Dwarf Planet in Purple

This morning I thought of going outside, after I was finally dressed, to try to project an image of the transit of Mercury through my binoculars. (Hey, it worked for the partial solar eclipse a couple of years ago.) But then Tall Dancer phoned (to keep himself awake on a long-distance drive), and I hadn't talked to him in months, and by the time we ended the call, 105 minutes had elapsed and the transit was over. Ah, well....

Of course, the transit of Mercury reminded me of the transit of Venus, which I attempted to watch with Pedro and Devora, and just under one year later, we were bidding farewell to Pedro. Sic transit Gloria mundi….

This past weekend was Philcon. I've gotten used to the idea that it is a small, aging science fiction convention. I drove R. to and from Cherry Hill, N.J., and he paid for most of my expenses (still awaiting a delayed freelance check, grrr). It's been 32 years since my first Philcon….

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart,
The secret anniversaries of the heart...
(from a poem by Longfellow)

Yesterday I had wanted to feel good, damn it. It was the 30th anniversary of my ending of a miserable relationship -- the day I started Life over again. As I wrote in LJ a decade ago, October 2, 1987, was the day that I had ended a particularly miserable relationship. A small group of friends helped me pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on with my life (which probably would *not* have lasted 58 years and counting if I'd stayed with that asshole).

Plus, the second of October is R.'s birthday -- he was born exactly the same month, day, and year as Gordon Sumner.

Like most Americans, I woke up yesterday morning to the awful news of the Las Vegas mass shooting. I am sad, of course, but also beyond angry with this country's inability to get a grip on its gun problem. I had CNN on in the background for most of the day while I noodled around on the interwebs. I exchanged emails with R. and wished him a good birthday, but it was nothing spectacular.

Ultimately, I guess I was trying to balance my gratitude for my last 30 years of living with the grief over so many other lives senselessly cut short.

Still trying to decide whether I can afford to go to my high school class reunion on Saturday (that involves a roughly 900-mile round trip of driving and a couple of nights in a cheap motel).

First off: Today is the 34th anniversary of my father's death. Coincidentally, at the time of Dad's death, my parents had been married for 34 years (and about seven weeks). So, about seven weeks from now, I'll have a sense of how long my parents' marriage lasted.

Gene Wilder has died at age 83. Mostly I remember him as Willy Wonka.

Tall Dancer called me again tonight. I guess this is becoming more of a weekly check-in thing. This time around I avoided talking about job searching and mostly prattled on about dancing, eating the endless leftover cole slaw from the epic party, my weekend plans, and so forth. He is always more reticent about his personal life than I am with mine -- the whole pseudo-counselor thing, I guess. But he did say he is going camping at an outdoor "relaxacon" over the coming holiday weekend. Up with friends from Kentucky and Tennessee. I think he did the same thing over last Labor Day weekend, too.

Happy find at a local Little Free Library: I snagged a copy of the Ron Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired the Broadway musical Hamilton. Given my financial state, I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of seeing the actual production, but at least I can enjoy the book.

Tall Dancer phoned me earlier this evening! He was driving to Kentucky to spend the long Thanksgiving weekend with friends there. He sounds quite content to be away from the local SCA and negative memories involving his ex, although he still intends to go to Gulf Wars and maybe some dance-specific events.

Forgot to mention yesterday that the boy toy and I took a big step yesterday. No, not that kind of step. We went to the post office and submitted his application for a U.S. passport card to give him, finally, SOME sort of valid, unexpired photo ID. (He let his California driver's license expire more than a decade ago and hasn't bothered to get a new one in more than a decade on the East Coast.) I say "we" submitted his application because I had to sign an affidavit stating that I've known him for more than two years. He might not get the passport card in time to fly to his parents' retirement home in San Antonio for Christmas, but probably he'll get to spend a week with them in late January. I am SO happy that he will finally have a valid ID.

I think I've caught up with everybody from the friending meme, so it's about time that I started explaining myself to my new friends (and this may be a refresher course for longtime friends as well).

I'm Patty, Pat, or Patricia (not Trish). Born and raised in Massachusetts, I still identify with that state, even though I have lived in Maryland for 23 years now. I am simultaneously an only child and the youngest of at least five -- my mother had a whole string of miscarriages before I came along. When I was growing up, I thought *everyone* waited 11 years after their wedding to become parents. Ha ha ha. So, yeah, my parents were "old" parents. In fact, today would have been my mother's 96th birthday.

So, yeah, I've been "on my own" since my mother died when I was 37. My father died shortly before my 23rd birthday. At least he got to see me graduate from college ... the first time around.

I have bachelor's degrees in both journalism and physics (different universities, different decades) and a master's degree in astronomy. Didn't get to my doctorate; the master's degree is worth about as much as a postage stamp in the job market. I did a lot of writing for trade magazines you've never heard of. For the past five years I've been freelancing, which means that I still write for some of those obscure publications, but for far less money. Sometimes I get really depressed and wonder why the hell I bothered to be the first in my family to go to college.

Anyhow, as you may have noticed from looking at my tags, I've been in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) almost as long as I've been on LJ. (See this for an explanation if you're unfamiliar.) Sometimes I wish I had joined the SCA much earlier in my life -- who knows what my life might look like by now -- but one can't turn the clock back. I just might as well make the best of whatever life I've got left.

