Corner of Bourbon & Division

Hokay. This weekend was jam-packed with stuff and things and action, so I think I ought to record it for posterity.

:::ETA:::

Holy shit this got long. Cut-tagging now for your convenience.

:::/ETA:::

( Friday )

( Saturday Morning )

( Saturday Afternoon and Evening )

( 'It's the Sunday morning after...' )

And that's it for this entry. I think I shall make a separate one about 24 so that it doesn't get lost in all the verbiage.

I was cheerfully writing up the latest instalment of Beyond the Pale last night when the phone rang for the second time. The first time had been luvenditti with some fun news. However, I wasn't expecting any calls, and I came close to ignoring the phone. Then I remembered that I had resolved not to ignore my phone as much, so I picked up.

It was the president of my dancing club. Turns out I was scheduled to volunteer last night but hadn't written it down in my agenda. Oops. So I left the apartment like a bat out of hell, and arrived only about twenty minutes late. Oops again. So much for going to bed early.

Luckily the class ended early, and I managed to get to bed by 11:00. It's not quite the 9:30 bedtime I'd been planning, since there will be no time for me to sleep in for a few weeks after this, nor to go to bed early, for that matter. But it was still a reasonable hour.

Organizational skills obviously need some work. Gah.

There's more, but I may reserve that for another post. Today is turning out to be equal parts stress and unremitting boredom.

This cold is deceptive. I felt fine last night, then spent half the night coughing, then felt fine again this morning.

Now, the dog in the proverb has got nothing on me.

I hate this so, so much. Yes, I will continue bitching about this cold until it goes away, you have been warned.

I've decided not to go to my dancing thing tonight, just as I didn't go to the NaNoWriMo meetup yesterday (elected instead to let my parents feed me). This cold is seriously eating into my social life. :P

I'm going to go home and sleep it off if it kills me, dammit.

Learned another advanced dance yesterday. Kicked ass, too.

I thought of whiskeygirl8, because it was a choreography composed for a Toby Keith song, "I Love This Bar."

I'll have to show it to her when I visit Oklahoma, or when she comes here to visit, whichever comes first. :) It's a couples dance, mind you, so I'll have to learn both parts, depending on whether she's a leader or a follower. Me, I follow best when dancing, but I figure I could probably learn the leader part without too much difficulty, given practice.

That's all for now, I think.

Happy Trails!

I'm probably not going to have my license suspended on grounds of being crazy. We'll see how that works out.

Weekend went by really, really quickly. Line dancing on Friday, much fun was had, although I was already pretty tired by then. Got up stupidly early on Saturday and cleaned, picked up ai731 for band practice. Practice rocked very hard, as usual, although I had to leave half an hour early in order to get stuff done. Did my grocery shopping at Atwater Market in the pouring rain, got soaked, and I think I paid too much for the asparagus. Still, I now have food in the apartment, which I didn't have before.

Guest arrived fifteen minutes early. I have a great track record for always being in the shower when the doorbell rings in the new apartment. Anyway, the guest in question was more than forbearing, and made friends with the FFE's (Feline Forces of Entropy, for those of you who are new to my LJ) while I got myself a little more organised.

Dinner was, well, a little haphazard. I made champignons en crème, which I hadn't made in a while, and my timing was a bit off. My béchamel was ready long before everything else, and I've apparently lost the trick of making good crepes with sarrazin flour (I get the feeling there's more French than English in that last sentence. Oh well.). Luckily I had a backup plan, which was baked potatoes in the oven, over which I poured the cream of mushroom, and that worked fairly well. It's more of a winter meal than a summer one, but the temperature outside was cool enough that we didn't both immediately expire from the heat.

We skipped salad and dessert, but there were some lovely cheeses. A St.-Agur, which is always nice if you like blue cheese, and a Ile-Aux-Grues Riopel, which is a Quebec lait cru and puts most French cheeses of its ilk to shame. Also had a nice little goat cheese seasoned with herbs that was mild and fragrant, but whose name sadly escapes me. Began with a "B."

