August 2005

Link: Missing pregnant woman found dead - Yahoo! News.

I was pretty surprised to read this actually.  I knew there was bias in media, but I guess I hadn’t thought about how much of it there really was until this article and the linked one here at USA TODAY opened my eyes.   As  I mentioned in my post regarding D (please click here to scoot back to that post) it’s really not so important that D was transgendered or that Ms. Figueroa was Hispanic.  What matters is that these are people.  They are valuable, they are not throw away.  They all deserve to get as much respect, attention and justice as we can give them seeing that their perpetrators preferred to treat them as objects of contempt.

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Yahoo’s dropping private chat rooms gotchya down and lonely? Dropping them was for the right reason (read article Yahoo Chatrooms go offline for why) but many in the transgendered community (as well as many other communities) rely on chat rooms for support, to make connections, and for simply companionship. When you can’t be with someone physically or on the phone with them, chat lines can form a key support.

A new on-line community might fill a void for you: Transdentity. Transdentity exists as a supportive community for the creative exploration of identity for all individuals. The site hosts a forum, chat line and bulletin board. The chat line can be found on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Undernet system. The channel is #transdentity. You can get to Transdentity’s chatroom by clicking on this link here.

When the log-in screen pops up type in your nickname (use the one you have at Yahoo if you’d like!), then type in #transdentity for you Favourite channel. If a pop up window appears with a Java Security Warning, asking you to accept or deny, click accept. The site is secure and shouldn’t pose a problem (or hasn’t for me anyway).

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Okay, now something like this could really ruin a good cup of espresso with friends here at the cafe  Sand Storm in Iraq: April 26, 2005.

   My spouse makes hellacious potato salad. In fact, her potato salad is so hellacious that it is a hit with anyone who eats it. But, being the health conscience parent that I am, I needed to figure out a better potato salad. Salad of love (my honey’s potato salad)
wins hands down. Salad of Science (my potato salad) tastes like it was made in a food science lab. I’ll let you guess which one tastes
best.

Salad of Love (also known a pile ofstuff whipped into a pot that magically produces potatoessalad)

* 1 bag potatoes boiled, then peeled (boiling ‘em first makes the peeling easier)

* Throw in two eggs while potatoes are cooking, to make them hardboiled

* Take peeled potatoes, cube ‘em and then toss into a bowl

* Shell eggs, dice, toss in same bowl with potatoes

* Finely chop &5 carrots and toss in

* Finely chop about 6 celery stocks & toss in

* Finely chop one onion, dice it up, toss it in to the same bowl

* Toss in some extra macaroni, or any other edible substance that has not grown mold or generated a smell reminiscent of your local waste management station.

* Toss it all together - if you use your bare hands it’s best.

* Take your fav mayo and put in about 5 big spoonfuls (big being your definition of big spoon)

* Add in some Italian dressing - just make it go around in a circle on top….your guess is as good as anyone’s as to how much is the best amount

* cover, refrigerate overnight - then whip out the next day at lunch and eat!

Calories? who the heck knows, and who’s counting! Serving size? By the plate! Taste? all children give this a thumbs up.

Salad of Science

(From page 107, Weight Watchers, “Simply The Best” recipe book)

Ingredients
(measurements are precise)

- 1/4 Cup plain non-fat yogurt

- 2 tablespoons reduced-calorie mayonnaise

- 2 teaspoons minced dill

- 1 teaspoon cider vinegar

- 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

- 1 celery stalk, diced up

- 1/2 red bell pepper, seeded & diced

- 2 hard cooked eggs chopped

- 2 scallions thinly sliced

- 2 small red potatoes, cooked and cubed

In a medium bowl, combine the yogurt, mayonnaise, dill, vinegar and black pepper. Add the celery, bell pepper, eggs and scallions; toss with a pair of salad tongs to lightly coat. Ad the potatoes and toss gently, again with the tongs.

Calories? 130

Service Size? One third of the batch as listed, serves 3. Taste? All children look at me questioning if this is potatoe salad, egg salad, or craft paste.

Link: Missing Asiatics

You may recall my Asiatics "disappeard" (see Link above).   My digital camera has returned, so hopefully I’ll be able to nab the culprit (at least on film!).  It’s likely the deer.  It’s not like we live in the boonies, but, with reduced predators deer need to go someplace.  Apparently they need to eat someplace too!

