My long weekend: projects, talks, sex, film, bike riding, 60s friends, fairs, dykes, poker and more!
It's been a long time since I've written a 'what I did over the weekend' entry. Apart from the holiday, last weekend wasn't super-special, but nice enough to write about.
Friday night, hopeforyou, lilpnkspyder and I went to simplykimberly's and yesmanesq's place for their monthly craft night. cyan_blue jencallisto plymouth and auros were also there, although I think I got more 'craft' done than most of them!
I got some concepts for one of my Burning Man projects sketched out a little more (hence my call for metalworking help yesterday), and enjoyed the usual good food, cat scritching and hot tubbing that goes along with a trip to that particular part of the boonies.
*** BTW, this month's projects_night is next Monday the 11th, and also the Tuesday of the following week. See that new community for details.
Saturday was supposed to be the day I'd get my laptop working again, come hell or high water. Neither hell nor high water came, but I still didn't get it working, for technical reasons I couldn't be bothered going into. Stuff it!, I thought, and ordered a used laptop, a Dell C840. This is in the same range as the C800 I have but better, and from all the research I've done, it's highly compatible parts-wise. My intention is to put my existing 80MB drive in that, and reinstall the operating system over the top of it-I have all my data on a separate partition. Thus, in one swoop, the dicky keyboard, dodgy clit mouse, broken built-in Ethernet, squeaky monitor hinges, and missing mouse buttons will be things I won't have to bugger about with anymore. I'll have a reliable laptop again! I'll be able to work on trains again, and keep up with e-mail again! It's not money I wanted to spend, but it's money well-spent. And since then I've found out that repairing my
Kombi will be cheaper than I initially thought, so it's all good.
Later on Saturday I went to a friend's cuddle party, where sex is allowed after a certain hour. It's a place where I can be a lot more in touch with my insecurities than at an ordinary sex party, and I had a really nice time. I spent a long time chatting with somebody who's dealing with issues that are similar to mine, but is reacting to them quite differently. It was good to compare notes. I also had some particularly pleasurable and memorable sex with somebody else, so yay.
I had a productive heart-to-heart conversation with hopeforyou on Sunday morning. We've been having a lot of good conversations like that lately. Each of us still has our issues and we're continuing to take responsibility for them individually, but we're getting better at not tripping each other up on them, hence our relationship is feeling stronger, and we're able to support each other even more as a result. Lately, our couples therapy has been giving me a lot to think about, which I often talk to my individual therapist about, which gives me more food for thought, which often comes up again in couples therapy. It works very, very well, and although it hits the occasional raw nerve that severely upsets me or makes me want to hide for a few days, it's actually kinda fun overall.
I got around to working on the car on Sunday afternoon, or at least starting to get some of the parts I need. I went to Pick'n'Pull in Richmond, a wrecking yard where you bring your own tools to salvage the parts you want, and got a new set of window switches for the drivers' side door. Once I put them in, they'll hopefully make the passenger side window openable again. The switch got damaged when the stereo was stolen late last year, or maybe when the smashed drivers' side was replaced. I looked some more for stereos, too. I've given up on finding one with a user interface I like; I'm now settling for anything that has a knob for volume, some way of adjusting treble, bass, etc. individually, an auxiliary input or two (for laptops, MP3 players, and hopeforyou eventually wants satellite radio) and a removable face plate. hopeforyou has now taken over the role of looking for a stereo. We're hoping to have it installed before Junkmail Man. Hopefully I'll find a passenger side mirror by then, too... that's been missing for nearly a year. It's good to be able to afford a few parts like that now, and the occasional bit of time to try to find them!
On Sunday night, thebostondyke and I went to see Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room at The Parkway Cinema in Oakland. (You've never been to the Parkway? You're missing out! Film, pizza, beer, couches, rustic charm, that progressive neighbourhood feel... go!!) The film was what you'd expect: a long series of interviews with lots of people who worked for Enron and lots of people who hate Enron. There were also what sounded like recordings from tapped telephone conversations, but I can't imagine who'd be tapping such conversations and how the film's producers might have obtained them, so I wonder if they just made that part up. It was definitely sensationalistic, probably biased, and the overall presentation was good but not spectacular. Still, I'm happy I saw it, and would recommend it if you're in the mood to see something to piss you off. (I felt the the rage in the cinema when they got to the bit about Enron creating those rolling blackouts here in California a few years ago. Our power rates are still ridiculously high, and I, for one, am pissed off that some greedy arseholes' company's bankruptcy is affecting my monthly bills, especially when one of the arsehole is still a multi-millionaire, and thousands of ordinary people who worked for those arseholes lost their pensions because of it.)
Monday was a holiday, and late that morning I met my friend D. at her place in Cole Valley. I've been getting to know her over the last couple of months, and she's warm, colourful person. She lived in the nearby
Haight/Ashbury district during the Summer of Love, 1969, and in the late 1980s she was a Kings Cross stripper while living in
Newtown! Today she's pushing 60, but she still dyes her hair interesting colours. Anyhow, Sundays are apparently car-free day in a big chunk of Golden Gate Park (cool link with lots of photos!) so we spent a couple of hours riding our bikes around. We made it a bit past those oddly-placed bison, three-quarters of the way to the beach. I could've gone much further but she hadn't been on a bike since before I was born so she was taking it easy. She showed me a fairly hidden patch of grass which is apparently used for a whole pile of Pagan rituals, and pointed out places where free concerts popped up unannounced, and people fed LSD to the police horses. I hope to go riding again next Sunday... I've already asked paisleychick to join me. We'll see if something actually comes of it.
We met up with hopeforyou in the afternoon, and went to the Marin County Fair. D. had a friend who gave us comp tickets, which saved us $12 each and a long-arse queue. We saw one of D.'s favourite jazz bands play; they were visiting from New Orleans. We also saw a bunch of stalls, art, and lots of farm animals, including a llama who I got to pet, and a very lost-looking wallaby. It was like a smaller version of the State Fair that noressa and I went to many years ago, which in turn is like the Royal Easter Show without the showbags. (No Tim Tam showbags?? Aaaah!!) One of the highlights was the exhibit where a photographer took photos of families a few decades ago, and then took photos of the same families in the same locations over the decades that followed. There was also a sci-fi exhibit, which included a model in a Darth Vadar costume standing next to a model in a NASA astronaut suit.
Later in the day, hopeforyou and I stopped by triskel's place in Bernal Heights for the party she was having. It was full of drunk and stoned dykes, who were happy to see me arrive with two containers of ice cream.
I really like what triskel and her housemates have done to the place; it's got a lot more character, and feels more like some happy housemates live there, then a bunch of random people and their stuff.
I wish we could've stayed longer, but we also went to poker_night that night. I lost more money than I ever have before-a whole $7·90. It didn't ruin my day, though; that would've been hard since I had so much fun. There were even random fireworks going off as we headed home that night.