I am currently at work.

Let me say that again to let it sink in properly.

***I*** am currently at work.

No boy in my chair today, or ever again. Just me. <3

OMG!

I'm back from Philly!

I had an amazing time.  <3

I will give more details later, once I've unwound a little bit more.  <3 

Ooops, I forgot to say anything here!  It's done!  All is well!  I am legally Rachel now! 

5 more hours...

I'm excited and nervous.  I'm sure it'll go just fine.  =)

In other news, I went out sailing with some friends yesterday.  It was fun, but now I'm burnt to a crisp.  =P 

Just got the last piece of paperwork I needed for the Court, the affidavit from the newspaper that says, yes, I really did get my notice published the required four weeks in a row.  Everything is set for Monday now.  My trans friend who recently got her name changed through this same court is going to be there for moral support and everything, which is nice, because I'm gonna be all sorts of nervous I think.

I also got the test results back from my doctor.  Thyroid's fine.  Which is good in its way, but it means I've got to figure out some other reason why I'm cold and have so much trouble losing weight.  The doctor said she suspects my metabolism is awfully slow.

I'm simultaneously hot and cold right now.  It's rather disconcerting.

Got my weekend off to an early start by taking off an hour early from work.  (My boss took off about 2.5 hours before that, so I don't feel too bad about it.)  Got my iPod and figured out how to work it and make it happy with my computer (though I think I hate iTunes.  Not 100% sure yet, but pretty confident in that assessment.)  Then proceeded to spend the rest of the evening re-arranging my bedroom and trying to fight the clutter monster.  I think I got a little bit ahead.  At least my bed is where I want it now.

Saturday we barbecued up some kebabs, yummy yummy.  Then we went out for ice cream at Baskin Robin's.  Also yummy yummy.  Then one of my girlfriends wanted to get out since she managed to ditch the hubby and kids for an evening and wanted some girl time, so we went out for shakes.  Yummy yummy, but awfully overfull at this point.  =P  Oh well.  On the way home I got pulled over, cop wanted to tell me that my headlight and taillight are out.  Thankfully most of the police around here are pretty nice, they won't ticket you for stuff like that unless they've told you about it before and you didn't get it fixed.  He took my license and registration and stuff and went back to his car to run it.  Then he started walking slowly back to my car with his flashlight focused on my docs, examining them nice and close, then he took a good long look at me..."Um, this license says you're male?"  "Yes it does.  Legally I am."  "Oh.  Well.  Get your car fixed."  Gave me my stuff back and I went along my way.  Then a few blocks later another cop pulled me over for exactly the same reason.  I told him I'd just been pulled over for exactly the same thing, he took my license and called in to see if it had just been run (to double check my story), then sent me along my merry way once he found out it had.  So scary, so nerve-wracking.  The look on the confused cop's face was priceless though.  And I obviously must be doing something right to confuse people so thoroughly.

Sunday morning I tried a little more to get the clutter monster under control, didn't get very far on that though.  Then mid-afternoon I went to help one of my friends do some shopping for a baby shower, and then to a StarCraft LAN party.  WAY too many nommables, and WAY WAY WAY too much dessert.  It'd been way too long since I'd had pizza rolls, though, they were delicious.  Stayed up until about 4am, crashed out in the spare bedroom, slept in until about 9 when my grumbly tumbly woke me up (the blankets I was under were kinda toasty and it decided it didn't like being that warm after I'd put so much sugar in it the night before...), then I just kinda hung out with my friends and their kids for most of the day.  The kids (2- and 4-year-olds if I'm remembering right) seemed to take quite a liking to me, so I'm finding myself forced to re-think my long-held stance that I'm no good with children.  Played a little more StarCraft and then went home, had dinner, and then ended up turning right back around to go out and play camera whore with some other friends (the same ones that took me shopping about a month ago.)  We took a LOT of pictures out in one of the pretty parks, spent like two and a half hours out there.  The one kept trying to take photos of me while I was changing between sets, thankfully she didn't actually get anything more scandalous than my back when I had my top off one time.  I'll see about getting some of those pics up once I get them from her.

My name change hearing is in 6 days.  No, I'm not nervous at all, what makes you think that?  Heh heh...

Still cold, still waiting to hear back from the doctor.  My diet is officially on hold for as long as eating a little extra helps keep me feeling warmer.  Hopefully I won't start gaining weight because of this.  Also, tired.  Long weekend was long, even though it was all kinds of fun.

