Now for a set of miscellaneous wrap-up topics, about what has happened since I got back and stuff that I forgot to mention earlier.
My bronchial cough has really been nasty all week, although I’m on my usually “onions and honey” home remedy. It is definitely improving, but I’ve been very low energy. (The remedy: chop up a strong onion into dime-sized pieces and place in a Mason jar, then fill to covering the onions with honey. Put on the lid and store for 8-12 hours. Decant an ounce — a shot glass full — of the now thin and smelly honey and drink it. Tastes awful, try not to breathe in as you drink! Take further shots morning and night until what remains is too thick to deal with. Strain out the now-desiccated onions after 24–36 hours. Works about as well and fast as a Z-Pack of antibiotics, and it’s both cheaper and you can make it up right away rather than waiting until your doctor can arrange to see you four days from now. Now and then, I have to do a second batch, but I’ve had to do that with a Z-Pack before, too.)
The medals from the OutGames are disks with the center cut out, and they are hung around the neck on a cord looped through the center. When my boyfriend saw it, he said it looked like a Chinese coin. I had a flash of insight and fetched one of my leftover Danish coins — a disk with the center cut out. Ah ha!
A week later and the cough is still around. Mostly out of the chest, but up in the head. Completely knocked me out on Sunday evening, such that I slept (or at least dozed) 12 hours. So I finally broke down and called the doctor, and they phoned in a Z-Pack prescription. Here’s hoping it helps. (Another week later and there are still traces of the cough, and probably will be for another couple weeks. But it’s tolerable, down to only one or two cough drops a day now.)
In the Amsterdam Centrum, I had noticed that most of the limited parking for cars was right along the canal edge, without either a curb or a railing to mark the edge. It would give me the heebie-jeebies to park like that, so easy to go a few inches too far and edge up in the canal. And then just after I got back to the States, I chanced upon this entry from Schott’s Vocab blog, about Smart cars ending up in the canals in Amsterdam.
In Berlin, I found a little music store and went looking for some European country music. Didn’t find any of that — it was a mostly Classical music store, which is probably why most of their country selection was from the Johnny Cash era, with very little current country and nothing that wasn’t American. But I did end up buying a Greatest Hits CD from Buck Owens, whom I have little from, and it was a Japanese import to boot. (So let’s see: I spent €5 to purchase American country music from the 1960s imported to Germany from Japan. Sounds par for the course.)
Between my medals from the OutGames, my medals from the 1st World OutGames a few years ago, and other medals from dance competitions, I’m acquiring quite a few, to the point that I can’t really display them effectively. (Nor do I need to display most of them. Many are generic, without even an indicator of what event they are from, nor what I won them for.) An idea that comes to mind, given the general size and flatness of the medals, would be to have them embedded in clear plastic, with a floater label on the back indicating when and what they were for, and turn them into coasters. Probably just the important, unique ones — the OutGames and a couple of the IAGLCWDC competition medals — rather than the whole lot. Not that I generally need more coasters, having about a dozen already, but that would make the medals both useful and actually displayable, which seems like a great solution. I think I’ll try visiting TAP Plastics here fairly soon.
I got interviewed by the Seattle Gay News for an article (and picture) on the OutGames.
A week after I got home, some scabs on the top of my head released. These would have been from repeatedly banging my head on the rafters while getting dressed at the contest. Guess I did some damage. Ow.
I seem to have dropped 3–5 pounds on the trip. That’s a good thing, although I’d still like to lose another 10 lbs. at some point, down to the low 190s. But it’s hard to complain when you’re back at the weight you were at 10 years ago.
Updated on February 5, 2010
Updated on May 19, 2010
Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/08/europe-2009-aftermath.html
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