Justice for Angie

In a surprisingly fast deliberation, the jury in the Angie Zapata murder case found Allen Andrade guilty on all counts - first degree murder, bias-motivated crime against a transgender person, aggravated theft, and identity theft. He was almost immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

As far as I know, this is the first time someone in the U.S. has been convicted of a hate crime for the killing of a trans woman.

I'm doing something I don't usually do by posting this from work so I'll leave it at this and write more later when I get home.

Odds and ends

Work has been brutal the past few weeks and I can't remember the last day off I had. I actually got off work before 9pm tonight so figured I'd better post while I have a few minutes of free time.

There's been a lot going on lately that I've wanted to post on but I'll have to go with the short versions for now...

• The Angie Zapata murder trial started last week about 50 miles north of here. This one hits pretty close to home and I'll definitely be posting more about it when I have time.
• The governor of Texas is threatening to secede...I say we call his bluff.
• I recently bought a gun and applied for a concealed carry permit. I should have more to say on this one soon.
• Gay couples can't get married in San Francisco but can in Council Bluffs, Iowa. WTF?!?
• I had the best Beef Stroganoff *ever* last night at Red Square.

I think that's about it for now. I'm not sure when work is going to get sane again, but I'm hoping that happens by the end of this week. Until then, I'll probably be pretty light on posting anything new.

Tax day

It's after midnight, so it's officially Tax Day. Despite having filled out everything in my tax program, I haven't pressed the button to transmit it all to the IRS yet. I don't usually procrastinate so much on filing, but this year I've been hung up on a certain medical deduction. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you'll know what I'm talking about.

The validity of my deduction is a big gray area as far as the IRS goes and is currently being litigated in federal court. The litigation has been going on for a few years without any ruling, which is kind of a bummer. I was really hoping to hear something before I had to file my taxes.

After I post this, I'm going to go ahead and send my stuff off. What do all of you think about GRS as a deduction based on medical necessity? Would you put in under the same category as purely cosmetic procedures (breast enhancement, face lifts), which aren't deductible, or under the category of covered procedures such as stomach stapling?

Working for (or at) the man

I overheard a couple of conversations during breaks yesterday that got me thinking about a little linguistic anomaly. In the first, I heard someone talking about how she worked for Marriott, the hotel that shares a courtyard with the building I work in. In the second, I heard someone say they worked at the Marriott.

One person was a uniformed hotel employee, the other was not. Can you guess which one said they work for Marriott?

I started thinking about whether I work for or at my company. My answer was that I tend to work for people...my current employer and the last few that came to mind. I wondered if working for or at a company had something to do with white collar vs. blue collar jobs. I asked a couple of people I work with to answer the question, "where do you work?," and they each said "for [my employer's name]."

The more I thought about it, the more I settled on the idea that you work at places which are typically thought of as locations - restaurants, stores, hotels, etc. I think you work for a company when the company isn't so associated with a particular location.

Anyhow, these are the types of thoughts that go through my head when I'm outside on a break. Yeah, I need to get a life. :)

Since I've been gone

Hey everyone. Well, it appears I've blog-faded yet again. It's kind of funny how these things sneak up on me...

Looking at my post queue on blogger.com, I have three posts that are saved as drafts. These are posts that I started writing but then thought it was better not to post those particular thoughts. Once I start censoring myself, it's usually downhill pretty quickly from there.

Around the same time as those posts, I was reminded by my boss that we shouldn't be blogging or having public myspace pages or any of that sort of thing. The company I work for is in a pretty sensitive industry and there are "activists" out there looking for any reason to nail us to the wall. I guess that a year or two ago a guy who was doing some consulting work for us got caught with a pretty ugly myspace page that ended up all over a few of these activist's blogs and resulted in us losing a contract.

For the past month or so, I've been thinking about how I want to deal with all of this. Should I pull my blog completely down? That was honestly what I was going to do until I remembered things like archive.org and Google's cache. The thing is, I've been outspoken on a number of topics all over the internet and that stuff is out there, like it or not.

I've done some searches on my name and this site doesn't come up in any of the first few pages, so at least I have a little anonymity there. I went in and changed my settings so that the blog doesn't show up in search results or the blogger directory. I'll probably switch my profile to private too. I'm really wishing I would've done like Waldo and Mickity and used some kind of pseudonym this whole time. I've worked in the online industry for the past 8 years...I should really know better.

For now I'm going to try to get back to regular blogging. Even though my employer probably wouldn't be very happy to find out I'm doing it, I think that any damaging info about me is already out there if someone chooses to engage in a little character assassination. If it starts getting a little too uncomfortable here, I'll shut this blog down and start up a completely anonymous one somewhere else. If that happens, send me an email and I'll let you know where I ended up.

In the meantime, thanks for sticking around and keeping up with what's going on in my life. :)