sistawendy: me in my Suffragette costume going "Eek!" (eek)
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.
sistawendy: me in the Mercury's alley with the wind catching my hair (smoldering windblown Merc alley)
Friday lunch: my son took me out for a burger. We talked about current events because we always do that.

Friday dinner: Funny Lady took me out for a very belated birthday dinner at Shiro's. Excellent company, and some of the best sushi in town.

Saturday morning: the Lambert House trans group facilitators got together at Lost Lake. (We ended up sitting in the Comet and ordering from Lost Lake's kitchen, which was a bit weird, but I'll take it. Moral: if you want a table in Lost Lake proper on a Saturday, be there by 9:30.) We talked about trans stuff. And facilitating. And Lambert House. It's a weirdly comfortable feeling to hang out with a group of people who Get You in ways that hardly anyone else does.

Saturday evening: Pony with Tacoma Girl. I hadn't been since before the pandemic, and she'd never been. It's very gay, with big photos of naked men (and one trans woman) on the walls, sculptures of genitalia hanging from the ceiling, and a sticker game that in places rivals the Blue Moon. Tacoma Girl is convinced that some of the graffiti is by art students. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Seattle Ms. Leather, who organizes the women's munch I've been to, showed up and sold us candy. The crowd is way more varied and thereby interesting than the one at, say, Union; I think it's fair to say that Pony is a queer dive bar. Tacoma Girl loved it, natch, and so do I.

The two of us failed to scare up eats that didn't involve a long wait, so I got home at a reasonable hour via busy mass transit.
sistawendy: a butterfly in the style of a street sign (butterfly)
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.
sistawendy: a head shot of me smiling, taken in front of Canlis for a 2021 KUOW article (Default)
Lambert House trans group last night. It was the best attendance we've had since we moved into the temporary location at St. Mark's, both in person and online. That's... something? The yoof seem to be all right, especially considering.

The trouble is, to be awake for Lambert House I drank an unusual third cup of tea late yesterday afternoon, so I didn't get to sleep until late. And then I woke up at 0415 when all that tea wanted out. I'm frankly amazed that I didn't fall asleep during tonight's call with the Tickler.
sistawendy: me in a Gorey vamp costume looking up (skeptic coy Gorey tilted down)
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.
sistawendy: a butterfly in the style of a street sign (butterfly)
Last night was a second mad dash to St. Mark's, the temporary home of Lambert House. Everybody seemed to be making an effort to talk about everything except politics, which is a deeply unpleasant subject for trans people in the US right now. In case you didn't know, arguments about a Supreme Court case, US v. Skrmetti, which could get rid of affirming care for trans minors is on the docket. You know they won't stop with minors.

I'm ambivalent about avoiding the subject: we're talking about teenagers here. They need the comfort, but they also need to know what's going on and to process what they're feeling about it.

Once again, no youth showed up for the group in person. The cool weather and inconvenient location may have something to do with that. The sooner the renovations are done to the house, the better.

How's the bod? Fine, as long as I don't kick anything or try to do leg lifts. I probably shouldn't get back on Miss Indigo Bike until after the next bunch of rainy days, though.
sistawendy: me looking stern in a blue velvet 1890s walking suit (lizzy)
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.
sistawendy: me in the Mercury's alley with the wind catching my hair (smoldering windblown Merc alley)
Went to brunch at St. Hooligan's in Frelard* with Dancer and her pal S, who's been taking care of her after knee surgery. The food's fantastic, and nobody seems to know they're open for brunch! Not only have I found good brunch in the north end, I can actually get a table! O frabjous day!

There's something I've noticed about Dancer: she's fond of last-minute changes to plans. This tends to cause confusion. Another thing I've noticed is that she often pushes herself too hard physically. Her knee, which had just been operated on a week ago, bothered her so much she was in tears once. I hope she's resting now.

Next: St. Mark's Episcopal, where I needed to spend a couple of hours doing updates to the Microsoft Access (Ptui!) UI for the Lambert House database. I've sternly admonished the volunteer manager to test the damn thing better than I did before the volunteers get their hands on it.

