In addition to the rally we attended last week, Stephanie landed her loop during her skating lesson on Thursday, which is a major breakthrough and something she’s been working on for a long time. One of her fellow skaters filmed her doing the loop on his digital camera, so I’m hoping to see it soon. So congratulate her when you see her; she’s doing great.
Read on; this is a long update:
Designer Looby Lu is an illustrator/cartoonist who is starting an online business selling adorable dolls she’s designed and hand made.
When I saw them I thought of some of the things my mom has made.
I have Movable Type up and running on my site, and this blog you see is in it now. However, I’m still working on moving my old blog posts from Blogger into Movable type, and I’m only about half done. The difficulty is with Blogger, not with the new content management system. Within Blogger, I can only export 999 posts at a time, which is not all of my posts by a long shot. That’s why if you look at my journal page it appears that my blog only goes back to 2003; that’s only the most recent 999 posts. And within Blogger, to get at those other earlier posts to export then, I have to delete the recent 999 one by one.
The other thing that kinda bites is that I lose all the comments made on posts in the past, because Blogger can’t export them. So I need you all to go back through my blog and write the same comments that you wrote before. 🙂 Heh.
“An upward movement initiated in time can counteract fate.”
I got this one last week, and it’s easily the strangest, most mysterious fortune cookie I’ve ever received. This is what a fortune cookie should be; inscrutable.
More health-related googling and blogging for me.
Transesophageal Echocardiogram
Basically, I have to have one of these soon to see what’s actually going on inside my heart.
Today I went to the cardiologist (Dr. Yee, Cardiac Care Center, Methodist Hospital) to talk about the results of my recent echocardiogram. While I was there, he was interested in finding out how my heart reacts to stress, so he had me stay and and do a stress echo, which is the same thing as last week, only with exercise. Basically they do an echo, then the put you on a treadmill to get your heart rate up as high as possible, then they lay you back down and do another echo while your heart rate is way up. It wasn’t as fun as the last one; it was exhausting.
They were able to learn a lot more about what’s going on, but they don’t have a really detailed picture of the architecture of my heart, which is where the Transesophageal Echocardiogram will come in. Unfortunately, what that involves is sticking a tube down my throat and doing an ultrasound from inside my body, which means I have to be put under and on an IV, etc. I have to have some one take me and pick me up from the hospital, etc. More complicated and stressful.
Recently the Indiana Senate passed Senate Joint Resolution 7 on a vote of 42 to 8. The proposal to amend Indiana’s Constitution to ban same-sex marriage now moves to the Indiana House of Representatives for their consideration. Authored by Senator Brandt Hershman (R-Wheatfield), SJR 7 would also bar similar legal structures such as civil unions, threaten domestic-partnership benefits, and endanger other legal protections for unmarried families.
If your Indiana State Senator is one of the 42, they are Wanted for Crimes Against the Constitution! Please let your Senator’s constituents know about this! Download a WANTED Poster [PDF] of your senator to send!
For example if you live in ZIP Code 46219, your Senator is probably Patricia L. Miller, Republican.
Um. this is totally Mike’s fault that I have this “Numa Numa” song stuck in my head. I’m not planning on forgiving him.
But check out the site; the guy (Gary Brolsma) singing along on his web cam is priceless. Here’s another site of him singing; it’s great.
I guess this same thing was featured on the Today show, too, and on VH-1’s Best Week Ever according to MSNBC. I’m apparently the last one to hear of it. Oh, well, I’ve been busy. The song is O-Zone’s Dragostea Din Tei.
Photo Set: 2005 Rally Against SJR-7
We had a wonderful, successful rally at the Indiana Statehouse yesterday! Hundreds of people showed up with extraordinary signs to protest the SJR7 legislation. We were getting people’s contact information, and of the people who agreed to sign up, we got 757 contact addresses. That was about 3/4ths of the crowd, so we had about 1,000 people attending.
