Another full weekend.
I had another full weekend this weekend (but then again, when don't I?). I guess I'll start with Friday...
This is going to be mega-long, so I'll use cuts.
I slept a bit later than I had intended to Friday. Eric and I had made plans to have dinner together, and I hadn't bought the ingredients I needed on Thursday: chicken breasts being the main one. So after stopping at Starbucks, I made my way over to Metro. Problem was, I had spaced on the fact that they were going to be closed because it was Good Friday. Oops. So I came back home and started looking up phone numbers for nearby grocery stores, calling each to find out if they were by any chance open.
Sobey's on Mt. Pleasant: closed.
Metro at Eglinton and Bayview: closed.
Sobey's at Yonge and Davisville: closed.
Sobey's at Yonge and St. Clair: closed.
I couldn't find a Loblaws or No Frills listing for anywhere near me, so I didn't bother.
At this point, I think it was about 3:30. I decided to walk over to the Hasty Market at Eglinton and Redpath - they sell more than just regular convenience store stuff, and I knew they'd be open. However, they had no chicken breasts. So I walked back to Yonge Street and started walking south in the hopes of finding a market or other shop that was open. I found two, but neither sold meat, except for packaged cold cuts.
At this point, I was starting to panic a little. Then I remembered that there's a Rabba just northeast of Yonge and Bloor (I don't know if there's a closer one). So I got on the subway and headed there.
Success! (They were a little more expensive than I would have paid at Metro, but that's what I get for not buying them on Thursday.) So I headed back home (Eric called me while I was on the subway, wondering where I was as it was about 5:30 by this point), logged onto Skype, and enjoyed a wonderful evening.
gurudata had emailed me earlier in the week to invite me to a surprise birthday party for kanecool. ghostleegirl and her husband were to be there early setting up, and I decided to head out early and help. I got there around 6 and pitched in. Okay, I handed them masking tape as they put up streamers. Despite the fact that gurudata's email had said that they would be there around 6, they'd arrived a little earlier and so that was about all there was left to do. So after we were done, we sat and chatted as other people arrived. Finally, around 7:15, kanecool arrived with gurudata. We were in a fairly visible area, so we couldn't really do a good job of hiding and yelling "Surprise!", unfortunately. Besides, the waitress ruined it by coming up just ahead of them and asking everyone if we wanted to order refills. Great timing, there...
(It turns out that kanecool had recognized aion117's car in the parking lot, anyway.)
I left around the same time as everyone else, about 12. I was supposed to meet cuteteenboy downtown afterwards, but I hadn't heard anything from him all day. So I called... and woke him up, as he'd forgotten that we had made plans. Oops. Declan-of-the-secret-LJ asked if I wanted to hang out with him, but I had a meeting scheduled for 11 this morning and decided that it would be better all around if I just went home. (And as soon as I got home, I sent an email to gurudata and Terry, with whom I was going to be meeting, asking if we could push it back to 12:30 as neither gurudata nor I wanted to do it that early. Of course, Terry said, "Yes!" in response, so maybe I could have hung out with Declan after all... but it's still just as well that I didn't, as I was about 20 minutes late arriving today. (I just missed a bus at the subway station and had to wait nearly 20 minutes for the next one.)
We discussed several Anticipation-related items and figured out some things that needed to be figured out, mostly involving scheduling and room allocations. Terry also asked if we could use his help on the 2010 Gaylaxicon, since he's moving back to Montreal shortly. We're a bit short on Montrealers on concom, and he's a qualified Treasurer, so I said sure. (This will be interesting... I've worked for him on two cons now, but he's never worked for me...) He may end up taking a different job, though, as we do have a few that haven't been filled (and a few people who haven't told me what they want to do).
I got home around 6:30 or so, answered an email relating to a job I'd applied for, talked to cuteteenboy and my mother, made dinner and settled down on the couch, which is where I am now.
