My So-Called Blog

The High Court in New Delhi struck down the law criminalizing gay sex.

In what many are calling “India’s Stonewall”, the New Delhi High Court on Thursday decriminalized homosexual intercourse between consenting adults, by striking down section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This law labels gay sex to be an “unnatural offense”, punishable with up to ten years in prison.

Drafted in 1860, this Colonial-era law was brought into effect by the British, and was in line with similar anti-homosexuality legislation passed in England at the time. In the past decade, gay rights activists and lawyers have strived hard to abrogate Section 377, calling it “inhuman”, and as the Naz Foundation, which filed the petition to abolition 377 in 2001 argued, a violation of constitutional rights to privacy and equality.

In its ruling today, the Delhi High Court affirmed that claim, saying that Section 377 violated basic human rights. The same court, however, had dismissed a similar petition in 2001. It is clear that this latest ruling is a reflection of increased activism by gay rights groups and high profiled supporters like Bollywood actress and Former Miss World Celina Jaitley, along with a more progressive government.

Needless to say, this is an amazing development for New Delhi. I hope this event is another lengthy ring in the death knell of anti-homosexual legislation everywhere.

July 2nd, 2009 | Category: GLBT, Int'l News-ishness | Leave a comment

…but this has to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen yet.

June 26th, 2009 | Category: File 13 | Comments (1)

Dear Dad,

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about you. As time marches forward without you here, I’m seeing the true depth of things I never asked you about.

This week I went golfing for the first time with my friend JS. I shanked the ball and was probably 100 over par on a nine-hole course, but hell… I haven’t held a club since 1990. It occurred to me as I hit my second sand-trap shot that I never asked you what your first round of golf was like. My eyes stung with tears as I realized we never talked about that. So many questions I just assumed I’d have time to ask.

Thinking about that stirs up grief so strong I can barely keep it inside.

Mom misses you a lot. I know she feels lost without you. So much happened so fast, I think it’s just now hitting her. She’s going to move closer to us soon. I know she will not miss the house… I think it will be good for her to be here.

I still have not dreamed about you directly. I wish more than I can tell you for a visitation, even if only in my dreams. To hear your voice and imagine your touch. Because even an imagined visit is better than nothing. And right now, so often the day feels like nothing.

The next time I go out on the course I will pretend I can hear your voice, telling me which club to choose, how to anticipate the lie, how to get out of the infernal sand trap. I will try to feel your hand on my shoulder as I wind up and take a swing- a swing that will no doubt be errant, but at least contact will be made.

I miss you, Dad.

Love,

~Lachlan

June 26th, 2009 | Tags: dreams, grief, Missing | Category: Memoria & Nostros, The Devil Duck Tales | Leave a comment

A bit of prologuing: Some of you may remember that Sumi had a rather exciting adventure when we visited Indiana two years ago.

The gentlemen who accidentally set her free is my good friend TW’s friend we’ll call RW. RW and I met later in 2007 where I thoroughly embarrassed him by saying “So YOU’RE the guy who let my dog out.” He turned scarlet. I was still mad at him two months later, but saying that gave me peace of mind. I heard later he was mortified all over again.

Well, RW has raised himself considerably in my estimation today. More »

June 15th, 2009 | Category: Jet City News | Comments (4)

I woke up this morning, melancholy. I dreamt of going to Dad’s funeral. Again. And as with all dreams, there were many nonsensical moments, weird outfits, and unexpected people showing up.

And somewhere, this song came back to me from the far reaches of my memory.

Prayer, Lizzie West

“Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that flow
I am the sunlight on my own grave

Do not stand at my grave and cry.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there I did not die.
I am not there I did not die.

June 6th, 2009 | Tags: dreams, grief, love, Missing | Category: Memoria & Nostros | Comments (3)

…my honey is 28 years old.

She is now the same age I was when we met. It’s almost impossible for me to believe that we’ve been together 6 1/2 years. My life has been infinitely better for having her in it.

So happy birthday, my love. Tonight we celebrate your awesomeness with a good bottle of wine!

June 3rd, 2009 | Tags: Birthday, family, love | Category: Blogsploitation | Comments (5)

I’m working on so many things right now my head is spinning, but the key to them all is baby steps.

