The Voice Of Reason

You may recall me telling you about My Pal Annie, a transgender woman I've known online and in person since the late 90s. Though some of her friends have known that she was transgender, many did not and this year she came out to them. From what I understand it's all been very positive. Annie went to drama school about 10 years ago or so but hasn't had a lot of luck aside from an episode of Shameless. She's belonged to an amateur dramatic company in Chorlton for years and has been involved in lots of productions with them and she's done some radio stuff I think.

She's just got her big break. I've known what it was for a couple of months but until it was officially announced, I couldn't say anything. She's going to be in the UK soap Hollyoaks!!!! That's a huge break. And her character, a teacher, is going to be transgender as well. They announced it yesterday, just after another rival soap got in there first with their announcement that they are hiring a transgender man to play a trans character. Hollyoaks has been a bit more low key about it, as one article says, they weren't making a song and dance about it".  They had actually had a trans actor playing a non-trans role earlier this year, without a huge amount of publicity. Just like hiring any actor, and that's how that should be. But in this day and age, seeing positive publicity for a group of people that don't get a lot of it is also good for all the trans people out there who might and should see them as role models.

I heard more details about it when I saw her at the UK wedding bash and i can't say too much about that because it's storyline spoiling well enough into the future that it has to be confidential. She's going to be doing some publicity, the chat shows and things as well, later in the year. She'll be on screen at the end of this month. Hollyoaks is a soap aimed at younger people so it's very trendy, and populated with a lot of teens and twentysomethings but that doesn't matter. A soap is a big deal to get cast in.

Annie has worked hard for this and she really deserves it. She's been filming for about a month now and is stupidly happy and excited. Her life is really going to change and she's ready for it. I am really going to be pleased and proud to watch her journey! I don't think fame will change her adversely. When the news hit the media yesterday, what was she doing? Fitting a new toilet seat!

Work is busy which is good. It makes the days go by but it also makes it harder to get to the gym early enough to do cardio before i meet the trainer on those days. Inevitably someone will come to my desk about 3:30 or i'll be in the middle of something. I meet the trainer at 4 some days and like to try to get there to do at least 15 minutes on a bike or a treadmill. If i am meeting him at 4:30 it's ok most of the time.

note to self, get a lottery ticket for tomorrow night. Dad asked me to buy a ticket on his birthday every year though he's not sent that little winning magic down from wherever he is to grant me more than the occasional free ticket win yet. I actually bought a Bingo scratch ticket the other day, won $3 on it so i got another one and am sitting here with a $6 win on that one. I will use the proceeds of that to get the Lotto Max for tomorrow night. I don't regularly buy lottery tickets or scratch tickets, just once in awhile. The most i ever won was about 100$ on a Max ticket "twist" option (where random numbers over three lines are "circled" so you don't have to get the numbers all on one line)

Good friends of mine got married this morning in Manchester. Nobody knew! Or very few people in the online world of friends at least and we're in contact on an almost daily basis so i'm surprised he didn't let it slip! He did say they were taking some holiday time but not that it was a honeymoon.  It would have been a Registry Office do with just their immediate family and a few close friends I assume. I would have liked to have known so i could have sent a card that would have got there about now rather than 2 weeks later but i wasn't the only one that didn't know so i don't feel left out ;)))  I did know they were engaged, just not when they planned to do the deed. I'm really pleased for them, they're a really nice couple and very good people.

So... retirement do yesterday at work for a man i've worked with for 24 years. There was an in-office cake and gathering and a party at Cheers after work with a stupendous turnout and lots of faces from way back! Gosh what a shock to see one of them at least. There were a few others that we don't see much but who do come to these things now and then. Good party but i don't tend to stay late at them because i don't tend to drink a huge amount and by 8 or 9 everyone's getting pretty legless and if you're relatively sober it stops being as much fun.

The cake was incredible. It was made by a local fancy restaurant, Scanway and had shaved white chocolate all over it and it was white layered with fresh strawberries. Oh wow!. I painted him something from a photo he took in Ireland and gave it to him last week. Graham added in the figures of his wife and daughter, something i would have been crap at attempting and overall it made a really good painting.

