Dolphin’s Dock

• Is no impressed with the personal property tax rate in Roanoke. #
• My front porch is begging for Xmas decoration (starting Dec 1st!), but looking in my bank account, I'm not sure how I'm gonna pull it off. #
• I really should have told my mom that I couldn't make t this year… #
• A tree skirt is a piece of fabric that lays on the floor. I am NOT paying $40 for one. #

• Ben thinks I should get stitches in my arm. I think I've had worse and it healed without them. #
• After my hour anf 15 min commute into work, I realized I forgot my (work) computer at home… :/ #
• I got Voice Candy for Mac for free from tap tap tap. They're celebrating the launch of Voices for iPhone http://bit.ly/i56Un #
• I'm avoiding avoiding Valley View Mall and the surrounding area like the plague until Palin's book signing is over. #
• Overheard: "We're supposed to be a country tolerant of other religions but we're not tolerant of our own" / We have a state religion now? #
• Waiting for my oil to be changed. The hot guy just got checked out leaving the customer lounge completely boring. *sigh* #

• Happy Veteran's Day folks. I share my office with a Veteran and he has to work today. What's that about? #
• If this is true, it's about damn time. http://ping.fm/YllIE #
• So the DVD recording of the final Broadway performance of RENT is really pretty bad. Though RENT is like pizza, even a bad show is alright. #
• Heading to the moon? Pack a swimsuit: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/11/13/water.moon.nasa/index.html #
• took a spill when running with Zeke. Dropped the leash but fortunately he ran straight home and was waiting for me by the time I caught up. #

I realize that this title could be as easily applicable to my presence here, which is partly why I’m making this post. I’ve been particularly busy lately, working into the evenings frequently on employed work and spending a bit of time ripping apart the horribly done back porch to close it into a new a laundry room (ok, well, properly framing in the wall and replacing the screen with the old windows, now that we’ve had all the house windows replaced; moving the plumbing and electrical for the washer & dryer will be a later project). I’ve actually got a post saved as a draft that I’ve been adding a sentence to once in a blue moon when I, mistakenly, think I’m gonna actually have 5 minutes to devote to blogging. That’s not a great way to write I gotta tell you. But all that said, I figured I’d fire off a quick and dirty post about, not my return to blogging, but my return to the bar scene after several years.

First you have to know that in all of southwest Virginia, there is only one gay dance club/bar (there’s at least one other gay bar-bar I know of and several that are not “gay bars” but have sorta been claimed by gay folks as the place “we” hang out). It’s not all that exciting, but it’s the only one so it really doesn’t have to be to draw a crowd. We hadn’t been in years because, while it was somewhat fun, it wasn’t so much fun as to justify the longer than one hour drive each way from where we were living, and coming home reeking of smoke.

Well now we’ve moved within a couple miles of the place, so at the request of a friend, we went ahead and headed there Saturday night. We arrived around midnight, when the place would have usually been packed as we recalled. It was maybe half-full. It did pick up a little bit later, but never to what I remember it being like when I used to go. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, a club isn’t a club, without the energy of a packed house. On the other hand, there was more room to move about without bumping into people or worrying about getting burned on a cigarette (which never happened to me, but I remember seeing those glowing tips floating around the dance floor in the past and always being worried about it). Speaking of smoking, if we’d have held off on our visit a couple of weeks, we could have avoided it. Since VA is going smoke-free in Dec (which is something I philosophically oppose as an intrusion on the rights of business owners to decide what goes on on their own property, and would vote against, but I can’t say I’m not distraught over it’s passage), they’re going ahead and making the switch on Nov 20th. Now THAT will be a change that might even get me in there a little more regularly (though still not too often; it’s a “fun every once in awhile” kinda place for me). The music has been switched from 80s Techno to Top 40. I think that’s over all a good thing, but I’m hoping it was a recent change and that’s why the DJ hadn’t yet discovered that it’s more or less impossible to dance to Pink’s “So What?”

I was less than impressed with security. The security guards who used to wield metal detectors now use a substantially less effect “pat each pocket” method for weapon detection. I’m not kidding; I could have had a handgun in my waistband and they’d have never been the wiser. For a place that had an anti-gay shooting there about 9 years ago, you’d think any change to their security policies would have been to make the stricter, not looser. I initially thought the average age of the crowd had seemed to drop some, and it in fact wasn’t until I was actually leaving that it occurred to me that (horror of horrors), it may not have been a younger crowd, just me observing them through older eyes!

Living so close now, and with them going smoke-free, we may just make a trip out there a bit more regularly, but I think we’ll invest in some discreet ear plugs first.

• I'm not ready for Halloween to already be over. #
• Why can't the guys with the cutest butts and the guys with the cutest faces be the same group? #
• My @mailchimp t-shirt just came in. And it's exactly the style I'd have chosen based on what they showed on their site during the contest! #
• There was some guy at the gas station this morning pumping gas in a green robe and blue boxers. JUST a green robe and blue boxers. #
• *sigh* The knowledge that marriage equality is inevitable doesn't lessen the sting of battles lost along the way. #
• One day I will figure out why I always must wrestle with setTimeout(); and setInterval(); to get them to work. #

• The wind is whistling like crazy!! Very creepy moaning sound for this Halloween week! #
• I wanna tell some people, "You don't understand, I'm not laughing WITH you…" #
• I think it's safe to say that I will NEVER get a @Discover card due to annoyance at the sheer quantity of junk mail they send me. #
• Happy Halloween!! #
• Up to 15 trick-or-treaters! I love being in a real neighborhood! #
• Make that 23! #
• Final Trick-or-Treater tally: 39. Awesome! #
• Definitely thinking about next year's Halloween outfit NOW so next year I will be prepared. #