luscious_purple: women's rights (rights)
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.)
luscious_purple: Paint Branch UU Chalice (Paint Branch Chalice)
I meant to include this in the previous post, but...

My church has sold its property -- the buildings and grounds. Closing date was January 26th (the day after my last post). There was one document that all of us trustees had to sign, but the board chair handled the rest of the paperwork for us. We now have a nice chunk of change that will go into a separate account; a group of Ethiopian Muslims have a new religious home; and we'll find out in a few weeks, during our annual pledge drive, how many of our members have taken a permanent hike.

The Ukrainian-themed SCA event was awesome! My breads were one of seven entries, and even though I didn't win, I got lots of compliments. Many of the activities and classes also had Slavic themes. My friend did a great job organizing the event!

Unfortunately, this past Tuesday I started feeling sick, exactly like the last time I had a virus back in August 2019. Well, that couldn't have been covid, right?? Finally I got around to swabbing my nose today, because I need to decide whether I'm going to dance practice tomorrow night, and ... dammit!! I have the damned covid!! I hope I didn't give it to anyone else at last Monday's dance practice before I felt sick.
luscious_purple: Paint Branch UU Chalice (Paint Branch Chalice)
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.
luscious_purple: women's rights (rights)
Thanksgiving weekend was quiet but tasty. The boy toy made a great meal for the holiday itself and found some innovative ways to use the leftovers. (Turkey and stuffing quiche is surprisingly good!) It was a little weird not going to Chessiecon, but since last year's convention was such a bust, I'm not surprised there wasn't one this year. I have no idea what's going to happen next month.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I had a great time at Atlantia's Holiday Faire, while R. went by his lonesome to Philcon. I don't think any of his friends were there. (Well, one longtime friend of ours from Massachusetts, a fellow named Phil, died at the end of October, so he's not going to any more SF conventions.)

My last year of serving as a church trustee is proceeding apace. Things have been a lot less hectic -- i.e., fewer emergencies. Granted, we are having a special board meeting tonight, but that's to decide what kind of arrangement we will have with our next minister -- someone in the UUA's developmental minister program, which would mean a four-year commitment to trying to fix our flaws, or a contract minister, who would just be an employee who does the ministerial work for a given period of time. We are now too small of a congregation to call a settled minister, who would be a permanent minister staying for an indefinite period of time.

The boy toy and I have some Christmas decorations up, including our new Christmas tree. (The old one was a pre-lit model whose lights stopped working, so we abandoned it in the move.) But we still have more holiday stuff, including the ceramic tree my Aunt Bev made for my parents and my mother's Santa pitcher, are still in our storage unit up in North Laurel. Little by little, we are emptying out the unit, but some of the stuff will have to wait until there's a new floor in the bedroom (long story).

Movies: I would like to see The Holdovers in the theater, because a film stylized to look like a quirky 1970s movie should be seen on technology that existed in the 1970s. I really, really want to see Maestro on the big screen, but it's not playing that close to me. Sigh.
luscious_purple: Paint Branch UU Chalice (Paint Branch Chalice)
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.
luscious_purple: women's rights (rights)
... and I forget to update DW. My apologies.

Church is ... about as polarized as the nation at large, I guess. Only the issue is selling the church property. We had our special congregational meeting, followed by a vote, and I worked long and hard on that electronic ballot. The only question was "support" or "do not support" the trustees' decision to sell the property. Well, the "support" side won, 62 percent to 38 percent. But the losing side is still really, really struggling.

The SCA is ... great, when I have time for it. I haven't done a lot of A&S lately, except for working on the inkle loom I bought at Pennsic. I'm making an orange and black strap or piece of trim or whatever you want to call it. Just for practice.

Other things: Just after Pennsic, the husband of the leader of my SCA-related singing group had a massive heart attack, followed by a quintuple bypass, followed by a whole host of complications. He's still in the hospital, but slowly improving. Then I found out a friend who had esophageal cancer -- not the "heavy drinking/smoking" kind, but the "middle-aged man with a few extra pounds" kind -- died at the end of August. I think my last phone conversation with him was in May, maybe June.

