Be Of Good Cheer!

Ports O'Call is here until December!  To explain.  Some developer cut a deal with Disney Cruises.  Disney will use the LA Port for embarkation if the City of San Pedro would tear down all of the existing buildings along the water to re-build.  Ports was on the list.  My heart sank like a donut in a cop's cup of coffee.

So yesterday's news that they will be open until December caused quiet tears of joy in my heart.  A vast buffet and a constantly-replenished flute of champagne will live through the summer and fall.

And improvements have been made within Ports, too.  The dessert selection was: cut your own wedge of cake or pie or ladle of chocolat mousse, tapioca pudding, etc.  Consequently that area looked like a bomb had hit it.  Now it is delicate slices of dessert on little plates.  Just scoop and go.

That's not all - at the Salad Bar, the caviar is in a nice bowl, same as before,  with surrounding bowls of toasted baguette slices, chopped red onion, chopped hard-boiled egg - all of the fixins' for classic caviar less a lemon wedge - you will still have to scoot over to the Seafood station (wherein dwell peel and eat shrimp, crab legs and mussels) for that. This is imminently do-able.

But no rosy skies without a hint of gray ... Eggs Benedict?  Vanished.  A ton of bacon?  Alas.  I loved to get a couple of strips of bacon on my plate, slither over to the Eggs B and discretely spatula a poached egg and sauce onto the bacon and stealthily sidle away.  If this is the worst thing that ever happens to Ports ...

Contemplating the reprieve... 

Richie always looks worried when I'm the shooter.

I Still Don't Get It, But I'm Trying
"To My Trans Sisters, A Love Letter to our Community From the Women Who Understand," compiled by Jennifer Finney Boylan

The book is comprised of nearly 100 letters and includes writers, activists and media names.  I checked this book out because I was curious.  Wanting to be someone else, let alone the other sex, is utterly foreign to me.  If I knew what was what, I reasoned, I could understand this transition business better.

I read maybe 45 - 50 of these letters and then the same mentions over and over again, palled.  Every letter that I can remember stressed, "Be yourself!" which I thought would not be particularly helpful to  trans people be they Joe or Josephine.  If a trans doesn't know who they are, how can they "be themselves."  This is well above my pay grade so I wish them all a good and cheerful life. 

Even though two-thirds of the letter writers professed to have been sexually confused at age five.   Clearly kindergarten  in Kansas City, Missouri, was not particularly helpful in my later years for much of an understanding about gender confusion.   They meant well.  Learning to read beats everything else I can remember learning there.