Nuttin' Happened . . .

This was another one of those trips where it’s almost not worth writing the story up because nothing terribly interesting happened. I guess that’s a good thing, because it implies that I, and the people that I interact with, are so comfortable with the whole cross dressing thing that it’s nothing special. I suppose that I should be pleased!

Ahead of me in line at the airline counter was a young couple, apparently on their way to get married. He was asking about the cost to upgrade them to first class and then made the decision to go ahead and do it.

“Now I have to warn you, I can get you both into first class, but I don’t have any adjoining seats. Are you OK with that?” the customer service rep asked them.

“Sure, that will be OK” the young man told her, after glancing at his lady for confirmation.

“You can always ask the people next to you if they will move so that you can sit together. Very few people will tell you no. Oh, and I find that it helps a lot of you tell the person sitting next to you that you get violently ill with motion sickness. They just can’t wait to trade seats after you tell them that!”  That got a huge laugh from all of us within ear shot.

This time I was flying with US Airways, and much to my disappointment I discovered that I had gone from being “Gold Preferred” to “Silver Preferred”. What this means is that my odds of getting upgrades to first class on US Airways just plummeted AND I guess that they are supposed to charge me for my second bag.

“OK, so I see that you are silver preferred!” said the customer service rep with a smile as she checked me in.

“Silver? I thought I was Gold? Heck, I’ve even got this purty little card y’all sent me saying that I’m Gold” I replied while handing her the card.

“Yeah, they updated everyone’s status on March first, and it looks like you didn’t make Gold this time. Sorry. . .” she told me, managing to look honestly unhappy about it.

“Oh well, bummer! No worries though.”

“I guess I’m supposed to charge you for the second bag, but I think we’ll just overlook that – what do you think?” she said with a grin.

“I think that sounds awesome – thank you!”

So tickets in hand I headed over to a bench before the security check point to pull my laptop out of it’s bag and to take of my jewelry, and out of the corner of my eye I can see that someone is walking directly toward me. I glanced up and found a very pretty woman with gorgeous hair down to her waist looking straight at me, and so I stopped to wait for her.

“You know, I just had to tell you how much I love that coat!” she told me, pointing at my pretty blue coat.

“Awe, thank you! It is kind of pretty isn’t it? I think I got it at JC Pennys a while back.” I replied with a huge smile. Let’s face it, I love getting compliments from women – there is something most gratifying and affirming about it.

We're gonna share 'em!

So my wife, our two youngest children, and I all went shopping in a Goodwill yesterday. On the way to the check out counter my 8 year old daughter and I stopped to look at the ear ring racks. She and I both liked a couple of pair that were pretty, and so I looked at her and said "All right, tell ya what - I'll get 'em and we can share 'em OK?"
"OK Daddy!"
So we get to the check out counter and the girl behind the counter says "Wow - those are pretty!" when she was ringing them up.
"Yeah, my daddy and I are gonna share 'em!" my daughter proudly proclaimed to the woman and more than loud enough for everyone in line behind us to hear.
Oops . . .

Orange County Choppers

 

So I had just gone through the TSA check point and am sitting down putting my shoes and sparklies back on when I notice a beautiful woman going through the check point wearing absolutely killer heels. They were about four inches tall and tan with red accents. Given the fact that she was exceptionally attractive, well dressed, and wearing awesome shoes, she was getting quite a bit of attention and I could hear one of the female TSA agents telling her how much she liked the shoes and then they had a short conversation about them. As soon as the woman moved off, the guy that was in line behind her started talking to the same TSA agent.

“Those were some serious shoes weren’t they? I wish I could wear shoes like that!” he said with a laugh and a theatrical exaggeration. Considering that I was putting my own high heels on as they were laughing at his joke, I almost choked. If I had been close enough that I wouldn’t have had to yell, I’m pretty sure that I would have gone ahead and told him that he could have worn shoes like that if he really wanted to . . .

