Alice Jane in Newcastle

The people you bump into

2012-02-08T21:45:00.001+11:00

My frequency of outings en femme hasn't improved. I realised yesterday morning that my legs were too hairy to disguise with pantihose, and the weather was too hot and muggy for anything thicker so I made an appointment to get waxed from the waist down and to get my lashes tinted. The earliest appointment available was in the afternoon, but allowed me to check out an op shop on the way, which resulted in a purchase of a brand new dress for $10. :)

Sadly, because of the weather, the trip home was abnormally slow and I simply didn't have time to dress and go out to the cafe night.

I had been getting my nails done every 3 weeks, but lately they've been growing so fast that I've had to get them done more often. I would like to get them done about every 2 1/2 weeks, and had made my next appointment for this Friday. Even though I'm still not working at the moment, I need to go to a work related meeting on Friday so I brought my appointment forward to today.

When I got up this morning, I was still hoping to go to my appointment en femme. Then, after I'd had breakfast and done a 40 minute session on the treadmill (now 6km/h up a 3 degree incline), I realised that I really had to wash my hair. By the time I'd showered including washing my hair, then dried and straightened it, I was running too late to dress for my appointment.

So, after my nail appointment in boy mode, I walked to the building society to withdraw some cash. I had to open my wallet carefully and the teller, who I've known for years and almost certainly knows about me, commented about the fact that I was being careful with my nails and I told her that I'd just had them done.

While I was in the branch, a woman walked in and I greeted her. She didn't seem entirely sure who I was until I joked that she didn't recognise me because I wasn't wearing a dress. She laughed, as she suddenly realised where she knew me from. She used to be a regular patron at the same cafe as we go to for our Tuesday cafe nights and I'd bumped into her in Charlestown square a couple of times.

I joked to the teller that I didn't know how they'd react if I came in wearing a dress and she responded that it wouldn't phase them. There was nobody else waiting so I got my internet tablet out, loaded a recent wigless photo and showed it to the teller. Her comment was that I looked so different that she wasn't surprised that the other woman hadn't recognised me. Realising that there was now someone waiting, I left it at that.

I walked up the street and bumped into the same woman again in the first of three op shops that I visited before going home.

I can see myself going to the building society en femme sometime soon. :)

Weight and sleep update

2012-02-01T12:10:00.001+11:00

I'm not sure where I'm at right now.

I don't feel depressed, but I feel like I'm exhibiting symptoms, including some comfort eating. I'm just not interested in doing anything except concentrating on getting my sleep pattern and my exercise regime sorted out.

I've been in bed by midnight for the last 12 nights but after the first 4 days it became a struggle and has been consistently within 5 minutes of midnight.

I've done at least 30 minutes on the walking machine twice each day, gradually increasing the speed from time to time. I also set up the walking machine so that I can watch DVDs while I'm working out, and started watching the series NCIS from the beginning. Since the episodes are about 42 minutes, I'm now doing 40 minute sessions and I'm up to 6km/h.

I know that my stamina is improving, I'm building muscle on my calves (not sure if that's a good thing or not) and I'm gradually sleeping better but I still don't seem to be losing any weight. Before I started this I was gaining weight so stabilisation is a start. :)

I also need to get my mornings working better before I return to work. I've been off work since before Christmas, and hope to be back working by next week. In the meantime, I've started my morning exercise sessions. Initially, I was getting up, having breakfast then getting onto the treadmill. Somewhere along the line, I started checking Facebook etc between getting up and having breakfast. I've got to stop that, because I'm not going to be ready for work early enough in the mornings at the current rate. I think that I might have to adjust my goal to be in bed by 11:30 instead of midnight before the end of this week, too.

Sadly, I haven't been out to a cafe night in the past 2 weeks. This week, having been off work for so long, I even lost track of what day it was and didn't realise that it was Tuesday until about 6pm, when I should have been almost ready to walk out the door. Tonight is the first Wednesday of the month, meaning that it is a Central Coast cafe night. If I go, I'd need to leave by about 9pm to have any chance of getting to bed before midnight and even that would be a struggle. Hopefully I'll get home from today's errands early enough!

Family and sleep

2012-01-24T14:30:00.000+11:00

I mentioned yesterday that my wife now acknowledges that her sleep patterns need to change. It seems that my making an effort to get to bed before midnight is having an effect on her, as she was also in bed before midnight last night. We both had trouble falling asleep, and lay in bed talking until after midnight.

On the first night that I got to bed before midnight, I was still awake at 2am. I'm hoping that by getting to bed at a reasonable time and getting up around 8 hours later, I'll re-train my body to sleep during that time, but I don't want to be too sleep deprived, so I'm not too worried if I stay in bed for a few minutes extra while I get into the pattern.

We were going to be going to Canberra for a few days with my inlaws to allow my wife and her father to compete in sport, as we have done before, but work related issues mean that I will have to stay home while my wife and son will travel with my inlaws. While they are away, they will likely be getting up between 6 and 7am. They will get home on Sunday night, in time for our son to start the new school year on Monday. That means that they will need to be up by 7:45 on school days. The only way that my wife will get enough sleep will be to follow my lead and get to bed before midnight consistently. I expect that the few days away with her parents will help to reinforce the pattern.

If I can maintain the pattern, hopefully it will help my wife to do likewise, and will ultimately make our house a happier place, as I suspect that we are often both grumpy due to lack of sleep. As a side effect, if she gets up earlier on weekends, it might not be so difficult for me to get out en femme during the day, which will make me a lot happier.

The next challenge will be seeing what time I get home from the cafe night tonight, and hence whether I fit in my walking session and shower and still get to bed before midnight. I really don't want to miss the exercise, or be up after midnight, but I really need to be home by 10pm for that to all to work. I'm not sure that I've even left the restaurant by 10pm on any of the nights that I've been there in the last few years.

Weight and sleep

2012-01-23T15:30:00.000+11:00

My weight and sleep problems have been recurring themes in my blog posts. Both affect my crossdressing, albeit in different ways. Both also influence my depression.

My weight affects not only what clothes will fit and how I look, but how I feel about myself. The fact that my fat distribution tends to be a typically male pattern, particularly a spare tyre around the waist, means that the heavier I am, the less feminine I feel and the more likely I am to be depressed.

To really complicate things, I tend to comfort eat when depressed or stressed, leading to weight gain that pushes me into a downward spiral of depression that makes me less inclined to go out en femme because I feel fat. The downward spiral is worsened by the fact that getting out en femme is something that I need to do, and not doing it makes my depression worse. At the end of a depression cycle, I usually find myself heavier than I was before it started, and wondering how I'm going to fix it.

While my weight and depression have been problems that I've been aware of for decades and have mentioned since my early blog posts, it was only around mid 2010 that I acknowledged that I had a sleep problem. It sneaked up on me over a a few years, and the real issue is not the time that I get to bed or the time that I get up, but the time I spend asleep. When I get less than 4 hours sleep, I end up trying to balance it out by getting more than 8 hours on another night by getting up late.

I've been off work since before Christmas and I've been getting more sleep than usual. After getting up around noon for a few days, I realised that I really needed to do something. I was feeling better because of the extra sleep, but was so late getting up that I wasn't getting anything done. I also realised rather suddenly that I wasn't depressed.

So a couple of days ago, I decided to make a major change to try to address both my sleep pattern and weight. I don't know whether I'll be able to keep it going, but I've got to try. To start with, I am aiming to get to bed before midnight consistently, and get up about 8 hours later. I hope to gradually move to getting to bed before 11pm. I'd love to get to bed by 10pm and get up at 6am consistently, but I seriously doubt that that will happen.

To work on my weight, I'm not only trying to remind myself that everything extra that I eat works against my weight loss goal, but I've started walking again. This time, instead of walking an hour circuit each night, I'm using a walking machine that I picked up through freecycle. I can set it up so that I can watch TV or videos on a computer, and for the past few days I've been doing two separate 30-minute sessions, walking fast enough to work up a sweat each time. One in the early afternoon and the other just before having a shower and going to bed. Once I go back to work, the daytime session will either stop, or will have to be in the morning when my wife is presently in bed asleep. Fortunately, she now acknowledges that her sleep patterns also need to change.

Time will tell whether I manage to keep both the sleep cycle adjustment and the exercise going, but I have to try, and the walking machine overcomes the biggest problem that I had before, which was stopping because of the rain and not starting again.

A year in review

2012-01-22T20:00:00.016+11:00

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted much recently. I have been feeling rather out of sorts and just not with it.

I decided to look back at the goals that I set myself last year.

* I did continue to come out to people around me, but haven't said anything to people who I am sure know but choose to say nothing.

* My work commitments did indeed increase significantly, but I completely failed to delegate anything to prevent it from swamping my girl time.

* My plan for frequency of outings fell off a cliff. Not only did I fail to achieve an average of getting out once every 5 days, I didn't even come close. In fact, with just 51 outings for the year, I didn't even average one outing per week. :(

* I still had problems with lacking ideas of things to do en femme, but push my comfort zone and do a few new things. I caught a train to the Sydney CBD and back twice, the first time in a blonde wig in May and the second time wigless in August. In between those, my third time out wigless was the first time putting fuel in my car en femme, as I drove to the outskirts of Sydney and took a suburban train into the city and back. My fourth trip to Sydney was in September for IMATS, when I again drove to outskirts and caught a suburban train.

Sadly, I didn't get in touch with our former belly dance teacher, and while I believe that she still lives in the same place, her web site no longer exists and she doesn't show up in any web searches.

* My sleep patterns continued to be a disaster last year, and in the past few days I've started making a real effort to fix that, in spite of my wife making it difficult due to her sleep patterns. I still don't know how it will work with cafe nights, particularly as others make an effort to make the nights run as late as possible.

* I haven't improved my organisation for preparing to go out, and the building work that I was hoping would have helped with that, which should have been well under way by now has not even started, for reasons beyond my control.

There have been a few times both last year and this year that my wife being in bed asleep has prevented me from going out during the day. By the time she gets up, I feel that it's too late to bother. :(

* I keep thinking about trying to go for a smaller breast size, but haven't done anything about it. I think that my present D-cup size fits my frame and downsizing would probably not look right. I think I've decided by default to do nothing and simply continue with what I have.

* I achieved my goal of wearing halterneck tops and dresses. Sort of. I don't think that I mentioned it but, while in Sydney for work in August, I bought 2 new style body shapers that loop over the sides of a bra instead of having shoulder straps, which made halter a much more viable option. I wore a halter dress for the first time in September and my first halter top in October, but with outings coming to a virtual halt, they were the only halter outfits I've worn out. One dress, one top, no plural.

* When I went back to my posts from early last year, I discovered that the 5th of January was an anniversary of more than one thing. Not only was it the first anniversary of having my nails done in acrylic and gel, but it was also the first anniversary of the first time I ever went out en femme without a wig. I think that both are very significant events, and somehow I had forgotten that these events had happened on the same day.

The interesting thing about going wigless was that it became habit forming. It took me until June to go out wigless for the second time, but the third time was just 3 days later, when I went shopping in Sydney with friends. At that stage, I still hadn't been out wigless in Newcastle. It took another 3 weeks before I finally challenged myself to go out wigless locally, and I haven't worn a wig since! That's right, in all of my outings en femme, I haven't worn a wig since 21st June. I'm not saying that I won't wear a wig again, but for now I'm going to enjoy living with my own hair.

* I just started to type that I have not made any progress on packing my girl stuff to travel, then realised that by going out with my own hair, I no longer need to pack a wig. If I decide to wear a wig while away, I'll have to look at the options then. In the meantime, I'm thinking that I should just get a large suitcase or backpack with enough space. Packing my hip and buttock padding without damaging it remains the biggest issue.

I might have a look around the local shops in the next few days. :)

* I've made completely and utterly no progress on my female voice. :(

* As mentioned above, I've maintained my nails long and painted for over a year now, and the colours are nowhere nearly as subtle as at the beginning of the year. Yay. :)

* I ended 2010 at 72.5kg. Sadly, I ended 2011 at 83.5kg, and was 85kg a few days ago. At the same time as realising a few days ago that I really need to make an effort with my sleep patterns, I've also realised that I need to make a serious effort with my weight!

Nail anniversary

2012-01-05T18:10:00.006+11:00

Today is an interesting anniversary for me. It was 12 months ago today that I first got all of my nails done in acrylic and gel. Aside from a couple of days in June, I've had colour on my nails for all of that year. I started with neutral colours close to the colour of the skin under my nails and worked my way up to more obvious colours.

Sadly, with ongoing stress, depression and exhaustion problems, I haven't been out en femme since my last blog post, when I had my nails done for Christmas, including missing another 3 cafe nights.

After Christmas, I got busy with several days of gardening that I had been putting off for too long. I broke one nail on the first day, so I went and got it fixed on Friday. The next day, I broke another one. This time, I decided to clean it up, trim the natural nail back and just keep working. By yesterday, I'd not only had enough of gardening for a while but I was getting tired of having a mismatched broken nail so I brought my next appointment forward to today.

I celebrated the anniversary by getting my nails re-done this morning. :)

Christmas holidays

2011-12-23T21:30:00.007+11:00

Well, it's official. I'm on holidays.

My work stopped very suddenly due to the long anticipated government rule changes, but hopefully the stoppage will be only temporary. In the new year, I've got to do some paperwork to see if I can resume the type of work that I've been doing almost exclusively for as long as I've been in business.

I managed to get to the Newcastle cafe night this week, and was amused to learn that the conversation that I had with a solicitor at the cafe night in early October had led him to ask where I was when he was there on one of the many Tuesday nights that I missed. Apparently he was of the opinion that if he had me as an expert witness, he could win every case related to my field. I'm not all that keen on expert witness work, but it gives me a fallback option, meaning that the government department need me more than I need them. That puts me in quite a good position. :)

I got out a second time this week. Today, I went and got my nails done, including getting them painted in Christmas colours, then went and wandered around Charlestown Square for a while. Last year, I wore the Christmas colours only from Christmas eve to after boxing day, and was only seen by a limited number of family and friends. This year will be quite different, as I plan on leaving the colours on my nails from now until the next nail appointment. Unless something unexpected happens, that should be the Wednesday just under 3 weeks from now. So I'll be seen in both boy and girl mode for almost 3 weeks with quite distinctive nails.

That's pushing the comfort zone a little bit but after a whole year of wearing colour on my nails, I haven't had a single negative comment so my confidence is far better than it was last year.

Let down

2011-11-27T19:10:00.005+11:00

I have posted only once in over a month, and that was just a photograph of my Melbourne Cup outfit. I made a special effort to go out for Melbourne Cup night, and it is the only time that I have been out in the past 6 weeks.

I've been overwhelmed with work, to the extent that I've been working 7 days a week, often getting to bed after 2am then getting up again before 8am. With this ridiculous workload have come migraines and exhaustion. Several times now, I have decided to lie down for a rest on a Tuesday afternoon intending it to be just a few minutes before I prepared to go out, and ended up sleeping too long to go out at all.

I also haven't had any opportunity to catch up with my friend, who was so depressed several weeks ago.

I know that I'm letting people down.

I'm letting down my friends and family. In spite of trying my hardest, I'm also letting down a lot of my work clients. Worst of all, I'm letting myself down.

It can't last. Sooner or later, the uncertainty that has been hanging over my work for over a year has to be resolved. I'm actually at the point of liking the idea of stopping working and living on my savings for a few months. I know that I would be letting down all of my work clients by doing so, but something has got to give. So far it has been me, but that cannot and will not continue. I won't cope much longer unless things change.

Melbourne Cup 2011

2011-11-04T22:25:00.000+11:00

I hope to get back to blogging more regularly soon, but in the meantime here's a photo of my Melbourne Cup outfit for this year. :)

A slip of the tongue - followup

2011-10-22T15:40:00.005+11:00

I mentioned recently about one of my work clients who obviously knows about me, but says nothing.

I went there for work a couple of days ago, and was there for over 2 hours. S did not come up in conversation, but B did.

The closest that the conversation got to mentioning my crossdressing was general agreement that B has a big mouth. :)

Another halter, another interesting conversation

2011-10-16T21:40:00.007+11:00

On Tuesday, I wore a halter top that I've had for at least a year. I think that I bought it just after I got bras that I could wear halter. Like the halter dress I wore a few weeks ago, I found it a little unfamiliar and experienced irritation around the neck strap. I'm hoping that this will all settle down as I wear halter tops more often.

Like last week, Linda somehow managed to convinced another patron to join our table. This time, the conversation ranged from her birth during The Blitz in London to how a technical illustrator has to be able to convert an engineer's sketch on a serviette into something meaningful. As an engineer, I could so relate to that. ;)

Norma came along in girl mode this week, too. :)

Looking for a fascinator

2011-10-09T19:00:00.004+11:00

I'm going to be deliberately vague about a few details in this post. I'm planning my outfit for the cafe night on Melbourne Cup day, which is on the first Tuesday in November. Unlike last year, I don't plan on wearing a wig this year, so I'm putting together an outfit that suits my natural colouring. Don't worry though - all will be revealed on the night. :)

Have you ever opened up a store catalogue, looked at a dress and thought "I'm getting that", with absolutely no doubt in your mind? I did that on Thursday, so that night while out shopping with my wife and son, we went to the store, found one in my size and bought it. Knowing the store return policy would make returning it easy if necessary, I didn't feel any need to try it on at the time.

On Saturday, I put on all the undergarments, padding etc necessary to try the dress on properly. Aside from a neckline that moves around a little and needing to push my bra straps out a fraction on my shoulders from their usual spots, it was a great fit, and as I suspected, goes very well with one of my existing pairs of shoes.

Like last year, what remains to be resolved is accessories. In particular, I want to find a fascinator that will go with the dress. With that in mind, I decided yesterday that I wanted to go out today to look for one. My plan yesterday was to go out en femme and look through shops at both Charlestown Square and Westfield Kotara. Then the wheels fell off, as they often do for me. I stayed up far too late and didn't get up until after noon!

With most of the shops shutting at 4pm, I knew that there was no way that I could choose an outfit and get dressed en femme and have any worthwhile time to shop. So instead, I spent a while on line, then went shopping in male mode with the photo of the dress from the catalogue in my pocket.

I spent over an hour at Charlestown Square, going from shop to shop. I tried the various accessory stores, a couple of the department stores and wandered into many of the dress shops to ask if they had fascinators. Very few did, but for those that did, I looked at what they had and explained that I was looking for one that matched the dress in the photo. I found a couple in one of the department stores that were close to the right colour, but were more like a hat than a fascinator, and cost more than I wanted to pay, so I left empty handed.

The interesting thing was that I felt no hesitation walking in and out of accessory and dress shops in male mode, looking for that specific item. It only occurred to me as I was typing this that I have no idea how many of the shop staff realised that I was after it for myself, and I don't honestly care.

Now I've realised that I also need to look for a handbag to suit. I hadn't considered it before, but I don't think that I have one that will suit, and if I can find one that goes with the shoes it will be useful with any other outfits that go with those shoes. Knowing me, it'll have to be something a bit bigger than a clutch, though. :)

Very open conversation

2011-10-08T17:00:00.002+11:00

Tuesday night this week, there were a total of 5 people at our table but only 2 of us in the group photo. That might seem odd, but it isn't really. We had one new guest, Norma, who I remembered from when I was active in Seahorse NSW about 8 to 10 years ago. Being unfamiliar with the Newcastle area, she erred on the side of caution and came along in boy mode, and hence didn't join the photos.

