Don't Frighten the Moose!

So, I'm looking into flights into Medicine Hat, AB, Canada for work. I'm going there for about a week at the end of August, and I really need to get there early enough on my arrival day to check the setup of the training room. Otherwise, I've gotta fly in on Sunday, check the room on Monday, and then spend the rest of the day working in my hotel room. Yech. Not fun. It wastes two days, basically... Sunday on travel, Monday on a tech check. I'd rather get there at a reasonably early hour Monday so I can do the tech check and then get dinner and do my last-minute prep.

Well, apparently, it's not too hard to get a non-stop from Dallas to Calgary, which is the nearest large city. It's not hard at all to get a one-hop from Dallas to Calgary. I can go through Chicago, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Toronto, Houston, or Denver if I don't, for some reason, want a non-stop flight. *snerk* However, the hops from Calgary to Medicine Hat have me completely puzzled. I can only fly into Medicine Hat after 7 pm. I can only fly out of Medicine Hat before 9 am. Do they have restrictions on this airport that it can't be used during daylight hours? Are we trying not to disturb the mating moose at the end of the runway?

Anyway, after a quick consult with Google Earth, I've decided that it's best to take the nonstop flight into Calgary and drive to Medicine Hat. The layovers are such that I could literally rent a car and drive to Medicine Hat before I could get through the layover and get on the plane.

Crossdressing lawyer in the news

This article turned up in the "Weird news" feed from Reuters. Here's the text in case that link dies...
Cross-dressing lawyer skirts dress code
Tue Jul 25, 2006 8:52am ET166

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A male lawyer who appeared in a New Zealand court dressed in an ankle-length skirt, lace stockings and a diamond brooch said Tuesday he was protesting against a male bias in the country's justice system.

Rob Moodie, a former New Zealand Police union secretary, stunned the courtroom Monday when he appeared in women's clothing at a hearing related to a long-running case involving the death of a man in a bridge collapse on a North Island farm.

Moodie said he wore the two-piece women's suit because of what he described as a boys' network in the court room.

"I'm objecting to the male ethos that is dominating this case and from now on I'm going to be dressing as a girl in my daily life," Moodie told Reuters.

"It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't seen the gung-ho attitude in this case. The more this goes on and the deeper the cover-up gets, the frocks will get prettier," he said.

Moodie, who said he was wearing a skirt while talking to Reuters by telephone, is married with three children but said he had a strong female gender bias.

"The sexes are not opposite, they're complementary," he said, drawing comparisons with New Zealand's hugely popular All Blacks rugby side.

"The front row of the All Blacks is a very important part of maleness and is not to be disparaged at all, but neither should the guy who wants to do ballet," Moodie said.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The thing is, I'm not sure from the article if the guy just wants to crossdress, or if he's really doing it as a protest. If the latter, it's unclear whether he's protesting the case specifically, or the justice system generally. Maybe the protest serves two purposes? Maybe he needed the excuse of protest to be able to crossdress, since that's what he wanted to do anyway. I'm not sure and the article doesn't answer that for me. Either way, I'd love to see a day when this makes the regular news wire, and not the "weird news" wire, y'know?

odd realization...

have you ever changed your appearance in some way, say getting a drastic haircut or changing from glasses to contacts? after you did it, did you notice that you had some reflexive gestures that went along with the old look? like flipping your hair over your shoulder, or pushing your glasses back up your nose? did you keep doing the gesture for a couple weeks after you made the change?

i just did that, with my nose piercing. for the last 6 years, i've had a style of jewelry called a (i know this sounds awful) nostril screw. it was basically a stud-style earring with a really long post that is bent around in a spiral so that it lays flat against the inside of your nostril. the great thing about it is that there's nothing on the inside to poke your septum, so it's very comfortable to wear. unfortunately, it can be really hard to fit those things. i've had three different nostril screws in the past six years, and the last one is the only one that fit right on the inside. unfortunately, the spiral it was in, while it fit great in my nostril, left the gem on the outside looking a bit "tucked in" and crooked.