Finally, I found out through an online search that the ex who abused me back in the 1980s has died at the age of 66. I'm not crying. I actually feel a bit relieved that I can wander around my old haunts in eastern Massachusetts without the chance of running into him. I'm also glad that he did not try to ruin my science-writing career. Btu still, it feels a tiny bit weird too.
luscious_purple: "avoid heralds" (avoid heralds)
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.
luscious_purple: women's rights (rights)
I just realized I've been a very bad Dreamwidther (is that a word?).

Busy month. It began, really, in late May with Balticon. Once again, I roomed (platonically) with Mike T., who is still doing pretty well despite his Parkinson's diagnosis. I had not seen him in person since the previous Balticon, so we had plenty to talk about. I was there from Friday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon, because I took the MARC commuter train between New Carrollton and Baltimore. The fare only $8 one-way, so it's cheaper than parking in downtown Baltimore, plus the arrangement let the boy toy have the Tucson for the weekend. I didn't hang out with R. much. R. was very focused on helping his friend Ira sell his used books in the dealer's room. So I didn't have to contend much with R.'s reactionary views.

The following weekend was Storvik Novice Tourney. For the first time in a long time (duh, pandemic), I camped at an event. And ... I had forgotten what a BEAR that wooden IKEA twin bed is to assemble. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I will bring it to Pennsic, if indeed I go (and that is a story for another night because it's getting late), but for weekend events, I definitely need a folding camping cot. The comfort of a wood-framed bed is great for Pennsic, but I just don't have the energy to put into assembling it for 36 hours of eventing.

The weekend after Novice was the Baltimore Lithuanian Festival. One of my high school classmates, the one who lives on the north side of Wilmington, drove down with family members and we had a GREAT time together. My classmate presented me with an insulated water bottle inscribed with our high school emblem, a souvenir of that 45th class reunion I missed last October.

And then we had our church's annual meeting and elections ... but that is a big can-o'-worms that I don't want to open tonight. Need some sleep.
luscious_purple: women's rights (rights)
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.
luscious_purple: Paint Branch UU Chalice (Paint Branch Chalice)
I really need to dust this journal off! Let me summarize here:

ELECTION: I worked as an election judge for four of the eight days of early voting and for Election Day itself. Same as the Maryland primary -- same-day registration during early voting and provisional ballots on Nov. 8. Fortunately, no giant windstorms and power outages this time around.

CHURCH: We finally have a place to hold in-person worship services! We are meeting on Sunday afternoons at the University Christian Church in Hyattsville. (This started only on Nov. 20.) Despite having the word "Christian" in its name, the church is a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination, which is pretty ecumenical. The Hyattsville congregation welcomes the LGBT+ community, and when I drove by it just before the election, I noticed that one of the messages on its outdoor LED sign was "Reject Christian nationalism." I can go along with that.

PHILCON: Even though I would have liked to have gone to Holiday Faire (an annual SCA event), I used the free membership to Philcon 2022 that I won at Costume Con 40. I rode up there with my fussy friend R. in his shiny CR-V. (Before our trip to Cherry Hill, he'd owned that vehicle for about 18 months and put a grand total of 3,200 miles on it.) For some reason, all the people I already knew at this convention were male, and they have been getting steadily more conservative. By the end of the weekend, I was craving the company of female friends.

CHESSIECON: Now this is a convention that is all about female energy. But it was dreadfully small ... *maybe* 120 people. And since it was at that Hunt Valley Inn that used to host Balticon, which is something like 10 times that size ... it felt empty, full of ghosts. The con committee rented way more function space than they could fill with programming, and they didn't sell out the room block, so the committee is now thousands of dollars in debt. Most of the (few) attendees believe that this was the last Chessiecon, sadly.

And now Julia is demanding her nightly treats.

P.S. I am definitely NOT missing the Virginia congressional candidate commercials.
luscious_purple: Paint Branch UU Chalice (Paint Branch Chalice)
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.)
luscious_purple: OMG WTF BBQ (OMG WTF BBQ)
Tonight my church trustees had our "public" Zoom meeting at which we voted to reject the contract to build the new deck and to reject the $550,000 mortgage that would have paid for most of the deck (but not all of it, and certainly not all the other repairs our buildings need).

