Not Quite Ready for the Olympics

I’m sure this is the most riveting piece of information you’ve read today - I signed up to run in a 5K race taking place in mid-October. It’s kind of a big deal to me because September 13th will mark ten years since I wrecked my back. I’ve talked here and there about my back drama and I think it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update.

The very short of it is, I spent the first nine years after my injury getting treated for degenerative disc disease. This meant I spent countless hours doing core stabilization exercises, seeing who knows how many physical therapists and doctors, enduring excruciating epidural corticosteroid injections in my spine, and never having a single pain-free day. The medications for treating pain and inflammation were often worse than the pain itself. Chronic pain shouldn’t be underestimated, nor its wingman - depression.

Vacation Countdown

Six weeks or so from now, we’ll be off to Norway for the Viking Queen’s wedding. It will make exactly a year to the week that I was last in Norway and this trip will mark LF’s first trip to Europe. I’ve never been to a gay wedding before, but this wedding will be particularly meaningful because it’s legal. LF and I won’t understand a word of their vows, but I’ll probably get a little choked up seeing my best Scandinavian girl all grown up and getting married. Plus, the Viking Queen’s soon-to-be husband is completely dreamy. There are not enough superlatives in the book to adequately describe his dreaminess.

We’ll be staying with the happy couple in Oslo, but LF and I are going to branch off on our own for a couple of days before the wedding and do the touristy thing. We just booked the Norway in a Nutshell tour, which is a train trip that will take us from Oslo up through the fjords and over to Bergen via the Flåm railway and the Bergen railway. I’m particularly excited about the Flåm Railway though. We’ll spend a couple of nights in Bergen and then take the one-hour flight back to Oslo and begin the countdown to the wedding.

I know the trip is going to fly by and we’ll be back in Baltimore before we even realize that we were on vacation. I definitely envy the Europeans with their many weeks of vacation time they get each year. A week is barely enough time to get adjusted to time zone differences, let alone get a feel for a foreign city. We’ll take what we can get though. We are very fortunate to have good friends host us and show us Oslo through their eyes. Besides, how often do you get the opportunity to spend $10 per draft beer? A girl like me could die of thirst living in Norway full-time.

Verbotene Liebe

Curse the YouTube gods!! Clicking on the ‘Related Videos’ section can steal hours from your life, if you’re not careful. I honestly can’t remember what I was watching when I stumbled upon what has become my new obsession - Verbotene Liebe. Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love) is a German daytime soap opera that has all the typical daytime soap drama. What makes it different from most of the other daytime dramas is that it features a bunch of full-on lezzies and mos. One of the main characters, Carla von Lahnstein, is a super-sexy Euro Lez who manages to seduce any woman she sets her sights on. She’s smart, beautiful, well-dressed, and the daughter of an aristocrat - what more could a girl ask for in another woman?

See my new fantasy lover in action:

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I’m not sure exactly what it is about this show that gets me all a-flutter. I know a big part of it has to do with the clothes and shoes that these Euro Lezzies wear. I just can’t help myself when I see attractive women in tailored clothing. It’s my weakness.  Another aspect of this show that makes my No-No places tingle is the language. I don’t speak German, but it always sounds like someone giving commands whenever I hear it spoken and that’s pretty hot.

More Carla von Lahnstein in action:

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I don’t need to learn any German because HOT is a universal language.

Weekend High and Lowlights

Lady Friend and I took Thursday off and started the long weekend by borrowing a small powerboat and getting our Crockett and Tubbs on. We hit the Magothy River and tooled around the different creeks checking out all the waterfront houses and passing judgment on people’s bad taste. We live in Pigtown, so we consider ourselves authorities in bad taste. Before we went on our three-hour tour, we had to gas up the boat. I guess the cost of gas is really c-blocking people from blasting up and down the river in powerboats and on jet-skis because the Magothy was so empty that I lost my bearings and I almost missed the marina. We pulled right up to the gas pumps at the end of the pier and there were no other boats gassing up or waiting to gas up. It was like a ghost town on the dock. We filled up the boat  and took off for Dobbins Island, leaving $20 bills in our wake when I hit the throttle.

