It's been an interesting few days. Friday was fairly quiet, I got a whole bunch of microanalyses back and some were good and some were awful. That's really the main thing holding my thesis up apart from waiting on other people. I left work early and I think I slept a lot. Thursday had of course been the Democrats Dinner which was quite cool. I went with Peta and ending up sitting on a table with Llewellyn (from the ANU) and a few other young people which was nice. I haven't been to a political dinner before, and although it was interesting, I wouldn't be going to another again soon. I got home with several glasses of wine in my system as my previous diary entry will attest. ^_~
Yesterday (Saturday) I did some shopping and then lay in my sun-beam for a while. I decided to call Illara because her phone was about to be cut off, and we had a good chat for about an hour. She's going to possibly be in Nashville for December, and I hope I will be in Miami, so perhaps we might finally be able to catch up. After that I had to race around to collect my stuff because a group of us were going to Casurina Sands which is a spot on the Molongolo River a few kilometers out of Canberra. So, Chrissy, her sister Sonja, Caitlin, Emma and myself squeezed into Emma's car and we drove out there. I didn't know I was supposed to bring my swimmers, but the water was much too cold for that anyway, so we just waded about and played on the little beach. After a couple hours of building mud-castles and sunning ourselves, we drove home and hung around at Chrissy house for a while. We figured we were going to go out on the town, so I came home to have a rest and then showered and changed. Emma picked me up and we walked over to Chrissy's house.
Emma and I were doing the "leather dyke" look, as we both had leather pants and jackets on, and she had her leather top. Chrissy went with the pseudo-leather top and long skirt. We got into town before anything much opened (~7 pm) so we had pizza and chatted away. We walked to P.J.'s and started drinking there, and the noise was low enough to have a good conversation. After a few drinks we went to Jackson's and secured a seat. They were playing some fairly scary mid 80's music and we settled in to wait for the Karaoke to start. It was a pretty funny time, one example. I was sitting by myself minding the jackets as Chrissy and Emma danced. This really young guy slid over and asked who Emma was and if I could put in a good word for him. Emma is cute, short and blonde and was dressed in leather, so I guess I should have expected it. She got stuck with him and then curled up next to me in self-defense. She went back to dance with Chrissy and they started dancing "suggestively", so that after about 15 seconds he turned to me and said "Is she a lesbian!". His mate got a lot of mileage out of that, and the lesbian defense seemed a pretty good one for the rest of the night, though it was still rather strange and didn't stop a few guys coming over to chat or straight out ask if we were gay. There were two girls in turtle-neck sweaters who were also getting heavily into touching and dancing close, but we figured they were just doing it to tease the guys (I thought one of them might have been a young, extremely passable tranny I'd seen at the Meridian a few times). We stayed until about 1:30 am, and then we grabbed our stuff and wandered over to the Gypsy Bar when Chrissy's boyfriend was working on the door. We chatted to him and though we thought about going in, the music was just a bit too much. We grabbed some coffee, but Emma was coughing badly because of the cold air, and so we grabbed a taxi back to her place. We sat around chilling to Chris Isaac (I felt obligated to put it on ^_~) and then we crashed out, I got the spare bed, and Chrissy shared with Emma. The sun woke me up about 8 am so I walked home, showered and went to bed until 1 pm.
It was a really nice night, and I hope that we can get out and do it again soon.
After I finally crawled out of bed after midday. I sauntered over to the lab to check my email and surf my usual sites. I dropped By Andrea James's "Road Map" for the first time in a long while, and saw that she had some interesting updates. The first was for TS people travelling in the US after the September 11th incidents, and the other was on protecting one's anonymity on the internet. This is something I check every few weeks, I type my name into www.google.com and see if anything comes up. Sometime it does, and if I can erase it I do. I discovered that a simple script in the header of the web page can stop google web-bots from picking up that particular site. I installed a few of these on my home-page and after checking my site statistics to see where my hits were coming from, I wrote a few emails asking to be taken off various "TS lists". I presume that a lot of these lists are duplicates, and although I understand that these people are in some ways doing a service to the community, I hope they will remove my site. I definitely do NOT have a problem with an individual putting a link to me on their site (in fact I find it flattering), however I do object to being incorporated into mammoth lists of every gender related site on the internet. As far as I am aware, there aren't any pictures of me floating about on the web, and I'm happy to keep it that way.