Bus slippers, building appreciation, tax diversification & retail therapy, and my drag king friend!

~Thursday~  I checked my work e-mail on my phone while still in my bed. I had a request from my boss’s boss for a copy of some notes from a meeting last week that he wanted to look through before a 10:45 meeting of ours today.

I caught the Wolfline #9a GV Tripper to DH Hill, which arrived at about 8:20. It had center-facing seats, like the regular Wolfline buses, and a guy took a seat across from me, wearing—what I’m quite sure were—house slippers.

House slippers on feet on bus

Logorrhea boarded at her usual stop, but in the rarest of rarities, she did not utter a peep the entire way.

The framing is done on the Bristol Creek Apartments that we pass, and I couldn’t help thinking about our Habitat trip to New Orleans and how it gave me a whole new appreciation for what I was seeing. Not only did I understand the kind of work that had gone into what was done so far, I even noticed some things I’d’ve never noticed before, such as the temporary bracing studs holding the wall frames level.

Framed apartements

The university Wolfline buses have to turn onto a service street alongside Hillsborough Street in order to get to two stops, and there are two gates along that service road. When we approached the first gate, another bus had stopped in front of it, but for some reason the scanner wouldn’t read its decal to automatically open, and that huge thing had to back out of there. Another Habitat trip flashback: It reminded me of driving that 15-passenger van in New Orleans. It’s funny how you don’t appreciate most things until you’ve experienced them.

The bus I was on then pulled in after the one that had been stuck had backed out of the way, and I was ambivalent about that strategy. Fortunately, it opened for us, though.


At work, I couldn’t find the notes from that meeting that my boss’s boss was asking for. I searched the hard drives of my personal Windows laptop, my work Mac laptop, my Windows work desktop, and Dropbox, all to no avail. I knew I’d taken notes during that meeting, and when I asked a colleague who was at the meeting and had helped me with a couple of names of attendees about it, she said, “Yeah, it was a Google doc.” Bingo!!! So much technology, so little memory.

After the 10:45-Noon meeting that he wanted those notes before, I ran out to see my financial advisor, where we I met his dog, Lila (Adorable!), and we talked about some strategies:

  1. Making more cash available to me, as I’m investment rich, but cash poor—relatively speaking, of course
  2. Options of what to do with that ~$40,000 I’m rolling over from my IBM pension plan
  3. Tax diversification on my invested money; moving more of it from taxable instruments into my Roth IRA, which included an interesting discussion about my possibly working retail for a period of time in the not so distant future

Tonight was “Turnabout Night” at Flex, and the GLBT kids from NC State took over Trailer Park Prize Night for a fundraiser, and one of the kids from my 2011 Alternative Spring Break Gulf Coast Habitat for Humanity trip, Caitlin, was in the show. All but two of the performers were drag queens, but two of them were drag kings, one of them being Caitlin, whom I was very, very proud of!

Enrique De La Noche


The whole show was much more entertaining than I had anticipated it being, a lot having to do with the number of young people who came out—and are “out” at such young ages these days—and the boundless energy of youth. Wistful sigh.

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