Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Remember my fellow trans facilitator A-the-lady? Well, she's out of commission for a few weeks due to a horrendous bike accident on the way to Pride involving the accursed streetcar tracks and, of course, vehicular traffic. Unlike me in my two accidents in the last year, she didn't ask for trouble; she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mayunn, cyclists shouldn't need to be braver than the troops just to get around.

But first: Murphy's Law dictates that I sleep poorly the night before I need to go to Lambert House. Between five hours' sleep and waiting a total of 45 minutes for the two buses home, I was light-headed from fatigue by the time I got home around 2300.

The trans youth at Lambert House seem to be bearing up remarkably well to... all this. Better than I am, possibly. Or so it seems: I've heard from B the volunteer manager that one or two of them have been having severe difficulties. But as I told him, I wouldn't have guessed if he hadn't told me, at least not last night.

My other job at Lambert House is as database monkey. Ken the director wanted me to run some queries to help him decide whether to continue with Discord, but I crashed Microsoft Access (ew) and then B showed up to kick me out of the "house". Luckily, it isn't as urgent as the quarterly report.

Oh yeah: the "house", if you'll recall, is Lambert House's temporary location in the carriage house at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral. They were flying a Trans Pride flag when I showed up yesterday evening. Darn you Episcopalians, almost making me weepy as I got off the bus. We're supposed to move back into our real house in the first half of next year, and there are some things I'm going to miss.

Telecommunication #1, Friday: former co-worker M calling* and telling me to talk to my HR department to see if they'll let me work for them from Canada, and maybe even sponsor me.

Telecommunication #2, Saturday: my ex texted me to tell me to make plans for Canada. If you'll recall, Ex is Jewish and like many if not most American Jews she lost relatives in the Holocaust.

Telecommunication #3, Sunday: Good Sister called with what she called an update with no real news. Her lawyer is being kind of weird about getting us permission to sell Mom's house, telling GS not to call the court about it. My sister is a ball of frustration about to go super-critical. She's calling the court today, and has let her weird lawyer know that.

Telecommunication #4, Sunday: I texted the director of Lambert House asking if they'd sent out their 1099s yet; I can't file my taxes until I've seen it. He responded with a thumbs-up tapback. What does that even mean?

The thing is, the Canadians aren't going to do squat for trans Americans unless their lives are directly threatened, and maybe not even then. Sure, I'll talk to HR and update my go bag, but really? That's about it.



*We're Xers. We talk on the phone.

Yeah, I had to go back to (the temporary location of) Lambert House and fix the stupid UI, which is is written in Visual Basic for Applications. And what did I have to fix?

• The stacking order of UI elements, which gets messed up every single time I touch them.
• Actually do the plumbing from Access's pidgin SQL to VBA. How pieces of data get from the former to the latter isn't exactly obvious. It's the seam that holds Frankenstein's head on.
• Figure out why the check boxes weren't checking. The answer here was that if you want to check a box you have to click about 1mm to the left of the box. That's right, there are arithmetic errors happening way down deep in a UI library, and they'll never be fixed because they've been unsupported for years now.

So what's the really right way to fix this? Move to a real SQL server and write a front end. It wouldn't even take much Javascript to do what Lambert House needs. But that's a big-ass project, and one that I've already tried and failed to sell to Ken the director. Welp, if things ever really go sideways I'll be doing that project in a big hurry. Maybe I should engage in speculative execution.

I got home after 10:00 last night and slept the sleep of the just.

This just in from Evil Sister: she and her elder daughter are fine despite Hurricane Milton, and Gainesville, FL "dodged another bullet". I can't help but wonder how long that's going to last. I'm not even sure what my sister was doing there.

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, I did my database monkeying for Lambert House last night at their newish temporary location: St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, an architecturally interesting church about a mile from the house.

I've been asked several times why the house has moved temporarily. It's having its foundation replaced; leaks had rendered the basement unusable and had imperiled the house. So, somebody's going to jack the place up and pour some brand new concrete.

How's the church, or rather, its carriage house? Swank! It's a lot of space, and it's in excellent repair; I had no idea the Episcopalians did so well for themselves. Our poor little house with its decades-long history of absentee landlords suffers in comparison. The move seems not to have deterred the kids youth from coming, which was the highest priority in the selection of the space. The IT situation wasn't quite ideal yet, but we made it work. Gotta crunch those numbers.

And another excursion: I went to the Blue Moon Tavern, which is an ancient dive bar in the U District with a venerable history of serving literati and pinkos, for of all things a house music night. Picture people, several older than I am, shaking their booties to old house on vinyl in a smallish, sticker-covered bar that predates my mother. That's why I live in a big city. I'll be back for "DJs in a Dive Bar", and preferably not alone.

Yesterday my son forgot that he said he'd come over for dinner. But if he had come over, I would have needed to go grocery shopping late last night after my Lambert House volunteer shift.