-Can’t get my first geocache placed? Patience and incremental steps, research, etc.¹
-Learning my new job? Little bits of knowledge, I can’t learn it all at once.²
-Modifying my diet and exercise? VERY small steps; more water in the AM, eating every two hours, bringing healthier snacks to work, reducing processed foods.³

Lots going on. Never a dull moment!

And if anyone needs a reminder of the human will and its possibilities, check out this lady.

1. It’s driving me crazy. I feel like I’m flying blind [↩]
2. Though I keep trying, dammit [↩]
3. Will someone please take the beer away? Please? [↩]

May 28th, 2009 | Tags: changes, Fitness, life, patience, planning | Category: The Digital Salt Mines | Comments (3)

So, I have turned the corner of healthy into semi-not healthy. I’ve been asked to take (at least temporarily) a statin for high cholesterol. It’s Simvastatin, in case anyone is curious.

This brings to a head an ongoing battle I’ve been having with my body and food for the past couple years. My metabolism began to slow down around age 33, and I found myself gaining weight. Two nights a week of soccer have not been enough to stave off weight gain or the cholesterol.

Which leaves me… in this place of frustration. There are things I love that I have to admit I’ve been probably consuming too much of:

-beer
-red wine
-meat in general
-sugar

I think to battle this bulge -I’m 5′2″, 150lbs- and get me to where I want to be (125lbs) the keys will be portion control, continued exercise, and switching out the bad snacks for the good.

All my research has led me to some stories that were both inspirational and maddening. People whose diets and weights were WAY worse than mine (seriously, 6 donuts for breakfast? Pizza for dinner EVERY night?) and they managed to lose over 100lbs and keep it off over several years. I am heartened by their success -all done with sensible eating/exercise- and their determination. So what do I have to complain about, really? I’m just looking to shed 25lbs, that’s nothing, right?

It seems like 100, 200. I guess I skated on my reffing and soccer (4 combined nights of running) for a long time. When I tapered off that and began working at the Cool Company, I really started to struggle. Cube life makes for a rounder middle…and here I am with a belly.

Time to right that imbalance. I think I’ll start small. Get the knee healthy, get back to soccer, change my diet slowly, and take the goldurn meds for awhile to see if they help. God willin’ and the creek don’t rise, I may actually meet my goal by the fall.

May 26th, 2009 | Tags: cholesterol, Food, genetics, health, obesity, overweight | Category: The Devil Duck Tales | Comments (10)

*sigh*

I feel like my blog has turned into the corner of the universe where I bitch. Which sucks for the 4 of you who still read and comment. My apologies, because here comes another whine.

We’ve been working on a project to honor my Dad that involves geocaching. We’re having some issues getting it started/up and running because of the rules in geocaching- caches may not be placed closer than .10 mi (528ft) apart. Bayou and I went to our chosen location last night and found a good spot.

I emailed the Geocaching reviewer I’d been working with and s/he told me no dice, it was too close to a multi-stage cache’s endpoint. The problem is, if I have not solved a multi-stage cache, I cannot anticipate its endpoint. So this makes placing a cache in Seattle hard- there a LOT here. In my zip code alone within 15mi there are hundreds.

Anyway, that’s my first whine. I can’t get this placed and it’s making me mad/sad. But I am confident we’ll figure it out.

The real whine is that on our way out of the park last night I fell and banged myself up pretty bad. I stepped on a wet bridge strut and my feet went out from under me. I fell off the bridge I was on, and a lot of the impact was taken by my knee. The inside of my right knee hit the wooden strut as I went down and I flipped completely over. I narrowly missed hitting my knee on a sharp boulder.

I’ve lost flexion/extension and I can’t put a lot of weight on it. Bonus whine: both of our primary care docs are closed on Wednesday. Thank god for my awesome Chiropractor, who is going to see me in a couple hours.

Please, please, please let this just be a seriously bad bruising of the bone/surrounding tissue.

May 20th, 2009 | Tags: cache saturation, Geocaching, injury, whining | Category: Geocaching, Memoria & Nostros, The Devil Duck Tales | Comments (10)

I knew in February this week would be hard. How hard was up for grabs.

