to secure individual posts to an arbitrary access list.

I don't think any noncommercial blogging platform actually provides me both of these at the same time. Blogger requires a separate blog for every access list. WordPress doesn't permit ads unless you pay for a VIP account. DreamWidth doesn't permit ads. LiveJournal's administration policies make me nervous... and don't permit ads.

It's looking like what I really want is a self-hosted WordPress site. But... what I don't want is another rassa-frassa migration from one site to another. I also want to avoid getting back into administrating my own frickin' blog software. I also want to avoid people thinking that I'm even more of a flake than I already am. However, it seems that if I really do only want to have to keep track of one site on top of LiveJournal... then this is probably going to be it.

So, to you, my theoretically loyal readers, any thoughts? Is the effort of consolidation worth the hassle of updating my own software? Does anyone actually read anything on DreamWidth? As long as I provide links as appropriate, do people care if I have a hojillion Blogger sites? Should I give up and come back to LiveJournal? Should I give up on the idea of trying to make money off my writing at some point? Does Jif really taste more like fresh-roasted peanuts?

Is there anybody out there?

0001 Lakera 22: Flushed

The universe giveth with the right hand and taketh away with the left.

Last week was Athamara, the details of are not yet written, but suffice to say that this is the big Lapinian end-of-year holiday celebrating love, friendship, and togetherness. Gift exchange, group gatherings, cuddle piles, lots of expressions of happiness that other people remain as part of our social circles. At least, that's how it's supposed to happen. With nobody having been told about it, it ended up just being a week off of work for me, a nine-day weekend that I really needed.

Today, after plowing through my backlog of email, I discovered the following unfortunate things:

• I apparently didn't turn on my out-of-office reminder before leaving work Kimya week. No big deal, in and of itself, except that...
• Two days ago, my realtor sent an email telling me that the oil tank at the house had run out! No problem yet but something to address pretty damn fast.

Putting these together, of course, meant that sometime between then and today, we had pipes freeze and burst. The oil delivery truck showed up at the house and immediately called to say that water was running down from the second story through the living room and into the basement. They very helpfully shut off the water main to keep the damage from getting any worse, but I have no way to survey the damage that's already been done.

Now, way back when, I had oil set up on an automatic delivery to prevent this very sort of situation. I just got a bill in my mailbox on a regular basis, and I paid it, and I never worried about getting low because they just knew when to fill the tank, and all was golden. So, when I moved, I assumed the same thing would continue, and that the bills would just show up in my new mailbox since I had mail forwarding.

Some time back in November, I discovered much to my shock that they weren't actually mailing me bills; they were stuffing them in my mailbox. A good chunk of time went missing between the arrival of one bill and the next, and in that window the oil company I had contracted to do automated delivery actually flagged my account as delinquent and disabled the routine shipments. Now, I can't really fault them for this; I'd have done the same if enough time had passed, especially if the house seemed empty and the only contact number I had was disconnected. So, I can't really blame them for this.

I can, however, get right pissed at them for not turning automated delivery back on after I called them in a state of great contrition and paid the delinquent bill in full. I even explained at the time that I had moved and that I wasn't going to be there to check on things. Now, it's entirely possible that they asked me if I wanted to go back to automated delivery and that I said no. I won't deny that that could very well have happened. At this point, I honestly don't remember. If I did, then mea maxima culpa.

Either way, I still have frozen pipes in my house.

I have no way to check the extent of the damage; I'm not there, and I can't really get there in any sort of a reasonable time frame. I just spent a week's vacation and can't really afford to take any more time to go back and look at the house. Even if I could... it wouldn't do me any good. I would just lose more sleep over things. I suppose in that sense, ignorance is bliss. The more facts I have, the more likely I am to chew the walls endlessly, working myself up into a fine froth over something I can't fix.

I've already called the insurance company to file a claim. Having had this scenario already happen three years ago, I have no idea if they'll honor it or not. At best, they say "this is what your policy is for" and it's all good less any deductible. At worst, they say nothing is covered and then I call the mortgage company and tell them they've got a lemon on their hands and I need to talk with their collections department, 'cause if insurance won't cover it, I can't afford to fix it myself and I won't be able to sell it for anything close to what I owe on it.

It would be very nice if the Luck Plane could please stop bouncing me so close to the bowl. Thank you.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

On 2004-12-19, I bought a house. Technically speaking, the house is my house, not "Jessie's and my house," because of the fear that her name on the paperwork would hurt the chances of getting approved financing and the
like. Now she's got a fairly good credit history thanks to our joint accounts and the fact that I seem to have mostly dug myself out of the Black Pit of Debt with only a third of my owings going to unsecured holes. None of that is really relevant, save the fact that we have an actual house-house instead of an apartment or cave-dwelling or other stuff-keeping-place that belongs to a third party.

Our house has a garage. It's kind of a manky, tinky outbuilding, with a broken outhouse, rotting support beams and crumbling shingle-siding. The previous owners had started to put up new vinyl siding, but they'd abandoned
the effort pretty early into the game, with two-thirds of one of four walls finished and the rest ignored. It looked... bad. There really isn't any other way to say it. It was tacky and cheap, and I wasn't happy about it, but I never went back there because I was renting the garage to Aly and Aly didn't care how it looked as long as it gave her a place to work on her Firebird, toke and listen to Howard Stern.

I think she did more of the last two than of the first.

At any rate, the garage for the house has never been up to code since we bought it. The appraiser looked down his nose at this little rundown building, and the borough gave us a lot of grief over it during the purchase process, but ultimately it worked out that the previous owners would agree to finish siding the house within ninety days of the purchase, since they couldn't legally sell the house with the garage in its current condition anyway. Jessie and I both thought at the time that that was an acceptable answer, and we signed off on it when we claimed the keys and the mortgage.

The previous owners contacted me exactly once over the next ninety days after that. Perhaps twice. I remember one call to arrange a time to meet to learn about our new coal furnace, and I know at some point there was a discussion about when the siding on the garage would be finished, with the ex-owner saying he was going to do the work himself and would get to it as soon as the weather was more hospitable, and these conversations may have been on the same call but it's possible they were on two different ones. Even if they were, though, that's still only twice that I ever spoke with the people responsible for bringing my new house into code.

I probably should have done more across the intervening time after that to follow up on this and get them to fix the siding, but shortly after that—or is it those?—call(s), the pipes froze, and then there was the major reconstruction, and then The Bad hit, and by that point my focus was on other things entirely.

So, imagine my surprise when last week, I got a letter from the Borough inspector's office, saying that they'd tolerated my eyesore for quite long enough, thank you very much, and that I had thirty days to fix it, get rid of
it, or get fined. 