Linda, Norma and I were chatting when Linda realised that Ros, another regular guest of the restaurant who had chatted with us in the past, was eating alone at a table nearby and invited her to join us. She did so, and around the time that we ordered dessert and coffee, her husband (whose name I'm embarrassed to admit I've forgotten as usual) came along looking for her and joined us as well.

The conversation covered various aspects of what each of us do for a living, where we lived etc, to the point that by getting a copy of the right government published list would identify me unequivocally. During the conversation, it also came out that the husband is a solicitor who works in the suburb that I live in, at the fringe of the shopping centre, just around the corner from the salon where I get my nails done. I have walked past the place and parked across the street from it in boy mode hundreds of times over the years.

Ironically, if I quit the type of work that I currently do, I could work as an expert witness, working for solicitors firms such as his, so it turned out to be a form of business networking.

Once upon a time, I would have kept quiet about what I do for a living for fear of being outed. Now, about the only thing that I avoid is actually mentioning my male name!

The photo above was taken by our guest photographer for the night, Ros. :)

Op shop experiences

2011-10-04T13:00:00.005+11:00

I find that my enthusiasm for op shopping tends to be intermittent. While I enjoy it, I'll often get so busy doing other things that I just don't get the opportunity. While I really enjoy shopping en femme, the reality is that often the opportunities to shop are between jobs on a work day, or are too short for me to have the time to dress, shop and then change back before I have to do something else.

And so it is that most of my op shopping is done in boy mode. When I bought my current breast forms in 2008, the package deal included a pair of moulded foam "sleep/travel" breast forms of approximately the same size as the silicon forms. These now live in a drawstring bag (my primary school library bag) along with a bra. While this combination is not ideal, I generally find that if a top or dress fits properly from the waist up and covers the bra while wearing these, it will fit with the good forms.

As I mentioned back in April, I bought some orangey red shoes. Early last month, I also bought a pair of burnt orange suede Tony Bianco shoes. Since I bought the red shoes, I've become aware that I don't have as much orange and orangey red in my wardrobe as I'd like, so I've concentrated on looking for those colours when op shopping.

On the Saturday afternoon a couple of days after buying the orange shoes, I drove around to three Salvos op shops (Belmont, Belmont North and Charlestown) and picked up a couple of dresses, a skirt and a glass beaded necklace that my wife has since remade as a charm bracelet.

The following Saturday, I picked up an orange top at my local Lifeline shop, and wore it the following to the following Tuesday cafe night with the orange shoes.

Work kept me very busy for a few weeks, but on the way home from a job last Thursday, I dropped in to Salvos at Glendale and picked up a couple of tops for $5 each.

Being enthusiastic after Thursday's success, I managed to get out shopping again on Saturday. This time, I checked out the new Lifeline Hamilton North shop that I hadn't been to before, Salvos stores at Wallsend, Mayfield and Newcastle West and the Lifeline shop at Mayfield. I also had a look at a combined op shop and costume hire shop a couple of doors from the Lifeline Mayfield and another privately operated shop near Salvos Newcastle West. The haul for the day was 4 tops, a necklace and an earring and necklace set, costing a total of $30!

At both of the privately run shops, I chatted with the women running the shops. The conversation at the first one started with me being asked if my nails were real, and went on to discussing crossdressing both in sales and costume hire. In the second private shop, the woman was enthusiastic to tell me about all the other crossdressers who frequent the shop.

I have had many positive experiences this year since I've had my nails long and painted and I'm more comfortable being open about who I am. The number of negative experiences I've ever had is remarkably small, and I'd actually have to read back through my diaries and blog to try to work out when the last one was!

Helping a friend

2011-10-03T13:00:00.006+11:00

To most women, whether married or not, spending some time with a girlfriend who is feeling alone and depressed would be a perfectly normal thing to do. Until the past week or so, I'd never considered this in relation to me being the supportive friend.

When I used to get really depressed (sometimes to an almost-suicidal extent), I suffered alone. While I'm not entirely over depression and probably won't ever be, two things helped me. One was coming out as a crossdresser, which took away a lot of pressure to conform to a masculine stereotype and hide my feminine traits. The second was that I discovered that I am chemically sensitive to the artificial sweetener aspartame, which caused or exacerbated a range of problems for me, including skin rashes, heart palpitations and a fog-like blanket of chemically induced depression.

Having lived through such bad depression, I understand it well enough to empathise with other people who are suffering through it, and to want to help where I can. In fact, that's one of the things that drives me to continue attending the cafe nights regularly. I know that closeted crossdressers are prone to depression and I want to help to provide a path for those who want to come out of the closet because I know that it will also help in dealing with depression.

A few years ago when I was still mostly closeted, one of my nieces attempted suicide and ended up in hospital for several months. She was later diagnosed with a mental illness, and for reasons closely related to that, she isolated herself from her mother while she was in hospital. Knowing that she was depressed and feeling alone, I organised around my work, my wife and my son to visit my niece in hospital most days over those months. I mostly went alone but a few times my son went with me. As a close relative, there was never any suggestion of impropriety in my visiting her frequently. We became quite close over those months, and I came out to her while she was in hospital.

I've now found myself in an interesting situation with a female friend who I met online. She is in her 20s and knows about me including my family and my crossdressing. We have met in person a couple of times when I have been out en femme, but she has never met me as a male. While I don't know all of the details, I know that she is quite depressed at the moment and is feeling rather alone. I have offered to spend some time with her because I believe that she needs a sympathetic friend.

I mentioned the situation to one of my crossdressing friends, who thought that it meant that I would be having an affair with this young woman. While I didn't think that anything like that was ever going to happen, I could see that that could easily be the way other people might see it. I discussed it with my wife, and explained the situation as I saw it, and my crossdressing friend's take on it. I think that my wife actually understands me quite well. She had me confirm that I had only ever met my friend "as Alice", and that if I did spend time with my friend, that I would be doing so "as Alice", then confirmed that she didn't see a problem. She understands that, as Alice, I am sexually disinterested. Even as a male, I'm monogamous and committed to our marriage. To be honest, I couldn't be bothered having an affair!

A little while after talking to my wife about it, I realised that I actually see my young friend as being very much like my nieces. She is a similar age, and in a lot of ways I probably consider her to be a foster niece, if that makes sense. In that context, I don't think that there would be any impropriety regardless of whether I was a foster aunt or a foster uncle.

Avoiding the subject

2011-10-02T13:00:00.006+11:00

I mentioned early last year that we had new neighbours move in across the street in 2009. They are a couple who I'm guessing are in their 50s or 60s. The woman and I occasionally wave to each other, but we rarely speak. I don't know her name but she has mentioned that her husband's name is George. Ironically, the place where we have spoken several times has been in the local Lifeline shop. I was there in boy mode yesterday and we chatted briefly.

I asked about the strange behaviour of their dog, who barks normally during the day but makes loud snuffley, wheezing noises instead of barking at night. I'm sure that he recognises me when I go to take the garbage bins in and out in boy mode, and when I go to pick the local free papers up off the driveway in girl mode after getting home from cafe nights on Tuesdays. He barks to greet me and tell me that he's there and that he knows I'm there. I was assured that they don't do anything to the dog to cause this strange barking. The woman told me that it was just that the dog is weird, and that he takes after her husband. :)

I noticed that she addressed Bev by name. Bev works in the op shop, knows about me including having taken photos and is one of my friends on facebook. In spite of me having seen the tell-tale glow of a lit cigarette in the dark on the front verandah across the road when I've been picking up newspapers in girl mode, there has so far been no acknowledgement that she knows about me, and nor has she said anything to Bev.

All in good time. :)

A slip of the tongue

2011-10-01T23:10:00.000+10:00

One of my friends, who I'll call S, knows me better as Alice than by my male name, also knows some of my work clients, including some who know B, who, as I previously mentioned, has apparently told quite a few people about me.

S was visiting one of his friends who also knows B. They were discussing the changes that might soon see my ceasing to do the work that I presently do.

At some point during their conversation, S accidently referred to me as Alice. His friend didn't miss a beat. Apparently his response was simply depends which web site you got to. I don't know much more than that, but the impression that I got was that that was essentially all there was to it. Acknowledge and move on.

I'm not going to pretend that there aren't people around who have a problem with who (what?) I am, but over the past few years, my perception has changed from believing that virtually everybody would reject me to realising that those with a problem are a remarkably small minority.

There's another (seemingly larger) minority who are happy to acknowledge that they know and are actively supportive. The majority, if they know, will acknowledge that they know if the subject comes up but don't really care. I can live with that.

Next time I see B, I should say thank you. While I originally thought that what he had done was out of line, I've come to realise that it hasn't ultimately been harmful to me. In fact, probably the opposite.

IMATS

2011-09-30T00:20:00.010+10:00

Yes, just like last time, it's been almost a fortnight since my last post. I've been fairly stressed while trying to deal with being extremely busy with work, including 4 trips to Sydney for meetings and the like this month. My future remains uncertain although the previously set deadline for regulatory changes appears to have slipped, so it's no longer the end of this month.

Those 4 work trips weren't the only trips to Sydney for me this month. I took a day off last Saturday and went to the International Makeup Artists Trade Show (IMATS), which was held at Darling Harbour. Several of my friends from Beauty Heaven and Facebook had arranged to meet up at IMATS, including all but one of the girls I went shopping with in Alexandria back in June. In addition, Yvette, who I hadn't seen since the Beauty Heaven open day in May last year was there. I also got to meet several others from near and far including Chrissy from Sydney, Stacey from Queensland and Michelle from Victoria. There were also a couple of ring-ins in our group, including a friend of Chrissy's and Michelle's sister. During the day, I also said hello to a couple of other bloggers who I knew.

It was a long day. I was up at 4am to get ready. As with the shopping trip to Alexandria, I drove to Wahroonga and caught a North Shore train into the city rather than catching a train all the way. Part of the reason for that was that the Newcastle trains only run once per hour, while the trains to and from Wahroonga run 10 to 15 minutes apart, so there wasn't the risk of having to spend most of an hour waiting if I just missed a train. The other thing was that the closest station to Darling Harbour is Town Hall, which the Newcastle trains don't go to. The North Shore trains do go there, and it's much easier not to have to change trains at Central just to go to the next station!

I was so organised that I was in Darling Harbour by 8:30. Not long after I arrived, Yvette found me and I said that I was guessing that there would be about a dozen of us. We found a few more of the girls outside, and we went in together and found more of the girls inside as we wandered around the various stands. We didn't stay together as a group. Instead, we wandered around separately or in small groups, with the groups changing as we bumped into each other on the way around. We sat down in the Exhibition Centre cafeteria for a while, and the gathering grew until there were a dozen of us sitting around chatting. :)

I had 2 things that I specifically wanted to get, a large palette or two of eyeshadows and one particular sized brush. Remarkably, I bought what I set out to get and nothing more. The 2 palettes that I bought were on special at $35 each or 2 for $50, and the brush was just $4! While we were sitting around chatting, one of the other girls (I'm pretty sure that it was Su but I could be wrong) handed around a few eyeshadow testers that she'd been given by Chrissy. One of them was very much my colours, so I added that to my haul. :)

I'm embarrassed to admit that I forget who left us between sitting around and getting a few group photos in the foyer. The 4am start was really starting to catch up to me! A few of us walked down to the food court in the nearby shopping centre for a while. Eventually, I said goodbye and walked back to the station to catch my return train. As with the Alexandria trip, I was home early enough to shower and go out for dinner with the family in boy mode in the evening.

I believe that some of the girls are already making plans for IMATS next September! :)

Halter!

2011-09-17T17:35:00.006+10:00

Yes, I know that it's almost a fortnight since my last post. Work is very hectic at the moment, and doesn't look like letting up until the end of the month. After that, I'm almost certain to refuse to sign a new contract with substantially worse terms and conditions and much higher costs, and in doing so, walk away from virtually all of my current work.

I may get to take some forced holidays while I look for other work. Holidays will probably mean a bit more time en femme, but very little money to spend.

On a brighter note, this week I achieved one of the goals that I set myself at the beginning of the year. I wore something with a halter neck for the first time ever, to Tuesday's cafe night. What's more, it wasn't a wide banded halter neck but a thin strapped dress that I bought at an op shop a few weeks ago. I finally wore one of the convertible bras that I bought last year, with a clear plastic strap that was barely noticeable with the dress. Before I put the dress on, the plastic strap kept on wanting to roll over up my neck, but the straps of the dress seemed to keep it flat and, aside from the halter straps being quite an unfamiliar feeling, it was quite comfortable to wear and I didn't experience any wardrobe malfunctions. :p

Fathers day

2011-09-04T17:00:00.000+10:00

I guess you could say that I got a non-traditional fathers day present from my wife today. It's a hand-made charm bracelet. I have trouble with gold coloured costume jewellery tarnishing, so my wife made this from scratch using a type of coated wire that is not supposed to tarnish. Some of the parts in it required quite a bit of time to make.

My son gave me a hand-made fathers day card, which would have been a joint effort between my wife and son.

For someone living with depression as I am, these fairly simple, cheap but lovingly hand crafted items are a reminder that my family really do care about me, even if we do have our moments.

Rejection

2011-09-01T22:20:00.001+10:00

For years now, it's been a standard arrangement that if I'm home when my son goes to bed, I make his bed for him, tuck him in, give him a hug, kiss him on the forehead and say goodnight.

Last night, I was still in girl mode after the day out for the nail appointment and shopping. I made my son's bed and tucked him in, but then he told me that he was too tired and wanted to go to sleep rather than give me a hug. It was a very clear rejection of something about my being en femme.

I have put him to bed before when en femme, and he's had a funny smirk but hugged me. I'm wondering whether it's just that my hair was out loose and he didn't want me to put my hair in his face.

I'm a bit sad about the whole thing, and am not sure whether this is just an isolated incident or a developing rejection of my femme presentation, as he was quite happy to give me a hug tonight when I was back to male mode.

I guess next time I'm en femme at his bed time, I'll have to remember to put my hair up first and see if that makes a difference.

A nine outing month

2011-08-31T18:00:00.005+10:00

Today was my second nail appointment for the month. It was also the first time I'd had a morning appointment. I usually get early afternoon appointments but when I made this appointment, the afternoon was already booked out. That meant I had to make an effort to get up early to go to the appointment en femme.

Turning up en femme was a surprise to my nail technician, as I had mentioned last time that I usually get up late on the days when I get my nails done.

Interestingly, in spite of several days when I wanted to go out but had work that took priority, The nine outings that I had this month equals my record, which was set in December last year. One little difference is that this month I have been wigless for every outing.

Today's nail appointment then shopping was interesting in that I'm becoming increasingly comfortable going out without a wig, to places that I've been to many times in boy mode.

My average frequency of outings for the year hadn't been doing all that well, but after this month it's a lot better than it had been! There were 5 Tuesdays in the month, meaning 5 Newcastle cafe nights (and I didn't miss any), there were also 2 nail appointments (plus a bit of shopping afterwards each time), one Central Coast cafe night and one day in Sydney. In fact, my average is better than once ever 6 days, for the first time since early June.

Yeah, occasionally

2011-08-28T13:00:00.067+10:00

A couple of weeks ago when I went for my nail appointment wigless, I decided to try out a white gold nail polish. I wasn't all that keen on it once it was applied and decided to wear it a while and see if it would grow on me. After about 11 days, I decided that I just didn't like it, stripped it off and applied the bronze that I wore over the weekend of the shopping trip in Sydney in June.

Unlike June when I took the bronze back off before work on Monday, this time the plan was to apply it for day to day wear, including at work. The bronze is a bit darker and more obvious than the gold that I wore recently, and has got a bit more response.

I had to go to see a dentist a couple of days ago, and on the way out of the surgery, a receptionist asked if they were my real nails and I turned my left hand over so that she could see the underside of the nails and said yes, they're my real nails, but I have acrylic over the top to stop them from breaking. The ensuing conversation with the 2 receptionists and a nurse would have been completely normal if you ignored the fact that I was presenting as male at the time!

The most notable incident was yesterday, when I took my son to a birthday party for one of his school friends. He and his friend quickly disappeared into a bedroom to play, and I chatted briefly with the parents. The father commented about my nails during the conversation, and later asked if I ever dressed up to go with them. My response was "Yeah, occasionally." Nothing more was said about it, and the conversation flowed onto other things. When I returned to collect my son a few hours later, we had another fairly long conversation while the boys continued to play, and the subject didn't come back up again.

I wasn't going to push it because I don't want to cause problems at school for my son, but if the conversation heads in that direction again, I'm not going to be dishonest. I've sent the mother a friend request on Facebook from my male profile, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

snippety snip

2011-08-27T18:20:00.000+10:00

Work has been a bit busy for me again lately, but I'm still surprised that it's been almost a fortnight since my last post. Sorry about that!

I was going to write about something else, but I was just looking back through my last few blog posts and realised that I didn't mention anything about my haircut.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I decided that it was really about time that I got my hair cut, so I made a phone call on the Thursday and got an appointment for a haircut on the Friday afternoon at Salon Lisa in Maitland, which is run by Ralf, who I met at a cafe night in January, and his sister Elke. Maitland is over 30km and over half an hour's drive from my home, but Ralf came so highly recommended that I decided that it was worth the drive. Better still, I had to drive over half the way there for a work appointment, so I organised my hair appointment for after my work appointment.

Ralf had a good look at my hair and suggested that we just do a slight trim and tidy up this time round, and consider whether I want to do some layering next time.

Interestingly, he was very impressed with the condition of my hair and couldn't even find any split ends in spite of it having not been cut in over 4 years! After Sharon's comments a couple of days earlier, I was very happy that the length taken off was only a few millimetres, rather than the 4 inches that Sharon had suggested.

I asked Ralf about adding a bit more hair to my fringe. He wasn't keen to do so, and showed me a few options, and in the end we settled upon adding what he described as a wafer thin bit to the fringe. Very Monty Pythonesque. :)

Aside from being a bit tidier, it's almost impossible to discern that anything has been removed. I'm very happy with that, as I'm enjoying the length that my hair is and would like to grow it a bit longer yet.

PS my spellchecker doesn't like the word Pythonesque and suggests Grotesqueness instead. It's remarkably accurate. :p

A day in Sydney

2011-08-15T01:30:00.031+10:00

Melanie, one of my friends from Beauty Heaven, lives in Far North Queensland. She had to fly to Sydney for work over the weekend, and found out that she would have several hours to kill between booking out of her motel and booking in at the airport for her flight home on Sunday.

So what do you do when you've got a few hours to kill, a long way from home? You jump on Facebook and ask if any of your Beauty Heaven friends want to catch up, of course! A few of us were interested but with children to look after, illness, etc, it ended up being Su and Christine, who I went to Fashion Weekend Sydney with in May, Melanie and me.

In spite of staying up until after 1am getting things organised, I was up at 6:05am to get ready to catch a train at 8:48. As before, the train trips down and back were remarkably uneventful. At close quarters, even young children and teenagers paid me no particular attention. This was also the first time I've done an intercity trip without a wig. My last wigless train trip was a much shorter suburban one, while my previous intercity trip was done in my blonde wig.

I had a bit of a problem finding the others when I arrived in Sydney, but after a few phone calls, we found each other and headed off towards Haymarket to get some lunch. We then spent a while wandering around Paddys Markets.

As with my other recent daytime outings, virtually nobody appeared to pay me undue attention. Whether I pass better than I think that I do, people assume that I'm a transsexual or people just don't care, I don't know. I remember my paranoid past when I was convinced that everybody was looking at me, whispering and giggling. Whether it's my vastly improved confidence, an improvement in my presentation, my not being afraid of what people think of me (what Linda Karen calls my "inner f... you"), people generally not caring any more, or a combination of those, I don't know. What I do know is that going out en femme is getting to be so easy that I can't see how it could get much easier.

