Again, the years have flown by.

Today and tomorrow are the closest the LA and I get to a wedding anniversary this year. Next year, we actually get abona fide, for-real anniversary, our first, but this year, we only get a sort of celebration, since it's only 3 years since we stood in the LAX courthouse and made solemn promises to each other.

I'm cooking Swedish Sailor's tonight, since the LA asked me very nicely. It's a lot of prep work, but oh so good when it's done, and right now I can smell it.

And in other news, I've had a couple of my RPG rulebooks spiral bound at an office services place. The tough part was overcoming my reluctance to mutilate bound books; however, both were already falling apart. Now, though, I'm serously contemplating having another one, in near-perfect condition, treated the same. It really is that big an improvement in usability for a rulebook which will be constantly referenced; it now lays flat, can be folded back with no damage... for roughly $7 per book, the value is astounding.

Might as well make it fully public.

I have become, by choice, a member of a visually identifiable minority, and one which suffers some degree of prejudice.

Yup, I got a tattoo.


To be fair, this was not a rushed decision. The design and placement have been settled since before I even met the LA, which does date it somewhat; she and I are only just over a year from our first wedding anniversary, and the wedding was not a spur-of-the-moment thing; we'd been intending to marry over two years by that point.

I can highly recommend the place I went to: Diablo Ink, in Pleasant Hill (or, as the business cards have it, Pleasant Hell). My artist was the owner, Rickey-Lee, but all the artists there are good, and the prices are very reasonable for California. Multiple friends of mine have been very satisfied with work from Diablo Ink, and I'm expecting to remain happy with my ink; everyone who's commented on it so far has said very nice things about the choice of design and quality of work.

Right now, that arm is itching, and I'm fighting the urge to scratch. In about a month, it'll be fully healed, but right now it's still slightly fragile. As for the inevitable questions about whether I'm intending to add to it, I don't know at this point. I don't have anything in mind, though, so given my self-imposed rules for tattoos (minimum of a year wanting the same design and placement), I won't be getting inked again this year, and probably not next!

Two nations...

The UK and the USA share a great deal of heritage, but there are some interesting differences in outlook between us. For instance, I've been at protests in the UK where signs have been held aloft proclaiming: "Come Back Wat Tyler, All Is Forgiven", or "Where is Guy Fawkes when his country needs him?". Both of these figures were rebellious, and a rough equivalent in the US would be along the lines of substituting John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald (side note: it would appear to be a very good idea for Presidents to avoid men with three names), and I realised that that would be utterly unthinkable. On the other hand, both Tyler and Fawkes were ultimately unsuccessful, whereas Wilkes and (according to most sensible hypotheses; I don't intend to get into that quagmire) Oswald both succeeded in killing their targets; perhaps a better parallel would be John Flammang Schrank, who failed to kill Theodore Roosevelt in 1912; in fact Roosevelt gave a campaign speech shortly after being shot. However, Schrank is almost unknown; everyone over here knows Teddy was so tough he gave a speech after taking a bullet to the chest, but hardly anyone could tell you who the shooter was. I looked it up, on Wikipedia; I have no idea of the reliability of the information.

I thought about this for a while; the national outlooks are otherwise so similar, but the British seem more inclined to allow leaders of rebellions to become folk heroes. Then, I realised; the Americans have done exactly the same. Their Founding Fathers were all insurrectionists. All of them rebelled; they won, but that doesn't keep them from having been rebellious in the first place. Really, we're not so different after all; it's just that the American rebellious folk heroes became the establishment, while the British ones were honourable failures.

Has it really been 25 years?

Twenty-five years. I suppose it must be, but January 28th 1986 is one of very few days I know exactly what television I watched. Well, not exactly; I don't remember whether Newsround was still John Craven's Newsround or not, but I do remember the lead story.

NASA had lost a Space Shuttle. The first Shuttle loss, and perhaps the one which cut the deepest. I can still clearly see the graceful, curving exhaust plume, the ragged ball of smoke, and the two trails of smoke climbing from it, and I remember knowing that this was Bad. It was a significant event; it could be credited with having made me a geek. It certainly made me interested in spaceflight.

Seven men and women died aboard Challenger. We should not forget Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis.

Choice does not trump everything.

First, for background, a link. The one-sentence summary: a marriage commissioner in Saskatchewan has stated that, despite the legality of same-sex marriage in Canada, he will, because of his religious beliefs, refuse to marry gay couples, and "they'll have to fire [him]" despite a court ruling that his views don't excuse him from doing his job.

