My concerns about what to wear, getting in early, what I’d say in the voir dire…were all useless! We never even made it into the courtroom. I was at least selected to go upstairs from the jury assembly area, but we just sat around outside courtroom 5G for about an hour while the parties involved - we’d seen them go in - talked amongst themselves, and then we were told by the deputy to go back downstairs to the assembly room. I played my CSI computer game for about half an hour (the modem connections mentioned on the jury website were not functioning, and the wifi access won’t be up until next month) and then listened with amusement as the clerk attempted to locate the one guy who hadn’t returned and was preventing the rest of us from leaving. He finally turned up and we were all released more than an hour earlier than we’d been told we might be set free.

I called A and offered to drive out to where she works for lunch. It’s completely out of the way from anywhere I’d normally go in my free time, but traffic will be easy at this time of day and it will be fun to have lunch with her. After that I have to head back home and go to Jiffy Lube and do a few other errands and chores around the house. It turns out I have to request next Tuesday off work as well, though, just in case my group is called back.

I can finally tell the secret I’ve been holding on to for…oh, a couple of months now!

click to enlarge

Those are our “wedding” rings. We can’t get legally married, of course, and we’ve been practically married for a few years now, but this just symbolizes our commitment. I’m on cloud nine now that we finally have them. We ordered them a couple of weeks ago from DVB, a New York-based company that is the source for many other sellers. My wife (I’ll be calling her that more often now) felt strongly that she wanted a poesy ring, so we were looking at those pretty much exclusively. The ones we ended up getting are in Old French, and they say here is my heart, guard it well. You can see a close-up picture from the maker, but it doesn’t show that the word coeur is actually a drawn heart. It’s based on a ring that is currently in the British Museum, and it dates to about the 15th century. My ring is 14k white gold, and my wife’s ring is 18k yellow gold. For heterosexual couples, the man doesn’t usually have other jewelry to coordinate with and doesn’t care what color the rings are. But being two women, we each had different tastes! We’re not having a ceremony just yet, though…we will probably have some kind of party for our ten-year anniversary, but we don’t really feel the need for a ceremony right now.

As I mentioned, I am absolutely flying high with this. I love our rings, and I love my wife.

I received a gift in the mail today - and I don’t know who sent it! The Amazon.com box was waiting outside the door when I got home, but when I picked it up it felt awfully light. I took it inside and called my girlfriend at work (I usually do that when I get home anyway, to find out when she’ll be coming home) and asked her what she’d gotten me. She said “I hate to tell you, but I didn’t get you anything!” I opened the box to find an envelope that said “Don’t Ruin Your Surprise - Open your gift before this envelope.” So I cut open the packaging and found a small gift-wrapped box with a printed notecard:

Meredith,
For the wonderful way you touch
people’s lives.
–P

I had no idea who “P” might be! As I opened the package, I realized it was a CD, and was delighted to find one of the few k.d. lang CDs I don’t already have. I finally opened the envelope and found the sender’s full name and billing address. He’d sent it next day air (!), gift wrapped and everything, but didn’t indicate who he was! I tried putting the name into Google, but it’s a common first name paired with a common last name so I had absolutely no luck.

So, PT of California, if you’re reading this…feel free to drop me a note and let me know who you are and how you know me! If you really want to keep your identity a secret, that’s okay, but if you feel like revealing yourself I’d love to know! I especially appreciate the note you enclosed with the CD; it’s so nice to know someone out there is thinking of me! Thank you so much!

Yesterday was a very cool experience. On Wednesday, my friend _R_ forwarded me an e-mail from someone looking for an interpreter for an anti-war protest on October 2nd. I said I was definitely interested, and he put me in touch with the group. Because I knew it was a small group, I offered a sliding scale for payment. If they could afford $50 for the day, that would be about half what I charged per hour when I first started intepreting two years ago. If they could only afford $20, I’d take that gladly. And if they needed me to work pro bono, well, I’d do that too.
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I just spent half a day - literally half my waking hours - getting the pictures from the gymnastics show cropped, sized, uploaded, titled, and captioned. I got home around 3pm and it’s now 11pm. I just finished. I have been doing a few other things throughout the afternoon and evening, but that’s been my primary project. I am in no mood to write about the show itself now, I want to do other things! So instead I will just send you to look at the pictures, which have narrative captions anyway. (The captions don’t include my impressions; I’ll write about that later.) Please feel free to leave comments on the pictures!

We had a great time this weekend. We left on Saturday around 3:15, and to our surprise we got to our destination in about an hour. This was much earlier than we’d planned, so we stopped off at a Halloween store in a nearby shopping center. We left at about 4:45, and we got to :JB:’s house within five minutes, so we sat outside in the car. I saw somebody peek through the window of the house and realized we’d been spotted - sure enough, :JB: came out through the front door and waved.