I'm now consistently enjoying life far more than I can remember ever having done before. Instead of my previous experience of having brief happy moments in a generally miserable existence, I have brief periods of exhaustion and moderate depression in a generally happy life. I have more genuine friends than I ever had before and I'm enjoying spending time with many of those friends. I am coping remarkably well with family problems and a bureaucratic rule change that threatens to destroy my small business. A few years ago, these circumstances would have had me close to suicidally depressed, but now I have the confidence to tackle my problems head on.

And just in case you're wondering about the photo, I was in joggers, so it seems that I'm a giant even in flats. ;)

Making it all worthwhile

2011-08-13T13:00:00.000+10:00

As I've mentioned before, I suffer from depression. Sometimes it interferes with my going out en femme. I get depressed and just don't feel like doing anything. Very self centred!

In contrast, the regular cafe nights that I go to are an altruistic activity. Their primary purpose is not for a clique of regulars to hang out and chat, but for there to be a consistent, known safe place where inexperienced transgender people to come out to. If people want to step out of their closet for the first time, we want to provide them with a venue. If they're too shy to come out en femme the first time, that's okay too. The goal is to show people that they can come out in public and to help them overcome their fears.

Even though I enjoy getting out to cafe nights, I sometimes struggle to overcome my depression and remember why I'm doing it.

This week, we had a new guest at our regular Tuesday night cafe night. When she came to door of the restaurant, Linda Karen and I were debating whether she was in fact a crossdresser or a GG. We weren't certain until she approached our table and introduced herself as Evelyn. I have been friends with Evelyn for some time, on Facebook and on another Australian site, but she was far more passable in person than in any photo I'd ever seen of her.

Evelyn told us that Tuesday was her 4th outing ever, and that her first ever outing had been the Sunday a fortnight earlier. Not only were the cafe nights a large inspiration to her, but so was my blog. Apparently she reads every post and enjoys the fact that I post about real world things that happen to me and around me.

Thank you Evelyn. Thank you not only for gracing us with your presence, but for your kind words of support. Thank you for showing me that I am making a difference, and making it all worthwhile. I hope that I'll see you again soon. :)

Wigless close to home

2011-08-10T20:45:00.007+10:00

As I mentioned last week, I had a nail appointment today. In spite of not expecting to do so, I pushed myself to do something that I didn't think I was ready for. In spite of my comments last month about going out wigless to Newcastle cafe nights, I really didn't think that I would be game to go to my nail appointment in my local suburb (literally a few minutes walk from home) wigless.

I was wrong. Today, I dressed in a fairly casual outfit without a wig, went to my nail appointment then to Charlestown Square to try on some shoes that I'd spotted in boy mode. I wandered around several stores, looked at various cheap jewellery and tried on a few pairs of shoes. The only thing that stopped me buying one pair was that they didn't feel quite right around the toes. I realised that I haven't trimmed my toenails recently, and that felt like the problem, so I need to do that and try them again soon. :)

I also dropped into Tree of Life and chatted with the manager, Sharon, who is a former hairdresser. She had never seen my hair out of a plait before, and immediately commented that I need to get about 4" cut off the ends because it's damaged (which I actually already knew because the ends go strange when straightened).

So now I need to try to figure out when I can get my hair cut, which I said I was going to do back in January.

Education Week

2011-08-04T13:00:00.002+10:00

It's Education Week in schools around here this week, and my 8yo son's school had an open day for parents and grandparents yesterday. Remembering that younger children are reputed to be unusually observant of gender non-conforming things such as a guy with long nails, I was curious to see what sort of reactions I'd get.

My wife and I spent about an hour in my son's classroom, watching him do various normal classroom tasks. I don't think that very many of the people present even took any notice of my being there, and none appeared to notice my nails.

The second part of our visit was a school assembly, where various awards were given out, the choir sang a couple of songs and the principal made a speech. I ended up at the end of a row of seats, where many of the children (ranging in age from about 5 to 12) walked past on their way in and out of the school hall. In the whole time, I saw just one girl (about 9yo) who looked at my nails, looked at my face, looked back at my nails and then turned to whisper to the girl next to her without even breaking stride, I'm pretty sure that she didn't turn around to look back at me.

With the number of children who walked past me, I was genuinely surprised that only one appeared to have even noticed my nails. The paranoid assumption that everybody would notice has been well and truly disproven! :)

Hairy admiration

2011-08-03T13:00:00.018+10:00

The building society branch that I often go to for work has recently had an almost complete change of staff. Apparently they've been shuffling staff amongst the branches. The teller that I showed my photo to last December doesn't appear to be there any more. In fact, I can only think of one of the staff from last year who is still there.

In boy mode, I almost always have my hair tied up in a ponytail and plaited to keep it from getting damaged, dirty, etc.

One day last week I was the only customer in the branch and I got into a conversation with three of the tellers who are there now but weren't before. One complimented me on how straight and even my plait was. All three of them agreed that they couldn't plaint their hair as well as I do mine.

I responded that my hair comes out a lot better now that I use a hair straightener. More agreement.

Afterwards, I was thinking that it's funny. Guys don't generally have conversations like that with women. I'm still trying to remember whether that happened a day or two before I changed my nails from brown to gold, or within the first few days afterwards. :)

Another client's nail comment

2011-08-02T13:00:00.005+10:00

As mentioned, I've kept the gold nail polish on for over a week now. Yesterday I had another male client make a fairly off-handed remark something like "It takes a lot of effort to maintain nails like that."

I thought at first that it was a fairly neutral remark rather than being either positive or negative, but upon reflection I think that I should take it as a compliment that I manage to keep my nails looking how they do.

I commented that I thought that it might be a bit confrontational to some people. He shrugged and commented "To each their own" then we continued with the job at hand.

To some extent I'm tempted to tell the closeted people on forums to stop being negative because the bad things that they imagine happening (and often carry on about at length) just don't happen, but I fear that I'd jinx myself by doing so and end up having something bad happen! For now, I'll just keep relating the things that actually happen.

Real world experience trumps imagination. :)

Mediocre but improving

2011-08-01T13:00:00.018+10:00

I haven't been all that well, so I didn't manage to have any outings en femme aside from the regular cafe nights last month. Having missed one Tuesday night at the beginning of the month, that means I've had a total of 4 outings for the month. I'm a bit disappointed at that, but it's still better than no outings at all!

I still don't expect my work to slow down and give me more me time this month, so I'm probably going to get out to most or all of the cafe nights but not much else. I've got a nail appointment next week, and if I keep to my 3-weekly schedule, I'll have another on the 31st. I might try to get to at least one in girl mode depending how I'm feeling.

My wife will be away for a few days including a weekend this month, leaving me with my son. That pretty much guarantees no time en femme while she's away.

Oh well, that's how it goes.

Nice err Gloves

2011-07-31T20:10:00.005+10:00

I'm still wearing the gold nail polish that I applied for last Saturday's family Christmas in July get together.

I took my wife and son out for dinner last night, at a restaurant that we frequently go to. I've gone there many times with my nails painted light brown and once with them painted bronze and had no comments. Last night, as I paid the bill, the waitress (who we've seen there many times before) glanced at my hands. She said "Nice... err...", then paused. She glanced at my son, who was putting on gloves and said "Gloves".

I didn't laugh at the time, but I'm quite amused at the number of people who clearly see my nails but go out of their way to pretend not to have noticed. It's almost an "elephant in the room" type of effect. :)

To date, I've only ever had 2 comments that weren't complimentary of my nails. I mentioned one last month, but I don't think that I mentioned the other one. Neither was specifically negative or insulting, more just a comment to say that they had noticed.

When I decided to keep my nails long, I was genuinely expecting some negative comments. I'm really enjoying having my nails how they are, and even more so given the absence of those anticipated comments!

Fixed nail and a distinct lack of comments

2011-07-27T20:30:00.003+10:00

I was able to get an appointment to get my broken nail fixed on Monday afternoon. The remains of the gel was buffed off so that the remains of the acrylic could be soaked off. A plastic false tip was glued on, then the acrylic and gel re-done, along with 2 coats of the same gold polish as I already had on the rest and a top coat.

The net result is that unless you look at the underside of the repaired nail, you can't tell the difference between it and the rest, so they're back to looking like they did on Saturday.

Which of course puts me back to having all of my nails quite long and painted a rather obvious shade of gold. Having had no comment or even any obvious sign of anybody paying undue attention to my nails while in boy mode, I've decided to leave them this colour until I feel like a change, or my next infill in 2 weeks time, whichever comes first. :)

Snap

2011-07-25T13:00:00.008+10:00

Yesterday afternoon, I walked away from the computer part way through typing yesterday's blog post to help sort and put away some clothes. While I was hanging up a shirt, my wife handed me something gold that she'd found in the washing basket that I'd been taking the clothes out of...

BUGGER!

(For those of you not in Australia, that's a mild expletive, on par with oh crap or damn!, not an invitation. :p )

Realistically, with my work being so busy, unless I can get a late appointment today, it'll be at least Wednesday before I can get this fixed. I've stuck with the colour for work though... :)

Christmas in July

2011-07-24T15:45:00.008+10:00

Have you ever tried to get an extended family group together at Christmas? Some of my relatives, and some of my wife's relatives try it every year. There are always people who can't make it, so last Christmas, someone suggested organising a Christmas in July get-together. This was for the same family group as we spent the evening with last Christmas, but with a different combination of people absent.

I gave some serious consideration to going to this event en femme, but knew that there was a lot of potential for problems if I did, so I compromised and went with a fairly subtle combination of jeans with yellow and orange tops and shoes chosen to complement my gold nail polish. As with Christmas, nobody said anything. Pretty much what I expected.

I've just about decided that I'll leave the gold polish on my nails until at least Tuesday for the cafe night. :)

Another thing about last week

2011-07-20T23:30:00.000+10:00

I knew that there was something else that I intended to mention about last Tuesday night's cafe night. Because it was the 200th, and my wife had gone to the 100th with me, I had hoped that my inlaws would take our son overnight so that my wife could go with me. My wife appeared to also like the idea, and seemed to want to go.

On the Sunday before, my sister in law (wife's sister) came up from Sydney to visit her parents for a few days, bringing her toddler (our son's cousin) with her. While our son was welcome to go and visit during the day, we were assured that his presence would guarantee that his cousin would be too hyped up to go to sleep, and therefore the option of having him stay there overnight on the Tuesday night no longer existed.

I commented to my wife that every time I ask our son if he wants to go somewhere with me when I'm in girl mode, he says no. With nobody to take him for the night, the options were that she stay home with him as usual, or that they both go with me. It was school holidays, so it wouldn't matter too much if he was up late, but I didn't want to pressure him, so it was her decision.

My wife's decision was that we all went. She told our son of her decision, and he didn't argue. When it was time for him to get ready (when I was mostly ready), I told him that it was time to get ready and he changed clothes and got ready without any fuss.

Aside from being bored (I only remember one other person going out of her way to talk to him while we were there) and tired because we were out later than he was accustomed to, he coped quite well.

I'm not sure whether it was a good result in terms of him being more prepared to go out with me when I'm en femme in the future or not, but it didn't appear to be a bad result.

Bright red nails at work - part 2

2011-07-17T13:50:00.000+10:00

A couple of months ago, I mentioned going to see a work client with bright red nail polish on my nails, which were, even then, quite a bit too long to be normal for a male.

Because last Tuesday night was the 200th Newcastle cafe night, we had a few girls from Sydney who hadn't been for some time make the trip up to for the special event. One of those was the friend that I mentioned that my client knows is transitioning. In conversation, I discovered that she had visited that client for a couple of hours, and that after about an hour and a half, he asked her directly what the story was with my nails. I think she said that he had described them as "very long and very red". Her answer was to tell him that she knows me as Alice.

While most people would see that as a betrayal of trust because she had outed me to someone I know, in this particular case it was not. I don't remember whether I had explicitly given her permission to do so, but I know that had certainly given her implicit permission. The client in question has known me for several years, but has known my friend for decades. She knows him better than I do, so when he asked that question of her rather than of me, she knew that the answer that she gave was the right thing to do.

She also mentioned to him that it isn't generally appropriate for her to tell him what she had, or for him to say anything to me about it unless I volunteer information myself. In this particular case, that wouldn't have bothered me.

The red nails incident occurred over 3 months ago, and I believe that her visit and conversation with him occurred within a few days afterwards. Not only has my client said nothing to me about it, there has not been the slightest indication of a change in his attitude towards me in that time.

Next time I see him I might mention that I had dinner with her and that she told me about their conversation. :)

frequent wiglessness

2011-07-16T23:30:00.006+10:00

I forgot to mention in my last post that, following on from the outings on the Central Coast and in Sydney early last month, I wore my blonde wig for both of the outings closer to home, then, after missing out on a week, I decided to challenge myself and go out to a Newcastle cafe night sans wig.

I'm honestly not sure whether that's a bigger deal than using a lift in a shopping centre or catching a train to Sydney and back, but I know that until recently, I've always feared recognition. It wasn't until I was typing this blog post that I realised that the reason why going out locally in girl mode wigless doesn't bother me as much as it used to is that I no longer fear that recognition anywhere nearly as much as I used to.

Plenty of people (including quite a few work clients) know that I am a crossdresser even if they've never said anything or even seen photos. With my long nails, long hair with fringe, shaped brows, pierced ears and general lack of facial and body hair, I look somewhat feminine even as a guy. Even though few people comment, I'm fairly confident that a lot of people guess from just my nails.

After that one local cafe night outing, the obvious question was why would I bother with a wig unless I wanted to change my colouring. And so it was that the two outings so far this month have also been wigless. I expect that I'll probably go wigless again this Tuesday night, but I'm unsure whether I want to go wigless to my nail appointment that is so close to home. Then again, I might not even get there en femme. I'll have to make a decision before Wednesday.

Over run

2011-07-15T18:45:00.006+10:00

I mentioned in January that I knew that my work commitments were going to get a lot busier than they were last year, but I underestimated the extent, because I had no way of knowing that there would be even fewer people available to do the work than there were even a couple of months ago.

With the massive influx of work has come a number of missed outings. Not only was there the Tuesday cafe night that I previously mentioned that I'd missed, but I got to one Tuesday cafe night then missed the following two and the Seahorse meeting, and my last nail appointment was done in boy mode. I'm happy to say that I did manage to get to the Central Coast cafe night on Wednesday last week and the 200th Newcastle Cafe night this week, so hopefully I'm getting back on track.

It remains to be seen whether I manage to keep my workload under control or whether I end up being over run again.

Instant recognition

2011-06-18T13:00:00.025+10:00

Last week, I mentioned that I was wondering whether the new casual girl at Tree of Life in Charlestown Square would recognise me in boy mode. Well, the answer was yes. Unlike the manager, Sharon, the young woman (whose name I'm embarrassed to admit I still can't remember in spite of being told it about 10 times so far) did a double take the first time she looked at me when I went there in boy mode, and I thought that I saw a hint of amusement. When I spoke to her she confirmed that she had recognised me instantly.

Going from a blonde wig to male is about the biggest contrast in appearance that I do. If I had been there with my own hair in girl mode or with an auburn wig, recognition would not have surprised me so much.

Sharon, like my sister-in-law's mother, knew me in boy mode first and didn't recognise me in girl mode. If someone knows me but doesn't know about my crossdressing, there's a much larger mental leap to make to recognise me in girl mode. I suspect that seeing me in girl mode first (and probably reading me) makes it much easier to recognise me as a guy.

Snoozing and losing

2011-06-17T13:50:00.001+10:00

Things fell apart somewhat for me again this week. We had a long weekend last weekend, and I spent most of it sorting out computer related issues that I had been putting off for far too long. In the back of my mind, I had wondered if I'd get what needed doing done in two days and have a chance of getting out on the holiday Monday. No, not a chance!

As it turned out, I was still sorting things out late Monday night, meaning that I got to bed fairly late in spite of having an early start Tuesday. By Tuesday afternoon, I was exhausted. I intended to lie down for a while before getting ready to go out for dinner, but the little while ended up being all of the time that I would have needed to get ready and then some. I got up briefly, had some dinner then went back to sleep, missing out on going out. :(

Some time after 9pm, I got up and got ready for bed, then sat down in front of a computer to check emails, facebook etc, and then realised that I'd blown it yet again as it was after midnight by the time I went to bed.

I'll just have to get myself organised and get out again as soon as I can. :)

More often than not

2011-06-10T15:00:00.000+10:00

In my last post, I mentioned that I intended to go out on both Tuesday and Wednesday. It wasn't until Wednesday evening that I realised that I had been out 4 times in the first 8 days of the month. Then I realised that the last day of last month was Tuesday, and I'd been out to the cafe that night as well, making 5 outings in 9 days.

Of course, I didn't get out Thursday or today (Friday) and won't be getting out Saturday, so the frequency has dropped back a bit, but that little burst of activity was interesting.

On a side note, after getting my nails done on Wednesday afternoon, I went to Charlestown Square for a little while. I dropped into the Tree of Life store to say hello, and they had a new casual girl there in addition to the manager, Sharon, who didn't recognise me a couple of years ago. As far as Sharon and I know, the new girl didn't read me at all, so it will be interesting to see what happens next time she's working when I happen to be there in boy mode. :)

On Wednesday, I was also wearing the same pink top as I wore when I had my photo taken in the Tree of Life store in Charlestown last year. Do I look thinner as a blonde? :p

improved frequency

2011-06-06T23:20:00.001+10:00

I noticed after Saturday's outing that my frequency of outings is finally better than once every 6 days for the first time since January, just before things fell apart.

This week, I plan to go out to the Tuesday cafe night, and to a nail appointment on Wednesday en femme (I forgot to mentioned it, but I promised last time that I'd go blonde this time). I've also applied to re-join Seahorse NSW, a support group that I was a member of up until a few years ago, when I chose to let my membership lapse because I didn't believe that I would ever go to their meetings again.

I've been out twice so far this month. If things work out, I may get to the Seahorse meeting late in the month, as well as all of the cafe nights and two nail appointments 3 weeks apart. That would total nine outings for the month. I don't really expect to get to all of those, but there's no harm in trying. :)

Daytime wigless shopping with the girls

2011-06-05T18:00:00.003+10:00

Choosing a title for this post was quite difficult. I really wanted it to emphasise the fact that I had a really enjoyable day out with a great group of cisgender women who accept me as the woman that I present myself as, but I also wanted it to reflect the fact that I went on a daytime outing without a wig.

It was quite a long day for me, and as I mentioned yesterday, I painted my nails on Friday night in preparation for Saturday. Aside from that, I chose my outfit in advance, deciding to wear the same outfit as I had worn to a nail appointment a few weeks ago, but add a jacket because the weather is cooling down.

Getting up before 6am meant I was up before dawn, having had less than 5 hours sleep. I worked my way through all of the things that needed doing, including straightening my hair for only the third time. I'm happy to say that I'm starting to get the hang of it and it's taking less time than expected.

The only thing that I forgot to do while getting dressed was to put the shoulder straps onto my convertible strapless body shaper. Until yesterday, I had always worn the straps with this type of shaper because the previous ones that didn't have straps would inevitably roll down and bunch at the waist. While I did have to hitch the top edge up a few times during the day, it was nowhere nearly as bad as expected, and gives me hope that I might yet be able to use this shaper with halter neck tops and dresses once the weather warms up.

