JDBakerMN

i'm sitting here waiting for then to finish working on my car. they said 20 minutes, but it has been 40 so far. just oil and radiator fluid change. so while waiting, I decided to find out how hard it is to blog from my phone. Not bad, but I wouldn't want to write a novel. Oh, looks like they are almost done. More later, maybe.

150,000 attendees.
184 groups participating in the parade
~90 marchers for GLEAM (Gay & Lesbian Employees at Microsoft) (not to be confused with the *other* GLEAM that was marching for Merck)

This was the first time that I marched for an entire parade route. I think I've joined up with MIT's contingent once or twice at Boston Pride. Anway, the day started by arriving at Capitol Hill at 9:15am. We were group #22, so we'd actually be starting to march right around the actual start time of 11am, as opposed to poor #184 who probably started marching about 2 hours later. We all got new t-shirts for the parade - MSN shirts with the little MSN Pawn in the 6 rainbow colors on the front. Cool design. Not so cool implementation. The colors didn't actually come out looking like the rainbow.

I got asked to help give out stuff to the crowd. Well, actually my job was to give stuff from the car to our marchers, who would then give the gifts to the crowd. We had tons of t-shirts, XBOX hats, gum, pens, little radios, and mints. About half of our t-shirts were given away by the MSN Butterfly who joined us for the march. I was usually so busy making sure everyone had things to hand out that I hardly noticed the crowd. It was the biggest crowd ever for Seattle Pride.

Towards the end of the parade route (maybe the last two blocks), we ran out of t-shirts (my bad). Something else strange happened almost at the same time. People stood up and clapped for us. It was really moving, having everyone standing up and applauding.

Let's see what else... After GLEAM was done with the parade, I hung out with two other GLEAMers that I had met, A & B. A is 30 and works in Legal. B is 27 and an intern in Research. B also has a certain rhythm and diction to his speech that very much reminds me of justom. Both are Canadians, although A has been living in the US for > 10 years. We walked around the park looking at the different booths for a bit, then tried (and failed) to find a beer garden. So we went back down to Broadway (the parade route) and headed for a bar. We got to see the tail end of the parade as we searched for beer. We ended up hitting 4 different bars and spent about 4-5 hours just talking. It was cool.

Hopefully A & B will keep in touch - it'd be nice to have some more GLBT friends out here. Especially ones that drink beer. (Most of my friends out here don't drink at all. It's very frustrating.)

Made sugar cookies last weekend with a recipe from "The New Best Recipe" cookbook, produced by the people behind America's Test Kitchen. They start with a recipe and play around with all the ingredients and all the steps until they have what they consider their best recipe.

The cookies were fine, but I like chewier cookies. And the flavor was a bit, um, flat. I think a bit of milk would have helped. Anyway, I'll make my own recipe to get it chewier. Their steps were good, though, and helped me get them nicely shaped and sugary.

But I do recommend the book. Er, tome. It's huge. I was browsing in William Sonoma in the cookbook section when one of the clerks asked if I wanted help. I said I was just browsing. Anyway, she told me that she really liked this book (probably the most expensive one they had, certainly the biggest). I thought she was just trying to make a sale. So I opened it up and looked at the chocolate chip cookie section - it had three recipes, one for chewy, one for puffy and one for crispy, with explanations about what ingredients were keys to each recipe. Anyway, cool book.

I also made chocolate souffle last night. Actually very easy. If you like it, I highly recommend you make it yourself. I'd say it's at about the level of difficulty of, say, banana bread. Maybe a tad harder, since it requires more than one bowl, but pretty damned easy. I've never had chocolate souffle before. I'm not sure what to think of it. I think I was thinking it would be more like a chocolate bread pudding.

I haven't baked anything in a while. A long while. So I decided to bake some banana bread last night, maybe an apple cake today, and maybe some cookies and a chocolate souffle over the weekend.

Finished the banana bread last night.  Pretty yummy, although I'm pretty sure I had the oven on 'Broil' the whole time. Needless to say, the top is a bit, um, shall we say 'dark'?

Hopefully the remaining items will go a bit better.
 

Had my first allergy shot today.  No big deal.  Felt like a pin prick.  Had to stay in the lobby area for half an hour in case I had a bad reaction and they needed to administer epinephrine. 

I got to take my antigen serum home with me.  I did that because I'm switching locations and am going to have my shots done at a different clinic than where my testing was done.  I was readying the "Antigen Dosage Sheet" (which tells me, among other things, that it will be 23 doses before I get to "maintenance level".  I can get there by doing them 3-10 days apart.  I'll probably try to stick to the 2x a week schedule and get there in 3 months.).  On the sheet it listed what the antigen serum was made of.  I was reading it to my mom when I realized that there were some things missing.  Like Cat and Dog.  So I got out the copy of the results of the allergy test and realized that 9 things were missing. 

So I get to call them back on Thursday and ask if I was supposed to get a second shot too.  And if not, what happened to the rest of the stuff I'm allergic too.  And in case you're thinking that maybe they just took the stuff I'm most allergic to, that's wrong.  Cat and Dog actually top that list.