We didn’t make any plans for the 4th of July since we didn’t have any money left after cashing out our savings and our 401(k)s to fill up the boat. One of my hungover cousins called and she didn’t have any plans for the 4th either, so we decided to hole up in the Pigtown Palace and do the most patriotic thing any true American can do in honor of Independence Day - watch a Steven Seagal movie. Saturday, LF and I continued the patriotic theme by packing up some lawn chairs and some ice cold beers and then heading over to Fort McHenry N.P. We picked a tree on a hill and sat in the shade nursing our low-grade Seagal hangovers while watching the ships move in and out of the harbor.

Yesterday we took a day trip to Sharpsburg, MD to bike around Antietam National Battlefield. It took us about three hours to bike the whole thing because it’s pretty hilly in spots. The scenery is beautiful and it’s so quiet around the battlefield that it’s hard to believe there were 23,000 casualties in one day in that location. When I worked for the state park service back in the day, I occasionally used to have to camp at Antietam Creek. I could never fall asleep when I stayed there because my imagination always ran wild thinking of all of the ghost stories I’d heard about Civil War soldiers wandering through the woods.

I feel like I should fess up to my weekend lowlights though. When I’m left unsupervised in front of the TV it’s not uncommon for me to make really bad decisions in my viewing choices. LF came home from unSafeway and caught me fully engrossed in the atrocity that is Georgia Rule. To quote LF upon opening the front door and seeing what was on the screen: “I was only gone for ten minutes!!!” There’s only one thing worse than a Lindsay Lohan movie and that’s a Lindsay Lohan movie co-starring a pinko communist traitor and hater of American troops Jane Fonda. I need to call DOUCHE DISH Network and give them an Anger Hangover Rule - No Jane Fonda Movies on the 4th of July (or ever, for that matter).

As if losing precious minutes of my soulless existence to Georgia Rule wasn’t bad enough, I debased myself even further by getting caught up in Freedom Writers (aka Million Dollar Dangerous Minds). Wow. This movie was so heavy-handed and overly wrought that I was praying Clint Eastwood would show up and put this Mo Chuisle out of her misery. He never showed up though, which meant I was left lingering on life support for the duration. Fortunately, LF found the strength to pry the remote control from my cold hands and pull the plug on HBO-E.

Some may debate whether or not this his a highlight or lowlight, but LF and I got sucked into El Cantante starring Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. I feel no shame in admitting this - the movie was really good. It was basically a Puerto Rican version of What’s Love Got to Do With It, minus the chronic wife-beating and Buddhist chanting. Good stuff.

Are You Paying Attention?

It’s been nearly seventy years since the Supreme Court has heard a Second Amendment case. A ruling on the District of Columbia versus Heller case is expected today and it could be big. The focus of D.C. v. Heller is on an individual’s right to keep and bear arms and the main issue is whether or not D.C.’s handgun ban violates the Second Amendment. There’s definitely a sense, from different sides of the gun debate, that the D.C. handgun ban will be declared unconstitutional. As a handgun owner living in the People’s Republic of Maryland, a state that’s barely a step less restrictive than D.C., I’ve been following this case closely.

One of my neighbors has been following this case from the very beginning and his Second Amendment saga is an interesting one, to say the least. Depending on how the Supreme Court rules, he and I may be in the streets of Pigtown tonight firing celebratory shots in the air. I’m kidding, of course. Doing something like that would be completely irresponsible because ammunition is just way too expensive to waste.

It will be interesting to see how people in the various blogospheres (on both sides of the gun debate) will take a sudden interest in this case and become sudden gun law experts. Let the uneducated and uninformed flaming begin!!

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UPDATE: “The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.”

This is major! Restrictive gun laws only apply to people who actually obey the law, which basically renders you, the law-abinding citizen, a victim-in-waiting. Criminals know this and use it to their advantage. So congratulations to all of my law-abiding friends in D.C. You now have the right to defend yourselves.

