Occasional Jots and Tittles

A friend has a tag for posts he calls “snarky”, which I translate roughly to mean “OK, I’m being a little bit of an ass here, but you can see it’s deserved.” You can imagine, in dealing with people in general and with gay people in particular, it could be very useful. I’m adding it as a category here.

So I’m online the other day, on Gay-Oriented-Service-1, and I see a profile for someone I remember from Gay-Oriented-Service-2. Part of me was a little hesitant about contacting him, because I’d eventually deleted him from my friend list at Service-2, but I couldn’t remember exactly why. I did remember, though, that he enjoys big pickup trucks. We have an F250 Crew Cab (Powerstroke Diesel) so they don’t get a lot bigger, and I figured it would at least give us something to chat about. Bad move.

As I soon remembered, one of his huge fetishes is getting a truck like that stuck in mud. I mean axle-deep, spinning till you’re almost buried, stuck. Odd fetish, but I’m not one to judge, as long as nobody gets hurt, right? I just figure it’s not something we’d want to go do on purpose, as the truck weighs about 9,000 lbs and isn’t easy to tow out of a “stuck deep” situation.

So I told him no, I wasn’t interested in getting the truck stuck in the mud for him, so as to not incur a towing charge. No problem, he says – I’d pull you out, you wouldn’t need to pay anything!

Mind you, he’s in Houston, 4 or 5 hours away. What am I supposed to do in the meantime? (Don’t answer that; I already know what his answer would be, and it would add an interior detailing job to the tab.) No, I said… I’m not going to do that.

Let me call you and talk with you about it, he says. Now, I know what that means, and you know what that means. You don’t call someone to discuss a fetish, when that person has the object of your dreams and doesn’t want to let you use it the way you want, unless you’re going to (A) try to talk him into it, or (B) get off online talking about it, or (C) both. None of which interested me. Struggling to be polite, I told him so, point blank, because I was getting a little tired of this whole line of discussion. And here’s the response I got for my trouble:

you fucking little inbred white trash LA coon ass….I’ve been wanting cuss your little nellie ass out your fucking QUEEN worthless piece of FUCKING white trash or whatever the fuck you are, I’ve never met anyone from LA that was worth a fucking piece of shit, so why don’t you go fuck yourself you piece of faggot shit!! I put you on ignore…haah your screen name almost reads cowboy in bra is more like it !!!! FUCK YOU!

No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. But at least this way, once I blocked him on Service-1, I made a note to block him wherever I saw him. Still, you have to wonder about someone who can come that unhinged over a simple turn down – and hope he doesn’t have access to firearms.

January can sometimes seem the drabbest month here. It’s not about the cold (our snow day was a once-in-a-decade event), but the overall gray cast to everything. Once in a while we have blue skies and sunshine, but even our warm days have a kind of dreariness to them. Even our winter birds, for the most part, are in their drabbest colors.
For some, though, drab colors are still fairly bright and eye-catching, especially on birds that don’t normally winter this far north. A few years ago, I had an adult male Baltimore Oriole show up in January – something we don’t often see in Baton Rouge. Today, I had a young male show up (one hatched last summer). We know this because of his plumage; once he’s reached his adult, breeding plumage, he’ll keep that year-round. But you can already see hints of the brilliant orange and black he’ll turn out to be, by about March or April.

(with apologies to Norma Desmond)

Christmas, and the post-Christmas weeks, were incredibly busy this year, so apologies to my hordes of fans (all three or four of you) for the lack of updates recently.

Jonathan outdid himself again this year with the Christmas lights.

We spent most of the Christmas week driving back and forth to my sister’s and my parents’ houses, for one event after another. Between the driving and the overflow of children (whom I love, but really….), and the time demands, we’ve already decided to cut back on family events for next year.

In the midst of all that, I did two Christmas Bird Counts this year. I’m the compiler for the count in Baton Rouge, which is usually a well-attended but not particularly exciting count. However, this year, I found an Ash-throated Flycatcher, which was only the second of this species ever recorded on our count (another party had the third, in another section of our circle). Unfortunately, no pictures of this bird yet.

Jonathan is now off at MAL, assisting good friends at their vendor booth this year. I’m sitting here freezing, as Baton Rouge has finally had a couple of sub-freezing nights, which have largely frozen back most of the hummingbird plants. However, that’s driven what may be a new hummingbird to the feeders; I say “may” because she (a female Rufous Hummingbird) appears to be banded, and there’s a chance that she’s the bird I’ve had since Election Day, but having lost her color mark. Or she could be a returnee from some other point in the past. We won’t know unless we recapture her to check her band number.