This is the first time I've talked to her since I was laid off. She'd called last week to ask if I got the two articles she mailed me about the new Trek movie, but I hadn't really felt like calling her back because I knew that the moment I mentioned that I'd been laid off (which I would have to, because the first question she usually asks is, "Are you getting to work on time?") she would go into Mad Meddler Mode. And she didn't disappoint. "You'd better find something soon!" "Try to find something closer to home!" "I hope this doesn't take as long as last time!" Master Of The Obvious kind of stuff. But she wasn't as naggy as she usually is... probably because I mentioned that I hadn't yet eaten dinner.
And that's been my weekend. A couple of other things that have happened this weekend:
For those who haven't heard, Amazon has been removing the sales rankings from all of their "adult" books. Problem is, they seem to be disproportionally taking aim at LGBT-themed works, and not just fiction. Biographies, self-help books, history... all of them have had their sales information removed. And yet, books like "60 Years Of Playboy" (I think that was the title mentioned elsewhere on my friendslist... I didn't look it up), which contain pictures of naked women, are not.
The strange thing is that when I checked Robert Rodi's books (he's a favourite author of mine... he writes what I call "the gay equivalent of chick-lit," which I admit is a weakness of mine), and some of his books have had their sales figures removed, and others have not.
(Banner links to Cheryl Morgan's blog entry on the topic.)
There's an online petition here for those who want to sign it. When I did so, around two hours ago, there were 4328 signatures. When I first composed this paragraph, there were 6100. Right now, as I'm about to click "post," there are 6534. They're shooting for 100,000.
Edited to add: I forgot to mention that the first hit you now get when you search for "homosexuality" on Amazon is a book called A Parent's Guide To Preventing Homosexuality. Um, yeah. I don't think I'll be shopping at Amazon for the next little while...
This part is likely to be long and involved. I'll try to boil it down, though. But as I said in the cut text, it was a slightly surreal experience for me.
This Globe and Mail article by Margaret Wente appeared on the front page of yesterday's newspaper. Prompted by the recent court case of an HIV-positive man - who knew he was positive - having unprotected sex with, and infecting, several women, it's trying to open the debate about whether HIV-positive people should disclose their status to potential sex partners.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? Of course they should!
Well, there's apparently a billboard in town that says, "If you were rejected every time you disclosed, would you?" (It's visible behind the man in the picture that accompanies the article.)
I'm gratified to see that of the 114 comments on the website, there are only three or four (all from the same person) that claim that it's a positive person's right not to tell. The commenter seems to think that it's an African-Canadian cultural thing, and that the rest of us are racists for suggesting that the failure to disclose should be punishable by law... and then he goes on to compare circumcision to child abuse and blame it all on the Jews. *headdesk* And in all those comments, there are only two that use the word "sin". (The one that suggests that monogamy, expressed through marriage, is the best way of preventing STDs thankfully didn't say anything bigoted... I'd been expecting it.)
Okay, so what was so surreal about this article, you may be asking yourself.
Well, I had a one-night stand with the guy pictured in the article in March 2002, after we met one Saturday night at Woody's. (I remember it was March because it was a week before The Time Machine came out in theatres... and I remember that for reasons I won't go into.) In the article, he mentions that he was diagnosed seven years ago. He didn't say a word to me about it at the time.
(In case I didn't mention it in all of my medical posts of late, my HIV test came back negative.)
Okay, it doesn't say when, seven years ago, he was diagnosed. It could have been after we slept together. But still... to hold himself up as a proponent of full disclosure... it just seems a little strange.
Oh, and the next day, several hours after he'd left my place, I discovered that he'd stolen my wallet. I know I had it the previous night because I'd had the key card to let us into my apartment building, and after I came back from getting him some water, he practically dove onto the bed from wherever he'd been in the room, and made a concerted effort to stop me from putting my hands over his head, so I figure he must have been hiding my wallet under my pillow until he could get me out of the room again. I also remember him mentioning a few times that he was friends with this particular Globe columnist, like that was going to impress me.
Hmm. It occurs to me that I did make a police report at the time... though it hardly seems worth bothering with at this point. He only got $40 and a bunch of ID which I was able to cancel and replace. And it was seven years ago, after all...
