Hello, and Happy Pre-Christmas Eve, everyone. Hope you have all finished your holiday shopping, and been good girls and boys. (I plead the Fifth, personally.)
I've been dressing in seasonal colors the past few days, starting with a green dress on Wednesday and a white blouse and red maxi-skirt yesterday. Today I went with my red blazer, above. (If you look closely you can spot the green scrunchie holding up my ponytail too.)
This is just a brief post about my adventures last weekend, and not the second of the promised pair of posts mentioned recently. I hope to finish that one tomorrow, lest I further tempt fate with Santa. Read on below the fold for all of the details. :-p
Hi everyone! Hope you're having a pleasant holiday season so far. Things have been quite busy here, between work and moving and various other adventures. I have another post that is about half complete, but I suddenly realized yesterday that I had completely overlooked a major milestone:
Five years of HRT.
:-O
For those of you not overcome by the vapors, follow along below the jump for more!
Depends on who you ask, actually. [coughcough] ;-p
Actually, I have been naughty; I have several long-in-development posts that I need to finish. I promise, Santa, I will get them done as soon as possible! (No promises on any other mischief I may get into, however. [insert evil grin here]) ;-p
Meanwhile, I'll be here practicing my innocent look:
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Paul Kelly, who is rightly considered a national treasure in his native Australia but is criminally overlooked Stateside, is the author of this wonderful, moving, and utterly unique Christmas song: "How to Make Gravy." While he does, indeed, tell you how to make gravy, it's about much, much more. This is a gem. :D
No one but Paul Kelly could have written this - and thank goodness for the rest of us that he did. :c)
Here are a few others from his vast catalog of great songs. First up, we have "Before Too Long," from 1986:
Next up is "If I Could Start Today Again," from 2002:
If you appreciate great songwriting, he has a terrific anthology called Songs from the Southland that is the perfect introduction to this wonderful artist.
Hi everyone, and apologies for the radio silence. I need to keep this brief; I've been frantically busy the past 5-6 weeks, and will be for (hopefully only) another.
Long story short: my landlord, C, who is 91, unfortunately could no longer live by herself. So her family made the difficult position to place her in a nursing home. It's a very good one, fortunately, but it's still quite sad.
As you can imagine, it's quite expensive. As a result, they need to sell her house to pay for her care - which meant that I needed to move, with very little notice (as in, less than a month).
I manged to make it happen (thank you to my best friend F, who was there for me on moving day last Saturday), but it was quite stressful to pull off in just a few weeks. And it necessitated moving Thanksgiving weekend, which is typically a four-day holiday. I am exhausted, as things are quite busy at work right now. Hopefully things will calm down after this week. Fingers crossed.
***
In other news, I wanted to say a few words about a new TS resource that I hope might be useful to some of you. The good folks at Juno Medical, a European healthcare company, kindly asked me if I could let readers of my blog know about a guide they've created with information about GCS.
It's clear they have invested a great deal of thought and care has gone into it, so it is my pleasure to share it with you. Please take a look at the fruits of their labor here:
Thank you to Tim and all of the lovely folks at Juno Medical for putting this together, and for giving me the honor of sharing it with all of you! I hope you find it to be a valuable resource!
That will do it for this girl for now. I hope to start posting a bit more regularly, so watch this space. :c) Have a good week, everyone...
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On top of the stress of moving, I'm still coping with the fallout from our most recent election here in the States. I almost never post about politics here, and only mention it now to say that it makes me even more grateful than usual for what is my very favorite Christmas album of all time: Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. This is "Christmas Time Is Here," one of the lovely originals he composed (along with Lee Mendelson, the special's producer).
So peaceful... thank you, Vince, and thank you, Charles Schulz...
Well, I don't know about Devil (perhaps "mischievous pixie," to paraphrase how Alice usually refers to me? lol).. but I certainly enjoyed wearing my steampunk outfit to the Halloween party at the office today!
Well, part of my steampunk outfit, anyway; I purchased an awesome hat online to go with this outfit, but alas, it didn't arrive in time for the party today.
But no matter; I loved every second I spent wearing it, from the dress to the petticoats (sigh... petticoats) to my thigh-high boots. (The skirt and petticoat cover them up, but take my word for it: they are sooooo much fun to wear! Even if I was barely able to hobble to my car in the parking lot at the end of the day. lol)
Since this is an actual outfit and not simply a costume, I'll be able to wear it again in the future - and I plan to do so as much as possible, be-hatted and carrying my aerodynamically-efficient parasol. In the meantime, here's a more close-up shot of yours truly in her steampunked glory. Hope you like it!
