Greeting cards and bars

I finally found a birthday card that's actually appropriate for one of my aunties. It says, "You have a special way of bringing laughter to the hearts of our family." And friends. And the Sisterhood. And people we barely know. Yah.

I really hate aunt cards. They're all so saccharine. "You are the sweetest thing ever!" "You are our ray of sunshine!" My aunties are not anybody's damn ray of sunshine. My aunties kick ass. And how come the aunt cards are all "you make me want to hurl with your candied pink sweetness" and the uncle cards are all "let your emotional repression lift for one stinking day of the year, and also look at this deer, sailboat, or golf course"? I swear, if my extended family didn't put so much importance on greeting cards....

In other news, if you're going to Minicon, come to pameladean's reading and the lj party! There will be bars! I feel so much better now that there will be bars. I obviously should have thought of The Scandosotan Girl's Default Action sooner. But now they are not just any bars, they're bars for Pamela. (Which also clears up which bars they will be: accidentally vegan ones.) Which is much better than just showing up at a con hotel and smiling expectantly around: hullo, it's me with bars? Anybody care? Bars? This makes me feel much better about the fact that I was apparently planning to wear the same skirt twice this week and had not scheduled laundry, so now my wardrobe is once again flung into confusion. And I have to get dressed soon. Meep. But bars, there will be bars, I will think about the bars.

It also looks like Minicon may not be an entirely dry con for me thanks to greatestofnates, but I'm not sure on that yet. Have to talk to markgritter.

I finished Checkmate last night. Uff da mai. Now I'm reading Peter O'Donnell's Dead Man's Handle, which is walking the line between "villain annoying within the story" and "villain so annoying he makes you want to set the book down and wander off to maybe make some bars." Except I don't have the stuff for bars.

The new printer is working fine, and I've got a whole pile of stuff going in the mail this morning on the way up to porphyrin's. yhlee, wilfulcait, and sienamystic: look for mail in a bit.

The Only Thing

onehipmama just found out that I'm an only child and asked me how I feel about it (a couple days ago now). To a certain extent this is like asking me how I feel about being an oxygen-breather: for many of you, having siblings is the default state of humanity, but it certainly isn't for me. And that's part of what being an only child is like: you just don't assume that there were other spawn running around someone's childhood home. For me, being an only child feels reasonable. It feels normal. It's just how things are. timprov and I make reference to "one of those weird sibling things," because it's the other way that's foreign, not our own upbringings.

( My only child stuff, at some length )