Maybe I should get in on this deal to re-release big-game predators into the U.S. ecosystem…

Link: Seth’s Blog: Hurry!.

This is a great read with excellent advice - had to share!  (now I guess I need to take that advice).

I’ve just come out of a two day depression. A dip. I hate these. Usually I just hide for two or three days. Since hiding under the covers in bed isn’t an option, I just hide on the Internet instead. In my bizarre sense of economy, I figure it beats being an alcoholic or a drug addict as my father was - and who subsequently died as a result of complications from those addictions.

I’m so messed up right now I can barely think straight, let alone string together words cogently enough to make sense. I have no idea
why these “dips” happen. The best I can make of them, they happen when I don’t take care of myself, burying my being transgendered deep inside me to the degree that it drives me to a depression that I can’t really deal with. I know there are medications for this soft of thing. And my therapist has recommended them on more than one occasion. So why not avail myself of them and get back to some normalcy? Mainly, I think, because I don’t like the side effects, the increased tendency for suicide, the unknowns of taking them for so long. So I chose to ride out these periods and then I come to my senses after two days of not sleeping, of hiding, and realize I’m really in a bad sorts, pull myself together and drag myself up and out and see that the sun really is shining, the air really is filled with oxygen and that maybe things aren’t so bad after all.

Expressing my transgendered nature really does help me in these situations. Generally, it’s about crossdressing. In doing that, I am able to bring some level of congruity between my body and my mind and that makes all the difference, calming me, making my little world line up and then letting me sort of just go on with life. That going on with life is what most if not all folk who are transgendered really want. They just want some measure of peace and then to live and work and love. It’s pretty simple stuff really. I don’t know a single transgendered man or woman who would ask to have Gender Identity Dysphoria (GID). The general complications that it causes are just mind boggling. MOST of those complications are the result of societal pressure that being transgendered is somehow so weird that it demands stomping out or to be relegated to some sensational talk show. Many of those complications are caused by the transgendered persons own fears as well.

So it’s nice to be out and about. I don’t feel particularly comfortable in my own skin right now, but I’m not in some darkcavernous place at least.

Alton Brown’s Good Eats on The Food Network is THE best show.  I love his cooking style and how he so imaginatively talks about food, and teaches about how to cook.  It’s really fun.   On tonight’s episode he talked about French Toast.    I don’t make much French Toast any more since my children are grown.  We did go through a spate there where French Toast was all the rave in my kitchen.  I don’t do it up nearly as good as Mr. Brown does, bu it was edible (and yeah, the bread was like over a week stale not a day!).

Though French Toast was fun for a "season" the real draw in my kitchen was (and still is) PANCAKES.  Pancakes are the ONE thing I can trust to get my brood up and around the kitchen table TOGETHER.  They may mutter something vaguely distinguishable as English when they ask for "coffee", or  look at each other through bloodshot eyes and grunt, acknowledging there is another body in the room.  But the key is we are all together around the table.  Pancakes get us there.

Here’s the recipe I’ve used for years, and just thought I’d share the pancake love with ya’ll:

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  We have a nice bed of lillies in our orchard. It contains day and Asiatic lillies, and they are gorgeous. The Asiatic’s were a new import this year into the bed and we have been very happy with their gorgeous pink flowers & the height difference they’ve brought to the bed. Well, HAD might be a better idea. In the mornings, walking out into the orchard, barefoot, cup of coffee in hand, can be wonderful. But then I noticed as I was walking that up on the hill, where the bed lives, something was a miss - the Asiatics! Or more precisely, the flowers and BUDS. Carefully approaching the finely pruned bed I noticed it, the heads had been eaten off. WHAT! The outrage!!

Okay, so who could be the culprit. The day commuting woodchuck that has her daily apples from our apple trees? Hmmm, she might be able to get up on her hind legs. The coyotes? No, he’d be chasing the day commuting groundhog. It could only be deer (well, it could be elk, but we don’t have elk in these parts). Hmm, once my digital camera has been fixed I’ll have to see if I can get a pic of the perp, bud in mouth!

Link: Mercola Health Newsletter

These were way too funny to pass up posting over my steaming mug of hazelnut coffee…see the whole list at this link here

1. The Swiss
  Spaghetti Harvest

In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks
  to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded
  spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti
  crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants
  pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers
  were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could
  grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically
  replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin
  of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

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