Homer'sWorld

Post 1876, A Day of Sickness and Naps. In between short naps I have been working on my major local history book. It covers every person who lived in a township in the county I was born in in Michigan between 1862 and 1910. Several thousand individuals. The Mormon Church, unpleasant in many ways, has an obsession with genealogy and has been scanning in records and volunteers have been transcribing those records and then they are posted to the Intertubes. It is very useful to me, a raving homosexual, who many Mormons would look upon with disgust, in my research and I am busy tying up loose ends, but not in a bondage sort of way.

My good friend Aaron has returned to his wonderful blog. I hope he publishes many pictures of the tasty and nutritious foods he creates. I am trying to eat healthier myself. I also enjoy his reviews of vintage television shows. Just today I watched a series of Lumiere Brother films, created between 1896 and 1900. Every single person in the films is dead.

That is something strange to contemplate, just like every person in my local history book is dead as well. Life is short and fleeting, and filling it with hate, such as Miss Artifically Enhanced Breasts Runner-Up Carrie Prejean seems bound and determined to make a short-lived career of, is really a waste of time. As I have commented on many conservative blogs or newspaper articles, "No one remembers the KKK fondly." Similarly, Carrie Prejean will be a footnote in somebody's PhD dissertation and will likely be so obscure that when she passes on to the great beyond, the New York Times Online Edition won't bother with an obituary. It may be difficult to determine her ancestry, although by the time she is gone all records will likely be easily accessible online.

I am following Jimbo's advice and staying home from work today. I am coughing up junk and feel run down. I guess my homosexual agenda lifestyle is catching up with me.

Drinking lots of orange juice and now I'm going to lay down on the couch and watch Martha Stewart's show, because her calmness is healing. I suspect a nap will take place afterwards.

Despite my close proximity to Mexico I do not have swine flu. So far I do not have the urge to wallow in mud or oink loudly. That could change at any minute.

A weekend of excitement ensued. On Friday night I had dinner with Howard at Rosa's. Later that night Forrest and I walked up to the top of the adjacent mountain and took interesting low-light pictures. We also watched the beginning of Logan's Run. Renew!

The following night I attended Gay West with Jeffrey and watched Lady Bunny perform. Attendance at the charitable event was quite low, I certainly hope they made enough money.

And yesterday I purchased kitty litter and made a quiche and strawberry shortcake (with biscuits) and Steve and Forrest came by to eat.

Today at my career I am analyzing metal artifacts from the 1930s-1940s. I have buttons, razor blades, jewelry, and many unidentified thingies awaiting computer coding. It is very scientific. Especially when I call things "thingies."

Self portrait with Henny-Penny.

























I'm going to be totally honest with you. Henny-Penny has a very pleasant personality, she lays pretty light green eggs, and she clucks gently when she is sitting on your lap. The other day I was talking on the telephone with Forrest's friend Jason and Henny-Penny climbed up on my shoulder and she started chatting with Jason too. She was very intrigued by the fact that a human voice was coming out of this strange device. She pecked at it, her way of exploring the world, and the voice continued.

Everyone should be so lucky to have a friend like Henny-Penny. When Brett comes to visit Memorial Day weekend, he's going to be very excited to meet Ms. H-P. I will have to make sure he doesn't try to chickennap her.

Watch this. The singer is using the text of the legal justifications for torture created by the Bush administration's as-yet-unconvicted war criminals (lawyers) as lyrics.

I'm listening to the testimony about gay marriage in Maine, and this is what I've learned:

- gays are just like Nazis
- one woman was speaking for God because he couldn't be there to speak for himself (she was particularly nasty), I guess God was busy doing something else like killing people with tornadoes
- gays are evil child molesters

Many of the anti-gay folks testifying claim to have friends who are gay. They are deluded. They don't understand the difference between friends and acquaintances.

A friend will support you in good times and bad times, they respect you. They will not describe you as being depraved, Satan-worshipping butt fuckers while claiming to be your friend. I would not even have acquaintances who talk this sort of shit, but then I am lucky to work in a very liberal field.

The testimony of the fundamentalist Christians is particularly vile and suggests to me a high prevalence of mental illness among these folks. In particular, the threats directed towards people for not following the particular religious beliefs are scary, "You will be judged."

My friend Jim Burroway and his colleagues at Box Turtle Bulletin deserve to be thanked for their tireless work. A couple of years ago I ran into Jim at the library, where he was busy collecting information to refute the "science" of the anti-gay folks. He told me he was planning a new blog to cover this issue, and now his hard work has paid off. Box Turtle Bulletin covers current issues and has detailed articles exposing the truth behind the "ex-gay" business.