Of course, I called them the day after the letter arrived. I did my best to explain to them that it was the previous owners who were legally and financially responsible for the problem, as they could not have legally sold the house to me without an agreement to fix it, and in fact I had that in writing in my sale contract. The city inspector said he sympathized, but he also pointed out that I was the owner of the outbuilding in question, and that it was my responsibility to follow up my own business contracts and enforce them, not theirs. If I thought in thirty days I could cajole, beg, bargain or intimidate the previous owners into fixing the garage like they were supposed to have done by beginning of March 2004, he'd be more than willing to drop the entire matter. Otherwise, he said, it was my problem.

I hate it when other people make sense.

A day or two later, I found a contractor who could take on the job of "dealing with my outbuilding" on such short notice, and he agreed to come out and inspect it to give me a free estimate on either repairing it or hauling it away. He showed up, studied the little ramshackle shack for half an hour, pointed out all the things he thought he'd need to do to it to make it functional again, and gave me a number. 

I twitched and said, "I've got five thousand in the bank, and I'm in no financial shape to go over that; that's my entire safety net." While the statement is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, it's not much of one. I maybe have another five-hundred beyond that but that's getting into the financial Red Zone. Remember the X-Men video game in the arcade, and how when your hit points got low enough you could use your special attack without it hurting you? Ever play City of Heroes? This is Financial Defiance, people.

He chuckled, said, "I never leave anybody broke," and agreed to do the whole job for four-thousand.

He spotted Aly's Firebird in the garage and said I'd have to move it before he could get started; it'd be in the way. I told him I didn't have the legal ground to do so and explained the whole convoluted mess involved in this
piece of the Vixapede Legacy. He looked at his son, shrugged, and said he had four guys and a truck, and the car'd be "handled" as part of the job.

I don't know if he threw that in there to clinch the deal, but it worked.

Last night, I gave them a check for the repair work, which they took off to Magical Bank Land to convert it from a worthless piece of paper into a lot of not-so-worthless pieces of paper, or perhaps some very valuable ones and zeroes in a computer system somewhere. I think this guy is the pieces-of-paper sort of guy, though. That's fine, too. All I know is that pretty soon here, a lot of my valuable ones and zeroes—mostly the ones—are going to go away to cover this conversion cost.

The practical upshot of all of this is manifold:

• After next week, I should have a practical, useful, pretty garage again that looks like it belongs on my lot, not as part of a set for the re-enactment of a post-apocalyptic suburban warfare movie. I'll sort of miss
  the look, but not really.
• Jessie and I are likely going to have to cancel our planned trip to visit her parents in Shreveport in November. This one's not guaranteed, but it's pretty likely given the state of our financial cushion. Their place isn't big enough for us both to stay on their couch, and they have enough pets that my allergies get hammered after just a few hours, so that means a hotel and a car rental on top of the plane fare which at this point is likely to be over a thousand dollars of trip that we now cannot afford. I'm not giving up on
  it, but I'm not counting on it either. 
• Further Confusion is off for both of us. Don't bother asking. If some financially-independent party has two-thousand dollars to throw at a couple of Universe-A refugees to attend church for four days, let us know, otherwise we'll be here in Philly when the opening ceremonies commence.
• Megaplex may happen as a substitute con, but this one's stretching it. I won't have fully rebuilt our buffer by that point, and to be blunt it's in Florida for Dobbs' sake. Getting Jessie south of the Mason-Dixon Line once was hard enough; I don't think I could manage it again without, like, cookies the size of dinosaurs.

I checked with a debt collection agency about getting the money back, and they sent me to an attorney. I checked with an attorney about getting the money back, and they said it was two-hundred dollars per hour to pursue it as a case, meaning it's not cost-effective if it takes more than three days of wrangling to try to get blood from these turnips. 

Maybe I'll find the previous owners' new contact information in the paperwork for the settlement, call them and get profuse apologies and a check for costs plus heartache. Maybe I'll strike oil in my backyard, too.

Four steps forward, three steps back. 

Okay, first the bad news.

On the way to Outback Steakhouse, to celebrate Jessie's birthday, I got rearended by a telephone pole doing thirty miles an hour. No, that's not a typo. It is, however, a bit of an exaggeration. What actually happened is that going around a corner on Route 100 South near the house, the Blazer began hydroplaning, and I succeeded only in changing the direction of spin, not in actually regaining control of the vehicle. I slid backwards off the road, through somebody's lawn and then into a telephone pole, crumpling the back end of the car. I think I bent the frame, but it was really hard to tell. What was obvious was the back bumper touching the passenger-side rear tire, and the shattered window in the crunched gate. What was also obvious was that the bunny should not be allowed to drive in inclement weather in a rear-wheel-drive SUV. She hates rear-wheel-drive vehicles. She hates SUVs, as much as she loves their carrying capacity.

Were I in better financial straits right now, I might say to hell with the Blazer, ask them to total it, and take the money as a down payment on a hybrid station wagon of some sort. I am not in that good an economic position, but it's still really tempting. 

Nobody was injured, thankfully. Jessie got an abrasion from rubbing the back of her hand against the door during the spin, and we were really sore over the weekend, but we both seem to have made a full recovery, or will do so. It actually would've been fun, I think, if we'd had proper safety harnesses and it had been a ride at an amusement park. As it was, it was quite harrowing,and it left me very rattled for a few days.

In every time in the past in which I've ever had an accident of any sort involving a motor vehicle, it's always been just me in the car, and anyone else involved has been in somebody else's car under somebody else's control. This is the first time I've ever been in an accident with someone else under my direct influence, and it scared me very badly, thinking how it could have gone... how Jessie could've been hurt. I spent Friday night and part of Saturday suffering from very serious nightmares, all on the order of the Blazer rolling or hitting the pole head-on, and it took a lot to convince myself that I had not casually jeopardized my wife's life. That really shook me.

I suppose what really gets to me most about it, even now, is that the whole event felt like a message of some sort from Coyote, both in the potential severity and in the ultimately minor loss that resulted. Nobody was hurt, nothing is permanently destroyed, the only losses are material, and even those are ultimately temporary. Really, I'm out about five-hundred dollars in towing, rental car and deductible, but it could've been far, far worse. It felt like a warning of sorts, a reminder that I am neither infallible nor immortal. This could just be me and my broken brain reading patterns where they're not warranted, but that doesn't make it seem any less true.

When I was younger, I never thought I'd find religion. Now I wonder if I'll ever lose it. 