Then a sunny walk down Broadway for Tacos Chukís, Duolingo in Cal Anderson Park, and then a Goth munch at the Unicorn. I only stayed an hour at the Unicorn because while pleasant, it was a bit of a sausage party and not very... munchy. And I had a lot to do at home.

Some of what I had to do at home was on-call stuff. What I didn't realize was that my shift had ended, irregularly, on Friday. Arg! But at least I got the laundry and cooking done at a reasonable hour.



*St. Hooligan's sign says "Balmont". Aw. I like the name Frelard, and I think they're fighting a losing battle to call it anything else.
sistawendy: me in the Mercury's alley with the wind catching my hair (smoldering windblown Merc alley)
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.
sistawendy: me in my nurse costume looking weirded out (weirded out)
I spent last night at Lambert House running database queries. It was a bit of an emergency; I should have done it earlier this month, but I only just remembered yesterday. The director hasn't been well lately, so he didn't remind me as usual.

Going to Lambert House last night meant I didn't go to the munch* that I'd planned on attending. But then this morning, the organizer of the munch wrote me as if he'd met me last night. I had to assure him that he hadn't.

This is at least the third time that somebody has told me they've mistaken someone else for me somewhere on Capitol Hill**. I'm a transgender woman in her fifties with purple hair. How many of me can there possibly be running around? I'm more amused than worried — for now.



*A "munch", in kink community parlance, is a non-kinky social event by and for kinky people. There's usually food involved.
**Let's be honest: if you're going to look for my doppelgänger, the Hill is the most logical place to go.
sistawendy: me in a green velvet dress in front of a brick wall, laughing and looking up as I think, "WTF?" (wtf laughing)
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.
sistawendy: me in my suffraget costume raising a finger in front of the Vogue (oh yeah)
There's something else I learned, or rather had confirmed, while I was talking to Rebecca the Lambert House staffer. The fraction of the youth that Lambert House serves who are homeless has fallen during my time as a volunteer.

How good is that? Parents still kick their kids out of their homes for being queer, but has the rate of such incidents fallen? That would be wonderful, but there's a less pleasant alternative explanation: homeless queer youth just aren't showing up at the house.

I can think of why that might be the case. Early in my years and Rebecca's, the biggest complaint about the house that the youth had was that we weren't doing a good enough job of keeping banned youth out; one day's group of floor volunteers wouldn't necessarily know what had transpired on an earlier day because the records were all on paper. One of the first things that executive director Ken Shulman had me do with the database and front desk app was add features to make communication between volunteers about such issues more automatic and to alert them to potential problems. Maybe what I did worked.

Are homeless youth historically more likely to be banned for substance use or other inappropriate behavior? It would be wrong to assume so, and I couldn't honestly hazard a guess. I have access to the data that the house has on that, but I've never queried it myself. And that data is based on voluntary reporting by both the youth and the volunteers, so I can't promise that it's any good.

Mind you, COVID scrambled everything. Lambert House, the physical building, is again open to the youth five afternoons a week as of October. If we're going back to the situation of ten or twelve years ago, I guess we're going to find out shortly.
sistawendy: me in my nun costume with my duster cross, looking hopeful (hopeful nun)
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.
sistawendy: me in my nun costume with my duster cross, looking hopeful (hopeful nun)
I worked my first full(ish) day of the year on Friday. Not horrible.

It's a good thing that Lambert House didn't have their data entry done until late last week, because I sure as hell wasn't ready for it until the weekend. So I bopped on down to the house — I can't work remotely because their remote access software is old — and failed to get into the usual office, whose lock has been janky for years. Luckily, somebody did the admin chores needed to allow me to use a machine elsewhere.

Next frustration: spending an hour resolving the 1% or so of data marked as duplicate entries, which mess up our reports to a degree that director Ken Shulman finds unacceptable*. I don't know how this happens so often, but nothing is foolproof.

Next frustration after that: finding the queries I need to run. This is where Microsoft Access makes me want to yell. Queries with UNION operators are elsewhere in the UI? Really?

But I got (most of**) the job done, so with numb toes from the lack of heat in the empty house I walked to dinner with the felicitously nearby Funny Lady. Bar Vacilando does have a good burger, as she promised, and I had a lovely time with glögg. But I was still coughing enough during dinner that I bailed on any further attempts at fun that evening. Look at me being sensible!



