Australia trip redux, homework, a recommendation letter, birthday@bookclub, and scareyoke…

I uploaded the final few pictures that were still in my camera from my trip. The address of the Sydney Westin, at which we stayed, was 1 Martin Place. Here’s a few pictures of me in the square about the hotel, and a picture of Robert that I love, love, love.




And here I am at the Sydney airport before boarding our United flight back to San Francisco having to suck down what I’d hoped would be a souvenir, but thanks to entering back into the U.S. and its “liquid on board” rules…


Yeah, that’s still some of those Shapes left—the ones whose “flavour you can see” that we bought on Heron Island. That was one strong drink, all 12 ounces of it—it was like having four cocktails in 10 minutes.


I had a flurry of activity with Jason and Kim Rothwell today regarding our 2nd Coder testing we wanted to do today. Jason ended up meeting Kim at 7:00 tonight to do the exercise. I’m anxious to learn of the results.


I did some more homework reading for Rhetoric of Science and Technology class, trying to get a little ahead for Wednesday’s class readings. Also, since the professor did create the discussion questions today, I was able to devise and post my response to one of them. Yay!


I wrote a letter of recommendation for Andrew Armstrong’s application for membership in Sigma Tau Chi.


I met book club—minus Mary, who had a last-minute work commitment come up—at The Cheesecake Factory at the Streets at Southpoint for our October meeting, which was in honor of my birthday.

I stopped at the Apple store there, first, to return the earbuds and ($20) iSplitter (that I ended up getting one for at Target for $2.99 instead). Their initial reaction was that I’d missed the return window, which I had assumed was 30 days, but was actually 14 days. Bastards.

However, since I I had missed the window by only two days, neither of the two packages had been opened (albeit the earbuds box had been sat upon), and they both were things they were still selling, they went ahead and gave me a refund anyway. How gracious.

Suzanne, Janet, and Sharon all gave me birthday cards, and after I opened all of them, I said, “You might be gay if—all of your birthday cards have women on the front of them.” It then occurred to me, too, that the card Joe gave me yesterday had a woman on the front as well. Things that make you go, “Hmmmm.”


I met Joe at Flex, where we played several games of pool and saw Tequila Rose out of drag for the first time. We were both surprised that that voice she uses (we thought) for drag, is actually her real voice. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her out of drag, and I know I wouldn’t have recognized her as Tequila Rose if I’d seen her as a man.

We left there at a little after 11:30, as within the span of about five minutes, the place became tragically empty. We couldn’t bear to be only two of about five people left in the place to listen to this guy who had literally stumbled up to the microphone to sing. He was so drunk, in fact, that when he went to pick out a song to sing, he originally went up to the emcee’s table and picked up the album of karaoke CDs thinking it was the songbook. Note: The songbooks are not up at the emcee’s station. They are on tables, scattered throughout the bar. Tequila Rose was looking at him with her head cocked a little and one eyebrow raised as if to say, “No, he is not going to go through my CDs.”

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