---

Now the good news:

The house refinancing is done. This is a Good Thing on many accounts. First, it means I'm no longer banking with Navy Federal in any fashion. After the way they screwed me over at the beginning of the year, during The Bad, I'm pleased to say that after the fifteenth or so, I'll never have to do business with them again. The big downside is that I still haven't found a bank that's done well by me; my financial experiences have all been either with Companies That Screwed Me or Companies That Haven't Screwed Me Yet. I'm really hoping that's not the norm, but the more I research, the more I suspect it's becoming the case. For now, I'm with National Penn Bank for checking and web-banking, and Ameriquest for my mortgage. They've done well by me... so far.

The other thing, though, is that I can roll the worst of my credit card debt into my mortgage and convert it to secured debt. This is a most excellent thing for many reasons:

• The interest I pay on it is tax-deductible.
• The interest rate I pay is a lot lower than it was on the credit card.
• The principal will count against me far less on my credit report.

All of these are nice, and they definitely help, but the real advantage is that the monthly payment on the new mortgage is about two-hundred-fifty a month less than the combined mortgage and credit card payments were prior. That's an instant savings. Plus, I don't have to pay anything until August, which means another good chunk of change our pockets. Finally, and this is the truly frightening thing, I still have equity left over even after the new
loan. This is pretty freaky to me. Check this out: 

1. I paid USD 81,000 for the house in 2003-12.
2. It valued at USD 85,000 at the time of purchase.
3. I guessed it was worth USD 92,500 when I applied for the refi.
4. The mortgage company guessed USD 120,000 on the initial application.
5. The appraisal company estimated it as USD 132,000 last Friday.

That means that in eighteen months, I've turned a fifty percent profit on my "investment," without even trying. Of course, there are a number of reasons why they might think the house was worth that much. The housing market in general is booming. The job market in the area is theoretically improving. The house has all-new carpet, furnace, paint, oil tank, heater and linoleum. It's in good repair in a fairly nice neighborhood.

Of course, this means that the best thing I ever did for my finances was let the pipes in my house freeze.

I did just get done talking about Coyote Luck, didn't I? In other circles, it would be known as "surfing the Luck Plane." Either way, it's perfect wu wei. Now I just have to avoid taking pride in it. It happened. I didn't make it happen. I shall merely be glad that things worked out for the best. 

Getting back to the nuts and bolts of the new loan, I've been able to pull out about five thousand dollars in equity to do things like repair the sidewalk in front of the house and finally buy a new laptop to replace my current one which is dying by inches with random lockups and reboots. It's money in the bank to pay bills when they arrive and not when the next paycheck clears. It's financial peace of mind.

I'm sure I don't need to describe just how good that feels.

We're not out of the woods, but I think we've finally found the path.

I think that the greatest hell yet inflicted upon me in the name of corporate fealty is the overnight business trip.

The true hell is that there's something vaguely glamorous about the notion of being sufficiently high on the industry food chain that not only can you or your company afford to make such a ludicrously out-of-proportion expense part of your or their budget, but that it's worth any conceivably cheaper alternative. There's something attractive about being a member of the jetset community. "Sorry, baby, can't stay for breakfast; I'm flying out to
LaGuardia in the ay-em to lunch with a vee-pee, then it's drinks in Denver with the see-tee-oh on Wednesday, but I'll be back in town on Thursday if you want to hook back up." It feels so seventies-luxury, definitely something I'd have to consider a guilty pleasure.

At least, I would if right now I didn't feel like my body were trying to send my intestinal tract into involuntary exile.

My tale starts Sunday around 14h00 EDT. I'd packed and prepped for the trip as best as I could. Previous flights in recent years—like my last business trip— had suggested that individuals are allowed a total of three bags on the plane, of which at least one must be checked; and that one is also allowed a personal item such as purse or laptop bag. Thus, because I was only going on an overnight, I packed accordingly: I put everything into two carry-on bags, including Malachi, who goes with me everywhere when I travel because he loves to fly and to see new things. At the time, I thought this would mean I wouldn't have to go through the hassle of baggage claim, as that always eats up a good half-hour or more of my time, waiting for my suitcases to make their magical reappearance from whatever stygian pit in which they were stored for the duration of the trip. This will later prove to be a Bad Idea(tm), but it made sense at the time I did it.

Having packed, Kitana graciously took me to the airport so I wouldn't have to leave the Blazer there overnight. I spent most of the drive into the airport thinking that because it was early Sunday afternoon, the crush of bodies shouldn't have yet started and the flight should be reasonably easy. I'd flown on Sundays before, and while they were early-morning flights I'd seen crowded early morning flights before and I thought this would be comparable to the volume I remember from my whirlwind trip to Washington to pick up Jessie's belongings from her old apartment with Greg and Pascal.

The security line at the terminal to get into the gate area reached halfway to the parking lot.

Now, truth be told, this wasn't as bad as I'd seen it in the past. At times it's not only reached the parking lot, but doubled back towards the check-in counters again. Strictly speaking, this was relatively light traffic. However, because one of the security lines was closed, the trip into the gate area took just as long as it usually did. They've also finally implemented a policy of "take your laptop out of its bag and send it through the x-ray machine separately," which they hadn't done before. So, this time when I get to the x-ray machine, I have to drop everything, dig my laptop out of its case, put it in a bag, and then reassemble things enough that they can be
sent through the machine behind the laptop, only to reverse the process on the far end, with no convenient tables at which to work. 

After this, I beeped going through the arch.

Now, having gone through this process before not two months ago, I should have remembered that my collar would set off the metal detector. Truth be told, I don't really think of it as a separate thing any more. It's my collar, and I refer to it in the same way I would my finger or my left knee. It's just another part of my body. So, when I beeped, I instantly knew what it was, and yet up until that moment I had genuinely forgotten it was there.

The woman managing the archway asked me to step back and offered me a choice: remove the collar or get wanded. At the time, I chose to remove it, but what that does to my brain every time I take off my own collar... I think I'm going to ask Jessie at some point for a locking one that doesn't come off. I'd rather put up with the wanding than willingly remove my own collar from around my neck, even if I do have my Mistress' permission to do it. It feels like disobedience, even with the orders.

I am no stranger to odd headspace.

After making it through security, the wait for the flight wasn't too bad, though the flight itself was quite annoying. Above, I said I had packed two carry-on bags and my purse. It seems that the policy of "three bags, of which one must be checked, and a personal item" is officially long-dead in the public literature, though I would have sworn that both Continental and USAirways allowed such things. However, I can find no evidence of this on either site. At any rate, it was most definitely not allowed on United, and so when I got to the gate I had
to stuff my purse into my suitcase so that my laptop bag would be my "personal item."