So that was my weekend.
This is going to be mega-long, so I'll use cuts.
I slept a bit later than I had intended to Friday. Eric and I had made plans to have dinner together, and I hadn't bought the ingredients I needed on Thursday: chicken breasts being the main one. So after stopping at Starbucks, I made my way over to Metro. Problem was, I had spaced on the fact that they were going to be closed because it was Good Friday. Oops. So I came back home and started looking up phone numbers for nearby grocery stores, calling each to find out if they were by any chance open.
Sobey's on Mt. Pleasant: closed.
Metro at Eglinton and Bayview: closed.
Sobey's at Yonge and Davisville: closed.
Sobey's at Yonge and St. Clair: closed.
I couldn't find a Loblaws or No Frills listing for anywhere near me, so I didn't bother.
At this point, I think it was about 3:30. I decided to walk over to the Hasty Market at Eglinton and Redpath - they sell more than just regular convenience store stuff, and I knew they'd be open. However, they had no chicken breasts. So I walked back to Yonge Street and started walking south in the hopes of finding a market or other shop that was open. I found two, but neither sold meat, except for packaged cold cuts.
At this point, I was starting to panic a little. Then I remembered that there's a Rabba just northeast of Yonge and Bloor (I don't know if there's a closer one). So I got on the subway and headed there.
Success! (They were a little more expensive than I would have paid at Metro, but that's what I get for not buying them on Thursday.) So I headed back home (Eric called me while I was on the subway, wondering where I was as it was about 5:30 by this point), logged onto Skype, and enjoyed a wonderful evening.
gurudata had emailed me earlier in the week to invite me to a surprise birthday party for kanecool. ghostleegirl and her husband were to be there early setting up, and I decided to head out early and help. I got there around 6 and pitched in. Okay, I handed them masking tape as they put up streamers. Despite the fact that gurudata's email had said that they would be there around 6, they'd arrived a little earlier and so that was about all there was left to do. So after we were done, we sat and chatted as other people arrived. Finally, around 7:15, kanecool arrived with gurudata. We were in a fairly visible area, so we couldn't really do a good job of hiding and yelling "Surprise!", unfortunately. Besides, the waitress ruined it by coming up just ahead of them and asking everyone if we wanted to order refills. Great timing, there...
(It turns out that kanecool had recognized aion117's car in the parking lot, anyway.)
I left around the same time as everyone else, about 12. I was supposed to meet cuteteenboy downtown afterwards, but I hadn't heard anything from him all day. So I called... and woke him up, as he'd forgotten that we had made plans. Oops. Declan-of-the-secret-LJ asked if I wanted to hang out with him, but I had a meeting scheduled for 11 this morning and decided that it would be better all around if I just went home. (And as soon as I got home, I sent an email to gurudata and Terry, with whom I was going to be meeting, asking if we could push it back to 12:30 as neither gurudata nor I wanted to do it that early. Of course, Terry said, "Yes!" in response, so maybe I could have hung out with Declan after all... but it's still just as well that I didn't, as I was about 20 minutes late arriving today. (I just missed a bus at the subway station and had to wait nearly 20 minutes for the next one.)
We discussed several Anticipation-related items and figured out some things that needed to be figured out, mostly involving scheduling and room allocations. Terry also asked if we could use his help on the 2010 Gaylaxicon, since he's moving back to Montreal shortly. We're a bit short on Montrealers on concom, and he's a qualified Treasurer, so I said sure. (This will be interesting... I've worked for him on two cons now, but he's never worked for me...) He may end up taking a different job, though, as we do have a few that haven't been filled (and a few people who haven't told me what they want to do).
I got home around 6:30 or so, answered an email relating to a job I'd applied for, talked to cuteteenboy and my mother, made dinner and settled down on the couch, which is where I am now.
