Feh. After searching for a while for a headboard that was a good balance between not-horribly-ugly and not-horribly-expensive, I finally found one and ordered it. I just got an email that they're sold out, so they're cancelling my order.

I'm not looking for a piece of artwork here! Just something that'll keep my pillows from falling on the floor, and doesn't cost more than about $150. I don't even need for it to last for that long, just a few years, until I can afford real furniture. (The way my apartment is designed, there are weird jutting-out things in most of the corners, so that there's no way to get the head of my bed flush against the way without wasting a whole lot of space around it.)

Yeah, there is a difference in spaces where kids are appropriate. Pure bar late at night? Well, I might be a judgey. I wouldn't take my non-existent kid there. OTOH, maybe it is meeting up with kidless friends when they can and you can't get a sitter at the last minute and holy fuck, you need some adults. Quitting time, a lot more leeway. Serves food to all comers but is technically a bar? I may be judgey without knowing the person, but that's just about me.

Hell, I've taken my friends with babies out with me being the designated driver (couldn't get a sitter, dad out of town, long planned night out- basically I'm the sitter.) Of course, in that case, 1 drink = friend needed a driver and a babysitter when she went to bed.

gotcha. Sorry.

I don't care whoever else is in a bar as long as they're not dictating I change my behaviour. As long as I get to do as much boozing and swearing and ogling as I would normally, I care not a whit for my audience. On the flip side, it doesn't bother me more that it's a one year old in hysterical wordless sobbing for half an hour--in fact it probably bothers me less--than if it were a twenty five year old.

Supermarket guy suggested a red wine I could drink while I cooked with it. Do you know how many of my meds say not to drink while I'm on them? Including the big M? But I guess here is where I work out my boundaries.

We don't take Noah to bars. Well, I haven't been to a bar in ages. We also don't take Noah out to dinner because he does better when he goes to sleep by 7. That limits some of the taking the baby out stuff. I'm okay with that.

However, we are often the first people in line for the various breakfast places we go to.

Oops. And in discussing this with K, we wouldn't take Noah to a bar for us to have a drink because I'm not putting him in a car with either of us after a drink. I'm such a lightweight now.

And I should say, one point of utmost hilarity was a house party in which the 9 month old kept trying to steal bottles of beer. Of COURSE we didn't let her, but there was photo evidence and she'll get years of ribbing once she's old enough.

And then there is my brother's family. We're all about the inappropriate but enforcing the actual acceptable rules. I mean, the eldest plays with my brother's experimental brain cancer mice at the lab. But he is unaware of that his daddy kills them.

Which is kind of fucked up, but then, we handle that well.

ION, I've been following the stories of the Baltimore riots in '68 in response to MLK's assassination. It explains a lot about the state of certain parts of the city, and yet doesn't. And it is... I don't know. It raises questions, some very uncomfy. Like about self segregation. Which, as I've toyed with buying a home, has been in my mind. I ended up in this neighborhood without that legacy, because I knew jack shit about B'more, really. And despite having gone to college in the south, I was really naive concerning race issues outside the history books (I knew the striations in the hispanic community, but beyond that? Whatever. It's stupid, but when I visit my hometown, I think, wow! we've finally gotten more than 3 people of african american ancestry! It's an odd town in some ways. Anyone "black" when I was growing up was likely a professor from Africa. )

Survey shows that I'm a cheap date. How cheap? Less than a full glass of wine. Quite less.

Ah, well.

My hometown was like that, too. My elementary school had no black kids. My high school graduating class had about five, but I'm pretty sure that two of them actually lived in Paterson (city best known as the setting for "Lean On Me") and were just claiming to live with grandmothers or aunts in the suburbs. Three or four Hispanic kids, about ten or fifteen Asian, and the other 130 or so white.

I can remember a few racial incidents, though most of those were just as much about class as about race, though it can be hard to separate them. Stuff like "That's all right, that's OK, you're gonna work for us some day" at basketball games against Paterson schools. Or when someone had been stealing bike seats and handlebars from the bike rack, someone asked, "Who would steal just part of a bike, anyway?" and someone else replied, "Someone really poor. Where did you just move from again, Maria?" to a girl who'd just moved to our town from Paterson. Then there was a white girl who, for most of eighth grade, thought it was really cool to address any black guy as "Prince." Never did quite figure that one out.

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