Fraaaaank says, "I plaaan zis parfet wadding vur yew!"

My dear friend, Brad, has decided to help Rose and I out a little by advising us on our "something old/something new/something borrowed/something blue" wedding traditions. He's a doll, and a good sport when I do something dykey and don't quite reach the FABulous mark. Rose is always thoroughly fabulous, but she has an alter-ego to help her with that. I have to muddle through with neither a gay man's sensibility for fabulousness nor a straight woman's aplomb for aesthetics. So, basically, I'm a dude.

Anyway, in his spirit of helpfulness, Brad photochopped us all into a scene from Father of the Bride to help us all get into character. Anyone remember that movie? I'm afraid it may have set unreasonably high expectations in my parents' minds for what their daughters' weddings would be like. One out of three ain't bad? (My apologies to Mr. Meatloaf...)

P.S.: Mom & Dad, if you read this, I'm kidding about the movie.

she of the abnormally long legs...

Rose and I went by the local army surplus store this week to pick up extra camo pants for our upcoming roadtrip. I used to be in the Air Force, and I fell in love with the camo uniforms while I was there. I found them to be the sexiest uniform item, like, EVAR!!!1!

Ok, not really, but they're so damn functional I forgive them for being unsexy. If you're looking for sexy, you might think about flight suits. I know they don't look like much at first glance, but they're a short zipper away from being silk boxers and combat boots - silk scarf optional. What's not to love?

So these camo pants have giant pockets, the fabric breathes WAY better than denim, and they're reinforced through the butt and the knees, should you ever find yourself in contact with the ground. Hopefully you won't, but even if you did, the cargo pockets are so big you could probably store a trauma team in them to get you back on the road before the next day's breakfast. Why the next day's breakfast? Well, most bikers seem to have this crazed 'kickstands up at first light' philosophy that, had I known about it ahead of time, might've kept me from pursuing the pastime. See ANY of my posts tagged coffee for an explanation.

In short, they make perfect riding pants. We had ordered some extra-long pants for me because the merely long pants were, as you can see below, about three inches shy of being long enough, even when i wore the waist around my hips (which actually does a lot to improve the sex appeal of the pants). I was walking out of the dressing room holding the special order pair of extra-longs when the manager spied me for the first time and said, "You must be the Extra-Long Pants I ordered!" Yep, that's me, Giant Amazon!




Unfortunately, the Extra-Long pants were only available in a waist size that is... skinnier than your resident Giant Amazon. So the next time I post some decadent food item that I've cooked or eaten, feel free to leave me a comment reminding me to go jog that off. Until then, I'll be wearing slightly short, but hip-skimmingly sexy pants in the larger waist size. Maybe I could stuff a personal trainer in one of those cargo pockets?

CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME!!!

... okay, maybe i'm not going to california. but i really like that song lyric and i bellow it at the top of my lungs whenever i can. making it a nice big, bold post topic counts as bellowing. you can blame my mother, who taught me that if i couldn't sing it well or remember all the words, i should make up for it by singing the parts i knew VERY LOUDLY.

so, california legalized gay marriage today! great news. when you get the press release from Equality Texas (which is where the above clicky takes you) you also get the following interesting factoids...

According to a January, 2008 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, approximately 50,000 same-sex couples were living in Texas in 2005. About 20% of these couples are raising an estimated 17,444 children. They deserve the same opportunity to legally protect their family relationships as all California couples now have.



Equality Texas will continue its ongoing efforts to help build strong Texas families, including those with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family members.

I had no idea there were so many. Some days, it feels like Rose and I are the only ones. Of course, percentagewise, that's only about 0.5% of the state population, but it doesn't take into account the unattached ones. To look at it another way, it's half the population of the city of Plano - which is 9th in the state, for those of you not familiar with the outliers of the DFW metroplex. That's quite a lot of people.

*crosses fingers* someday, right?

it is good to be my dog.

This is my dog, in the pose colloquially known as 'tits up'. She will sleep like this for hours on end. Shortly after we took this picture, she went to the vet and got her rabies vaccination, where she proceeded to pretend she was shy. Then we went to the park, where she and her cousin-dog went swimming, and she proved what a liar she'd been at the vet's by making friends with every human being and waterfowl within a 3 mile radius. Even the ducklings and cygnets like my dog. What is up with that?

Here's the thing that's weird about taking my dogs swimming at the park: we attract a LOT of attention. I have labs. They swim -- this is elementary. All the dogs I've owned in recent memory have been swimmers, actually. Even my reluctant rottweiler, Duchess, was a swimmer once she figured out how to not imitate a rock. I don't understand why dogs swimming are so fascinating to people at the park, but by all evidence, they are. People stop what they are doing, bring their children over, pull out cameras and gawk for 15 minutes or more. Oh, yeah, they also talk to me.

I've said this before: I'm slightly unapproachable. Nobody stops me in the grocery store to ask directions (which, honestly, is in their own best interest. i hate shopping and i'm grumpy and bewildered when i do it.) or approaches me for anything other than the classic panhandle. I know that conventional wisdom says dogs are supposed to make you more approachable, but kids who would RUN THE OTHER WAY if I said "hi" because OHMYGAWD A STRANGER TALKED TO ME! will stand next to me while I play with the dogs and tell me their life stories. Today, for example, I learned all about some kid's Pekingese, how he taught it to stand up, and how a cat bit him once just for eating French Fries, and ... well, I'll stop before you get bored. Kids have short lives, but that doesn't mean their life stories are short. They can be incredibly detailed.