The FFE's made total and complete idiots of themselves, acted as though no one loved them or took care of them and as though they hadn't been fed in days. Yowled and fawned and generally acted like the complete sucks that they are. Even Smudge eventually found his courage and ventured down from off the top of the bookcase to climb into the first available lap. I've apparently managed to make a semi-sociable animal out of him after all. I was impressed.

Sunday was breakfast with the parental units, and then off to the club for my last Sunday ever of volunteering. Hit the Massive Wall of Tired (TM) around 5pm, and never quite recovered. Didn't help that I haven't had much sleep over the last ten days. Got seriously annoyed when I saw that the two other volunteers basically only left me with Friday nights on which to do my volunteering. Meaning that I wouldn't get to do any dancing for six weeks straight. Let me tell you, that one didn't go over well at all with me. I am no longer being a martyr to the cause, the way I was in August. That time is over. Period. So I threw a rational and reasonably calm hissy fit about it, and pointed it out to the one volunteer who happened to be around. He hemmed and hawed and tried to wriggle out of his responsibilities, and then conceded that he would talk to the other guy (they're both named "R" so that doesn't help. Maybe I'll go with both initials.) and that they'd try to work something out.

So, yay me for standing up for myself. We'll see if that actually comes to anything, or whether I'll have to go to N, the guy in charge of all the volunteers, and get him to fix it. I hope it doesn't come to that.

This week is going to be busy. Tonight is the celebration of my father's birthday (two weeks late, but hey, it's not our fault he was in Europe for his birthday), tomorrow I have dancing (the advanced class), Wednesday is a retirement party for a friend, Thursday is dancing (intermediate class), and Friday I'm volunteering. Saturday there's more band practice, then a date (eek!).

Then, Sunday, blissfully, I get all to myself. There will be sleeping in, yes.

I’m going about my life wrong. In lots of ways. However, I think I can fix at least one thing about it right now, and that’s how much time I spend away from home. Between work, line dancing, playing with Random Colour, and the social life I seem to have sprouted somewhere around this time last year, I’m very rarely home anymore.

This is bad for many reasons:

1) I have no down time. I haven’t been able to recharge properly in weeks, possibly months. I need that "me" time at least once a week in order to be even-tempered and good-natured, and just the naturally awesome Phnee that you all know and love. Ahem.


2) It’s all starting to feel like work. The line dancing, the band, seeing friends. See point 1). I don’t want the activities in which I take pleasure to start to feel like obligations, like chores. Honestly, I want my leisure activities to remain leisure activities. I don’t need artificial sources of stress when I already have enough natural ones.


3) The cats are getting more neurotic. They like having their Mummy home, and I miss spending time with them.


4) I have less time to keep the apartment tidy. I did a good cleanup on Labour Day weekend, but once-a-week maintenance is generally required. So.

5) I’d like to have a significant chunk of time set aside to devote back to my roleplaying. I’ve been neglecting the two games I have going, and I want to get back into the swing of things. I haven’t touched my home computer in days. This isn’t the most important reason, but I enjoy the roleplaying a great deal, and so I want to put by some time to be online.


All this to say that, as of the middle of September, I will be keeping my Sundays to myself. There will be no volunteering at the club on that day, and I will go there to dance only if I feel like it. I will spend the day puttering around, regaining spoons, and using the computer and cleaning. Nothing more.

Exceptions might be made, but they will be exceptions, not the rule.

That’s my resolution for the week. :)

First off, may I ask anyone in the way of hurricane Katrina to get the hell away as much as you possibly can? Not having a television means I haven't seen any of the footage, but I remember Hugo from when I was small (about 10 years old), and if this is worse, then dear God above, I don't know what to say.


That being said, I am wiped out. Exhausted. Burnt. Toast.

Needless to say, my club will not be getting me to volunteer for more than one day a week ever again. Three days in a row, for a total of twenty one hours, is NOT my idea of fun. In fact, that's a second job. If I'm going to be working a second job, I'd like to get paid, plsthx!

I'm taking all of next weekend away from the club. I need the break, else I'll end up hating it. I realize they're short of volunteers, but I refuse to make myself into a martyr for the cause. I realized this weekend that I was falling back into old habits, not saying "no" when I needed to, etc. By the time last night rolled around I was so overtired I couldn't think straight, and I went and collapsed on my mother's sofa until about 10 pm. Completely out of spoons. Recouped a couple overnight, but not nearly enough. I predict an early night in my near future.

