UMTravels

It may be a late morning flight but I’m still feeling knackered. Why, why, why do I have dinner parties the night before flying. Apparently I just don’t learn.

No line at security and I’m from curb to Board Room in fifteen minutes, ten of which is walking. Might be a record.

Easy flight down — person next to me had her nose buried in her book as I had in mine. Tunes on the headphones, drinks on a regular basis, and a little snack plate thrown in as well. Damn, I like First Class.

Lunetta was a the Oakland Airport to meet me and haven gotten voicemail while I was in the air, it is off to M. Lowe and Company to visit with Alicia. This is where I get my custom earrings made — though at the moment I’m wearing a ruby I bought from them, having once again, lost my custom teardrop garnet in a rose gold setting with a 1/4 diamond .

The bad thing about M. Lowe is that I always find something I like. Today’s purchase was a replacement for a Indian (dot, not feather) Brahma bull ring that I lost years ago. The new one is a much more modern interpretation, but still could put an eye out.

Amusingly, after my nap and a couple of cocktails the boys and I went out for Indian/Pakistani food here in Berkeley.

Tomorrow is a 112 miles of driving looking at various office possibilities here in the Bay Area. Fun.

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So, if I’m not billing hours, I should be banging nails or doing electrical work.

Today, it’s both banging nails (got the trim done on the outdoor kitchen) and doing electrical (new lights, an outlet).

Here is the end result…

Man, that looks good in the photo! And there is even an outlet to plug in Christmas lights into.

Unfortunately it was 5:30pm when I was donewith this project and company was do at 6:00pm — Fluff, DBear, Dunderful.

Crap — time to get a roast and potatoes into the convection oven (4 pounds, 1.25 hours) and potatoes (should have been .75 hours), and corn bread (15 minutes). Salad, wine, appetizers — hell, life it hard.

Pushed company out (thank god they loaded and started the dishwasher) at 9pm so I could actually pack and do the final paperwork for tomorrow’s trip.

Damn — at least it’s a late morning flight.

[217.6]

The morning was work, work, work.

The afternoon was work and dealing with a worker working on the outdoor kitchen and other little projects. Handy worker, Stewie, from automotive repairs (earlier this week) to finishing the fence work and putting the ceiling into the outdoor kitchen (though it still needs to be trimmed out):

It continues the bamboo theme of the back porch. Still working on the concept for the countertops — probably also trimmed out in bamboo. And I need to extend the lighting so that it points towards the grill and the convection oven.

Thanks to Helene I have plenty of protein in the fridge… I’m thinking it will be chicken tonight, and the roast tomorrow. Buffalo will go into the freezer for next week (thinking about doing it in the same marinade that I use on flank steak).

And as for travel, my luck is holding — my freebie upgrade to First Class on the Oakland trip on Saturday came through this morning. I even got my favorite seat — 1C (1B on United, but Alaska uses a different numbering system).

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After a day of little bits of everything (work, play, errands), it was time to entertain friends this evening. The line up was Helene and Swanda — Jonathan was a no-show. I love my friends — Swanda shows up with a couple of bottles of wine — Helene showed up with most of the meat counter at Whole Foods — a standing rib roast, some chicken breasts, some buffalo. And crackers, cheese and olives for pre-dinner nibbles. WOW.

Yes, that is a bronze sculpture of me as bacchus holding up the nibbles platter. Please notice the Obama plate in the background, a late Christmas gift from Swanda.

Dinner tonight: fresh sourdough bread, spicy ricotta cornbread, high-heat roasted asparagus, salad, jerkked lamb. Yum. Of course there are leftovers, I was expecting Jonathan to hoover everything in sight. Just means a great breakfast instead.