A Way With Children and Animals

My neighbor, Mr. Brown, has quite a way with words and hurling insults - especially when they are directed at children and pets. This is why he is one of my favorite people in the world. Recently, Mr. Brown has been on fire with his heckling of small children as they ride their bikes up and down the block. The little kids love it though. They go out of their way to get Mr. Brown’s attention because if Mr. Brown insults you it means he likes you.

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The Stare

Some of you may not know this about me, but I have a superhero power - The Stare.

I suppose I’ve always known I had The Stare, but I never knew how to harness its power until I got older. Living in a place like Baltimore for so many years has helped me focus my superhero power into something I never dreamed could be so potent. Some friends and family members are familiar with The Stare and I’m told it is a little scary.

Now that the warm weather is here, people are out and about on the streets which means The Stare comes out of hibernation. Each winter, I’m always afraid I’ll lose my edge in the staring department but now I’ve come to understand that The Stare just gets stronger. What makes The Stare so powerful is the silence that goes with it. I don’t say a word to anyone on the receiving end of The Stare and this makes them extremely uncomfortable.

Flip This Crack House?

Something is going on with one of my next door neighbors, whom I’ll refer to as Sir Smokes A-Lot. I call him Sir Smokes A-Lot because he has had a crack problem since well…the dawn of crack. This is according to another neighbor who told me that Sir Smokes A-Lot has “been chasin’ that white ghost ever since I don’t know when.” Several Saturdays ago, there was a lot of banging going on in SSAL’s house, which was strange because the guy hardly ever makes a sound. We didn’t hear any screaming during or after the banging, so we figured all the noise was legit.

The next morning I was sitting in the upstairs office/back bedroom, hoping to finally reach the end of the internet, when all of the sudden there was SSAL standing on the roof of his back porch just six feet away from my window. He scared the sweet bejesus out of me! He had a cigarette dangling from his lips and appeared to be pulling the end of a dresser out of one of his windows. He was grumbling instructions to push and I heard the all too familiar screech of one of our friendly neighborhood hookers from inside of the house, “I am fuckin’ pushin’!! This fuckin’ shit is heavier ‘n fuckin’ hell!”

Hi.

It’s a little strange logging on to this blog after a couple of weeks of not logging on at all. I feel kind of shy and self-conscious after being gone. It’s been a really difficult couple of weeks and the reality of what’s happened with my neighbor is only starting to hit me now that the shock has worn off a bit. My head is not even close to being clear on things and there’s a good chance it never will be. I’m not sure if or when I’ll even write about my neighbor. I know some of you were worried it was Mr. Brown, but it wasn’t. I probably should have mentioned that in my last post. Mr. Brown is fine, but he’s not quite right these days either after what happened. He was the person who broke the news to me when I came home to that scene two Mondays ago.

Anyway. I think we’re all trying to get back to normal, whatever that means. I guess for me, part of getting back to normal is a return to putting up D+/C- blog posts.

Right now I am at a nerd conference (is that redundant?) in Filthadelphia, PA. It’s kind of nice to be out of Pigtown for a few days, although I know I will not be able to sleep because it’s too quiet in this hotel. I almost fell into a deep sleep walking down Market Street when an ambulance and fire truck went by. Sirens are my crickets - so relaxing and soothing.

Speaking of soothing, here is a list of the sessions I attended today and the ones I will be attending tomorrow:

Today:

• Content Analysis Tools and Structured Authoring
• Migrating to Topic-Based Documentation: Content Strategies
• Love Thy Developer: Becoming an API Writer

Tomorrow:

• Writing as an Asynchronous Conversation
• Designing for Search
• Architecting and Classifying for Better Information Retrieval
• Creating Task-based Navigation with DITA
• Making XML Technology Accessible

I am a completely out of the closet nerd, in case you were wondering. This kind of shit turns my crank.

Pause

One of my very good, very kind neighbors committed suicide. We (the residents of this block) just learned of this about five hours ago, as we watched the medical examiner remove the body from the house. I’m not able to process any of this right now. It’s shocking and it’s devastating for all of us here and I need to pause for bit. Once I gather my thoughts about things and about my neighbor, I’d like to share some of them here. I’ll be back sometime soon.