Wedding Report

I know, I know, so little mrpeenee news of late. I've been so distracted what with the wedding, the big party to celebrate the wedding and bronchitis to make the entire thing more challenging. Also, the cat keeps puking. But be assured my darlings, my thoughts are with you always, always.

The wedding? Fabooski. We got there on time and then stood around FOREVER in the clerks office waiting our turn. We met commissioner Mary Ortez who married us and she was a sweetie. She was very firm that we needed to exchange rings as part of the ceremony, which we hadn't planned to do, but she said it was the best part, so, being good sports, we went along with it and she was right. Not that I actually remember the ceremony, it's all sort of a blur now, but I do remember being struck with how charming and sweet without being saccharine it was. We stood at the top of the big stairs under the rotunda, right in front of the bust of Harvey Milk (how appropriate) with our best friends beside us
and I patted R Man on his beard and then, somehow, we were married. It doesn't feel any different, but I like it anyway.

Lunch at One Market was terrific.

We ran around like crazy mad monkeys on Friday getting ready for the party on Saturday which, by the time it started, had worn me to a frazzled mess (and I was sick) but once it got under way, I had a good time and was vastly amused by all our friends. I just wish you could have been there. We wound up having burritos for everybody who stuck it out. Mmmm, burritos.

I've reveled in my newlywed bliss since then by coughing vigorously (it's become something of a hobby,) taking Vicodan, and napping. I went back tot he doctor today and he said the stuff in my lungs (I believe the technical term is "snot") is still there, hanging around like it doesn't have anything better to do. I'm annoyed, but I'm also through with errands, so I'm taking to my bed to recuperate. If you want me, I'll be filed under "Mimi Violetta."

Bridezilla, the Gay Edition

Today's our wedding, hoo dee hoo hoo. It's a beautiful blue, warm day here, perfect for a trip to City Hall.

R Man and I will both be wearing suits, grey for him and black for me and I'll have on my favorite, most beautiful tie. Very respectable, very well put together.

As for the traditional rest, here's the rundown:
Something Old
After my mother died and I was back in Texas for the funeral aftermath (remind me to tell you all about how I missed my mother's funeral. Fascinating story) I went straight to her jewelry box and boosted the rhinestone necklace I was so fascinated with as a little girlyboy. It's very demure (for rhinestones;) just a single strand of stones, hardly bigger than a chocker. Since it's the oldest wearable thing I have, I'll wear it under my shirt and tie as a sentimental salute to my family. I'm not telling anyone else about it, just you and me, it's our little secret

Something New
A fresh bandaid for the place where Saki the cat bit me last night.

Something Borrowed
I never can keep track of those shirt stays that keep your collar stiff. Since I've lost all mine, I have to borrow some from R Man.

Something Blue
My lucky underwear. Duh.

And a sixpence for her shoe.
Who the hell has a sixpence? And who wants to try and walk around all day with a coin in your shoe? I shall substitute a Vicodan for my mouth. To swallow. I still have bronchitis, although much better, and a little chemical oomph can only help.

I gotta go, I'm getting married.

Wedding Bell News

stinkylulu reminds us that we mentioned, more than once, that we're getting married, but then sort of drifted off topic. As many of our friends will testify, drifting off topic is rather a speciality of ours. Just wave something shiny around and, wham. Anyway, here's the news.

We get married this Thursday in City Hall. Our dear friends Urbanstreetpitrate and Diane von Austinberg are flying in for the festivities, which will include a wedding lunch at the schmancy One Market. Another good friend knows the catering manager there and has arranged some gala surprises, yay. As long as it's not mariachi bands, I'm delighted with it.

Diane's annual visits are always something to look forward to and Urban has been missing far too long. Diane and I like to cook together (and how many people can you say that about?) and are the terror of thrift stores all over town. Urbanstretpirate is sweet and charming and the perfect friend to hang with. In short, the bestest wedding a poof could hope for.