If you monitor the articles on BTB you begin to wonder whether we are entering a new stage in the homosexual civil rights movement. The anti-gay crowd senses they have lost, and so some of them have started to advocate violence towards and imprisonment of gay people. A couple of examples:

- Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute, described as a hate group by the Southern Pverty Law Center, states that attempts to thwart bullying of children based upon their perceived behavior discriminates against Christian children, who apparently should be able to bully others at will.

- American anti-gay activists support the forced outings of LGBT folks in Uganda, where men and women can be arrested and imprisoned for being perceived as being homosexual. One of these Americans, Scott Lively, believes gay people should be forced into "conversion" therapy.

- Science Fiction author Orson Scott Card, now on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, writes an editorial in which he whips up anti-gay hysteria by stating that "They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes." The old sticks and stones saying is not entirely accurate. Words can hurt you.

And so on. These groups are getting desperate- they are losing. We can expect them to lash out in many ways. Some will do so by labeling us perverts or worse. Others will attempt to get anti-gay laws passed and civil rights protections removed. Some will advocate violence towards gays.

What they won't be able to do is to keep these things a secret from most people anymore. I am glad that Jim and his friends at Box Turtle Bulletin are aggressively covering these awful people. It is interesting to see the reaction of the anti-gay creeps when light is shined on their activities.

Trying to give me a guilt trip doesn't make me feel guilty, it makes me feel angry. I'd really like to vent about this, but what's the point?

Why do some gay men have to put everything down? Example- Ms. Susan Boyle has made a big stir with her appearance on that British telly show. And I am glad she got to sing and pleased that she did well. I shouldn't bother to read blog entries about her because more than enough gay men think she is not pretty, slim, young enough to be worthwhile. So over pretty, slim, young- perhaps because I am none of these. Hey young gay guys, if you are lucky you get to grow old and see what happens to your exquisite body!


We seem to be sliding rapidly into summer here, will it reach 100 by the end of the week? I hope not. Can we have a few more weeks of nice temperature, please?

Beard trimming accident. I should have left it to the professionals.
























It grows back quickly.

I used to really like to read, but now that my eyes have changed so much it is difficult to read for a long period of time. I check out books from the Pima County Library (we have an excellent library system here), and I read a few pages and then the book goes back. I'm trying to remember the last book I finished, and for whatever reason, I can't.

When I was a kid I read everything I could get my hands on. Especially after we moved to the farm and my father stopped long haul truck-driving and had to figure out to be a stay-at-home father, which he utterly, completely sucked at. My father was not a fan of education. Like the other farmers in out little town, education meant you left home and went away to the big city. And like the other fathers, he would try to stop that silliness. He hated seeing me read, so I would take my book and hide up in my bedroom or, in the summer, perch myself up into the old apple tree and read there. I was lucky in that Mummy encouraged me to read and look me to the library whenever possible.

Maybe I'm less inclined to finish a book because of the books being written nowadays. Who knows. Oh! Just remembered, the last book I read all the way through was Blindness by Jose Saramago.

Well, Mummy left yesterday and arrived safely in Traverse City. Now she will get to enjoy spring all over again. At the airport she told me she wants to come to Tucson before it snows this year, so I guess she will be coming in November and staying for longer.

I celebrated having the house by myself by buying a loaf of sourdough bread and eating peanut butter and jam on toast. It was awesome.

I admit it, I am tired of the hair that I grew out. I also need to figure out the correct way to trim my beard so I don't look like a serial killed afterwards.

I'm going back to the gym after almost four months off. Let's see if I can avoid spraining my ankle.

They had one of those teabag protests here in Tucson. The participants complained about having to pay taxes. While standing in a park built and maintained by taxes. Talk about a boring "protest."

Recommendations for a new cell phone company? Mine is going out of business for some reason. I've had Q-West for the last seven years.

- I use I around 1,000 minutes a month
- don't text message
- don't see the need for one of those Iphone thingies

Henny Penny video!!!

Brian made an exciting video of the bestest chicken ever! But I am not savvy enough to post it here so you'll have to go to his blog and watch it.


Henny Penny from cheapblueguitar on Vimeo.

Welcome to the sewage plant.



















A modern sewage treatment plant and a prehistoric farming village.

My company has been working at the plant since last summer, excavating areas where new giant underground sewage treatment thingies are going to be built. There is a prehistoric site that dates to the San Pedro phase, 3200 to 2800 years ago.

