This 'n that

Quick trip to HQ
Tues morning I drove to my company's headquarters in Richmond, VA. I set some meetings and a training session in the afternoon, stayed overnight, and had more meetings and more training Wed morning. I left at 1:00 and drove home. It was a lot of time on the road (9 hours) in 2 days, but I accomplished a lot in a short time.

Gays marry in IA
Did you hear that Iowa is now permitting gay marriage? According to a story at http://www.gfn.com/channelArticle.cfm?channelDesRecordID=492:
Gay College Students Legally Wed in Des Moines
One day after an Iowa judge ruled that a state law stipulating the only legal marriages in Iowa were between a man and a woman was unconstitutional, two male college students were married in the front yard of a Des Moines residence.

The couple — Tim McQuillan and Sean Fritz, both 24 and Iowa State University students — were married this morning, after they obtained a marriage license at the Polk County recorder’s office and got a judge to sign a waiver allowing them to marry today rather than wait three days, as is required by law, according to a report in the Des Moines Register.

They were married by the Rev. Mark Stringer of First Unitarian Church in Des Moines at 10:32 a.m.

Fritz proposed to McQuillan last night when he heard Polk County Judge Robert Hanson had ruled Iowa's law forbidding gay marriage was unconstitutional. As reported by RadioIowa, Fritz went to the store and bought wedding rings last night, then got on the Internet to find the paperwork for a Polk County marriage license.

"There was a lot of double-checking everything on the Internet to make sure that we got all the paperwork filled out correctly the first time," Fritz said. "We didn't want to get refused because we messed up a 't' somewhere."

Fritz says he called McQuillan's mother in California to ask permission to marry her son. McQuillan says Fritz then got in touch with him. "He instant messaged me over the Internet that this was going on," McQuillan said. "When he picked me up around nine o'clock he proposed to me on the spot. Besides the obvious shock, I still haven't recovered. Maybe it'll set in later this week."

Iowa Family Policy Center president Chuck Hurley called the state of affairs this morning in Iowa "devastating" and "outrageous."

Blog excerpt to be printed
Last Fri I received an email request from the editor of the DelRay Sun newspaper to print one of my blog entries. It seems that my favorite Mexican restaurant Cantina Mexicana (aka: The Taco House) has resumed advertising in that paper, and the editor wants to help steer more business there. He said he found a blog entry where I wrote about the restaurant and staff and thought it would be helpful to print it in his paper.

So if you're in the Alexandria/Arlington area be on the look-out for my excerpt in the Sept 12 edition of the DelRay Sun.

Drag Queen name of the day: Maureen Core