Dwarf Planet in Purple

More than a month since I last updated this journal. Aack! I didn't even get around to making a note on February 29th, that rare day.

The covid is long gone and I am back in the swing of things. Which is good, because I have a feature article due next Monday. Double aack!

Still enjoying the Blue and Green Cottage. The temperatures have been jerking up and down, but I am starting to get eager to plant herbs in the various five-gallon buckets that my landlady and landlord have been using as pots. Maybe even some veggies. Their semi-feral (spayed) cat, Peaches, patrols the property, so I'm not as worried about squirrels raiding our edibles.

Some good fortune dropped into my lap last week. On my 2007 trip to Hawaii I bought a $10 ukulele, but it turned out to be no better than a toy. I mean, it goes out of tune as soon as you let go of the tuning peg, before you even get a chance to play a chord. Still, I had hope, so the last time my church held a fundraising auction, I bid on some uke lessons and won them, and then I told the woman who offered the lessons that I didn't have a decent instrument to learn on. Fast forward to last Wednesday, when the woman sent me an email that someone had given a new ukulele to her uke group, and it was mine, free, if I wanted it. HELL YES!!! It seems to be of a decent quality for a beginner instrument and comes with a nylon bag, extra strings, etc. So as soon as I finish this feature article, guess what I'll be doing.... :-)

(P.S. On Thursday I'll be "six months to Medicare." Can't wait. Friday will be the 20th anniversary of my firing by the Frosty Lady and the Marathon Man. That publication was bought and sold a couple of times and no longer exists.)

First of all, I honor the anniversary of my mother's passing, 27 years ago tonight.

Now about the heading of this entry. At church on Sunday I stayed after the service to rehearse a hymn for next Sunday's MLK Jr. service. I kept my mask on while singing, but not everyone was masked. Late yesterday afternoon I received an email from our minister -- who tries not to work on Monday, her personal sabbath -- stating that if we stayed for the singing practice, we were probably exposed to covid. She sent it out BCC, so I'm pretty sure I know who the other recipients were but I don't know whose name was left off (and was thus the person who exposed the rest of us). So now I feel like a pariah. I skipped last night's dance practice out of an abundance of caution, and during tomorrow's errands I will certainly wear a mask. I need to find a non-expired covid test before Friday so that I can determine whether I can do anything this weekend (singing practice, Maugorn's birthday, church...).

Today my self-isolation was a no-brainer because a "winter" storm is blowing through. I put "winter" in quotes because the weather is not cold enough for water to freeze, so we're just having lots of rain and wind gusts. Fortunately, we still have power here in the little cottage, which is just outside the Pepco area in BGE's turf.

So this is what 60 years feels like. November 22, 1963, is the first specific date that I can remember. As I recalled 10 years ago here on DW, the JFK assassination made a definite impression on me, even at the age of 4.

I didn't realize until I was an adult that my cousin Tim's birthday is November 22. He'd spent his 15th birthday at the dentist -- ugh. Today he's 75 years old.

Last week was rough: first my church's religious education director died, then a member of my Laydes Fayre singing group had a miscarriage, and then Devora's 1-week-old niece died of an infection. Horrible. At least the JFK anniversary is much more distant in time and thus less emotionally fraught.

OK, cut me some slack here, because I went to Pennsic and I don't mess around with DW on my phone. I write better when I can type with all my fingers.

So, yes, I got to Pennsic after all! Splitting the cost of the trailer with my new minivan-driving friend worked awesomely well. I had an absolute blast!

I still have not replaced the Hyundai Tucson. Church stuff has gotten in the way again. While I was at Pennsic, some people who do not want the Board to sell the church property amassed enough petition signatures to call a special congregational meeting to debate the issue for the umpteenth time. And we are having a congregation-wide vote on the matter, even though our lawyer has opined that the vote cannot be binding under the laws of the state of Maryland. Can you tell I'm getting tired of this issue already?

As much as I want to write more about Pennsic, my sudden need for sleep is getting in the way. Sucks to get old.

OK, I should really get back in the habit of updating this journal.

I left you all hanging, and I apologize. I will try to keep the updates short and sweet.