( Photos of the painting )

Today, i went to the community centre where the mother of a friend of mine wanted to do a practice run for teaching a painting class. There were three of us, two of us had painted before and one never. I think the "teacher" decided that she probably won't teach after all but it was fun to sit and chat and paint for the morning and part of the afternoon anyway. This was my effort.

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I've been on LJ since 2002 i think. Same username the whole time. I am still pretty good about keeping it up because i like to write and it's not just about letting other people know what's on in my life, it's also for my own records. I don't keep a paper journal anymore so i still like to witter on, post recipes, rant about the news, etc.

I've met lots of nice people through LJ. There are some i've never met face to face, some only once or twice and some a few times. I feel quite fond of many of my LJ friends and look forward every time i get the chance to meet up with one/some. The person that introduced me to it was naturalbornkaos who then left it for a bit but returned. In fact, i may have been the one that sent him the (re-)invite back then when you needed one to join. He's probably the only one i met pre-LJ, other than my family members that joined later.

Major changes that LJ has witnessed in my life include meeting and falling in love with gramie_dee though LJ wasn't instrumental in this. Also, my father's illness and death was significant. I think there has only been on drama, and I'm not going into that as it's over and done with long ago. LJ has been a place for me to post travelogues and photos from my travels as well.

I'm getting an ebook reader for Christmas, the Kobo one that Chapters/Indigo sponsors (and Barnes and Noble sells in the US). It will read ePub books which is the standard for ebooks as well as pdf files. I will be able to borrow from the library if i want as well. I also did some judicious searching online and have found a few downloads of ebooks, many hundreds and after weeding through them to discard the ones i defiinitely don't want, i still have nearly 1000. I doubt i will read them all, there are many that may not really be my thing but there's a lot that i probably will read. Not all older classic books either, there's some newer ones and many of the books or authors are ones i though i might like to read or re-read. I'll have a good library to pick at when i've read any that i've bought or borrowed from new releases.

I officially get the ereader tomorrow night when gramie_dee and i exchange our Christmas gifts at our annual webcam "party". I'll get my annual song t hen as well. Stay tuned here and on Facebook as well for a link when it's ready for public listening. He's quite pleased with the results of this one this year so i expect great things!

We had our office Christmas lunch and afternoon do on Friday. The food was really good, done at a local hotel. The organizers did up some little games like a Bingo sort of thing and another one where you get snippets of songs or dialogue from movies or tv shows and you had to guess which ones they are. I suck at Bingo so i didn't do very well there. I did ok on the guessing game but missed out by one in participating in the tie breaker. Ah well. I'm working this week up to Friday noon when the offices close down and then am off for a week.

I had a visit from my best friend J. today. She drove down from Moncton. My other friend, T, who makes up the third side of our triangular bestfriendship wasn't able to be there, in fact, i think they probably passed each other on the highway as T. was off to Moncton to her partner's family's Christmas get together. T and I will meet up on Thursday and exchange our gifts. J and I had a lovely long chat all afternoon. She moved east from Edmonton in the summer so we will get to see each other a bit more now as Moncton is only about 3 hours' drive or a little less if it's not winter.

2010 books
33 was that one about Catherine de Medici that i mentioned in the last book post.
34: The Sign by Raymond Khoury This was good. We start at a remote location where there is a scientific research crew. The head of the crew argues with someone and is killed and a witness is chased as he runs away. It seems as though he drives over the edge of a cliff in his hurry. Two years later, we are in the Antarctic where a news crew is covering the disintegration of an ice shelf as part of the larger environmental disaster the world is hurtling towards. Suddenly a glowing symbol appears in the sky. The news crew gets the scoop but nobody really knows what this symbol means. It happens again shortly after over Greenland where another environmental problem is ongoing. Is this sign religious? nobody knows. We move to Egypt where a monk, a very well known religious man, is in a cave in the mountains and has covered the walls with a drawing of this same symbol, but he's been doing that for months, long before the symbol appeared in the sky. We also follow the brother of the man that presumably died and he is on a mission to prove that his brother didn't die and might have something to do with this sign, whatever it is. Slowly we discover that the sign is being projected or man-created. There's good guys and bad guys, people that use and get used. It was a good read. I'd read more of this guy's books. I think i did read one of the ones he wrote about the Templars as it happens and he's done a few more.