The plan was for a group of us who had met through Beauty Heaven to meet up at noon at the front of the Estee Lauder Staff Shop in the Sydney suburb of Rosebery, a few kilometres south of the city. Three of the girls live in the city area, and one of those, Jasmine, offered to collect me and another girl from Central railway station and drive us there. Unfortunately, the other girl who was to come by train from the south coast was unable to make it on the day, and as I mentioned a few days ago, there were trackworks planned, which would affect the Newcastle trains, so I decided to drive to Wahroonga, right near the end of the freeway and catch a train from there to Central.

That led to another little first for me. The first time putting fuel in my car en femme. I know that it's a trivial thing, but for whatever reason, I've always planned things such that the car was fuelled up before I went driving anywhere en femme.

The drive down, including putting fuel in the car and going into the shop to pay was uneventful, as was the train trip in (on the train before the one I planned to catch). There was a little confusion meeting up with Jasmine, as I was at a railway station exit at the acute intersection of 2 streets, expecting her to be on one street when she had stopped on the other, just out of sight of where I was standing. That was sorted out by SMS, and we set off for the shop. We drove along the street, spotting 2 other factory outlet shops and a church fete before finding the place in between the other 2 outlets. We were the first to arrive, and aside from Magda, who messaged to say that she was running late, the rest arrived within a few minutes of us. We went in, and shopped enthusiastically. :)

Both Su and Christine, who I went to Fashion Weekend Sydney with a few weeks ago, were in our group. Christine finished in the shop first and decided to check out the fete while waiting for the rest of us. She found that there was a table there with unopened cosmetics that had been donated, and bought a few. When the rest of us had finished at Estee Lauder, we walked up to the Swarovski outlet, which we found out is only open 10am to 2pm on the first Saturday of every month, so we fluked it! After admiring but not buying anything there, we wandered across the road to the fete, where Michelle found the bargain of the day, an unopened Dr Lewinns facial set. We all wandered back past the two shops that we'd already been to, to get to the final shop, which was on the next block. That shop was also only open 10am to 2pm on the first Saturday of each month! Several of us bought a few things there, then we wandered back to the front of the Estee Lauder shop to take a few photos while Michelle and Christine waited for their lift home. Jasmine gave Su, Magda and me a lift back to the city, dropping Su near her home then driving us to Central.

Just as I said goodbye to Magda and started to make my way to the platform to catch my train, an old asian man gesticulated wildly at me and shouted excitedly to his friends in a language I don't understand. I assumed he had read me and was telling his friends. Then again, maybe he thought that I was someone famous. Nicole Kidman, perhaps. Same height and hair colour. :p Once upon a time, this would have been a devastating blow to my self confidence. Instead, my reaction was to think that he was a rude, stupid so-and-so, ignore him and continue on my way.

The train trip back to my car was a bit delayed because the train was faulty, which meant standing for about 15 minutes on the platform waiting for it, then delays at several stations on the way. I wasn't aware of anybody taking undue notice of me in that whole time, including a boisterous mixed group of 6 teenagers who were standing right next to me on the platform.

In spite of my earlier concerns, the combination of makeup, straightened hair (including the fringe) and hair spray was successful in hiding my widows peaks even out in the wind. If anything, in spite of my hesitance to go wigless because of my widows peaks, I am now starting to feel that I actually pass better without a wig. Of course, passing is very much a state of mind, and being increasingly comfortable in public in all sorts of circumstances seems to be making more difference than more effort with my presentation ever could.

I made good time on the drive home, arriving home around 5:15pm. I immediately changed, had a quick shower and went out for dinner with my family in boy mode. We were sitting in the restaurant before 7pm. I did, however, choose to leave the nail polish on. I asked my wife if she would object and she said no, she didn't. Because it was cold, we all wore gloves outside, but my nails were visible while we were in the restaurant. Nobody said anything. I'm tempted to leave it on until my next nail appointment on Wednesday, but I don't think that I'm quite up to dealing with work clients for 2 days and my inlaws over dinner on Monday night, so it's probably going to come off tonight.

Nail clippers

2011-06-04T23:00:00.010+10:00

After Wednesday night's cafe night outing, I decided that I had to take the nail colour off and I didn't have time to apply another colour and wait for it to dry before going to bed, because I had an early start Thursday. Given that my nails look fairly natural now that they just have gel overlays on real nails with no extensions, I decided that I could get away with just having them plain, so that's what I did from Wednesday night until Friday night, when I did my nails in preparation for Saturday's outing, which I'll write about tomorrow. I'm too tired to write it up tonight, but thought I'd share this little comment from Friday, by a long-term work client.

This particular guy was one of the very few who commented about my pierced ears, doing so every time I saw him for the first couple of years after I had them done. He insisted that I should have had more piercings one side or the other to identify whether I was "tough" or gay. I told him that I wanted them balanced because I was too unbalanced as it was. :p He also commented on my long hair many years ago.

While my nails were unpainted, I visited that same client. He noticed my nails, and made a passing remark about needing to get some nail clippers onto them. Knowing that he was kidding, I simply let it slide. While I've known him for well over a decade, I really don't know how he would react if I came out to him, and I don't see any benefit in doing so at present. Given the things that he has noticed, he may well have guessed but chosen not to say anything. In hindsight, I'm not sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that I had no colour on my nails!

More wiglessness

2011-06-02T17:40:00.011+10:00

I finally had another go at using my hair straightener yesterday. I straightened my hair before 2pm, wrote yesterday's blog post, did my nails, did my makeup, etc before heading out for dinner. I don't think that I did that good a job with the straightener, but it was mostly okay. I'm sure that it will improve with practice! Sadly, by the time I left home, my hair was well on the way to frizzing again due to the humidity. :(

Regardless, I brushed my hair to give me a centre part and a fringe, similar to my wigs, and went out wigless for only the second time. Unlike last time, I was far more comfortable with how my hair framed my face, although I did find that the top was a bit flat and the back of my hair tended to annoy me a bit. In spite of using a heat protection spray, it felt a bit dry and straw-like from straightening (a lot like how some of my older wigs feel), and then as it frizzed, it became more bulky, and that's when it became annoying.

In spite of the fact that my wigless appearance is a lot like my male appearance because I have the same fringe both ways, I'm a lot more comfortable going wigless after last night than I was after the first time. In fact, I'm seriously considering going wigless for my trip to Sydney on Saturday. If it's cold, I might even break out the beanie with pom-pom on top that causes my wife to crack up every time I wear it. :)

A seven outing month

2011-06-01T16:00:00.004+10:00

May ended up being an okay month for me. In spite of at the missed opportunity to get my nails done en femme plus one other day when I had planned a week in advance to go out but got too busy with work, I ended up getting out a total of 7 times including the train trip to Sydney.

The seventh outing was achieved because there were 5 Tuesdays in the month. I am still a long way behind my target for the whole year, but I've caught up a bit from where I was up to last month.

The coming month is looking promising, too. Tonight is a Central Coast cafe night, and I'm planning on another shopping trip to Sydney on Saturday with friends who I met through Beauty Heaven. Due to trackworks, I plan to drive to the northern side of Sydney and catch a suburban train into the city and back this time.

I have to keep this short or I'll run out of time to paint my nails before getting ready to go out tonight. I want to try out a Face of Australia limited edition molten metal nail polish. :)

Resolution at last

2011-05-21T23:30:00.009+10:00

When I was in 1st class, a girl moved to my school. She was the most attractive girl I'd ever seen, and we were in the same classes all the way through infants and primary school. Because we were both in the top classes for most subjects, we remained in some of the same classes all the way through high school. I started to take an interest in girls around the end of primary school and this turned into an infatuation with the girl who I thought was the most exquisitely beautiful girl on the planet. Yes, I really did think of her like that.

Unfortunately, around the age of 5, when I was in kindergarten, I realised that I was different. I was weird. I was a freak. I wanted to dress up, look and behave like a girl, and I was absolutely certain that I was the only one in the world who was such a screwed up freak. Hence, I was a social misfit. I was also a geek. In 1978, my father built a microcomputer around a Signetics 2650 CPU evaluation kit. By about 1980 (age 11) I knew how to load programs either by hand from printouts, or using the cassette recorder that plugged into the computer.

So what happens when an extremely self conscious geek who is paranoid that someone will discover his dark secret of wanting to cross dress is infatuated with one of the most popular, attractive girls in the school?

Of course, I did things to try to make her notice me. Of course it all went wrong.

Virtually everybody who knew me knew that I was infatuated with her, but I could barely even talk to her. She was out of my league and I knew it. About the only thing that I was successful at was hiding my crossdressing from everybody except my mother (who didn't let on that she knew until years later). I later came to believe that I caused that girl a great deal of embarrassment over the 6 years of high school.

The last time I saw her was about 8 years ago, when my then pregnant wife and I got up and danced with belly dancers in a Turkish restaurant which has long since closed. I saw her, but didn't know whether she realised who I was or not. My feeling at the time was that she recognised me and looked away.

Today, I was looking through "people you might know" from high school on my male facebook profile and realised that she has recently joined facebook. I wasn't entirely sure how she'd react, and I sent her a friend request with a message attached, in part saying:

One of my biggest regrets in life is the embarrassment that I caused you in High School, and I'll understand entirely if you don't want to add me as a friend.

A few hours later, I went back on facebook to find that she had accepted my friend request, and had sent me a message in response, in part saying:

Please don't worry about high school that was such a long time ago. Happy to accept you as a friend.

It's incredible how those few words have lifted a feeling of guilt that has been in the back of my mind for over 20 years.

Now I have to decide whether to send her a friend request from my female profile or not. Perhaps not straight away. :)

Opportunity lost

2011-05-18T22:30:00.000+10:00

Because I've been struggling to get work done, due to a combination of way too much of it and ongoing headache problems, I decided yesterday that if I was able to get a particular job completed, I'd go to my nail appointment today en femme, and if I didn't, I'd go in boy mode.

Sadly, by the time I got home from the cafe night last night, organised myself and showered, I got to bed after 1am without touching the paperwork. I slept poorly and ended up sleeping in a bit, which helped my head a bit, but meant no girl mode outing today.

While I was at the salon, several things happened that made me regret the decision. Firstly, unlike the time I went there en femme last month during school holidays, the daughter of the woman who does my nails was there because she was off school sick. I think that seeing me en femme would have cheered her up. The second thing that happened is that a woman who I have spoken to a few times before because she often has her appointment after mine on a Wednesday afternoon was there, and she still hasn't seen me in girl mode yet, either. One of the staff who had been in hospital recently was back, and she also missed out on the twice that I went there en femme...

The final thing was a little more complicated. The salon sub-lets a room to a remedial massage therapist, so a wide variety of people come to see her. Today, that included a client of mine from work, who I've only done one job for but it was fairly recently. If I had been in girl mode, he would have been very unlikely to recognise me but in boy mode, he almost certainly did. He didn't say anything to me, but given that I was sitting at the nail technicians' station waiting for my nails to dry, it's a fairly safe bet that he realised what I was there for.

I don't mind coming out to people on my own terms, but something beyond my control like that worries me a bit. Of course, there's nothing that I can do about it, so I'll just have to live with it.

The ultimate irony of my self imposed missing out on going out en femme is that I probably didn't get much (if any) more work done than if I had gone out en femme. Yes, I'm kicking myself!

Pushing boundaries

2011-05-16T23:45:00.001+10:00

Yesterday, I did a few things that pushed my comfort zone. Surprisingly, things that I feared so much that I simply hadn't done them turned out to be remarkably easy.

On Thursday night, Su, one of my friends on Facebook who I originally knew from the forums on Beauty Heaven, asked who wanted to go to Fashion Weekend Sydney, on Sunday afternoon. My immediate reaction was that I'd love to go but wouldn't have time. After some lively discussion on Facebook, I decided that I'd try to get there. At least one of the other women that I met at the Beauty Heaven open day last year, Christine, was going, and another two of my online friends might also have been going.

I considered driving, catching a train or perhaps a combination of the two by driving part way then catching a train from there. Like my former fear of using lifts en femme, I had never used public transport en femme for fear of being abused or assaulted by somebody and being unable to get away from them. That's also why I still haven't managed to get to Sydney during the week for a shopping trip that I had planned to do in January!

By the time I went to bed on Saturday night, I had chosen my outfit and decided that if I went at all, I'd walk to my local railway station and catch the train to Central station in Sydney, then walk to the venue at Moore Park rather than try to figure out buses. It was less than 2.5km walk each way, which really isn't a problem for me in flat shoes. I set my alarm for 8am Sunday. The goal was to make a 10:50am train, which was supposed to get to Central at about 1:12pm. Walk a fairly flat route to meet up with the others around 1:45. Easy!

When I woke up and looked at the clock in the bedroom, it was 7:59. I turned off the alarm so that it wouldn't disturb my wife and got up. I started with the usual morning things of washing my face and having breakfast. I could have wimped out and gone back to bed, and seriously considered it several times. Fortunately, I continued instead. I did my makeup and dressed, and walked to the railway station with 6 minutes to spare. I took a seat on the surprisingly busy platform while I waited, and boarded the train when it arrived. I took a seat and was almost universally ignored. It was a bit of an anti-climax. On the way down, I had 2 women sit next to me at different times along the way. Neither spoke to me, but that's fairly normal for the majority of people on trains around here.

At Central, and on the walk from there to the event, it was the same story. Everybody was too busy with their own lives to take any notice of me.

When I arrived at the venue, I walked to the main gates wondering whether this was where to go in or not, and looked to see both Su and Christine standing waving to me. We went in and had a brief look around on the way to the 2pm fashion show, which I think was a first for all three of us. The tickets that Su had been given were for front row seats about half way along the catwalk, so I'm probably in the background of a lot of photos. :)

After the fashion show, we spent over an hour wandering around looking through all the stalls, and generally not spending money. Su bought one dress for $10 that was probably originally priced over $100. When she and I went up to the VIP lounge so that she could pay without queuing, we discovered that we were supposed to have received VIP goodies bags and could get complimentary mini-manicures (a new coat of nail polish). Even though I'd been slack and was still sporting my 18 day old nail polish from my last salon visit, I decided against the manicure since it would take a while and I'd have to clean it off and go back to boring beige before the morning anyway.

When we found Christine outside, we explained about the goodies bags and she went back in to get hers. There was a little mix up, and we stayed outside waiting for her to come back out, while she thought that we had gone back inside and waited for us just inside the door. While there, she bumped into Olivia, one of the staff from Beauty Heaven. We chatted briefly, got a few photos then Olivia headed back inside while we set off home.

After a little confusion trying to find the bus stop for Christine to get back to Central, I decided that it would be better to spend $2 to get a bus to Central with her than walking and risking missing my train and having to wait a full hour for the next one. We got a bus, and were very fortunate that the driver told us at a stop that this was the stop for Central, because we wouldn't have known and would both have missed our trains. As it was, I got the train with just a few minutes to spare. When I arrived, there was a large crowd on the platform as there was a 4-car train at the platform and another 4-car set was being shunted and coupled to form an 8-car train and nobody could get aboard until the coupling was completed. I waited in the crowd, again finding that nobody paid me any undue attention.

The trip home was as uneventful as the trip there, but it was a bit cold on the train, and even colder on the walk home. Because I had the VIP goodies bag on the seat next to me, nobody sat next to me on the way home.

While it was quite a long day, I accomplished several things. I met Su, who I'd known online for years but not met before, I took two quite long train trips totalling about 5 hours, and a bus trip of a few minutes in Sydney en femme, I sat in the front row at a fashion show, browsed a large fashion sale amongst hundreds of people and was treated as the woman I presented as for the whole time. I know that a few people looked at me funny from time to time, but there was no direct negativity and certainly no aggression aimed at me in the whole time.

I'm also finally starting to shake a feeling that I've experienced when I'm en femme with other people. I've often felt like I'm an amusement or a diversion to people, or that they are just humouring me. It's not something that I've ever put into words before, and I know that I don't get that feeling from some people, such as Marian, who works at the cafe where we go for dinner on Tuesday nights. With other people, I'm not so sure. I really didn't feel that way with Su and Christine. Instead, I felt like I was with real friends who accept me as I am. The part of my mind that has been telling me for years that I'm a freak is getting shouted down, and that's probably a bigger breakthrough for me than overcoming my fears. :)

There's already an indication that Su and I might meet up with Jasmine, one of the other girls who didn't make it on Sunday, to go shopping sometime in a few weeks. Don't worry, I'll be sure to post about it if it happens. :)

Some people just don't get it

2011-05-09T00:30:00.034+10:00

I had an interesting little incident happen yesterday.

A couple of days ago, I attempted to enter an Estee Lauder competition on Facebook, only to find that in order to enter, you had to have picked up a free sample of their new lipsticks from David Jones or Myer first, as the competition requires you to enter a code from the packaging.

On Sunday, I was in boy mode taking my wife and son somewhere else, and on the way we stopped by David Jones at Kotara to visit the Estee Lauder counter so that I could pick up the free sample. This is the same place where I bought a bottle of foundation last month, but the Estee Lauder rep there was not one of the 3 that I've dealt with there before.

I walked straight up to the rep and told her that I was after a free sample of the lipstick. There were no samples on display at all, but she knew exactly what I was talking about and opened a drawer and got the sample out, only to turn to my wife and present it to her!

My wife immediately handed the sample to me. At this point, I still don't think that the rep had realised that it was for me. Perhaps having my nails about 10mm past the fingertips and painted, long hair with a fringe, both ears pierced, etc was too subtle for her.

I wasn't finished though, as there was something else that I needed to ask her, which left her in no doubt as to the fact that I was there for product for myself. I asked her whether there has been a problem with the Double Wear foundation, as the last bottle that I bought there recently is noticeably paler than the previous ones. When she assured me that nothing has changed with the product and that she was not aware of any problems with it, I informed her that I'd used 3 or 4 bottles of it over the past few years and that the current one is noticeably paler than the previous ones. I told her which shade it was, and when she suggested that perhaps my skin tone has changed, I said no, the foundation is different. Her response was to get a small sample bottle out and fill it from the bulk bottle of that shade that they use in the store.

After all of that, she appeared indifferent, as if she just wanted to give me the sample so that I'd go away. I got the impression that she didn't care about whether I wore makeup or not, her attitude appeared to be that I and my family didn't look posh enough to deserve to be at the Estee Lauder counter or to be served by her.

I'll try that sample against the bottle I'm using and see if they are the same or not. If it's different, I'll take the bottle back and see if they'll replace it. Whether I'll go in boy mode or girl mode, I don't know yet. :)

A six outing month

2011-04-29T15:00:00.000+10:00

In amongst the goals I set myself for this year, there was the aim of getting out on average more often than once every 5 days for the year, with at least 6 outings, including at least one daytime outing, every month.

April has been the first month this year where I've achieved the monthly average including a daytime outing. I spent 3 days over the Easter long weekend doing some work around the yard, which did damage to the acrylic overlays on my nails, to the point that I was worried that if I didn't get them fixed up I might break the real nails underneath. Ironically, it was the damaged nails that led to my daytime outing on Wednesday.

I've been getting my nails done every 3 weeks, and had planned on going to get them done next Wednesday, between the Tuesday Newcastle and Wednesday Central Coast cafe nights, and going en femme as I did at the beginning of March. When I got up on Wednesday morning, though, I looked at my nails and realised that they were worse than I had realised the previous night, with one nail having lost a large piece from the side after I'd done the nail polish that I wore out Tuesday night. I rang the salon and was able to move my appointment forward a week, as there had been cancellations. At about 9:30, I'd made a 1pm appointment then fairly suddenly realised that it should be possible to go along en femme. With my wife still in bed asleep, I was somewhat limited on what I could do about choosing an outfit for the day, and effectively lost about half an hour. In the end, I wore a casual top that I hadn't worn since Easter a couple of years ago, cream jeans and mustard joggers with short socks.

