"I just had to see your face . . . "

You know, I used to be one of those people that never, ever got sick. I would watch people fall all around me and I would just keep on trucking. Heck, after more than a decade of active duty army service, my entire medical file wasn’t more than a few dozen pages thick. Well, all of that has apparently changed, because I am now sick far more often than not. I suspect that it is both – my school age daughter bringing things home from school with her, and my own time spent in airports and airplanes that are doing me in.  On my flight home Saturday, there was a woman across the aisle from me who was hacking up a lung the entire two and a half hour flight from Charlotte to Austin, and I’d have to admit that I had to talk myself out of killing her with each and every cough that she let loose. Sure enough, by the time Tuesday rolled around and I had to be back on an airplane, I was the one doing the coughing and feeling guilty every time someone gave me the same look that I had no doubt been giving that woman.

The next day was a LOOONNGGGG work day for me, but since it ended in success, I was pretty pleased with it. This time I was working in Dearborn MI, with one of my very favorite customers. She had been one of the very first customers that I had traveled to solo to work on our FTIR, and that first time so many years ago she had known far more about FTIR, and my company’s instruments, than I did. That could have been awkward, but since she turned out to be such a wonderful person, it wound up being a great first service call and in the years since then, I have come to think of her as a friend. Well, this time she had three instruments that she wanted me to take care of, and that is pushing it hard for one days work, and so I ended up getting there at 8AM, working through lunch and dinner, and then working until 730PM at night on an instrument with an intermittent problem. Right up to the end it looked like I wasn’t going to find the root cause, but in the last twenty minutes or so, I got it figured out, problem solved, and one of our best customers thrilled

.

When Thursday rolled around and it was time to head for home, I sat there in my hotel trying to decide if I should fly pretty or not. My cold is still alive and well, but at least it is only an isolated cough and not a runny nose or anything like that. I still didn’t feel so hot, but had spent Tuesday’s flight feeling sorry for myself and jealous of many of the women I had seen in the airports, and I really didn’t want to repeat the experience – fly pretty it is!

Going through the Detroit TSA inspection point, I noticed that everyone seemed to be ignoring the
x-ray machine at the far end. Four or five machines had a line of like ten people in front of them, and the line at the far end only had four, so I made my way to it. Once I got my stuff up onto the belt and was waiting for my chance to go through the metal detector and body scanner, I found myself chatting with the female TSA agent there.

“So how are you this morning?” I asked her.

“I’m fine thank you! You fly a lot don’t you?” She replied.

“I do fly a lot!” I responded with a laugh.

“Yeah, I thought so. I’ve seen you going through here quite a bit. What do you do that keeps you flying so much?”

“I’m a field service engineer.”

“What’s that? So what do you do?”

“Well, when my company sells something, I go install it and train the customer on it, and when and if it breaks, I go fix it!”

“Well that sounds pretty neat!” she said.

“It is, and it pays the bills, so it’s kind of a win-win.” I replied with a wink. Next it was my turn to go through the scanner so I stepped into it, held my arms up, and exited when they told me to.

“Wait here.” Said another female TSA agent with her hand up to stop me. I just grinned at her.

“I pretty much always get a personal inspection at this point.” I told her with a wink.

“Ok, you’re free to go.” She told me, with no inspection and not the slightest sign of a smile.

“Well I’ll be damned! Thank you.” I told her, and then made my way to the outlet of the x-ray machine where I grabbed my things. Rather than stand at the crowded belt trying to put all of my things away and put my shoes back on while standing, I usually just grab the bin with my things and go find a chair to sit in and get it done comfortably. I was doing just this when I noticed the older man sitting next to me looking at his ticket and then around the airport with a look of panic and confusion. He noticed my looking at him and spoke to me.

“Are you going to Philadelphia?”

“No sir, but I do fly an awful lot. Is there something that I can help you with?”

“I’m going to Philadelphia but I have no idea where to wait.” He replied with a most confused look on his face.

“May I see your ticket? It will usually tell you where you need to go.” I asked, and he handed it to me.

“OK, your gate is D26.” He still had a confused look so I tried to clarify things for him by pointing at the sign for a gate next to us.

“Do you see that sign that says ‘D19’ there?” I asked him.

“Yes, is that where I wait?”

“No sir, but your gate will have a sign just like that one, but it will say ‘D26’ instead.”

“Oh! I understand. Thank you so much!” He told me with a look of utter relief on his face. It turned out that my own gate was right next to his, so when I later saw him slowly walking down the terminal I once again spoke to him.

“Got it all figured out now?” I asked with a smile.

“I do, thank you. I’ll get there sooner or later!” he replied with a grin and continued to slowly make his way down the terminal. As I continued down the terminal myself, a woman a little older than I was was walking by, and she slowed to walk along side of me.

“You know I just had to see your face!” she told me with a grin. “Every single guy that has walked by you has turned to get a second look.”

“Oh my God, is that good or bad?” I told her with a laugh.

“Oh, it’s good all right.” She said with a mischievous grin. “I just love your shoes!”

“Well thank you!” I told her, feeling more than a bit embarrassed.

“You’re welcome.” She said, and as she started to walk away from me she turned to speak one more time. “You know, I was young once.” And then let loose a loud sigh . . .

‘I hear you sister, believe me, I hear you ‘ I thought to myself as we parted ways.

I don't bite . . .

Well, it has been a hell of month for me! There I was, sprinting from job to job for months on end and about ready to die of exhaustion, when suddenly the work just dried up. It seemed that all of a sudden there was no one that needed a service call and so I found myself sitting in my cubicle day after day until I started to get nervous. Let’s face it, no company is going to keep someone that isn’t doing anything for them, and my utilization was dropping through the floor. I decided to try and head that off at the pass and so took an unscheduled vacation for a little over a week. At least now we can tell management that no, I wasn’t busy on service calls, but I was on vacation!

