Enfin, le mouvement commence!

Pardon my French...

We're getting to the endgame of our move to New Orleans. We go there tomorrow for a weekend orientation session at Tulane. Spouses/partners are invited for Saturday's events, so it'll be interesting to see how everyone reacts when they see me with D. It's been alleged that New Orleanians ( at least the Uptown crowd) are cool with gay folks, but there's no greater test than putting it in their faces. I understand that one is supposed to use euphemisms when discussing one's partner, e.g., "He's my roommate of 17 years". I got that info from D, who used to live in NO. He waffles on this - sometimes he wants to follow convention and other times it's "to hell with 'em". I'll let you know how it goes.

On other fronts, I've booked the trip for the first week of class and also the final trip to NO after everything's been packed and loaded onto the moving van. D will scout the NO neighborhoods Sunday while I'm at a team building exercise. I have to call the movers to let them know who had the winning bid. Next week we give notice to our landlord. Mundane but necessary stuff.

The call this morning from our friend Mae-Z really impressed upon me this is about to happen and that we're about to become even more enmeshed in New Orleans. Our plane arrives Friday at 8PM and Mae-Z wanted to see when we had to be on campus Saturday because he's going to buy tickets to Varla Jean Merman's 11PM Friday show at the Chat Noir - he wanted to make sure we didn't have to get up at the crack o' dawn Saturday.

Um, Mae-Z, there's no 11PM show listed on the club's web site... maybe that's for the locals!

As a consultant, I've been trained to use hypotheses to gather data to derive the recommendations most pertinent to the client's issues. You develop a hypothesis ("hypo" in consultant's lingo) and then formulate key questions and check questions to test whether the hypo is correct - the questions drive the data gathering process that leads one to "the answer".

So here's my current hypothesis prompted by my impending move to New Orleans: New Orleans is about to experience a tech-oriented, gay flavored renaissance. I have several supporting data points for this hypothesis:

• A tech-flavored, web savvy blogger community is already in place. You know who you are.
  
• The desire of others of a similar vein to relocate to New Orleans.
  
• An article written last year by none other than New Orleans CityBusiness saying that our presence may be the "canary in the coal mine" of New Orleans' tech renaissance.
  

As I said, these are all data points, data points that are easily refutable. Some in the community may be more bar savvy than web savvy, but at least they understand the concepts necessary to communicate via the web. And the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce is probably clutching at any straw that shows the hint of a tech industry in the Croissant Cite. Nonetheless, New Orleans could be at the same stage of development as Miami Beach was in the late '80s.

Who will be the da Vinci of Bourbon Street? Are you the Michaelangelo of Rue St. Anne?

It's Christmas time in the Castro, which means buying tickets to the SF Gay Men's Chorus' Christmas Eve performance at the Castro Theatre. D and I are going with our friends Chris and Terry. It's a fun time; everyone's in a great mood and fewer people than usual honk their car horns to display their anger at not being Queen of SF (our fair mayor, Willie Brown, is the current undisputed King of SF).

This is also the time of year I send holiday cards to friends and family, particularly friends I haven't seen or been in touch with in a great while. This year's list comes to 41 people, but that number usually increases when I get cards from people I'd forgotten to put on my original list. I thought I'd get fancy this year and print my friends' names and addresses on pre-printed mailing labels from Hallmark. What a hell that turned out to be.

First, the Palm desktop software somehow lost its drag/drop capability for Word. Removing and re-installing the desktop software was useless, ditto Palm's "support knowledgebase". Then it turned out I had to re-install Office 2000 because the original install was faulty. Once that was resolved, I spent an hour making sure the names printed properly on the mailing labels. It would have been easy if the labels were plain, but they had a design in the left margin that had to be accounted for. Printing to an Avery 5160 wasn't enough - I then had to adjust margins. horizontal pitch,... Eventually, the labels were printed.








Then the fun began - writing the cards. In and of itself, that's a lot of fun. However, I was challenged this year because for once I have an overabundance of Christmas cards.








Who gets what? Who gets the San Francisco themed cards? I have to use all of them because we're moving to New Orleans next month. Which cards are non-denominational enough - does Santa make it denominational? Which cards can I send on my own and which should I hold in reserve for D's signature? Who gets the snowmen and who gets the Japanese temple?

I've just wrapped up a weekend of visiting with Rusty, an old friend from Houston visiting SF on his way to San Jose. Once he's done in San Jose, he'll return to Houston via SFO. Incredibly, his secretary found a flight from San Jose to SFO and booked him on it! A thirty mile flight with a transit time that will probably take longer than simply driving there. Oh well, I guess it's part of the pleasure of having someone on the payroll whose only concern is your welfare. But back to Rusty...

We spent most of the weekend catching up on news. Work, family, friends. My unemployment, his company's impending merger. Trashing the current McCarthyism revival. We (D, Rusty, and I) did catch Mark Morris' The Hard Nut at UC Berkeley. Fantastic show, fabulous costumes. And the dance between the Doctor and the nephew had a nice frisson.

Rusty does prefer his men en cuir so we did a pub crawl last night in SF's SOMA district. We started the evening at The Eagle, where we talked about his readings on Buddha. Then we went to the Loading Dock, walking through a light drizzle. I was clearly in violation of the dress code (the only leather on me was my belt, wallet, and the upper's of my shoes), but no one said anything. It was my first time there and I liked the club. I'm not into leather all that much, but the club is nicely laid out and the music was great. After a round of Heinekens, we then continued on to the Powerhouse.

The Powerhouse's claim to fame is a backroom, great music, and 365/24/7 porn on the TV. It's the only place I've seen that uses empty Crisco cans as part of the club's decor. I'd had enough beer by then (please, I'd started started drinking Heinekens at 2PM and by 12AM, I felt a bit bloated) so I switched to my usual vodka seven. I doubt Saturday's porn was filmed in the US - the "models" were not tanned, buff, or beautiful. Honest to God, I think one or two were even slightly balding. Once the club closed, I took Rusty to his favorite after hours club and went home. A quick check of email and then to bed.