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July 25, 2006

Another jewel via Dienekes'

The answer to poor female body image is found! Starve your men!

July 20, 2006

Please, watch the sharks while we take your blood

So yesterday I gave blood for the first time since I went to Scotland. Because I'd been in Scotland for 6 months, I was barred from giving blood until recently when they relaxed the restrictions. You see, as far as I know, scientists have yet to discover a way to screen blood for the presence of mad cow disease. Therefore, anyone who'd been in the UK for over 6 months in the last 20 or so years was considered possibly tainted. They changed this last year to anyone there for a certain amount of time before 1996, and since I was there in 2002-03, I'm free to bleed for the Red Cross once again.

So when the building across the street from us announced that they were having a blood drive and that our company was invited to donate, I signed up. I kinda like giving blood it makes me feel like I'm doing something nice for others and of course, it gives me a certain feeling of pride when I see the blood letters reaction to my gigantic veins. That's right, I have huge veins. Just ask Jamie, a friend of mine who is at the moment a traveling nurse in Cali. She's mentioned several times how easy it would be to stick a needle in my prominent blood vessels, often while in a public place, making other people in the room either laugh or appear very nervous.

Anyway, so I arrive at the conference room and they begin to ask me all sorts of questions like, "Have you traveled in a malarial area in the last year?", "Have you taken drugs by needle not prescribed by a doctor?", "Have you ever had sex with a man who has had sexual relations with another man?" and so on... In both the survey/snack room and the blood room they were showing on large projector screens a video from BBC and the Discovery Channel about life in the sea. There were pretty pictures of parrot fish and sea turtles. I had a lovely conversation with one of the volunteers about scuba diving in Australia, all in all, very relaxing. Until the shark segment. One man walked into the room, ready to get stabbed in the arm, looked up and immediately went pale at the sight of a shark feeding frenzy blown up to cover almost the entire wall opposite him. Possibly not the best choice in movies for a blood drive.

Once a blood bed had opened up for me I was called into the other room. My blood pressure was taken, things were taped to my arm and I was given a stress ball to squeeze. The woman was just about ready to stick me when she looked at my huge vein, paused, and then brought out a sheet of the same material they make your bib out of at the dentists office. She put it between my shirt an my arm and told me it was in case my blood squirted out. How weird is that? I've never heard of blood escaping while the nurse takes it from your arm. At first I thought does my vein look like it's about to explode? Then, as I turned my head so as not to see the needle pierce my skin, I wondered if maybe she was just terribly incompetent and soon my blood would be everywhere. Thankfully, she was not incompetent and there was no blood squirtage during the entire donating process. As I sat there squeezing my stress ball every 3-5 seconds I realized why I had had to wait so long for a bed to open up. The beds on either side of me were occupied by people still recovering from their own blood letting ordeal. They were being feed plenty of juice and were asked if they were feeling alright every minute or so. Both ladies looked quite the worse for wear. Fortunately, another consequence of my massive veins is that I tend to fill their puny blood bags very quickly and was having my elbow pressure wrapped and walking out the door in no time, feeling slightly light headed and wondering if it would affect me any more since I was now living in a less oxygen rich atmosphere.

July 17, 2006

I'm Melting

Denver hit another record high yesterday at 106 degrees and I don't have air conditioning. Rick saved me on Saturday by organizing an impromptu camping trip in the nice cool mountains. However, I was back in my sweltering apartment on Sunday afternoon debating whether or not getting drunk by myself at a bar at 2 in the afternoon simply to be in an air-conditioned place was a wise decision. It was so hot that the power company apparently had to institute rolling blackouts simply to cope with the power used by everyone's AC's. Even the Body Worlds exhibit was forced to close for an hour or so while the museum was hit by one of these blackouts.

This morning it was already 76 degrees out at 6 am when I got up. I couldn't wait to get to work where its always freezing no matter what the temperature is outside. One of the interesting ways that Coloradians deal with the heat are swamp coolers. I'd never heard of these things till I moved out here since they probably wouldn't work so well in a place as humid as Northern Virginia. But apparently they work wonderfully in semi-arid Colorado. Basically, it's a machine that sits on top of your house and sprays cool water down through a fan which vaporizes it. These use much less electricity than a normal AC and many people out here swear by them.

I'm hoping that next weekend isn't as bad as this last weekend, but if it is you'll probably be able to find me at the gay coffee shop down the street taking advantage of their free wifi and AC. Either that or taking a cold cold shower.