So what did I do on my week of vacation? Did I go somewhere glamorous and exotic? Why no, no I didn’t! Instead, I busted my butt off on my home, rebuilding our bathroom, continuing to rip out the old floors that were damaged when our foundation was repaired, and then installing new tile. My father in law, a professional mason, kept laughing and telling me that by the time we got the floor of our home done, I would be a qualified tile installer. I’d do it if that’s what it took to feed my family, but it sure wouldn’t be my first choice for making a living. Too much time spent on your hands and knees holding heavy 18 inch rock tiles out in front of you. More days than not, I could hardly stand at the end of the day for my back hurting so bad. Still, the end result is worth the effort, because it is starting to take shape and looks wonderful.

The View from our Kitchen to the Dinning Room

Our Dinning Room

The Bathroom that Kim Built!

The Bathroom that Kim Built!

Gown I found on trip to Louisiana

After week of hard work on my floors at home, I was delighted to hear that I had a service call to make even if it was in Louisiana.  After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided to drive there instead of flying. It would take just about the same amount of time, but this way I could pocket the mileage money instead of paying an airline. On the drive there, I stopped at every Goodwill thrift store that I came across, and what do you know – I found several items that I think are awesome. I got a couple of skirts and a dress that I know will look great on me and so I considered my shopping day to be a success! In one store I found something that made me stop and go “huh?” though. It was a 100% silk full length and formal black gown from Victoria (NOT Victoria’s Secret mind you). I looked up Victoria on the internet and discovered that the gown may well be worth over a thousand dollars, and so despite the fact that it was too small for me, I decided to get it and put it on ebay. Now I just have my fingers crossed that some skinny size 10 woman will want it, or else I am out a little money. 

At long last, a service call came up where I could once again fly pretty, and so off I went to the airport. This service call is a good news/bad news sort of thing though, as I was going back to Arizona where I had recently performed a repair, because the customer insisted that there was a problem with the instrument. So now not only had I been more or less idle for two weeks, but I was going to have to return (at our expense) to look at an instrument that I had just repaired.  I began to feel as if I could actually see my job security plummeting through the floor. . .

I had the usual chit chat with the good folks at Delta and then made my way through security where I made my way through the scanner, just to be stopped and inspected as usual. It was a young woman that was doing the screening and it looked as if she were being trained because she had an older woman standing at her shoulder. I don’t know if it was because she knew what I was, or because she was brand new, but she had a major “deer in the headlights” look on her face as she stood in front of me, so I tried to make her laugh.

“It’s OK, I promise that I don’t bite!” I told her with a wink as I held my arms out to my sides. 

I wont detail each one, but I had several women comment on my dress. It is from one of my favorite designers, Tahari, and fits me rather well I think, and so it was gratifying to hear the compliments. The rest of the trip to Arizona really didn’t have anything worth commenting on until I arrived at the Holiday Inn there. The young woman at the counter was a tiny and cute little thing, almost elfin in size and appearance.

“Checking in?” She asked me with a smile. I couldn’t help myself, I actually looked to see if she had cute little elf-like pointed ears.

“Yes ma’am. My last name is Huddle.” I replied while setting down my backpack and getting my purse and ID out for her.

“OK. . . “ she replied as she started looking through her records. “The reservation was made in your husbands name?”

“Um, not exactly . . . “ I told her, handing her my ID and my credit card which she paused to take a look at,

“Oh! I see now!” she said with a huge grin as she looked at my ID that has my real name and gender on it.

“I have to tell you that you just made my whole day! I’ve felt like I looked so bad that I wasn’t fooling anyone today, so it’s nice to see that I must not look all that bad!”

The following morning I headed off to my customer to take a look at the instrument that had failed so soon after I had last worked on it.  Happily I discovered that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the instrument and so there was no question about the work I had performed on my last service call here. The problem was in the way that they were operating and using it, and so I found myself “fixing the customer”. This got frustrating though, because the two men using it know exactly nothing about it, and they like it that way. Their company set them up with our equipment as part of a package that they created and installed, and they were operating our system through their own software and automation. From the view of these two gentlemen, they pushed a button in their software, and things were supposed to all run flawlessly. That’s all well and good when the automation does what it is supposed to do, but if their automation has a problem or a flaw, they are suddenly helpless and completely unable to evaluate or trouble shoot the system. It took me several hours, but I was able to determine and to prove to them that their automation had significant flaws resulting in poor accuracy. When I operated our equipment manually so that it could be used properly, our instrument was absolutely accurate, but when we allowed their automation to control it, things went all to hell. I spent hours talking to their software guru to make changes to their automation to correct the obvious faults. I then tried to teach the two men running the system the very basics of how our Infrared Mass Spectrometer works – and ran into a brick wall. They don’t understand it, don’t want to understand it, and could not be convinced to really pay any attention to me. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back here again . . .

Normally I make one service call per week, flying out one day, doing the job the next one or two days, and then flying back home. Given that I had spent two weeks without work though, I made an exception this week and flew directly from this customer to the next one in Huntsville Alabama. This means that I will have to fly home on Saturday, but it beats the hell outta being unemployed all day long and twice on Sunday.

After going through security, I was sitting down putting my shoes on and putting my things away, when I noticed a tiny infant screaming her lungs out. It’s not unusual to hear that in an airport, but what got my attention was how long the little critter had been crying so frantically.  The mother had just made her way through the x-ray machine but now found the narrow exit to the hallway completely blocked by people and two wheelchairs with older folks in them who were being helped by attendants. I don’t know if the woman had just reached her breaking point, or if she was just a horribly pushy and rude person, but what followed floored me and everyone around me. With the way blocked by people waiting on the folks in the wheel chairs, the woman starts to loudly make rapid fire demands.

“I have to feed the baby. You need to let me through. You need to move. You need to move now!” She loudly demanded to the entire crowd. There was no pause to allow people time to even register her demand, let alone try and make way for her, she just kept rapidly repeating the same thing.
“I have to feed the baby. You need to get out of the way and you need to get out of the way now!”