[218.7

Well, I’ve done it again. Gone and booked some more travel. But before I give you the latest, I should tell you what is already on the books:

• February 28-March 3rd, Bay Area, Visit the boys and do some scouting for E&A
• March 21-March 23rd, Bay Area, Visit the boys, make dinner for Alicia who turns fifty, and maybe work
• April 16-19th, Birch Bay 3-Bedroom Penthouse with Marybeth and the Kids
• May 7-10th, Long Beach 3-Bedroom Presidential with the Poker Boys

And now for what I just completed today:

May 11th-24th, Alaska Cruise Tour with Ross. Starts in Fairbanks, goes through Denali, down to Anchorage and onto the Holland America Line’s Statendam.

And then of course I still need to be in Santa Fe on the 28th of May for my niece’s high school graduation. Guess that means I’m flying, not driving. May isn’t looking good for billable hours. 

Another quiet evening planned at home, hopefully billing some hours.

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Long day in the billing area — 6.5 hours. Between trips to the Eastside to order renewal postcards and decrapify Fluffernutters’s computer and my house to start the leg work for the Bay Area trip to look at possible office space. And boy do I have a few places to look at:

All the red dos are places that we are looking into. Looks like my Sunday and Monday are going to be VERY busy driving around the Bay Area. I still need to plug the addresses into Google Earth to see what the neighborhoods look like.

Other than that, a quiet day around the house, just the sound of clacking keys.

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Last week I got a note from my mother continuing a discussion started at Christmas when I was there, but never finished. It started when we were headed to Trader Joes for last minute items (and booze for me). There was ice and snow on the ground and her comment when something like “If I crap out on this errand I have a Do Not Resuscitate Order in my purse.” Merry Christmas.

So, when the letter came, it was no surprise that it spelled it all out for my Dad, by brother and my sister-in-law.

• Stroke/Heart attack — would rather be allowed to die tan come back and face something worse later
• Cancer — no chemo, radiation, ventilator, no nothing
• If caring for me becomes a problem — find me a nursing home

This is the verbatim last paragraph and I couldn’t agree more:

“I hope this does not sound to macabre, or as if I am depressed and determined to die. That is not the case. On the other hand I don’t really want to live to be 102 either. Surely there is some happy compromise between the two. I know you’ll help me find it.”

WOW was my first reaction. My second reaction was to order her a Do Not Resusitate necklace for Mother’s Day (they take about a month unless you want to pay rush charges). This is what I got:

So, Mother’s Day is in mid-May so I’ll get it in plenty of time. Now if I could get the same information out of my reticent father. He has already nixed the idea of moving to a “community” saying…

“You’ll take me out of here (the house) in a pine box.”

How’s that for a Sunday post? This all started years ago during the Terri Schiavo case where the US Government got involved in decisions that weren’t theirs to make. For more information on the case, click here. It got our whole extended family to get their living wills, and legal wills updated. Is yours up-to-date?

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Another beautiful day in Seattle — for the run to Swanda’s to pull mail (unnecessary) and Home Depot (close to unnecessary) it was TOP DOWN.

A slow morning of drinking coffee and reading the paper before actually getting down to business. The first valance went in easily (after removing the medicine cabinet and putting it back after installation of valance):

Nice bathroom! And now for the bedroom, with the 13″ LCD TV (and you can plug your monitor into it or point it to the bed, or the living area):

For dinner, a little stir-fried chicken over a bed of romaine… and it’s off to a party on Beacon Hill — the Seattle Faerie Re-entry Party. One more chance to experience the normal rather the mundane.

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Well, other than a little billable hours, today has been all about valances.

Definition:

Noun

• S: (n) cornice, valance, valance board, pelmet (a decorative framework to conceal curtain fixtures at the top of a window casing)

When I installed new curtains in SOB (Son of Bob, my RV) it quickly became obvious that they really needed valances — 4.5″ real oak. For the one in the bathroom, I thought a plate rail would be a nice touch (to match one in the kitchen) and serve as a place to store more stuff.

Luckily, this one goes wall-to-wall so no end caps are needed. By 4pm I was done with the other four of them, complete with stain and seal. Needless to say, the Jag is out in the alley. Once I got this one done I powered through the rest of them since the air nailer was hooked up, glue and stain were out, and generally everything was ready to go.