Since the day I landed in Ohio the first time, my heart and head have been numbed. A shot of emotional Novocaine right into the heart my being is what’s kept me going. That and some involuntary bodily functions…

Yesterday was two months since Dad died. Today is his 65th birthday. I’m awash in so many feeling that they’re impossible to sort out. My insides are still very numb, but pieces of things have begun to thaw out.

Anger. Profound sadness. Memories. These things come in spurts and rip me open for a short time, before cooling down and icing over. It hurts. It’s tiring. But it seems natural even if it’s not what I expected. I had this script in my head about what the grief would feel like, how the pain would process… but it was as far off as can be.

It feels so unnatural to feel this numb. It feels even more so to not feel driven to expiate the numbness and bring on the pain.

I feel lost. There’s a light at the end of this long, dark tunnel… but I wish I knew when I’ll reach it.

May 7th, 2009 | Tags: Dad, death, emotional process, grief | Category: The Devil Duck Tales | Comments (6)

(Borrowed that from my pal Jill. Hopefully she won’t mind.)

The Maine governor signed the same-sex marriage bill today.

Gov. John Baldacci on Wednesday signed a gay marriage bill passed just hours before by the Maine Legislature.

Baldacci made his announcement within an hour of the Maine Senate giving its final approval to LD 1020. The Senate voted 21-13 in favor of the measure after a short debate.

“In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions,” Baldacci said in a written statement. “I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.”

The House of Representatives gave its approval on a 89-57 vote Tuesday.

The governor’s signature makes Maine the fifth state to allow gay marriage.

5 down, 45 to go…

May 6th, 2009 | Tags: Marriage equaliry, marriage rights | Category: GLBT | Comments (3)

Apparently, it goes something like this:

Move your desk and work possessions to your new digs, but do your old job for two more days. WTF?

Adding weirdness to delay, I’m doing my old job from two years ago. Seriously?

It’s bizarre to sit in a new place, with new peeps, who are doing work completely alien from yours. I’m not quite sure what to make of it, but whatevs. It’s another day in limbo-land.

May 4th, 2009 | Tags: delay, job change, work | Category: The Digital Salt Mines | Comments (5)

Well, this my last week in the role I’ve been doing for four years and 11 months. Time flies when you’re working OT out the ass and making your employer’s site the safest place to transact ever.

I’m not as ambivalent about this change as I was. When first approached, I had just gotten back from Dad’s funeral and the thought of uprooting my work life was far from appealing. But I thought about it and realized that it was the only way to go, and adding skills to one’s resume is never a bad idea.

Plus, I know the team -trained some of them in other functions, too- and the manager well. It wasn’t an unknown quantity.

It still feels a little weird. I’ve been doing the same thing for so long that the thought of tackling a whole new realm is mildly disconcerting. I’m sure I’ll pick it up quick, but there are always bumps in the road. At least I am going to an easygoing manager and to a team with good experience levels. It won’t be like starting over so much as adapting.

I’ll miss my current team, and I got some of the best responses and kindest kudos when the announcement was made. Below the cut is my favorite reply. More »

April 27th, 2009 | Tags: changes, friends, work | Category: The Digital Salt Mines | Comments (4)

Via Pixie. What, you expected content from me? Chaa.

If you want to play, paste the sentences into an entry of your own, change to your answers, then tag any number of people you want.

1. My ex… is my ex for a reason.

2. Maybe I should… do a better job keeping up with my friends & family.

3. I love… seeing the spring sunshine outside my window.

4. People would say that I’m … a little intense.

5. I don’t understand why … people are so selfish.

6. When I wake up in the morning … I hope for a better day than the one before.

7. I lost my … joy when I lost my Dad.

8. Life is full of … surprises, joys, heartaches, and revelations.

9. My past… has shaped me, mostly for the good.

10. I get annoyed by …people with more book smarts than common sense.

11. Parties are … not high on my list of fun things to do.

12. I wish life was not …so brutal and difficult for so many people.

13. Dogs are … a fuzzy, funny bundle of joy.

14. Cats are… a purring, meowing, bundle of contradictions.

15. Tomorrow is … a chance to learn from today.

16. I have a low tolerance for … my mistakes.

17. If I had a million dollars … I’d pay off my Mom’s stuff and get her set up in a phat place here in Seattle. Then I’d take Bayou on a very long unpaid vacation just because I could.