*What about the local government agencies that require us to make the reports? Historically, sometimes they read the reports and care about their accuracy, sometimes they don't. But Ken's right that we shouldn't take it for granted that they don't.
**Ken likes to do deep dives into the ZIP code breakdown. It looked like the kind of thing I shouldn't do alone. Indeed, in pre-COVID times Ken & I spent several nights working until 0200 on exactly this. Ungh.
sistawendy: a cartoon of me in club clothes (dolly)
Hit the Merc with Shiny H & G for the former's birthday. Got to chat with [profile] 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.
sistawendy: a butterfly in the style of a street sign (butterfly)
I did my quarterly number crunching thing at Lambert House last night. Yeah, I've been doing that for eleven years, but last night was special: for the first time since the pandemic started, there were other volunteers and youth at the house. There were kids in every room I checked that they usually have access to. It felt really, really good.

The LH volunteer manager sent me a bunch of small changes he wants to the hoary old MS Access app that we use for collecting data. Le sigh.

On the way home, I saw a sign pasted just outside the entrance to Capitol Hill station: "A WORLD WITHOUT TRANS PEOPLE HAS NEVER EXISTED AND NEVER WILL." Nice, but somebody improved it by applying "PROTECT TRANS YOUTH" stickers over "OUT" and both instances of "NEVER".
sistawendy: me in a Gorey vamp costume with the back of my hand to my forehead (hand staple forehead)
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.
sistawendy: me in profile in a Renaissance dress at a party (contemplative red)
On Tuesday, I remembered that I hadn't done the quarterly report for Lambert House. This late into the second quarter, that's a potential problem for the house; we do have a deadline. I texted the director, and he said go, go, go. I went to Lambert House right after dinner with the Wendling – my remote access has been busted ever since I moved – and was, surprisingly, not alone. The volunteer manager had juuuust finished entering the data that I needed to run queries on, and the director was there doing his thing. The good news is that we got the report done before the city noticed it was late. The bad news is that I missed my weekly video call to the Tickler.

Oh: LH is now doing in-person programs on Mondays and Fridays, with plans to expand that calendar in the fall. The giant stuffed unicorn is downstairs on the main floor, where queer kids are no doubt cuddling it.

Optional night out with local cow orkers. It was a spirited but small gathering; not all of us in the area showed up. Our corporate overlords have been recruiting heavily in Canada, not the US, so the Seattle "office" has shrunk to the point that it's unlikely to be physical ever again. Yes, believe it or not, I miss getting out of the house every day. I'm just going to keep missing it for the forseeable future.

I said goodbye to them across from the street from the boarded-up building that used to be the Noc Noc. That's where I spent my first ever evening living full time as a woman, in the company of more friends of my expected.

My social calendar is blowing up lately. In general that's good, but I wish it were more spread out throughout the year. I'll be writing all about the social events right here when they happen, natch.
sistawendy: me in the Mercury's alley with the wind catching my hair (smoldering windblown Merc alley)
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.
sistawendy: Lego me in a red dress holding a beer tankard (celebration plastic)
I've been late to post because I was busy. With what, you ask? My 12th rebirthday! Half a dozen people came over on Saturday night. The gathering was small but pleasant: sushi, chats, and non-distilled alcohol, as advertised. I even got to see an unusual suspect.

I put on the big, indigo-and-black dress with the printed scroll design on it from Gallery Serpentine. That's a tight fit in parts of my house,

Speaking of my house, I've got to come up with a more satisfactory arrangement of the living room furniture for gatherings. Currently, the couch faces away from the dining room table, which means I had people (including myself) sitting on the back of the couch.

[swaps couch and bouncy chairs]

Mind you, a few people who said they would didn't come, but there are all kinds of good reasons why they might not have. So, leftover sushi, which I have cooked for safety and eaten half of so far.

Yesterday was cleanup and lunch with most of the other trans group facilitators at Lambert House. There's a Middle Eastern joint called Aviv a block away that's pretty good; I'd somehow managed not to eat there despite walking past the place dozens if not hundreds of times. We vets dished dirt about the house to the noobs with their encouragement.

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sistawendy: a head shot of me smiling, taken in front of Canlis for a 2021 KUOW article (Default)
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