walkawayslowly

Friending policy: I mean, if you feel like it. I'm between fandoms right now (though that could change at the drop of a hat) and I mostly only talk about the random stuff I reread, veiled (or not so) complaints about my job, and life on the family's 60 acre ranch. So if that sounds like your cup of tea....

I have written fic, and it is entirely housed over at my website, Happier Endings. If reading on lj is more your thing, my SPN and SPN RPS fic is here, under this tag.

And now here's Merrin in ten bullet points or less:

1. Texas is home.
2. Diet dr. pepper is boss.
3. Managing people is sometimes more trouble than it is worth.
4. Reading is life.
5. My cats own me.
6. Friends are like therapy for poor people. (Quoting, quoting.)
7. TV on DVD means I don't have to watch commercials.
8. Wii is more important than sleep.

You guys, I have been feeling ALL OF THE FEELINGS lately. I feel like I'm one step away from bursting into tears all the time, but it's not particularly unhappy, it's just FEELINGS. I'm not even on DRUGS, I don't even know. (Although maybe that's the problem?)

I found out last summer that an older former coworker of mine (he's 63) has stage 3 lung cancer. I really rather adored this man, because he'd been kind of like my mother at work. He cuffed my pants for me and tied my shoes and let me sit on his lap (he is also gay gay gay) and would bring me lunch and heat up my queso for me. He told my mother on a great many occasions that if he'd been 25 years younger he would have married me, and despite the fact that he was gay he would have been completely faithful. Earlier this month I found out his lung cancer (which had been in remission over Christmas) has metastasized to brain cancer, and then on Tuesday I found out that his doctor has given him two weeks to live. I've only seen him once since the initial diagnosis, but my mom and I went over together on Thursday, and I got to hold his hand while the hospice minister baptized him. He told my mother again that he would have married me, and my mother again told him he's very sweet.

My nephew continues to be an overwhelming force of nature in our house. The divorce won't be final until the 22nd, and even then my brother technically gave her until the end of May to vacate the house. I love my nephew, really I do, but I will be pretty happy to have my house to myself again. I'll be happy to at least have a BREAK.

I've also seen a bunch of movies and read a bunch of books, but I don't particularly feel like talking about them in this post with my coworker, so maybe in a little bit, if my nephew is still asleep.

I truly, honestly cannot believe it's been more than a month since I posted. I can't remember a time when it's been that long. Big things have been happening to my family, and for a while I wasn't allowed to talk about them, and then I was too exhausted. 

My older brother is getting divorced. I know we're not the only family to go through divorce, but I've been really lucky in my life. My parents are celebrating 34 years this fall, and my grandparents were both married 50+ years. I don't have aunts, uncles, or close cousins to speak of, so divorce, my whole life, has been something that happens to other people. 

I know I've complained about my sister in law before. I'd be lying if I pretended I wasn't thrilled that sometime in May, I'll be able to defriend this woman on facebook and attempt to forget she ever existed at all.  

Thankfully? Fortunately? She is selfish and horrible and doesn't want children almost as much as she doesn't want a husband. My nephew has been living with us for the last month or so (as well as my brother). You all, really and truly, I have so much respect for people with children under five, especially people with MULTIPLE children under five. There are days I walk out of the house without my shoes on or my contacts in, because Liam is such a whirling dervish of energy and distraction. And I'm not even his primary caregiver.

So I'm not especially mad about the divorce, because my soon to be exSIL has been stealing my brother away from me for eight years now, and that I'm kind of sick of. What kills me is that some day my precious, adorable, daring nephew is going to grow up and realize his mother never really wanted him at all. That future pain just kills me right now, even though I know it's just borrowing trouble. I know he'll be better off without someone who throws things at him and yells at him to just leave her alone, but he's not going to remember that. At least, I hope he doesn't.

So they're living with us. It's amazing how quickly my brother has gone from awkward aquintance who bears passing resemblance to someone I used to know to actually BEING MY BROTHER again. Complete with name calling, hair pulling, stealing my shampoo and farting on me. (Allison likes to pretend gas doesn't exist, and would actually yell at my brother for HOURS when he burped in front of her. Hilarious thing? She's the one leaving him.)

Divorce is complicated. Luckily, my brother lost everything and then some a few years ago on real estate, so there's no assets to speak of and divide. She gets one car, he gets the other. He was terrified for a while that she would use Liam as a pawn to get more out of him before everything was said and done, but it turns out that she is too stupid to play that game. Harsh, but it's kind of true. She sometimes makes noises about wanting to see her son (it's been over a month) but every time my brother goes up there to sit down with her, she never actually asks about Liam. She just says that to get my brother up in Austin.

Reasons behind the divorce? She told a court appointed counselor that she never wanted to get married and be a mother, that now she's really into professinal cycling and can't handle all these demands on her previous time. The full time job she's going to have to get to support herself now will probably be more of a time suck than parenting ever was (FOR HER, I mean, I'm well aware that there are people who do it better). I'm pretty ecstatic she's the kind to take rash action, because my brother certainly would have taken MUCH longer to leave her. My brother, lord love him, is very much a status quo kind of guy. If it takes too much effort, leave it like it is.

I love getting to hang out with my nephew more, even if it means I sleep a lot less then I used to and have twice careened across the living room on matchbox cars. There are sticky finger prints on everything and all my recently watched things on netflix are cartoons. I frequently have to fight with him over who gets to use my phone, and I've sung the Rainbow Connection so many times on command that I've almost come to hate it. But I get bath time and nap time and watermelon kisses. I get tiny hands trying to tickle me and the POUNDING PATTER of little feet on wood floors. Laughter that fills up a room over the smallest, most delightful things. Bap (bath), yogurt (yoga), Ganny (granny), Beezil (Hazel), and wawamewun (watermelon).