As you can likely tell, I had an absolute blast dressing up today. Not to be outdone, my colleagues, The Divine Miss M and The Equally Adorable Miss S, both came dressed to the nines today.
As it turned out, TDMM and I were matching gingers. She even managed the seemingly impossible feat of being even paler than your humble blogstress. No mean feat, that. (In case you're wondering, she came as a zombie - a cute-as-a-button zombie, granted... but still a zombie). :D
TEDMS, meanwhile, while not a ginger-for-a-day like TDMM, was just as fetching in all of her elf-like glory. :c) And she bakes a mean spicy chocolate cookie too, I might add. Yummm....
Happy Halloween, all!
***
It's a given that this post feature Bruce Springsteen's epic "Devil With the Blue Dress" medley, covering Detroit's great Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels:
And since I saw them just a few weeks ago, here's a gorgeous song from Toronto's favorite sons, Blue Rodeo:
Soooo good! In fact, that deserves a follow-up, don't you think?
Incidentally, the handsome young gentleman singing the second verse is Devin Cuddy - and that's his father, Jim, Blue Rodeo's co-founder (along with Greg Keelor, who wrote and sings this song) beaming proudly in the background. :c)
Hello all. Hope autumn is treating you well. My allergies have been acting up in ways they haven't since before I moved to Seattle over 15 years ago. I don't think they're back; it's just that we had an unusually hot and dry summer this year, which has stirred something up.
I'm not really congested; mostly I get headaches (nasty ones, in several cases), a dry cough, and feel somewhat tired. Once we have our first frost I'm sure I'll be back to normal. (And as I joked with my manager L today, I can finally start wearing the cute boots I purchased last spring!)
I have several posts in various stages of readiness, but need to wrap up a few things before I post them. In the meantime, I wanted to share a moment from last week that stopped me in my tracks - literally.
I was walking downtown around noon on a bright, sunny day. I'd just returned from a mini-vacation to visit my dear friend Alice up above the Maple Curtain (known to some as Canada) that morning (aside: Canadians have the right idea in celebrating Thanksgiving in October when, you know, it actually happened in the first place!), and decided to go for a walk downtown to pick up a prescription.
Perhaps I was tired from allergies, or still a bit bleary-eyed from having risen at 5:30 to catch my flight. Whatever the reason, I noticed something that I suspect would ordinarily not have.
I saw the silhouette of a woman, wearing what looked like a ruched dress, reflected in the store window I was passing. She was taking long strides, her pocketbook bouncing and hair ruffled by the breeze.
I thought, "Hmm... I should check her out"... -until I suddenly realized who she was:
Me.
Whoa.
As I mentioned above, I truly did stop in my tracks.
I was stunned.
I've been full-time for nearly three years.
I've long since become comfortable in my own skin, long since realized I genuinely liked who I was, for the first time in my life.
Transitioning is the hardest thing I've ever done. I've experienced depths of pain and loss I could not have fathomed previously.
But it's also the best thing I've ever done. I've worked and worked - and continue to work - to learn who I truly am, and to appreciate myself, flaws and all.
Part of that - a crucial part of it - is that I've come to realize that I pass. I look in the mirror now and see me, not "him." I've also come to realize, much to my surprise, that other people are noticing me in ways I never once experienced pre-transition. I'm still learning to adjust to that reality (and enjoying the process of doing so immensely, I must say!). :D
For all of those reasons, I was beaming as I began walking again.
For in that moment, seeing the silhouette of that woman, I had my first experience of seeing myself as someone else would.
And for all the heartache and pain, I was reminded once again that it has all been worth it.
And that the best is yet to come.
***
Not that it's ever necessary to have a reason, but this post gives me a great excuse to share this great track from Tom Petty's classic 1979 Damn the Torpedoes album:
And this track is from one of my favorite bands, Oasis. If it's possible for a song on an album that's sold in excess of 15 million copies worldwide to be a deep track, it's this one from (What's the Story) Morning Glory?
This version comes from one of two sold-out shows Oasis played at Knebworth in October 1996 to over 250,000 people. Noel Gallagher, the band's chief songwriter and guitarist, has since remarked that he played those shows in awe of the fact that in barely four years they had risen from playing their first show to perhaps a dozen people to the absolute pinnacle.
I think I've posted this before, but my favorite Oasis song wasn't even released on an album, or as a single. It was, incredibly enough, the flip side of the "Roll With It" single - "Rockin' Chair":
It's incredible that such a great song could be released as a B-side!
Just saying hello. I've had some adventures the past few days, which I promise I'll post about as soon as I get some sleep. (As I said... I had some adventures. :-p)
Here's a quick shot I snapped over the weekend in a rush - so much so that apparently I neglected to, you know... aim. :)
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