Stolen from Chris:

1. What do you add to your coffee?  When I wanted to start drinking coffee in high school my dad made me drink it black saying that if I wanted to drink it I’d better learn to like the taste.  I’ve never drank it any other way since then.
2. What are you reading now?  The Woods by Harlan Coben.
3. Do you own a gun?  Yes, we own three (shotgun, 22 and deer rifle) but we’re going to get rid of them one of these days. (we used to live in the country and it made more sense to have guns then)
4. Are you registered to vote?  Yes, and I’ve never missed an election no matter how minor.
5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments?  No, why should I?
6. What do you think of hot dogs?  I groove on Costco hot dogs, the rest not so much.
7. Favorite Christmas Song?  Silver Bells as sung by Kate Smith.
8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning?  Coffee.
9. Can you do push ups?  Yes, but why would I?
10. What was the name of your first boyfriend/girlfriend?  First serious girlfriend Anne Marie.  First serious boyfriend Lance.
11. What’s your favorite piece of jewelery?  Don’t wear much jewelry, but the favorite would be my grandmother’s wedding ring that I had sized to fit my pinkie.
12. Favorite hobby?  Reading.
13. Do you work with people who idolize you?  No and I’d be weirded out if they did.
14. Do you have ADD?  No.
15. What’s one trait that you hate about yourself?  Too many to narrow it down to just one.
16. What’s your Middle name?  David.
17. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment.  Is it lunch time yet, my back hurts, I want a massage.
18. Name 3 things you bought yesterday.  Nothing.
19. Name 3 beverages you regularly drink.  Coffee, water and sometimes iced tea.
20. Current worry right now?  I have to teach a class next week that I’m not prepared to teach and the materials aren’t written yet and I have no time to prepare for it.
21. What side do you dress to?  Right.
22. Favorite place to be?  Seattle
23. How did you bring in the New Year?  Nothing special think I was in bed by midnight.
24. Where would you like to go?  Now? Home.  In general? Everywhere.
25. Name three people who will complete this.  Anyone who steals it because I’m not tagging.
26. Whose answers do you want to read the most?  Anyone who links back to me.
27. What color shirt are you wearing?  Blue and black plaid.
28. Do you like sleeping on satin sheets?.  Not really.
29. Can you whistle?  Yes.
30. Favorite color?  Either orange or green I like both of them a lot.
31. Could you be a pirate?  I’m a butt pirate, does that count?
32. What songs do you sing in the shower?  None.
33. Favorite girls name?  Myrtle (grandmother’s name)
34. Favorite boy’s name? Don’t really have one.
35. What’s in your pocket right now?  Nothing.
36. Last thing that made you laugh?  Jester’s recap of Jesterpoo
37. Best bed sheets as a child?  Ones that were on the bed.
38. Worst injury you’ve ever had?  Tore up my left knee dirty dancing with a hot boy in college.
39. Do you love where you live?  I love my city and loathe my country at the moment.
40. How many TVs do you have in your house?  Two.
41. Who is your loudest friend?  Nettie, no competition.
42. How many dogs do you have? 0
43. Does anyone have a crush on you?  If they do, I’m not aware of it.
44. What are the most fun things you ever did?  Too many to list.
45. What are your favorite books?  Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell, The Stand - Stephen King, The Talisman - Stephen King, Les Miserables ~ Victor Hugo and too many more to list.
46. What is your favorite candy?  Don’t have one, don’t eat candy.
47. Favorite Team?  The gays, oh you meant sports teams.  None, I don’t follow sports, I have a life.
48. What songs do you want played at your funeral?  No funeral.  Cremate my ass and toss the ashes off the ferry into the Puget Sound.
49. What were you doing at 12 AM?  Sleeping.
50. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up?  Coffee, haven’t you been paying attention?

So the results of my sleep study are in… I woke up on average 65.8 times per hour.  Yikes! How is that even possible?  Next step, another overnight study hooked up to a CPAP machine to see if that makes me actually sleep through the night.  The boyfriend has one, how cute will we be, matching breathing machines and everything.