The wheel chair attendants did their very best to move the old couple off to the side and allow people to pass, all the while with shocked expressions on their face. I think pretty much anyone that has children can understand a mothers frustration and desperation, but her attitude and demands that the old couple be shoved to the side this very instant sure wasn’t winning her any friends. I suspect that she would have had much better results by asking nicely. . .

Much to my surprise, Delta had stuck me in one of the cramped middle seats for the entire three and a half hour flight from Phoenix to Atlanta. That middle seat really sucks for a long trip, and so they rarely do that to one of their platinum customers. I was standing in line to talk to the customer service folks at the gate to see if they might be able to change my seat for me when I heard a young woman loudly sobbing not too far behind me. I glanced her way to see a girl in her teens or early twenties crying as she talked on her phone, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I wondered what might be wrong that would cause someone to cry so pitifully and loudly in a crowd of people? Was she sick, stranded, broke, lost?? Once I was done at the counter, I had to walk right past her while I was looking for a place to sit down. I noticed that she was off of the phone now and so I stopped to talk to her.

“I don’t mean to intrude, but is there anything that I can do to help?” I asked her.

“Not really, I’m just leaving home for a while, and I’ve never been away before.” She said with tears streaming down her face.

“Awe. . .  I’ve been there and done that. It does get easier, I promise!” I told her gently and with a smile.

“I know, I know . . . Thanks anyway . . . “ she replied with a halfhearted attempt at a smile.

Oh – Delta DID get me out of that middle seat, but no upgrades to first class dang it! I was third in line for the upgrade and didn’t get it. You know, it just boggles my mind that there are people that fly more than I do. I want to talk to the people that were first and second on that upgrade list to find out what in the hell they do that has them traveling more than I do!

Thanks Dad. . . . . (NOT!)

Wow – though I know it hasn’t been all that long, it sure seems like it has been a long time since I was last in Detroit! I guess with all of the trips to Albany, and then all of the work we have been doing on my home, it just seems like it has been forever.

Speaking of Detroit! I had a grumpy comment posted on one of my Flickr photographs:

“Would you PLEASE stop tagging all of your photo’s with ‘Detroit’?! No one cares about your pictures but you and all of your middle aged friends!”

My first inclination was to get irritated, but the more I looked at it and thought about it, the more I thought it was amusing. I have been pretty prolific on Flickr (** blush **) and a fair share of those photos are tagged for Detroit, so I guess I must drive people that are trying to find photos of Detroit absolutely nuts. Sorry ‘ bout that!

So anyway, it got me to thinking about a few things. The first thought that struck me was that it was almost a compliment as he presumably didn’t realize that I am not exactly what I appear to be, and neither are my “middle aged friends”. The second thing to cross my mind was that I think I’m a bit embarrassed by my obsession with taking my own damned photograph. It started out as a perfectly understandable desire to make sure that I had some memories to look at when I get older and uglier, and perhaps some sort of self vindication, but it’s morphed into something more – an obsession, a compulsion, an evil trip down an egocentric and egotistical road! (** GASP!! **).

My blog has become something that I am kind of proud of, and now I have to ask myself – is the blog about being transgendered in the real world, or is it about Kim’s photographs? On the other hand, the vast majority of the traffic to my blog is from Flickr, so how many people would stop reading it if I pulled my head outta my backside and stopped posting so damn many photos? Hmmmm, might have to find out . . . tomorrow . . . right now I have pics to upload. . .

My trip to Detroit was a fairly miserable one, with me sick, hacking, and coughing the entire way. Believe me, you don’t want to see a photo of that trip! The good news is, although I had been miserable for my entire time there, the night before I left for home I suddenly felt a lot better! Hoping that the healthy feeling was going to last until morning, I found myself pulling skirts and tops out of my luggage for my flight home – it’s time to travel pretty!

It’s been about a month since I last entered the world as Kimberly, and I’d have to admit that I was a bit nervous as I got ready. When I had myself all together, I took a look in the mirror and wanted to sob at the sight of all of the wrinkles that have attacked my face in the last few years. My wife has been very fortunate and has virtually no wrinkles despite the fact that we are the same age, but unfortunately my genetics were not so kind as hers. Still, it is what it is, and so I headed out to put my bags in the rental car and to get a cup of coffee from the hotels breakfast area.

Of course the first thing that I noticed was that it was a pretty messed up day out there – very dark and raining. My new shoes were so slick on the rain covered parking lot that I could have just about skated to the car if I’d wanted to. After I got my bags put away in the car, I headed into the hotel to drop of my room keys off and to get a cup of coffee for the drive to the airport. I dropped off the keys at the counter, where a young lady thanked me and wished me a good trip home, and then I made my way to the coffee pots. I made it about half way there when I heard a voice behind me.

“Hey you!”

I turned around to see Cheryl, the customer service representative that has always been so nice to me here.

“Good morning Cheryl! How are you?” I replied.

“Oh I’m fine, thank you. I take it that you are feeling better huh?” she said with a grin, while giving my outfit the once over. “Honey, you look great!”

“Awe thanks! I think I’m getting too old for this shit though. Everyday it’s more and more wrinkles.” I told her while making a boo boo lip.

“Do you dance?” she asked me from out of the blue.

“Are you kidding? I have a full blown phobia of dancing – just the thought of it scares the hell outta me!”

“So what do you do when you go out then?”

“Pretty much sit there like a bump on a log.” I told her with a laugh.

“That’s a shame. You should dance. I’d love to see you dance!” She said with a wink and a smile.

“Thanks, but no thanks!” I told her with a laugh as I poured my coffee. We said our good byes and gave each other a quick hug, and then I turned around to find pretty much the entire staff of the hotel behind the counter looking and grinning at me.

“Have a good trip home!” One of them said.

“See ya next time.” Said another.

“Count on it!” I said, and gave them all a little wave as I laughed and made my way to the car.

I had a brief conversation and laugh with the woman at the US Airways counter as she checked my bags in.

“And you’re just a touch under the weight limit on that one!” she told me with a smile as she took my huge suitcase off of the scales.