July 11, 2006

Redstripe is beer. Hooray Beer!

Brian was out here all last week, yay. Unfortunately, it rained almost every day he was here! Denver has been in drought mode for 5 years and it decides to rain the whole week he's here! But hey at least neither of us got sick, I figure things are looking up :)

There was much soccer watching as the World Cup was in it's last week so we caught most of the games at The Park (a bar around the corner from me) where the beer flowed, Hooray Beer! We had to watch the last game at the airport as Brian's flight home was scheduled to leave in the middle of it. His flight ended up getting cancelled which was sort of good because he got to watch the whole game live and I got him for a whole extra day, but bad because he ended up having to spend 6 hours at the airport and miss a day of work.

Anyway, on Sunday and Monday last week we went camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. It was gorgeous except for the crazy lightning/rain/hail storms which seemed to hit every afternoon. We hiked nearly 10 miles in on the first day and stayed at Lost Lake which to our surprise was completely infested with mosquitoes.


We hadn't prepared for that at all and so had no bug repellent and ended up hiding in our tent whenever we were at the campsite. Monday morning we explored the area around Lost Lake and attempted to scale Icefield Pass but ended up turning back halfway up. This was probably the smartest thing we did all day, however, since soon after one of the above mentioned freak storms set in and we were later informed that the pass is pretty dangerous this time of year without an ice-axe and cramp-ons. Afterwards we had to book it back to the campsite since it was starting to lightning and we were far away from any sort of forest shelter.


After waiting out the rain in the tent once again there was a lull and we heard a voice outside wondering if anyone was around. Turns out it was a Park Ranger and we were camping in the wrong spot, oops. Apparently, I had completely not paid any attention to the name on the backcountry pass and had assumed we were meant to be at Lost Lake when in fact we were supposed to be about a mile down at Lost Meadow. He asked a whole ton of questions and the whole time I'm hoping he doesn't see the bottle of 151 in the tent and that our bear bag wasn't quite high enough in the tree (it was impossible to find a sturdy and high enough branch in the wimpy trees near our tent).


Eventually, he decided not to fine us the $50 for camping in the wrong spot and not to tell Colorado DMV that I'd moved to denver in the winter and still hadn't registered my car or gotten a colorado license. He said we were free to stay at Lost Lake that night as long as it was ok with the two guys that were supposed to be there, then he disappeared back into the woods. Since it was only 3 o'clock or so and we didn't particularly like the idea of camping 5 ft. away from two random guys we decided to break camp and head down to Lost Meadow.


But when we got there about half an hour later we were feeling really good and weren't looking forward to another hard packed dirt night or the early morning march out so we could catch the 1 o'clock soccer game at a bar in Denver. So in our infinite wisdom we decided to make the long trek back to the car. This was a great idea until the last mile or so when my feet decided that it was way past time to stop hiking. Fifteen miles in one day is a lot. That night was slept like the dead.


The next day was 4th of July and we had tickets to see the Colorado Rapids play the New England Revolution at Mile High. Unfortunately, it also was the night of the worst downpour I'd ever seen in Colorado. They had to hold the game for over a half an hour during the first half because of the lightning. Luckily, we decided to move early on and got pretty good seats in a sheltered area.


The fans were great though and occupied themselves by performing "the wave" during most of the delay. The best part about the game was the halftime show, I've never been so entertained at half-time. At DC United games they often have little kids play short sided games on the field, the Rapids had a short sided game played by a bunch of random Mascots! It was hilarious, mostly because the field was so wet that they were constantly slipping all over the place and completely missing the ball.


Ok, so maybe you had to be there.

After the game was a very pretty fireworks display accompanied by, I think, every song that ever had the word 'America' in it.


The rest of the week was fairly relaxing. It rained so we spent a lot of the time inside. We caught the midnight showing of Pirates of the Caribbean on Thursday night, which was great. We saw Superman Returns which we enjoyed despite all you movie snobs and your scathing reviews (you know who you are). Lighten up, I don't see how anyone who's grown up on the original movies could have expected more than what they got. As far as I'm concerned the Superman myth has never been internally consistent and has always merely been an excuse to show off Superman's ability to lift lots of heavy objects and pine over Lois Lane. Personally, I went to see a guy that looks a lot like Christopher Reeve repeatedly save people in an action-packed two hours. The only real downside was the guy sitting behind us who repeatedly whispered the words "that's superman's son" even after the fact had been made painfully obvious to everyone over the age of 4.

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