I did my makeup in about 50 minutes, which is a fairly good time for me. Then, having heard a weather prediction of rain, I drove to my appointment instead of walking as I had intended. Parking was a big problem, but I ended up getting to the salon about 5 minutes early. After my nails were done, I wandered around the local op shops (including getting rained on) then headed up to Charlestown Square for a while.

In addition to the 5 cafe night outings, Wednesday made 6 outings for the month. I don't really expect to achieve the same every month, nor do I expect to catch up the outings I missed in the previous 3 months, but I'll be really happy (and fairly surprised) if I can maintain that 6 outings per month for the rest of the year.

All in all, it was a fairly uneventful day but it was an outing en femme, and when I stop and think about it now, I didn't even pause heading out of the house, getting out of the car or even getting into the lift from the carpark into the shopping centre. I know that I've come a long way in recent years. :)

Seeing the optometrist

2011-04-21T22:00:00.003+10:00

I had a slightly funny visit to the optometrist today.

One of the machines that I had to rest my chin on had little tear-off paper pieces on the chin rest, while another had space for them but had none. I queried whether it should have had them, and she assured me that it didn't really matter as she cleans it with alcohol occasionally instead. I remarked, sort-of jokingly, that it was okay as I wasn't wearing makeup today anyway, and she responded that that was good as I wouldn't leave marks on the machine.

I wear contact lenses, and have done so for several years. As part of the consultation, I went in wearing contacts so that the optometrist could check my eyes with them in, take them out before another part of the eye test and then put them back in at the end of the consultation.

When I was putting the lenses in at the end of the consultation, she asked me if I have trouble getting the lenses in and out with such long nails. I said no, I just put the lens onto the tip of a finger to put it in and the nails make no difference.

That was it. A bit of an anti-climax. I would assume that she knows, but neither of us felt the need to say it outright. I have to get a pair of different lenses to trial in a few weeks, and then go back for another consultation when I've worn them for a couple of weeks.

I have no idea whether either of us will say any more on the subject. I'm also contemplating dropping in en femme to collect the trial lenses in a couple of weeks time...

Reassessing goals

2011-04-16T14:00:00.006+10:00

I mentioned back in February that I was falling short of my goal of getting out an average of at least every 5 days and at least 6 times a month.

Things really haven't improved, and don't look like they will any time soon. I'm getting to the cafe nights more consistently than I had been, but I have a few new priorities getting in the way. We are in the midst of organising to do some long overdue building work on our house, and I'm having to spend time cleaning up, sorting things and getting rid of things that we don't want or need. Add in work that seems to be growing exponentially in spite of my trying to keep some sort of control over it, and I'm simply not able to find or make time to get out en femme at any time other than the cafe nights.

By my quick count, I've been out 14 times so far this year, for an average of a little over once every 7 days. With the weekly Newcastle cafe nights and the monthly Central Coast cafe nights, I'm confident that I can achieve an average of once every 7 days over the whole year, but I'm now thinking that instead of having a goal of getting out an average of every 5 days, I'll aim to achieve an average of 7 and a "would like" rate of once every 6 days. If I don't achieve this, I'm not going to beat myself up about it.

If the building work gets sorted out as planned, it will not only reduce the amount of time I have to spend doing other things around the place, but will result in my being much more organised for preparing to go out, which should translate to short term pain for long term gain.

Future wiglessness

2011-04-15T13:00:00.000+10:00

I've mentioned going out en femme without a wig before, and I recently mentioned that I bought a hair straightener. I wasn't happy with how my hair framed my face when I went out en femme with my hair tied back, so my plan is that, given that my hair is longer than most of my wigs, I intend to try to style my hair to be similar to the wigs that I prefer, but with a centre part instead of offset.

I had a brief try of the straightener the day after I bought it, without a great deal of success. I decided that the risk of damaging my hair made it worthwhile buying a heat protection spray, which I bought a few days later. Sadly, with work and family issues having overwhelmed me, the straightener and spray have stayed untouched for several weeks.

Hopefully sometime soon, I'll get a chance to try out the straightener a few times and work out how to get worthwhile results.

Fizzled Wednesday

2011-04-14T13:00:00.008+10:00

I mentioned on Tuesday that I had a nail appointment and had to go and see a client on Wednesday. In the end it was a fairly uneventful and I supposed a little disappointing outcome. I got to bed very late after the cafe outing on Tuesday night and woke up with a bad headache. I consequently got up so late that I barely had time to do all the usual boy-mode morning things while answering phone calls, plus checking email etc before heading off to my nail appointment.

As it turned out, in spite of being school holidays, the daughter of the woman who does my nails wasn't there, so I didn't feel that I was letting her down by not going en femme.

I also wimped out on nail colour, going with my current preferred drab beige colour after having my infills done. I ducked home for lunch, then out to the client. Nothing more was said about last week's nail colour, but my re-iterating that Wednesdays are not really convenient resulted in them suggesting that they'll try for Tuesdays from now on.

That probably means that once I get past the existing bookings on Tuesdays, I'll start having to write off Tuesday early afternoons to go out to this client, which might mean doing my nails at lunch time for the Tuesday cafe nights and wearing that colour to this client to give it time to harden before I get ready to go out. :)

Being outed and not caring

2011-04-13T13:00:00.001+10:00

Back in early January, a client, who I'll call "B", informed me via Facebook that he knew about my alter ego, and sent me a friend request, which I accepted. That in itself isn't all that odd, as I have come out to a few clients in recent times, and currently have about 9 clients as friends on facebook.

What was a little surprising, though, was that a client from a small country town hundreds of kilometres away came to me a few weeks ago, and near the end of a 2 hour meeting, made 2 comments that took me by surprise. The first related to a piece of information that is only on my male Wikipedia user page. The second was that they knew about my alter ego, and had seen my profile on Facebook (including photos) because they had been told about me by B. I can only guess that they spent some time doing a web search on my male name after being told about my crossdressing, and that's how they found my Wikipedia page.

Ironically, I'm not upset about this turn of events. I've come to realise that my attitude now is

As long as it does not adversely affect my family or me, I don't care who knows.

I'm a little concerned about B though. Apparently one of my friends, who doesn't know B but does know about me, overheard a conversation a few weeks ago where B was telling someone else all about me, quite loudly, in a crowded public place. The impression that I got was that my friend was quite offended by the tone of what was said about me and that if the circumstances had been a little different, things could have become quite heated or even violent. Eek!

Working on Wednesday again

2011-04-12T13:00:00.031+10:00

Following on from yesterday's post, I got another email from the same client as I went to last Wednesday, asking me to go there again this Wednesday. The problem is that this Wednesday I have a nail appointment at noon, and it's school holidays so the daughter of the woman who runs the salon is likely to be there. I had been considering going for my appointment en femme because I think that she'd enjoy it (as her mother did), but I don't think that I'm quite up to going to see the client en femme just yet.

I was intending to go to the salon wearing whatever nail colour I wear to the cafe on Tuesday night, and go back to a drab colour after the infills are done. Louise commented on yesterday's post to the effect that her favourite nail colour is gold and now I'm giving some consideration to going with the gold that I wore out at the beginning of last month as my drab colour for the next week. :)

The final option would be to go to the nail appointment en femme, then home, change, scrub off all the makeup then go out to the client. If I'm really enthusiastic about going to the nail appointment en femme, that might be the best option. If I'm organised early enough, I might even be able to wander around the local op shops for a while before my nail appointment.

Bright red nails at work

2011-04-11T13:00:00.028+10:00

I went out for dinner on both Tuesday and Wednesday night last week. I made a decision ahead of time that I would apply my rather bright orangey red nail polish (the same one as I wore to last month's Wednesday cafe night) on Tuesday afternoon and leave it on until after the Wednesday outing. To tie in with that, I decided to wear the same shoes and top both nights, but put together quite different outfits. The results can be see in the photos at the right.

There was, however, a little glitch in the plans. I had planned to spend Wednesday working on paperwork in the office and not to see any clients. One of my regular local clients had other ideas, and sent me an email a few days before asking me to go and see him on Wednesday. While I've never directly said anything to him, I've said some very obvious indirect things, and he knows that I am friends with one of his suppliers, who is currently transitioning.

The obvious solution was to simply go out to see him on Wednesday in boy mode, with my bright red nails. When I mentioned this at the cafe on Tuesday night, it was jokingly suggested that I should not do things by half, and should instead go to the client en femme. At this point, that's just not going to happen.

So on Wednesday, I did as I intended and went there in boy mode. The client didn't say anything about them, but he has another guy come in to help him a few days a week, This other guy made a comment something like

That red's a bit bright. Lucky I'm wearing sunnies.

Nothing more was said. Just as I was preparing to leave, a woman arrived to ask my client about something, and as it turned out, I was the one who could answer her questions, so I spent several minutes talking to her including shuffling through some paperwork she had with her. She didn't say anything about my nails. :)

New shoes

2011-04-10T13:00:00.004+10:00

When I wrote yesterday's post, I was racking my brain trying to remember what else I did between my nail appointment and going out to the cafe on the Wednesday night. It wasn't until I looked at photos from a few days later that I finally realised what I'd forgotten.

The week before, I spotted an orangey red stiletto in the window of the Wanted Shoes shop in Charlestown Square while out shopping with the family. It was a colour that I thought would go really well with a few tops that I have, but I didn't have time to do anything about it at the time. I also spotted a similar but more reddish shoe in another shop, which was entirely covered in tiny sequins. I wanted to try both, and the Wednesday afternoon was an excellent opportunity to do so.

I wore the top that I thought that the shoes would match best, and when I held one of the Siren brand shoes at Wanted Shoes up to the top, it was almost a perfect match. I tried the shoes on and they fitted very well, but I wasn't entirely happy that there were some barbed wire marks on the leather. Obviously, the manufacturer had used hides that had marks, and some inevitably ended up on the shoes, albeit towards the back of the sides. I was also a bit unsure about the price and wanted to try the sequinned shoes before making a decision, so I went to the other shop and tried those, finding that they didn't have my size but had the next size up. After trying them and looking at them closely, I realised that they were far too fancy and I couldn't see myself wearing them often, so decided not to buy them.

Besides, the sequinned shoes were nowhere nearly as high as the 13cm heels of the Siren shoes, which also have a hidden 3cm platform in the front. :)

By the Friday, I decided that I wanted the Siren shoes, but preferably not the marked pair at Charlestown. I had to drive to Gosford, so I stopped in at Westfield Tuggerah on the way back, expecting that there would be a Wanted Shoes outlet there, but there wasn't.

The complication here was that my wife had gone away for a few days with her parents, and I had to take my son to and from school on the Friday, which meant that I didn't have time to search for the same brand in other shoe shops at Tuggerah, or to go to other centres.

On the Saturday, in male mode with my son in tow, I drove to Charlestown and asked whether they had more than one pair of those shoes in that size and colour, because of the scratches. The answer was no. While there, I also went to Price Attack and bought myself a Diva brand hair straightener, chosen on the basis of recommendations of other members of the Beauty Heaven web site.

Realising that I was also getting short on foundation (for which I had the colour code written down), we drove from Charlestown to Westfield Kotara, where there is another Wanted Shoes outlet as well as a David Jones (aka DJs) store, where I usually buy my foundation. The shoes at Wanted had a couple of barbed wire marks, but not as bad or as obvious as on the pair in Charlestown, so I bought them plus went to DJs to get the foundation. The Estee Lauder rep there went out of her way to compliment my son on how well behaved he was.

As a reward for putting up with being dragged around the shopping centres, I was going to buy my son an ice cream at the Cold Rock icecreamery at Kotara, but when we went downstairs to where it used to be, it was gone. It looks like they might have closed down at Kotara when they opened up the new outlet in Charlestown, so we drove from Kotara back to Charlestown for icecream before going home!

Getting back on track

2011-04-09T23:30:00.023+10:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been a bit out of sorts recently. I had no intention of stopping blogging for over a month, but that's what has happened. For those who are interested and enjoy following my inane ramblings, I apologise.

The migraines have continued, and they create a form of writers block, which combined with the amount of paperwork that I'm expected to do for work, has left me with a massive backlog of work to be done. Much as I'd like to say that blogging is more important than work, the truth is the other way around. People rely upon me to provide a service which is critical for many of them, and there are a very limited number of other people available to do it in the local area, or indeed in the state. I also have to make a living and to support my family.

Anyway, while there is at least a weeks worth of paperwork backlog sitting on my desk, I've decided to ignore it for a while and try to get back into blogging.

In my last post, I mentioned that I intended to go out to cafe nights both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and that I hoped to go to my nail appointment on the Wednesday en femme. The good news is that all of the above happened. :)

On both the Tuesday and Wednesday, I went with autumn colours, so the gold nail polish from the Tuesday night wasn't out of place with the outfit I wore to my nail appointment, but I took a completely different colour, an orangey red, along to get on my nails once the infills were done.

I had previously suggested that I might turn up for the nail appointment en femme. When I arrived, I sat down in the waiting area until the woman doing my nails was free. When she came into the room, she looked at me, realised who I was and broke out in a huge smile and emphatically complimented me on my makeup and presentation.

Sadly, having to work on the Thursday meant having to return to a bland nail colour Wednesday night, including staying up late waiting for it to dry. The bland beige that I'm wearing regularly now is a little more obvious than the ones I've used before...

Incidently, these 3 photos are all on the same backdrop using a flash. I have no idea why one turned out so completely different to the others!

Awful apart

2011-02-27T21:30:00.004+11:00

I'm sad to say that things have really fallen apart this month. A combination of heat stroke and stress over a government department wanting to do things that could force me to close down the small business that I've run for over a decade translated into a bout of deep depression, the worst migraines I've experienced in years, a small amount of weight gain, almost constant exhaustion and a very disappointing total of one outing for the entire month.

That's right, I made it to just one cafe night. The first time I'd missed one since December 2009 and I managed to miss 3 of the 4 Newcastle nights plus the Central Coast one, all in the space of one month.

The depression is fluctuating wildly from day to day but the bottom of the cycles isn't as deep as it had been. The migraines haven't gone. They're not as bad as they were, but they're persisting, usually setting in around late afternoon, at about the time that I'd normally be preparing to go out to cafe nights.

I've decided to make a conscious effort to put this month behind me and try to get out on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights this coming week, I've also got a nail appointment on Wednesday afternoon, and I'm hoping to go to it en femme, and perhaps do some other shopping.

Recognition? Definitely not!

2011-02-13T18:00:00.002+11:00

Back in November, I mentioned that I had been to an op shop where my sister-in-law's mother (I'll again call her E for convenience) volunteers. In December, I visited my brother and my sister-in-law, and no mention was made of E having recognised me.

While I was fairly sure that if E had recognised me, she would have said something to her daughter, I also thought that there might have been a small chance that she might have simply said nothing, so a lack of comment might have been inconclusive.

I visited my brother and his wife last night, and mentioned in conversation that I had seen E in the op shop and didn't think that she had recognised me. My brother jokingly said "you weren't in drag were you?", but I didn't get a chance to respond immediately, as my sister-in-law was telling me that it wasn't a bad thing that E hadn't recognised me, this being with the assumption that I'd been there as a male.

When I finally got a chance to mention that "I was wearing the wig that is closest to my natural hair colour", the conversation became somewhat comical, with everybody making jokes about it. I was not only reminded that St Vincent de Paul is a Catholic Church run organisation, but that E has some rather traditional views, and that if she had recognised me, my brother and his family "would have never heard the end of it." There was also a suggestion that my brother "would have been ex-communicated from the family" ... "with an axe" ... "or a chainsaw if she could work out how to start it."

While some of the comments were obviously a little exaggerated, I think that it's safe to say that if E had recognised me, my sister-in-law would definitely have known about it. Some of the people who know her best are quite confident that she would not have said nothing, so it's fairly safe to assume that she didn't recognise me. :)

Goal failures

2011-02-05T00:00:00.010+11:00

Well, I failed in my goal of at least 6 outings in January including one daytime outing, and I'm well on the way to failing that goal for February too.

I took holidays until mid January, and as I mentioned about a fortnight ago, going back to work really put me off balance. My workload has been so bad that I haven't had time to sit down and write blog posts let alone getting out.

Another couple of weeks on and things have been even worse than I anticipated. A planned day off fell apart because a client had a vehicle break down and couldn't get to me until the following day. A paperwork backlog has forced me to spend many hours in the office, usually meaning that I'm so late getting to bed that I struggle to get up at a reasonable time in the morning. That's another goal failure - I've made no progress sorting out my sleep pattern.

Then there was this week. We had a fairly mild first half of summer, but the past few days have been more normal for here. Temperatures have been around 40C (about 105F) since about 26th January. On Tuesday this week, I had to drive to several places around town for work. Each time I parked the car, it got very hot inside. Each time I drove to the next place, there wasn't enough time for the car to cool down, so I got hotter and hotter through the day. By the time I got home, I had heatstroke and had to lie down in a cool room with the curtains closed to try to recover. A friend suggested that I should take a cold bath, but the water coming out of the cold tap was quite warm!

I'm sad to say that I missed my first Tuesday night cafe night in well over a year. Worse, I had to go to Sydney on Wednesday for work, meaning that I also missed the monthly Central Coast cafe night. We went by train there and back and I made the mistake of letting my travelling companion choose where we sat. It was about 2.5 hours each way and on both occasions he put me in a window seat on the sunny side of the train, which added to my feeling unwell.

After struggling though work on Thursday and Friday, I was looking forward to relaxing and recuperating on Saturday and perhaps trying to go out on Sunday. My mother has other plans for me, though. She rang me on Friday evening to tell me that they are doing a big clean-up at their place and that I have to go there over the weekend to sort some possessions of mine that have been at their place since I left home over a decade ago!

The weather won't be cool, and I can neither fit my car in their driveway nor park in front of their house, so I'll have to lug whatever I want to keep up the steep driveway and along the street in the heat to load it into my car. If I do that Saturday, I will probably spend the entire day Sunday trying to recover from heat stroke again. That makes 3 planned outings in a row down the drain. :(

On the upside, I may well soon be unemployed and have much more time to get out. :)

Wigless peers - 2

2011-01-26T13:00:00.002+11:00

I'm really starting to feel like the odd one out at cafe nights!

Last night, there were 8 of us, including 3 crossdressers, 2 transsexuals, 2 hairdressers who did one of the CD's hair last week and this week, and one GG partner.

Last week, there were 2 of us wearing wigs. This week, I was the only one in a wig!

It was one of my favourite wigs which is getting a bit old and the net is a bit stretched. I had pinned the sides back off my face before I went out as usual, but when I arrived at the restaurant I found that the clips just weren't keeping it off my face how I wanted, and took about 10 attempts to get one of them to sit okay. For some reason, the wig also irritated my neck all night. I really regretted wearing it.

I had a chat with the hairdressers who came along, and will probably organise to get my hair cut by one of them soon. They assure me that they can come up with a style that will work much better en femme while still looking much the same as it does now in boy mode. I'm probably also going to have to read up on hair straighteners, as that's probably the solution to the way the ends of my hair go fluffy.