Drinks with Jill after she gets off work (what an odd phrase, that) which will allow more time for the valances to dry. If I have the energy there is an engagement party at Barca (Lounge) that I should go to at 9pm, allowing more drying time. At the moment I’m feeling whipped from the day and wondering how I can even make it up north for drinks.

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It is so nice to drive to the eastside with the top down, even if I am freezing my butt off in the morning.

Odd marketing meeting this morning with Barb in Dallas and Swanda in Minneapolis, and the owner nowhere to be found. Must have been a family crisis since that’s about all that would keep him off the conference call.

And what a list of errands:

• Bank (2 checks)
• Harbor Freight (brad air nailer for making the valances for SOB, and other miscellaneous items)
• AAA (maps for the new car)
• Jaguar of Bellevue (check on a new DVD for the navigation system)
• Lowes (two rolls of fencing and a 2x4x1/4″ piece of oak veneer for the microwave enclosure for SOB)
• Radio Shack, Shucks and Napa looking for interesting gauges to mount in the left over space in the microwave enclosure.

Whew! Who knew that the Jaguar was a delivery van…

Had a great dinner at Jimmie’s with Suzanne as well. Nothing beats having someone else cook for you.

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It is a rare thing to have a sunny day in Seattle in the winter. And how nice that I dropped the top on a check run to the apartment.

I really do like it better with the top down. Brother Jon is talking about joining me for the rag-top trip to Santa Fe for niece Em’s graduation this May. Means May is going to be BUSY with the poker weekend at Long Beach and a 13-day land/water cruise tentatively schedule right after that.

Guess that fucks my May billing. Who knows – if Brother Jon isn’t coming along, I might just fly.

Amongst the other things today I did get a little SOB work done. I found the remote for the rear TV, figured out why the HDTV converter wasn’t working on the first day of the original conversion (bad batteries), and started figuring out how the microwave cabinet panel will look like.

Illustration below:

OK — it a photo-shoppedversion of a possible layout without the cabinet door. I think I need to find another instrument or outlet to stick in there for balance. Currently it is a video monitor, a power switch for the monitor and the HDTV converter box mounted on top of the microwave/toaster combination. Tomorrow I purchase the brad nail gun after the marketing meeting.

Dinner was another steak — should I check my cholesterol? At least I had salad and some greens.

And my bathrobe still smells like Hugo Bass and cigarette smoke from last night. Bad dates never end.

[216.5]

Weird day.

Running around cleaning the house, cleaning up the mail (email) box, billing hours, getting ready for the evening date.

The date? A Friend that I’d lost track of for half a dozen years. It could have gone better. Bad sex, good dinner (steak, baked potatoes, salad, and apparently too much wine), and then out of control drinking. So much for the “stay over” — more like drive him home at midnight.

Maybe I should be happy at 52 that I have a sex life. Or not.

And there isn’t even a picture for today.

[217.5 — at least I didn’t gain any weight on the trip]

I think is the act of traveling – feeling movement in my body – that I care more about than the destination. It’s a thought that I keep coming back to. Maybe I should have been a pilot, a train engineer, or a bus driver.

The plan is to leave after lunch today, with Mark and Onyx being dropped someplace in Portland – plans unknown at the moment as we’ve left them to the last to not feel like the end is near.

With the occasional flurries turned to sunny days, the roads are good.

As luck would have it, we are out of the parking lot before 2pm — which is amazing for the boys. With stops at Starbucks (coffee and sandwiches again for me), Fred Meyer (to return the coat Onyx didn’t end up needing), we head to Enterprise so the boys can pick up a car for the day (using Mark’s frequent renter points).

I’m at home by 7:45pm after a stop in Olympia for groceries and gas.

It’s kinda nice to have a quiet steak and salad dinner.