35: Official 50th anniversary book of Coronation Street - Sean Egan. Lots of pics, focuses on many of the individual actors, brief summaries of the major storylines up to mid 2010.

Melted butter dripped off my toast onto my top this morning. Luckily i was still home and could change.

Embarassing moment:
Go and pick up a carton of milk and a carton of Orange juice. Ask for a bran muffin. It's just under $5.00. Look in (new) wallet. No fiver in the usual place. Ok. Look in wallet proper for a larger bill. Nothing.
Wait...
Nothing?
I could have sworn i had cash.
Forget that for the moment, i had to pay with my debit card.
I hate doing that for under 5 dollars.
Needs must.
Walk out of the shop, but i have to look again in that (new) wallet.
Realize there is now a zipped change section on the outside of the (new) wallet so i look in there and see.... a five dollar bill and a couple of two dollar coins. Ah.
Look in the wallet again and realize the bill section is divided into two sections. And yep, in the back section is the cash, $50. Phew!
New wallet, yes, just bought it on Saturday.
Obviously still not used to where i have to put things in it in relation to where i used to.
Doh.

My Personal Fitness Dragon is on holiday this week but i promised i would not slack off. Thus i am going after work today as usual and then am meeting a friend from out of town for dinner. I've met her face to face before though she's mostly an internet pal. When i went to Toronto a couple of years ago for a photo seminar, she offered to pick me up at the airport and then drove me to Niagra Falls for lunch. What a star! she and her husband are in Halifax this week for the Men's Curling championship tournament, the Tim Horton's Brier. I don't know if her husband is coming to dinner or not, she didn't know if he could tear himself away from the rink or not :)

Provincial election day today. I forgot my voter card but i have ID so that'll be ok. Poll station is convenient, on the way home from work. I'm going to vote, are you? I don't even care how you vote (well, yes i do but it's none of my business!) but make the effort!  I overheard a young woman on the bus this morning saying she wasn't going to bother, it didn't mean anything to her. It does though. People don't realize how much that a government does that affects your daily life. Our bus fares are going up. One of the reasons is the higher cost of fuel, and aside from the world price of oil, one of the other reasons fuel is so high is the amount of taxes on it, taxes the government sets.

I haven't posted too much, not a lot to say really. We had a family birthday for my nephew on Sunday and this weekend there's a flat warming party for one of my cousins that i may go to and a graduation party for another relative. I don't know him really but it's a good reason go get together and see family that i don't see too often. A former coworker is visiting Halifax in a couple of weeks so there will be an after work drinks do to catch up with her for those of us that knew her when. She decamped to the balmy breezes of Florida and loves it there.

Season 2 of Ashes to Ashes finished last night in the UK. ( here be spoilers and speculation )

Seems the US soap, Guiding Light, is being cancelled and will end in September.  This is a show that started off as a radio soap opera in 1937 and went to television in 1952 so it's 72 year run breaks all records for anything! There's another soap, As the World Turns that's been on television since 1956. Coronation Street, which was never a daytime serial, probably wins for longest running primetime serial/soap, coming in at 48 years and counting. It's 50th anniversary is December 9, 2010.  There's a man on ATWT that has been playing the same character for just a few months longer than Bill Roache has been playing Ken Barlow on Coronation Street though Roache is the one in the Guinness book for it.

I've stopped getting the daily paper delivered. I've been reading less and less of it and at home, the papers just pile up on weekends unread half the time. I am going to read it online by subscription there. I tried setting it up this morning but it wasn't working so i don't know if the work firewall was preventing it or not. I'll try from home on the weekend. If i subscribe, i can see the whole paper, not just the main stories that are on the newspaper website. 