Going out en femme wigless to local events might not be as far off as I thought! If it really works out well, daytime outings might not be out of the question either. :)

Wigless peers

2011-01-23T14:00:00.002+11:00

I haven't blogged for over a week, and I'm not happy about that. I'm not ill as such, but being back at work has really put me off balance.

At this week's cafe night, we had a total of 7 of us, including 5 crossdressers, one transsexual and one GG partner. Within the group, just 2 of us were wearing wigs. Two of the others who had worn wigs to the Central Coast cafe night when I went wigless were wigless this week, leaving me really wondering what is stopping me from doing likewise.

The restaurant that the Newcastle cafe nights are held at is a lot more public and a lot closer to home for me than where the Central Coast cafe nights are held. I have seen people both in the restaurant and walking past who know me, and I've been very happy hiding behind a wig, but am getting more and more comfortable coming out to people around me. I suspect that going there wigless is going to happen for me fairly soon. I'm not sure whether it'll be weeks or months, but I'm pretty certain that it will be this year.

Back to work blues

2011-01-15T10:00:00.002+11:00

I mentioned on Tuesday that I've been feeling a bit flat, in part because of the sense of impending doom that comes from the knowledge that my 4 weeks off will come to an end on Monday, and I'll be flat out at work again. Combine that with the fact that I haven't been out this month aside from the cafe nights, and I look like I might fail to achieve my frequency of outings goal in the first month of the year!

On a brighter note, one of my nieces (the older sister of the one that I've mentioned before) and her partner joined us at the cafe night this week. Unfortunately, her partner developed a bad headache and needed to go home, so I arranged to drive my niece home. Finding that her partner had taken something for his headache and was in much better spirits, I visited them for a while, leaving after 12:30am! My niece is quite accomplished at sewing and has offered to help out with some repairs and alterations that my wife has been promising to do but just hasn't got to. For example, there are a few dresses that I've bought at op shops that I've later realised were a little too long for my liking, which I want taken up so that the hem is a little above the knee instead of below. With my recent weight loss, a few of my dresses also need taking in, particularly at the waist. Hopefully my wardrobe options will improve a little bit, fairly soon. :)

Feeling flat

2011-01-11T14:00:00.003+11:00

I've been feeling a bit flat for the past few days. I made a big effort to get out several times in the last week of last year and went out to cafe nights twice last week, which was great but a little tiring due to my badly screwed up sleep patterns.

That is fairly minor compared to the big problem. I took 4 weeks holidays over Christmas and new year, as I have done in previous years. Unfortunately, they're holidays that aren't really relaxing because the emails and phone calls from customers won't stop even though I'm not answering them yet. There's also the stress of knowing that not only do I have to go back to work next week (with a considerable increase in workload compared to last year) but I really should start catching up on work this week because there's so much to be done.

I had hoped to take a trip to Sydney this week to do some shopping but one of the places that I planned to go to is effectively a wholesale outlet. You're expected to know the products that you're after before you go there, so I need to spend some time looking around locally and making myself a wish list. Given that it's already Tuesday, I'm a little doubtful that I'll get out, make my wish list and get to Sydney between now and Friday as well as getting a head start on work.

Rather than push myself and stress even more, I've decided that I'll do the wish list when I can, and plan the Sydney trip for a day off work later in the year. For the sake of my sanity (what little I have left), I am going to have to take days off work on a regular basis. I'm thinking probably one day per fortnight.

First things first, though. I'm off to decide what to wear to the cafe tonight so that I can work out what colour I want to put on my nails. :)

Recognition? Wigless, yes

2011-01-08T12:00:00.001+11:00

One of the downsides of going out en femme wigless is that there is considerably less difference in my appearance between male and female, and hence a much increased probability of recognition compared to wearing a wig.

That was quite clearly confirmed yesterday, when I was shopping at Charlestown Square in boy mode. I had met a relative of one of the other crossdressers for the first time at the cafe night on Wednesday. When I saw her in Charlestown, she immediately recognised me, smiled and said hello. We chatted briefly then went our separate ways.

While it might not have been a problem if my sister-in-law's mother had recognised me, I'm not sure how things would have gone if my customer and her daughter had, and it could have been very awkward if my father-in-law had. Then again, perhaps they all did and just pretended not to and it's all irrelevant. I don't know.

I think that I much prefer the greater chance of anonymity that the combination of a wig and makeup provides. Wigs also provide the option of a radical change in hair colour, which I quite like.

Whether wearing a wig that frames my face better than my own hair makes me more passable, or my real hair looks more natural and hence more passable, I'm not sure. One thing that I am sure of is that, for now at least, going out wigless close to home is not likely to happen soon.

I guess I'm just not out enough yet.

Gone wigless - reactions

2011-01-07T13:00:00.001+11:00

After I posted yesterday's post about going out without a wig for the first time ever en femme, I realised that I'd been interrupted and had only told half the story.

I think that a couple of the reactions on Wednesday night deserve a special mention.

Sue, the organiser of the Central Coast cafe nights and a regular at the Newcastle cafe nights, who has been wigless the past few times I've seen her, greeted me when I arrived, commented that "Alice has her hair tied back" and started to say that she hadn't seen that wig before, then realised that it wasn't a wig and complimented me on my hair.

The other notable response was from Linda Karen, the organiser of the Newcastle cafe nights. When she arrived, I was seated facing away from the door. With my hair tied up, it was obvious that it wasn't a wig, and she later said that she had no idea who I was from the back. It wasn't until she walked around to the other side of the table to take a seat that she realised it was me, and jokingly came out with "You look great you bitch. I hate you", which is quite a compliment from her. :)

Gone wigless

2011-01-06T15:00:00.002+11:00

I have sort-of achieved one of the goals that I wrote about a few days ago. However, it was done with no hair on my widows peaks. Instead, it was done with a combination of makeup, a fringe combed over the bald spots and hair spray to keep it in place. I'm not sure how I feel about the comb-over bit an I'm not sure how things would go if I was out in the wind, but for the indoor venue of the Central Coast cafe night, it worked.

The idea of using makeup to disguise the widows peaks came about because I had noticed some time ago that the eyeshadow that I use to colour my brows when I'm wearing an auburn wig (because I can't find a brow pencil the right colour) is actually quite close to my hair colour. A few nights ago, I experimented by using that eyeshadow to colour in the widows peaks and create a more rounded hairline.

It wasn't great but it worked. I decided that I'd try it for Wednesday night's Central Coast cafe night, which is in a relatively private suburban restaurant. If I wasn't happy with the result, I could always put an auburn wig on instead.

On Tuesday morning, I went and bought a beaded hair comb gadget, which consists of 2 metal combs with bead covered elastic between them. Before I started doing my makeup for last night, I tied the top half of my hair up in a pony tail, then used a plastic gadget to pull the pony tail through underneath the tie that held it and up the back of my head, making it stick out more, then put the comb in to cover that. This is something that you simply can't do with a wig!

Instead of stopping my primer and foundation at about the edge of where a wig would come to, I carried it all the way up to the hairline, including fully covering the widows peaks to give the shadow something to stick to. I coloured in the widows peaks before doing contouring and highlighting, and feathered the edges a little when I powdered my face.

Once I was dressed, I brushed my fringe forward and, with a bit of fiddling, got it sitting just right to cover the widows peaks. I gave the fringe a light spray with hair spray to help keep it in place, added jewellery (including my only pair of real gold expensive earrings) and spent a few minutes looking in the mirror trying to work out if I was happy enough with the result and whether I was ready to do this. The fact that the venue is relatively private made it much easier to say yes.

If it had been somewhere more public or closer to home, I don't think that I would have been able to do it. There's a psychological barrier there that I'm yet to overcome. I'll have to work on that.

Off colour

2011-01-05T13:00:00.000+11:00

No, it's not that I'm feeling ill (although the thought of going back to work is having that effect). I wore the beige (Revlon Putty) nail polish that I applied on Wednesday night last week until yesterday morning. While I've experienced a slight yellowing of nails from polish before, I really wasn't prepared for the colour that my natural nails had gone. In spite of having used a base coat, they were a brighter yellow than I was expecting in even my worst nightmare. In contrast, the two nails that were covered with gel were still nice and pale except up towards the cuticles where they'd grown out, and the ones overlaid with acrylic but not gel were a bit patchy.

So it looks like I'm stuck with something of a catch 22 situation. I have to wear nail polish to hide the yellow staining of my nails, but by wearing polish, I'll guarantee that they will continue to be stained, unless I have gel overlays done on my nails. Overlays also reinforce the nails, reducing the risk of breakage.

Add in that I'm still having trouble with the side of one nail cracking, in spite of having had an acrylic overlay over a patched edge, and I decided that it was time to head back to the salon to see about getting gel on all my nails. I dropped in yesterday afternoon and made an appointment for this morning, then went home to put some CoverGirl Fuchsia Girl on for last night's cafe night.

Goals - 2

2011-01-04T14:00:00.000+11:00

Last night, I realised that there was a goal that I omitted from yesterday's list.

* I want to try to learn not to eat too much when out at parties or visiting people who habitually put out nibblies, and/or over cater. I need to learn that just because there is food available doesn't mean that I should partake of it in larger than normal quantities.

72.5kg on New Year's Eve, 73kg the next 2 nights, then 75kg after visiting some of my wife's relatives last night to catch up with one from Canberra who didn't make it to Newcastle over Christmas. :(

I'll be going out to cafe nights tonight and tomorrow nights. Hopefully I'll be able to do better with my diet than I did last night!

Goals

2011-01-03T14:00:00.000+11:00

I didn't make any new year's resolutions, as that would just be setting myself up for failure. Instead, in addition to the ones I've already mentioned separately in the past few days, I have set myself a few my goals for 2011:

* I intend to continue to come out to the people around me, and aim to raise the profile and improve the public perception of transgender people. I'm still trying to work out whether to say anything to the people who know but want to pretend not to or whether to let things continue as they have so far.

* I know that my work commitments will increase significantly this year compared to last year, and to prevent that from swamping my girl time, I intend to delegate anything that I can. It might sound trivial, but I need to do things like paying someone to mow the grass so that I don't have to do it myself.

* I plan to get out on average more often than once every 5 days for the year, with at least 6 outings, including at least one daytime outing, every month. I don't want to be a long way behind in about October and have to push other things aside to catch up at the end of the year as happened last year.

In the back of my mind there is an even bigger goal of getting out no less than once every 4 days with 8 outings per month including 3 daytime outings but if I aim for that but fall short, I'll be happy as long as I make the easier goal.

* A few times last year, when I didn't know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, I wasted an opportunity and didn't crossdress at all. This year, I intend to try doing new things push my comfort zone en femme but I don't intend to place myself in danger.

For example, I will probably travel by train to the Sydney CBD and walk around shopping during the day. I had a very traumatic experience in the Sydney CBD a few years ago, and am not very comfortable being there even in boy mode. I've travelled by train in boy mode plenty of times but never en femme, but know that some of my friends in Sydney do so without any problems.

I'd also like to get back in touch with our belly dance teacher and see if we can arrange classes again. I miss them, and even though I only ever did one en femme, I really enjoyed it and would like to do it again.

* I want to sort out my sleep patterns so that I can get to bed and get up earlier instead of missing out on daytime outings because I'm too late getting up. It's something that I've mentioned several times before and made no real progress with.

One of the things that makes it difficult is that the cafe nights always end late and, with the Central Coast ones that can be almost midnight and I have about an hour drive home afterwards. I'm thinking that I may have to set an alarm for myself for around 10:00 as the time that I leave cafe nights, even if that means missing out on being in the group photos.

* I want to organise myself so that I can reduce the time that it takes for me to transform in both directions, as I have come to realise that the combination of this and getting up too late often prevents me from even starting to change.

* I need to make a decision one way or the other on buying a smaller pair of breast forms. The ones I have now make me a D cup, which is a little large for some outfits. Buying a smaller pair so that I have the option of being a C cup instead would make some of my clothing choices much easier, but for reasons that I'm not going into here, I have been unable to talk to my preferred supplier.

* I intend to wear halterneck tops and dresses for the first time. I bought several last year, but have never actually worn one out. To some extent this relates to problems with body shapers and breast size but hopefully I'll sort those problems out very soon.

* I intend to go out with my own hair instead of a wig. As I mentioned a while ago, my hair is longer than most of my wigs, but my receded widows peaks hairline discourages me from going out without a wig. I've been trying Minoxidil without discernible success, and will continue until I finish what I have. Unless it starts to show results, I'll consider hair transplantation after I finish the Minoxidil. I'm now also considering makeup techniques to make it less obvious without actually doing anything about the hair, or possibly getting an artificial fringe to clip in.

* I intend to organise myself so that I can pack my girl gear when I travel, and do so. I've been thinking about how to convert the cane basket that I bought recently and hope to start on it quite soon. At this stage, I have no suitable trips arranged this year but that's quite likely to change. While I didn't make it to Transformal last year, I might get there this year.

* I want to work on improving my female voice so that it fits my appearance. I have a recorder program on my internet tablet that should be quite suitable for recording and listening back, and will have to make myself spend time practising. I also need to get over the shyness that prevents me from comfortably practising my voice at home when anybody else is there. My wife and son both know about me, so there's no logical reason for the shyness and yet it persists.

* I intend to maintain my nails at an (un)reasonable length and wear nail polish virtually all of the time. I'm comfortable having about 8mm of overhang beyond the nail bed, and want to keep them at about that length. While I'd love to have them longer, I find that when they are longer than that, the rate of breakage and damage goes up noticeably. Even if I often wear a colour that is close to the natural colour of the nail bed to minimise attention, I intend to try to wear polish. Depending how things go through the year, I may wear increasingly obvious colours in boy mode.

I'm sure that there are more but I can't remember any others off hand.

Shape

2011-01-02T16:00:00.000+11:00

I'm very happy to say that I finished 2010 weighing in at 72.5kg. After getting to that weight once a few weeks ago, I went back up, peaking at 75kg as a result of various Christmas parties. Annoyingly, I seemed to get very peckish yesterday afternoon and evening, weighing in at 73kg again last night. I'm starting to think that perhaps there is a correlation between crossdressing and weight loss! The days that I'm crossdressed, I eat less between meals and therefore lose weight. Then again, it might just be the fact that when I'm en femme, I'm usually also away from home and hence away from the temptation to snack.

I have decided that my goal in weight loss is to try to get rid of the (now much smaller) spare tyre around my waist, but not go below 65kg. If I get to 65kg and still have the spare tyre, I'll just have to put up with it. If the spare tyre is gone and I'm still above 65kg, I'll adopt the weight that gets rid of the flab to be my target weight and try to maintain it plus or minus 1kg.

I'd like to say that once I get to my target weight, I'll be able to stop wearing a body shaper, but until I get there, I simply won't know. In the meantime, I will continue using the best flexible, comfortable body shaper that I can find. I will not wear rigid corsets and the like, they just aren't me. If I can't wear it comfortably all day on a hot Australian summer day, it's no good to me.

As part of my time out shopping on Friday I went for a drive and bought the Bella Bodies strapless boxer body shaper that I intended to buy. As it turned out, between when I made the decision to go there and when I actually went, I did some more research online and discovered that the style that I have now is obsolete and that there is a new style with a new sizing scale. The one that I bought on Friday was of the old style, and is quite suitable to wear with anything that covers conventional bra straps adequately. Given that the current recommended price is $65, the normal price from this shop was $70 but, with a 20% off sale it came down to $56, I'm happy to have another old style one, and will buy a new style one when the opportunity arises, probably during a trip to Sydney in the next month or two.

The new style changes 2 things. Instead of having a detachable shoulder strap on each side, they apparently rely upon a pair of straps that loop around the sides of the bra above it, eliminating the need for additional straps and opening up the possibility of fitting with any style of bra including halter, crossover, etc. The other thing that has changed is that with the new sizing scale, I'm now towards the top of the scale for the M size, instead of firmly in the L-XL size in spite of my recent weight loss.

Interestingly, the sizing scale no longer has Large and eXtra Large names in the scale. The scale is now S, M, V and VV. Apparently V is for Voluptuous and VV is for Very Voluptuous. As a marketing strategy emphasising positive body image terminology, I think that the naming is a brilliant idea.

The Bella Bodies strapless boxer isn't the only body shaper that uses straps around the bra. A few months ago, I ordered a similar garment from Spanx in the USA. The Spanx one doesn't just use side straps, though. It uses 4 straps, with two at the middle of the front and back and two at the sides. The strap at the front turned out to be quite noticeable under even a moderately low cut top! On a whim, I also ordered an all-in-one version that has an integral bra. When they finally arrived, weeks after the expected delivery time, they were too big to the extent that they were virtually a perfect fit for my size without compressing anything anywhere. They were also made from very heavy material. I would probably collapse from heat stroke if I wore one of them outside on a hot Australian summer day. The Bella Bodies material is thinner and breathes quite well, making them much cooler to wear. The only advantage that the Spanx have over Bella Bodies is that they are seamless, whereas the Bella Bodies have seams down the front and back.

The bra part of the all-in-one Spanx was not specified as a cup size. There was just a "size large" with rather stretchy cups and underwires suitable for about a C cup. The cups provide vastly inadequate support for D cup breasts and have too high a centre height at the front for my liking. Unfortunately, the cost of posting them back to the USA for a refund would have been throwing good money after bad, so I didn't bother returning them. Hopefully I can find someone a few sizes larger to sell or give them to. Hmm. Perhaps I'll consider a give-away to blog followers. I'll have to think more about that.

Recognition? Probably not - part 3

2011-01-01T16:30:00.001+11:00

I intend to do a wrap up of the year and set out my goals for ~~next~~ this year, but it will probably be spread across several posts over the next few days as I think of things that need wrapping up or that I want to mention. I think that there's just too much to fit in one post. First, I want to tie up and/or add to a few loose ends from the last week or so.

Just in case anybody is confused, the inlaws I am talking about most of the time are my wife's family. The sister-in-law whose mother volunteers in an op shop is the wife of one of my brothers.

After spending a few hours out shopping in the makeup-melting heat (which reminded me why I prefer air-conditioned centres with covered carparks over open air shopping centres with exposed carparks, such as Glendale Supercentre aka the smokers' shopping centre), I changed back into a frog and went out for dinner last night with my family, then drove to the inlaws' place. My sister-in-law almost immediately commented about the fact that I was no longer wearing the green and red nail polish that she commented on when I wore them on Christmas day, but didn't comment about the beige that I'm wearing now. Considering her earlier comments (which I mentioned in last year's wrap up post), I'm guessing that perhaps her attitude has softened a little, but I'm still not sure that I want to say anything.

In conversation, I also asked whether they had been at Charlestown Square on Wednesday, because I thought that I had seen my father-in-law there, pushing a pram. The answer was yes. I didn't mention how close to him I was at the time, or what I looked like. There was no indication that they had any idea, and I thought it best that I leave it that way for now.

Yay.

2010-12-31T16:30:00.000+11:00

Happy new year. Well, it's almost here. :)

I think that I'm slightly in shock. I didn't expect to achieve my goal, but I did it. I got out shopping today, meaning that I averaged an outing every 5 days for the year 2010.

There's a lot more that I intended to say today, but time is against me, I'm expected elsewhere this evening (by some of my wife's relatives, in boy mode) so I have to go and turn back into a frog now. Hopefully I'll do an introspective year in review and plan for the one ahead tomorrow.

So close

2010-12-30T15:00:00.003+11:00

As we get close to the end of the year, a couple of other things have also been close.

