Sharp Dressed Dyke

I tried to generate a new user pic but it keeps throwing a useless error.

So, a lot has happened. Let's start with what hasn't changed: Wifey and I are still together, Roommate is still with us, and we're in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, yet. One of these will be changing later this year.

I've had some health matters, mostly preventative with a neurologist (I decided I was being a bit too forgetful for comfort and to get things checked out.) I am still dealing with bullshit for my HRT; every refill, not just new prescription, involves delays because new physician authorization is required. There is a bill pending in the Washington State legislature that I hope will help - while I don't live there my current work is for a company whose only offices are there and, thus, my insurance is a plan out of that state.

I do have a girlfriend but not the same one. She and I broke up about a year ago. We remain friends; we just needed different things and realized it was best to end the romantic chapter then rather than draw it out and both be hurt. She's an amazing woman who I am proud to call my friend.

I met someone in May of last year and we had our first date on US Memorial Day, enjoying the Canal Walk in Richmond. She lives in that area so I have been spending part of most of my weekends there for the past year. She also accompanied me on a camping trip in Ocracoke for my 50th birthday. I've also met a bunch of her family.

Pulling together the last two paragraphs: in January Girlfriend and I had tickets to see Taylor Tomlinson's show at The Altria in Richmond. In a subsequent discussion with ExGirlfriend I found out that she and her girlfriend did as well and propose that we all meet for dinner before the show, which we did. I got some ribbing from friends about how very lesbian core that all is.

That news also means I now have a riding partner again. She has been a passenger on my bike and, as of this month, got her own: a 2024 Honda XR150L.



This photo led to some jokes about how the bike on the right has over 10x the displacement and 3x the weight of the one on the left.

The BA plans fell through. After a flurry of communication on getting all of the paperwork - me receiving the forms and getting them all submitted - the office went on radio silence: I couldn't get a peep out of them. No clue what their problem is but it's not worth my time. I still want implants but I just am out of energy to fight the bureaucracy.

I've been to the theater twice and to two concerts. Both of the former were VA Stage Company: A Sherlock Carol and Fat Ham. The former is telling A Christmas Carol as if it were a Sherlock mystery (the phrase "Moriarty was dead to begin with" is stuck in my brain) and the latter is a take on Hamlet where our main character, Juicy, is a young gay Black man living in a city. For my friends across the pond: the UK premiere of Fat Ham will be put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Swan Theater later this summer.

As for concerts I had Streetlight Manifesto and Malinda. The former is SKA which isn't too much my thing but a dear local friend wanted company to attend so I did and found it more agreeable than I expected. The latter was a positively moving experience. Y'all might know Malinda better for the Google Translate Sings series in the 2010s; she's an accomplished musician and singer now. Girlfriend and I decided to take the train to Washington, D.C., to see the concert at the 930 Club. She closed with the song I was most hoping she would perform: "Lucky." I was in tears holding my girlfriend while listening to it. The song draws from the journals of Dr Kathleen Lynn about her life with Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, and how they were not just roommates.

There's so much more but that's the highlights. Dysphoria over botched surgery has been kicking my ass but I have a good place to fight it.

Since 4-20 was recently I'm going to indulge my inner 12 year old here and share a photo of what I saw on my motorcycle's odometer this past Sunday while I was in Surry.

 ...to a reasonably distinctive location.

I've been off of Estradiol for a while. My prescription expired in the summer because my last Dr in Houston told me he would write it for a year, like I'd been on for the last 9 years, but only did so for 6 months and it was an electronic prescription so I didn't notice. I scrambled to find a PCP and when I did the labs showed elevated platelets which caused my new health insurance to refuse to authorize the refill until an oncologist clears me to take it again. The appointment was yesterday with the result being "we'll draw labs today and follow-up in 3 months but with less than 3% above the upper end of the range and an inflammation that explains it I don't see any reason to be worried."

Both the intake nurse and the doctor asked me "when was your breast augmentation" assuming it was omitted from my medical history despite appendectomy, multiple mole excisions and vaginoplasty being listed.

Girlfriend and I passed the 1 year mark last month. She also had to move out into her own place at the end of the year due to divorce.

Wifey and I reach 5 years together tomorrow.