I should pause here to mention who :JB: is and the role he played in my life. For more than 25 years, he taught English at Wilde Lake High School, which I attended from 1993 to 1997. He was my English teacher when I was in ninth grade, and introduced me to the wonders of science fiction - even if I did struggle through reading Brave New World! He had a more important role than that of teacher, though: :JB: was also my advisor. A 20-minute “class” similar to homeroom in many schools, advisory period was where the pledge was recited (he never insisted we say it, but did require us to be respectful), attendance was taken, and other housekeeping duties were performed. But as the name suggests, teachers were also counselors for students - more plentiful than guidance counselors (the school had three when I was there) and better able to get to know each individual student. I was lucky enough to have :JB: as my advisor all four years of high school, and I have stayed in distant touch with him since graduation. Last year, he and his wife were involved in a serious accident while on vacation in Canada. An 18-wheeler struck their motorcycle, leaving them both with injuries too severe to continue their trip - in fact they had to spend several weeks in a hospital before they could even return home to Maryland. There is a lawsuit pending because the crash was the truck driver’s fault, and a few months ago :JB: contacted me to ask for help. He remembered that I type very quickly (95-100wpm on average), and wanted to know if I would be willing to type up the handwritten journal he kept after the accident so it could be used as evidence in the case.
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I saw k.d. lang perform live for the third time last night. I’d seen her at Wolf Trap with good seats, and at the 9:30 Club which is an intimate venue, but our seats at the Meyerhoff were pretty awful, especially given that they were $39 each and the best seats were only $75 each. Next time I’ll pay the additional money so I can see her! If it weren’t for her unique and stunning voice, I might not have known it was k.d. - the face of the person on the stage looked like a tiny white dot with black hair on top, so it could have been anybody. Her voice is unmistakable, though - nobody else sounds like k.d.

She did a mixture of previous songs (Miss Chatelaine, Love Is Simple, and of course Constant Craving among others) and some from her new album, Hymns from the 49th Parallel, which will be coming out in late July and is an ode to her home country of Canada. Her outfit was kind of questionable - it looked Asian-inspired, sort of like a loose kimono-jacket, with a skirt! When she went to sit in a chair to do Patsy Cline’s Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray, somebody called out that she should be careful how she sat down, and she replied that “this skirt thing is new to [her]” which drew friendly laughter from the audience. She was barefoot, as usual, but didn’t sing “Barefoot” to my dismay. I think she’s gotten a haircut recently - she seems to be keeping her hair shorter than usual.

The funniest part of the evening was when she was announcing her medley and said “There’s a song I want to play for youse now…” and paused for effect. In that break, somebody yelled out Hon! and she heard them but didn’t understand. A few lines were exchanged with the audience that I couldn’t make out, but I could tell people down on the main level were trying to explain to her what “hon” means. She finally said “Oh, so you use it where we use eh?” which most of the audience - the locals, anyway, including me - found hilarious. She repeated herself, saying “There’s a song I want to play for youse now, hon…” and then commented that she’d really shock people in the audience the following night!

It was an enjoyable show, of course, because I adore k.d. lang (she’s my favorite artist by far), but next time I will have to cough up the additional dollars for better seats - it was so frustrating not being able to see her!

Because we went to Kings Dominion this past weekend, I’ve been on a coaster kick for the past few days. I didn’t have Rollercoaster Tycoon installed on this machine, so I dug out my old CD case and found the CD. I also came across a CD that had no labeling at all, so I put it in to see what was on there. It turned out to be a little time capsule from 1999 - pictures of me back then (with short hair, ack!), MP3s I listened to, and even some software I used to use. It was fun looking back to five years ago! I even found all the pictures a friend captured from my time on cam with Adora, whom I knew as Wednesday before she moved out to L.A. and everything. There’s also an exchange of e-mails from when someone bought the Amanita.net domain name for me, the entire South Park movie soundtrack in MP3 format, and my entire website circa August 19, 1999. There’s also a ton of pictures, including a bunch of k.d. lang, various wallpapers, and some pictures of gymnasts. I’m quite tickled pink by all this.

I saw the circus on Saturday night! It was really awesome. It was the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus and we had VIP seats which were better than regular seats but otherwise didn’t net us anything special. My favorite part was the Chinese acrobats, but I missed the Upside-Down Clowns and the Pendulum of Pandemonium completely because I was in the bathroom! (Argh…) Fortunately the parts I missed were on the DVD I bought, but the Chinese acrobats were left out completely. The main feature on the DVD is only 25 minutes long, and then there are a few special features about their elephants, the history of the circus train, and things like that. I also bought a program, which came with a big inflatable hand with the RBBB logo - a trinket I have no use for. The cotton candy I got was $6, which is very expensive, but the giant soda was only $3.50 - about equivalent to movie theater prices. The DVD and the program were $15 each.

Oh my god! A and MK&R got me an awesome birthday present! It’s my own American Girl doll. I’ve wanted one for many, many years, but they are so expensive that I’ve never gotten one. When I met A, I was delighted to fawn over her Felicity - we buy clothes for her, and accessories, and things like that. A also has Coconut, and we play with her together too. So I’ve been living vicariously through Felicity for a few years, and after we got back from New York I recounted the American Girl Place story to :MK:, and she said to A that it sounded like I needed my own doll. I thought “oh, that would be nice,” but didn’t think anything more of it. But they got me one! She looks like me: light skin, light brown hair, and green eyes. (My eyes tend to fluctuate between green and hazel, but they’re often green.) I was going to give her a name starting with M, like mine, but A suggested I give her a name with a similar meaning. Various baby name books say that Meredith means “guardian of the sea” or “queen of the sea,” so I searched for baby names that had meanings related to sea, and settled on this:

CORDELIA - f - English
Pronounced: kor-DEL-ee-a, kor-DEL-ya
Meaning unknown, perhaps from a Celtic name meaning “daughter of the sea”. This name was first used in this form by Shakespeare, who used it for one of the daughters of King Lear.

I like the name Cordelia well enough, and it’s from the same area as mine (Meredith is a Welsh name), and has a similar meaning. Plus it has the mixed blessing of having been used in both Shakespeare and Buffy! I am so thrilled with my doll. A also got me the wetsuit and bikini, which I’d wanted when we were in New York but neglected to get. And she got Felicity’s traveling gown, too!