I'm posting this one

I start so many posts. Then I delete them.

What have I been up to lately...

We made one last trip to the water park and splurged again on the cabana (and cabana girl). Once you've done the park that way, you're spoiled.

We spent Labor Day weekend in Arkansas, visiting Court's family. We both picked up colds while there, and then I got even more sick once we were back. I'm better now (after a trip to the MD), but still very tired. Fortunately I don't have a lot of work happening right now.

We had a good visit with Court's family. There were more than enough reasons to be worried for the kids. I'm relieved to say that despite all the adult dysfunction in their lives, the kids (ages 16, 13, and 10) are doing okay. One good thing going for them: they are involved in a really good church. People are looking out for them.

Court deserves sainthood for being nice to her parents and other sister (she's 25). And that's all I'll say about them.

We did our every-second-Saturday gay cafe this past weekend. We splurged on one of these. OMFG was it good.

Church is in full swing after a summer hiatus, and that has me busy. I edit the newsletter, I'm a trustee, and I'll also be leading a few services this year.

My mother called me the other night and we had a very positive conversation. This is really good. She and I have so much anger. It's time to just get over it.

So far so good with Amanda and her move from high school to the community college. The newness has worn off and now she's getting into the hard slog. She's upbeat. My days are filled with driving to campus to pick her up or drop her off.

We have a busy fall coming up. We'll be in Pennsylvania in a couple weeks to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. We also have plans to go to the State Fair in Richmond, the Wine & Garlic Festival in Amherst, the Apple Harvest Festival in Winchester, and we'll be camping at Martinsville for a weekend of racing.

I'll also fly to Kansas City next month for two days of staff meetings. I'm not looking forward to that.

I'm excited for the Chase, NASCAR's version of a playoff, which begins this weekend. My driver, Tony Stewart, is second in points. He's had a bad month, and does not have good momentum going into the final ten races. I hope he turns things around. I'm really excited for the fall race in Martinsville. Hopefully Tony will still be in contention by that race.

Of course I'm loving football now that it's back. I married a Razorback, so they are a sentimental favorite, along with Pitt and Penn State. And then there are my hometown Steelers, who I think are the worst-looking good team of the bunch. I have a hard time watching them play.

I guess that sums things up for now.

End of summer purge

I'm sorry to see summer come to an end. It's been a good summer. It's the easy time of my calendar. Soon financial aid season will be upon me and I'll be at my laptop for hours upon hours, days and weeks at a stretch. Not looking forward to that. In fact, I'm dreading it.

I had my annual physical last week and though I don't have all the lab results yet, I don't expect any surprises. I'm feeling better than I have in a long time. The coughing that had me down during spring (likely allergies), is long gone. The nausea that began last year and worsened this past spring is also gone. It left with Celexa.

Speaking of Celexa, I think I'm finally through the withdrawal. Looking back on it, the process probably hit its apex when I was in Oregon in June. I was so miserable that weekend I wanted to die. I wasn't depressed or suicidal. I just wanted to die. Hard to explain. It's all behind me thankfully. I feel great, both emotionally and physically.

I think my thyroid may be off kilter a bit, so I half-expect to get a call from my doctor to change my Levoxyl dosage. I say half-expect because if my thyroid was off like I think it is, I'd be dropping a lot more weight. I have been dropping weight, but it's because I've been working at it.

After a seven month stretch when I took a break from weight loss and rarely exercised, I picked it up again, in earnest. I came off a stressful winter/consulting season with a serious case of cabin fever. When work wound down, I busted out. I've spent every possible minute of every day this summer outside (or in the pool), doing something.

The batting cage is the perfect compliment to Frisbee golf [I throw from left-to-right and swing from right-to-left]. Just saying.

I've had a lot of time for the outdoors because this is my off season. I've not been especially busy with work. I do a different kind of modeling in my off season. I do these cookie-cutter, assembly line, predictive models. I get a fixed price per model, and there are enough to do that I earn half of my year in my off-season. Yet I hardly work at all.

