Storm Ravages Byron!

Very crazy! On the 15th, a massive storm system swept through the area. Spotters reported several tornadoes in Shiawassee County. One of those suspected to touch down was in my home town of Byron. Basically on my grandparents's house. They were unharmed, thankfully, but the massive maple tree--probably 150-200 years old--in front of their house did not...


Neither did the carport, Dodge pick-up truck, lawn mower shed, porch or their Buick.

Inocensio the Dancer

The first time I met Inocensio was during the second day of our transect through Havana Vieja. We were interviewing residents and measuring their apartments in his building. Hundreds of years ago, his building had once been the home of the Cardinal who presided Havana. Today, like so much of Cuban architecture, it’s grandiose past had obviously come on hard time. As we came to the third story balcony, he was on the far side, mopping the tile floor. When he saw us starting to make our way across the crumbling balcony, he warned that we should walk next to the wall and not the railing.

Wearing his long golden hair back in a rag, make up, a shirt tied-off mid-torso, tight spandex shorts and a pair of old dancing slippers, Inocensio is the most flamboyantly gay man I’ve seen in Havana. Despite the difficulties that gays typically face in Cuba, Ino [as he likes to be called] was making no effort to hide who he was or put on a false front. I thought this was extremely interesting given what we’d heard and experienced from other more secretive homosexuals and those who walked the Malecon & La Rampa at night.

Ino didn’t elaborate too much on his past—we focused more on his present circumstances. I did learn that he’s not originally from Havana. He had grown up in Santiago de Cuba with his parents and eight siblings. In 1982, at the age of fifteen, he came to Havana after an argument with his father over his choice of lifestyles became physical and was kicked out of the house. Since that time, he’s not turned his back on his family and still maintains a loving relationship with them, visiting and phoning frequently.

While the housing situation is tight in Havana, it is especially tight for those who are openly homosexual. One day while he was in the city, he came upon an elderly woman having trouble getting her groceries home and offered to help her. Having done this, he was asked by the family to stay and help take care of the elderly couple. So, after living in Vedado for several years, he came to live in Havana Vieja and has lived there for the past 18 years. He and other residents in the building are in the process of constructing a small apartment for him on the roof of the same building because he likes the neighborhood so much.

Ino’s occupational history is as dramatic as he is. He was educated as a pediatric nurse and, for a while, worked as one. However, his life’s true passion was dancing. One day, while involved in a children’s cultural event for the hospital, his dream came true. Alicia Alonso, primera ballerina of the Cuban Ballet Company was in attendance, saw him, took note of his “size and attitude” and asked that he receive dance instruction. And he did. First in classical ballet but later in salsa and other modern styles as well. He currently works with a small dance company performing 5 days a week. The 192 Cuban pesos [$7.25 USD] he makes in one month, however, have to be supplemented with money from outside Cuba and the new regulations introduced by the Bush Administration have him worried that things will only be getting tighter.

Ino is fortunate to have a network of friends outside of Cuba. The gay community, he says, is pretty disparate in Cuba—they don’t speak with one voice or have the unity as they do elsewhere in the world. It’s better to be single, he states. I wonder how much of that opinion is biased by the events of his life. For a long time, Ino had a long-term partner while living in Havana. However, in 1992, his partner committed suicide. In the note he left for Ino, his partner had admitted he’d had AIDS. Today, Ino remains HIV negative, but also seems to remain alone for the most part as well, and admits that he no longer does many of the things that he and his love had done together.

Like so many Cubans I have met, Inocensio loves Cuba. He’s also a diehard Communist and supporter of Fidel—to a degree I had not yet experienced. Despite this, he does believe some change is necessary within the government and would like to have the chance to better himself and his conditions by experiencing more of the world. He’d love to have the opportunity to dance in Spain or England.

Before we part ways for the afternoon and the end of the interview, he asks me—with a seriousness that took me by surprise—whether the U.S. would invade Cuba. The answer, of course, was ‘no,’ but I find it to be an extremely frustrating notion…

If it meant that Inocensio, that all Cubans, would be free to dance in England or to have any of the many opportunities we take for granted, it’d be hard to not support such a thing…

Bertuzzi comes to Detroit!

Hahaha!

I think this is awesome.

Yes, I loathed him with the Canucks [and loathed the Canucks in general].
Yes, I thought he should have been kicked out of the NHL for life for what he did to Moore.
Yes, this makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

But I'm totally going to buy his Red Wings jersey when it comes out and I'm totally going to wear it to Vancouver.

I'm tired, but cannot sleep...

So it's 5:13am on Friday. I got into bed at 9pm last night, read for hour, turned out the light and have managed to not get more than a two or three hours of sleep. My mind just won't stop going...

Yesterday started very early [for me]. I got up at 6am so I could be into work and carpool to the Annual General Meeting with Brian and John. Aside from the watery orange juice and coffee, things went well. The Davison Country Club weathered a very brief but intense blizzard or two. It was interesting to hear about the company as a whole, too. I'm usually bored with such minutia as was explained yesterday, but given the light of the economy these days and my love of work, it was fairly interesting as a whole.

After that, it seemed like a typical bear of a day. For this time of the year. [I'm talking hybernation, of course.] The work on my desk was limited to new MDOT TEA [Michigan Department of Transportation - Transportation Enhancement Application] grant and a SHPO [State Historic Preservation Office] application. I was basically wrapping up what I could do on them at around 3:30, but, as luck would have it, that's when things started getting interesting. Doug came up and told me that a client wanted a new layout for a cycling/pedestrian trail project we're doing in Flint. It's gotta be done ASAP and it's going to a lot of rather important people so it's gotta look good. Not a problem. It needs to go out by the end of the day on Friday, but with 2.5 - 3 hours left to work yesterday, I figured I could get a good portion [if not all] of the work done right then...

