How often can you indulge in something like a blue cheese encrusted filet mignon and tell yourself, in good conscience, ‘it’s for charity?’  That’s why I love Dining Out For Life‘s annual fundraiser. Sure, I could eat every day like I’m striving for my first heart attack, but this is special.  BorgHealth be damned, this is for the public good.  Every tasty little bite was helping someone living with HIV/AIDS.  Even the baked provolone appetizer was making someone’s life better, just as certainly as it was making mine shorter.

Not sure whether it’s the pollen, the lingering effects of some bad chicken last night, a touch of depression over my current caseload (too much family law), or the early onset symptoms of bacon flu, but I’ve just felt blah all day and ended up getting nothing done.  Not a damn thing.  Diego and I just hung out and watched each other.  He’d roll over and I’d stretch.  I’d adjust pillows and he’d roll over. A couple of times we almost sychronized our stretches, but that was as good as it got.  Lethargy ruled the day.

Interesting reading the news from Des Moines and flashing back to the first day of legal same-sex marriage in California last June.  We were planning to get married on Day Two (which we did), but on Day One we spent some time scouting out the registrar’s office up in downtown San Luis Obispo.  

Two things were in mind: we didn’t want to get lost the next morning with our guests in tow, and we were just a tad curious about how the local wingnuts were going to react. We found the building easily, and instead of wingnuts we found the local branch of the Unitarian Universalists serving cake and handing out roses. We hadn’t been quite certain how our folk would be welcomed up there (most of the news accounts had focussed on the larger counties) and along with the wonderful staff at the San Luis Obispo county recorder’s office, their congregation’s marriage party was a pleasant surprise.  Glad to see they’re doing their thing for Iowans too.

With the outside temp at 95 at 11:15, I’m beginning to think it will break 100 here today.  In April.  I was trying to avoid turning on the A/C this early in the season, but I don’t think I can hold out for long.  Going to evacuate the staff to the pool for now though in an effort to at least stave off the inevitable.

An otherwise great weekend is being marred by news of the death of J.G. Ballard and the imminent death of a friend’s beloved pet of 15 years.  I haven’t explored Ballard’s writings as much as I should, but was a huge fan of the film of his autobiography, Empire of the Sun.  Prostate cancer deaths always twist my emotions just a little bit harder; going to have to find some of his other books at the library this week.  As for the other, spending time with Diego now and planning for the consumption of alcohol is very near future.

Just in from catching a showing of Zanna Don’t, a “musical fairy tale” that opened Friday in San Diego.  Great cast, several of whom I’ve seen in other local productions, and a fun story that had us laughing most of the evening.  Can’t argue with second row seats either, even if it was second out of four.

Spent the morning at the Wild Animal Park’s Butterfly Jungle exhibit with the parents this morning. Simply beautiful.

Didn’t sleep well at all. I think Diego’s fidgety anticipation of a giant rabbit bringing colored eggs stuffed with bacon (his beliefs, not mine) kept him up, and in turn that kept me up. Randy however, is somehow still out cold.

Not for long though. In an hour or so we’ll be heading out for an easter brunch in Laguna with old friends. Kinda like an Easter sunrise service in that we’ll be on the beach too close to the hour of sunrise, but we get a private booth, and well, get served. Some of the people there will undoubtedly look like the risen dead too.

Since you’re here though, enjoy some photo flashbacks of Easters past: 1995 or 1996, 2005, and 2007.  No object lessons, no ghosts, just fond memories.

The weekend roadtrip was only marred by a problem with thieves in Bakersfield. Sometime early Sunday morning some loser(s) smashed a window on Spinner’s Mazda and grabbed a few things off the back seat. Most notably, they got four days of dirty laundry and a black duffle bag that I’ve dragged around the world since the late 1980s. Oh, and Spinner’s camera with our photos from the big Friday night out at the Wynn. The shocker was the Bakersfield PD: they actually came out and did crime scene stuff for a car break-in. The SDPD certainly never would have bothered. In hindsight, I’m think the hotel staff’s calm professionalism in knowing who to call and helping to vacuum up the glass shards from might have betrayed a sense of boredom at a common occurrence and a sense of ‘oh, only one this morning.’ Oh well. Despite the frustration with replacing the window being forced to shop and replace the soiled laundry is much more fun than washing it.

Spinner and I spent last night in the VIP seats at La Reve at the Wynn here in Vegas. It was over the top when Katherine showed us to out seats and served us our chocolate-dipped strawberries. It was overrer the top when she kept topping off our flutes of Perrier Jouet as we watched the cast prepping back stage on our monitor.

Then we just abandoned the top for an hour and twenty minutes of sensory overstimulation. Like a Cirque de Soleil production, this is theater in the round. There was dancing and diving; acrobatics in the air on the ground and in the water. Four incredible Cupids bringing in the comic relief and the emergency first aid for a stricken show dove. Amazing eroticism, homo and otherwise (it is the story of a romance between a man and a woman). Timing and engineering feats that had divers leaving stage areas then immediately diving back into the pools that replaced them and dance platforms rising and sinking in the pool as needed.

And the performers? OMG the abs, they went forever. Impossibly fit bodies as far as the eye could see and costuming that made certain you knew just how hard those bodies were working while still helping to tell the story.

Two parts of the show in particular did it for me. There was an early scene with divers, some synchronized and some solo, performed beautiful and fun dives off an ever rising series of platforms, with the final dive coming from the rafters at least 20 yards above the pool that had been a stage moments before. Later was an amazing scene with two men performing a modern dance/gymnastics routine that ended with one man balancing the other on his back, neck to neck vertically, before diving into the pool. Not sure words can ever do that one justice.