Now, let me digress here just for a moment and say that I am utterly insane, because not only do I talk with my plushes, but some of them talk back to me. Not necessarily in words, but they have moods and feelings and
opinions that are in their own way just as real to me as my own. This established, Malachi was unhappy at being stuffed inside my carry-on suitcase because he normally travels in my backpack where he can stick his head out
and see everything that's happening. This time, I didn't bring my backpack, so I had nowhere else to put him but the suitcase. He wanted to come along, and I told him he could come out to look out the window during the flights, which he loves to do, so he agreed to sit in the suitcase. Then when I had to cram my purse in there, there was suddenly no room for him inside! I ended up having to take Malachi out of the suitcase interior and put him in an external pocket zippered up around his head. This was less uncomfortable, but even more confining, and he was very upset about this but put up with it because he knew we didn't really have any other choice.

Malachi is a very good bunny. Sometimes he's a better bunny than I am.

The flight itself was crammed full, as in there were literally no spare seats anywhere on the plane to be had. I also had the misfortune of being seated next to two people who spent the entire time chatting about nothing when one
of them wasn't complaining about me stepping on his ankles in my attempts to shift myself around in an economy class seat. By the time the plane touched down in Denver, I was ready to run screaming into the night away from life in small-town America.

Denver itself wasn't too bad at all, really. However, as my mother oft-liked to quote, "there's nothing in the world that's quite so bad as something that's not so bad." I ran into my coworkers, we rented an SUV, we drove to the hotel, we dropped off our belongings, I took the time to get Malachi out of the suitcase so he could stretch out on the bed, we went to dinner at Outback Steakhouse, we came back to the hotel, and we went to sleep around
23h00 local time. This all took about four hours, but it went fairly quickly because I was already tired by the time we actually got to dinner. 

Pro-Tip: Trying to diet on a company per diem for food is difficult. 

Now, having been exhausted, I should have slept like a rock, but something in my intestines refused to lie down and be still, because I woke up twice in the middle of the night. Not just "stir, roll over, sleep" but "wake up, sit up, put on glasses, look at clock, blink twice, lie back down and try to pass out again". When the alarm went off at 06h45 MDT, I thought I would die if I tried to move, but within five minues I was actually awake so I packed back up—and Malachi went back into the suitcase with only a token protest—so I could go down to breakfast.

I met up with the rest of my team in the lobby, we had a quick morning meal—an omelette and some bacon with water for me—before heading to the Denver facility to meet with the production staff there. We ended up spending about six hours on-site, but to tell the truth we really didn't get anything actual production-related done there. The entire trip felt like a goodwill visit. The operations manager of the Denver center very rarely tells
us anything is wrong until it's been wrong for some time, and then when we do finally find out that something needs to be done it's already well past the point at which we could've done it silently, and usually a VP of some sort is already involved, which isn't good for anyone. This visit really felt like an attempt to smooth out some ruffled feathers and hopefully get into some meaningful dialogue, rather than actually resolve any problems. If we
do get some problems resolved, so much the better, but nothing actually got mentioned that wasn't already being investigated.

Lunch was a bacon-cheddar-and-onion buffalo burger with a Caesar salad, which tasted kind of weird to me. The salad dressing had way more anchovy than I'm used to having—not bad but definitely not what I was expecting—and the burger itself had a really powerful taste that was again stronger than I'd anticipated. Plus, something in the combination of flavors was just off to me, but I didn't pay for it and free food always tastes best.

After the meal, we went back to the Denver warehouse and attended a conference call, then did a bit more e-mail management and Remedy analysis while my manager and the GM of the Denver site had a smoke, and then we packed up to head to the airport. This time going through security, I remembered to take off my collar before stepping through the archway, but as I was putting my laptop into the case, the TSA admin working the other side
of the conveyor said to me, "We recommend you remove your shoes and place them on the conveyor as well."

At the time, I thought to myself, what a funny way to put that, but then after some consideration I assumed the wording was deliberate. It's not really an order, but lots of people have metal grommets in their shoes, and if the archway is turned up high enough, those will be enough to make the scanner beep, and sending people's shoes through the x-ray system is a good way to stop that slowdown and keep the line moving. No worries, I know my
shoes are plastic and don't beep, so I proceed to the archway without removing them. I get two steps, and the TSA person looks at me very sternly and says again in a much more pointed tone, "Ma'am, we recommend that you remove your shoes and put them on the conveyor."

Ker-blink? I turn, a bit confused, and say, "They don't have any metal on them, and I wore them through Philadelphia's security system without beeping." Mind you, I'm still working on the notion that this is some kind of practical security or efficiency issue. I'm not trying to be belligerent or disruptive. Besides, she said "recommend." That's not an order; that's a request. If it had been an instruction, like "please remove your shoes and place them on the conveyor," I would have complied immediately, but because it was presented in the form of a piece of advice, I weighed it in my mind, judged against it and thought no more about it. Apparently this makes me a danger to America.

The response I got was, "It's not about what they're made of, and this isn't Philadelphia." Ker-blink again. If it's not about what they're made of—say, plastic explosive—then why x-ray them? If you're worried about shoe-bombs, then this is an issue, but then why phrase the instruction as a suggestion? Are most people so complacent that they respond to such juvenile techniques as the buy-in? That is, suggesting people do something so that their compliance is judged in their own heads as their decision rather than yet another order from a faceless authority—does this tactic really work with people?

Once in the terminal area proper, my manager and one of my coworkers spent an hour in the smoking lounge while my other teammate spent an hour on the phone to somebody, so I spent the time getting pssh to work on my Treo, then hopping onto IRC. I don't like that it's not SSH1 compliant, and I'm not too thrilled about its low-entropy PRNG, but it's still better than nothing.

Everyone else on my team left for Seattle at 17h40 or so, after a fifteen minute delay due to weather, and I had just under an hour to kill, so I went and got some McNuggets and a Diet Coke from the airport McDonalds, then
played more Spider on my Treo waiting for them to announce boarding. First the flight was delayed five minutes, then fifteen, then twenty-five, each time because of rain pushing back the landing time of the previous flight's arrival. Then we tacked on ten minutes until the cleaning crew could get inside the cabin to make the plane ready. Finally, they called boarding and told us that our scheduled arrival into Philadelphia would be 00h13 EDT, only twenty minutes off of schedule. I announced that time to everyone on channel, signed off, and boarded.

We then spent an hour on the runway waiting for the Denver tower to clean up a traffic jam on the taxiways. I don't think I've ever heard a captain of any plane flight say "I don't know what the people in the tower are smoking" before.

