Oh barf. Newsweek has an article about flexitarianism which is the phenomenon of being vegetarian but eating meat occasionally. This sounds like pescetarianism, which is also not vegetarianism. According to the article only 2-3 percent of Americans are traditional vegetarians - I can’t believe it’s that low - and lot more people eat meat occasionally. You guys might remember the foray I attempted to make into meat eating a couple of months ago…but I just can’t do it. I’ve been vegetarian for 15 years and the idea is just abhorrent to me.

Today was the memorial service for Robert Davis, an incredible figure in the leather community in Baltimore and surrounding areas. This man cared so much. He did work in Baltimore for homeless people and people living with HIV/AIDS. He had time for everybody, somehow his days had over 24 hours. He was so encouraging to hopeful leather titleholders, giving them a guiding hand. His contributions are too many to number. He really was incredible. And he gave of his body, literally, to save a fellow leatherman’s life. When he found out a friend needed a kidney, he donated his. Can you give any more in your life to someone? (I believe the kidney is the only thing you can donate while you’re alive.)

The service was really touching, lots of tears. I interpreted free, of course, and so did fairerhiannon. Two of my favorite deaf people showed up; they both spoke about their memories of him. My own memory, which was briefly related by one of the deaf guys, was from IDL 2005. Robert wanted to get up on stage and say something; I offered to interpret and he said no, he’d do it himself! He was capable of holding a conversation in ASL and did his own presentation on stage.

I really can’t describe what a great guy he was. Just phenomenal. I kept expecting him to walk in the door, the service was held at the Hippo, and he’d been there so many times before. I had been thinking about him during the week before he died; I am not the woo-woo type but I think it is a little odd that I had been. I wish I had sent an email to ask how he was doing. He is so deeply missed.

Okay. So I write for the official blog for my school, right? And sometimes I read it, too. Here is something recently posted by an ultra-religious, ultra-conservative HUG student:

I wonder what happened to the American people between 9/11 and now. What changed? In 2001, most everyone loved President Bush. He received countless emails, phone calls, and letters from Americans showing their support for his godly leadership. Then, something happened. Now, people go so far as to send him coffins. Tell me, why do people HATE Bush? If you disagree with his policies, fine; I can accept that. But hate him? What did he, in and of himself–alone, do that was so terrible?

I can’t even respond to that. I’m too astonished. I need to go beat my head against a wall 900 times now.

I love dumb people. All day today I have watched a back and forth pertaining to the Family Tree DNA project. Some people seem unclear on the concept, and they think it means you can actually find your relatives. (Admittedly the ftDNA website makes it seem like you can; I only signed up because I participated in the Genographic Project, I wasn’t hoping to find anybody.) So some guy e-mailed 381 people. In the “to” field, so we can see them all. The very first reply was somebody saying “this only means we are related 50 generations back, but how did you find a server that let you email so many people?” Then people started replying with their genealogical info. Then I replied and said “okay look people, it really only means we are related as far back as 10 generations, blah blah here is the scientific stuff.” Then there was more genealogical info, more requests for people to shut up, etc. I replied to the first replier and said “why did you use reply all?” Now she’s emailed me back and said “You are the only one that answered, I had to email the guy six times to get an answer to my question, I want to know what server allows you to email 381 people!” So I said “Wait…it sounds like you want to know so you can spam people. I know that can’t be it, right?” But you see, she is a politican, so it probably is right. Sigh.
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I’m still sick and still home. A insisted I had to stay home, and my friend G. told me on IM just now that if she hadn’t said to stay home, he would have! I did have to drop my car off at the shop for its appointment - 30k maintenance, P0171, and P1170 on the OBD-II reader. On the way home, I bought something I would like for lunch (frozen pad thai with tofu) and a bunch of popsicles and some steam-in-bag veggies. I weighed myself this morning out of curiosity and I was 195.0 which is 1-lb down from last week despite pizza on Saturday, so I guess eating nummies when you are sick is not that bad. No, I’m not eating junk food, just “oh I feel icky I would like a 100-calorie pack of Doritos now” and “my throat hurts gimme popsicle” type of nummy-eating.

I am watching Slacker Uprising today, Michael Moore’s new film, free streaming download. No subtitles on the website unfortunately, I can hear it just fine with the sound up, but Gallaudet ordered a copy of the DVD (free for schools, $10 for others) which does have subtitles so the rest of campus can watch it.

I’m kind of glad I’m the kind of person who has to be told to stay home. I used to be the kind of person who would take advantage of a tickle in the throat, but the fact that I enjoy school so much that I have to be told to stay home is nice. I just wish I didn’t have to miss school in the process. Why can’t the world stop and wait for me to get better?!

I can go over a year without getting sick, easily. I may feel sluggish and sore and cranky for other reasons, but I don’t get SICK sick. Well, I am now SICK sick. I don’t know if it’s a sinus infection (major ear and eye pressure going on) or a cold (snuffling, sneezing), or the flu (stiffness and soreness). It’s all of the above, I guess. Thank goodness there’s no stomach bug involved. By the way, does dieting get canceled when one is sick? I think it should.