Yesterday, I got out for the 72nd time this year and unless I'm mistaken, I think that I came close to bumping into my father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law (and possibly her husband) and nephew while out shopping. I was walking along in Charlestown Square when an older guy pushing a pram looked over his shoulder and looked straight past me. I only glanced at him for the briefest moment, but I'm pretty certain it was my father-in-law. Given the direction that he was looking, it probably means that the rest of them were in a store behind me. I changed direction slightly and continued to a different part of the centre.

Given that they all know about me but don't talk about it, I thought it best to avoid creating a scene. I have no idea how any of them would behave towards me in that situation.

I only need one more to make my target of 73 outings and hence an average of once every 5 days over the whole year. That 73rd outing was going to be today. I asked my wife a few days ago if she had anything planned for this week and she said no, so I planned to change my nail colour from the green and red Christmas colours to something different, then go out to the cafe night Tuesday night, then shopping Wednesday and Thursday.

I had all of my nail polishes out on Monday, trying to find a suitable colour to go with some of my pink outfits. When my wife saw them all out, she got hers out as well, and I found a very suitable slightly purplish pink, which I applied on Tuesday afternoon. Sadly, it didn't harden properly so after getting home on Tuesday night, I re-did my nails with the same colour before going to bed. Again it didn't harden and the nails were a mess. My wife then informed me that she was given that nail polish in about 1988!

While I was out Wednesday, I bought a few new polishes including a similar shade, but I later decided to go with an entirely different colour for a few days, so I'm now sporting a Revlon beige colour called Putty. The 1988 polish will probably go in the bin today whether my wife approves or not!

When I mentioned last night that I intended to go out again today, my wife informed me that she was intending to go to a Zumba class today, meaning that I had to either have our son with me, or stay home with him. Given that I don't want to force him to go out with me, and that I will be expected to go out shopping with the family tonight in boy mode, it left me with too little time between her class and this evening to go out and do the errands that I wanted to do. instead, I took my beige nails out today and did some boy errands, making sure that I was back before my wife left for her class. Nobody appeared to notice the colour of my nails, but that was part of the reason for choosing the colour. It's a bit more subtle than the dark brown that I considered wearing in boy mode recently.

I also made a phone call to confirm that a Bella Bodies body shaper that I want to buy (to replace a worn out one the same) is in stock at a shop about half an hour's drive away. The lady confirmed that they have them, and when I asked about the price she also informed me that they are on special until the end of tomorrow. It looks like I'll be going out en femme tomorrow instead of today, which means I might make my goal after all.

If I was out crossdressed past midnight tomorrow night, would that count as an outing for next year as well? :p

PS don't ask me why I had my hand spread across my belly in the above photo. I don't know, and think that it looks silly but the photo shows a top that I hadn't worn before, which emphasises my relatively slim waist and I didn't get a photo without my hand there so I'm stuck with it.

PPS yes, I'm now making it a habit to watermark photos used on my blog and in forums because some have been used without permission.

A little problem

2010-12-27T08:00:00.004+11:00

I have a little problem.

I've now spent 2 days in boy mode with my nails painted alternating bright green and bright red. Very Christmas colours, but on nails that are clearly too long and shaped for a guy. I've only been around people who I know - my wife's relatives one day, friends the other.

The problem? I've had a taste of having brightly coloured nails for a couple of days and don't want to go back to the drab pale pseudo-natural finger nail colour that I usually wear.

Yesterday, I considered that we will again see some of my wife's relatives on Monday night and I wondered about leaving my nails as they are until Tuesday. Then I considered taking the colours off and reversing them to see if anybody commented. :)

Last night, I even started looking at tops or dresses that would go with these nail colours so that I could leave them as they are and go out during the day on Monday and again for the Tuesday evening cafe outing. I found a couple of tops that didn't really match both colours but could work okay during the day. The only evening outfit I found was the one that I wore last Tuesday and a fortnight earlier, which I don't intend to wear again this week!

The most likely outcome is that I'll stay home during the day today, visit relatives tonight, change polish to something chosen to complement whatever I decide to wear tomorrow night, then have to try to convince myself to revert to a drab colour before we go shopping on Thursday night. I can see myself looking for a drab-ish but slightly brighter colour to replace the present drab colour...

Unfortunately, the likelihood of making my target number of outings for the year is looking less and less likely, as I'd have to get out at least 3 times between now and Friday and I'm not sure that I'm really up to that. Tuesday night is virtually a certainty but the rest of the week is quite uncertain. Part of my problem is that I don't actually have any specific places that I want to go to or things that I want to do, except that I want to do it wearing bright nail polish! :)

I like your nails. Very colourful

2010-12-26T08:00:00.002+11:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I wasn't sure what sort of reception I'd get with my nails painted red and green. Even yesterday morning after my blog post, I was still considering taking the colour off and going back to neutral because I looked at them in the bathroom mirror and was worried that the colours really draw attention to how long they are.

I wandered around to hand out Christmas cards to my neighbours before driving to the inlaws' place, and the first couple pretended not to notice, the second couple chatted about them because they already knew from facebook, and the third said nothing but already knew because they'd seen them on Christmas eve.

I then drove the family to the inlaws' place, where only one person said anything. Interestingly, it was the person who made a rather strong unapproving remark some time ago. On this occasion, the comment was "I like your nails. Very colourful." I responded with a comment about them being Christmas colours and left it at that. My 2 year old nephew was quite entertained by them, particularly when I waved my fingers around.

In the evening, we went to a larger gathering of my wife's relatives, which included all of those who we had been with at lunch plus several more (including the cousin that I almost bumped into while out shopping at Easter last year), and none of them said anything at all.

Today is boxing day. I haven't taken the nail polish off yet, and am considering visiting a couple of friends today, as I did on boxing day 2008.

Christmas nails

2010-12-25T09:00:00.000+11:00

Merry Christmas. :)

I'm planning on doing something today that I wimped out on last year. I've done my nails in alternating green and red, in colours approximating the traditional Holly leaf and berry colours, and I plan on going to my inlaws place for lunch, then to a larger gathering of more inlaws in the evening, in boy mode, with my nails like this.

I have approval from both my wife and son to do this, although my son preferred a lighter shade of green. I applied the red to one middle finger nail and the 2 greens to the nails either side of it and wore them like that for several hours yesterday while trying to choose which green to go with. When I put them against the shirts that I have to choose from, there was no contest as the lighter green simply didn't work with any of them.

If I survive the day, I plan to post a follow up tomorrow. :)

That's me

2010-12-24T10:00:00.003+11:00

After Wednesday evening's outing to Charlestown Square, I noticed that I'd torn the edge of one of my nails over the nail bed, up past an acrylic patch that was done last week. When I removed the nail polish that I'd worn since Tuesday afternoon, I realised that I had tears on the edges of 3 nails, not just one. All were on nails that had been patched in the past 2 weeks, and when I went to use my nail glue on them, I discovered that the bottle was stuck shut.

Fortunately, I managed to make it to Thursday morning without making any of them any worse. I realised that my son had received some money with Christmas cards at my family get-together on Sunday, so I took his building society book with me when I went into town. I went to the salon first to see if I could get an appointment later in the day, and one of the women there had time to do full overlays on those 3 nails straight away. While there, I chatted with a couple of older women who were getting their nails and hair done. I got my internet tablet out and loaded the photo from Wednesday ready to show the woman next to me, just as she got up from the nails area and went back to the hairdresser's room.

When they were done, I left the salon feeling quite self conscious of my nails. They were all either bare or clear coated, the 2 extended nails were visibly different to the rest, and the lengths varied from 8mm to 10mm past the nail bed.

I walked into the building society branch, and one of the regular tellers was free. I got out my son's book and decided to add some more cash to the deposit. While I was getting the money out, the teller complimented me on my nails and asked how I managed to keep them looking so good. I replied "I make a lot of effort", then, remembering that I'd left the photo on the screen of my internet tablet, I pulled it out and showed it to her, saying "That's me." She smiled. I scrolled through a few previous photos. I think that she said something like "You'd never guess." We had a brief conversation about it. Some of the usual questions. Yes, I'm married and my wife knows and is fine with it, etc. I also asked something that I've been wondering for years, whether I could get a Visa debit card connected to my existing account, with a different name on it. The answer, sadly, was that years ago, I could have, but the recent APRA (Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority) regulatory changes have probably made it impossible.

Knowing what places like the building society branch are like, I expect that all of the staff will know fairly soon. I might soon be able to start doing my banking while I'm out en femme. :)

Recognition? Probably not - part 2

2010-12-23T15:30:00.003+11:00

I went out again yesterday. I had a full loyalty rewards card from Salvos op shops, which would have expired at the end of the year, so my first 2 stops were Salvos stores. After using up the card at the second one, I went to a lingerie shop that used to carry Bella Bodies body shapers because the current one is about due for replacement. They don't carry the brand any more, and only had a few leftovers that didn't include what I was after. :( After that, I dropped into my local Lifeline op shop then did some shopping at the local Woolies.

When I got home, I just couldn't convince myself to change. In the evening, I decided to go out to Charlestown Square to see if I could find a replacement body shaper. I tried all the places that I could think of and drew a blank at all of them, but had a bit of a look at costume jewellery while I was there. While wandering along between stores, I had an almost heart stopping moment when I realised that a work customer and her late teen or early 20s daughter were walking directly towards me, just a few metres away. There was no way that I could turn around without drawing their attention, so I just looked past them and kept waking. Unlike my wife's cousin last year, there was no double take. No hint of recognition. I didn't look back to see if they looked back at me, but from what I saw in my peripheral vision, they didn't pay any attention to me.

The funny part is that I stopped and chatted to this customer for about half an hour in the same shopping centre while in boy mode less than a week ago, and her daughter was present at the time.

It took a little while for the adrenaline rush to wear off. I considered doing a few laps of the centre to see if could find them again, but thought better of it and left. :)

Recognition? Probably not

2010-12-19T20:00:00.000+11:00

As I mentioned yesterday, there was a family get together today. This was something that I had been anticipating for a few weeks, as it was the first time that I'd seen my sister-in-law since I went en femme to the op shop that her mother (I'll call her E for convenience) volunteers at.

Given that nothing was said by my sister-in-law about E recognising me at the shop, it's almost certain that E has said nothing to her about it. There's still a remote chance that E recognised me but chose not to say anything, but I don't really think that that is her style.

For now, I'm thinking that it's probably more likely that she didn't recognise me than that she did. A lack of comment doesn't prove anything either way, but certainly shifts the odds towards probably not. :)

Do you think anybody would notice?

2010-12-18T12:00:00.001+11:00

Last night, I did my nails in a nice dark brown colour in anticipation of going out en femme today. Then I ended up getting to bed so late that I got up too late for that to happen. There simply wasn't enough time between when I got up and when I'd be expected to go out for dinner with the family in boy mode to dress (including makeup, etc), go out for a while, then change, including removing makeup and showering.

So there I was, in my pyjamas, looking at my nails wishing that I could just leave them as they were and go out in boy mode. Nope, not going to happen with such a strong, obvious colour on such long nails.

I jokingly asked my wife and son if they thought that anybody would notice. Both were quite positive that people would indeed notice, so I reluctantly removed it and re-did my nails in the frankenised neutral colour that I usually use during the day.

With a family get-together tomorrow, that means no en femme outing today or tomorrow. I've also still got a backlog of work related paperwork to be done before I can really start my holidays. I can see myself falling even shorter of my goal than I had previously anticipated. :(

A basket case

2010-12-17T17:00:00.001+11:00

Today, I decided to drop into the salon that I went to last week, to see if I could get splitting and cracking on the edges of another 2 nails patched up. This time around, the owner of the salon greeted me by name. She was just finishing with another client and was able do it for me straight away. By getting the edges repaired as soon as possible, I hope to be able to avoid damaging any of my other nails while I grow out the nails that have acrylic and gel on them. Even bare, the ones that have an acrylic repair on an edge are hard to pick from the ones that are completely natural.

Having finished there, I wandered around the nearby op shops. One was having a 50% off sale, and had a cane basket outside the front door for $3. It has a little damage here and there but overall it looks okay. I immediately thought of my need to make or buy a travel case for carrying a wig on a stand, foam padding etc. and decided that for the price, the basket would be worth the gamble on whether I could make it do the job or not.

I had a closer look and I measured the basket after I got home. I found that the basket has a sturdy timber frame with metal hinges on the lid, and that it is 320mm square at the top and 580mm high inside. Considering that I was generously estimating that I needed about 300mm round by 600 high, it's pretty close. I'm not sure when I'll next be travelling that I might need or be able to use this case, as I'm already committed to staying home to work next time my wife and son go away, but I'll be looking at how to modify it to do the job very shortly, so that it is ready when I am. :)

A little down

2010-12-12T15:00:00.001+11:00

After noting that I was going to fall short of my target for how often I get out over the year, I realised that I might still be able to make that target if I was able to get out once a week in addition to the planned cafe nights. I got out last Saturday, and even took this photo with the Newcastle landmark Nobbys in the background. It was also the day that I realised that I really need to make an effort to find my female voice again.

Logically, it would follow that I should have gone out again this weekend to have a chance of making my target. Sadly, it was not to be.

I went out to a Christmas party in boy mode last night, and ate too much. Since the one night where I was down to 72.5kg a few weeks ago, my weight has been steadfastly remaining at 73kg. It was the most stable that my weight has been in years. Instead of floating across a range of about 1kg from day to day, it was the the same day after day until last night, when it jumped to 74.5kg. I expect that it will be back down close to 73kg again by tonight, but I'm disappointed that I still don't have the self control to avoid overeating like that.

I also planned to change my nail polish last night before I went to bed so that the polish had time to harden rather than applying it in the morning and having it messed up before I got out the door. After getting home from the party late, I should have had a shower then removed the old polish before I sat down in front of the computer, and applied the new stuff while I was sitting there, but I didn't.

As usual, I lost track of time and didn't get to bed until about 2am and then didn't get up until 10am. I was resigned to leaving my nails in the neutral colour that they are, but planned to dress and go out this afternoon. Then I tried to decide what I would do and where I would go. In spite of having vague ideas about going to Morisset Mega Markets or possibly wandering around some suburban shopping centres, I simply didn't have a definite plan and so many places are closed on a Sunday that I sat down in front of the computer for a while. An hour later, I still didn't have any real idea where I would go and realised that with the time having got away from me, I didn't really feel like pushing myself to go out. It is, after all, supposed to be an enjoyable experience. There's no point in pushing myself to do something that I don't feel like doing.

Around about then, I was playing with the Friend Finder on Facebook and one of my wife's relatives who had been one of my friends came up. In other words, he has made a conscious decision to remove me as a friend. I think that it was inevitable, as he has never commented on anything that I've put on my wall or interacted with me. Removing me as a friend gets all my stuff off his news feed, which fits with knowing about me but choosing to say nothing. I guess he doesn't want my photos and blog posts being stuck under his nose.

On the upside, the decision not to go out today gives me a chance to concentrate on paperwork that has to be done for work. Some really needs to be done today and some needs to be done within the next week to hopefully clear the backlog before I start holidays. If I don't get it done, I'll have it hanging over me while I'm on holidays over Christmas, which will either lead me to doing it during my holidays or leave me stressing about it not being done. I should also try to mow the grass today, as it has been left unmown for too long. I guess today is turning into an opportunity to remove obstacles to getting out later in the month. Making my target looks unlikely but it's not impossible yet.

From bored to happy in seconds

2010-12-09T10:00:00.005+11:00

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had repaired a nail by gluing it back together. I'm happy to say that the repair held long enough for the nail to grow so that the tear was past the end of the nail bed before falling apart so badly that I had to trim and file it back. That left me with 8 nails that were fairly long, one with about half the overhang past the nail bed of the others and one that was right back at the end of the nail bed.

Of course, I didn't want to cut any of the long ones back, and the most obvious solution was to get acrylic nails done just on the 2 that were short.

With that in mind, I wandered into a local salon in boy workday mode yesterday afternoon and asked about getting a couple of nails done, and a couple of damaged spots on others fixed. It took a little convincing for the rather bored teenage daughter at the front of the salon to go and check with her mother on whether it would be possible for me to get them done. The mother came out and informed me that she was busy and running a little late but if I wanted to come back at 4:45, she could do them then.

At the appointed time, I walked back into the salon and sat down in the waiting area. The daughter still looked quite bored and entirely disinterested in talking to me. Within a couple of minutes, the woman finished with her previous customer and was ready for me. As I sat down at the table with all of the nail gear on it, she asked me why I wanted my nails done. Was I a musician? I said "No, I'm a crossdresser" then took out my internet tablet and showed her a few recent photos, starting with this photo from the previous night's cafe outing.

It's amazing how positive some people can be towards crossdressers. The daughter's attitude in particular changed very rapidly, from bored to interested and happy. Both were obviously surprised that I was so open about it. A asked the woman if she would have guessed from the pierced ears, long hair etc. and she shook her head and said no, she wouldn't have guessed. The conversation then went onto some of the usual questions like when did I start crossdressing, how did my wife feel about it, and when I mentioned that I have a son, how did he handle it. Part way through, the mother had to go and do a spray tan on someone else, and while she was away, the daughter told me about a couple of her gay friends at school who are struggling with their non-accepting parents.

The conversation covered a remarkable range of topics, from whether I used a different voice when in girl mode (to which I responded that I used to and need to practice, and told the story that I wrote about a few days ago) to whether I had trouble walking in heels (I explained that I often wear 12cm heels and have no trouble walking in them).

While she was doing my nails, the woman asked if I normally wore colour, as the acrylic nails are more white than my natural nails (which are showing some staining from previous nail polish). I haven't been using colour much lately but after I got home, I cleaned off the old clear coat and I've now put a couple of coats of the light opaque nail polish that I mixed up some time ago onto my nails. It's pale, a little bit too pearl and a little bit too reflective, but it's translucent enough to be able to see through the tips of the nails and makes the colour difference between the nails less obvious. It'll just have to do. :)

Voice

2010-12-05T13:00:00.001+11:00

I really need to work on my female voice.

Somewhere along the line, I've overcome my phobia of using lifts (elevators) en femme, but using one yesterday led to the realisation that my voice is quite a problem. I use the lifts in the new section of Charlestown Square fairly often and know what the various levels are called. On the way up into the centre from the car-park, a couple of women entered the lift on level 1 on the way up to level 2. They looked at the buttons and looked confused. The levels from bottom to top are P1 (P for parking), P2, P3, 1 and 2. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that there are 3 levels inside the centre, but the bottom one is called G (ground floor) and doesn't extend to where these lifts are. I think that the women were expecting to go from level 2 to level 3.

To help them out, I explained that they had entered on level 1 and were going up to level 2. There was a clear "oh right" reaction, closely followed by a double take at the incongruity between my appearance and my voice. I'm guessing that I had passed on appearance but my voice just didn't fit with my appearance.

I have previously spent time working on my female voice with some success, but tended to find that I was overly self conscious about practising it around the house and would only whisper when anybody else was home, so I've never really been confident in using it in public. I didn't have a convenient way of recording myself before, but have recently discovered a sound recording program for my internet tablet, and it works quite well. While I'll try to start practising this month, I think that it is going to be another goal for next year. I want to develop a voice that is consistent with my female appearance.

Falling short

2010-12-03T14:00:00.002+11:00

I could blame my work. I could blame other people around me. I could even blame the phases of the moon but the truth is that there is only one person to blame for the fact that I'm unlikely to make my target of averaging one outing every 5 days over the whole year. Me.