Speaking of Lambert House, I promised to do some database monkeying for them on Sunday, but I napped instead of going in the afternoon as I'd put in my calendar. I remembered just in time to bop on over to Capitol Hill and back before bedtime. The actual monkeying was mercifully fast, and my mass transit mojo was working.

I managed to do laundry before or between meetings this morning. It was definitely time: I was low on warm socks and unsexy underwear in my dresser.

I went to the Lambert House volunteer social yesterday afternoon, pretty much as ever, but this one was different from the last few: the director, Ken Shulman, was absent due to shoulder surgery, and it was in the actual house for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

Yes, it was a lovely time chatting with and checking out my fellow volunqueers and their partners. But what really got my attention was the news of the org itself. I've posted here before about how the org has to temporarily move (!) while the house that we now own gets its foundation replaced (!!) and that we only had about half the total money to make it all happen.

Well, it looks as if between Ken's fundraising hustle and a lot of creative economizing, it's going to happen in the spring. Our host will be St. Mark's Episcopal Church Cathedral. For you non-Seattle folks, that's a century-old architectural landmark that's visible from much of the city. They're putting us in the "carriage house". St. Mark's is probably as good a location as we could get: it's big enough, it's transit-accessible, its security situation is good, and it's near enough to the heart of Capitol Hill, Seattle's gayborhood, that the youth should find it reasonably accessible.

Dinner was high-protein pasta with Brandon the volunteer manager and his fella. Yeah, gay men and their carbophobia. But another of the Lambert House staffers, a woman named Rebecca, drove me to the Cha Cha lounge to get my umbrella back (!) and then home to Fremont (!!). I was very grateful, especially given the ongoing maintenance on the light rail.

Hit the Merc with Shiny H & G for the former's birthday. Got to chat with aaminahlefae a bit. She's crashing out of that divorce, and it's a beautiful thing to see. And, and and and, Vienna La Rouge was there too, in the out-of-the-way Handjob Corner. No icky dudes with her, no partner either. Good Goddess, that woman's unfairly attractive, in a gay way. And hanging out and talking to her is... nice. No, that's not dirty. It reminded me of when we used to do that in 2008.

Shallow fashion details: violet brocade overbust corset from Dark Garden; "boot licker", i.e. very high-low, skirt from Gallery Serpentine; Fluevog Truth Melanie held above my knees with black velvet ribbons; and all the violet accessories with violet MAC makeup. It was my 2019 Pride eve outfit, only dressier.

Went to the annual Lambert House volunteer appreciation gathering in Volunteer Park. Sheesh, getting there on transit took forever. Oddly, coming back was easy. Said Ken the director, they're in negotiations for a place to move to for two years, but they haven't nailed anything down, so there's nothing really worth announcing. He asked us grunts if any of us had a line on a space, but he says the youth won't go to a space that's office-y. What the actual? Lambert House is such a precious thing, a place where it's safe for queer kids to be queer. I like to think that when I was their age I wouldn't have cared much what the building looked like. Anyway, if any of you know of a transit-accessible place on Capitol Hill that isn't (too?) office-like, please let me know.

I neither made it to the annual ravey thing at Myrtle Edwards nor circumflatulated. I needed to do housework, and my son should be arriving for dinner shortly. Ah well, I have a few summer weekends left.

And why the FOMO? Well, uh, let's just say I've been unusually successful with Clara II these last three days. Record-breakingly so.

Over Pride weekend I mentioned that I said hi to my favorite non-profits. That naturally includes Lambert House, where I've been volunteering since 2012.

A few years back they nearly got kicked out of their house by an absentee landlord. Director Ken Shulman saved the day by raising several million to buy the place. Go him!

Well, he has a new challenge: the house, build in the 1900s, has for years had a river in the basement when it rains. You know this is in Seattle, right? Yeah. So it needs some foundation work.
I asked Ken, "This isn't one of those things where you have to jack up the house and replace the foundation, is it?"
"Yes, it is."
"Oh, shit! That's about the most expensive repair on a house you can make."

The good news is that Ken has secured a million for the actual repair. The bad news is that he needs another half million or so for the temporary move, plus he needs to find an actual place to move to. That place has some special access and location requirements given that our clients are queer kids youth.

Am I worried for the house? Not especially, but then again I don't know more that what I just told you.

Lambert House, the queer youth center where I volunteer as database monkey, has to do an annual statistical report for its funding agencies at the start of the calendar year. I haven't gotten remote access to work since I moved*. So I bopped on down to the house, which is unheated when the youth aren't there.

Picture me doing three hours of database queries and spreadsheets in my big, red & black coat with gloves on. Even with the extra clothing my fingers and toes went numb. Hello, Raynaud's syndrome! I felt completely justified in going up the street to Smith for a bowl of clam chowder. I miss the days when the Monday night Lambert House crew would hit Smith for drinks & munchies.

Punch line: the director said afterward he could have turned the heat on for me remotely. Le sigh.



*I think it's an IPv4 vs. IPv6 issue. Xfinity wants to assign me an IPv6; the thing at the other end only wants IPv4. I might be able to configure my way to happiness, but I'm not messing with that until work settles down.