Of course, right as we move into position on the runway for takeoff, my guts decide they have to coredump Right Now, so I beg my way back to the toilets and evac just in time to get back for the liftoff. I think I missed being
stuck in the loo for launch by a minute and a half. This flight was far better than the last: I had an open seat next to me, my Nintendo DS was fully charged, Malachi got to look out the window and watch the clouds, and for the
most part things were fairly serene other than the late start.

We touched down at 01h31 EDT Tuesday morning, ninety-six minutes past when I was supposed to be on the ground. I was actually supposed to be home by the time I arrived at the airport. As it turned out, though, Kitana and Jessie were late getting to the airport because of other issues, so it actually worked out for the better that my flight was delayed. More coyote luck. 

My guts decided that they needed to explode again on the way home. In fact, seizing an opportunity, I asked Kitana to exit 422 at Royersford so we could get late-dinner at the Wawa—pepperoni and provolone for me, a salad for Jessie—and so I could use their restroom. I almost didn't make it, but I did, and "explode"was definitely the word for it. Either something I'd eaten, possibly the buffalo burger, hadn't agreed with me, or I'd picked up a stomach bug. Either was possible.

By the time I got home, it was 03h15 EDT. I snarfed my dinner, plugged in the work computer, launched Outlook, sent the team an e-mail saying I would be working from home "tomorrow" because of the late hour, and crawling into bed. My intestines—not my bladder, but my colon—then woke me up at 08h00 and again at 10h30 to demand purging.

It is now 12h08 EDT. I've had the equivalent of six hours of sleep after being awake for nearly twenty, which itself is after the equivalent of five hours of sleep after being awake for nearly eighteen. It's time to go clean myself out, make some two-princess soup for breakfast, and then log onto the office laptop in the hallway so I can be "at work" today.

I need a vacation from my vacation.

Oh, the joys of homeownership.

As noted in the previous entry, Jessie and I went out of town for two weeks. One thing I didn't note in the previous entry, because I didn't think about it, was the state of the coal-hopper in our new house.

Yes. Coal-hopper. I'm still shocked too.

We discovered that the house was coal-heated when we first inspected it. The then-current owners had actually converted the house to coal from some other heating system, saying it was dirt-cheap to power and provided
them with ample heat. They have, in fact, converted their new house to coal as well, because they like it so much. Did I mention before that the previous owners were weird?

At any rate, the house is powered by a coal furnace. We didn't get a manual for the furnace when we bought the place, but the owners were at one point to meet with us before we went on vacation to impart their wisdom on the operation of the heater. Unfortunately, we had to take care of replacing the car the day that we had scheduled to meet with them, and then we never managed to reschedule, so we never got any instructions on how to manage the furnace or any vital information about its operating parameters.

Information like, say, how quickly the coal-hopper typically empties under standard operating loads.

Last night, we went out to the house to deliver another load of boxes, and the place was frigid when we entered. We could see our breath even once the front door had been closed, so immediately we knew the fire in the furnace had gone out, and I went into the basement to restart it.

While I was down there refilling the hopper, Jessie called for me to come up and have a look at something that might suggest restarting the furnace right now was a bad idea.

I returned to the living room, and Jessie pointed to an irregular dark patch on the carpet that most definitely hadn't been present when we left. On closer inspection, we found that it was a patch of ice, near the base of the
radiator.

Now, here I must digress for a moment and once again say that the old adage, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," has never been more applicable to anyone than me. The realtor said that the heater was a "forced air" heater, which I thought meant that the furnace piped superheated air through the radiation system, which heated the pipes to a degree that they radiated heat, which is what one expects a radiator to do. So, if the heater ever went out, no biggie. The house would be cold for a while, but it would warm easily enough once I got the fire started. 

Turns out I was almost right, or maybe he was almost right. The radiators had water in them, not air.

Of course, everyone should be able to guess where the story goes from here. Some time during our trip out of town and the subsequent work week of hell, the furnace ran out of coal. When that happened, naturally, the fire died. The temperature then dropped sharply over the last few days, to below the freezing point. The water, without heat, quickly froze in the pipes, and four of the radiators cracked. One actually didn't just crack; it burst. The third bedroom, thankfully the one with the hardwood floor, had a thin sheet of dirty black ice covering most of the floor, and a four-inch-by-one-inch section of the radiator itself had broken free. Thankfully, the two in the
carpeted bedrooms were actually undamaged.

This was all quite a shock to the both of us, neither of whom had ever lived with a coal furnace before.

I called the insurance company last night, and in forty minutes I have to call them again to actually speak with the claims department. Then I have to load up the car with boxes again and take them out to the house, along with
the camera and space heater I've borrowed temporarily from Bennie. The camera is for getting pictures of the damage, and the space heater is so I can work without having parts of my body freeze in the process.

Fortuitously, the insurance company called as I was making this post, and they said that frozen pipes are covered under my policy. In fact, frozen pipes are the only times under which this sort of thing is covered. so we've managed to get this under our policy. They're going to have an emergency clean-up company contact me in the next few hours, and I'm going to call a plumber and schedule actual repairs, the bill for which I can forward to the insurance company for reimbursement.

While I'm at it, I'm going to switch to an electric boiler. Filling the hopper last night and cleaning up the ash generated a huge volume of dust, which Jessie's lungs just won't handle well because of her asthma. It'll be more expensive in the long run, but as my friend JonBuck said the other night, there's no way to put a price on peace of mind.

Normally one might that a diary entry posted on the last day of the standard calendar year would be a wrap-up for the year in total, but I actually have instead a list of things about which I'd intended to talk earlier, but never managed to dedicate the time to actually saying simply because of other events that occured along the way. So, instead of a summary of the past twelve months, instead this is a full review of, oh, the last two weeks or
so.

The House

On December 19, we officially became members of the gentry. That is, landed homeowners. Well, I say we. The ugly truth is that I became gentry, because Jessie and I were both afraid that her credit rating and employment history, whatever they are right now, would negatively affect our chances. I do want her name on the mortgage paperwork, but that's something that'll probably have to wait until the re-fi, if we ever do one, which considering our interest rate we may not.

It feels very strange to own a house; it's there, and yet it's not really real yet. I know consciously "this house is mine" and yet because we don't live in it yet and don't see it every day, it hasn't really sunk into my head that this is a permanent thing for the next five to ten years. So I guess it's not really permanent, but it'll be longer than I've lived anywhere since my parents' houses.

The Car

On December 20, I bought a "new" car—a 1987 Volvo 240DL—for a really good deal, or at least what I felt like was a good deal. It was a thousand less than he was asking online for it, and he felt confident that he could've gotten his asking price, but he said he knew I had really bad luck with cars, so he offered to sell it to me for cheap so I'd finally have a good car to drive. He told me it was rock solid, and that I'd
have a real hard time breaking it, which I seem to do to all my vehicles.