This has ignited some discussion online, of course, and so I'm sticking my oar in here, where I can control the discussion and also where it's under the radar of those dedicated to intolerance. That, of course, makes my position clear; I believe the man is full of shit. There are several things the article and discussion have given me to talk about. One is the person I shan't name, who claimed that non-religious marriages aren't marriages. That person can go and die in a fire, because if I think I'm married, my wife thinks I'm married, and the US Government agrees that we're married, his religious nutball views mean nothing, and all he's doing is insulting me. I refuse to take that.

Another is the somewhat reasonable question of whether the commissioner's religious rights are being quashed, and if so, whether it's acceptable. Well, here we run into a problem; he's not acting as himself, he's acting as the state. That means that whatever religious objections he may have mean nothing; he is required to act as the state sees fit, and the state sees fit to marry couple regardless of gender.

This leads into a question of whether private prejudice is allowed. It most certainly is, but it can't be expressed when acting as the agent of an entity which is required to not be prejudiced. To say that he should be allowed to refuse to perform marriages based on his whim is tantamount to saying that a supermarket cashier can refuse to serve customers based on race, and THAT, I'm pretty sure everyone agrees, is very definitely not acceptable.

Which essentially means that although his religious rights ARE being quashed, they would be just as quashed even if he weren't being asked to do anything he found distasteful.

And then we have another fun one; people have been asking why gay people's freedom to marry apparently trumps their "freedom of religion". Well, we've got a couple of points here; number one is the difference between holding an opinion and acting on it. You can disapprove of what happens all you like, but you may not necessarily be allowed to take steps to stop it. Second, we have a more fundamental difference between sexual orientation and religion: religion is something you choose, while sexual orientation is something that just is that way. I never chose to be attracted to women. Not one of the gay people I know chose to be gay; those with whom I've discussed it knew they were gay before they really understood sexuality. That being so, it's exactly as unconscionable to discriminate based on sexual orientation as it is to discriminate based on race or gender. People choose to be bigoted; the targets of bigots generally did not choose the characteristics which make them targets.

Now that's a rather nice feeling.

I'd have preferred to be listening to Test Match Special, but for various reasons, I couldn't; England have just wrapped up the Ashes series. It's not happened in a manner I expect such things to happen; after drawing the first Test, they've won three and lost one. All of their victories were by an innings,which is to say rather crushing. For the statisticians, this marks quite a few records; most innings victories by England in Australia (a record they broke twice this series), first series win down under for 24 years (which means the first in my memory), and the fifth Test saw England's highest ever score in Australia, at 644 all out, eclipsing the previous record set in 1928. History, it's safe to say, has been made.

I feel almost sorry for Australian cricket fans. It's no fun to watch one's national team get comprehensively trounced; as an England follower, I know that all too well. I very much hope there's more of a fight over the Ashes in 2013; nice as it is to retain them by winning, rather than drawing, a series, I find a succession of easy victories somewhat less than exciting.

I imagine my dad will be rather pleased when he wakes up to the result. He actually remembers England being a good team, before the struggle and drought of the 80s and 90s. I grew up with England being a disappointment; I well remember the hope in the first Test of 1997, and the heartbreak following, and when England actually won the Ashes in 2005, I was overjoyed.

Productivity can mean several things.

My maternal grandmother could draw very well. My maternal grandfather was a good woodworker. Most of my family has some creative talent, in fact. For a while, I felt like I was an exception, as though I was the sole non-creative person in my family.

But now that I look at it... I build worlds. I also do a fair amount of work with my hands, such as the installation of the front wing turn signals on my car which should have been there from the day it was built (US lighting regulations are a long way behind Europe when it comes to cars), or the add-on tabletop I made with felt covering for gaming. I knit.

And in the past week, I've finally made a breakthrough in sketching. I've wanted to draw for many years, but always found it frustrating. The best output I came up with was the doodles I made while on the phone, with most of my brain otherwise occupied. I finally realised that, and stopped thinking about drawing while drawing. Simply letting the sketch flow has led to me producing works I'm happy to sign and date.

I'm a perfectionist. I readily admit that, and in some areas of my life it's a benefit, but I've finally learned to accept "good enough", and it has finally become good enough. Next time I go anywhere scenic, I'm going to take with me a board, some paper, and some of the 2B pencils the LA managed to find for my birthday. She knows I prefer a slightly softer pencil for writing, but I usually go for a B. A 2B is a touch softer than that, and I've found it's very good for the sketches I draw. Currently, those are drawings from memory of Cornish landscapes, but I shall be drawing Californian lanscapes from life soon enough...