It was hard. One of our Board co-chairs, who grew up in my congregation, cried during the meeting and could hardly speak at times.

But in the end, the deck contract and the mortgage were both voted down unanimously.

When I first visited this church in 1993, one of the things that struck me was the beautiful wooden deck. No stairs! So egalitarian! Everybody could cross the bridge into the church no matter their mobility issues! Coming from a lifetime of climbing church steps, I was in awe.

I never dreamed I'd take tonight's votes. But we have a lot of questions about the low bidder on the contract. (Not going to get into them here.) And the "listening session" (or Q&A) meeting we had on Tuesday night revealed that people have wildly different opinions about what should be done.

Ultimately, that lack of consensus among the people we're supposed to represent turned the tide in my mind. Whenever we've had a meeting to call a settled minister -- and we've done that three times since I signed the membership book in the spring of 1999 -- we've been told that UU ministers generally don't accept the call if the congregational "yes" vote is under 95 percent. I don't think any other vote of ours would reach that high mark, but I also don't feel comfortable pursuing a major capital project if we don't have a decent-sized majority on board with it. And we don't have it.

Where to next? I don't know. Will we end up selling our beautiful but difficult property? Probably.

More some other time.
luscious_purple: Paint Branch UU Chalice (Paint Branch Chalice)
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.)

Oof.

Aug. 30th, 2022 11:32 pm
luscious_purple: Ganked from many people (damn not given)
It wasn't until last night that I realized that I hadn't posted here in three weeks or so.

Anyhow, things have been hopping, mostly with my church. We five trustees -- and we *are* down to five warm bodies, out of nine possible slots -- have to make a lot of mighty big decisions: whether to take out a mortgage to fund most (but not all) of the complete deck replacement, whether to bother replacing the deck in the first place, what to do about all the other things that need replacing (HVAC, roofs on both buildings), whether or not to sell the whole darn property because we are a small, aging congregation now.

Oof. Yeah.

When I say "the deck," I don't mean something extraneous. The only way to get in and out of the main floors of both the Meeting House and the RE Building on our uneven property is to have a deck connecting the two buildings with the parking lot. Can't have stairs, a winding path, ladders, or whatnot. Our current wooden deck dates back 31 years and is no longer safe for groups of people.

We've got to explain all this to the congregation, and it will be ... intense.

Plus I went through all the shenanigans of moving furniture around to accommodate a portable A/C unit for my living room, I just finished a five-day stint of dog-sitting (and doing a bunch of free laundry because my condo building has coin-op machines), and I have a new science-writing client with a short deadline. Oh, and I am getting together online with high school classmates to try to organize a 45th reunion. (How can we all be so OLD???)

I'm so tired, I'm sure I'm forgetting something....
luscious_purple: women's rights (rights)
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.
luscious_purple: Star Wars Against Hate (Star Wars Against Hate)
Things are REALLY busy this month. Holy freakin' moley.

Let's start with this week. (Well, technically last week...) I had thought I'd be serving as a Prince George's County election judge only for the July 19 primary, but then I received a call asking me to work on the even-numbered days of the early voting period (July 7-14). No big deal, right? Easy money! Except ... I'm also madly working on my science-writing assignments (and not as far along as I'd wanted to be). AND we started a new church year, so the Board of Trustees (to which I belong, remember) must make some crazy-big decisions. AND Storvik's signature Novice and Unbelt Tourney was scheduled for July 9 instead of sometime in June.

AND my condo's HVAC system is on the fritz, and I won't have the money to get it repaired until after all this work is done.

AND there was a storm on the way.

July 8 and July 10 were OK days at the College Park early-voting site, the gymnasium at a recreation center. As the same-day-registration judge, I sat under an A/C vent and was really glad I brought a sweater. Brrr. July 12 was like that until dinnertime, when I heard a loud roar like a rainstorm of BB pellets on the roof, and then the lights went out. I was in the middle of updating a woman's address in the database when that happened, so I had to ask her to sit and wait about 15 minutes until the backup batteries kicked in and synchronized things. Some of us stepped outside and saw that trees were down everywhere and political signs outside the no-electioneering zone had gone flying. It turned out that the neighborhood had been one of the places where winds had gusted up to 85 mph, which is basically hurricane force. It wasn't a tornado or a derecho, though, but some other kind of meteorological phenomenon ("bow front" or something like that). Even the air smelled like fresh wood, filled with essence of living trees suddenly ripped apart.

