Catching Up-

By Diane Frank

I really thought I’d get a newsletter together for August, but things piled up. First, we had to move our website fully to its new home. It’s unbelievable how much work it took to do something that should have been so simple. It was supposed to be just copying some files, changing some names and email addresses. At the risk of boring people with technical details, there were changes that our vendor made that rendered some parts of the site inoperative. Our guest book wouldn’t work. The site indexing wouldn’t work. Some links got broken that I hadn’t expected. Several phone calls later (and thanks for the cooperation of Diane Brennan handling the financial end of this), and some late nights, our site functions pretty much the way it’s been functioning, and I can get back to worrying about content.

Something else that happened in July was that I started a new job. I’m commuting 40 minutes minimum each way, and this is taking another chunk out of my time. But it does mean I’ll be able to afford to upgrade my wardrobe. And while I was waiting to hear when and if my job would start, I did audition for and get into the upcoming production of Victor/Victoria at the Cassidy theatre in Parma Heights. I’m totally blown away by the talent of the rest of the cast. I hope it does work out that AO has its October meeting as an outing to the show. I think that we should get to work on ordering a block of tickets, as the AO meeting night is the Saturday before the show closes and those nights are typically pretty full. I can’t say I’ve found a restaurant in the area that would be good for dinner first. I suspect people will be going out after rehearsal on Labor Day Sunday, so I’ll get a better idea then.

Also in July I was invited to speak at a presentation sponsored by PFLAG and Trans-family. I’ve written down what I said, but I’m not going to publish those remarks in the newsletter...but rather put them in the "webmistress selects" section of the website. I expect that some of my points are fairly controversial, and I’d rather have them somewhere where I can be clear that these are my opinions as one member, albeit an officer of Alpha Omega rather than risk having them taken as a policy statements for Alpha Omega.

On another note, I’ve had some interesting email correspondence lately. It seems that my recommendation that people read the Bailey book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen", so they could be aware of some of the pernicious arguments out there was taken as some kind of approval by the publishing house. A quote to that effect appeared on the web site. I wrote to them, and it has been pulled.

Another letter commented on my book review of "The New Girl". The remarks were favorable and by someone who knows the author.

The other correspondence I’ve been dealing with on the old web home has been people
SPAMMING our guest book. I’ve made some changes in the code that permitted that, and we’ll see if we can avoid it for a while.

And we also had to sever a link to us from a site largely devoted to hooking people up.

And that’s it for Summer Vacation.- Diane