The small things

I went to dinner last night with Claire, Brooke, Tyler, /Amber/, Amy, and Rachel, along with “JoanB” who heads out for SRS next week. We also had three celebrating recent or upcoming birthdays, but we won’t mention names. We had some very good Peruvian food at a little place called Fresca. Very good. I have leftovers that I’ll be chowing on for lunch today. Yum!

“JoanB” heads out this upcoming week to basically finish off transition, and then, well, I guess she’s set to get back to living her life. She’ll still have a couple of fun months of dilating, but that’s what it’s all about, right?

After dinner, Brooke, Amy, /Amber/, Claire, and I found a pool hall to hang out in for a while. I think Claire wanted to do a little dancing where there were “a lot of single, straight, good looking guys,” but she settled for pool. I want to say we got there about 10ish and waited for about 30 minutes on a table to open up while I took a small nap. We played 5-way cutthroat. Claire was definitely the best shooter, while the rest of us just tried to play along. Claire seemed to have this fascination with sinking all of my balls first, as well as jinxing me with the #2 ball. We played a number of games, only the first few which I was able to win (and act really cocky). When I went to check the time, I found it to be 3:15am. Wow! I hadn’t been out that late in a long time. We played one last game in which Claire routed us again, then headed out. Brooke and /Amber/ stopped by my place a little after 4am before they headed home themselves, then I was off to bed slightly before 5am. Just over a month ago, I would have been waking up and heading off to see Dr. O.

I woke up this morning around 10am to miscellaneous sounds, especially to some annoying person who kept banging on the metal siderails of the apartment building stair’s. Dooiiinnnnnggggg! Doooiiiinnnnngggggg! ggggrrrrrr!!!!! That’s just so annoying. So, I got up and took Scooby for a walk since it’s just her and I this weekend.

This past week has continued to include a lot of small milestones. The IT department finally got around to my name change stuff, and even though it included a lot of small annoying system hangups, it was nice to finally have my name on my messages.

I contacted my old university about name changes and new diplomas. One of the women in the alumni office emailed me back saying that another woman had recently gone through all of the stuff I’m going through with the name/gender change. Yep. We’re out there, but it appears I’m only the second of 2 at my alma mater. I told her she could forward my email info on to the other one who’s journey took her along the same route.

Let’s see, the mail brought my new bank checks, the initial package of info from Dr. Meltzer for SRS, and my driver’s license. Yep, it arrived with my new picture, and where it says “SEX:” there is a big fat F following it. I look swollen in the picture, but all of the information is correct, for once. I might go back in a few months and have a new picture taken in which I’m hopefully less swollen.

This past Thursday, I had my first therapy visit since FFS. My therapist thought my FFS went well, and we discussed what exactly Dr. O did. Other than that, we just talked about the past month or two, including going back to work. As I was driving back to work, /Amber/ calls. She noticed that I went out for a couple of walks this past week and wondered if I wanted to go for a walk or run. As I told /Amber/, though, I bounced up and down a few times at home to see how the face would handle the jarring, but portions of the forehead and nose felt weird, so running was out for a while. She said her work computer had gone bonkers or something, and that she didn’t have anything to do. I told her it was better for me to stay out of the sun, so we met in the evening on a local university campus to walk around. I think we walked for about an hour and a half, jumped one fence, rambled all over campus, and talked, talked, talked. I’d never really visited much of the campus that wasn’t accessible via car, but there was so much more on the interior part that I had never seen before. We grabbed dinner before I headed home. Anyway, I put in walks of 2, 3, and probably 5 miles this week. Not too bad.

Anyway, I have a ton of things to do this weekend...taxes, pay bills, CLEAN, get an oil change, and probably do a little shopping (Express has a sale!!!). Uuuugggghhh. I feel so tired though.

I spent about 5 hours going through tax stuff this afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve done it online and through a service. I figure I’ll be doing that from now on. The good news is that I have a federal and state total return that basically equals Dr. O’s down payment. Nice! This next year should be even better with the major payment of Dr. O’s fees counting as a medical deduction, assuming, of course, that my tax return goes through ok. I’ll hopefully be able to use that money to pay for at least half of SRS.

Let’s see, what else did I do today. Hmmmm. Well, I had the oil changed, but now I’m headed to bed.