That's MISS Plop Hero to You

Diane von Austinberg (who arrives here on Wednesday, lending light and love to our wedding and risotto to our dinner plans. Tremendous yay.) forwards this fascinating tool to discover what you name might be were Gov. Palin to have spawned you.

http://politsk.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah_13.html

Mine is Plop Hero Palin. I love it. Both sordid and noble, much like me. Maybe Sarah really is my mother. I think I'll go shoot something now.

Doctor Who?

Darlings, the last couple of days have just been a whirl of glam doctor visits and many, many trips to the pharmacy. For one thing, our insurance company refused to refill R Man's pain medicine, saying he'd uses the first one up too fast. "What's it to you, you old biddy?" I wanted to ask, but instead back to the doctor for a new scrip and then back to the thrilling Walgreen's on Castro Street.

Walgreen's on Castro is 24 hours and big ass big, it churns out so much medicine it makes the Mayo Clinic look like 7-11, so we always go there. Unfortunately, so do plenty of other people, people struggling with English as a Second Language, and people struggling with Too Loaded to Stand Up and, worst of all, people struggling with You Are Too Stinky to Stand So Close to Me, Would You Back the Fuck Up, Please?

So, multiple trips later, meds all straighten out, pretty much, and this morning a jaunt down for an MRI to have a look see at R Man's back. Since his back pain is so severe he can't sit in the car, I made a bed in the back seat for R Man. He was very flattering about how luxurious it made the experience. The staff at eh MRI were nice and I abandoned him to their tender mercies while I went down to Sweet Inspiration on Market Street for a mixed berry Danish. Mmmm, delish.

Walking back, I realized the cold I've had all week was making the trek up a weeny ass little hill an absolute ordeal. I had asked my doctor yesterday for cough syrup since I can't stop hacking once I get going and he insisted I come in this afternoon. Oh boy, another trip to the doctor. He listened to the swampy sounds my lungs seem to be making and announced I have bronchitis. Of course, yet another trip to Walgreen's for antibiotics and cough syrup. And stinky, fucked-up guys who can't speak English.

Our last medical visit of the week will be one to the neuro-surgeon tomorrow to read R Man's MRI and see about treatment. I take it as a matter of faith a prescription will be involved. If I spend any more time in Walgreen's, I plan on demanding retirement rights and stock.

As for the illustration here, thanks to Jason over at Night is Half Gone for reminding me of Cherry Ames, Nurse Bitch. Isn't she just the picture of lovingly, but firmly reprimanding the distinguished looking patient for being such a sissy about rectal thermometers?

Danse of the Houseboys

I'm terribly afraid the houseboys may have found some of R Man's pain pills and taken to self medicating themselves, the naughty pusses. Certainly the interpretive danse festival they insisted on putting on in the hopes of raising his poor, battered spirits seemed, well, excessively odd, even for the boys. Gustavus Schivangus, for instance, kept getting all twisted up in the drapery scrims they were using as backdrops. I finally had to use the garden shears to cut him loose.

R Mania, Take Two

Oh sweetums, I know the posts have been sort of thin on the ground of late. I've been busy being a ministering angel to R Man. The poor lamb is well and truly suffering form his disc problems. His left leg hurts excruciatingly, to the point where he can't walk and his pain meds do almost nothing except make him nauseated. Things are not bright and happy around Chez Peenee. A couple of doctors have mentioned that these things frequently just get better, but that takes time.

R Mania

So I know I have mentioned more than once the ambivalence about getting married R Man and I have after we've been together almost 27 years. While I can't speak for him, here's one plenty good reason why I'm marrying him:

Isn't he dreamy? What kind of dope wouldn't snag someone who looks like this?

I have this picture as my screen saver at work and over the years as people drop by my desk for the first time, the conversation inevitably goes something like this:

"Who's that? Is he a model?"

"He's my boyfriend. He's a lawyer."

"That guy is your boyfriend?"