Work is changing; the smallish company I contract to was bought by the largest company in the world for that field.

I did something a little festive last month over on Poquoson, Virginia - an obscure town on the Virginia Peninsula tucked in behind NASA's Langley Research Center. They do a Holiday House for kids to which Santa arrives on a fire truck and with a motorcycle escort. I decided to make the geezer glide festive for the occasion.



I took a ride up Virginia Route 10, which basically runs the south side of the James River, and decided to stop for a late lunch in RVA.

I mentioned to my therapist that I didn't know which surgeon actually performed my surgery as I met both for the 5 minute consultation in the waiting room immediately before I was taken into the OR  (the only pre-surgery consultation I had.) My therapist said that is highly irregular and I should have been furnished with that information.

I had a decade of people insisting I was wrong and overreacting to be uncomfortable with that and "but you signed consent forms so they did nothing wrong!"

I keep thinking of the therapist stating "the risks of losing sensation and having complications is not a valid concern in this day. It was a problem with older SRS procedures and surgeons. The modern ones have eliminated that risk" and the endocrinologists asserting "if you don't need SRS then you aren't trans and taking HRT has to be bad for you."

it wasn't a one-time thing, it was hours of interrogation about my feelings about surgery every month for 4 years, until I finally gave in to their demands. All of it lies hiding the actual risks.

I'm done with GxP training and into actual technical work.

We decided that it's time to GTFO of Texas and are heading to the mid-Atlantic when our lease is up late this year. 

Had a screw-up about the vaginoplasty revision consultation. It's a long comedy of errors which includes a web and app system for the consultations that fail to make it clear what timezone it is displaying even when the other party is in a different TZ plus me calling to confirm and getting a bad answer. It's now scheduled for next Friday.

I still debate canceling again, like I did 18 months ago - I'm doubtful that any good can come of this but also no good comes from not fixing the botched result I currently have. I just...everything I have indicates that if you get a bad result then the odds aren't good for it ever getting better and you're into dealing with surgeons who will decide "not my problem" and go radio silence once you have a problem from their work.

I have a plan to have breast augmentation next year.

This is the surgery I wanted to have consistently from before the first time I saw a therapist in my teens, and for nearly 30 years have been trying to make it happen but faced endless barriers - denial of the surgery letter that was required by the surgeons through the mid-2010s, threats by endocrinologists to end my HRT prescriptions for having it, and a spouse who actively engaged in financial sabotage of my plans. The entire time they used that I had fears about SRS and, later, regret for having it as part of some supposed argument that a boob job would be even worse for me - that somehow my response to being coerced into surgery I didn't want meant anything about how I would handle surgery I did want.

...and we're gonna get informally married!




We went to the nearest Harris County Courthouse Annex with a County Clerk office (there are 10 county clerk offices in my county - there is a population of 4.7 million) and filed form Form H1057, "Declaration of Informal Marriage." "Informal Marriage" is how you say "common law marriage" in Texan. This declaration seems to be unique to Texas; functionally it's a marriage certificate and cements that we are married rather than having to construct it from various things like how we filed our taxes, recollection of others, etc.

It was just a formality, documenting a marriage that has legally existed since the summer of 2020, but I still ugly happy cried in the car because of the joy at having this.

I'm also proud of how much I healed. 3 years ago I couldn't have done this because I still needed to recover from my first marriage.

US HUD announced distribution of $1.0 billion USD in funds for mitigating the flooding that happened during Hurricane Harvey, sends $0 to Harris County or any municipality therein, the areas most affected by that hurricane.

https://twitter.com/HarrisCoJudge/status/1395883892511551492

Due to off-topic banter among some coworkers who joined a conference call early I realized: it's right about 4 years since the last time my first wife and I talked.

In May of 2017 she decided we were going no-contact because she would not agree to abide by the same rules she demanded I follow for contact.

As I thought about it I realized it's been a long time, at least a year, since I thought about any of the calendar dates that used to be important - her birthday, the anniversaries of our first date and our wedding.

It's a good thing that this is the case. It's healing and moving on with my life, leaving that chapter firmly in the past. But at the same time it feels weird that for 20+ years this person was a daily part of my life and now is a stranger who I most likely (and hopefully) will never see again.