I managed, of course, but that story follows shortly.

The Christmas Trip

We left for Jessie's parents' house last Wednesday, with the intent of arriving Thursday morning and sticking through to Saturday arvo, then heading back and returning to the apartment early Sunday afternoon, in time to head to work Monday morning and get the half-week for which we're scheduled
done.

As always, visiting home was a blast. We arrived on Christmas day, which meant that we went pretty much into opening presents and such. Jessie arranged to get me something that... well... it's incredible. I've long wanted a "family portrait", and she had one commissioned for us. It made me cry looking at it. It still does. It's beautiful. Thank you, my love. And thank you, Sue, for the work itself.

The rest of the extended family arrived around 16h00, and we all chatted and opened more gifts. I do have to admit there's one member of the extended family that manages to unnerve me a bit when she's around. She's perfectly nice, but she's a shade too perky and too shades too animatronic, going from total passivity to lively conversion and back with a startling ease. I know she's had a rough life, and her ex is a rather nasty piece of work, so I don't blame her for the way she acts, but it still makes it difficult for me to interact with her. Jessie's grandmother was there, and she invited us to go out with her for dinner the following night, which was totally unexpected. Jessie's dad made way too much turkey and ham, and I indulged greedily in both.

We stayed at Jessie's brother's apartment with he and his wife Thursday night, then got up the next morning and had breakfast with Erick before heading back to Jessie's parents' place. That day is pretty much a blur, mostly because we spent the day talking with Mom, then went to dinner with Jessie's grandmother as invited the day before. That was weirdness and a half by itself, too. Until that trip, I had never heard her be positive and polite about anything in recollection, but over dinner she made light conversation about all of her dead friends and then we talked about playing bingo at the civic center on Tuesdays with people older than her. Very creepy.

After dinner, we returned to Erick's and Daisy's place and snacked on leftover Chinese food while we played Talisman, which is apparently one of Erick's all-time favorite board games. I haven't played a board game other than Scrabble in years, so it was quite refreshing to actually do so. I learned, however, a valuable lesson: never let one's spouse roll for the bad guy.

Saturday morning we ate at a Kip's Big Boy, of all places, for breakfast, and then at the traditional Bob Evans for lunch. I say traditional because we usually eat there just before heading home, and we did it again this year, so it's turning into a strange sort of tradition. At any rate, Jessie's mom didn't want us to leave, which she says every year and is its own tradition, and then we finally managed to start home. Normally we partition the drive back into two days, each of about five hours. I like to put in the bulk of
the driving on the first day, but rarely can I sit through the whole trip in a single shot, so we overnighted somewhere in Pennsylvania and then planned to finish up the trip Sunday morning and be home by about 15h00. 

Sunday at 11h00, the fuel pump on the car died on the interstate.

We didn't know it was the fuel pump when it died, of course. We just knew that the car engine suddenly quit and then refused to start, and we had no idea why. I frantically checked the oil and found it to be off the dipstick, so I had a good panic attack about burning out the Volvo engine a week after getting it, which Jessie managed to avert mostly by telling me to quit freaking out and relax. Some kind woman on her way to Allentown stopped and called 911 for us, and the state trooper called us a tow truck which took us to Kylertown, a small hole-in-the-wall at Exit 131 or thereabouts, notable only in that the town's entire purpose of being is to feed the truck stop. It has a motel, a truck wash, a truck garage, a post office, and four stores. Maybe you could count the pizza parlor.

Maybe.

Of course, the car died on Sunday, so the regular car garage up the road in the next town over wasn't open, and the mechanic at the truck garage tried to look at it but really couldn't tell us much; he did warn us that neither foreign models nor car engines were his specialty, so we didn't expect too much, but it did mean we were stuck at least until the next day when we could contact the local regular garage and have someone inspect the car. At least the roadhouse had good food.

Monday morning, they found out the fuel pump had died, but they didn't have the part it needed in stock, so they wouldn't have the car fixed until Tuesday morning, so that meant we'd be there until Tuesday morning, possibly longer if the part didn't arrive or anything else happened.

Now, to our credit, Jessie and I both packed overmuch for the trip. We had a full week's worth of medication each, and clothes for as many days just in case. However, Tuesday meant the absolute outside limit on our pills, and Jessie had therapy this morning, so it became imperative that nothing else died, I get very panic-prone when I become reliant on other people for things when I'm under a deadline, so I spent most of Monday and the better part of Tuesday morning trying not to have a fit.

We finally made it home last night around 16h40, two days later than we had planned to return. I missed two days of work to the car, but at least I was back in time to do some work before the New Years'
break. 

The Car Redux

So, now that we're back from the trip, the fuel pump on the car is fixed, but it's got a rash of other problems that I should have investigated. The overdrive light on the dash is constantly lit now, meaning it's not working, but I checked the fuse panel and the fuse marked "Overdrive" is still good, as far as I can tell, so something else in the overdrive system is wonky and should be repaired. It's annoying, but not crucial. More worrying, however, is the Volvo's new habit of sputtering when I first start it after it's been sitting a while. It'll start, then start to stall and suddenly rocket up in RPMs to twice its base idle, then slowly die again and repeat the cycle until I put on the gas. I've also had it stall out on me while trying to reverse or advance slowly in a parking lot, so the fuel pump may not be properly calibrated. It's worth investigating, definitely, but it's going to have to wait until after...

The Trip Redux

As soon as I get off of work, Jessie, Tanya and I are supposed to be heading down to Andi's for the New Year's Bash. It'll be good to see Shay, as well, 'cause she's staying down there and she didn't make the Bash in July. I just wish that Kelly could come with us, but she can't get the days off. We didn't tell her early enough, I guess. That and I know she's getting beaucoup overtime for the days.

Originally we had planned to take my car, but at the moment I'm still wavering somewhat on the wisdom of this plan and Tanya has insisted her car is more than roadworthy for the trip. It might also afford us more legroom which would be good for all involved. I would've thought the Volvo would get better gas mileage, but with the overdrive malfunctioning that's no longer a guarantee, plus I don't have cruise control which Tanya says she wants to have, so we'll probably ending up in her landyacht, which will be fine.

The Diet

I know I haven't talked much about this lately. It's been something of a sticking point for me mostly because I've been keeping steady but I'm not losing anything and it's been frustrating. However, I must gloat here briefly: I lost two pounds over the Christmas trip.

That's about it. Nothing else is happening.