I just keep doing self destructive things all of the time. As I type this, I'm lying in bed with a migraine after midday on a Friday that I took off work because I had planned to go out. The headache started on Wednesday night, on the rather late drive home from the Central Coast cafe night and has steadily worsened as I've continued to do stupid things like sitting in my office until after midnight trying to do paperwork but getting little or nothing done. Of course what I should have done was to was to go to bed early to try to relieve the headache and be more productive later, but I didn't. It seems that my hindsight is far better than my foresight.

I'm still going to try to get out a few times this month. I only got out 7 times in November, and I've been out once so far this month, which means that I need 8 more outings (including 4 planned cafe nights) this month. With the headaches and increasing backlog of work, I'm pretty much resigned to falling short of my target.

I've been considering my target for next year. I'd love to aim for once every 4 days but I doubt that there's any real chance of getting out that often. The reality is that the reason why I'm falling short this year is that I had several months in the middle of the year where I fell short each month, and it's those missed outings that I'm trying to catch up at year's end. My target for next year, then, is to not only average better than once every 5 days, but also to have a minimum of 6 outings including at least one daytime outing every month.

This year, I've prioritised cafe nights over other non-crossdressing events. I may not be able to do that next year. If I have to miss a cafe night, I'm going to aim to make up for it with another outing the same month.

A weight loss milestone

2010-11-30T11:00:00.004+11:00

When I stepped onto the scales last night, I was pleased to find that I was down to 72.5kg (my scales work in 0.5kg steps). This is something of a milestone for me.

Last time I made an effort to lose weight was a couple of years ago. I got down to 73kg a few times in 2008 but no lower.

I realise that this is going to sound odd but a few months ago I found an old spreadsheet that I'd started years ago, where I had started to chart my weight from the rare occasions where I had written it in diaries over the years. Over a few weeks, I updated the spreadsheet using newer diaries, giving me a record of my weights all the way from 1990 to now (with some very long gaps). I've varied all the way from a high of 92.5kg in 1994 to a low of 68.5kg in 2006.

Looking at this graph makes me far more aware of my weight variation over the years, and is how I realised that getting below 73kg was a milestone. The last time my weight was below 73kg was in late 2006. The next milestone for me will be getting below 71kg. The last time I was below that was in mid 2006. The really big milestone will be getting below 68.5kg, as that will make me the lightest I've been in my whole adult life.

It's amazing how much a graph on the computer has focussed my attention on my weight. I'd never before realised how much my weight fluctuated, and I'm now far more conscious of it. Hopefully it'll help me to keep focus and get my weight to where I want it, and keep it there!

Affirmation

2010-11-29T12:10:00.000+11:00

After the negativity that I experienced on Saturday morning, I was surprised to realise that I was quite happy by the end of the weekend. I received a great deal of support on facebook and on the forums where the negativity occurred, not only from friends but also from some people who I barely know but who look like becoming genuine friends. The number of affirmations of my character, my parenting and my right to be who I am has been overwhelming. To all of those who supported me, whether you commented or not, I sincerely thank you.

I made a comment on Saturday that I've come to realise isn't really true. I said that I wasn't hurt by the comments aimed at me. I think that for more than a day, I was telling myself that I wasn't hurt by it, but I eventually realised that I was. Hurt not so much personally but by the fact that people can be so spiteful, hurtful and negative towards someone that they don't even know, on the basis of a personal or institutional bias.

By the time that I realised that I was hurt by what had been written, I had already been overwhelmed by the positive comments from so many people that I realised that, in the whole situation, I have come out ahead. I have had considerable support from a number of people far outweighs the negativity of one twisted person. I have gained friends for being honest and I have a few more people following my blog including at least one who had never heard about crossdressing from the crossdresser's point of view before. I'm happy to know that I am educating people about transgender issues, and hopefully increasing the level of acceptance within the community.

Dealing with hate

2010-11-28T21:00:00.001+11:00

[name], I forgive you for your thoroughly unchristian comments and pity you for the abuse that you have suffered to have had such a hurtful and hateful attitude ingrained into your very being.

I will pray for you, that you might come to know the love and compassion of Jesus Christ our saviour.

It's not the sort of thing that most people would usually expect from me, but it's what I wrote in a forum on Saturday.

On Saturday morning, I woke up early and was considering getting dressed en femme and going out shopping. While still lying in bed, I turned on my internet tablet, had a quick look at facebook, then opened blogger. There was a comment awaiting moderation, so I opened and read it.

The comment was posted anonymously in response to my post Out and about with my son, and basically said "Why don't you stop doing that and just be a normal man" (the answer is, of course, that that just isn't who I am. It would be on par with telling a female executive that she should be uneducated, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen), indicated that in the poster's opinion, crossdressing equals homosexual (a change from the assumption that all crossdressers are transsexuals, I suppose, but just as wrong), and that they considered me to be a bad parent because my son is exposed to my crossdressing (a loving parent, in a stable marriage, who works to provide for that family is a bad parent? Compared to what?). In my not-entirely-awake state, I thought churchianity idiot (or similar) and deleted the comment. In hindsight, I wish that I'd kept the comment so that I could have published it, to show just how misguided the author is.

I then went on to have a look at the forums on a web site that I frequent. I was shocked to find a post in there, in a thread about blogs, that was written in a style very similar to the blog comment, saying similar things. In part, the poster said that I was "sick and should be stopped." Except that this time, it wasn't anonymous because the site doesn't allow anonymous posting. I didn't immediately know how to react.

Sadly, combined with my usual lack of sleep, this rudeness threw me off balance enough that I abandoned my plan to dress and go out.

By the time I went back to the forum to post a response, a few other forum members had responded, variously defending me and/or criticising the other poster. I asked myself the question "what would Christ do?", then posted the above comment.

I believe that the best response to bigotry and hatred is forgiveness and pity. Preferably delivered with a smile. It's not worth dragging yourself down to their level, and if nothing else, it'll confuse the hell out of them. :)

Wednesday op shopping

2010-11-25T10:00:00.006+11:00

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was tempted to go out shopping on a Wednesday to the op shop where my sister-in-law's mother (I'll call her E for convenience) volunteers. Well, yesterday was the day.

Before I left home, I realised that I was nervous. Really nervous, like I used to get every time I went out. Nervous to the point that I was a little shaky. I was assuming that I was nervous about how she might react to me, but the nerves settled down almost as soon as I turned out of my driveway and drove off down the road. If that sounds odd, it's not, really. I work from home, and often get people showing up without appointments wanting to talk to me. I think that what I was nervous about was probably far more to do with being seen leaving home than what would happen while out shopping.

I drove straight to the suburb in question, parked in a convenient carpark and walked straight into the nearest op shop, where E was behind the counter, which was located about half way back through the shop. She was chatting with another volunteer who was putting clothes onto racks near the counter. I browsed along the dress racks at the front of the shop, finding nothing of interest. I did a couple of laps of the front half of the shop looking for skirts, then realised that they were just past the counter, towards the back of the shop. I found 2 skirts that I was interested in, turned to E and indicated that I wanted to try them on.

Some op shops insist that you show the staff before trying clothes on, so I make a habit of doing it in most of them unless I'm sure that I'm not expected to ask. She pointed me to the dressing room and said something along the lines of "Yes, try them on." Sadly, they were too low waisted for me, so I put them back on the rack and paused to look at something near the counter. The lady putting clothes out made a comment about hating getting old, and I turned around and looked at her, smiled and said "It's better than the alternative." I looked at E and smiled at her as she agreed with what I'd said, then casually wandered out of the shop and down the street to the next op shop.

So the big question I'm asking myself is did she recognise me? There was no indication that she did, and the colour of the wig that I was wearing is the closest that I have to my own hair colour, so probably the most likely to be recognisable. To some extent, her lack of reaction makes me think that she didn't recognise me, but then I think that I look so similar that she must have recognised me but not known how to react. For now, I think that I'll just assume the latter and wait and see if there is any feedback through the family. If she says something to my sister-in-law, I'm pretty certain that I'll know about it fairy quickly, whether it's good or bad!

Repairing torn nails

2010-11-22T14:00:00.001+11:00

I had read a thread on Beauty Heaven some months ago on how to repair torn nails. It's something that I've tried before without much success. That was, up until yesterday when I repaired a nail that was torn over half way across.

I have recently had small tears on the sides of 2 nails, and had used nail glue on both of them. The glue would set in the narrow gap of the tear and I'd file the roughness off the top, but the glue wouldn't hold and I redid them over and over for a couple of weeks. The nails each ended up with a groove across the top of the tear and the glue wouldn't dry there. It only seems to dry in between things. The glue also wouldn't go to the very edge of the nail, meaning that there was always a bit sticking out to snag on things. Yesterday afternoon, one of those nails snagged and tore.

After thinking about the suggestions in the Beauty Heaven thread, I applied glue in the tear and over the top of the groove, then put a piece of tissue across the top of the glue and pushed it in with an orange stick. The glue saturated the tissue and then dried and hardened. Yay. :)

I trimmed and buffed the edges of the paper away, then repeated with another piece of paper that I had cut to follow the edge of the nail. With a little bit of experimentation, I've managed to repair the nails right to the edge, so that there is nothing to snag, and filled in the grooves.

Hopefully I'll have some time to shape and paint my nails soon, and I'll see if the repairs are visible. I'll have to wait and see if they tear through the repairs.

In the above photo, the row of pale spots across the nail are the visible remains of the tear after it had been glued and filed. The edge of the nail at the bottom of the photo has been filed a bit too much from trying to remove the snagging edge of the nail before I tried using the tissue.

Going wigless

2010-11-21T10:00:00.000+11:00

My own hair is actually longer than most of my wigs. Yes, I have a couple of waistlength wigs that are longer than my own hair, but all the others are shorter. I've been wanting to go out without a wig for a while now, but I have quite pronounced widows peaks, which annoy me because they make it virtually impossible to create a hairstyle that will not only look feminine but will stay that way if the wind blows my hair around.

I decided that I'd try Minoxidil to see if I could get the hair to re-grow. It's a topical application (ie rub it onto the bald spots), which has to be used twice per day, which I'm finding quite frustrating because it not only needs to be done twice a day, but it also isn't supposed to be covered with a hat, wig etc for at least an hour after application. That means that most mornings, I have to go out in the sun without a hat for a while, which I don't like doing because of my fair skin.

I've also come to realise that the solution that the 5% Minoxidil is diluted in are high on the list of the products that should be avoided where possible, namely alcohol and propylene glycol. I now have dandruff around the perimeter of the area that is being treated.

Does it work? Maybe. I have light vellus hairs all the way from the widows peaks to my brows, and struggle to see whether any of the hairs in the treated area are any different to the ones further down my forehead. I've been using it for several months, and I've decided to complete the pack that I bought and make a decision then on whether to continue or stop. I'm about half way through, and I can see a few short stubby hairs here and there that might be non-vellus but they're not long enough or dark enough to be sure.

If, when I get to the end of my supply of Minoxidil, I decide not to continue using it, I'll probably look into hair transplants. The area to be done is not very large and if transplantation means not having to apply harsh chemicals to my scalp twice a day, I'll be much happier.

Either way, I'm setting myself a goal of having enough hair on my widows peaks to get out en femme without a wig before the end of next year.

A little down on weight, a lot down on sleep

2010-11-18T10:00:00.004+11:00

Back in September, I mentioned that I'd dropped 10kg in 12 weeks. In the 8 weeks since then, I've dropped another 2 or 3kg. How much I had lost didn't really sink in until I went to wear an outfit on Tuesday night that I hadn't worn since last summer. Back then, I was wearing a belt with a buckle, done up in the second longest hole of 5. Last night, I put the belt on, buckled it to the shortest hole and found that it was too loose. I finished up borrowing a smaller belt from my wife. For comparison, I've put the photo from last night above a photo from January.

In spite of my apparent feminine shape, I still have something of a spare tyre, which I want to lose. It's certainly not as bad as it was, but it's still some there. To prove that, I was going to post a photo but I really don't like the way my belly looks naked! The reason why my waist looks so small and as gives the impression that I don't need to lose any more weight is a combination of a considerable amount of padding on my hips and butt and a body shaper that pulls in the flab.

While I'm starting to get my weight loss back on track, my sleep pattern is still badly screwed up. It's not uncommon for me to get home from a cafe night, upload photos from my camera, crop a few, post them to facebook, email some, then do some other stuff like composing blog posts before heading off to bed after 3am. If I'm lucky, I have a late start and can get up at 9am. The following day, I might have to be up at 6am, and get to bed around midnight. It's not just the lack of sleep but the variation in when I go to sleep and get up that makes it almost like permanent jet lag. :(

At least I got a few compliments on my waistline and blonde wig from others in our group. I also got compliments on my pattered tights from others at the restaurant. They are still the most consistent ice-breaker with other women. :)

Epilation

2010-11-15T10:00:00.003+11:00

For over 10 years now, I've used an epilator to remove facial hair fairly regularly. Why do I do it? Simple, really. I don't like facial hair. I don't like the way it feels, and it always makes me itch, as does body hair. I'm not certain but I think that I'm allergic to my body hair. Let it grow and the skin that it rubs against always comes out in a rash. Removing facial hair also means that I don't need to use heavy makeup to hide beard shadow. The lack of beard shadow as a male doesn't really bother me, and nobody has ever commented about it.

Most people have experienced hair being pulled out one way or another, such as by the glue on a band-aid, by waxing or by using an epilator, and assume that removing facial hair that way must be incredibly painful. The first few times, it was quite painful, as is the first time after I've gone a few weeks without doing it. The more often it is done, the fewer hairs there are to remove and the finer the hairs are, making it much less painful.

The big downside is ingrown hairs. If you remove hair without using some sort of ingrown hair treatment, you'll probably end up with ingrown hairs. How many and how bad varies from person to person. I've tried a few different products over the years, and have been using Nad's Ingrow Solution for at least 5 years. If I get slack and don't use it, I get ingrown hairs. If I use it consistently, I don't. These days, I have far more trouble with my legs after waxing than my face after epilation. If you're wondering why I get my legs waxed instead of using the epilator, the main reason is time. Doing such a large area simply takes too long and I don't start because I know how long it will take.

After all this time, I've found out that it is a controversial topic. I've been told quite vehemently by self appointed experts that epilation of the face is something that "nobody should ever do". The main reason given is torsion, where the hair roots get twisted and the hairs no longer grow straight, causing ingrown hairs and making it difficult or impossible to do electrolysis. Another reason occasionally given is that it can cause scarring. I guess that if the hair was strong and heavy, that could be true but I can't say that I can see any skin damage from the epilator since the first few times, when I was pressing it too hard and grazed the skin. At this point I'm not having trouble with ingrown hairs, I'm not seeing twisted hairs, I can't see the value in getting electrolysis done when regular epilation is such a cheap and easy alternative and I don't believe that my skin is being damaged by the process. If I was going to experience these problems, I would have expected to see them by now!

I know some people who don't believe that ther hairs become sparser or thinner with regular epilation, and who always experience ingrown hairs no matter what they do to try to prevent them. Everybody is different, and I'm quite happy to continue doing what works for me.

Out and about with my son

2010-11-14T10:00:00.002+11:00

Somewhere along the line, my son has decided that it would be a bad thing to go out with me when I'm en femme and it's probably my fault. A couple of years ago, he was misbehaving while I was getting ready to go out for a cafe night. From memory, I think that the issue was that he didn't like what my wife was planning to prepare for dinner for them while I was out, and was having a tantrum about wanting something else instead.

I don't remember exactly how I said it, but I asked if he would prefer to go out for dinner with me instead of staying home. The idea was completely impractical because he goes to bed around 8:30, and I typically don't get home from a cafe night until after 10pm. Add in the fact that it was a Tuesday night during a school week and he absolutely hated the idea. I think that he thought that I was threatening to punish him by taking him out with me, and at the time that might have been true.

Unfortunately, the side effect of that is that ever since, any suggestion that he might go out somewhere with Alice has been met with immediate rejection. He doesn't apparently have a problem with me going out en femme, but doesn't want to go with me, even if it was to somewhere such as a shopping centre where he has no reservations about going with me when I'm dad.

I'm still trying to work out if I can turn his attitude around, and if so, how. I've got him to see op shops in a positive light by taking him there on the rare occasions that my wife is away and I have to take him with me when I do banking on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. We browse the boys racks and pick him up a shirt or two each time, but that's always with me as dad. Perhaps one day I'll suggest that Alice can take him op shopping and his interest in op shopping will outweigh his dislike for the idea of going out with Alice. I don't know.

I'm not going to push him into going out with me en femme, but I'm hoping that at some point in the future he'll choose to say yes. It's a shame that nobody that I know seems to have fancy dress parties, as that might have provided a good opportunity that isn't threatening to him. Of course, Alice would have to dress up as something or somebody. I'd have to think about that if the opportunity arose.

A transsexual in denial. Not.

2010-11-13T10:00:00.005+11:00

I've heard the question "What's the difference between a crossdresser and a transsexual? asked as a joke quite a few times over the years, with the answer being a period of time, usually 18 months or 2 years. As a crossdresser who has no intention of ever transitioning, I find this so-called joke remarkably insulting and inappropriate, particularly because it is usually told by transsexuals and pre-supposes that every crossdresser will eventually realise that they are in fact transsexual and will transition to living as the opposite gender. Worse, this attitude confuses people outside the transgender community, who see such statements as confirmation of a misconception that they already thought was a fact, that all transgender people will transition.

I've been on the receiving end of abuse from someone who believed that I was doing a disservice to my wife and son for being in my family. The assumption was that at some point in the future (presumably sooner rather than later), I would abandon my family to transition so I shouldn't have been there in the first place. Another person was very upset when they found out about me, asking how they were going to explain to their son, when he gets older, why my son has two mothers. The answer is that he doesn't, and won't. Much as I'd probably enjoy spending a few consecutive days en femme, there are many reasons why I don't expect to ever live as a female continuously. It's simply not who I am.

This reinforcement of an incorrect stereotype is divisive to the transgender community, and yet I continue to see similar negativity expressed by all sorts of people who really should know better.

In a google search of blogs on crossdressing recently, I found one transsexual who believed that there were gay male drag queens, transvestic fetishists and transsexuals, and that the first two should stop trying to take advantage of civil rights gains by the latter. The author effectively denied the existence of crossdressers, implying that we are all fetishists or transsexuals.

Another blog that I stumbled upon appeared to claim to be authored by the partner of a crossdresser, and be in the form of an advice column. I read an article where that author advised that a father's crossdressing should be hidden from a young child, because what the parents do in their sex life is not something that a child should know about. The pre-supposition that crossdressing was purely a sexual thing also appeared to indicate a belief that crossdressers are all fetishists.

I'm at a loss to understand the motivation of either of those bloggers. I'm not sure whether they're impostors deliberately trying to spread misinformation, psychologically troubled or simply well meaning but incredibly misinformed. I can't think of any other alternatives.

This confusion between crossdressers and transsexuals reminds me of an incident that happened at a Seahorse NSW meeting many years ago. I was told by another member that I was a transsexual in denial, while my wife was standing alongside me. The logic used to justify this statement was that I made too much effort with my presentation. "If you were really only a crossdresser, you would be as unpassable as the rest us." Coming from someone who dressed like a street prostitute and openly acknowledged that fact, that was quite a remarkable statement. She simultaneously insulted every seahorse member present while saying something that could have potentially been damaging to my marriage if my wife had been as misinformed as some of the people I've mention above. Ironically, my presentation has evolved, matured and improved considerably since then.

It makes me so much more appreciative of my wife and the other people around me who accept me for who I am. I'm far from perfect, but I try my best.