The conversation sputters to a halt as they try to think of a nice way to ask what someone who looks like that is doing with me. Their tone of astonished bafflement is my cue to change the subject and ask what they need with my own tone implying that hanging around my cubicle may not be such a hot idea. I'm sure there are plenty of my co-workers who are convinced I have cut out a photo from some fashion magazine and claimed it as my partner.

I have long since grown accustomed to the disparity in our looks, but I know in a gay world where lovers so very often look like clones of each other, it's not something expected. I'm just glad for it.

Anyway, R Man, aside for being gorgeous, is also temporarily lamed. He has a disc problem in his back resulting in a compressed nerve which is generating a lot of pain for the poor thing. He has MRIs and doctor appointments scheduled next week, so we'll see what's up.

I Was a Childhood Book Slut

When I was a little boy off visiting my granny in the wilds of East Texas for summer vacation, the only thing that saved me from terminal boredom was my promiscuous love of reading. She had stacks of Readers Digest going back to before I was born, McCalls, the complete works of Zane Grey (who delivered the most convoluted, bizarre plots I have ever come across. And evil polygamous Mormons. Yay!) and a substantial collection of odd paperbacks that wandered in from god knows where. I read them all. If it was printed on paper, in English, and didn't actually involve auto mechanics, I read it.

There was also a lot of True Confession-type magazines that I believe my trashy female cousins had left behind. They were stuffed with advertisements for feminine hygiene products that made me vaguely uneasy and mail order frilly ruffled curtains that matched the frilly ruffled bedspread and the frilly ruffled vanity table skirt that completed your mantrap boudoir. To this day, I connect that kind of decorating excess with sanitary napkins.

The stories baffled me. I would read them over and over again, thinking I was missing something. Rife with euphemisms and Random Capitalization, I caught on that they were discussing something important, but could never figure out what exactly they were sniffing around about.

They all had titles like "I Married a Wrong One" "One Night of Sin, a Lifetime of Regret" "I Promised Myself 'He'll Never Know'"

One I particularly remember was "My Husband Was a Stranger to Me." I thought it meant they were not well acquainted when they wed; turned out the marriage was never consummated. Or rather, in the required style, Never Consummated, even though the writer shied away from such blunt language as that. I believe the bride delicately complained her bed was "empty." From scraps of the story I retain, it's possible the groom was a homo. But she cried and he rushed to her waiting arms and everything was okay. Fade to black. The End.

I also remember arguing with my mother that these tales were true, true, true. The cover said so. Sometimes I'm amazed I managed to survive my own naivete.

Schadenfreude

I know reading about the details of somebody else's work life is less than scintillating, so let me spare you girls that and just hit the barest outline: someone that I'm working with from another organization to put on a very complicated and big deal event just got the axe from his agency, leaving me scrambling and ready to shriek like the high point of a B 52's song. The upside? A whiff of scandal. Ooooh. Everyone's being terribly discreet, but you know how it is, an unfinished sentence here, a lifted eyebrow there, nothing untoward, of course, because we're all ever so professional. But I got my Nancy Drew sweater set on and I am on the trail of dirt; plus I have a friend in the guy's former office. A mole, could it be more fabulous? Today, speaking with her, I swore I wasn't interested in the sordid details that she's not supposed to be sharing anyway. Next week, I'll suggest lunch or, better still, drinks. I predict to have the case cracked by Tuesday, September 23, maybe by noon, certainly no later than COB.

Ladies Who Lunch

A most amusing lunch at the Zuni Cafe today with our friends Anne and Mike to celebrate Anne's new position as R Man's boss and also to mourn the loss of her dachsund, or rather, one of them. Anne enjoys packs of wiener dogs and as a model of saintliness, always picks the most ancient and decrepit ones at the shelter or rescue. Lucy died on Thursday and they got a new one yesterday at SPCA, where they know her by name and welcome her intervention with problem cases.

As we were toasting the new job and dog, and Mike’s sort of new job, and our wedding license, I insisted on a toast for me not having slapped anyone at work this week. I was just making a joke, I don’t know why they all agreed wholeheartedly on that being such an accomplishment for me. I got to start hanging around with people who know me less well.