What I was really impressed with was not just the fact that I saw tons of people I knew (some of whom I’d never imagine going to a political rally) but I saw tons of people I’ve never seen before in my life. That’s really amazing, because when you’ve been out in the gay community as long as I have, you tend to think it’s really small and that everyone knows everyone else. It takes something like this to make me realize that we have a HUGE gay community in Indiana.
There were excellent speakers, and according to some of the people who lobby regularly, we made a great impression on some of the legislators. Nobody expected the size of crowd we had. At the end of the rally we went inside to lobby, and ran into Eric Miller’s Advance America bigots as they were leaving. Most of Miller’s crowd were home-schooled kids and christian school kids who get extra credit for being bussed into Miller’s rally.
So we chanted at them and basically screwed up the end of their rally. Stephanie and I were by the doors, and a group of bigots who were leaving started to bunch up to trap us inside, chanting and trying to intimidate us. So we kissed in front of them and freaked them out. It was GREAT! They RAN outside to get away from us. A reporter from the IU School Paper snapped our photo while we were kissing, and then interviewed us, so we’re likely to end up in the IU paper. It was really exciting.
UPDATE: Stephanie and I were quoted in the IU paper but they didn’t include our picture.
Scott Barrett’s Photos
Marti Abernathy’s Photos
Scott Barnes’ Photos
Wilson’s Photos
Check out this picture of an anti-gay bigot attempting to punch one of the people from our rally:
South Bend Tribune
Another Story of threatened violence from the bigots from a person at our rally: “The Advance America people were filing out —a small group of 5 or 6 young men approached me holding our big IE sign and one said, ‘Don’t you wish we had some torches?!’ The others laughed and they continued on down to the sidewalk.”
NUVO Story: “God hates gays”
Indy Star
WISH-TV
WTHR
The IndyChannel (RTV6)
WXIN – Channel 59 (Indianapolis)
WIBC/Network Indiana
Associated Press
Courier-Journal (Louisville)
Indianapolis Star (Dan Carpenter column) “Inside the anti-gay crusade”
Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne)
Courier & Press (Evansville)
Northwest Indiana Times
365Gay.Com
What follows has been lifted from an article called “Top Ten “Anti-Gay” Companies” that was published in a Christian magazine called Business Reform (hence the anti-gay language). Don’t shop here:
4. Meijer Inc.
Industry: Retail
Why We Picked Them: Meijer made the number 9 spot in 2004 on Forbes’ list of the 200 Largest Private Companies, and yet they still have succeeded where retail king Wal-Mart has failed. No domestic partner benefits, nothing about gays in the workplace written into the company manual, and no overt support of the GLBT lifestyle or agenda.
8. RadioShack
Industry: Retail
Why We Picked Them: With industry mates Borders Group, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and SC Johnson & Son getting high praise from pro-gay groups like The Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC), RadioShack has retained most of their values when it comes to not supporting the homosexual agenda. The company offers no benefits for domestic partners, and requires no sexual diversity training. RadioShack also does not support any GLBT groups financially.
9. Exxon Mobile
Industry: Energy and Utilities
Why We Picked Them: Exxon, in 1999, was only the second company in
American history to rescind domestic partner benefits for its employees (Perot Systems Corp. was the first-see above). It also rescinded its sexual non-discrimination policy that was once in its employee handbook. Exxon is not exactly on the HRC’s list of favorite companies, given that Exxon regularly donates money to organizations dedicated to upholding traditional family values.
Note from Ron: This is my favorite recipe for Perogies which does spice them up a bit and makes them very tasty.
Dough Ingredients:
•
Mix all ingredients together until dough leaves side of bowl. Roll out on a well floured surface until 1/8 inch thick. Cut into 3” squares, fill with potato mixture and fold into triangles from corner to corner, press edges to seal. Place on brown paper to dry for at least 2 hours. Place perogie in boiling salted water and when they rise lift out and place on dish. Cover with melted butter or ketchup and eat. Fry leftovers.
Perogie Filling:
•Mash boil potatoes until they are chunky, NOT Smooth. Cut up bacon and fry with diced onion until crispy, place in small bowl. Brown down small chunks of Spicy Pork Sausage, add Garlic. Use all together, or separately with potatoes for filling.