From Accidental Bear: new scrumcap color options are available from the Thom Browne Fall/Winter 2012-2013 menswear line. Click to embiggen:
Rugby practice starts on Valentine’s Day. Which color should I choose?
I was up on our roof with my landlord* fixing stuff this weekend and while I was up there I took a picture of the construction around the Shaw/Howard Metrorail station. The yellowish building is the newly renovated Howard Theatre, expected to host a grand opening on April 12. You can see some damage to the red brick house on the right from the August 2011 earthquake:
Here’s a closer look at the damage to the neighbor’s house from the earthquake. Some of the chimney has already been repaired, but much of it had fallen in August. Granted, these chimneys probably hadn’t been maintained in decades but the quake did wreck a few things in the area.
This morning on my way to the Shaw/Howard MetroRail station to work I saw that they were preparing to put up the marquee sign for the newly refurbished Howard Theatre.
It’s been fascinating to watch the repair work progress and nice to see the city putting work into a historic place. It was a dump and an eyesore for far too long.
* You may wonder why I was up on the roof with my landlord or why should I care about the place when the landlord should be doing maintenance? Well I have a fairly good deal on the rent, and the landlord likes it that I take good care of the place so it’s an arrangement of sorts. Plus in all the rental places I’ve lived I’ve picked up a lot of homeowner tips, tricks and things to watch out for should I ever own a home. So I pay attention to what needs to be done when I can. I’ve learned a lot about termites, crappy on-demand water heaters, mold, and other things that can go wrong with an old house should I ever grasp the American Dream of home ownership. But alas with the high cost of living and my bloated (not) Federal government salary it will be a long time until I build up a sizeable down payment for my own house.
I have noticed the gays don’t have their iPhones out obsessively checking Grindr all the time anymore. I’m guessing the craze is over and also people may have realized how rude and/or douchey they were looking checking their Grindr while in a gay bar. Or maybe they’re scared their dick pictures will get hacked. Oopsie!
Anyway, I’m happy to see people are experiencing others in a live setting without the use of a device. It was getting unsettling there for a while and I was starting to think SkyNet had taken over the gays.
A few people have sent me this link about a new phenomenon called “Phone Stacking.” Basically when a group of people are out at a restaurant or bar they all put their phones in a stack. The first person who compulsively grabs their phone to check a text or Grindr foots the bill. I like that since very few texts are really that important that you have to check it during a meal. You’re not a EMT or a CDC fatal disease outbreak epidemiologist, are you? No you’re not. But there are still plenty of self-important people in DC who will continue to do that. But for the most part I believe people are getting better with behavior and devices. Every new invention brings with it some social situation that could be negatively affected. At the advent of the toilet seat, we had to learn when to put it up or down when we were done, depending on the household. Similarly when we all got email for the first time, many learned not to forward every. single. joke. they received in their inbox. There are a few people who forward everything they receive to a mass e-mail list but they are so few they’re endearing at this point and I just hit ‘delete’.
Anyway, where’s some fun stuff for the weekend. First a fun not-electronica Robyn mashup:
And a flying dildo invades a Russian press conference!
This is kind of amazing because dildos are fairly heavy, so it takes a lot of lift to get that thing aloft and stay horizontal like that. I’m guessing they hollowed one out or used a lighter foam cast.
Sifting through the pages of Accidental Bear I come across the spring/summer 2012 undies outlook and see a shirt I werq’d way back in 1988.
I liked that shirt but couldn’t find it for sale on the site, only the briefs that accompanied the pic. The photo caption only says ‘Red Marl Cooper Baseball Shirt’. I’d be grateful if somebody found out where I could get that shirt and I promise to werq that look again.
Fashion queens help a sister out and find that shirt!
I guess January is nature blogging month for me.
Here is “Shit Birds Say,” featuring (in order of appearance – several species are repeated in this video):
canada warbler, blue tit, chipping sparrow, ovenbird, song sparrow, red-tailed hawk.
This weekend was Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend, an event designed primarily to benefit partnered gays who need even more play time with others. I didn’t go to any official events as I don’t do the meat market scene very well anymore.
There was a guy in town from Atlanta who I had been in touch with for a while, and he seemed interested in me and I was interested in him. But when I asked if we could hang out like for a beer or lunch he could absolutely positively not break away from his group of friends at any time over the entire weekend. All I was asking for was :15 minutes for a beer or :30 minutes for lunch. But he couldn’t and I totally was confused by that. Just say to your friends “Hey guys do you mind if I go have lunch with this Jimbo person?” and they’ll probably give you permission to do that. But his leather dance card was apparently full for 72 hours straight. So I assume he has a partner and he’s just pretending he’d like to date someone else, which is usually the case for shady partnered guys who give out confusing/contradicting flirty vibes. Anyway I get these confusing vibes every year during MAL because in most cases guys are continually hedging for the next best thing whether it comes or not. Thus my annual frustration this time of year.
So today I walked by the beaver dam and lodge in College Park. It rained all day yesterday into the evening, and the beaver dam was partially blown out from the flooding. Poor guy has work to do if he’s still there.
Then strangely just nearby was this dead wet rat on the sidewalk:
It’s unusual because the area isn’t as rat infested as downtown DC, so I don’t know where this guy came from. He looks like a young rat that got washed out of the storm sewers from all the rain.
