Charlie

A friend of mine whose husband is a disabled vet got the shot for him through the VA in Florida a couple of weeks ago; she still has been unable to get the shot herself.

Mine was probably "Blue Suede Shoes."

Mine was an Elvis Presley 45, but I don't remember which one.

There has been talk of it possibly being rescheduled to autumn, if the pandemic situation has improved by then.

My best friend was a very serious stamp collector, which was relatively normal, but he also collected paperweights and giraffe figurines, which was not. After he died, there were a few other other stamp collector friends who practically fought over his collection, but no one wanted the other collections. His sister finally had the clever idea of asking all his friends and relations to each choose one paperweight to keep in his memory, but I don't know how she got rid of the giraffes.

My first partner and I lived together for four years, and had separate bedrooms. However, during my first first three years living with my current spouse, we had one bedroom apartments and only one bed. I am much more comfortable sleeping alone--I am a restless sleeper and like having a whole double bed to myself--so as soon as we could afford to buy a house, we made sure it had two bedrooms. Now that we are old, we also tend to get up during the night to empty our bladders, so unless we are traveling and sleeping in guest rooms with a single bed or hotel rooms with only one bed available, we always sleep in separate beds. Our bedrooms are also our entertainment areas, and since we have totally different tastes in what we watch and listen to, we need our own spaces. If we had been forced to share a single bedroom for the past year of self-isolation, we would be snarling at one another.

I have been everywhere I wanted to go, done everything I wanted to do, had every experience I wanted to have. The joys have outweighed the sorrows. I would like to have more, but if I were told it would end tomorrow, I would feel prepared. I don't want to be around so long that I wished it would all end.

She was remarkable as Miss Jane Pittman.

Hotels can take leisure visitors again, and outdoor dining is once more open. However, there isn't much to do of a touristic nature, other than enjoy the scenery. Bars are supposed to stay closed. The usual big seasonal events--the International Film Festival, Modernism Week, Indian Wells Tennis Tournament, White Party, Coachella, etc.--are all cancelled, postponed, or only accessible remotely. The biggest gathering in the valley is at the vaccination site at the Indio Fairgrounds.

I weighed myself last night as I always do before bed, and then weighed myself again as soon as I got up this morning. Somehow I lost 1.3 lbs while I slept (I did get up once about 1am to pee--I'm an old man, after all).

President Grant's initials were supposedly U.S. Grant , with the initials standing for Ulysses Simpson. However, that was not his birth name, which was Hiram Ulysses Grant. When he entered West Point, his sponsor had mistakenly put his name down as Ulysses Simpson [his mother's maiden name] Grant, and he liked the "U.S." so he adopted it, but when asked, he admitted that the "S." didn't stand for anything. The S. in Harry S. Truman didn't stand for anything either; he had not been given any middle name when he was born.

The worst part of traveling alone is eating alone in restaurants. If you meet someone you like, invite them to have dinner with you.

But, yes, usually Australia Day happens during the Aussie Open. I remember sitting in the stands and seeing the military jets fly over when I was there on January 26 in 2003.

Yes, it was pretty good.

My h.s. yearbook had a "best body" award for each gender, but they wore regular street clothes in the photo.

By the time of the 1964 election, I was not living at home, so we didn't watch it on tv or talk about it much. As often happens between generations, my father was more politically conservative than my grandfather, who had been very active in the progressive wing of the GOP (he was a protege of Teddy Roosevelt), while I was more liberal than my father. As for gay rights, it was not a subject that my father would have been comfortable discussing, so I didn't push him; he was OK with me being gay, as long as he didn't have to talk about it. He would have been very worried for me if he had known how involved I was in the gay rights movement before Stonewall.

I am currently reading The Global Age by Ian Kershaw, a history of Europe from 1950 to 2017. It is very long and detailed, so it has taken me a long time to get through it, but it interests me because I spent a lot of time in western and central Europe in the last third of the 20th century, at different times living in England, studying in Austria, and working in Czechoslovakia, so I lived through a lot of what he is describing, and I think he gets most of his analysis right.

My father and I were very different from one another in many ways, yet we liked and understood one another. He dropped out of school at 16, and had a variety of jobs, mostly white collar or blue collar; I have three degrees and was a tenured college professor by the time I was 28. But we both approached problems with the same kind of engineering mindset. I have much more money than he ever had, but I am financially conservative and frugal in the same ways that he was. He was born in the Eastern Time Zone and left it only once in his life, for a weekend in Milwaukee; I love travel and have been all over the world, including living and working in other countries. He was outgoing and made friends easily; I was very shy when I was younger, but managed to overcome that. He was quietly religious and I was a quiet non-believer. He was family-oriented; I was 'gay community' oriented. He rarely read anything more challenging than the New York Daily News, and I majored in English literature. Our tastes in music and art were different. He voted for Barry Goldwater; I voted for Lyndon Johnson. He enjoyed sports activities all his life; I worked out at a gym until I was middle-aged, solely to stay in shape for sex, and then took up tennis. He was honest, loyal, kind, considerate, organized and responsible, and I always wanted to be like him in those ways. I came out to my father when I was 19. He was not happy about it, but he tried to be understanding (after all, he had long realized that I was going to be "different" from him). I think he was conditioned by the fact that his favorite male cousin, whom he had grown up with, was gay, and the whole extended family had tacitly accepted that fact for years, since Fred wasn't a flaming queen but a 'normal'-looking guy who lived with his widowed mother rather than with his male partner, who was nevertheless included in family activities. Once I was established in a respectable career, Dad could accept that I might have the same kind of settled life as Fred, even though I was openly gay and lived with my partner, whom he liked. When he was dying, his main concern was what would happen to my mother, and was relieved when I assured him that I would take care of her just as Fred had taken care of Aunt Minnie. He has been dead for many years, but I still think about him often.

I went to both the "summer of love" in SF and Expo 67 that year. I had lots of sex in SF, none in Montreal, even though I went to Expo with gay friends.

They have not admitted that. Their explanation for lifting the restrictions is that the surge has flattened and ICU capacity is rising. Whether that is true, and whether they are lifting the restrictions too soon are other issues.

I weigh myself at the same time every night before bed, and my weight fluctates within a 4 lb range from day to day. Although my diet and eating patterns at home have remained exactly the same throughout the pandemic, and my exercise level hasn't changed, my average daily weight has dropped 8 lbs in the past year. The only explanation I can think of is that I haven't eaten dinner at a restaurant in months.

I had a student whose last name was Lett. Her mother named her Toya. I don't know if she thought that was cute, or whether it was a a passive-aggressive reaction to a child she didn't want.

It was in the wake of the Walter Jenkins scandal in DC. The military police were unhappy about reports that guys from the base were going to a gay bar in the town where they were stationed when they had leave on the weekend, so with the co-operation of the local police the MPs began a joint investigation. My friend was actually having an affair on the weekends with a local gay man--whom he had met at a church!--and both were caught up in it. Homosexuality was illegal (remember those days?), and my friend was discharged, as was Glenn, who was even more indiscreet about his sexual activities.

It was in the wake of the Walter Jenkins scandal in DC. The military police were unhappy about reports that guys from the base were going to a gay bar in the town where they were stationed when they had leave on the weekend, so with the co-operation of the local police the MPs began a joint investigation. My friend was actually having an affair on the weekends with a local gay man--whom he had met at a church!--and both were caught up in it. Homosexuality was illegal (remember those days?), and my friend was discharged, as was Glenn, who was even more indiscreet about his sexual activities.

So that's what happened to my favorite jockstrap!