Today, I spent the day refactoring FormBot. I actually started analyzing what I would need to do yesterday, but I didn't touch any of the code yesterday. I started this morning shortly after I got to work, and I finished some time around 15h00. In the middle, I finished up a project at work and got a second out the door that evening (after 21h00, three hours after I wanted to leave), so I don't feel so bad about working on it while in the office.

It's strange just how jazzed I am about this. Normally, code is a living for me, but rarely is it a hobby. This, though, really has me psyched. I've been able to take what I've learned in the last few months working at HMS and I've successfully applied them to my own code base. I refactored out huge swatches of code into two modules, moved a third, shrunk the main program down to a driver, added some spiffies to shrink out some wasted code, and generally rearched over half the program. In a day. And it works.

That's the part that really gets to me about this whole affair. It works. I half feared that I would change around something at one point and break the whole mess, so I didn't even edit the code in place. I made backup copies
of everything, then edited those instead. As it turned out, I had no need of them. As soon as I got all of the syntax errors out of the way, the code ran without a hitch. I'm actually getting better at what I do.

I've even helped Bennie at work modify and improve one of the modules he's planning to check into CPAN. It doesn't sound like much, but it's the sort of little step that really has me excited. I've contributed to source that may well be used by more people than just me. I've made improvements to code bases at work that have become part of the generally accepted toolset and part of the development cycle.

I guess I always felt at my previous jobs that whatever code I contributed lasted the length of whatever project I had, and never seemed to go anywhere. Now I'm actually improving my skills, adding new features to useful things that people are actively using. I've gotten to the point that a massive rearchitecture and reeingineering takes me six hours, and the whole time I'm enjoying the rewrite and ultimately coming away with better, more elegant
code that functions just as well as, if not better than, before. 

Competency is a good feeling.

---

I feel about a thousand percent better now from three weeks or a month ago. I think my hormones were off. In fact, I'm absolutely sure that my hormones were off, but it had been over a year, maybe even eighteen months, since I'd gone to an endocrinologist.

That itself was a game and a half. Down in Texas, as long as one called one's endocrinologist and reported nothing new or no reason to change things, getting a new set of refills was simple. In Pennsylvania, however, one has to see one's prescribing physician at least once every twelve months to keep one's prescription current. This means more than a phone call.

Nobody informed me of this when I got here.

I used to see one endocrinologist, and he did a good job, don't get me wrong. However, after the first time I saw him, I ended up getting my surgery, and then I was off of my prescriptions for a while, and I had a huge backstock along with more refills, so I just didn't go back to see him regularly. Not knowing I needed to do so regularly, I just figured that when I needed more drugs, I could call him and he'd give me a new prescription.

Imagine my horror to discover that not only could he not refill my scrip but that because it had been over a year since I had last been in his office, he had to see me as a new patient all over again.

Now, I don't know what being a new patient is like in most fields, but in endocrinology being a new patient is jusy shy of going through the Spanish Inquisition. A special office visit taking upwards of an hour is not unusual, and endocrinologists are the type that can pick and choose their patients and set their own hours, and so they often do. When I called to get an appointment, I found out that I couldn't get one until the end of June.

This was in March.

I took the appointment, of course; to turn it down would have been foolish. I had plenty of pills left, so I wasn't too concerned. However, it was not to be. The endo called me back about a week prior to the appointment and
said he wouldn't be able to be in the office that day and he asked me if I could reschedule. I said yes, because saying no would have gotten me nothing. I was shy about a week on my prescription to get me to the rescheduled date, but I called my general practitioner and he gave me an emergency cover dose for ninety days which would neatly hold me through to my date.

I missed that one because of work.

I called the doctor the next morning, frantic and begging for a reschedule. The first date he had was December. That was far past the end of my drugs. I nearly flipped. However, Jessie was seeing a different endocrinologist, so I went out on a limb and called him. Lo and behold, he had an opening! In September! I took it, eagerly, and scheduled the day off of work.

My prescription ran out a week short of the day I could get in to see the new endo.

I wasn't about to ask my GP for another extension, so instead I hatched a clever plan to cut back my dosage by a quarter every day, so that I could over the time save enough enough extra pills for a three-quarter dose all the way to the date of the appointment, at which point I could go back on my full strength. This was a great idea, except for one tiny factor: I was going crazy.

There's this thing that happens to post-ops, that I inadvertantly discovered the hard way: after surgery, the body doesn't have to fight against all of the testosterone and so it takes a smaller dosage of estrogen to keep things on an even keel. Consequently, the extra dosage above and beyond can cause unexpected side effects, like crazy-bitch syndrome.

Jessie, I'm sure, would be willing to attest to my slow mental demise over that time period. It was nothing clear-cut, to be sure, and I had plenty of lucid days, but the frequency, intensity and duration of my freakings-out were all on the rise, slowly but surely, and at one point Jessie did indeed suggest that I go back into therapy 'cause I was wigging out like mad. 

Two days after cutting back my dosage to seventy-five percent, I felt human again. No more—or at least no more crippling—breakdowns. No more screaming. No more tears. I've been sane. Mostly. Almost. Some approximation thereof.

My new endocrinologist has officially dropped my dosage to the new level and suggested I keep it there. He's also suggested some other tweaks to my dosages to perhaps help me with breast growth, since I didn't wind up with as much there as I'd like. That, though, will have to wait until my November check-up.

Now I just have to remember to go get my pills from the pharmacy tomorrow. I'm out.

It always happens that right after I throw a McMassive Hissy Fit^TM over something that's horribly broken or frustrating, I find a fix to my problem that works out so well that my previous temper tantrum looks like just that.
I suspect that this is either a conspiracy to make me look even more childish than I actually am, or else it's the Cosmic 2x4's way of saying "You're my Special Friend."

Today I called the Philadelphia County courthouse, laid bare the situation and asked them if they could issue me a license. She said that as long as my driver's license said female on it, there was no issue. They'd mark the paperwork as "legal name change" and be done with the matter. No need for birth certificates or other certifications.

I was aghast. I told the clerk there what the Montgomery County court had required. Her response was, and I quote, "Oh, the people up in Montgomery County are a bunch of assholes."

I love Philadelphia. And Philadelphia loves me back.

Parallel to this, Jessie is now legally Jessie, which I know has been a huge morale boost at home. I only wish yesterday that I had been in as good a mood as Jessie was. Knowing that Jessie wanted to celebrate and that I was being such a downer over the whole marriage thing only made my depression seem that much worse.

I don't think I'll have any trouble celebrating tonight, though the real party will be next Wednesday, once we've got the license in hand. I'm trying not to get my hopes up unnaturally high, but things are really looking good
right now.