“Yeah, you know I really need to completely unpack that one when I get home. I travel so much that I rarely bother to completely unpack it anymore and for the life of me, I don’t see how it can be almost 50lbs for this trip. I don’t recall putting anywhere near that much stuff into it.” I told her.

“Hah! You don’t even know what’s in your bag? That would be so funny when you open it and wild animals come running out of it!” she told me with a giggle.

Yeah, about that bag? I’ve been home for two days and still haven’t opened it . . .

Going through the “full body scanner” at the airport, the female TSA agent literally laughed when she saw the results of my scan.

“Well, I’m gonna have to pat your legs down and I’ll show you why!” she said. Still grinning, she pointed at my skirt and the hundreds of little beads that were sewn on to it.

“You see all of those fancy beads on your skirt? OK, now if you will turn around and look at the monitor behind you, you can see that you have just about given our software a heart attack.”

I turned to look at the monitor that she had mentioned and had to bust out laughing myself, because there were hundreds of little “X’s” all over the lower legs of the cartoon figure there, apparently showing all of the places that the software recommended the agent personally inspect. There were a LOT of these little beads on my skirt, and so the cartoon graphic looked like a little blizzard.

“But it’s my favorite skirt!” I told her with a wink as she finished with her inspection.

So much for happy happy joy joy – from here out the blog is a downer . . .

So does anyone remember my telling you about finding my long lost half sister Tracy a while back? We were separated when she was about six and my father “gave her” to a couple in Georgia. The bad news is that I lost complete touch with her. The good news is, letting someone else take care of Tracy was probably the only good and decent think my alcoholic father ever did. Anyway, I found her about a year ago through the internet and we have spoken a few times since then. I suspect that she has plenty of demons of her own given that every photo I have so far seen of her shows her in a bar. I can’t talk too much trash about that though, because I’ve been there and done that. While Tracy and I have not really talked much since I found her, I also ‘friended” her daughter on Facebook and am seriously worried about the little girl. She is only fourteen, and all of her posts are regarding doing drugs and her “relationships” with boys, and most of her posts use language that makes this ex-army sergeant blush. 

Last night she posted about being in the hospital after taking a fist full of sleeping pills.

Was it attempted suicide or just stupidity that prompted her take almost two dozen? I try to talk to her and encourage her, but you can only push so hard when you’re just some strange uncle talking to a niece that you have never met and who lives half the North American continent away from you. A cute little girl, already hooked on drugs, suicidal, and apparently with no adult supervision. It makes me want to sob and scream at the same time. I wish that they would invent time travel so that I could go back and shoot my father – the one who started all of this mess. The fall out from one abusive alcoholic has resulted in the destruction, or at least serious damage, to at least three generations of my family now. One messed up little person after another.

Thanks dad . . .

Home Improvement

Well, what to write about? Busy doesn’t come close to describing my life as of late but I really don’t know if any of it is of interest to all of you out there in blog world! Still, I have mentioned many of the things that we are going through, so I suppose it’s only fair to keep you up to date with events.

I believe that I mentioned that we just had our homes foundation repaired. This involved ripping up our wood and carpet floors, knocking about a dozen three to four foot holes in our concrete floors, and then digging them four feet deep to install concrete pads, piers, and jacks. After that $8,000 in work, they then tested our drain plumbing and told us that almost all of it was shattered and broken, and quoted us an additional $12,000 to repair it! I was on a service call at the time and so my wife was dealing with all of this on her own, and called me on multiple occasions crying and sobbing. See, we had taken a 401K loan out to pay for the work, and there was just no way at all that we were going to be able to come up with another $12,000 to cover the plumbing. We just didn’t see any possible way to make it through the situation. Fortunately, something about the plumber that the foundation people were using gave my wife the creeps, and so she decided to get a second opinion from S & D Plumbing out of Taylor Texas and thank goodness that she did! It turns out that the first plumber was either incompetent or a thief, because instead of the dozen breaks that he had told us existed under our floors, the new plumber found only two damaged pipes, and quickly repaired them at a charge of only $5,000. If you had seen the work that they had to go through to get to these breaks under our concrete floors, you would know that the $5,000 fee was not as unreasonable as you might at first think.

A lot of heart ache, tears, and dust later, our home was now level and had working drain lines and plumbing. Now the only problem was that we were pretty much outta money and had only bare concrete floors for Christmas. Sigh . . .

Still, you gotta count your blessings, because things could have been SO much worse. As it was, we had a house full for Christmas – ourselves, my oldest son with his wife and daughter, my daughter-in-laws parents, and my father-in-law. The floors might be bare and patched concrete, but we had a full house and home for Christmas!

In a rare event (this is the first time in the last 16 years) I had almost two entire weeks off from work, and so we started working on repairing our floors. We chose not to install wood floors, because they had suffered badly and we didn’t want a repeat of that. We also chose not to go with carpet, because all of the doctors had told us that carpet is bad for my daughters’ asthma because it collects dust. In the end we settled on rock tile, and got busy buying, prepping, and installing it.

Let me tell you, a rock tile eighteen square inches and about half an inch thick might not seem too heavy at first, but spend two entire days on your knees holding these tiles out in front of you to set them in place, and I guarantee you some major aches and pains are in your immediate future. After getting all of the living room tiled, I spent pretty much the next two days hunched over and moaning and groaning every time I had to move. It makes me really look forward to doing the rest of our home – NOT.  Suffice it to say that by the time I headed back out on my first service call of the year, it was a relief to get back to work just so I could get some rest!

My service call was in Tulsa OK, and so I decided to just drive there instead of getting a flight. It was either spend ten hours in the airport system, or spend seven to eight hours driving AND get to pocket a bit of money, so to me it seemed like a no-brainer. After all of the work on the floors, I honestly hurt too bad, and all of our things were far to covered in dust for me to even consider making the trip "pretty", so "Matt" made the drive while watching/listening to season two of "Torchwood" on my Ipod.