So here's to my dog(s) and their incredibly short but intensely good lives. Maybe their willingness to get this vulnerable is what lets people around them do the same?

scramble

rose's grandma just passed away. i think the technical reason was respiratory distress secondary to a lung infection, but she was 94 and had been in declining health for a while - so it's no surprise. we got the phone call a little before 1. now there's a mad scramble to buy an airline ticket, pack suitcases, fill out FMLA paperwork, and get her dad to the airport before the 3:30 PM flight to newark. because if he misses that 3:30 flight, he won't make the 10:50 overseas flight, and if he misses that, the next flight leaving for israel is at 4 tomorrow afternoon. and if he leaves that late, he'll miss the funeral. those crazy jews - 24 hours from moment of death to moment of burial. that's the max. i understand, historically speaking, the reasons for it. they believe in the resurrection of the body so they don't embalm (incidentally, that's why you can't tattoo yourself, and if you lose a body part you're supposed to preserve it and bury it with the rest of yourself) and that means that you have a very short window to get the buryin done. sucks for rose's dad. he was just there for passover and has only been home about a week. the silver lining in all this is that he did get to see her and say goodbye while she was lucid. i know that occasionally jews delay funerals for family members who must travel long distances, but rose's aunt ester is a SUPAH-STRICT orthodox jew who didn't come to her mother's bedside when she was hospitalized recently (we heard it was for "water on the brain" but it turned out to be "fluid in her lungs") because she had to stay home and prepare her kitchen for passover. ester does not bend the rules, even in situations when it is allowed by the tradition.

so, in honor of rose's grandma - sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, concentration camp survivor, a romanian jew who settled outside of tel aviv after the horror of ww2 was over - זיכרונה לברכה (may her memory be a blessing).

[ed. note: 2:39 pm and p just called me as she was leaving the airport. they got it all done, and dad will make his flight. so i'm glad that p's dad got on that plane.]

things

things which are underneath the driver's seat of my truck:

• cds of bands that a certain guitarist i know used to be in
• paperback novel by andrew greeley
• audiobook by maya angelou
• softball bat
• sun shade to go in the windshield on those hot texas days
• dog hair
• a bag of scooper bags to remove the waste of aforementioned dogs from public property
• a diaper (not from my nieces, so i don't know where it came from!)
• clip-on sunglasses for my girlfriend's prescription eyeglasses
• mapsco book for the dfw metroplex
• bungee cords
• air fresheners (the reasons for which should be obvious by now)

things which are not under the driver's seat of my truck:

• my cell phone
• a sackful of $100 bills
• jimmy hoffa
• the cheat codes for guitar hero 3
• any cell phones at all, for that matter...
  

ridin' the spyder...

rose had to drop her bike off today to get new tires, and a 40k service. the woman has had her bike only 3 years; she rides a LOT. i hopped in the truck wearing cut-offs and flip-flops, loaded up my dogs and followed her to the dealership... where they were having a "test-drive the spyder" event for anyone in closed-toed shoes and long pants. *le sigh* rose immediately signed up, of course. i hemmed and hawed and stalled and held her helmet while she filled out paperwork and watched the familiarization video, but i realized that i'd spend the rest of the year kicking myself if i passed up the opportunity try one of the little beasts. i blazed home and got geared up to ride and guiltily tossed my dogs a couple of kongs stuffed with milkbones to keep them entertained.

the video was full of french canadians with very sexy accents talking about how much fun it was to design and build a 3-wheeled sport vehicle that was not quite a motorcycle, not quite an ATV, and not anything like a car. they kept talking about the "paradigm shift" involved and how the whole time they were developing it they weren't sure whether they were the triumphant inventors or the crackpot mad scientists, but either way, they were having fun.

then was the familiarization briefing. i'll give you the highlights:

• like a motorcycle, except you can get it with automatic transmission
• like the beetle, it has a trunk in front
• unlike the beetle, the trunk can double as an ice chest
• unlike either a motorcycle or a beetle, it has... um... THREE wheels

then there was the closed course. if you didn't have a motorcycle endorsement on your driver's license, this was all you could do on the vehicle. it was just a circle of cones with a couple of stop signs. still, it was nice to get to tool around in a parking lot and get a feel for it before the road ride.

then there was the road ride!!!! they let rose join our group because it was small, so she got TWO road rides on the spyder today. (jealous!) ummm... first off, it's ZIPPY. that's very common for a v-twin, they're very torque-y engines, generally. i'm used to great torque on my valk, but this was crazy. the acceleration on this thing was HAWT. like pull your arms out of their sockets and leave your helmet a block behind you hawt. even, (dare i say it?) like a bacon bikini hawt.

also, it was stable. this isn't terribly surprising, since it has (i may have mentioned this) THREE wheels. but 3-wheelers can be tipped, especially in corners, especially if you're going fast. the beauty of the Y-arrangement on the spyder is that the drive wheel is the single back wheel, so it's much harder to flip than a 3-wheel ATV. there's a lengthy explanation of the stability control system available on the website, but the basics are that it's monitoring all the wheels all the time and adjusts traction by occasionally braking one or more of the wheels so as to keep them all on the pavement. it's also smart enough to know if you have a passenger on back, and adjusts differently for that than when you're riding solo.

it's a neato machine and was very fun to ride. i think it'd be a helluva lot better in nasty traffic than a motorcycle, simply because you don't have to keep putting your feet down to stay vertical. of course, if i had the huevos to try lane-sharing in texas, a motorcycle would be better. with that wide-front stance the spyder is just as wide as a small car and you definitely could NOT lane-split with it. you could still get two into a single parking space, though, especially if you parked them yin-and-yang style. rose and i are thinking about getting one if either of us ends up in a work-from-the-office job anytime in the near future. for now... it's not in the cards, but it was fun to have it in my hands for half an hour!