One of these days, I'm going to meet God. I intend to kick Him in the nuts, if he has them. Or tits, if She doesn't. Or ass, if Zie lacks those as well. Maybe all of them.

I am now two years post-operative. I have been living as a woman full-time for over three years. I have a passport and drivers' license that both identify me as female. I haven't received mail, electronic or otherwise, addressed to my old identity in nearly a year. My past life should at this point well and truly be behind me.

However, when applying for a marriage license in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the clerk of the court is required to ask for parents' full names as part of the process. I dutifully supplied both of my parents' full names without question. My father's last name is Hughes. My mother's maiden name is Blysard.

My last name, of course, is Davis.

The clerk looked me strangely for a moment, then asked me for proof of my change of name. I blinked, blinked again and asked why she needed it. She said that normally she wouldn't but because my name didn't match either of my parents', that she had to have proof of continuity of lineage. I said I could probably find that paperwork, did so and returned to the office.

She looked at that paperwork and asked me for proof of my sex change. My drivers' license obviously wasn't good enough. Neither was my passport. I eventually had to find the letter from my surgeon saying that I had indeed been through the sex-change operation and that I was now a functional female in every regard. I promptly faxed this document to the clerk's office and called to confirm they had received it, whereupon they notified me that I would have to call back in a few days after the friend-of-the-court lawyer that reviewed all their strange cases had looked over my documents.

I waited the requisite two days, then called back to confirm earlier today to ask if they had finally gottem my license ready. The clerk's supervisor then informed me that I would need to submit an amended birth certificate
and that the letter from my surgeon wasn't sufficient as it wasn't from a recognized United States agency.

Santa Clara County, California—the county in which I was born—does not list sex on their amendments. All they amend is name.

I explained this no less than four times to the supervisor. Every time, all she said was, "Then I can't issue you a marriage license." She even managed to say it four different ways, I think. I was so livid at the moment that I didn't hear her too clearly.

"Livid" does not begin to describe my mood. Every person in the legal system along the way has openly admitted that had I not changed my last name, none of this would have ever happened. They would never have asked
and thus never have known that my name had been different. If I had, in fact, changed my last name to my mother's maiden name, they would have simply assumed that my mother had later remarried and never thought twice about it. However, since I did change my name, they inquired and thus found out about everything else that they claim is sufficient grounds to deny me a marriage license.

The state of Pennsylvania recognizes me as female on my drivers' license. The Social Security Administration recognizes me as female in their paperwork. The Passport Authority recognizes me as female on my travel papers. However, because the county of Santa Clara does not list sex on their birth certificate amendments, the county of Montgomery claims the right to deny me the right to marry.

Now, of course, the thing I want to do is call them back and ask them if I can marry a woman. The supreme irony of being the groom at my wedding might offend, shock or otherwise horrify people, but at this point the people at the Montgomery County Courthouse have ruled that I'm not a chick, and in their two-sex world, that makes me a guy for the purposes of gettin' hitched.

What I'm probably going to do is find the closest county to Montgomery that doesn't ask all these stupid questions and doesn't have a residency requirement, then go there and get the marriage license and ceremony performed over some weekend in the near future. Barring that, I'm calling Santa Clara County and asking the clerk there if the amendment on my birth certificate can be... well... amended.

I am angry beyond words, and yet I feel strangely as if I have been given exactly what I should've expected. I allowed myself to hope that the people who could have made this happen would be better than they were, and I have paid dearly for my assumptions.

Anthrocon is already turning into something of a blur. That's how it felt at the time, too. Either I was helping Sue run programming, I was in my room sleeping, or I was out chatting with friends that I hadn't seen in a year or more. The only time I ever really got to just sit was during Uncle Kage's Story Hour, which is usually the single biggest "panel" at the convention and hardly a respite from the hordes.

I finally got to meet Ben Goodridge in the flesh, which after seven years of knowing him is probably a good thing. Strangely, we hardly talked about writing at all, but we did at least get the chance to play a quick catch-up game before hastening off to go attend to other duties. I also got another chance to see LeDiva, which is always good. I wish she lived closer; she seems the sort of person around whom I could really enjoy spending a lot of time. Plus, the Lansdale area can always use more gamers.

The only thing I personally didn't like about how things went is that I found out after the fact that I was supposed to be running a panel. The annual reading of the Eye of Argon had been scheduled Friday night, but I had had to work that day and so when Sue asked me if I was going to make it, I said I hoped I would. She thought I had confirmed that I would run the panel. I only thought she wanted me to participate. So, an hour after the panel
started, she called me frantically on the radio asking me where I was and why I wasn't in the room running things! I'm still embarrassed about this one, frankly. Next year, though, I'll know better.

Hopefully, I'll also be able to get time off of work next year to attend. This year, I've been fighting the Project From Hell, a supposedly simple test exercise that has become my driving focus for the past six weeks and now has a hard deadline of Wednesday to deliver. If I thought getting it done before was a problem, now it's downright painful. I'm still not entirely happy with how the automated scripts are handling it, and I've got to run everything from scratch again. I started to do that over the weekend, but the array of hard drives at work ran out of space and so I couldn't get any work done over the time period I thought I would have to do raw processing. So, this is going to be a nightmare few days while I frantically try to get this cranked out to the customer by Thursday morning.

I'm glad I got the chance to attend. More importantly, I'm glad I got the chance to help make the con a better place to be.

---

Of course, the day after I get back from such an exhilirating weekend, the Cosmic 2x4 had to make its feelings known again. I got to test out my air bag today. The driver ahead of me sped up to pass a dump truck, then slammed on her brakes at the green light at the next intersection when the siren of an approaching ambulance sounded. Her brand-new 2004-model car jerked to a complete stop in about two feet, but my old 1990 brakes locked and I slid into her bumper.

I couldn't have been going more than about 10MPH when I hit, but it was enough for the sensor to detect potential driver damage and deploy the SRS—supplemental restraint system, for once—right in my face. I wasn't even going fast enough to hit the airbag. The seat belt caught me instead, and so I was treated to a faceful of scorched talc as the bag snapped out of its hidey-hole. The whole car stank until I rolled down the windows and let the car air out while the other driver ran around panicking that she was in her boss' car.

I don't think the insurance will get involved. Nobody got hurt, neither of the cars suffered worse than scratches unless you count my air bag, and the cop that arrived when the other driver's boss called ruled the accident as a no-faulter. Plus, the other driver's boss sent the other driver back to work by foot and then claimed himself as the driver of record on the accident, so I don't think he's going to try to file anything at this point.

I'll still be out a hefty chunk of change replacing the airbag, but even that's preferable to having to replace the car again.