He dropped out of the race I guess. HA HA HAAA!
In related news, Virginia Teabag Douchebag and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has an uninformed opinion on rats in DC. Sad that a lawyer-type doesn’t know what he’s talking about and runs off the mouth on the topic. Typical teabagger.
A beaver has taken up residence in a drainage ditch near the College Park metro station on the Green Line near the University of Maryland. You can see the dam in the foreground an small lodge further upstream. The remnants of an old dam is in the close foreground. The dam is holding back about a foot of water:
Here is its small lodge. I haven’t seen the beaver yet as they’re nocturnal and I don’t usually go by this spot at night. I think it’s amazing that this critter seems to be doing well within the Beltway:
There is some evidence of the beaver’s work on saplings between the bus cul-de-sac and daily parking area.
It’s likely WMATA staff know about it as there’s evidence one dam has been deconstructed already. It is probably a single young beaver rather than a whole family. I doubt it will be allowed to build a dam as big as the one in Alberta, but we’re cheering it on.
UPDATE: The day after I took those photos it rained nonstop for almost 18 hours. Part of the dam was washed out and the lodge actually floated a few feet away from its original position.
Pardon the blogging absence – I’ll make it up by recycling something I wrote around Christmas but never posted, which you can read in the paragraphs following this one. I think I’m in a winter k-hole [again]. I realized my condition yesterday after I resolved to get outside for a jog, and I perked right up after the run. I need to keep that up – outdoor aerobic activity keeps me happy. For a while there I was worried because I didn’t even have an ounce of motivation to pick on my ex-husBear Brett (which takes no effort) but fortunately TJ was there to pick up the slack.
Over the Christmas break I officially retired my old North Face tadpole backpacking tent (shown at right at Red Creek in West Virginia). I believe I’ve had it since at least 1990. I purchased it one summer in Alaska along with my backpack which I will also soon retire. It ostensibly fit two people, but the occupants had to be very intimate as it was a tight fit for two. The waterproofing and rainfly were finally starting to degrade and I wanted a bigger tent anyway.
I offered the old tent to coworkers with kids who might want a backyard adventure tent but nobody took up the offer. I wondered if the Occupy DC people camped out in MacPherson Square might want a tent so I dropped it off there on Christmas day. They were very thankful and gracious about the donation. They told me the tent will house a single lady protester who was eager to move out of her communal tent for some privacy. I guess she wasn’t one of the Occupy DC tent city residents in a blossoming relationship.
Even though it went to a good cause I was a little sad breaking ways with my tent. I have camped in many sites over the past 20 years with that thing, including many Alaskan and West Virginia wilderness areas. ~sob!~
Aside from performing random acts of kindness for anarchists, over the Christmas holiday week I went to a lot of extremely gay Gay GAY holiday parties the week before Christmas, some of them actually recognizing the birth of Baby Jesus. Yes folks gays do have souls and some of us are even spiritual. You wouldn’t think that considering the rhetoric thrown at us on a regular basis but it’s true. When I ran support group meetings back in college I noticed the three main concerns for gay people coming into their own were the “Three Fs” – family, friends and faith. Basically gays coming out are concerned with losing one or all of the above 3 Fs.
And despite Andrew Sullivan’s continual assurance that we’re all so “post-gay” (written from the protective bubble of a gay theme park and fantasyland known as Provincetown) I keep hearing stories about holiday tales of woe and rejection from my people. Told in hushed tones in the kitchen or over by the bar, despite all our progess I still hear tales about how this couple couldn’t go visit one of their families because the parents don’t know he’s gay, and so on. My roomate’s 19 year-old son still won’t talk to him since he came out. Another friend still hasn’t met his live-in partner’s parents, I’m guessing because the partner is not yet out to them. We are most certainly not “post-gay” quite yet – all Andrew needs to do is to check things out in between coasts once in a while. I don’t know if it’s mostly because of anti-gay families or whether it’s the gays who are too fearful to come out (thus exacerbating the problem) but we are clearly not all out and/or accepted by our families quite yet.
Despite all the amazing progressive advances in laws and recognition across the country lately there is still a lot of work to be done. And I think a lot of this work has to do with our personal selves and in our relationships with our families.
Happy New Year! Woo! I spent New Year’s Eve dining on roast boar and drinking from a large stein at Cafe Berlin with friends. It was good times.
Requisite year-in-review post with a link to the most interesting post (or two) from each month. Here are my best photos from 2011 on Flickr as well. I’ll call 2011 “The Year of the Robyn,” because I saw her live three times, even flying out to see her (and Dingo) in Los Angeles.
Mega Python vs. Gatroid: the war with Big Fem Crocosaurus BrettCajun begins. Juvenile red-tailed hawk eating a rat in my backyard. Snowboarding in Vail, Colorado. I went snowboarding three times last year which is a record. I’m very proud of the Easter CenterPeep I made. Trip back home to Wisconsin. I invented beet cake and it was a success. I saw the final launch of space shuttle Atlantis and went to Darth Jersey’s Dacha. I saw Kylie live and when I opened the box containing her CDs the earth shook. And that was after an awful heat wave but before Hurricane Irene. I still play rugby. I want potsmoking Bears to use mouthwash before going out. I had a great trip to Los Angeles. Hellfest rugby tournament in Dallas. Blogger wedding of the century followed by our ugly breakup 72 hours later.
