Tea and Dragons

Comment to this post, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

phdelicious kindly provided the following:

Dreams--I enjoy them, as long as they're reasonably pleasant.  I have recurring landscapes in my head, including an entire mall that I revisit from time to time, and my sleeping brain also has an obsession with elevators (they rarely move in just one dimension) and, of all things, parking garages (no idea).  I have obsessive dreams about trying to get to a store to buy scones and clotted cream.  And nearly all my dreams have crowds of people I don't know.  

Writing--What I do for fun, as anyone who's reading this should know.  :P  One of my two-point-five talents.†  Actually, it's not writing in the strictest sense most of the time; it's typing.  My handwriting is awful; I deliberately cultivated sloppy writing as a child, in a reaction to my peers dotting all their "i"s with hearts, but even now writing clearly requires effort and my mother theorizes that I have a learning disability.☎  

Pets--The stuff of life.  I can't imagine growing up without them!  Five cats, two dogs, three rats, five guinea pigs, a gerbil, a turtle, and countless fish.  Never let your father name the gerbil--Alphonse, really?  And sometimes the nicknames are more fun than the formal ones--there was Squippy, Jack the Nipper☂, the Fluffbomb, the Calorie Pointer, Rupert, the dog we named after my great-aunt--and mustn't forget Mom's previous cat, whose given name was Saufie.  It stood for Smart Ass Under Foot.  Which she most definitely was. 

Fairytales--Practically infinite resources for the imaginative.  Even the most familiar and worn-out of tales can be refreshed into something new--take the concept and run with it, invert it, flip it inside out and dance with it.  Check out those from other cultures, and see what's the same and what's different.  Confound expectations.  Play.☛ 

Monuments--I am rarely impressed by them.  I saw Mount Rushmore and wondered why anyone had spent time on that. 

Vacation--I keep thinking about taking a week off to get stuff done, and then realising✈ that I'd probably just sit around and amuse myself on the computer, and get nothing accomplished... 

Laughter--To be expected, when my family gets together.  We love to laugh.  Sit us down to eat, and the puns start flying; leave us there long enough, and we begin uniting efforts to make my mother crack up (by no means an easy task).  This can be somewhat daunting to guests.  As jeanniemac stated long ago, "Dinner at the [name redacted] cannot be described; it can only be experienced."§ 


†Reading, and I throw a decent pot with some practice. 

☎I really predate the focus on learning disabilities.  I'm not at all convinced she's right, and if I do it's quite minor, but it's true that I can't do much of anything that requires fine motor control in the fingers. 

☂Almost.  

☛The recent upsurge in fairytale TV amuses me, and I admit to being a fan of OUAT, but that ain't exactly quality stuff.  Try Castle Waiting (thank you cincoflex!) and Robin McKinley if you want the good crack.  Or even Charles deLint, though his quality wobbles all over the place. 

✈Still stuck between American English and British English.  Sigh. 

§We hand out magnets if they don't run screaming.  

S: That's awful. 
Me:  It's obvious! 
A:  That's genius.  

Me:  It must be my birthday, you made me an artichoke! 

A:  My uncleing responsibilities have been revoked...

D:  It's like a silent movie, only reversed--just the sound, not the picture! 
A:  Like...radio.  

Me, on seeing the sparkling Shiraz:  Ooh, it's vampire champagne! 

M, cutting cake:  Do you want half of a third, or half of a quarter? 

D: He didn't steal them, he just relocated them. 
Me:  What exactly is your definition of stealing? 

A:  Is whipped cream coming out of her nose?  
Me:  You have to press the little button on the back of her neck for that. 

My ribs hurt.  It was a good dinner. 

Friends having rough times, work trying to make me cry, parental units refusing to recognize a legitimate "no".  *sigh*  I hate being stressed, and I hate worse that other people are more stressed.  I want a backrub and a day's worth of naps, and maybe a swim in a nice empty pool while I'm at it. 

On the other hand, Silver seems to have recovered from her respiratory infection, which frankly I didn't think was going to happen.  So that's something. 

My mom and dad are currently vacationing in Hawaii, and my mom sent me a lei by FedEx.  I've never even seen one in person before, let alone owned one.  It's gorgeous, hot pink and heavy. 

Not something that was ever on my list of desires, but I'm glad to have it. 

My mother, in one of her periodic fits of paranoia, just called to tell me where she and my father are this evening (at a musical performance, as it happens), on the grounds that should something happen to them both, neither my brother nor I would know where they were. 

Me: “You are aware that they can I.D. you from your I.D.?  Or dental records, if necessary.” 

Mom: “Yes, well, someone has to feed the cat.” 

I love my mother.  *grin* 

I just want to say thank you to everyone who left me such kind messages in my last entry.  Thank you for your sympathy, your stories, your offers of an ear or a shoulder, your cyberhugs.  It means so much to me that people who never even met Bernice care. 

It always takes time, grieving does.  But to slightly misquote, the pain now is part of the happiness then.  That's the deal. 

Thank you. 

I spent the evening at my parents' house looking at slides from early childhood.  It kind of turned into a game of "I remember that object!", though I find it interesting that I can remember books from when I was three, but good heavens I was an ugly kid.  My head was the wrong shape.  My mother doesn't agree, of course, but then she's my mother. 

Of course, we spent most of it laughing hysterically.  I have to say that whatever difficulties we've had in the past--and still occasionally encounter--a get-together among us usually results in laughter, and lots of it.  This is a good thing. 

May you laugh tonight as well. 

 'M off to the West until Wednesday for family stuff.  I may have Internet, I may not.  Not that I don't disappear for days anyway, but I'll get back to showing off my nifty graph soon, I hope.  

Be good, and if you can't be good, be smart!  :P