Occupy Wall Street – the video 0
I especially got a kick out of the Chinese dissident who asked me to take his picture.
Occupy Wall Street, the sideshow – I mean slideshow 1
http://w801.photobucket.com/pbwidget.swf?pbwurl=http%3A%2F%2Fw801.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fyy292%2FMadeMark28%2FOccupyWallStreetFinal%2Fc3f16014.pbw
There was more than a little of the carnival atmosphere to the place. While I agree with the underlying grievances, let’s face it: a lot of these folks are self-indulgent circus barkers. And that’s okay.
That crazy October snowstorm 0
This is one we’ll remember for years to come. There hasn’t been a significant, winter-like snowstorm in October since the Civil War, and this is one for the records.
We had no idea how severe it was going to be, so off we went to the Jersey house on Saturday morning. As we were driving not far from the house, the passenger-side windshield wiper broke – not just the wiper, but the apparatus – and started slamming against the windshield. Had it been the driver’s side we would have had to pull over and call AAA.
We made it to the house and decided to eat whatever little there was there for dinner and stay inside. Then in the late afternoon the power went out, as it did for 600,000 other New Jerseyites. There’s nothing quite as boring as sitting in a darkening house with candles. So finally we decided to brave the drive to the Giant in New Hope and at least get groceries. Their power had gone out in the afternoon and it appeared they’d be losing all their dairy and meat, and were running lights on a generator.
We did some shopping and found one restaurant open, the Stockton Inn in Stockton, on the way home. We went there and were eating dinner with maybe a half dozen other couples. Frank was still upset about the whole thing and I said, “Just let it go. We’re powerless.” And as if on cue, the instant I said we were powerless, the lights went out! We ended up having a lovely meal by candlelight, but the whole thing was very strange and more than a little unsettling.
Sunday morning the power was still out. The water wasn’t running, it was freezing in the house, so we just packed it up and came home. What an experience.
Birthday dinner at Rolf’s restaurant 0
I wanted to go to Rolf’s for old-time’s sake, so that’s where we had my birthday dinner. It’s just two blocks from the apartment. It’s a very festive place, and they do it up with hundreds of thousands of lights every winter. The bar’s hopping, but the restaurant wasn’t all that full. Who knows why. It’s German/Bavarian food. I noticed on their website, such as it is, they have some kind of postcard photo from Bavaria (or someplace). Strange, but the whole place is a little off.
53 is a prime number 1
Cross-posted from lgbtSr.com
Today is my 53rd birthday. I don’t usually make much of them, other than with a few friends and my partner, but this one feels significant. As for turning them into events, I’d reserved those for the decades: a party at 40, a cruise at 50. On the other hand, I consider myself a Halloween baby, so there’s always been something special and frighteningly magical to coincide with being another year older.
But maybe the fact I feel as if I’m running out of birthdays has this one seeming more important, more reflective. I’m at so many cross-roads: wanting to leave a job I’m no longer interested in (I had a great 10 year run with wonderful people, all of whom were swept out in a putsch); starting a website for over-50 LGBT people (lgbtSr.com) that has given me passions and interests that only serve to remind me how dreadful sitting in a cubicle can be; starting on a mystery novel – my very first – and wanting so much to reclaim those halcyon days of beginning each morning at a keyboard, opening my mind and letting my imagination out – or in, as the case may be; and, not least, the impending 20 year anniversary of my partner Jim’s death. He died November 6, 1991, and the last two decades, to use that old and tired phrase, have flown by.
I’m not one for feeling old or wondering where the time went, but its passing feels more pronounced this year. My parents are dead (except my birth mother, who’s now in a nursing home in Mississippi). I’m about to celebrate five years with my husband, although I’m not sure if we’ll be making that legal or not – but we will certainly be together until one of us is gazing at the corpse of the other. (That’s not really a morbid thing to say when you consider that we have both held the curiously heavy boxes of ashes of our dead partners.)
It just feels so . . . now or never. Even with the best of health and luck I am entering the last third of my life, and what I want to do with it, and how I want to spend it, is weighing heavily on me. I would sooner shoot myself in the head than to say I’m “fifty-three years young!” (oh, the ways we avoid the language of age), but I also think it’s prime-time, time to stake a claim to life if ever there was, time to stop wasting time. Happy birthday to me, and here’s hoping the next one arrives just a little bit more slowly.
Rick Perry’s wife blames Christianity for husband’s flameout, says Obama cost son his job 1
What’s with the blame-Christianity-first crowd? Not only does Anita Perry, wife of rodeo clown Rick Perry, say people hate her husband because of his faith, but she says her son had to quit his job because of those pesky SEC regulations Obama personally shoved down the gilded throats of the financial industry. Apparently the 28 year old has no other skills and does not believe in the personal responsibility mantra of his own political party.
Anita Perry, the wife of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, said she sympathized with the unemployed Friday because her son resigned from his job at Deutsche Bank to campaign for his father, reports CNN.
“He resigned his job two weeks ago because he can’t go out and campaign with his father because of SEC regulations,” she said at a Pendleton, S.C. diner, in response to a middle-aged voter who lost his six-figure job and now works as a handyman. “My son lost his job because of this administration,” she added. CNN reports that the SEC recently adopted stricter rules for investment advisers undertaking political activity.
SNIP]
Anita Perry has been campaigning for her husband in South Carolina this week. She spoke Thursday about how opponents had “brutalized” the campaign. “We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party,” she said. “So much of that is, I think they look at him, because of his faith,” she added, possibly referring to questions in recent days over Rev. Robert Jeffress, who endorsed Perry and has called Mormonism “a cult.” She also compared his decision to run for president to Biblical stories of Moses and Gideon.