Some other dramatis personae in this journal:

* Julia -- my beautiful gray and white cat. She came to live with me on July 14, 2009. (Don't worry, I love dogs too, I just don't have one in my life at the moment.)

* The boy toy -- this guy who has been living here in my condo (without a job) for some years now. I tend not to call him my boyfriend. More like the Doctor Who companion. I have no plans to marry him. People think I should throw him out, but I worry that I will be incapacitated with loneliness.

* Tall Dancer -- An unattached male SCAdian who lives 650 miles away. He was invited to our barony to teach some dances back in January and I ended up getting a wicked bad crush on him. Various things happened online. I guess we're just friends now. I have been unable to convince him to go to War of the Wings, a fairly large SCA event that is roughly equidistant from the two of us. But I'm going there anyway.

* R. -- A platonic male friend of mine for 30-plus years. Lives in northern Virginia. Politically conservative, so I try not to bring up the subject of politics. Huge LOTR fan. He has many, um, quirks, but he is part of a small group of friends who helped pull me out of a dark place when I was in my 20s, thus earning my lifelong thanks.

* T.H. -- A friend who has invited me to her house for Thanksgiving for many, many years. I mean, when I first started going, her nephew was in middle school, and he's now in his mid-20s. By now I know her entire family.

* Maugorn and Patches, CZ and Alex/Phoenix -- people I know both in real life and in LJ.

Other people to be explained when necessary.

Another fairly recent introductory post.

I think that's it for now. Feel free to ask questions.

So last week I started reading the Single Dad Laughing blog. And I just can't stop reading it.

I'm obviously neither a parent nor a man. Duh. But he writes for human beings, and he is just an awesome writer.

I stumbled upon the blog early last week when the "lesson of the saggy burrito" went viral on Facebook. As a woman who had to deal with this sort of thing for forty years, I still cannot reread it without laughing.

So I started exploring the archives, because the blog didn't seem to be totally about parenting. Oh, yeah, it is mentioned. But there is so much else. (And we non-parents can still learn something from the perspective of parents, can't we?)

I found other entries that made me laugh, but others that brought tears to my eyes, and still others that made me cringe in painful recognition of my own foibles. This Dan guy is an amazing writer. And he also knows all the blog-publishing tricks too, to keep the modern, Web-trained reader coming back. Tricks that go over the head of us old-fogy boomers. (He's only 35.) He has hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook ... books and apps ... and I'm sitting at the computer and realizing that in many ways he's living the kind of life I'd like to be leading.

As if 2015 wasn't already the Year of the Great Smack Upside the Head....

It's getting late, so I'm just going to post a whole bunch of links to Single Dad Laughing entries that have touched me in some way (humor, humanity, raw feelings). In the coming days I'll try to explain what I'm feeling. But right now, here's a list, starting with one of those open-a-vein-and-write posts.

http://www.danoah.com/2011/02/time-vs-worthless-heart.html

http://www.danoah.com/2010/08/validation-weekend-pick-me-up.html

http://www.danoah.com/2014/12/humaning-is-hard-sometimes.html

http://www.danoah.com/2014/12/1000-feelings.html

http://www.danoah.com/2011/03/you-are-not-man-she-married.html

http://www.danoah.com/2015/05/come-on-dan-whats-up-with-the-long-hair.html

http://www.danoah.com/2014/01/sdl-needs-your-help.html

http://www.babble.com/babble-voices/for-my-kids-first-birthday-i-got-him-a-facebook-account/

http://www.danoah.com/2015/03/sdlhc-toughmudder-end.html

http://www.danoah.com/2012/12/taking-my-blog-back-taking-my-life-back.html

http://www.danoah.com/2013/11/why-need-bail-while.html

http://www.danoah.com/2013/08/the-next-big-step-with-the-farmers-daughter.html

http://www.danoah.com/2013/09/15-things-ive-learned-about-love-relationships-by-being-perpetually-single.html

http://www.danoah.com/2011/06/just-say-youre-not-interested.html

And now, don't you feel just awesome? (And don't you think I'm writing just like this guy? I am such an imitator. Bleah.)

Here's an interesting link I found on Facebook: Hey, douchebag, your pet bunny did NOT ruin your sex life.

Did you see the "Saturday Night Live" skit with Miley Cyrus playing Michele Bachmann in hot pants and some other guy playing a gyrating John Boehner? It's repulsive and hilarious at the same time.

OK, gotta get going....

My apologies for not feeling much like posting here. I wrote another short article for my ex-employer, did some laundry, and wrote up the outline for the class that I'm teaching on Saturday at the University of Atlantia. (Now I just have to boil it all down into a two-page handout.) I also did a catch-up post on http://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com.

Last Saturday I had a fine time performing in a paid gig -- Maugorn wrote about it here. I *had* been planning to wear my navy blue Italian Renn dress with the white tie-on sleeves that I bought at Holiday Faire last November, but in the days before the event I was persuaded to wear my pink silk Cavalier outfit because of its higher "bling" value. I think it's a good thing that I heeded that, because the venue was a really nice "old money" hotel and the attendees were dressed to the nines (whether they were wearing "Venetian masquerade" costumes or evening wear).

Speaking of money, I can't believe how gasoline prices have rocketed up in the last week or two. The nearest gas station to my house is now up to $3.459 for regular. It seem as if it was $2.999 not that long ago. I hate to think what the prices may be like by the time Memorial Day rolls around.