Scenic Route

Between my shorter gifting list last year and this, and deciding not to frazzle myself with guesswork about gift recipients’ needs and desires, I’ve escaped the Christmas shopping season without once setting foot inside a retail store (except Parkleigh) and without once ordering anything online. Granted, cards with checks inside aren’t quite as much fun to open, and contrary to popular opinion, money is never the right size—it’s usually too small—but most people are too polite to comment. Except for my mother who complained it was too big.

Santa brought me the one thing I really need, that is jeans with only the originally-manufactured number of holes. The draftiness of my existing wardrobe has been a bit of a challenge with the deep winter-like temperatures we’ve experienced this month. And I’m quite sure the patrons at the library have grown tired of looking at my long underwear clad knees.

I’m waiting for signs of life in the rest of the building before starting the week’s laundry. I have yet to use the new washing machine. Right out of the box it didn’t work. At least the landlord was prompt with the refund. I may even treat myself to running a load or two through the dryer.

Yes, when the only interesting thing I have to write about for a month is laundry, you can bet things are pretty stable.

Well, a week ago Sunday I spent the afternoon entertaining ladies in my bedroom. Not the shocker you think. It was far easier to fold up the bed to make room for the card table than to rearrange the living room. Yes, it was my turn to host Spinster Church Lady Scrabble.

The meal I prepared was well-received. And for some reason, they were amazed at how nice my apartment is. While I certainly wouldn’t turn away the Queer Eye guys, it’s also not the sort of run-down tenement that proper suburban church ladies might have expected. Nor is the place festooned with old gym socks or whatever questionable things the stereotypical middle-aged bachelor is supposed to have for a decorating scheme.

I did not, however, take down my Bishonenworks calendars—one in the bedroom the other positioned for viewing whilst seated on the throne. This either failed to traumatize or failed to breach their guest decorum. While I didn’t allow it to breach my host decorum, but I was a bit perturbed that none of them removed their shoes, leaving me with a week of chasing down the ice-melt pellets they’d tracked-in.

Otherwise, things have stayed on a remarkably even keel. I’m cautiously optimistic for the rest of the winter considering I haven’t yet hit any crushing depressions, despite the extremely cold, snowy, unrelentingly dreary days. Yeah, I’m sleeping more and the quality of that is uneven. But when I’m up, I’m not all mopey. So that’s a plus.

In other news, I visited the prison last week. I think we wrapped-up all the issues that had troubled this past year. Perhaps in this next year we can return the the rebuilding and growth that characterized the preceding few years. There’s still plenty of time to get everything all straightened-out since it appears he won’t be a candidate for early release this coming October and will have to do the whole bid through August 2007.

CBC has started her hormone replacement treatments. She’s quite excited over this. Reports are that breasts have not yet started to sprout, but she feels different. “A lot more relaxed and at ease.”

Oh! Getting to know CBC’s aquariums a couple of months ago paid dividends a couple of weeks ago with my nephew. Arriving at his birthday party, my sister-in-law directed me to his room, where I found him, and a 75 gallon saltwater reef tank. He has impressed that at a glance I knew it was a 75 and could identify much of what’s in it and blew him away with the remark, “I see your clowns have no clue about what to do with the anemones. They were tank-raised, not wild-caught, right?”

It’s good to impress nephews.

I think I made the right decision—albeit at the last minute—to not pursue something with a 21-year-old that crossed my path. There was significant overlap, differences seemed intriguing rather than annoying and he’s certainly easy on the eyes, but the age difference… It just seemed, I don’t know, like it would be too draining day-in, day-out. The prospects for a year or two or three looked interesting, but I’m looking for more long-term and was afraid that over time, we’d tire of each other.

And I’d have had to change the thing about the trophy boyfriend in the site description.

Still, I could change my mind. We’ll see. Maybe just do the sex part… Of course, I’ve never been able to keep that bit separate from the rest, and I’m not sure I want to either try or succeed at it. But he is pretty. And nice.

I suppose I’m still on the fence.

In geek news, I ordered a new web server on Saturday. I’m hoping to be first on the list for today or tomorrow when the tech guys return to work at the data center. The current one has served me and my clients well for two years, but has become a bit cramped for RAM. The new one sports 2GB, which should do nicely for another two years.

Doing my own configurations, moving clients over and general tweaking should keep me off the streets and out of trouble for a week or two.

At Presbytery, I have a new computer. It’s to become their digital video editing machine, so it’s fully tricked-out with all the goodies, starting with a dual-core AMD-64 and 2GB of RAM. Certainly mad overkill for what I do, but a far cry from the six-year-old 500MHz Pentium-III I’d been using there. We’d already equipped that with dual monitors, but still, it was pokey enough to severely cramp my style.

Well, the new washer still has an Out of Order sign on it. But clothes come out of the new dryer completely dry after only 45 minutes. This is compares to damp-dry after 60 minutes in the old ones. Still, it would be nice to be able to wash two loads at once.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 26th, 2005 at 12:26 pm EST and is filed under Generic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.