potentialities

My parents and I were going to go up to Minneapolis this week to visit my brother and take in the Minnesota State Fair, preferably in the form of a bucket of Sweet Martha's chocolate-chip cookies paired with bottomless glasses of milk.

Sadly, we have been doubly thwarted in these plans, as it is not only hotter in Minneapolis than it is in Kansas City but actually under an extreme heat advisory, and anyway my brother will not be there as he has just passed through Kansas City this very morning on his way to the work-related destination where he will be occupied with work for the next two weeks.

I can, of course, make my own chocolate chip cookies and place them into the receptacles of my choosing, and no one is likely to stop me from refilling my glass of milk, but I don't think that it will be the same.

Nate, my brother's former roommate of three whole years, accidentally knocked his girlfriend up and they're having a baby together, like, any day now, or something like that.

(This is particularly noteworthy because Nathan, my brother's BFF from their days together in private fundy Christian school, accidentally knocked his girlfriend up and they had a baby together a few years ago. I'm just saying, if your name is Nathan and you know my brother, you should seriously consider celibacy or a vasectomy or something.)

Danny asked me over Thanksgiving what he should get Nate and his babymama for the baby shower. I gave the matter some thought, trying to decide what would be useful to the parents-to-be and also a meaningful gift from my brother, and then I had this brilliant idea: a black hooded towel with bat ears!

Now I just have to manage to make it with my deeply suboptimal sewing skills, but I think it's going to be awesome. Most importantly, they don't know the sex of the baby yet, but obviously both girls and boys can wear black and aspire to be batbabies.

2745 / 50000 words. 5% done!

As you can see, I have some catching up to do. I had planned to spend the evening isolated at the local tea shop for this purpose, but then my parents and poodle decided to tag along, so we're sitting outside enjoying the unseasonably warm weather.

Next thing I know, my mother has a crazy woman recounting her life story, which mostly involves her various possessions, such as a $2,500 laptop, a $9,000 pair of miniature rottweilers (acquired in 'central Berlin, Germany'), and a diamond-studded skull and crossbones ring, being stolen from her by various persons such as her neighbor, houseguest and Zales jewelry store. She seems to have settled in with a large cup of some kind of yellow liquid and a cigarette and doesn't seem inclined to go anywhere.

I, um, guess this could be some kind of inspiration?

She's now claiming that her Maine coon cat (which, according to her, was invented in the 11th century by a man named Coon) can herd 7,500 sheep in an hour.

In honor of my brother's brief visit this weekend, last night we revived the tradition of the Viking bonfire. We pillaged a bottle of locally-brewed mead from the liquor store, built a fire in our backyard and, toasting each other Viking-fashion, read aloud from the text Danny selected, the Prose Edda.

Danny, who did the honor of the reading this time, was highly bemused by the prologue, which manages to combine the creation story from Genesis, a smattering of geography, a bunch of genealogy with unpronounceable names, a Trojan founding myth à la Virgil, and then, finally, the Æsir, although even familiar figures like Odin insisted on having twelve more unpronounceable names. I advised him to drink more mead and it would all make sense.

He got more into the swing of things with the the Tricking of Gylfi, which had plenty of proper Norse mythology, although also plenty of unpronounceable names, which are inevitable. The night was gorgeous and nothing like a typical Missouri July night, and much fun was had by all.

Drinc hail!

I just got back from seeing Star Trek with my mom! She hadn't actually watched Star Trek since the first run of TOS back when there were like two channels and there was nothing else on, but she is a big fan of J. J. Abrams ever since I got her hooked on Alias. Her only complaint was that she couldn't hear what was going on in the Kobayashi Maru scene because the whole audience was chortling so damn hard.

You know that feeling you get when you find this plotty cracky epic fic in a fandom that you hadn't thought much about in a while and you devour the whole thing in a single gulp of fannish glee? Yeah, it was like that. I loved it.

Then again, I got into Trek through novelizations (my brother handed me his copy of Dark Mirror on a family vacation when I'd finished all my books) and fic (I'd been on the internet since I was twelve, but the first time I heard of slash was in an actual dead tree magazine when I was seventeen, and I started googling for Kirk/Spock even though I had only the vaguest idea who they were), so my cred is highly suspect.

For as long as I can remember, my mom has done the taxes in our family.

If you were only superficially familiar with my parents, their personalities and their predilections, you might find this division of labor curious. My father is the detail-oriented devote of all things logical and quantifiable who plays chess and works on robots in his spare time; my mother is the self-identified 'global' 'random' who reads magazines from the back forward and strings together entire sentences without a single proper noun. Even when I was little, while accepting the natural order of things as the very young naturally do, I found this curious.