Zap, zap, zap. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

I had an odd shaped little bump appear on the side of my face so I dropped by my doctor for him to have look see. A childhood on the Texas Gulf Coast and the resultant annual severe summer sun burn has left me with a heeby jeeby reaction to anything that might be cancerous. Of course, this wasn't anything, but then Mark, my doctorman, asked "As long as you're here, do you want to deal with some of those broken blood vessels on your nose?"

My people originated in Ireland, England, Germany, that broad swath of Northern Europe where all forms of cabbage are so very popular and where pale skin evolved as a away of dealing with seeing sunshine only a couple a weeks out of the year. That was fine until, like my family, they had the bright idea of migrating to Texas and California where fair complexions are a real hazard. Consequently, aside from the silly old melanoma issue, I have a nose as I enter middle age that looks like it was modeled on that of W.C. FIelds. It's basically a kind of faint magenta with a tracery of blood vessels; rather like having a map of Ireland printed on my nose. Pretty.

I know from past experience the "Let's deal with those" that Mark was so casually referring to is a torture involving an electric needle that fries the vessels. It's true, they're gone afterwards, but it's also true IT HURTS. I have mentioned, have not I, what a coward about ouchies I am. Mark's answer is that I should take a deep breath and hold it during the electrocution. He claims it will help, but I suspect it's really to keep me from shrieking during each zap.

I know this is what Ladies go through regularly with electrolosis to shape eyebrows and such and all I can say is you go girl, you're better woman than me. When my pal Jen was describing her waxing process, I was laughing, but also feeling sort of vaporish. She got to the point where the waxer demanded Jen hold her buttocks open ("You help.") and I thought my I saw my life pass before me, like a drowning man. Jen's boyfriend is terribly, terribly cute, but I think if someone demanded I spread my cheeks prepatory to ripping the hairs out with dried wax, I would turn lesbian and learn to love my hairy crack.

Licensed

Added to the list of sentences I never thought I would utter, but have now: "Yesterday, we went down to pick up our wedding license." My, the world we live in.

City hall here is not particularly well air-conditioned, so it was a wee bit stuffy in the clerk's office and the pace was leisurely, but I was happy to be there. I have to admit, R Man and I have both been rather ambivalent about this whole thing. Why are we getting married after all these years together? Turns out the basic answer is "Cause we can."

So there we were, along with plenty other poofs aiming down the aisle. Of the dozen or so other couples we saw there, only one was apparently heterosexual. The very nice chica at the counter assured us that same sex couples were always better looking. Well, duh. I have to say I was not impressed with the boys who were wearing calla lilies as boutonnieres (calla lilies?) but still.

So our actual wedding is September 25 and it turns out the most difficult thing is finding a place for lunch afterwards. So San Francisco.

Hurricane Watchin' II

Now that I think about it, I believe all hurricanes should be named after characters in popular sitcoms. Hurricanes Ginger, Mary Anne, Luvy, Endora, Jeanie, and of course, Marciamarciamarcia.

Hurricane Watchin'

I was struck in the coverage of Hurricane Gustav this weekend by how poorly CNN and their ilk hid their disappointment that the storm gave New Orleans a pass. All the reporters and federal aid workers and disaster planners standing out in the pissing rain, pouting. You could see they really wanted an ginourmous, Katrina-style cataclysm so they could show their stuff. As Gustav wobbled from a category 5 down to a 4 and then wound up making landfall as a Categotry 2 their digust was palpable. I would have felt sorry for them if they weren't so despicable.

And can I just say this about "Gustav?" What a lame ass name for a hurricane. I grew up in cyclone territory, on a little peninsula sticking out into Galveston Bay and the storms of my youth (all girl names, this was before the decline in civilization that allowed boy names equal access) were sassy bitches that sounded like trouble. Carla and Betsy and Wilma and Bonnie; it was like they picked them from of a line-up of checkout ladies at the Piggly Wiggly. All these recent ones like Katrina and Ivan and Gustav reek of striving and you know how I hate that.