I went to school today anyway because I had to give a presentation for my HIV/AIDS class. We were supposed to be working in teams, but the girl I was supposed to work with didn’t do anything. We’ve had this assignment for at least two weeks, and she never said anything. Last week on Thursday I was going to say “hey, so, we need to do this, right?” But she wasn’t in class. On Saturday evening she asked my friend Colleen (who is also in the class) for my pager number.^* Colleen paged me and asked if she could give it. I said “well I’ve already done everything, but sure, why not.” Needless to say, I never heard from the girl. I mentioned this to Colleen, and she said “that’s funny, she told me she paged you and didn’t get a response. Let me make sure I sent your number correctly.” Yup, she did. And this girl I was supposed to be working with skipped class again today because…she had a soccer game. So she contributed absolutely 0.0% to this “group” project. Obviously, I had to go in to give the presentation. A kept saying “you shouldn’t go in” but she found some Alka-Seltzer Cold and it was enough to get me to school, through the presentation, and back home.

Where I am now snuggled in bed. I had some no-chicken noodle soup earlier, I might have more, or I might have something else. That’s why it’s fortunate that I don’t have stomach issues…feed a cold, starve a fever, right?

^* - To say “pager” in the deaf community typically means your Blackberry, Sidekick, or other two way alphanumeric text communication device. When you say “I’ll page you” you’re referring to some type of mobile text communication - can be SMS, e-mail, or IM if your device is capable of that.

Emulated Mac, originally uploaded by woofiegrrl.

As you can see, I managed to get a Mac emulator working on my computer. I did it with this tutorial and it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would have to be! Of course it only works in VMWare, not VirtualBox (which I prefer), but it does work. Unfortunately it’s only Tiger, and I really wanted Leopard; also, it runs abysmally slowly, so it’s not like an actual workable solution or anything. I still want a MacBook…I’m considering offering people money for signing up with GiftMonkey because I want a MacBook so bad. Whoever thought I’d be craving a Mac?! Mostly I just think it’s cool that you can emulate pretty much anything on a Mac, including XP…I could make a virtual machine out of the laptop I’m typing on now, and then just run that on the MacBook, and use Mac stuff when I wanted to, and…and…and…

Okay, I know, I’m lame. But my friend Geoff got a $3,000 MacBook paid for by work and I am SO jealous. Plus we got Macs for the honors lounge and I am SO jealous. I want a shiny MacBook. Plus, you can run Windows on a Mac LOADS easier than you can run a Mac on a PC. (I’m still working on that; I do know about PearPC. No, FlyakiteOSX isn’t enough.)

So anyway, I signed up with GiftMonkey to get their MacBook Air. Reviews around the web indicate that GiftMonkey is one of the legitimate free stuff sites; you have to jump through the usual hoops, but then they actually deliver. So what I’m asking is for you to visit tinyurl.com/giftmonkey and complete an offer. You do not have to harass your friends, you just have to complete an offer. Some take credit cards and some don’t; I chose the Stamps.com offer which does require a credit card, but it’s also one I won’t kick myself if I forget to cancel for a month.

So yeah, I know this is lame, but if you feel like helping me out…I like shiny MacBooks!

From what I can tell, the Baltimore City Life Museums are gone forever. Although the Carroll Mansion and the Phoenix Shot Tower are still open under the auspices of the Carroll Museums, the other buildings on Museum Row and elsewhere in the city are just gone.

The 1840 House, pictured above, was my first “job” when I was 10 years old. We had gone there for a Girl Scout overnight, and I was so enamored of the place that I wanted to work there. (I think the fact that docents were costumed interpreters played a large part!) So for some reason, my mother drove me to the 1840 House on a regular basis, so I could give tours. I suspect most visitors were rather surprised to have a 10-year-old leading a tour (I might be misremembering my age, but I don’t think I was more than 13) but I’d like to think I did a fairly good job of it. My mother also washed my enormous dress, which was full-length and buttoned all the way down and which I absolutely loved. They happened to have one that fit me in their collection because the house told the story of a family, and there were daughters in the family, so they had a dress in my size - I seem to remember the petticoat got left there though, because all the girls who performed there shared them. I still remember the layout of the place quite well, right down to the chamber pot that was in the master bedroom that I used to mime tipping out through the window so people could see that its contents were dumped on whoever was walking by on the street!

Unfortunately I don’t even know what happened to the place. According to the E2 node I wrote about seven years ago, everything was transferred to the Maryland Historical Society. So I guess the walk-through experience of the 1840 House, the Center for Urban Archaeology, and the other BCLM buildings is just lost. According to this page the 1840 house was “closed by [the] city government” - what does that mean? And this page says they were trying to sell it for commercial interests; this old Baltimore Sun article says a couple was going to redo the rowhouses as a bed & breakfast and mentions that they were replicas (?!) for which $1M was paid back in 1999. There’s a flurry of articles from November and April 1998 about them, too…the attempt to save them. Their plunge into bankruptcy is covered in articles from mid-to-late 1996 and early 1997.

Whatever the museums’ fate, I hope the giant Nipper ended up somewhere happy.

So I’ve got the Blackberry back. It turns out the old one did not survive enough for data transfer; I tried hooking it up and the computer registered it as new hardware, but then the Desktop Manager refused to see it as connected. The latest backup I had was July 29th so I restored that one and at least I got most of my address book back. Thank goodness I’ve been using a Gmail account as my primary mobile address, so all of my emails are automatically backed up! I got the new Otterbox case installed right away, and I have a few bubbles but I’m not going to mess with them until I need to open up the case for some other reason. The membrane is a little hard to get used to, I’ve been making occasional typos on the keyboard, but it turns out “you can use your trackball through the membrane” means “there’s a little hole in the membrane so you’re using the trackball directly” which works fine. I don’t remember all the programs I had on the old one, but I can download them as I realize I don’t have them! The only one that might be an issue is Geocache Navigator, because I think that one is tied to your device’s PIN and mine is different now. I emailed them yesterday but I haven’t gotten a response yet.