Had my doctor's appointment yesterday.  The vampires had their way with me and there's two vials of blood off to the lab, one for checking T levels, the other to test for hypothyroidism.   The temperature dipped down over the start of the week, which did *NOT* help matters any from the coldness front.  I don't know if it's getting worse or if I'm just more aware of it since I've been paying attention to it, but the last few days have been absolute Hell.  Seriously cold frozen Hell.  As morbid as it might sound to say "I hope I've got hypothyroidism", I kinda do...just because if I do it will explain so many things, and it's easy to treat so it'll put me on the way to fixing all those things.

We also talked HRT while I was there (which was originally the reason I made the appointment).  We decided to add in some finasteride for to help get my hairline to fill back in (hopefully) and just to help thicken it up in general.  We're also adding in progesterone.  The doc wasn't too sure about it because she's not convinced it'll do anything positive and is afraid it'll make me grumpy and gain weight...but I've heard a lot of people say it helped with their physical changes, and with their sex drive (mine has been pretty darn low lately, almost to the point of being non-existant).  We agreed that it couldn't hurt much to try it and if the negative outweighs the positive I can always stop taking it.  We're keeping the spiro and estradiol levels constant since we haven't seen the changes to my T level yet since the last dosage change, plus it's probably best to only tweak a few variables at a time anyway.  =P

Last night I went out to see Star Trek with a couple friends I met through Sonia (yay for having a little piece of her influence still around even though she's gone!) and I thought it was fantastic.  It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen in my life but I definitely enjoyed myself.  It definitely exceeded my expectations by a lot, but then again almost since I heard of the project I was afraid they were going to be raping Roddenberry's corpse.  I'm glad to say I was wrong.  There was a lot that was different but since that was actually pretty much a plot point I was willing to forgive them for it.  The characters weren't perfect copies of the original series cast, but they definitely invoked memories of them so I'm going to call that a win.  All in all, I feel good about recommending the movie to anyone who might be on the fence about it.

Afterwards we went out to this little Vietnamese place I didn't even know existed.  I'd never had Vietnamese food before, it wasn't bad though it wasn't my favorite thing ever or anything like that.  =P  It was still enjoyable, sitting around having a late dinner with the girls.  =)

My iPod from Woot should be here tomorrow.  Makes me happy.  =)

Only 11 more days until my court hearing!  I'm so excited and nervous and scared all at once.  It'll be so nice to have ID and credit cards that match my presentation.  The closer I get to the date the more frustrated I get everytime I have to pull one of them out with the wrong name on it!

( Cut for being so long, rambly, and sickeningly self-affirming. )

I've started going back to #YfQ.  I'm not exactly as chatty and active as I used to be there, and I'm not there as often as I used to be...but I'm there.  Maybe I'll get chattier with time, maybe I'll start being there more with time...I dunno.  We'll see how things go.

So one of my loverly trans girlfriends is leaving the area, probably never to return.  Can't really blame her, it kinda sucks here.  =P  Last night was her going away party.  There was good music, good drinks, fun people and a little bit of pool.  For the most part it was a really good evening, though the whole thing was a touch bittersweet because of the occassion.  It was for me, anyway.  I'm really wishing I could have met her earlier, she's a pretty amazing person.  Oh well, there's always e-mail and Facebook.

Friend equilibrium probably maintained though.  Met a bunch of new people at the party, there's at least one of them I kinda clicked with, so we might get together and do something sometime.  I hope so, now that I'm starting to have friends to do stuff with I'm finding myself rather addicted to it.

Of course, there's one of my closest friends who I kinda screwed things up with earlier in the week.  I need to figure out what the hell is going on with my life and what I want out of it, because my confusion and general mental-fucked-up-ed-ness is threatening to drive people away.  I just hope I can get it together before I really do scare someone off.  u.u

In other news, inventory auditing is a pain.  

Got the official word from the airline: I should get the tickets in the name most likely to be on my ID when I depart.  If there is a mismatch between the name on my ID and the name on my tickets, and I can supply an official Court document explaining the mismatch, everything will be A-OK.

Since the worries about my name change not going through are mostly just paranoia...Rachel now has tickets to Philadelphia for THC.  If, for some reason, my petition gets denied, I'll get a certified copy of the denied petition from the District Court which will explain the mismatch.

And now that I have non-refundable plane tickets, I can't really talk myself out of going anymore, can I?

On a completely unrelated note: I am freaking *freezing*.  It's 52 so there's no real logical reason for it.  I'm gonna talk to my doctor next week about the possibility of hypothyroidism...not to sound like an internet hypocondriac but a lot of the symptoms seem to match up.