Have many things planned for this week, mostly next weekend. I'm going to be visiting looking4wings, and seeing a movie with luvenditti, and then Monday I'm going to give this place a thorough cleaning. It hasn't had a really good going-over in a few months, and I think it couldn't hurt at this point.

Guh. I don't feel like going to work. Too tired. With any luck there won't be any major rushes, and I'll simply be able to finish my filing, which is backed up about three or four weeks. I got some of it done last week, but this is not really a one-day job. I mostly need to be left alone at the office for two or three days to be able to catch up properly with the filing. Not like that's going to happen anytime soon, but a girl can dream, right?

In other news, I've decided that I'm definitely not going to be living the same life by the time I turn thirty. That means I have a little under three and a half years to change my life. I think that's doable. After all, Looking back one year, I was already starting a major change in the way I live. I think I may write a post about that later today if I have time.

Okay. Off to work.

I have to go to work. Then I'm volunteering. Tomorrow I have a million and one things to do to prepare for the RWP.

I am never, ever going to get a decent amount of sleep this week. Especially not while I'm still trying to produce something for august_writing every day.

I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to get any writing done while camping. I don't think I have enough time to produce an actual backlog before leaving this week. There just aren't enough hours in the day, at least if I want to get any kind of sleep this week, which already won't be enough (see above).

It wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't spent the last weekend exhausting myself in the name of line dancing. It was fun and oh so worth it, but now I have to pay the piper. I'm going to be a mess next week.

I don't even have time to update about my weekend, which rocked like a rocking thing (and I should know).

Okay. Off to work. I'll see if I can scrounge up some time over my breaks or something. Maybe I'll get lucky and get through more than half of my next chapter of Beyond the Pale before I get home tonight. That would rock.

So my mother calls me at work to let me know how things stand with a dinner invitation to the home of a family friend. Quick backstory: we were originally invited for Wednesday, and I told them I'd be delighted to come. Thinking it would be "better" for me on Friday, they switched the days on me, and of course I could no longer attend, since I'm volunteering at the club on Friday and we're short-staffed as it is.

My mother coolly informs me that she told said friend that I wasn't coming because my office was moving and I was working late. "Because," says she, "I couldn't bring myself to tell them that you couldn't come just because you were volunteering at a club."

Gee. Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mother.

Every now and then I get these nice little reminders that my mother is ashamed of me. Now she's ashamed to the point of lying to our friends about me. This is a first. Before it was simply lies of omission. Now she's going out of her way to say untruths so that they won't find out that I'm OMG t3h g4y! It's fine if she doesn't want them to know. But she might have at least told them a half-truth. Even saying "Oh, she can't come because she volunteers on Fridays." Or, "She already had plans that couldn't be altered, but she was very disappointed not to be able to see you."

But, no. She had to go hard-core liar on me.

She doesn't approve of the line-dancing, for many reasons. Foremost is of course that it's a gay club. She keeps asking me when I'm going to take "real" dancing lessons. Like, oh, walz or something. I think she's still harbouring some vague hope that by dancing these "real" dances I'll meet the right man that will convert me back to heterosexuality.

She still refuses to admit that I might date girls. In fact, whenever she uses a (hypothetical) example of dating concerning me, she'll invariably partner me up with a fictitious man. I gently correct her each time, but usually it just earns me a withering glare and a "Whatever. That's not the point I'm trying to make!"

No, Mother. It's the point I'm trying to make.

Maybe one day she'll realize I'm probably not going to change. Until then, she's going to do her damndest to shove me back into the closet as hard as she can. My mother is queen of that river in Egypt.

Pride was awesome. I regret somewhat having not been able to see all the floats and displays, but I must say that dancing non-stop for two hours and riding the crowd's energy was like nothing I've ever done before. I am so going back next year if I'm in a position to do so.

Yesterday I learned that trying to organize sixty-odd gay people into a functioning group is a lot like herding cats. First, you have to take into account GST (Gay Standard Time) which means add on twenty minutes to whatever activity you're planning, and multiply that exponentially as your group gets bigger (the parade itself started something like half an hour late).