The fourth of July sneaks up on me every year.  I think that because summer doesn’t “officially” start until July 5th in Seattle it’s easy to ignore the 4th until it’s almost here.  At Pride I somehow volunteered to host a 4th of July bbq at our house.  Luckily I had the good sense to farm out all the side dishes and the beverages to the invitees.  I handled making up the hamburgers and handing them off to Bryan to grill and then making the dessert.  Throw a few bears in the cooler and get Bryan to clean the house and we’re set.

Folks showed up around 3 and we grilled around 4 and then settled in for the serious part of any bbq, the drinking.  Actually I watched everyone else drink since my liver is still on strike* and I’m trying to give it a rest until the Vancouver trip. Then I’m once again going to show that organ who’s boss, by goddess.  Nettie made up a seriously lethal Sangria that knocked a few people (I’ll protect the guilty, for now) off their assess.  Apparently someone can’t remember the bbq… shall I tell her what she’s agreed to?**  Whipp, as is tradition, had a bag of illegal fireworks (ask her about the year that she, Poff and the CL almost set the Synagouge on fire - always a good time when your 14 yr old daughter is drunk off her ass).  This year the only really illegal toys she let everyone play with were the bottle rockets. Amazingly enough, only a few hit the neighbor’s house and no fires were started.  After a huge bowl of strawberry shortcake everyone headed out, we must be getting old, it wasn’t even dark yet.  I cleaned up the kitchen and back deck and then watched two of my favorite movies of all time (Cry Baby & Heathers) while Bryan went to bed.

Saturday dawned bright and early with absolutely nothing on the agenda which is always a nice way to spend the weekend. I paid the bills and balanced the checkbook, we did our weekly budget review and then Bryan and I went and ran a few errands.  The most exciting thing we did on Saturday was take the vacuum cleaner in and find that the motor was blown after only owning it for 8 months.  Thank goodness for warranties.  After an afternoon nap we had a lazy dinner and watched the movie Coffee Date, which was actually kinda funny.  Who knew Deborah Gibson had an acting career.

Sunday Bryan went fishing*** with some friends and I hung around the house and did nothing.  I finished a book and started a new one and caught up on all the blogs I’d been negelecting the last few days.  Then I had to be at the sleep study center at 7pm for a sleep study.  I got to sleep all night in a crappy bed with electrodes all over my body and being filmed to see if I have sleep apnea.  I’ll get the results in a few days, all I know at this point is that my skin still itches from the gel and tape they use to attach the electrodes and that I haven’t had that bad a night’s sleep in a long time.  I got to the office today to find 500 and something unread posts in my feed reader, geez, one night away from home and I’m swamped with posts.

____________________________________________________________

* ~ my cholestorol medication and my diabetes medication are apparently irritating my liver which has caused both my doctor and my nutritionist to encourage me to lay off the booze and take milk thistle to help calm the irritation.

** ~ we made vacation plans for next year, I think.  There’s a grand possibility that sober heads may decide this is not a great idea, but on Friday we decided to take a 2 week road trip around the US together.  Actually we want to get 10 of us in together on a tour bus and then we’ll go around seeing the sights like Mt Rushmore, Yellowstone, Yosemite and the largest ball of fucking twine.  I’m not sure if this is like the night we got drunk and decided to join the bowling league or not… Ask me about that season of regret sometime.  Of course our other option is a trip to China with my family, hard to decide between the two.

*** ~ he caught nothing, but had a good time nonetheless

John has started a new meme and who am I to resist the siren’s song, especially when it involves books…

The National Endowment for the Arts had a program this spring called The Big Read.  It was started after a 2004 report discovered a sharp decline in the number of adults who read for pleasure.  According to the report, the average American had only read SIX of the TOP 100 books on their list.

I’ve read 61, guess the rest need to be added to my to be read pile.  It helps that I read a lot and also that I was an English major in college for a year…  I honestly thought my number would be higher, but I suppose ten times the average isn’t bad.

Rules, always there are rules!

* Bold - the titles of the books I’ve read
* Bold & Italics - the books I own and have read

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (not the entire thing, but significant parts considering I’m an atheist)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Happy 4th to my American readers and just remember that there are only 199 days until the worst president* in the history of this country leaves office voluntarily.  Now that’s something to celebrate!  For my international readers, please remember that Dubya does not represent the majority of Americans.

