Winter

It is 6:12 AM and it is 36 outside.

Our normal temperature range for October is 51 to 75.

You know, there are a lot of things that I don't love about living in Alabama. But I've always been able to say, I love the weather.

Here's a selection of current temperatures from up north:

Fargo, ND: 49

Minneapolis: 48

Chicago: 46

New York: 40

Boston: 39

So what does this mean when I can say It's warmer in Fargo, North Dakota than in Birmingham right now.

This weekend was the grand opening of the first off-leash dog park in Birmingham. Jay and I have been very supportive of the group that has been spearheading this effort. So I was there at 9 AM with Charlie. Bundled up with gloves and a hat, and wearing these:

Under my jeans of course.

It's going to be a cold winter down here in Dixie. And it's probably Obama's fault.

Last night was the Equality Alabama Gala, the capstone event to Equality Weekend. Jay is on the board so things have been quite hectic for him. The highlight of the evening was this speech from Congressman John Lewis of Georgia. He was a leader in the civil rights movement and one of the strongest allies to the LGBT community in Congress.



It was a privilege to hear him speak.

No place like it...

I'm sitting in my parents' kitchen, in the house I grew up in. Southwest recently started flying into Boston directly, so I got a special fare from Birmingham to Boston by way of Baltimore.

My parents have lived in this house for thirty-two years. And they have never stopped working on it. The latest project is a gut remodel of the upstairs hall bathroom, known colloquially by the family as the "blue bathroom." My mother has never been particularly happy with the fact that, upon entering the front door, if one were to glance up the staircase, the toilet was visible. Bad feng shui or something. So this project guts the bathroom, the linen closet in the hallway, and the small walk-in closet in the bedroom formerly known as my sister's, and reconfigures it so that the doorway is moved, the tub and vanities are repositioned. A new closet is being framed out in the bedroom to replace the one that was lost, and a smaller linen closet will sit close to where the original bathroom door was.

Since my last visit home, the driveway has been redone in pavers as well as a seating area near the pool. Plus, the never ending cellar project has entered month 384. Mom and Dad are down there now rearranging stuff. "We're gonna get this organized!"

My entire life, there was always a room being re-wallpapered, re-carpeted, or re-painted. The landscaping has changed and evolved repeatedly. The kitchen has been gutted and completely redone twice, the first time as part of an addition that doubled the kitchen and added a garage and laundry room. They added a big deck and screen porch before tearing it down for the addition, and put in a pool in the early eighties. The bathrooms have all been redone - although the master bath lasted over twenty-five years before they tore into it.

All this to say, I have no desire ever to engage in any kind of home improvement project. Oh sure, Jay and I have looked at plenty of houses and thought about doing a remodel, but that's just to move in. Once it's done, I'm done.

It makes coming home to visit fun, though. I'm constantly walking around saying: Was this here before? Did you change something here? Is this different?

Where's my towel?

Where's my towel? Because I am ready to throw it in. I know what you're thinking: if we don't fight back then the terrorists win. I am just at the point to say fuck it, the terrorists can win. And by terrorists I mean Beck-Limbaugh-Palin et al.

I was fine with the birth certificate nonsense. I blew off the "socialist" bullshit. I even let the death panels roll off my back. But this hooplah over the Obama's highly controversial speech to schoolchildren has got me completely blown away.

They don't even make the pretense that they're not being hypocritical. I saw some asshole on TV insist that it's not Obama that got him upset. It's any President. No self-respecting parent would want THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES to address public school children. Except when presented with the fact that every President has done exactly that. Then it's like, Yeah well he's a terrorist Muslim socialist.

I've given up on the tired comeback of: Imagine for a moment what you would have said if people refused to let their kids listen to Bush's speech about the war. But see, that's totally different. Bush was killing brown people while Obama... well, you get the picture.

What has this country come to when children need to have a permission slip from their parents to watch THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES give a speech?

This is so fucking ridiculous, so disingenuous, just trouble for the sake of making trouble. So I'm done. Fuck it. You win. I'm going to move to Sweden or Norway.

District 9

***Spoiler Alert***

I went to see District 9 this weekend. The premise is amazing, and the movie succeeds at what it's trying to do, but there's a plot hole so big you can drive a truck through it, which just bothers me.

In this movie, an alien ship becomes marooned on Earth about 30 years ago. The giant mother ship comes to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa. After months of inactivity, we cut our way into the ship and discover about a million starving insectoid aliens. Now, in present day, the aliens are segregated into an enormous slum. We're treated one disturbing scene after another of humans treating the aliens horribly. The worst is Wikers, the goofy protagonist, explaining, with a sort of childish glee, the "popping" sound the alien eggs make as you burn them, with the screams of dying aliens in the background. The Bureau of Alien Affairs is attempting to relocate the aliens out of the slum to a new camp.

While notifying the aliens of the relocation, Wikers stumbles across various contraband and has an accident that turns out to be pivotal to the plot. At the end of the film, one alien character has managed to scrounge up enough alien biological "fluid" to crank up a smaller command module (which was conveniently buried under his shack in the slum) through which he can start up the ship and blast off for home. This was my plot hole. You mean to tell me that the whole mother ship is inoperable without this command module? Which was out of gas? And it took 20 years to scrape up enough fluid to get it started? I don't know, maybe that works. It just struck me as a bit simplistic to have the entire alien technology hanging off of one little cylinder of bio-fuel.

But, suspending disbelief for a moment, the movie is an interesting reflection on what we humans have done to each other throughout history. It was Native Americans, South African apartheid, Jews in Nazi Germany, and the list goes on and on. Definitely not a pick-me-up feel-good kind of movie.

Hello Weekend!

This was a pretty busy week. Typical schedule: work, gym, etc. Jay was out of town for a couple days so I had to come home at lunch and give the dogs an afternoon break to visit the backyard. That always throws off my day, although at least I only have 4 miles to go instead of 24.

The election was Tuesday. Turnout was very low. My new polling place had no line, nothing like last November where we were lined up around the block. Unfortunately, our friend Howard did not win his race for City Council. Our other candidate friend, Elisa, is in a runoff for her school board seat.

I am hell-bent on going to the movies this weekend. I want to see District 9 and The Time Traveller's Wife. This is my only "down" weekend for the next six weeks. Things are going to get very busy after this...

Weekly Horoscope

What life will you be living at noon on September 1, 2014? Who will you be? How thoroughly will your dreams have come true? What kind of beauty and truth and love and justice will you be serving? Will you look back at the time between August 27 and September 21, 2009 and sigh, "If only I had initiated my Five Year Master Plan at that ripe astrological moment"? Or on September 1, 2014 will you instead be able to crow, "I can truly say that in these past five years I have become the president of my own life"?

From Free Will Astrology