Of course finishing work at 5:00 meant that I spent all of last night running around like a headless chicken, trying to get changed, get to the parade, and snatch something to eat in the interim. I barely had time for the latter, but made a point of eating because I didn't particularly feel like passing out in the middle of one of the dances. It would have looked really stupid, not to mention left my dance partner in the lurch, and of course, I would have missed the parade.

Speaking of my dance partner, he was ten minutes late, which meant that he arrived twenty-five minutes after everyone else did (no matter what you say about the whole late start thing, almost everyone was there ahead of schedule. It was just like trying to get molasses moving uphill on a cold day).

We loitered and milled about for almost an hour before we even got close to being in position for the dance, and chatted and kibbitzed and practised one last time before lining up behind our truck. The jokes flew thick and fast, people shouted and whooped and flirted with the other groups who were also milling about waiting for instructions. A man raced around in one of those small street-cleaner cars, the ones that have a giant hose stuck on their end, making them look like a very weird futuristic impression of an elephant rendered by someone who's never seen an elephant in his life but was told once that they have a trunk. No one was very impressed, as all the guy was doing was spewing dust everywhere.

Still, everyone was in high spirits, and we had a great deal of fun when the Gay Autochtone society wandered by. I mean, there we were, in our jeans and cowboy hats, and there were "Injuns." Couldn't have been better. We danced, they mock-whooped, and more jokes flew around like plastic bags in a shopping mall parking lot. Much random silliness.

We danced in a circle for a while, since the parade wasn't going anywhere. We had the CIBC float right behind us for a while, although I'll admit I didn't even notice whether they were still in that position when the parade got underway. It was either them or Feygeleh, the Jewish GLBT group that was also nearby. Best poster of the day was theirs, I think: "I had to come out of the closet: my mother needed the space."

Finally, the whole shebang got moving, and after a few minutes of dancing almost by ourselves, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a teeming, cheering throng. The energy last night was electrifying. I've attended Pride the past few years, and the energy that you feel as a spectator is nothing compared to the experience of actually being in the parade itself. People screamed themselves hoarse every time the Shania Twain song we'd picked came on. They clapped and stamped and yelled and whistled, and somehow, even though we ran out of water and the end of the parade was rushed (we had to take it at a run instead of dancing), it was more exhilarating than I could ever express.

There were some low-ish points, I must say. My partner, for one, didn't seem to understand the concept of not wrenching my shoulder from its socket, and kept poking me because the people in our row were falling behind and he didn't want me to get too far ahead (never mind that I was perfectly aware of this anyway). The poking wouldn't have been so bad, except that his fingernails were sharp, and he kept scratching me. Enh. Whatever. It didn't mar my experience, so I won't dwell on it more than I have to.

Met up with some Bolo people who hadn't taken part in the Parade once it was over, and then about half of us staggered back to the club to get some water and decompress. Everyone was in very good spirits, and moaning good-naturedly about how they never, ever wanted to hear "Passadena" ever again. One of our older members, who wasn't dancing but was walking in the parade with us, had an unfortunate accident because the one restaurant that let her inside didn't have a working toilet, which was really too bad. It was supposed to be a good evening for her, and I can't imagine that having wet pants made it fun. She still seemed to be in good form, and people either didn't mention it or made light of it. It's fairly common knowledge that she doesn't have a strong bladder due to an operation she had a while back. The sad part is that this means she probably won't be in the parade next year, although her husband said he would be (yes, they're our token straight couple).

Anyway, after downing another litre or two of water (no, I'm not exaggerating), I eventually staggered to my feet and went home. The main problem with having the parade on a Monday night is this whole work-in-the-morning deal. Frankly, I might have asked for today off if L hadn't already reserved today herself. I have no idea what she's up to, but it's just me all by my lonesome all day.

I was too wired to go to sleep right away (*sigh*), so I read for a while and tormented the cats, and eventually fell into a restless sleep at about 1am. Woke up every two hours after that until 6:30 when I got up to go to work.

Somehow, everything today feels anticlimactic.