I’d have to admit that my year has started with a fair amount of good luck, because while I did get a flat tire on the drive, I got it as I arrived in Tulsa and just as I was driving by a mom and pop tire repair shop! I just drove off of the highway, into the repair shop, and paid a young man $10 to install new guts into one of my tire stems. Fifteen minutes later and I was on the way to my hotel without ever having to get my hands dirty! A little more good luck was found on my drive home when I stopped for gas just north of the Texas – Oklahoma border. As is fairly common in that area, the gas station had a small Casino attached to it, with one small room full of slot machines, and I figured “what the hell, let’s give it a whirl!”  I put $10 in the quarter slot machine and very quickly lost it all. I then put another $10 into a dollar machine, and after spending $5 of it, I hit a jackpot and won $88! I decided that I would go ahead and gamble until I was down to $80, and so played for a couple of more spins. Imagine my delight when I again won, this time about $40! With about $100 more than I had entered with, I took the money and ran for the border!

Well, next week I am off to Detroit and I had planned to make the trip “pretty”. It might be that the joke is on me though, because my wife and children were sick when I got home and they have been kind enough to share it with me. At the moment I am coughing, choking, and am a very active snot factory, so I kind of figure that odds are good I will end up making Monday’s trip the old fashioned and ugly way. Sigh . . .

Parenting the Transgendered Teen

So today I stumbled onto a heart warming blog from a mother raising a transgendered daughter. I can't even really put my finger on exactly what it is about the blog that impresses me so much, but it impress me it has! The mother is just so level headed about it all and somehow manages to navigate the minefields with humor and love. She treats her daughter the way that all parents should treat their children - lets her run free when and where it is appropriate, and hooks her up and puts the brakes on her when it's called for. In other words, she is a good mother and if I could reach this lady I would give her a huge hug. :)


http://transitioningfamily.blogspot.com/

Pass with Caution

Well, my personal life, and the lives of my wife and children, have been pretty torn up the last few weeks. Over the last five years or so, the droughts in Texas have caused the ground to sink in some places, and rise in others, predictably wreaking havoc on man made structures. I recently had to demolish my swimming pool because of this, and just a couple of weeks ago we had to have the foundation repair folks in to work on our home. All of the walls and the windows were cracking as our home settled unevenly, until it reached the point where we had no choice but to spend the many thousands of dollars it took to have the foundation lifted and leveled. That was just the start of our pain though, as they told us that virtually every drainage pipe under our foundation had been cracked and broken by the leveling process, and so new holes will have to be dug into our floors and the plumbing under the concrete almost completely replaced. We don’t have anything close to the kind of money it would take to do this and so my wife and children have been living in a home with bare concrete floors, and with a two foot wide, three foot long, and four foot deep hole in the middle of the living room floor while we try and figure out what we are going to do. As you can imagine, we are not happy campers . . .

Yet again I found myself on the way to Albany New York to assist our new engineer in installing a lot of new systems in a semiconductor factory that they are building in the area. I have mixed feelings about working there as I really like hanging out with our new engineer, but the job itself requires more patience than I seem to have these days. For the trip out, I decided to wear a kind of retro dress that I have had for a while. The last time I wore it, my wife and daughter in law both kept telling me that I should not have worn a black belt and shoes, but should have gone with red instead. Well, I spent months looking for the perfect red belt and shoes, and this is what I came up with!

To be honest, I was a little disappointed in the photos, because I thought that the outfit looked awesome, but the photos are just kind of “ehhh”. The important thing is that I felt pretty though and so it was all good!

I got a surprise going through the Austin airport – it seems that they have now installed those full body scanners, and so it looks like my life just got a little more complicated.

As I exited the scanner, the female TSA agent was all business and with not a smile to be found.

“Please wait here!” she said with her arm and hand up in front of me in the classic “stop” pose. She spoke again after a moments pause.

“OK, I’m going to have to pat down your side, OK?” She asked while pointing to a monitor behind me. I glanced at it to see it had a flashing dot over the side of a cartoon type display of a human form. It took me a second to realize that it was apparently marking the area where the zipper of my dress was, and so at least I knew what had triggered the pat down. 

Once she was done with me, another TSA agent picked up my back pack from the x-ray belt and held it up.

“Is this your bag ma’am?” he asked, all business.

“It is.” I replied

“I need to go through it and take some things out. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure – knock yourself out!”

“Do you have anything sharp in there that I might get poked with?”

‘What, is this an episode of “cops” or something?’ I thought to myself.

“Not that I know of.” I told him.

As good as his word, he started pulling everything out of the backpack one at a time, countless power supplies, USB cables, Ipod, my GPS, my camera, my laptop video camera, my Kindle, my external hard drive, my USB memory sticks, my . . .  well, you get the point. Lots of gadgets made their way out of my bag and into a bin. At one point the man actually laughed as he continued to find and remove toys from my bag.

“That was the problem.” He told me with a smile. “Too many electronics and cables piled on top of each other – it makes it hard to inspect them with the X-ray.”

“No worries. Y’all are trying to get me there alive and I kind of like the idea.” I told him with a grin.

As usual, after going through security, I had to take a few moments gathering my things and putting my shoes and sparklies back on. While I sat on a bench doing this, a woman walked by with her husband and grinned at me.

“I LOVE your shoes!” She told me over her shoulder.

“Well thank you!” I replied with a grin.

Going through the airport I saw countless grins pointing my way, a sure sign that people are reading me and amused by it. I just kind of decided to enter my “Well, since we aint getting away with it, we may as well have fun with it” mode, and so I started grinning back and winking from time to time.

As luck would have it, the woman that had commented on my shoes, and her husband, ended up in the seats right behind me so I wasn’t that surprised when she caught my eye and spoke again as I was stuffing my things in the overhead compartment.

“Wow, I really like those shoes!”

“Well thank you! I like them too. They are a bit higher than I wanted, but I looked and looked for the perfect red shoes and these were the first I found that I really liked.”

“I don’t care if they’re high or not, I love ‘em!” She replied.

