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.

Not much of an update, because even though I booked a hotel with free wireless internet…it’s not working. So a Sidekick update is all I can do. I wanted to upload today’s photos but that will have to wait!

Today we woke up at 4:15am and took a cab to the airport. We were on JetBlue and I was really impressed with their overall product and service. We arrived at Long Beach on time, about 9:45am local time. I was surprised by how small the Long Beach airport is…it has a tiny building and is otherwise mostly outdoors, which reminded me of Grenada’s airport. Even the baggage claim was outside!

We headed straight for Anaheim, and after getting lost on the streets around Disneyland, we spotted our hotel and checked in. We walked from there to the Mickey & Friends Parking Structure Tram Stop, and got on our first Disneyland “ride” to get to the front gates. After we got our tickets, we headed straight into Adventureland! We got FastPass tickets for Indiana Jones, and then boarded the Jungle Cruise which had absolutely no wait. We watched the Enchanted Tiki Room show next, which I found quite entertaining, mostly because I was able to imagine what it was like when those audio-animatronics were state of the art! From there we went to Pirates of the Caribbean, which startled me with its short drops - when I yelped, the little boy in front of me said “have you ever been on this before?” I said no, I hadn’t! After that we peeked into a few shops before going back for the FastPass line of Indiana Jones. I was surprised that even with FastPass we had a 30-minute wait…and there were a lot of people in the standby line too! The ride was excellent, well worth the wait…we might make that our first stop tomorrow so there’s not such a line.

We stopped and got lunch/dinner - it was about 2:30 by this point, but for us it felt like 5:30! We ate at the Cafe Orleans and then wandered off toward the Haunted Mansion…which unfortunately is closed this week so they can remove the holiday overlay. We went on the Winnie the Pooh ride, and I swear that would be the best ride if you were on acid! From there we ended up in Fantasyland, where we went on Snow White, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Pinocchio, and Alice in Wonderland. They are basically all the same ride, but they are done so well that you don’t care. It was also in Fantasyland that we bought awesome earrings featuring Marie from the Aristocats! From there we started heading back toward the hub. My feet, knees, and back were all hurting, so we stopped at the Plaza Inn and split a piece of cake and discussed how awful it is that I have far less stamina than my wife, even though we are equally out of shape, and even though she is 12 years older.

We went back along Main Street and ducked into and out of shops, and stopped for the First 50 Years presentation, which I actually liked a lot. (Hey, I’m minoring in history.) After that it was out the gates, back on the tram, and back to the hotel. The 15-minute walk back wasn’t as bad as I was expecting…the time spent sitting while we ate cake and watched Steve Martin and Donald Duck helped rejuvenate my feet enough to carry me home. And now I will say good night, because except for dozing on the plane, I have been up for 19 hours after only sleeping 5-6 hours last night.

The reunion was great! I saw a lot of people I remembered. There were some people I recognized faces of but didn’t know their names. But I had a really fantastic time. A is driving home now, because I am pretty sloshed. Or whatever the word is. I didn’t really dance although I kind of did a private Electric Slide for A and whoever else noticed. I discovered I’ve mostly forgotten the dance moves though. Anyway, I loved it. I don’t know if it lived up to my expectations, I’m not sure anymore what those were, but I had an awesome time.

Now I can finally talk about my past week of orientation. It’s been going pretty well - I can’t believe how much has happened! In the space of five days, I went from a normal member of honors to a grouch to a demoted “bridge to honors” student and back to being a full honors student. Whew!

I have also been mistaken for deaf almost constantly, and while it’s not a compliment anymore when somebody realizes I’m hearing, it’s still nice to realize that I don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

However I’ve also had an embarrassing moment that would only happen to a HUG student like me. I was in a makeup session of the ASL/Math assessment tests, and I was trying hard to concentrate. But an orientation session was also in there, and the leader was running late so the students were chatting and laughing…loudly. I got one of the test proctors to come over and asked if there was any way the other half of the room could be quieted down. I felt ridiculous asking such a thing in a deaf university, but I was trying to take a test, and I really couldn’t concentrate! They did quiet down and I was able to finish the test in peace…though I still completely bombed, hah! I didn’t even get what was going on, what the questions were, or
anything. Yikes!

