2004 - As it Unfolds!

January

The year started off wonderfully when I travelled out to Columbus to spend New Years with Nathan and his family. We had a wonderful dinner at Barcelona, Nathan's restaurant, where I met his mother, Nancy, and his ex and business partner, Scott, for the first time. They are both terrific people and we had a wonderful evening! (In fact, apparently after I left, Scott was loudly enthusing about me, which certainly laid some of my fears to rest.) Shortly after that, I made trips to Fort Lauderdale, FL, and Richmond, VA to see clients but I did manage to take some time for laying on a beach and visiting a stamp show while working. At the end of January, however, the following occurred:

Jan 31 - A Cautionary Tale

For some strange reason, stories involving me suffering intense pain seem to bring great joy to Clifford, and so, for some peculiar reason, I am therefore compelled to share the following true story of my weekend to bring him happiness.

It all started this last Thursday when I had to go to the cardiologist for a stress test to check my heart (which is great, by the way). Part of this test involved me exercising while attached to an EKG and so the technician shaved parts of my chest hair off to attach the electrodes to me. Afterwards, looking at myself in the mirror, I realized that I looked very peculiar as it appeared as though I had crop circles on my chest.

Consequently, this morning, after I had my shower, I decided to clean up my strange looking chest by taking the hair trimmer and trimmed the rest of my chest hair so that it didn’t look quite as odd. Once I finished with that, I realized that I still looked a little strange and so, foolishly perhaps, decided to trim up a little “down below”.

Everything would have been well and fine had it not been for the fact that I am quite a clumsy person and while I was happily trimming away, humming a little song to myself, I had one of my strange little spasms which caused me to drop the trimmer, while it was still running, directly onto my testicles, which, of course caused excruciating pain and lacerated a three inch line gash right across them which promptly erupted blood all over the damn place.

Hobbling around in agony, I grabbed a towel and promptly applied pressure to the wound in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Unfortunately, as apparently is the case in these kind of injuries, bleeding is very difficult to stop, so, after about 3 hours I realized that either I had to stop the bleeding or would have to go to the emergency room (a prospect which did not appeal to me as I could not imagine how I was going to describe this accident to the attending phsycian!).

I then had what I thought was a flash of genius as I realized that there is, of course, one way which is guaranteed to stop bleeding that almost every man knows about. WARNING – DO NOT, EVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, ATTEMPT THIS! Consequently I grabbed the styptic pencil (for minor shaving injuries) and promptly rubbed it across my wounded balls.

I cannot begin to describe the blinding explosion of pain that immediately occurred but I would venture to suggest that my scream of agony could be heard in the next state! Thor leaped about four feet in the air, Scruffy fell off the bed and the two dogs and the cat all started barking and yowling while I jumped up and down, stark naked in the bathroom, screaming at the top of my lungs. Clutching myself, and barely knowing what I was doing, I raced out of the bathroom towards the kitchen to grab some paper towels.

At that exact moment, the doorbell rang, and I realized that the farmer from up the street was watching all of this through the glass front door as he had come to offer to plow the snow off the driveway. I raced back in the bedroom, wrapped a towel around my waist and with, what little shreds of my dignity I had left, opened the door, thanked him for his offer but mentioned that I was otherwise occupied, and closed the door.

I have now spent the rest of the morning curled up in a foetal position on the couch and am hoping that Julia will take pity on me and bring me lunch.