So I had a bit of a layover in Atlanta and chose to spend some of it in the Delta Skyclub (more or less a country club in most major airports). Frankly I cant afford membership, but since they let you pay with miles, I’ve got the system beat! So I went to get a soda from the lady behind the counter, and the first thing that I noticed was that she has absolutely awesome eyes. I was doing my best to look at her pretty eyes without it being obvious that I was looking at her pretty eyes, while I ordered my coke.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Sure, I’d like a coke please!”

“Coming right up!” she said with a smile, and then she surprised me. “You look great!” she added out of the blue. Coming from a young woman that I thought was exceptionally pretty, I found this immensely flattering. The bad news is that it is sort of a back handed complement, because the unspoken words were “ . . . for a dude”  Let’s face it, your average woman may well compliment your outfit, hair, or accessories, but I really don’t think she just states “You look great!” to a complete stranger. Still, I knew I wasn’t passing already and so I took the compliment and ran with it.

The woman that sat next to me on the flight from Atlanta to Albany was a very friendly sort and so we chatted, chatted, and chatted some more. Somewhere along the line I asked about her job and found that she was a manager for a company that makes medical devices, and I guess that keeps her on the road almost as much as I am. The thing that surprised me was that she was so young and so tiny, that I just had trouble imagining her in a position of management.

After she told me all about herself, she then asked about my job and why I was on the way to Albany.

“Well, I am going to install a lot of systems for my company in a brand new Semiconductor factory there.”

“OH! You mean Global Foundries?!” she asked, clearly aware of the new factory.

“Yep. You should see the place – absolutely full of muscle bound he-man types so you can just imagine how very well that I go over there!” I told her with a grin and while passing my hand down my body and outfit. I was most gratified when she laughed so hard that she almost spilled her drink.

Just about then the flight attendant walked by and looked directly into my eyes.

“Honey, that is a beautiful wedding ring!” She said and then continued walking down the isle before I could respond. The lady next to me picked up the ball and ran with it.

“You know she’s right, that is a heck of a ring!” she said with a grin.

“Awe hell, this thing?” I said while holding it up for her to get a better look. “I got it at JC Penny and it is at least as fake as I am.” At this point, she almost did spit her drink out.

So here I was, absolutely convinced that I flat out was not passing at all when I made my way to the Avis counter in Albany and handed over my drivers license to get my rental contract. I have a state ID with my female picture on it, but that doesn’t authorize me to drive or rent a car, and so this is one of the few places where I still have to hand over my male drivers license. The lady behind the counter looked at it for a moment and then handed it back.

“I’m sorry, but I will need to see him then.” She said, very politely and very professionally. I was so convinced that I wasn’t passing all day long that it took me a moment to realize what the problem was, and then I busted out laughing.

“Miss, that is me. Here, does this help?” I said handing over my state ID with my female photo on it. She just looked at it for a moment and then looked up at me with an impressed expression on her face.

“Wow, I had no idea at all and wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t said something!” she said while still comparing the two forms of ID.

“Well, for the record, you just made my entire day and I thank you from the bottom of my heart!” I told her.

The folks at the hotel didn’t bat an eye at me, but since they knew me from earlier stays, this didn’t surprise me much. I still got a bit of a giggle though as I made my way to the elevator to find a man inside holding the door for me. Considering that the elevators are pretty slow in this joint, I really did appreciate his waiting for me and so I thanked him.

“No worries, I thought I heard someone walking up!” he replied with a heavy Australian accent. I took a good look at him and realized that the man was built like Popeye – kind of short but with the biggest forearms I have ever seen in my life. He was clearly just coming from the gym, still sweating and with a towel on his shoulders.

“So I hope you worked out a little for me too? I’m going downhill when it comes to staying in shape these days ya know?!” I told him with a wink.

“Sure I did mate!” he said with an embarrassed smile of his own. I figure that was probably about the time that he figured out I wasn’t what I appeared to be.

Well, I spent most of the following week doing nothing but work. Just to brighten up my day, my wife sent me a text message saying “God must hate us – call me.” The quote was in from the plumber that the foundation people used – it would cost $11,000 to repair the damaged drainage plumbing under our foundation. A huge amount for the foundation folks to tunnel under our entire home, and a bit more for the plumber to actually replace pipes. Leveling the house had just cost us $8.000 and now they were telling us that repairing the plumbing damage caused by leveling the house was gonna be $11,000! All I can say is that we were in absolute shock. I had expected thousands based on what their plumber had told us, but I was thinking more in the area of three to four thousand. A quote of $11,000 just totally rocked our world, and was absolutely outside of our ability to pay for. We had taken out a 401K load to pay for the foundation repair, and flat out couldn’t come close to coming up with an additional $11,000! Needless to say I spent more than one night on the phone with my wife sobbing on the other end. In the end, we decided to seek a second opinion and sweated it out until it could be arranged.

 

At last the weekend rolled around and on Sunday I decided to go to the movies and to go shopping. First of all I hit up JC Penny, one of my favorite stores. This time instead of looking for outfits for myself, I was looking for a Christmas present for my wife. She had commented several times on a cheap costume jewelry bracelet that I have worn and so I was trying to find something like it, but of better quality. I might buy cheap jewelry for myself, but I’ve never bought my wife anything that I didn’t think was decent quality – of course that might be why my wife has so little jewelry. Anyway, I was at the counter looking at options while an older woman in front of me was completing her purchase. We chatted about this and that while she checked out.

“OK, and here is a $20 coupon on your next purchase of over $100 here at the JC Penny jewelry counter ma’am!” said the cheerful sales associate behind the counter as she handed the older woman her receipt and coupon. The woman held the coupon up, looked at it, and then laughed.

“You know, I am never going to use this, so you take it!” she said, turning around and handing it to me. I was flabbergasted!

“Are you sure?!” I asked her, and she just laughed.

“I hold on to these things all of the time and never, ever use them. You make good use out of it and make someone happy.” She said.

“Well thank you very much! I think I’ll do just that!”

My wife will now have a very pretty and expensive (by our standards) bracelet for Christmas.