I already have several of the books needed for my Deaf Studies and English classes, but there’s still a bunch more for my English class I have to buy.

I had a good experience relating to being a HUG student today. Yesterday I chatted with another HUG about whether it was culturally appropriate to participate in certain activities - I think somebody had been surprised that a hearing student could play sports for Gallaudet. Today we were sitting through class elections, and I turned to another HUG and said, “now this is the kind of thing I don’t think ’students like us’ can participate in.” Another girl behind her who knows us both said “no way! You guys can do anything, it doesn’t matter if you’re hearing.” Which is just way cool to hear, and I told her “thanks, that really makes me feel good!” I still am a little suspicious of whether it would REALLY be okay…it just feels like it would be taboo for a hearing person to be class president at a deaf college. But it’s great that at least somebody thinks it’s okay!

I am still kind of shell shocked when I browse Facebook and see all these people graduated high school in ‘07. I can’t believe I graduated high school ten years ago. I’ve been looking forward to my 10-year reunion for a while, but seeing all those ’07s just makes me feel kind of old instead!

I just have to share this, because I am so totally thrilled about it. Ladies and gentlemen, today I am twice as close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get.

If you saw my quicklinks in the past day or two, you may have noticed the scuba diving cat video that I personally captioned, including two minor errors that I don’t feel an urge to fix. It took me about 45 minutes to caption the one-minute video, because I kept having to start at the beginning to make sure everything was still in sync. Now, I know there are multiple editions of the scuba kitty video on Google Video. But only one of them is captioned, and the two posts from CO both include the captions. (It’s also up on CuteCast.)

No, it’s not me in the video. No, I don’t know the cat. But you know what? That is as damn close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get, and I’m totally stoked. So there.

I’ve had a rush of thoughts in my head, of course. We have watched some TV, I took a nap for about an hour, and we cried together. I cried a lot, especially after reading a 9/11 edition of the rainbow bridge story. Every time I look out onto the landing from our bedroom, I want to see her there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cat sitting in the bedroom doorway just as she did, but it was Truffle. I have so many thoughts that have passed through my mind and I thought about writing them down but I just couldn’t collect them all.

There are several things I want to remember about Wu. How she liked to lick plastic - bags, cellophane, anything. How she wasn’t interested in a toy on the end of a string, but she was quite interested in the string itself. The sound of her wiping her paws on the plastic placemat before taking a drink of water from the bowl. She did that just the other night, and I can still hear it. She was declawed, so she wasn’t allowed outside, but she would sometimes hang around the cat door as if she were threatening to go out. She only got outside on a couple of occasions, and it scared her and she ran right back inside. How she used to demand love RIGHT NOW and would stand on our chests as we sat up in bed, making sure she was all we could see. How she would hide under the stereo table when she didn’t want to be found. How she would meow with great concern when we took a bath with the door closed, and if she was let in how she’d put her paws up on the edge of the tub to make sure we weren’t bathing in poison or something. And her voice - she was such a talker.

I’m so glad I have pictures and video, but I wish I had more pictures. I didn’t realize I had so few.

We brought her home with us from the hospital, and I think we were planning to bury her in the yard. I came to realize, though, that I would rather have her cremated and keep her with us. The hospital had given us the option of collective cremation for $60 or individual cremation for $239, but we ended up finding a place very close to A’s work that will cremate her alone for $140. We bought this urn on eBay for $40 including shipping; we had been torn between that one and this one because her name was Empress Wu, but we decided to go with the more neutral one that was also larger. We have five other cats, you see, and while the idea of collective cremation horrifies me, I can envision all of my cats playing together in there. I am also thinking of getting some jewelry to keep part of Wu with me.