Boy was I wrong.

When last I saw the CAD file--mercilessly hacked, cut/copy/pasted, drawn across, frozen, unfrozen, blocked, exploded and edited--everything was the way it should have been. I even made a couple PDFs to send in with the TEA grant for the project last week. Between then and now, the file was a completely different beast. At first, I didn't realize it. I went straight to a new layout page and started setting up a plot. But then Doug swung by my desk to tell me something and pointed out that something was awry. The new creek was somehow flowing through a bunch of MCC buildings. Easy to fix. Until I started noticing all the other things that were wrong and--as they started to pile up--not so easy to fix. I'm not sure if it was out recent switch to the latest version of AutoCAD which is not backwards compatible with the previous version, the involvement of some additional surverying work and plotting that was done by someone else, my funky and not entirely competent AutoCAD skills [especially since the last upgrade--folks, if you thought the previous versions of AutoCAD were laborious, confusing and unintuitive, you have NOT used AutoCAD 2007] or [most likely] a combination of all of the above, but whatever the case after two hours it was obvious that some things were completely gone, some just moved, some perfectly fine, and some looked as if they'd been replaced with older, obsolete versions I'd worked on weeks and weeks ago. It's a mess and I'm a bit worried about getting it sorted out in time to get some of quality produced.

It's safe to say that by 5pm I was a tad panicked and stressed. And the ladies across from me in Marketing had it even worse. They were putting together a qualifications package for a new project. The folks who wanted it, wanted it to be sent out that evening via email, so the girls were rushing to make sure that happened. Like me, however, they ran into some issues with files and things not working out the way they had planned. They didn't have my extra day though. In the end, they had a PDF put together to send out that was simply too big. But it still needed to go out immediately and unfortunately the pressure got a little too high, people got upset and the decision was made to call it an evening, take a break and tackle it first thing in the morning.

Well, having had the experiences I've had in graduate school, the 'survival instinct' started to kick in at that point. Once things had settled and most people had calmed down and gone home, I switched desks and started to pile through PDFs, documents and our friend Acrobat Distiller 8. I'd mentioned this process earlier in the day, but they explained to me that they'd run into issues with the CorelDraw created PDFs and were short on time. That led to our other way of creating PDFs which, unfortunately, isn't light on the memory and tricky with quality control leading to the decision to remove the images and graphics all together. [This was the point where there were all sorts of people there at the end of the day, all trying to make sure it went smoothly and the pressure got out of hand.] I wasn't doing anything that the previous person didn't know how to do, nor was I doing it in a revolutionary way [rather the opposite, actually, because I was still there until 7pm and it still wasn't 100% perfect]. I was merely doing it without the pressure or constraints they'd had--which changes everything.

I think my efforts got the job done, impressed people and, hopefully, eleminated the most of the stress that went with it. Since then, my minds been going non-stop. Everything from Vancouver to Flint to work to life to love to this awesome idea for a Che Guevara/office culture knock-off poster with his unforgettable image and the phrase "Cube Libre!" across the top. It'd do remarkably well, I think.





So I find myself sitting here in the dark, thinking of all the times I've tried to help in similar situations throughout my life--particularly in graduate school and most particularly very recently--and how, if history had any bearing or inclination towards repeating as it has in all the other situations, instead of coming up with a successful solution, I should have found some way to nuke the computer I was on, invalidate all the software liscences, crash the server and erradicate the company's S:\ drive.

I'm thinking of why I react to some things with what seems like limitless optimism, grace and talent, while my reaction to others is just the opposite. Pessimistic, hurtful and problematic.

Thinking of why I react to some things and not others.

I'm my own Father!

No, no... This isn't some dark, twisted, dystopian version of Back To The Future.

It's a more a whimsical, mystical revisioning of...uh... Crap. Some movie that deals with the priesthood in a serious, but non-sexual way.

Anyway, I'm now an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church. I'm looking into the requisit local laws to see what else is necessary of an ordained minister in Shiawassee County Michigan.

I like brushing my teeth, okay?

I've got my first client presentation tomorrow! It's not neccessarily MY presentation, but I'll be present, at the very least. As Brent the wetlands guy, says, "You're awfully quiet Shaun!" He was good enough to help us out with a beautification project we're working on in the middle of interstate on-ramp by giving us some good plants to use and by going to the site and doing some soil sampling which ended up meaning we'd have to do some major changes, but at least we caught them early!

Anywho, I was just thinking that I'm a major dental health freak. I've got two kinds of tooth paste. One is the new CREST ultra-super-mondo-wicked toothpaste that does e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g!! It whitens, protects against sensitivity, cavities, plaque, gingevitus, and tartar buildup, and--get this--freshens your breath, too! I use this stuff in the morning and at night. It's got a very unique texture, sorta like that pumice infused liquid handsoap that you use to get axle grease and oil grime off with. It's hardcore. For inbetween brushings, I use a children's toothpaste from Colgate. Decorated with Qui-Gon Jin, Darth Maul, and Jedi Padawan Obi Wan Kenobi, it's got a Galactic Bubble Mint flavor that leaves you coming back for more. The best thing though, is it's color! It's a deep, dark, midnight blue color with metallic gold flecks. It's the 1963 Somerset Blue Metallic Cadillac of toothpastes!





My God, I'm getting weirder and weirder...

I really shouldn't have cut my hair off...

OH MY GOD!!! WHAT HAVE I DONE!?!?!

*insert girlie scream here*