It all made sense in the end, thougg. It turns out that my mother, strongly encouraged by her Depression-era father, took a degree in Business Education, which was the safest and easiest education degree she could get with the fewest credit hours, and then there she was, with this electronic typewriter that was incredibly smart, under the circumstances, and knowledge of how to use it. Not only did it pretend to understand what you were typing; it would remember it, for one whole line at a time! This was truly impressive, and honestly, it produced more readable results than my father's Commodore 64. No wonder that my mother ended up taking over tax preparation.

These days, she purchases the latest edition of TurboTax almost as soon as it's available, but that doesn't stop her from doing my taxes, even if she has to grab my W-2 out of my hands to do so. (So far, not necessary, but I keep this in mind when it comes to what address my electronic checks are 'sent to'.) Having forced herself to prepare all tax forms every year, she is overly-enthusiastic about her self-appointed role, and yet it is a world of easier to let her steal my W-2 and file my takes for me every year, including 2008, when she basically seized them without my explicit permission than to actually do it myself. Drunken with the possibilities offered by basic software wizards, she forced me to itemize my deductions, purely as an experiment, even though the final result was less than a third of my standard deduction, amply confirming my desire to file a 1040EZ in the first place.

coercedbynutmeg would no doubt do a better job checking over my filing, and wisdomeagle would hopefully not flag me for errors. Not that my mother would allow me to do my own taxes in the first places, when she is perfectly capable of using her latest version of TurboTax ....

Every year it falls to me to me to decorate my little brother's birthday cake. My task is to produce a gloriously geeky creation, earning the acclaim delight of Danny and his many guests, in spite of the fact that when it comes to artistic ability, I have two left hands, and I am not actually left-handed.

This year, using one of the Dark Knight posters as my inspiration, I created the Joker cake:



A boy and his cake. Danny didn't actually know what I had planned in the way of decorating, but he was wearing his Joker t-shirt fresh from the boy's department at Target anyway.

( Three more pictures under the cut )

I have decided to formally renounce any attempt to catch up on NaNoWriMo in order to focus on my yuletide fic and other things in my life. I wrote approximately 12,000 words and my characters never even got to have sex (although I , um. Fantasized about it a few times). Better luck to me (and them) next time, I suppose.

Also, I just noticed that there is a stray contact lens stuck above our shower door. I immediately felt my eyes in a panic, but it isn't mine, so it must have been one of my brother's and thus have been there quite some time. I left it there to show him when he gets home tomorrow, because it amused me.

EDIT: Also! I scored a hardcover copy of Good Omens from the donations pile at our library, and the funny thing was, it was with a bunch of other books like This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti and one of the Left Behind books. I think its original owner was either very, very open-minded or just very confused.

The thing I just don't even begin to understand is how my laptop case could just vanish from our hotel room. I didn't take it anywhere the entire time we were in Rapid City and yet, when I went to pack my laptop, I discovered that I had nothing to pack it in.

We turned our hotel room upside down and uncovered two empty plastic vodka bottles concealed in the lower recesses of one of the beds, but no laptop case. This is annoying to me out of all proportion to any joy a thief might get from taking it on account of a.) Apple doesn't make any more 12" laptops so I'm finding the market for suitable replacements restricted to say the least and b.) that case had all of my Prince of Tennis DVDs in it, so now they are GONE, except disc one (episodes 1-24), which was in my not stolen computer and is therefore safe.

It's obviously not the end of the world since I can replicate my efforts, but still. My preciousssss. Wah.

I left handynavi custody of our Sims while I was gone and even procured a house key to lend him. (I don't have a house key. I asked my mom to have one made for me, but she doesn't have a house key. Just ... I don't know.) Unfortunately, my mother decided that just locking the doors like a normal person was insufficient and had my father barricade the door with a 2x4 right before we left, so Sam still couldn't get in the house even with the key.

I pondered this conundrum and concocted a scheme that I felt would afford the greatest chance of success to a person seeking entrance to our house which unfortunately I will omit here in case any of you are stalking me and are perched in the neighbor's tree right now with your laptop and wireless internet connection, trying to figure out how to take things to the next level. However, I can report that Sam and his sister did succeed in breaking into my house on Friday night, which is basically completely awesome. You only wish you were that cool.

I also have a few vacation stories that have nothing to do with breaking, entering or theft, and there are pictures, but now I think I'm going to do something slightly less strenuous like maybe lying around.

I didn't realize when I bought my mom an iPod for mother's day that I was signing my death warrant.

It's just a good thing there were no other people on some random road in Iowa with us when my mom started weaving all over the road because she was using her iPod at the same time. I owe my continued existence to the underpopulation of Iowa.