A mother and her little girl (about four or five years old I would guess) came and sat down next to me to put their things away. The little girl was cute as a doll and I couldn’t help but grin as I noticed the large and elaborately jeweled Tierra that she was wearing.

“You know, I KNEW I was forgetting something this morning! I left my Tierra at home!” I told the two of them with a smile and a wink.

“I KNOW! And they go with everything!” the mother replied with a brilliant smile.

So as I was sitting on the plane to Albany, I was surprised when the young woman in the seat in front of me turns around to speak to me.

“Hey, I know you! You were on my last flight to Albany too!” she said with a grin.

“I thought you looked familiar!” I replied with a laugh. “You work in the medical field right?”

“Yes, and you are an engineer right?”

“You got it! So we both lucked out when it comes to upgrades to first class on this flight huh? Once you get used to flying first class, flying sardine class really sucks!”

“Yes. In fact if I remember right, you and I were both upgraded on that last flight and that was what we talking about.” She replied.

“You know I just don’t get it. I’m platinum on Delta and Gold with US Airways, and yet there are people that fly more often than I do?! What in the heck can they possibly do that has them on planes more often than I am?” I asked her.

“I know right?!” she answered.

I was working in Fishkill New York installing one of our Ozone generators. I guess most people don’t know about it, but sometimes they use high concentrations of Ozone in the fabrication process of semiconductors (computer chips). I am really starting to get kind of frustrated when installing these things because I keep having the same issue – customers insisting that they are ready to go and that they need us there ASAP to do the install, and then I arrive to find out that they were nowhere near ready. We send them checklists and everything in advance, telling them that they must do this and that before we arrive, they tell us that they have done it all, and then we arrive to find out that they lied and are not ready. In this case, Bret, one of my colleagues from New Hampshire, and I arrived to find out that they didn’t even have electricity to our system yet! Still, we did all that we could without power before reaching the point where there was nothing left that could be accomplished. At that point, we headed off for a nice long lunch, then did a little shopping for some minor expendables we knew we were going to need, and then we sat there looking at each other.

“Well, we could go see a movie, but sure as hell, just as soon as we paid for the tickets and sat down, we would get the call that the power was now on and we would have to bail out.” I told him.

“Yeah, I’m not all that big on movies anyway.” He replied, and then his face lit up. “Hey, have you ever watched that show ‘Orange County Choppers’ on the Discovery channel?”

“Sure. I love the bikes they make” I replied.

“Well their shop is only about twenty minutes from here. Ya wanna go check it out?”

“Hell yeah!”

And off we went . . .

As far as I can tell, it is pretty much a huge tourist trap. This immense store, and it is filled with T-shirts, caps, mugs, etc, etc and relatively speaking, very few bikes. Still, it was pretty cool to look at the bikes they had on display and to read the stories behind them. Oh, and I did get my wife and father in law T-shirts and a coffee mug. 

 





 

Somewhere in the next day or so, they did at last get power to our system, and we started testing all of its safety interlocks and then trying to operate it. I wont bore you with too many details, but the system basically works by running Oxygen through these special gas cells where a LOT of power is applied to cause electrical discharges – more or less creating lightning inside our system, which then converts some of the Oxygen into Ozone. That’s the plan anyway. The bad news is, that if your customer does something really silly, like, oh I don’t know, connecting the Oxygen line to your tool to an entirely different gas, very bad things can and will happen. In this case, they apparently filled the oxygen plumbing with Argon while they were working on it for safeties sake. Pure Oxygen is a very dangerous thing around welding or sparks and so I understand why they would do this. The thing is, when the work on the Oxygen line is complete, one would expect them to remove it from the Argon supply and actually connect it to Oxygen, but they hadn’t. . .