As tired as I am of my brother using my towel and moving all my shit around in the living room, I'm going to be so sad when this is all over and they move back up to Austin.

You guys, I can't believe the last time I posted was VALENTINE'S DAY. Ugh. What in the world.

February was the busiest month ever. Through a series of over-committing myself to various people, I ended up with out of town plans every single weekend. (I'm choosing to heap the vast majority of the blame on my sister, since she doesn't read my lj and took up two of those weekends all on her own.)

But! We have her wedding dress, which I will post pictures of when I crop her face out. We have our bridesmaid dress, which I will also post pictures of at some future time. That was two weekends right there, and both of them involved copious amounts of driving on my part.

I also went to see my college friends in NC, which was AWESOME, by the way. College style drinking (it never gets old, and OH YEAH, I forgot I posted drunk that night, so you already know about it. good lord, that's so embarrassing.), watching of truly awesomely crappy movies (Burlesque, I'm looking hard at you), and celebrating of birthdays.

Then the last weekend I was up in OKC for a women's retreat. Which was awesome and a nice way to cap off a busy month, but OH MY GOD, I'm so happy March is here. I keep trying to make zero plans for my days off, and that keeps never working out in my favor, but I'm hopeful that some point in the not too distant future I'll be able to do something like sleep past 9:30 in the morning, or go the entire day without having to get dressed or leave my house. You guys, I need my Merrin time. It is valuable to me.

In other news, I had the incredibly horrifying experience of taking chickens to be processed. You guys, I don't think I'm ready for apocalypse ranch. I really like to be very far removed from my food. I crave the distance the grocery store affords me. I felt super guilty about that for a while, because if I have so much trouble with the process of their deaths, why shouldn't I have a problem eating them? And someone totally wise and awesome (she can own up to it if she wants to) told me it simply means I wasn't called to be a butcher, and I've decided I'm really quite okay with that. It might be a while until I eat chicken though. I would like to point out that the chickens on our ranch have a super awesome lifestyle. They get to range around all day and scratch in the dirt and eat bugs and sit in the sunshine. But we had way too many boys and they were getting in fights over all the girl chickens, and we can't use that many boys on the ranch. ( and I'M TOLD that the way they process them is one of the more humane ways they can do it )

THERE, ISN'T THAT PLEASANT. Don't click the cut tag, I mostly had to get it down for myself.

This entry is so WHOOO ALL OVER THE PLACE. For funsies, I'm now also going to tell you about the awful romance novel I just read. It's called Burning Skies and it's by Caris Roane. It's about winged vampires. Yes, I know. Sometimes I read things just because they exist.

( and I just decided to cut this for triggery things about rape. YES, RAPE IN MY ROMANCE NOVEL, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ) Sometimes I feel like the only sane person on goodreads.

Two! Two! Two cut tags in one entry. Except for rec entries, it might be a new record.

Ugh, you guys. My brain is so tired. It hurts.

Happy VD.

So I read some gay erotica, and I can't put it on goodreads or booknerds (my parents have links to those sites) and the people on amazon mostly don't care about my opinions.

First up: ( cut for those people on my flist that like to pretend I do nothing gay at all )

That's what one does, right? Talk about romance novels on Valentine's Day? Also, I accidentally wore red to work today, and then everyone thought I was getting into the spirit of the holiday, and honestly I wanted to kill people all day long. Yikes.

ETA ALSO THANKS FOR THE V-GIFTS, sylverwind and gwyntastic. YOU GUYS ARE FANCY. :))))

You guys. You guys. There's a Star Trek story that is burning a hole in my head with the desire to be reread, except I can't remember a single thing about it. Like, I've got a scene, and that's really about it. Don't know who wrote it or what the title is, not even a little bit. And for some reason, I don't seem to have it on my pinboard.

*GOES CRAZY*

And ststoryfinders is taking FOREVER to approve my joining their merry little band of deviants. And no one on my flist (that I can think of offhand) reads Kirk/Spock. BLARG.

ETA: HA. I just stumbled across it on my own, thank goodness. If anyone's interested, the story is Haven by corpus_invictus. :)

IN OTHER NEWS.

I am rereading all the fic in every fandom I've ever loved and not at all reading the book I've been reading for the last week. The kiss of death seems to be me adding it on my currently reading shelf on goodreads. I really should stop doing that.

I need a shiny and new fandom. Any suggestions?

SO. HI.

I went in for my tests on Thursday. Every single thing about my heart is normal normal normal. It performed like a champ during the stress test (my lungs, however, did not, but I was packing my inhaler). It looked perfectly normal throughout the entirety of the echo test. (Which, let's discuss, was slightly creepy. My heart looks like a little alien in there.)

So that's the good news.

The bad news, of course, is that because my heart is normal normal normal, the palpitations were definitely caused by stress, caffeine, or a combo of both. I haven't yet experimented with caffeine to see if it's just the new normal, though I might at some point. I know it's a good thing it's just the caffeine, really I do, but I miss it. (FIRST WORLD PROOOOBLEMS.)

Also last night, this happened:



The kitten did not want to be held. Good thing I've got a party to go to tonight, where I will be wearing this new low cut dress I bought.....

ETA: OH, AND IS ANYONE STILL WATCHING CHUCK? ( because the end of that series )