Feb 14 - Colorado

We flew out to Colorado Springs where the Pikes Peak Gay and Lesbian Community Center was holding their annual dinner where I presented the Thom Martin Community Activist of the Year award to an amazing couple of women. From there Nathan and I headed up to Breckenridge for some skiing. We arrived at the first condo but to say it was lacking would be an understatement. Without going into all that was wrong with it, the worst part was that the walls were made of paper. Not only could you hear the neighbours brush their teeth but we had screaming kids on one side (bad enough), but we also had a couple of German newlyweds on the other! (My high school German definitely never covered any of the many things that the young lady kept screaming every hour, day and night, but the mans groaning didn't need much translation!) We managed to switch condos to a magnificent two story, two bedroom unit with a hot tub right outside the front door, right at the foot of the slope. Nathan had never skied before, but after one day of lessons was sailing down greens and by day two even managed a blue. Even though it was bitterly cold, ever day the sun shone and the views were spectacular. All was going wonderfully well until the end of day four when, after a long, tiring and freezing day of skiing, we returned to the condo for a long soak in the hot tub. We dashed into the condo, pulled on bathing suits, went outside into 9 degrees of snow, pulled off the hot tub lid and found, to our dismay, that the water was ice cold. It was also at that moment that we realized that we had locked the door behind us and were standing, barefoot, armed only with towels in arctic conditions. God knows what people thought of two half-naked men dashing from door to door in the snow but eventually we found some friendly neighbours who allowed us to huddle in their living room while we waited for assistance. We managed to fortify ourselves and recovered quickly after downing large numbers of hot buttered rums!

June 10 - European travel adventures

Travelling to and around Europe has become a somewhat surreal experience. After booking and paying for what we thought was a wonderful itinerary at surprsingly low prices, we should have figured out that we would end up spending more time travelling than actually vacationing. It all started with a two hour wait to get through the check in line at Dulles. This was followed by another hour wait to get through the security checkpoint. Things looked up when I offered my seat on the shuttle to one of the airline hostesses as this meant that we were treated like royalty during the flight to Heathrow (wine and glasses and all sorts of other goodies from the first class cabin mysteriously kept ending up in front of us all night long!). Things turned back to nastiness, however, at Heathrow, when it took four hours of standing in line just to get through immigration. That, however, was nothing compared to the horror of the hotel in London (Never, ever stay at the Regent Palace in Soho!!). The next day, we realized why our flights to Genoa, Italy were so cheap. The fare was just the teaser as to actually complete the flight you had to pay trainfare from London to Stanstead ($144 return) and then the overweight baggage charge ($200 per segment.) We picked up the car in Genoa and drove to Triora, where we had a fantastic few days with the family in the most amazingly beautiful place I have ever seen and then drove to Florence where we spent another few wonderful days looking at art, eating great food and drinking buckets of red wine. It was at this point that I had a brilliant idea. Why, I thought, did we not look into dropping the car off in Florence and, instead of returning to Genoa and flying from there to Stanstead and from Stanstead to Amsterdam, fly directly to Amsterdam. Surely, I thought, it would be cheaper than the additional $600 in baggage charges that we would be about to incur. When I found that air travel would be more expensive after all, it was then that I made the fatal mistake of actually attempting to deal with the Italian railway system <begin ominous sounding music>. We walked miles to the railway station whereupon I saw a sign for Information! We stood in line for two hours only to be informed that, Yes, a train did go from Florence to Amsterdam but it only went via Paris and other than the fact that it might leave at 8:30pm each night, he wasn't sure how much it cost, how long it took or whether it actually existed. He then suggested we stand in line for tickets as they would have that information. (In other words, the only Information that they could provide was that I was, in fact, in a railway station, which I didn't really need to stand in line to find out.) Feeling foolishly optimistic, I actually went and stood in line for tickets! <ominous music increases in volume> I spent another hour and a half in line, only to be informed that I needed to stand in a different line. After two hours in this line I then was told that, Yes, there was a train to Paris and that I might be able to get from Paris to Amsterdam, but unfortunately they were unable to sell me a ticket or let me know if there were any seats on the train, but that if I checked out of the hotel, returned the car and simply showed up and got on the train, someone would ask for money and give us places or maybe they wouldn't let us on the train at all. Eventually we decided that this had really become quite exciting and so we decided to go for broke. We did eventually arrive in Paris (17 hours, not 7 as the Information guy had guessed) later and finally got to Amsterdam, but sharing a room of four bunks with folks with very smelly feet was not the most fragrant of ways for Nathan to first experience the joys of France.