 
 

It probably doesn’t sound like too big a deal, but it was. With the generator filled with Argon instead of Oxygen, this means that we were not creating lightning and ozone inside it, but were creating a plasma instead. As far as the power supplies and other electrical components in our system are concerned, a plasma is pretty much a direct short, and very bad things happen when you short out high voltage power supplies. Suffice it to say that they destroyed one of the two brand new Ozone generators and so I had the pleasure of spending the weekend so that I could wait for my colleague to hand carry the destroyed generator back to the factory to have it repaired and then bring it back the next week.

That night I went to the sports bar in the hotel for dinner and even though I was in boy mode, I bought a “girlie” drink called a “she-she” - and no, I swear that I didn’t make that up. So when the drink arrived I couldn’t help thinking “Damn but that thing is pretty – let’s take a photo of it!” As I was taking out my phone to snap a pic, I noticed a table with about half a dozen people sitting at it, and they are all looking at me! As I found my phone and start lining up the shot, a middle aged guy from their table gets up to make his way to me, and he starts to roar with laughter as he sees the camera. He stopped mid-way and turned back to his table.

“Look it that! That drink is so pretty he’s taking a picture of it!” The whole table busted out laughing and the man continued on his way to me as I snapped the photo.

 
 

“What IS that drink?” he asked, still laughing. So we went back and forth with my laughing with him and telling him all of the stuff that is in the drink. Here I thought that they were making fun of me, but this guy and one other from the table were just irritated that they had already ordered something else. Shortly after he returned to his table, a waiter came walking by me and winked while nodding his head toward the other table.

“Those folks sure are enjoying your drink!”

I pretty much had a movie marathon that weekend. I saw them as Kimberly but not a thing really happened that was amusing or interesting and so I guess I’ll just tell ya what I thought of the movies.

Red Tails – This is a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen in WWII. The special effects and cinematography were absolutely incredible. It’s hard to believe that the footage wasn’t real – it was THAT realistic. The bad news though is that some of the dialogue and acting was a bit lacking. It was almost as if the primary goal of the movie was to educate people and not to entertain them, and that’s OK, just be prepared for it. Like at one point, the Red Tails had just saved the lives of dozens of bomber crews, and one of the bomber pilots says something lame like “Gee, those red tails just saved our butts. I sure hope that we get them next time!” It wouldn’t have been so bad if the guy hadn’t said it in a monotone as if reading from a cue card. In my opinion, the movie was worth seeing, I just wish they had devoted a little more effort to the story instead of expending it all on the effects.

"Chronicle" - Not a bad show. This movie was about some teenagers who end up with super hero type powers and the chaos that follows. I thought it was OK, but three guys walking down the ramp behind me were loudly stating that it was "the worst F'n movie they had ever seen". Yeah, it wasn’t the best movie I’d ever seen, but also wasn’t the worst.

"Safe House" - pretty good action flick and the time passed quickly. It’s about a veteran secret agent that goes rogue, and the efforts of a new agent to try and capture him. Cant say much more without giving away things, so I’ll just leave it at that and say that I enjoyed it and the time passed quickly.

"Ghost Rider" - I love Cage, but this movie sucked - I wouldn't even spend the money to rent the DVD if I were you. I liked the first show, but this sequel was pretty much lacking in every way. Major disappointment . . .

 
 

 

When it came time to fly home, I would have had to get up at 2AM to fly pretty, and even I’m not THAT crazy, so I flew home the boring old fashioned way. At the Austin airport while I was waiting for my bags, I was chatting with the woman standing next to me. She grabbed a bag that came around, then laughed that it wasn’t hers and put it back. When my rather large and over packed bag rolled around and I struggle to lift it off of the belt, I saw her giving me an amused look.

“Yeah, I know – I don’t exactly travel light!” I told her with a laugh.

“I see this! I’m guessing there is a woman involved in this trip?” she asked with a sparkle in her eyes.

“Yes, ma’am, you could say that!” I replied as I extended my bags handle and headed for the door while grinning like an idiot.

"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 . . .