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Apologies for not getting these entries posted until my return to civilization. My usual internet connection here in the woods has been restricted. Yesterday we learned the reason…. With the community’s internet coming from both a satellite up and a satellite downlink, they have very limited bandwidth. Seems that many of the community have addictions to You Tube and what not that suck up all their allotment – they have locked it down to machine address (i.e. no outsiders) and restricted use to non-business hours. Oh well. Guess I’ll get a little more of that piece and quiet.At lunch was the streaking of the faeries by all the kitchen staff. So with boobs and dicks a flying they sped through the dining hall twice to honor us – and we returned the favor but streaking the kitchen. That last we was a dozen of our clan, not me (though I have in the past).

Tonight is the auction to raise funds for those who can’t afford to pay the whole $315 for the long weekend. This year we are paying out about $7,000 more than we are taking in. Ouch – that puts a dent in our reserves. Funny, when I was Queen Registrar we always made a little money on the gathering – but then I required a $50 minimum payment from everybody, and handed out scholarships on a first come basis, AFTER full paying folks… But every QR has the right to make there own rules in our non-hierarchical group.

It being the afternoon just prior to cocktail two hour… my plans are to not attend the auction, even though I’ve donated a massage table for the live auction (though it could end up in the silent auction)… and contributed an item for Swanda’s Pornocopia (imagine a giant horn of plenty stuffed with porn and toys).

I have yet to visit any of the waters – the sauna, the meadow pools, the hot tubs – my heart just isn’t in it this winter. With the snow I’m feeling more hermit like, and pondering my attendance at the summer gathering in August. I’ve missed only one summer gathering of all the gatherings of the Radical Faeries since 1981, including both weekends of the winter gatherings we had early on. Twenty-six years of twice a year, over fifty gatherings here. Maybe it’s time to let it go.

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Out of the cabin for breakfast.

Back to the cabin to finish one Michael McGarrity novel and start another. No nap this boy today. Then lunch, and back to the cabin. Maybe tomorrow. And as usual, the boys show up at 4pm to start breaking all the no booze and no animal flesh rules.

I’d go into the menus, but it all ends up in my mind as “Tofu and Twigs”. At least it isn’t vegan. The down side is to get protein into the mixture there is a ton of diary, which isn’t exactly on my preferred diet these days. They have figure out how to make interesting breads, however.

Tonight is the talent show. Only once was I in a talent show, it was at a EuroFaerie gathering in the Netherlands – I played Green Sleeves on a concertina. Haven’t touched the concertina since.

Here is a sample from the show – probably won’t post these to Twango as there is some nudity in them occasionally.

Didn’t stay for the second half of the show – went back to the cabin to continue my private time. In the most recent gatherings I’ve spent a lot of time quietly reading the cabin, making up for the lack of quiet time in the rest of my life…. Makes me wonder why I’m paying $330 to just have some quite time.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

[? ? ?]

What a totally lazy day. Up at a little before 8, head down to the lodge for breakfast, come back to the cabin for a nap, get up for lunch, head down to the lodge, eat, head back to the cabin to read.I did spend part of the day trying to get an internet connection at Elk’s to work as it has in the past… I failed, will have to attack it with Lunetta tomorrow.

Cocktails at the normal BBush time – 4pm. Managed to squeeze ten faeries into out little outpost in the woods. White Zinfandel, Mead, White Wine, Red Wine, two kinds of Scotch was on the liquid offering. Cold pork ribs, cheese, crackers, fruit, lox was on the food offering. Since Brietenbush serves only vegetarian fare, the meat products were most appreciated.

Then off to dinner before tonight’s big event… The Fashion Show. Historically The Fashion Show has not been as widely attended or had as many models and the Talent Show (tomorrow night). A surprising array of outfits considering they only had one sign-up slip at noon when I went down for lunch.

Here is a sample of the almost a hundred photos of this event:

These would be dresses from the Diamond Heart Collection – a faerie who passed away a couple of years ago.After the show it was back to the cabin to finish the last of the New Yorker’s that Swanda passed along.