First of all, housing. The boy toy and I have found an apartment -- namely, an accessory apartment on the property of two longtime SCAdians whom I met at my first-ever SCA event in January 2004. It isn't perfect, but it has some good points, including new floors and a new fridge, plus a big front porch. I will move his stuff in tomorrow (he has been staying with a friend of mine in Baltimore County, but she has other houseguests arriving next month). Then we will move a few essentials from our storage unit to the new place. Then I will move Julia and myself there.

Vehicle: As I figured would happen, the insurance company declared my car a total loss. Fortunately, it gave me a decent amount of money for it (considering that the car was 24 years old). So this week I purchased a 2008 Hyundai Tucson. Still a used car, of course, but with LOTS more carrying capacity than a Corolla. Just what I wanted! It will burn more gasoline, but I will deal with it.

In case you were wondering, here is a list of all the cars I have owned:

1973 Chevy Impala
1981 Chevy Chevette
1979 Toyota Corolla
1985 Mercury Marquis Brougham
1996 Pontiac Sunfire
1983 Plymouth Horizon (inherited from my mother)
1993 Honda Accord
1999 Toyota Corolla

So, yeah, I am finally driving a 21st-century automobile, more than two decades after my Y2K flight.

Church: As I expected, there is a lot of pushback against the unanimous decision by us trustees to sell the church's real estate and find a new home for us. More meetings are coming in the next few weeks. It's not over yet.

Work: I recently finished a feature article and are starting work on another one. Still wish I had a "real" job.

Health: Shortly after the March car accident, I slipped on some mud and did something to my right knee. Now it is still sore off and on. My legs in general feel rather stiff. I wonder if it is an aging thing, a too-much-sitting-down thing, or a transfer of my stress from my brain to my body.

Which is mostly church stuff, the last couple of weeks. We trustees, the lone five of us, have spent lots of time down "in the weeds," to manage the details of things that a church administrator should be doing (except we don't have one) or a volunteer committee should be handling (except volunteers are in short supply). I am assistant secretary on top of being a trustee, and it's hard to take notes AND participate meaningfully in a discussion. I grew up with the journalistic paradigm of sitting in a corner and writing everything down and not saying anything until it's time to ask questions at the end of the meeting.

We're dealing with so many different things that it's like watching the guy spinning plates on top of sticks on The Ed Sullivan Show. We talk about finding a temporary alternate worship site and what to do about the busted Internet/phone system in the RE Building and what should we do about the small private school that leases our space, and then church members who are not on the Board press us to repeat our explanation about why we didn't approve the mortgage, when are we going to fix the deck (with what money?), why can't we use our building when the school is using it (because the school is mostly using outdoor pavilions as classrooms).

And on and on and on, until I want to start screaming: Do we even want to be together as a congregation anymore? Do people want to do more than just tune into Zoom or Facebook Live once a week? We used to have lots of different activities, but nobody seems to be starting them up again as the pandemic recedes. So many of us are getting old. We don't even have children's religious education stuff anymore, because virtually no one in the congregation has young kids.

I just wish we would settle on the big picture so that we could fill in the details, instead of just running on a treadmill of endless details. We're rather like the five blind men who examined an elephant and came to different conclusions. (Sorry if I'm mixing metaphors and tales here, but I'm tired.)

Last night we five trustees and the minister had a private Zoom meeting to plan how we are going to conduct our "Board Listening Session" next Tuesday. That will be via Zoom. We will give our presentation on the proposed mortgage and deck repairs and then we will let people talk. We will try to give everyone a minute or two (with a timer) so that we can fit in comments from as many people as possible.

Then we will have another board meeting on Wednesday. That one will be open on Zoom as well. We will take our votes on the fate of the church.

(Well, technically we will vote whether or not to sign the mortgage and deck-rebuilding contracts. But, honestly, if we don't fix the deck, we will be selling the church property as-is. That will blow up the congregation. Heck, taking the mortgage and building the new deck will freak some people out too. Either way, some people will never speak to me again.)

This part of the month is "Pennsic Without Pennsic." The War is happening, but I'm not there. My feature article is finished, and all I am doing now is waiting for the check to hit my bank account, which will probably be on the 12th (i.e., just when Pennsic-goers start packing up to go home). The boy toy and I have painfully little money till then, so still no A/C.