Countdown to the trip now that the Corrie event is over. I leave on the 29th! W00T! 27 sleeps to Manchester, 26 until the day i leave but i usually count the higher number because i have to fly overnight and there's always a faint hope i might sleep on the plane!

Hoping to go out tonight with my mate Tracey in celebration of our birthdays that were in March. "Oh we have to get together..." so this time i said, let's decide on a definite date because we'll be more likely to do it, unless something does come up. Tonight is the designated date and it looks like it's still on so i must see what's playing at the movies.

Popped over to see blueberrymoon who was having an open house to show off and sell some of her prints and things. I picked up the Parisian cafe i'd been wanting and a couple of purse size mirrors for add-on pressies. Mom and i went to Staples after that and i found a nice new computer chair, all fabric with fabric covered arms. I always seem to get the ones with molded rubber and after awhile the rubber starts breaking off in chunks. I know the fabric will wear after awhile as well but at least you can put a new cover over it. I have to put it together so i'll do that tomorrow. It was on sale, down from about $169 to $99. Result! We checked out Penningtons where i failed to get a pair of jeans. They didn't have many and most of what they did were the petite length. No good for me. The store didn't seem to have much which is unusual. We picked up some bits in the bulk barn and now am home for the evening. It's sunny out and a little cool but i've got the window open to freshen up the place for a few minutes.

Lol thanks Sis, for pointing me to this site. Silliness really but kind of fun too! You upload photos and size them into a photo that has one or more faces cut out so yours will fit in.
( Surprise! )

My friend Denise and i have been going to see the local Shakespeare by the Sea company perform in Point Pleasant Park for years. We don't get there every year but we've gone to quite a few. They perform in a little clearing that's sheltered so it isn't too breezy but since it is quite near the mouth of the harbour, it can get a bit chilly at night once the sun goes down but it can also be blazing hot in the afternoon performances. This summer they're doing a version of Cinderella as their family show (yes, i know that's not Shakey), and Midsummer Night's Dream which we've seen several times before. They've done that before a few times as well. I guess it must be quite popular. I like it but it's not on my top list. As a percentage, I probably haven't seen all that many Shakespeare plays done live either in the park or on stage, maybe about a dozen, and have seen quite a few various versions on screen.

Anyway, the third play they are doing this summer is Othello. I know the story more or less but I'd never seen it all before. The company bagged two very excellent actors for the lead characters of Othello and Iago, just superb, especially Jeremy Webb as Iago. He had very impressive skills, body language and seemed very comfortable with the dialogue. Troy Adams played the Moor and again, did a very good job. Just excellent but Iago was the star for me. The rest of the lead players weren't too bad either but paled in comparison because the other two were so good. The play is put on in front of the ruins of Cambridge battery, an old remnant of a fort that used to be there guarding the harbour. the camp chairs are lined up on either side of a center "stage" and actors sometimes use the walls as towers and upper floors of houses. There are minimal sets, just some boxes and benches that get moved around. I notice the company has a good set of lights for after sundown. I haven't gone in the evening for quite awhile so that was new as were the two porta-potties. There probably could have been some better fight scenes, which seemed a bit rushed whenever they were on but that was really my only complaint. They use modern dress for the most part. Old Canadian military combat uniforms for the soldier scenes, the women in floaty skirts and lacy tops.

When i first started going, they were suggesting a 5 dollar donation. It's now a 15 dollar donation and if you donate more than 20, you'll get a tax receipt becasue they're a non profit organization. They held a raffle last year and it raised a good amount for them so they're doing it again this year, a trip for two to London with tickets to the Globe theatre, air fare, two nights in a hotel and $500 spending. It's well worth the entry fee though. These are all professionals. It's not an amateur hour or school play. It's a bit dark coming out of the park, though. No lights on the path and it's uphill-ish most of the way back to the parking lot but there was a full moon so it wasn't too bad and lots of people walking along. A few smart people brought flashlights.

With the performance, and a nice pub meal before hand, we had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. One of the two nice days this week. Back to the rain tomorrow.