Monday rolled around and started off a complete disaster. So there I am in the subfab (the basement area) where they keep all of the plumbing, pumps, and chemicals of the factory I am working at, when I hear a really odd sound – a very heavy rain. Remember, I’m in the basement of a huge state of the art semiconductor factory – it does NOT rain here. None the less, when I poked my head around the machine I was installing to look in the direction of the sound, I see a very heavy rain falling, and when I say heavy, I mean heavy. We are talking apocalyptic “Noah you better hurry up and finish that Ark” rain.

It looked like water, but you never know. In a factory like this they use at least a dozen chemicals in high quantities that will kill you, and so I didn’t hesitate – I grabbed my laptop and quickly headed out to find my colleague so that we could both get the heck outta there. I hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps away from the immense leak when the fire alarm AND the dangerous chemical alarms started screaming.

Well, the good news is that the chemical alarm was a false alarm resulting from a chemical safety device getting soaked. The bad news is that the alarm was generated by one of MY systems as it was getting bathed in several thousand gallons of water – something it most definitely is not designed to handle. At least three of my company’s systems were directly under the downpour. . .

I was supposed to meet Lisa Gayle Harris after work tonight, but it now started to look like I was going to be busy trying to dry out multiple systems, and so I sent her a brief email to let her know our evening was in peril. After lunch, we were able to get back into the factory and start cleaning things up. I was removing high voltage modules and pouring the water out of them, wiping things down, blowing them out, and just doing my best to clean things up. I had one rack in pieces and drying it out when water once again started to pour everywhere, to include into the open spaces of my rack where I had removed equipment. I kind of snapped and lost my temper at that point and told my colleague that we were done for the day – we can’t dry things out while water is still pouring from the pipes above. The good news that came out of all of this mess? I did get to meet up with Lisa after all.

So when it came time to meet up with Lisa, we sent a few messages back and forth trying to decide where to meet at. The sports bar in my hotel was actually a pretty neat place, but was often full of more than slightly inebriated sports fans, and I couldn’t help thinking that it might not be the best place to meet up. I did a search on the internet and found the Water Works Pub in downtown Albany. Lisa sounded less than thrilled about it, but for lack of a better idea we agreed to go ahead and meet there anyway

Just before arriving I drove past two police cars that were stopped and had three or four guys up against a wall, and so I started to wonder if maybe I should have given more weight to Lisa’s “that’s not a really good part of town” comment. Still, we arrived at about the same time and decided to stick it out. It was kind of funny with the two of us out in the parking lot trying to read the damned machine that was supposed to give is a parking receipt. Apparently you had to pay around the clock to park here, but the machines display didn’t have a light and so we couldn’t read the darn thing. There we were, both of us reaching for reading glasses and peering at this dark display trying to figure out how to use it when the instructions couldn’t be read. I still don’t know what it was that triggered it, but after we had been messing with it for a couple of minutes, it suddenly lit up so that we had no trouble at all reading it.

Having at long last paid for our parking we made our way into the place to find a reasonably cute female bartender, and four or five men sitting around the bar who all glanced our way. I saw a couple of them lean in towards each other, no doubt saying something along the lines of “Wow, did you see what just walked in?”, but we didn’t give it any thought as we made our way to a table. We chatted for probably a couple of hours I think, chatting of nothing heavy or Earth shattering, just talking about life, our families, and our jobs. Lisa has a daughter who is doing exceptionally well in school, and she is justifiably proud about this. She even showed me a photo, and I’m here to tell her that her daughter is one of the prettiest little critters you have ever seen. Not quite as pretty as my own daughter of course, but I digress. (just teasing Lisa!)

Lisa had to work early in the morning, and I had a disaster to try and recover from, and so we called it a night fairly early. When I mentioned that I wanted a photo for my blog. Lisa very bravely approached Chris, the bartender, to ask her to take the picture for us. I sat at the table and watched the entire bar listen in as Lisa asked her, and so I decided to go for the low hanging fruit and get a laugh.



 

“Yeah, you know – pictures. It’s kind of a drag queen thing!” I blurted out. Of course it then occurred to me that while I might think that it’s amusing to poke fun at myself, I might have just deeply offended poor Lisa. Too late though, I had blurted the joke out and was stuck with it. I was more than a little relieved when everyone started to laugh though.

As we made our way back to the parking lot, I joked with her.

“Well this was no fun at all! We didn’t even get mugged!”

“And thus disappoints you? Maybe I can arrange it?” she replied. I don’t think those were her exact words, but it was something along those lines.

And then it was back to the mess at work . . . 

The day before I was to leave for home, we discovered little green drops of fluid all over our tool boxes and the floor between two of our systems. I started to clean it off of our equipment, and when the new guy I was working with saw what I was doing, he suggested that even though I was wearing gloves, I really should leave it alone until we knew what it was. I thought he was being kind of paranoid, but I decided that he was probably right, and so I threw the towels in a bag, and removed my gloves and did the same with them. It took hours to find out, but at first they told us it was just hydrogen peroxide. . .

A few hours later they told us that it had been Sulfuric Acid . . .

The next morning they told us it was a high concentration of hydrofluoric acid (HF) - oh goody. . . 

I sure am glad that the new guy was paranoid about chemicals and convinced me to leave it alone and to throw away my gloves . . .

Between the broken water lines and leaking acid, I really couldn’t be happier to be leaving this place and heading for home.

I did get a little ray of sunshine though! My wife got a second opinion on our plumbing issue and the new guy tells us that the first guy was an idiot or a thief. He did all of the same pressure tests and everything passed EXCEPT the bathroom sink. After putting a camera down the pipe, he is reasonably confident that the only break is right at our bathroom sink. So, the bathroom floor has to be destroyed and the plumbing replaced, but more than likely no other tunneling will be required. He won’t know for sure until the broken pipe is replaced, but it is likely that we just went from an $11,000 quote to a $3,000 quote. It still hurts, but hurts a LOT less. We find out Monday so keep your fingers crossed for us would ya?