This is the first time I've talked to her since I was laid off. She'd called last week to ask if I got the two articles she mailed me about the new Trek movie, but I hadn't really felt like calling her back because I knew that the moment I mentioned that I'd been laid off (which I would have to, because the first question she usually asks is, "Are you getting to work on time?") she would go into Mad Meddler Mode. And she didn't disappoint. "You'd better find something soon!" "Try to find something closer to home!" "I hope this doesn't take as long as last time!" Master Of The Obvious kind of stuff. But she wasn't as naggy as she usually is... probably because I mentioned that I hadn't yet eaten dinner.
And that's been my weekend. A couple of other things that have happened this weekend:
For those who haven't heard, Amazon has been removing the sales rankings from all of their "adult" books. Problem is, they seem to be disproportionally taking aim at LGBT-themed works, and not just fiction. Biographies, self-help books, history... all of them have had their sales information removed. And yet, books like "60 Years Of Playboy" (I think that was the title mentioned elsewhere on my friendslist... I didn't look it up), which contain pictures of naked women, are not.
The strange thing is that when I checked Robert Rodi's books (he's a favourite author of mine... he writes what I call "the gay equivalent of chick-lit," which I admit is a weakness of mine), and some of his books have had their sales figures removed, and others have not.
(Banner links to Cheryl Morgan's blog entry on the topic.)
There's an online petition here for those who want to sign it. When I did so, around two hours ago, there were 4328 signatures. When I first composed this paragraph, there were 6100. Right now, as I'm about to click "post," there are 6534. They're shooting for 100,000.
Edited to add: I forgot to mention that the first hit you now get when you search for "homosexuality" on Amazon is a book called A Parent's Guide To Preventing Homosexuality. Um, yeah. I don't think I'll be shopping at Amazon for the next little while...
This part is likely to be long and involved. I'll try to boil it down, though. But as I said in the cut text, it was a slightly surreal experience for me.
This Globe and Mail article by Margaret Wente appeared on the front page of yesterday's newspaper. Prompted by the recent court case of an HIV-positive man - who knew he was positive - having unprotected sex with, and infecting, several women, it's trying to open the debate about whether HIV-positive people should disclose their status to potential sex partners.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? Of course they should!
Well, there's apparently a billboard in town that says, "If you were rejected every time you disclosed, would you?" (It's visible behind the man in the picture that accompanies the article.)
I'm gratified to see that of the 114 comments on the website, there are only three or four (all from the same person) that claim that it's a positive person's right not to tell. The commenter seems to think that it's an African-Canadian cultural thing, and that the rest of us are racists for suggesting that the failure to disclose should be punishable by law... and then he goes on to compare circumcision to child abuse and blame it all on the Jews. *headdesk* And in all those comments, there are only two that use the word "sin". (The one that suggests that monogamy, expressed through marriage, is the best way of preventing STDs thankfully didn't say anything bigoted... I'd been expecting it.)
Okay, so what was so surreal about this article, you may be asking yourself.
Well, I had a one-night stand with the guy pictured in the article in March 2002, after we met one Saturday night at Woody's. (I remember it was March because it was a week before The Time Machine came out in theatres... and I remember that for reasons I won't go into.) In the article, he mentions that he was diagnosed seven years ago. He didn't say a word to me about it at the time.
(In case I didn't mention it in all of my medical posts of late, my HIV test came back negative.)
Okay, it doesn't say when, seven years ago, he was diagnosed. It could have been after we slept together. But still... to hold himself up as a proponent of full disclosure... it just seems a little strange.
Oh, and the next day, several hours after he'd left my place, I discovered that he'd stolen my wallet. I know I had it the previous night because I'd had the key card to let us into my apartment building, and after I came back from getting him some water, he practically dove onto the bed from wherever he'd been in the room, and made a concerted effort to stop me from putting my hands over his head, so I figure he must have been hiding my wallet under my pillow until he could get me out of the room again. I also remember him mentioning a few times that he was friends with this particular Globe columnist, like that was going to impress me.
Hmm. It occurs to me that I did make a police report at the time... though it hardly seems worth bothering with at this point. He only got $40 and a bunch of ID which I was able to cancel and replace. And it was seven years ago, after all...
So that was my weekend.