fun week-end

Virginia · Post by **Virginia** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:04 pm

What a great time SL and I had this week-end!!! One of our own forum members came up and spent the week-end with us. Saturday we hosted our support group's monthly meeting and we had eleven of us here for dinner and conversation! It was great. I even provided a new snake, which was at the time unidentifiable but after going to the Virginia Natural Resources site and looking up snakes of Virginia (the Commonwealth, not me

) It turns out I had captured on my porch a rare, non-poisonous Northern Pine snake. Evidently a baby, about 12" long as they are born in August and September. It met all the listed colors and characteristics. It was a neat looking snake with like a gray band across its eyes. Anyway, I served it up on the grill and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Damn, girls, just kidding, seeing if anyone was reading this!!! I let it go and hopefully it will reach record length of 83" inches.

Sunday was Roanoke's "Pride in the Park" day which recognizes the GLBT community and our Tri-Ess group, for the first time had a booth set up and we garnered a bit of activity which was nice. Even with the overcast and morning rain, I would guesstimate 400+ folk in attendance. I know it would freak-out a lot of the "great unwashed" to know so many of us congregate in Roanoke! Ain't it great!? I even had some fun flirting with the local law enforcement. As he walked by and looked at me, I just smiled and said, " I love a man in uniform." One of the girls said he walked off, got on his radio and called for back-up as some blond was distracting him from his police duties.

Anyway we did have a bit of activity at the booth, just people stopping by and picking up literature, so hopefully we will garner a few new inquiries.

As SL and I were leaving one "gentleman" stopped me and said I looked like Gretta Garbo. I am going with that it was a compliment!

He was real sweet though and we spoke for a moment.

Ladies, get out and mingle.

Go Forth Woman and BE!!!

Love,

Virginia

Rony · Post by **Rony** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 7:54 am

Virginia
Yep! I did read your post, neat story if nothing else. Last summer I caught a small snake along the side yard. Turned out to be a bay rattler, I took it over to a near by brushy area around the bay and let it go.
Maybe it will keep the mouse and rat population in check.
Snake are neat, as long as they don't live at my house..

:-)

Rony

Virginia · Post by **Virginia** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 8:40 pm

Well so much for my head count. News article came out on the web --yeah, like our local paper would publish anything about the GLBT community ---- Anyway, attendance count was over 1000 WOW!!!! They said the first "Pride in the Park" had the organizers teriffied and they had over 100 attend and that was 20 years ago. It has grown steadily over the past years. The article also noted the abundance of young people. late teens and early twenties and to quote the article, "they get it!"

Even a couple of the local politicians showed up and they are not even running this year!

We are making progress!

Virginia

Absaroka · Post by **Absaroka** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 10:15 pm

A baby pine snake! That's really exciting.

I tried to pick up a rattler once, not knowing what it was and wondering about the funny noise it made with it's tail. Glad it didn't bite me.

Zari

JoAnnDallas · Post by **JoAnnDallas** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:43 pm

Back before I came out in 2006, wife and I lived in Roanoke, VA in 1999-2001. Then we moved to Lewisburg, WV which is only 1.5 hr drive to Roanoke. So we spent a lot of weekends in Roanoke until we move here to Dallas in 2005.
I wish I had come out sooner, so I could have meet you and SL and the rest of the Roanoke Tri-Ess chapter. I am a member of the Lambda Tau Nue (LNT) Tri-Ess chapter here in the Dallas area. Even got to go to Holiday En Fem 2006 and had a great time too.