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Luckily the conference call was a short one – but it was still 11:30 when we sat down to eat breakfast with a noon check-out. The boys were celebrating their vacation by sleeping in until my conference call was done. A relaxed drive after hurriedly packing to get out of the apartment.

By Salem, Oregon it was time to stop for supplies – hail Fred Meyer as the store with everything including gasoline. A not too quick stop at Starbucks for sandwiches and drinks and off into the mountains we head.

Arrived at Breitenbush to find directories NOT in the cabin – annoying me for wasting my time hooking up with Gregory to get them down a day early. This Queen Registrar she is a fickle one – didn’t realize you could be anal retentive AND fickle at the same time.

Cocktails at 5pm as people were arriving, dinner at 6pm – and me bowing out of the Opening Circle and Breitenbush 101 (no sex in the hot tubs, don’t burn the place down).

An early bed, for tomorrow is another day. But before I go, here is the shot of our cabin in the woods:

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It’s been a couple of days since we’ve had a good photo posted here in blogland…. so here is today’s pic, actually from last night:

Life imitates art, if you can call that art.

Conference call from 10:30-11:30 while the boys make breakfast for us all, then at noon it’s out of her and off to Breitenbush Hot Springs for the Winter Radical Faerie Gathering.

So that’s it for today’s post. Short. Sweet.

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Oh, the pain of an early morning after entertaining.

Alarm at 7am — the theory is out of the house at 8am to drop off the computer for MB’s son in Tacoma, then to pick up friends at the airport — the Portland Airport.

The reality of this morning was more like 8:30am with the windshield wipers frozen to the front window of the mommy van. It would have been more fun in the Jag, but with snow possible in the mountains, not the best move. Years ago I rented a Jag from Budget and went for a ride in the Colorado mountains and came VERY close to getting stuck — tires spinning for MILES to get back over the pass from the first turn around.

The boy’s (Mark and Onyx) flight was early, and I was late. Still slightly addled from the night before I missed the correct turnoff and headed us up the gorge instead of the the coast — bonus was a beautiful view of Mt. Hood without clouds.

Got to the WorldMark Seaside at around 1:30 — to find our room READY — amazing.  My guess (from the amount of ice in the freezer) was that the room was vacant last night as well.

Lunch at Girdles. We all ended up with variations on a theme… French Onion soup and a crab laced salad for Mark, Clam Chowder and a crab laced salad for Onyx, and Shrimp Bisque and a crab laced salad for me.

Dinner tonight is yet another rack of ribs (this time with Arthur Bryant’s sauce rather than last night vinegar based wash), salad, grilled asparagus, and a loaf of sourdough bread (from last night’s dough). Wine, of course (red for the Marks, white for Onyx.

Dessert – yes, courtesy of the other Mark. Chocolate… maybe we should open one of the bottles of port tonight.

Tonight’s free movie (courtesy of WorldMark) is Burn After Reading. I understand it’s a comedy.

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Work. Errands. Work. Wiring. Baking. Wiring. Grilling. Pasta Making.

The TV is installed and wired in in the back. The middle monitor is wired in — it will be mounted in a panel which I have yet to make. The HDTV converter box is in and wired to all the monitors, including the one in the dash.  And it’s all cleaned up.

That was my day preparing for the boys coming to dinner. Jameson (my faux nephew — my dead brother’s widow’s new husband’s nephew), and two of his school mates from Evergreen — the gay redhead and the straight vegan.

Dinner was salad, homemade sourdough bread (pulled half the dough for tomorrows dinner with another set of boys in Seaside, Oregon), high-heat roasted asparagus and brussel sprouts, homemade farelli pasta in an olive tapenade, and for the vegan — a couple of medium sized portobello mushrooms stuffed with minced marinated artichoke hearts. No dessert, I don’t believe in it.

Add a couple of bottles of wine and cocktails before and after, and you have a good evening for fall, even it I didn’t get laid.

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