Harvest Time Lessons

It's the end of summer and that means harvesting a lot of what we planted in the Spring.

I'm kind of a new gardner. I've had a lot of success with tomatoes, blue and raspberries, greens, squash and cucumbers. I was excited one day last Spring when my neighbor came over with some potato starts.

Since I had a lot of my garden planted already, I was trying to figure out where to put the potatoes. I had a good spot, with great, rich soil, but it was in the shade.

"Potatoes will grow in the shade. Don't worry about it!" My neighbor insisted. Since she grew up on a farm on the Idaho border, I believed her. I plopped them in the ground. Watered diligently, followed her very specific directions about "hilling" the potatoes.

As you can see, potatoes do "grow" in the shade, but they sure don't thrive there. My spuds were about the size of beans. Oh well, there's always next year...

Hanging Out in Dive Bars

I was away all last week visiting my family in Upstate NY.
One of my high school buddies is an amazing musician and whenever I’m in town I try to see if he’s playing. Sure enough, he was playing a happy hour show in a bar in a small town just outside of Syracuse. My sister and brother and a few friends drove out there on a beautiful warm Friday evening.

There we met this guy. His one claim to fame, besides requesting Harry Chapin songs, is balancing a beer bottle on his head. He thought he was really something special. Dipstick just had to show him, it wasn’t that hard to do. Poor guy, I think I really deflated his ego.



Regardless, be sure to check out my friend Jamie Notarthomas, he’s a great talent and a great guy. Here's one of his music videos.

Bitch and Friends

My long lost pal Trace recently moved to Portland and we've had a blast reconnecting. This past weekend we went to see Bitch in concert. 

Bitch is this wildly creative musician/songwriter who also happens to be partners with Daniela Sea (Max from The L Word.) 

All the uber-cool and trendy dykes crowded into a small and sweaty pizza parlor to appreciate Bitch's quirky genius. 

Trace and I just chilled on the couch, taking the whole scene in. 

Christmas with the Dipsticks

Well, I didn't make a fancy video, but the Dipstick clan had an amazing Christmas too. My twin sister Mary and her girlfriend Meg came into town on Christmas Eve in what Tiger calls "The Christmas Miracle" because the weather was so bad and the airport was closed for days.We had a great dinner with Tiger's brother and sister-in-law and then opened presents from her Mom, which was the Tiger family tradition.

Christmas day we relaxed, spent hours on the phone with family and far away friends and then had 17 lesbians, two gay men and one bisexual for the annual Dipstick & Tiger Christmas dinner/white elephant gift exchange.  

We had to borrow tables, chairs and plates from neighbors to fit everyone around the table. The ham was good,  and we also had Christmas crackers, but the highlight was the yankee swap gift exchange. 

If you don't know what a yankee swap is, it's where people go through their closets and find the craziest, crappiest stuff that they can't stand to look at, wrap it all nice and then you and your friends fight over it.

The hit of yankee swap this year was the "Rejuvenique" mask, which is supposed to make you look 20 again. I tried to win it, but of course the fags won out. To console myself, I found this video on youtube.

The Kerby Ave Urinal

Do you have a urinal on your block? I do. And I’ll tell you why. My neighbor Jim moved here from New York about 10 years ago. And ever since that time, Jim has peed outside, on the side of his garage, against the neighbor’s fence. I’m not sure WHY he pees outside. He just likes to.

Most neighbors would be pissed at someone pissing on their fence. But not Fernando. He thinks it’s endearing. Maybe it’s a guy thing, I don’t know. But when Fernando decided to get a new fence, he didn’t want the pee rotting the wood. So he had the contractor install a urinal.

Now Jim can still pee outside to his heart’s delight. And Fernando's fence won't rot.   Isn’t that neighborly?