Dan scrapes away the dirt with his special blade and has been exposing houses, pits, canals, and field borders.

























Dan.

In the picture below you can see the individual fields with the berms separating them marked with white paint. The dirt is much darker in the area where the fields were.




















Many charred corn cobs have been found, indicating what was being grown. Click on the picture to see in better detail.



















Pit structure with an entranceway.

Houses from this time period typically are round or oval. The big surprise has been to find several with entranceways. You can see the postholes for the posts that formed the walls and helped hold up the roof.

























Storage or cooking pits.

Scattered between the houses and around the fields are many pits. Some were used to store seeds. Others were used for cooking.




















Oval house with a very burned floor.

A series of canals run through the fields and past the houses. These are some of the oldest known canals in North America.




















The U-shaped canal is visible in this profile. We take samples of the dirt for various studies.

I was out at the site to look at something that I have expertise in.

























Donut day!

Lucky for me, the wind wasn't blowing when someone handed me a donut. It is really smelly at the sewage plant.

Despite the rain, my 4th Annual Boiled Egg Decorating and Backyard Egg Hunt was a success.
























Awesome rage-inducing lemon meringue pie!

Seven dozen eggs were decorated.

Mummy, Patrick, Jeffrey, and Steve.

It's raining, men. And Tara.

It kept raining off and on and finally we just went outside and yelled "Go!" and people ran around looking for plastic eggs.

Wet!

And the winners were...

Brady (1st), Jeffrey (2nd), and Steve (3rd).

My home computer is being fixed- so I have been without access to the intertubes for the past couple of days. It is very strange and very 1993-ish, except I am having a hard time remembering what I did before the internet. I guess I read those things called "books" and listened to music on "cassette tapes" and "CDs." But since I didn't have a blog back then I cannot tell you what I was doing on 12 April 1994 PI (pre-internet).

True story, the first time I got onto the magical, mystical internet was because a friend had asked me what a certain STD looked like, so I went looking for a picture. That was a mistake, since every picture of that certain STD posted back in 1994 was the worst case scenario. I have decided not to verify whether this is still the case or not, because I would like to have an apetite for lunch.

Because of the previously mentioned computer problems, you'll have to wait a day or two for my 4th Annual Boiled Egg Decorating and Backyard Egg Hunt photos and text. It was, of course, a fun time had by all. Henny-Penny came in for a visit and either charmed or horrified people (some folks think chickens are covered with disgusting diseases, apparently).

Henny-Penny is excited about tomorrow's 4th Annual Non Denominational Boiled Egg Decorating and Backyard Plastic Egg Hunt.




















She thanks Forrest for the water bowl.

I am taking half of the day off to clean house and get things ready. I wonder whether Patrick will win the grand prize for the third year in a row?

So the world didn't end. Homos can get married in Iowa and Vermont and absolutely nothing has changed. Must suck to be a fundamentalist in our country and slowly realizing that you have lost- that the next generation of kids doesn't care about gay marriage. Makes you almost feel sorry for the bigots- NOT!!!

Snowball is growing fast, putting on weight. He wants the other cats to play with him, but they are all grown up (and one is Helen Kellerish), and so he has to make do with me.

Today was one of those mediocre days. I did yardwork. I took Mummy to an Indian restaurant (if she doesn't like something she says, "Well, it is interesting"). We went to Michael's to buy some prizes for next Saturday's Egg Hunt party. Back at home I discover cat puke on the bedspread. I do laundry. I do dishes. I do some weeding around the big cactus and a thorn pokes me through my glove, the finger bleeds. I work on my genealogy book, finishing the families whose surnames begin with K. I delete 200 emails from my email program. Now I am trying to think what to make for dinner.

I'm sad for a couple of reasons. A good friend is leaving town for Mexico. I went out last night to say goodbye, and although I am really happy for him, the selfish part of me will miss him. The other causal factor for sadness is my broken record.

Plane tickets are so cheap right now. Who knows, perhaps a trip in the near future.

Happy Birthday Puff and Joey! I managed to forget that April 1 was their 9th birthday. Joey reminded me this morning by sinking her claws into me while sitting on my lap.


















Joey and Puff, photographed by Richard Whitmer (with assistance by Hiram Pena).

My new Progressive glasses make me a little dizzy.


























Always look both ways before pulling out in traffic.

Last night Mummy and I watched Mary Poppins. I really like that movie, especially where Julie Andrews sings the "Tuppence a Bag" song. It makes me a bit maudlin, really.