I texted the boy toy at home and he said that we didn't have power either. So I grabbed a couple of bags of ice and some fast-food dinner on the way home from the early-voting site. (The commercial strip where I bought these items was chaos -- some of the businesses had power, some didn't, but the traffic lights were out, and people were driving every which way. Scary!)

Apparently the power came back on for my building in the early-morning hours of the 13th, but the College Park neighborhood mentioned above still was a disaster area. Somehow the polls opened, with a generator and two industrial-sized fans going. When I worked on the 14th, the last day of early voting, we had regular electricity until about 2:30 p.m., when the grid conked out for no apparent reason (the weather was sunny). The generator and fans had to come out again after it got stuffy in that gym. The ceiling had a big translucent skylight in it, but I started to worry that the light (both from the skylight and the little emergency lights) would fade just as we would be starting to break down the equipment and box everything up. Fortunately, the lights came back on around 7:30 p.m. Whew! But the last few voters took their sweet time to fill out their ballots and didn't leave until about 50 minutes after the polls closed. Aargh!

On top of all of this, I cut the cable-TV cord because it's just so damned expensive. I miss my CNN.
luscious_purple: The middle class is too big to fail! (middle class)
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....
luscious_purple: If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention (outraged)
Yikes, I haven't written in more than a month. So, before the month of May expires...

Physically, I am fine, although on Sunday morning I ate breakfast with a Pennsic campmate whose father tested positive for covid-19 later in the day. I will test myself tomorrow or Thursday.

The breakfast (in the con suite) happened at Balticon, at which I stayed for the first time (except for crashing in CZ's room once when I was doped up on Benadryl). Mike, who is doing better with his Parkinson's medicine and exercise regimen than I'd expected, graciously let me share his room (platonically) because Phil had health issues and could not come down from Boston.

I enjoyed Balticon ... except for the time on Saturday evening when Patches and I phoned a dinner order in to Pizzaria Uno's across the street from the hotel, on the second floor of the Baltimore Harborplace. Practically as soon as we got there, I heard a bunch of distressed screaming from teenagers. We went on the balcony and saw three cops running toward something, and then the restaurant manager cleared the outdoor seating area. "Bring your food and find a table. We'll make it work," he said, with a facial expression that revealed he'd experienced this before. Even though Patches and I didn't hear the shots, we soon learned that two teenagers had been shot; one died and the other was rushed to the hospital. This happened with about 20 cops in the area. It still happened.

And of course this happened on top of all the other mass shootings this month, from Buffalo to Uvalde. Patches was visibly upset over the incident. I am just angry at how our society has made human life (well, after birth) so cheap and disposable.

My head is still spinning over tonight's church budget planning meeting. I don't want to go into details, but it just seems as if one problem is barely solved, another one pops up, like an ugly game of whack-a-mole. Except it's all with our physical plant. Ugh.
luscious_purple: Lithuanian map and flag -- "Proud to Be Lithuanian" (lithuanian map and flag)
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.
luscious_purple: Baby blasting milk carton with death-ray vision (death-ray baby)
Stupid LJ, effectively owned by the Russian government, has decided for whatever reason to ban crossposting from DW. Not DW's fault, apparently. I'm sure you can read about it elsewhere on DW.

I've made my Jan. 25 entry public and I will write a separate entry over at LJ so that friends there can catch up on what I've been posting. Guess I'll be doing a lot more cutting and pasting in the future. *sigh*

In other news, I had a quiet weekend at home, between an online "visioning" session at church and lots of online classes from the University of Atlantia. The visioning session is part of the congregation's effort to set some new goals and put ourselves on a more sustainable trajectory for the future. I'll write more about that some other evening.

May 2025

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