so i went for a change, and after three or four adjustments to the fit, my piercer (pam at trilogy in the gayborhood. she rocks.) suggested a different style. she suggested i use a labret stud. to which suggestion i said, "a what-what-what?" i'd never seen one up close, never having had a labret piercing. anyway, it amounts to an earring with a cap-style back on it. however, the "cap" in this case is like a tiny metal bud vase. it's got a very smooth, flat butt on it, and a short barrel that the stone kinda snaps into. it's actually kinda neat from a variety perspective because once you've got that backing, you can swap out for any stone you want. so i got an opal. (pretty shiny thing!)

now, the odd realization that started this whole post is this: i apparently had a large number of reflexive gestures related to my old nostril screw. it had a tendency to spin in the piercing so that the spiral part of the stud was hanging down out the bottom of my nostril. when you're a giant amazon, and most people look up at you from some lower elevation, this is especially apparent and rather a social faux pas. pam changed the jewelry out for me last night, and i can't tell you how many times i've reached up in the last 12 hours to make sure that my nostril screw was adjusted correctly. i'm looking forward to getting used to this thing so i don't look like i'm picking my nose all the time. ugh.

ouch

 

why i hate PVP (Player v. Player) role-playing games. 

swiped from the blog of the dark clown...

not sure if this is amusing or scary. I'm thinking both. [ed. note: add horrible to the list. amusing, scary, horrible.]

For those unfamiliar, 'captchas' are the graphics with warped letters that some webforms want you to retype to verify that you're an actual human filling out the form, not a spam-bot or something of the sort.

Today, I became aware of this. It's like the illegitimate offspring of captchas and HotOrNot.com.

More productivity than you can measure

So, this first "work at home" week has been a good one. It's nearly over, and in spite of the fact that my company has changed my e-mail address and apparently this has caused me to lose access to most of the cool systems like time-sheet entry and software downloading, my spirits are high. I figure if they can break it in a week, they can fix it in a week, too. There was apparently another woman already working for said employer who has my name, and since the e-mail addresses are standardized on a firstname.lastname sort of convention, I gummed up the works when I was hired. This is why the HR department called me a couple days before I got my offer letter to ask me about how I wanted my e-mail spelled... It's not that my name is all that complicated or that they didn't have it written down somewhere. It's that they had to use some alternate version, and since that's not standardized, they were asking for my preference.

Anyway, the alternative I chose didn't work out so well, and was causing all sorts of access conflicts for the original employee, so they changed my e-mail address to one of my less-favored alternatives. I don't mind, but I was kinda hoping to avoid that simply because there is one very common spelling of my first name, and -- well, that's not the one I use. I do use the second most common spelling, but that's my Dad's doing. If my Mom had had her way, I would use the more common one. In fact, she taught me how to spell my name her way when I was a wee tyke. Then, when I was about 6 or so and I discovered that she had taught me a different spelling from what was on my birth certificate, I was livid as only a 6-year-old-going-on-17 can be. I don't know how long this went on for, but there was a period in which I wrote out my full name, as it appears on my birth certificate, on every single school paper I had to hand in. I eventually got tired of it and went back to heading my papers with my (much shorter) nickname, but it seems this name thing has always been an issue for me.

Anyway, for all I was afraid of it, I managed to get nearly all my laundry done in the last two days. I only have two loads left to do, and then I need to find the time to fold them all. As it is, there's a huge pile of clean clothes on my couch. Any volunteers?

The kitchen, also, has received a dose of much-needed attention. I've cleaned out all the science projects from my fridge, set my tofu to marinate, washed up all my dishes, watered all my plants, and ground beans for tomorrow's coffee. Whee! The cool thing is that I get most of this stuff done at lunchtime, or just on the break between work and dinner. So I'm not "shorting" my work any hours, and I'm not eating up all my social time with it, either. Not that it would hurt me to spend a little less social time and a little more home time for a while... I feel a little out of balance lately. But that, gentle readers, is a whole other blog.

Why Mohammed went to the mountain...

I understand now why Mohammed went to the mountain, instead of waiting for the mountain to come to him. If you wait for the mountain (of dirty laundry) to come to you, it has some very uncharitable things to say to you about the level of neglect you've applied to your housework. Thus, the lesson for today is that it is far better to approach the mountain with humility than it is to wait for the mountain to come to your eminent feet. If you wait, it's liable to come as an avalanche, just to teach you a lesson.

And for lunch today, I did two sinksful of dishes, started on the laundry pile, and carried my trash out to the dumpster. I feel so flippin' productive (and philosophical, in case you couldn't tell)!