At long last it was time to head for home. Two weeks doesn’t seem like that long, but with your foundation torn up, your family living on bare concrete, the house covered in concrete dust, and a home with no Christmas tree as Christmas quickly approaches, it seemed like forever to me!



 

When I checked in with the airline at the Albany airport, the lady behind the counter was a real trooper and didn’t really bat an eye at me. Still, she kind of balked when she discovered that my bag was a bit over weight. (What do you expect with a cross dresser on the road for two weeks?!)

She took one look at the scale and then looked at the customer service representative next to her.

“His bag is over weight.” She said to him with a ‘what do I do?’ tone of voice and attitude.

“His” bag she had said – so apparently we aint passing today either . . .

“That’s OK,” he said. “She’s a platinum elite and she’s allowed up to 75 pounds.”

“Yeah, they let you get away with all sorts of things when you fly as often as I do!” I told her with a laugh as I batted my eyes at her.

I had the usual shoe conversation when going through the TSA check point when the female TSA agent at the entrance to the X-ray machine and body scanner saw me.

“Oh my God! I LOVE your shoes!” She blurted out. I glanced up at her and gave her a wink.

“Me too, but they are just a bit higher than I really would have preferred.” I told her while holding my fingers about an inch apart.

“Nah, I just bought a pair the other day and cant wait to wear them out.” She replied, while holding her fingers about four inches apart to show that she was talking about some seriously high heels.

“Well, I DO love them, but you wanna bet that by the time my trip is over today I’ll regret having worn them?”

I had almost the exact same conversation with the lady behind the counter at the Detroit Delta Skyclub.

“Those shoes are SO cute!” she told me as I handed her my card.

“Thank you! I guess that they aren’t exactly practical for airports though.” I told her with a smile.

“Well that’s OK since you have plenty of time and wont have to run for your next gate!”

So now for a deep and philosophical ending to this little fluff of a blog. My over all impression about this trip is that I “passed” very rarely, so now the question becomes ‘does it, or should it, matter to me?’ For the most part I don’t really think so. It would be grand if I were young and flawless, and everyone who saw me only perceived a woman. Clearly that goal is not within my grasp and so I have a choice to make. Either I can accept that most people know what I am and yet still treat me well, or I can go insane worrying about whether I am or am not passing. Since I’m pretty much having a good time, I figure to let it go and just be happy with being treated reasonably well regardless of whether they know what I am or am not.

Running for the elevator

To the best of my admittedly poor memory, this was only second time I’ve ever had a service call that lasted two weeks. I packed plenty of stuff, hoping against hope that I would end up with plenty of time to play, but no such luck. In all honesty, I really did have plenty of opportunity but I was just too damned worn out and tired.

This service call was a lesson in patience – a throw back to my old Army days of “Hurry up and wait”. They are building a new semiconductor factory in Malta NY (near Albany) and the factory has purchased several million dollars in relatively complex systems from my company. The thing is, there are three players involved here – my company who makes widget A, another company that makes widget B that our widget gets installed on, and then the new factory that bought widgets A and B. The problem is that in order for me to set up, test, and certify my widget, I need the help and cooperation of Company B, who is of course also busy trying to get their equipment set up and certified and doesn’t necessarily consider my needs to be their priority. To further complicate things, the factory was largely unable to provide me with the assorted gasses and liquids that my tool requires in order to operate. Suffice it to say that for me, the hardest part of the last two weeks has been to remain calm and to not come unglued while others wasted my time.

Saturday I just spent unwinding and literally did nothing but surf the internet, watch TV, and sleep. With all of that rest, I have to wonder why I still felt tired when Sunday rolled around?! Feeling tired or not, I wasn’t about to spend another entire day cooped up in my room, and so I decided it was time to go see a movie and maybe do some window shopping!

You know, it’s very rarely these days when I actually feel pretty, but this was one of those days. Sometimes I go through all of the effort just to look in the mirror and think that I look like hell. On the other hand, sometimes I just throw something together and end up thinking that I look great.

I went to the “Crossgates Mall” where I started off by walking through the same “Burlington Coat Factory” where I found a killer dress on my last visit to Albany . The good news is that I found one quite a bit like that one, but in black and white! The bad news is that it does not have it’s own lining and is a bit to see through for my comfort, so it will have to wait for another trip when I bring a slip with me to wear with it!

The movie I saw was “Immortals” and it was pretty fair. It was very much in the style of the “300”m which has both its good points and its bad ones, but over all I it was worth the seeing.

My next stop was into a shoe store, where a mother and her young daughter (maybe 10 years old?) momentarily blocked my way to the sales rack, but as I got closer, the mother looked up and asked her daughter to move over and allow me to walk by them. I couldn’t help but notice that the young girl kept staring at me as I was looking at the shoes on the sales rack, and so I gave her my best smile. She briefly returned the smile but continued to stare at me, so I’m guessing that she had a clue.

After I finished my window shopping through the mall, I headed back to the hotel where I got my last laugh for the day. As I walked by the front desk on my way to the elevator, the young man behind the counter looked up and smiled at me as he greeted me. The funny thing was that just before the elevator door closed, he jetted into the elevator, clearly flushed and out of breath. I had been about to press the button for the fifth floor when he startled me, and so I asked him what floor he wanted.

“The third floor please.” He said after a long pause that sort of gave me the impression he didn’t really have a floor he needed to go to at all. Then it struck me – there was no easy way for him to get from behind the counter and to the elevator in a hurry as he had done. He must have literally sprinted from the counter, through the offices behind it, into the hall, and then to the elevator, and he had done this in the same amount of time it had taken me just to walk there from the front door. Since I walk pretty fast myself, I figure he must have really busted his ass to get to the elevator in time to ride it with me.

“So how are you today?” I asked him with a grin as I was thinking of all of this.

“I’m well thank you, how are you?” he asked, face still red from his little run to the elevator.

“I just couldn’t be gooder!” I said with a laugh as we reached the third floor and he exited.