Enemy of Entropy

And another announcement, this one at the request of Stefanie:

The date has been set! Mark your calendars for NOLOSE ‘08: September 26th through the 28th (Friday-Sunday). Meet us by the pool at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center in Northampton, Massachusetts for a weekend packed with fattastic fun, food, friends and other good stuff!

We’re all hard at work, planning to make this year’s conference the best ever! There are a lot of exciting things in the works. The Clarion has charm, a great location and a staff that is already excited to hang out with all of us. As always, choosing a venue was no easy feat. We have a very diverse population and we have lots of factors to take into consideration. All in all, we are pretty psyched about the Clarion, and we are sure most of you will be too.

Keep your eyes open for more detailed information about the conference as it becomes available and, as always, if you have some ideas about what you’d like to see at NOLOSE this year, let us know! Expect to see a call for workshops in the very near future, because that’s how we roll.

For more information about NOLOSE and to keep up with the calendar and new information about the upcoming conference, please visit nolose.org.

NOLOSE is a volunteer- run organization dedicated to ending the oppression of fat people and creating vibrant fat queer culture. NOLOSE started out as the National Organizations for Lesbians of SizE. As the years passed and the organization grew, we changed our mission to include not only a broader community of queer women—dykes, lesbians and bisexual women—but also transgendered people.

NOLOSE and the annual NOLOSE Conference are explicitly trans-inclusive. We want to make it clear that NOLOSE invites all fat queer women, all fat trans and gender-variant folks and our allies to participate.

This not-flu or whatever is exceedingly tiresome. I should think it would be enough to live with the day to day stuff, let alone put up with this. Then again, nobody has ever claimed in my hearing that the world is fair.

I haven’t succeeded in holding any thoughts in my head long, so you’re in for randomness again this entry.

I have no idea why the main article was linked from ZDNet, but doesn’t this cheddar and apple sandwich seem yummy? I wonder how it would be with ham? I used to have a really good recipe for a sausage and apples dish, but I know I haven’t cooked it in the last decade. Maybe I could dig it out of my ancient recipe box? There are few ways to go wrong with cooked apples, as far as I can tell.

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I recorded some more pieces, but need to wait for Sam to “produce” them (clean them up and add appropriate music). One of them isn’t something I would have chosen myself, but Todd, who created Live Readings, asked to hear others read it. It turned out better than I thought it would. And it was fun to do something that I wouldn’t have chosen.

So it’s request time! What would you like me to record, or write about?

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I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).

The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.

It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:

• Fibrant Living - health, living with a disability, podcasts
• Academy Caritas - homeschooling, education, college
• House Fireheart - polyamory, particularly my and Sam’s approach to it
• Heartsong Handicrafts - home of my original needlework patterns, and soon to be home for the rest of my stitching information
• Cyberstalked! - internet safety and privacy issues
• Cynthia Armistead - my professional portfolio, where I put the geeky stuff
• Enemy of Entropy - here, of course, where I put general stuff, book reviews, and the like.

Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)

2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.

We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.

So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.

I managed to avoid the crime news, which is always horrific. Okay, I mostly avoided it. The three boys under 10 who are being charged with kidnapping and rape¹ is getting to me. That poor little girl!

Transgender candidate misled voters, suit alleges²

Actually, these guys seem to be suing everybody but the dogcatcher down there in Riverdale.

What does Ms. Bruce’s gender have to do with how she’ll perform as a city council member? Nothing, of course Ir’s been brought up because a couple of sore losers just won’t let go. Asshats!

Trumpet the news: Elephant is going to be a mom³

But she won’t deliver until somewhere around April 1, 2009! 22 months of pregnancy. Dumbo never mentioned that little fact.

In metro Atlanta, profile of those in need during the holidays has changed⁴

It isn’t just during the holidays, either. Food banks across the country are seeing more and more working people who need help. They’re having to reduce the amount of food given to each person or family because the demand has outpaced the supply so much.

I can’t say that I’m surprised. I know too many people who are just barely scraping by, and it isn’t because they’re irresponsible. It’s just how the American economy is, and something needs to change very quickly.