Unfortunately, the rest of my year doesn't come so easily. I haven't figured out how to adapt my econometric models to an assembly line system so that I can get the same price-to-effort ratio. I need to work on that.

When one can't work, one must play. Playtime aplenty has had its rewards. I dropped 10 pounds over the summer.

I've dropped 50 pounds since quitting my day job 14 months ago. My knees are a lot happier and I no longer suffer from GERD.

I'm working hard to drop 25 more. Then my plan is to clean up the rest of my act just long enough to pass a physical for affordable health insurance. The difference between Fat Trop and Lean Trop is about $200/month in premiums. Cha-ching.

I've blogged enough for now about banjo, except for this cute thing. The kid in the lesson before mine is an 8-year-old girl learning guitar. She's just starting out and already she's doing a respectable rendition of Walk the Line. When her lesson was wrapping up, I overheard her tell the instructor "They're going to make a movie about me, just like in Walk the Line." So. Cute.

If there was a movie about your life, what celebrity would play your part? No clue who would play me in a Trop biopic.

Another reason I'm sad to see summer end: Amanda. I enjoy being home with her through the day. I'm so lucky to have that. We'll still have it after school starts, but it won't be the same.

Amanda has been pumped for school after her first two orientation classes; her full schedule starts tomorrow. I hope she takes to college the way I did. I hated high school so much that I almost skipped out on college. As it was I delayed college until I was 20. That was the right thing for me. I hope this is the right thing for her.

I am so desperate to see Amanda blossom.

Courtney and I spent a lot of date nights this summer at city stadium, where the Hillcats play. Minor league baseball is a lot of fun. We went to the game last night and saw a great fireworks show afterward. I'm going to miss nights out at the stadium.

NASCAR has been SO much fun this summer because my guy has been at the top of the charts most of the season. He had a bad night last night though. Hope that's the last one. NASCAR lasts until November, so there's a lot of racing left.

Finally, I'm sorry to see summer end because with fall comes another birthday (October). I'm going to be 49 this time, and that's hitting me HARD.

Apologies

Had I known it would be five days until I got back here, I'd have never left that depressing post hanging out there for so long. Sorry.

Saturday we hosted another every-second-Saturday cafe. We had low turnout, which wasn't unexpected given that it was a holiday and a lot of people told us they'd be out of town. Nonetheless, we ended up with about ten more than expected, so that was great. We had a few first-timers, and that's always VERY encouraging.

It always surprises me that people come early and stay late... to a church, where there is no alcohol, on a Saturday night.

Who'd have thought it?

It just shows ya how desperate gays are to find other gays... so desperate that they go to a church on a Saturday night.

Despite the lack of booze, we can get down-right nasty. Wound up on gallons of coffee, we had a mean game of Apple-to-Apples going most of the night... a table of mostly lesbians and our minister, who is a fun guy and a good sport. There was a lot of harsh humor going on. The minister got an earful.

I came to realize that I say "fuck" WAY too much.

It was all very silly. Who doesn't need a little of that these days?

The cafe scored it's first official pick-up, when newly-single Zack rubbed arms with a new guy. I know they left together because I was on bouncer greeter duty at that time.

We didn't have our usual cafe clean up crew, so that left all of the clean-up to us, and made us very late getting home. Worse, we had to be back early the next morning to unload the dishwasher before Sunday coffee hour.

After church, I made the mad dash to load up Judy and hit the road for Savannah, where I am as I write this. Amanda and I left East Jesus at about 2:00pm yesterday and reached our downtown hotel at about 10:10pm last night.

About fifteen minutes after we checked in, Court sent a text asking if I'd seen her car keys. I have them. Oops.

We're here in Savannah for the day. Tomorrow we drive to Naples, FL.