18. I’m totally terrified … of dying without having lived enough.

19. My partner …is my wife, the other half of my heart, and the love of my life.

20. My life is … more blessed than I often realize.

April 24th, 2009 | Tags: fun things, Meme | Category: Blogsploitation, Miscellania | Comments (1)

This is a pretty good profile of a local geocacher and the sport in general.

In other personal geocaching news, I’m participating in a CITO event- “Cache In, Trash Out”- May 2nd. A group of local geocachers will be joining me to remove non-native invasive plants species and trash at Cougar Mountain. One of geocaching’s tenets is respect for the environment, so this is a way to give back. This particular even is being organized by Washington State Geocaching Association.

I had an epiphany a couple weekends back, while I was hoofing a trail in a local park I’d never been to or even heard of previously. Geocaching (to me at least) is micro-travel. I’ve seen more of my local stomping grounds (West Seattle, White Center, South Park, downtown) than I have in the previous 9 years I’ve lived here. I’ve learned more about the history of some of these places, and about the people who heavily influenced industries, nature, or other facets of Seattle. This micro-travel is an excellent substitute for long-distance travel, which is of course a lot more expensive, requires more planning, time off, etc.

This micro-travel has helped me to keep my sanity in these very topsy-turvy times. I look forward to more hiking -and for the really hard geocaches, kayaking- this summer.

April 23rd, 2009 | Tags: Geocaching, local history, micro-travel, Seattle, Seattle neighborhoods, Travel | Category: Geocaching | Comments (4)

People, people. Read the rules of the game! It’s expressly forbidden to bury a geocache. But these two yahoos clearly didn’t get the memo:

A buried geocaching box prompted an evacuation of Fairview High School in Boulder today while officials determined what was in it.

A teacher called from the school at 1515 Greenbriar Blvd. at 11:40 a.m. today, after seeing “a man and a woman burying some kind of box near the stone sign in front of the school,” a police news release said. They drove away in a cream-colored SUV with Nebraska license plates.

There are a number of rules one follows before placing a cache- no burying, don’t place on or near freeways, bridges, schools, or other possible terrorists targets- and be stealthy when placing it for god’s sake.

Stupid episodes like this will cause local governments to crack down on an otherwise harmless pastime.

UPDATE: Oh gadzooks, even better. There was a cache there and it was placed with school-district approval.

I still finding myself mentally calling shenanigans on the couple looking for it. On Columbine’s anniversary, no less. Sheesh, people.

April 20th, 2009 | Tags: ethics, Geocaching, rules, school evacuations | Category: Geocaching | Comments (3)

The upgraded ‘everything-but-marriage’ domestic partnership bill has passed:

The Washington Legislature has passed an “everything but marriage” bill that grants same-sex couples all the rights and benefits the state offers married couples.

After nearly two hours of debate, the House passed the measure on a 62-35 vote Wednesday. It now goes to Gov. Chris Gregoire, who is expected to sign it into law.

The bill expands on previous domestic partnership laws by adding partnerships to all remaining areas of state law where currently only married couples are mentioned. The statutes range from labor and employment rights, to pensions and other public employee benefits.

As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 domestic partnership registrations had been filed since July 2007.

UPDATE:

Before the ink is even dry, the bigots are organizing a referendum. Everything could and probably will remain in limbo for several more months.

April 15th, 2009 | Tags: DP rights, Gay marriage, GLBT, WA State | Category: GLBT | Comments (5)

Way to go and veto the guv, Vermont. Well played.

Vermont has become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote. The Legislature voted Tuesday to override Gov.

Jim Douglas’ veto of a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Under Vermont law, two-thirds of each chamber had to vote for override.

The vote came nine years after Vermont adopted its first-in-the-nation civil unions law.

April 7th, 2009 | Tags: GLBT, marriage, rights | Category: GLBT | Comments (2)

Take a gander here at our latest adventure.

We went all over Vegas, but we also traveled to the Rhyolite ghost town and the Death Valley National Park. You can see it all in the set, start to finish.

April 6th, 2009 | Tags: Death Valley, desert, Geocaching, Las Vegas, Rhyolite, vacation | Category: 2 Tickets To Anywhere | Comments (7)