Sara Golemon

About a day and a half ago, Reddit user stderr posted a link to the PHP documentation showing that GOTO will be a part of the language as of version 5.3. Somewhere in the reddit comments for this post, a link was pasted to an entry on this blog where I announced the feature being added years earlier. This naturally brought out the usual flame wars that circle around something like GOTO and drove some new traffic to my blog. No big deal, my server is pretty low-traffic, it can handle a few extra hits.

Within a few hours, burghler had browsed through other entries on my blog, finding what was at the time, the most recent entry about my friend's experience burying her mother. Just like the first reddit post, which had made the front page, this one also had a somewhat incendiary title.

Okay, more than a little incendiary, but I'll get to that in a moment...

I grew up in California, and my state is pretty well true to it's reputation of being....less conservative than average. Granted, I've been harassed, shunned, even outright beaten over being queer, but I always thought that when it comes to certain things, especially family, there's a line that just isn't crossed. This is why the events of the past weekend so thoroughly amazed me.

Several months ago, when she told me that her mother had Cancer, I promised my kinda-ex-nevermind-it's-complicated-girlfriend that when the time came, I'd jump on a plane and fly out to the Midwest to help her bury her mom. So it was, that when she called me from Toronto (she was in the middle of a business trip), I booked a one-way flight (we weren't sure how long things would take), and flew off to Cleveland to meet her and offer my sympathies.

Death is hard, no matter how prepared for the end you are, but for my friend it was doubly difficult. For the past four years, she'd only rarely been able to see her mom, due to both distance and conflict between her and other people in her mother's family. We'd hoped that in the darkness of losing a loved one, those hard feelings and prejudices could be set aside, that family could come together for just one day to share grief and say good-bye. We were unbelievably wrong...

So I went on holiday to the UK about 2.5 weeks ago. Just before I took off, the retina in my right eye started bleeding. It's done this before, it's all part and parcel to being diabetic for 17 years. So I kept on schedule, enjoyed my vacation, and just as expected my eye began clearing over time. Yay!

So while my right eye is busy healing, my left eye has decided it wants to get in on the fun too (this is a new development for my left eye). Right now I'm effectively blind. I can make out large, rough shapes, I'm not going to stumble in front of a bus and I can even manage to configure the accessibility options built into MacOS. More yay! In the mean time, however, I can't see flying off to Canada for PHP Quebec (pun intended).

I'm sure things will clear up in a week or two, so please take lots of pictures and video, and I'm sorry I'll miss it!

Just a quick hit, as we're headed out to Ely for more touristing, but I wanted to provide an update on the weekend's activities... Except I probably shouldn't Suffice to say, we were in Birmingham and Dudley and had a wonderful time.

Saturday's culinary experiment: Pot Noodles

Sunday's culinary experiment: Sausage and mash (w/ Beer)

Forget the gap, mind the bloody ceiling!

Friday was a new treat, leading me and my guide (who's name is Sarah, yes that has led to much hilarity already) onto the express train to London for a day of wandering around the mammoth capitol city. We arrived in the somewhat run-down looking King's Cross station, passed by platform 9¾ and walked across into the much more updated looking St. Pancras station.

My sister asked me to find something in particular during my trip, so I asked for our first stop to be Leicester square. We wandered down a warren of staircases and passageways which looked like some post-apocalyptic ruin of crumbling concrete and rusted metal (which I'm assured is merely routine maintenance - mmm hrmmm) and boarded the first of what would be several tube carriages over the course of the day. I wonder if maybe I am just a typical American used to excess, because these train cars seem very small (vertically) compared to BART or other rail systems and I developed a minor crick in my neck from ducking the low ceilings.

I never did find the subject of my hunt in Leicester square, so after a few photographs we just continued on to Trafalgar, and across the Themes from there. We wandered through more districts from here... Canary Wharf (which kept making me think of the Doctor Who season two finale), Liverpool street (replete with floating sky scrapers), and a thoroughly entertaining show by a street performer involving near nakedness, a chainsaw, a not-six-year-old, and a homoerotic display of mounting a large man named Ben. Just... look at the pictures, there's really no way to describe that...

Today's culinary experiment: Full English Breakfast

UPS doesn't have the best reputation in my experience, they tend to take the longer end of their delivery "estimates", and more than once I've had packages claim to have been "attempted", when I was quite certainly AT home waiting for the package to show up. Whatcha gonna do though, right? As Lily Tomlin used to say, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."

Well, this time I am LITERALLY AND WITHOUT EXAGGERATION DYING and the driver's done it again and lied on the delivery attempt report and I'm so fucking pissed I can't see straight. I'm ready to punch the mother fucker in the face when he does show up.

Do me a favor, don't give UPS your business, go with the post office if you can manage the wait, or FedEx if not.

Update (1:51pm): I seem to have made enough noise (Don't fuck with anyone who owns BDSM equipment and knows how to use it) I got the on-call operations manager to open the (normally closed) pickup counter and pull my package off the truck which had already returned to the warehouse. I have to give this guy credit, as he took my verbal abuse with a smile and took care of me anyway. I'm still pissed at the driver and the company, but respect where it's due: Thanks for stepping up Ron.

If you're not pissed off, then you're not fucking paying attention.