I’m going to go to work tomorrow, because Fridays are my easy day anyway. I’m hoping I won’t have to use vacation pay for the six hours I took off today. We’re still planning to go to a play Saturday afternoon, and I’m still planning to interpret with fairerhiannon at MAL this weekend. But I still feel terrible right now. I don’t even know how to end this so I’ll just leave it at that.

Oh my…I found what apparently is my “keepsakes” box, which hasn’t been updated since about 2001. There’s the spiral notebook I was planning to fill with hand-copied poetry and give to A (never got very far), there’s the little note that came with the flowers she had sent to my work on my 20th birthday, a sad weird note from A to me when we were going through a rough patch. There’s the vinyl catsuit photos (back when I was skinny), the naked posed Polaroids, and an album full of pictures of MOOers. (Some of whom now have LiveJournals - perigee, neschek, firesign3000, gilmore427, crayonbeam, indyanney, eeyorerin, rockwrok, misia, entelein, and trism.) Definitely amusing to browse through!

Okay, back to work. Bags are stashed, still working on the Stuff/pajama swap.

They say that olfactory memories are the strongest kind of memory - that a smell can trigger a memory better than anything else. That’s certainly true of the perfume A bought yesterday, because as soon as I smelled it I was reminded of the Girl Scout camp I attended for several years as a kid.

I was tickled to find that Camp Conowingo has a website now, with photos and tiny movie clips. There is even a picture of the chimney, which was the source of ghost stories when I was a camper. Reportedly a woman who lived in the house during the Civil War had fled when troops were approaching, and she stuffed her baby up into the chimney. The soldiers subsequently lit a fire in the fireplace and…well, it was a rather gruesome story! We insisted that we could still hear the baby wailing, because the chimney was all that remained of the home. The pictures of the dining hall show that it hasn’t changed a bit since I was there! The movie clips are pretty bad; they look like they were taken by a cell phone.

The images of the creek and lake were surprising, though - I could have sworn the lake was much bigger, and the creek was an uncrossable river! I haven’t thought about Camp Conowingo in a long time - that was a fun trip down memory lane.

I haven’t said much today, or done much reading of journals, because I spent the entire day working on a huge change to my website. (Okay, I did have a meeting to interpret in the afternoon.) I think everything is set up and ready and all my problems are solved…it’s just a matter of getting over the fear and going live with the changes!

I do want to mention, though, that I had coffee with eyes_of_cyrene last night - and we chatted for three hours! She is even more beautiful in person than she is in her pictures; when I saw her coming around the corner my jaw almost dropped - fortunately I picked it back up again before she noticed. It felt like we’d known each other for a long time already, and the time absolutely flew by. We were there so late that the coffeeshop employees started staring pointedly at us - we weren’t the last ones there (they have free wifi) but almost! We talked about all kinds of things, and I just had an absolutely wonderful time. She asked an employee to take a picture of us, I can’t wait to see it! To summarize, eyes_of_cyrene is really really cool.

Last night I dug through some old VHS tapes in search of Tank Girl, which I did not find. I did, however, find the tapes with my four It’s Academic shows! I appeared on the Baltimore version in both my junior and senior years of high school, winning both first round matches and losing in the second round each year. I was 14 years old in the first show, 15 years old in the second and third shows, and 16 years old for the last show. (After my first game, some of the cheerleaders came up to me and asked if I was really a 14-year-old junior…and yes, I was.) The tapes were a lot of fun to watch - but I was really nasty to my teammates in my junior year! I gave out the look of death more than once. My hair was also extremely interesting to me; in my junior year it was barely shoulder length (and I had bangs in the first show) but in my senior year I had it in a bun and my patented cowlick-that-still-sticks-straight out-from-my-temple was already there.

My wife suggested bringing the tapes to her dad and having him make a DVD out of them. I think I will indeed ask him to do that, and I’ll try to make copies of the DVD to offer to my teammates - if I can find them.