Overheard @Trop's

"I rode by; I always check for Unitarians when I pass by there."

--Ryan, a friend who said he saw me having lunch yesterday at a downtown cafe.

Busy, busy, busy

It's cafe night. We'll be on our feet running things until the wee hours of the night.

We spent a good part of yesterday too, getting things ready for our every-second-Saturday gay cafe.

Enjoy your Saturday everyone.

If you do it....

...they will come. I feel like Ray Kinsella.

Last night was the inaugural Cafe and people came. Court worked her butt off to bring it to life. I did my fair share of the heavy lifting, but the kudos really go to her.

Somehow the word got out and people came. We had about 45 throughout the night, and very few were people we knew from church. People came early and stayed late.

A couple of gay LU students came, and they shared their tales of de-gayification. Horrendous. Talk about brave people.

Things are off the a great start, and I couldn't be happier. An organized gay community is long overdue in East Jesus, and we are smack dab in the middle of it.

Life is good.

Michelle Malkin's worst nightmare

It's been a busy weekend for the Trop family.

Court and I spent most of Saturday preparing for our Welcoming Congregation workshop. We were the workshop leaders. We pulled it off, and nicely based on the feedback. It didn't hurt that our contribution to the potluck was an ice cream cake.

Bribery works.

This morning Court and I did our once quarterly stint in the Sunday School. Court was in the nursery, and I was a special guest with the older elementary kids.

My kids were a restless bunch, but it was time well spent. We talked about the election. We learned about Olympia Brown, a suffragist who broke many gender barriers in her time. A snippet from the story:

When Olympia Brown was in college, women weren't supposed to wear pants. Women weren't supposed to wear anything except very long dresses that came all the way down to their toes. But Olympia did. She wore dresses that came down only past her knees, and under them, she dared to wear pants!

When it was my turn to talk, I asked the kids what they thought about attitudes toward girls and women back in the day. I shared that when I was in elementary school, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. We had to wear dresses or skirts. The only exception was on really cold days (meaning below zero), when we could wear pants under a dress or skirt. Then I shared my dread on the day I forgot to wear a skirt over my pants, and how scared I was that the teacher would catch me skirtless. The kids just couldn't believe it.

We did an election, much like on Survivor, where we voted an action figure out of our class. We each selected a toy figure. We named our figures: mine was a big burly sumo wrestler that I named Diaper Dan. He got the most votes in the first round, and was kicked out of the class.

The teacher voted for the Ninja Turtle because he had a weapon "so he must be violent." This wasn't an intentional set up, but it might as well have been.

I was mostly there to talk about the consequences of majority rule, and specifically on the marriage issue. The majority may rule, but that doesn't make the majority right. I talked about how people sometimes cast their vote based on the way a person dresses, the kind of car they drive, what religion they practice, who they have associations with, where they live, how they earn a living, who they marry.

I said that I am married to a woman, and though that is far from usual, it isn't unusual either. Some people think that marriage is strictly for one man to one woman, and that because I am a woman, I should not be a allowed to marry a woman. Many of these people who oppose my marriage think that I am attacking marriage, because they think I am trying to change it. They fear that changing marriage will damage or destroy it.

Some people think that because I am a lesbian, I am a bad person, or that I do bad things, and that I should not be around children. Some people think that my family (made up of me, my wife and my child) isn't a real family.

I pointed out that the teacher voted off the Ninja Turtle because he had a weapon, and that made her think he was violent. I asked, "What if the Ninja Turtle has a weapon because he is a police officer bravely protecting our safety?" I surprised the teacher and made my point.

People can make a vote for the best of reasons. If a person is violent, I don't want them in my class either. It makes sense to vote for the violent person, to exclude him from the class. Ninja Turtle has a weapon, but is he violent? If he's a police officer, do I really want to vote him out of the class?


I am Michelle Malkin's worst nightmare: I've exposed vulnerable Sunday School children to my gay agenda.