Today I'm feeling a little blue because another member of the church Board of Trustees quit the Board before her term is up. She says she feels bad about comments she made at a special Board meeting on Thursday night and was "out of covenant" with our group. I try to stick to the covenant myself, obviously, but I didn't think her comments were *that* bad as long as she stopped making them when she realized what she said. I left her a phone message to that effect. Now we have to find *another* person to fill a vacant term on the Board (we just did that after someone else quit). I'm starting to feel as if our "bench" is really thin. What does a congregation do when there's no one left to lead?

Another thing that gives me a funny feeling: A late-night internet search led me to the discovery that my oldest first cousin, George, died earlier this year (May, I think). He was 83. (Yes, he was nearly 21 when I was born, but his father was one of my mother's older brothers.) I have not been in touch with him since 1997, the year Mom died. George tried to convince me to keep Uncle Rene's house in the family, but I just didn't have the money to fix it up to be inhabitable. I think George was secretly pissed off that HE didn't inherit the house. Sorry, George, that's not how Uncle Rene wrote his will.

Sometimes it feels weird, even skeevy, that when I was a child, "family" was mostly my mother's side of the family. But now I am completely out of touch with all of my mother's nieces and nephews and the family members that I do correspond with are on my father's side. It's not my fault that my mother's niece Janet never lists her phone number. And I looked up her cousin Donna on Facebook and, from the tenor of her posts, she's a true Trump lover. Sorry, if she thinks that people who believe as I do are the scum of the Earth, I'm not going to send her a friend request.

I tested negative for covid-19 several days after Balticon and have felt fine ever since.

The weekend after Balticon, I spent a Sunday at AwesomeCon, the commercial "comic con" for Our Nation's Capital. My barony had set up a booth in the exhibit hall to attract new people, and my role in the proceedings was to teach dancing for an hour. Patches, who knows much more about teaching dances than I do, had been drilling me on the ins and outs for more than a month. Something like 70 or 75 people showed up to learn an alman, a couple of English country dances and a few bransles. Thank goodness the room was equipped with a speaker that I could plug into my phone. I had brought along my friend's battery-powered speaker, but I think the carpeting and clothing would have muffled it up completely.

After AwesomeCon, I turned my attention to church stuff. Because we would be holding our annual congregational meeting virtually for the third straight year, I volunteered to run the electronic voting. So I signed up for an account on ElectionBuddy and performed test after test to try to get everything right. I think it turned out OK; some people said they didn't get their ballots, which had ended up in their spam folders, but that's to be expected. I let out a giant sigh of relief after sending out the official ballots and turned my brain off by taking a nap on the couch.

A few weeks ago, I learned that my former partner in the Lithuanian dance group back in 2016 had died. He went by the nickname Vyts (pronounced "veets") and had really badly bowed legs and was a terrible dancer. Plus, he said he had been divorced three times, and I couldn't help feeling that he was auditioning me as a possible wife #4. (The boy toy called him my "Lithuanian boyfriend.") I saw him at the Lithuanian Hall from time to time -- the last time in April when I went up there for a dancing event. (I am not dancing anymore -- I was just in the audience.) He looked as if he'd had surgery on his legs because they were straighter. I didn't have much to say, because I know from his Facebook posts that his political views were entirely opposite mine ... bleah. Still, it was a bit of a shock to learn that he had dropped dead at the age of 65, almost 66. Apparently he really was a big supporter of the Lithuanian community in Baltimore.

I know I'm rambling here, but I can't let June 17 end without noting that today is the 50th anniversary of the one day I went to school on a Saturday. The school board in my hometown could not end the academic year on Friday the 16th, because we would have been one day short of the state regulations. The teachers strongly preferred getting the school year over with on a Saturday rather than Monday, so that's what we did. (Not that we ever did any learning on the last day of the school year. It was always like "watch a movie, then get your report card.") And that's how seventh grade ended.

My strongest memory of the day is that someone let off a stink bomb in the playground crowd just before we were allowed into the building, and our assistant principal, Mr. R., stood on the steps of the main doors and shouted, "I see who you are! You're in trouble now!" That stentorian voice of his could silence hundreds of tweens and teens like nothing else before or since. We tiptoed around his massive bulk and crept to our homerooms.

And there was a giant disruption in the Force in the form of the Watergate break-in, and nothing was ever the same again....

Just keeping busy with my own crises and the church crises and the Ukrainian crisis.

Worried that the crisis in Central Europe will spread to the Baltic states.

I am amazed that LJ is still up and running.