Frothings, rants, and general blather...

Ah – a lull at work (ie., no bosses around), so I can actually write a bit. It’s cold and grey and crappy out, but at least there is no snow and ice.

So, not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking lots about Haiti over the past week, and, in particular, thinking about what a complete tits-up disaster the country is, how that has come about, and what can be done to fix it. One of the guys I work with, a Ghanaian, made a really interesting comment the other day – he said that the best thing that the NGOs could do right now, as they do their work saving the country, is to work with each other to ensure that it at least looks like the Haitian govt has some control over the matter, as this was the only way that there was ever going to be any respect for or trust in the govt after such a humongous calamity. Unfortunately, this won’t happen, as most of the NGOs have their own (often competing) agendas. (See http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-consider-the-risks-before-you-send-your-cash-to-haiti-1873076.html for example...). There was an interesting clip on the BBC the day after it happened. It showed fresh-faced, all-white, young, American missionaries boarding a plane to go back home. This one girl, maybe late high school age, said to the reporter, “It was really scary!” Yes, honey, I’m sure it was, but it’s a good thing now that you can board a plane and go back home, leaving everyone else there to deal with the mess. I’m not saying I have the slightest desire to be anywhere near Haiti right now (or ever), but it just struck me that these self-same people, there to save the souls of the heathens living in sin, bugger off back home the minute that their presence there might actually be useful – saving people for real, in the flesh! I wasn’t very impressed, and I have a sneaking suspicion that neither was the BBC producer who slotted that bit into the news report.

In other Haiti related news, our dept has decided to launch a money appeal. All very well and good. The webpage has a nice little message on it about how the dept wants to raise blah amount of money, and a link to go to some pictures – most of them, not surprisingly, rather disturbing. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that these pictures are interspersed with pics from the dept Xmas party, including one of me going for the buffet table. There is a minor riot brewing in the office I think – how could anyone think that was in good taste???

Anyway…

I’m picking up my bike today, with the third frame in two years. The second frame cracked in exactly the same places as the first. The woman at the bike store said that Marin frames have had loads of problems. Supposedly, they have put the newest frame on the bike (which has been pretty substantially changed). I wrote a suitably aggrieved letter to the company, and if this one bites it I’m going to write letters to every bike magazine and bicycle forum I can think of. I should have just gotten a penny farthing.

Decided to push back my citizenship a bit until I can finish paying off my credit card. I don’t actually need to get citizenship at the moment – I just want it. It is extremely expensive though – not very helpful for getting one’s debts under control. Poo.

Not a lot else at the moment really – things have been pretty dull, which I guess is not necessarily a bad thing. The days are getting slightly longer, which is most definitely a GOOD THING. Oh, we’ve seen a few movies lately. Saw Wolverine, which was complete crap, but at least fun (though, really – if they are trying to substitute New Zealand for the Canadian Rockies, they really should get rid of the arrows on the wrong side of the road!) We also saw Mary Poppins again, which I’d not seen in years. I still love that movie. (I probably always secretly wanted to be Mary Poppins). That was actually the first movie I ever saw in a movie theatre, with Mom and Grammie. I really didn’t have a hope in hell of ever being a heterosexual! Embarrassingly, I think it also has something to do with my very early interest in England, and how I ended up in this silly little country (though that has more, directly, to do with Jennifer and I running into some hunky Scots with amazing accents at a hostel in Vancouver in 1992…). I digress… We also watched Up, which is probably one of the cutest movies I have ever seen – I very much recommend.

Oh, last thing – it looks like I’m going to be helping David schlep his crap down from CT to AL in a U-Haul in April, stopping off at a wedding along the way (a wedding full of rabid, right-wing Repubs! How fun – I can’t wait!!!). We’re probably going to pick Robin up in Richmond, VA, and have a big gay drive down south (shades of Priscilla in a U-Haul?). We’ll have to endeavour not to end up on the news…

And that’s about it for the mo… I should probably do some work now. How dull…

Y2K and a tenner...

And, well it's 2010 - woohoo! We had about 10 people over last night for food and a vast amount of alcohol (luckily, no one was sick or had to be put to bed! I suppose we are all just getting too old and responsible (giggle)). We all piled up onto the roof just before midnight to watch the fireworks being shot off from the London Eye (and numerous other locations), and to clunk together our fancy plastic champagne glasses. Five or so minutes of fireworks were enjoyed, and then we decided it was actually rather cold (and it had started to snow), so we all piled back inside and sat around the rather crispy Christmas tree. People wandered off by about 2 or 3am and the three of us bundled off to bed. Or, rather, David ended up falling asleep on the sofa, I actually went to bed, and I think Robin wandered off in a general bedward direction. This morning (and I say morning in the loosest possible way), there may have been some hangovers to be nursed (not bad ones though, thankfully), but, all and all, a complete success.

And - I think we officially ceased to be white trash today because we no longer have a sofa, shrink-wrapped and under a tarp, living on the roof. Our landlady refused to store any of the (really crappy) furniture this place came with, and we sure as hell weren't going to store it (mucho expensivo), so, we've used some of it, one of the mattresses went off to a friend's and has since disappeared (i.e., got thrown away), and now we are down a sofa as well. We decided it would be cheaper, in the end, just to get some crappy sofas to replace them rather than pay £75/month to keep them in storage. Anyway, we decided to get rid of the sofa b/c the roof started to leak (unrelated to the sofa), and we have a roofer coming out to fix things. It seemed like an opportune moment to get rid of the thing. So, I called the council, which is coming tomorrow morning to pick it up from the front yard (OK, we're still white trash b/c we now have a dead sofa sitting in the front yard). Problem was, the sofa was sitting on the roof, three floors up, and the stairway down is very narrow - no way to get large things down without getting the downstairs neighbours to open their doors so we can back up into their flats. We thought about a variety of ways of getting the sofa down - winching it down using a hose or whatever. But, in the end, David and Robin just gave it the old heave-ho off the back of the building, and I stood at the bottom to catch it, I mean, to make sure there was nothing important that it might hit. Fingers crosses, prayers said, they launched it off the top of the building and it landed with a rather loud crack (but in one piece and without breaking any windows or fences) into a bramble pile. Thank God for brambles! And then we hauled it around the back of the building, into the front yard, where tomorrow morning the council is to come haul it away to make park benches or Volkswagens or something out of it. We hope. If that fails, there is a large housing project next door to here with a big trash area and I'm sure they wouldn't notice the addition of a big, dead sofa... ;-)

So yeah - that's the big excitement so far for 2010 - sofas falling from the sky. It's a brave new world...

This just in - a case of 'you know you live in a gay household when...' Robin has been chatting with some potential love (of the moment) online. Rather abruptly, he marched over here (as I'm eating dinner) and said, 'Do I have a hairy buttcrack?' Apparently, that was on (or off) Mr. Online's checklist... Oh the things we do for good friends...