* based on his approval rating, not just my personal opinion

It’s not often that I experience abject glee at the death of a fellow human being, but in this case I’m not even sure that Senator Jesse Helms was a human being.  Helms was a bigot of epic proportions, a throwback to a time that most in this country would choose to forget.  A few of his more disgusting quotes stolen from Joe.My.God.:

• On threatening the life of a sitting president: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.“
• On gays and AIDS: “It’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease”
• On equality: “I’ve been portrayed as a caveman by some. That’s not true. I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners, or niggers.”
• On education: “Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.”
• On civil rights: “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.”
• On journalists: “The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.”
• On the Duke University students upset by Martin Luther King’s assassination: “They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro.”

What better gift for this country’s birthday than the death of such a disgusting excuse for a human being. Rot in hell Jesse, they’ve had a special place waiting for you for years and years!

Once again we find ourselves presented with another bloody Thursday.  This can mean only one thing around here, it’s time once again, for another completely inane list of 13 things for the Thursday 13 meme.

Having just finished with an entire month of queer themed lists, I’m ready to talk about something, anything else.  I’ve got some great lists in the drafts folder for future weeks that were suggested to me during help a homo week.  However, this week I thought I’d take a look at something we can all relate to, high school reunions.

It’s that time of year and my 20th reunion is being held in about six weeks.  Once I realized that the dreaded event was looming, I issued explicit instructions to my parents.  They had two options, they could claim I had perished in a truly gruesome accident or they could just refuse to give my mailing address to anyone who asked them.  (Remember small town, many of my classmates were also classmates of my brother and sister or their parents were classmates of my mom.)  Apparently they chose one of the options because it’s six weeks out and I still haven’t heard boo about the reunion.  My desire is to spend the rest of my life on the “missing classmates” list, it’s a small goal, but completely attainable, I think.

13 things I’d rather do than attend my 20th high school reunion:

1. Take a trip to hell - have you been to eastern Oregon in August?  It’s about the same temperature but at least the residents of hell would be more interesting than some of my classmates.
2. Remove all my body hair by plucking, yes even *that* body hair
3. Perform oral activities on Roseanne Barr
4. Stand in the middle of a lesbian bar and shout “damn diesel dykes just need a good man!”
5. Let the jeebus missionaries in the house next time they stop by
6. Have a conversation with GW about anything
7. Retake college level statistics and/or calculus
8. Clean the mens room at Grand Central Station on my hands and knees
9. Go door to door in Seattle asking for donations to McCain’s campaign (Seattle’s just too blue for that to be successful)
10. Hold an iron rod in a field during a Midwestern lightening storm
11. Be tied to a stake on an anthill while covered in honey
12. Ass boil lancer - enough said
13. Wash the sheets at a sex club by hand

Once again I throw myself upon the mercy of you, my gentle readers (or not so gentle, let’s be honest I like it rough).  On the 18th of July, Bryan and I are joining T-bone, Trixie and Nettie on a train ride to Vancouver, BC for a long weekend.  The trip is to celebrate both Trixie’s 29th (cough cough) birthday and Bryan and my 15th anniversary (which was actually in February).  All of us except Nettie have been to Vancouver many times over the years.  So here’s where you come in…

What are your favorite things to do in Vancouver?  Where are the can’t miss spots?  We’re staying at the Sylvia Hotel near Stanley park and won’t have a car, so everything we do must be accessible by walking, cabbing or taking the Skytrain.  We’ll have all day Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday to play before the train ride back to Seattle.  So far we have the Granville Market on the list of things to do and we of course want to hit some of the queer clubs on Friday and Saturday evenings.  Also we might be interested in hitting a strip club or two, both male and female - so if you know of any good ones…

So there it is gang, hit me with your best suggestions and help me plan our trip.

My wit and general superiority have finally been recognized and rewarded.  I’m the proud winner of a tiara over at Shirley Heezgay! for this caption…

I’m so excited I might just pass out, or maybe that’s the vodka making me light headed.  Either way!

Stolen from somewhere

Your result for The What Middle Earth race do you belong to Test…

Elf

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