Schreiber

I shouldn't complain. This is totally first-world problems, and I had a perfectly ok birthday party. But...

My aunt has scheduled my uncle's memorial service for the Saturday of Thanksgiving. In Ithaca. For a number of reasons (including the fact that I should really help out with things like picking my mom up from the airport) this means that going up to Maine for the weekend, as I'd planned, is pretty much a non-starter. This is bugging me for a couple of reasons:

1a. Last year, doing pre-Thanksgiving with Dad&Friends, then TG Dinner itself with my brother, was really pleasant; I'd hoped to do a repeat.

1b. Over the years since my divorce, I have done Thanksgiving dinner with various friends and family. (Thank you all for your hospitality, whether on DW or no!) However, there are...certain things you grow up expecting from TG, just because of how your family always does things; and none of the various Thanksgivings I've attended have fulfilled 'em, barring last year; and that means I come away from thanksgiving feeling really weird about the whole business.

2. This was going to be my only actively pleasant major public holiday this half of the year. Christmas, I am going to be alone; New Year's, I am going to be entertaining Peter.


(And ironically, I'm not at all sure that my uncle WANTED a memorial service.)
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I should finish writing about my uncle. And about my car adventures.
And I should write to my remaining grandmother.

For the moment, I'm going to go home and cook dinner. And probably drink heavily.

(Yes, before you ask, I voted. At like 8 this morning. What do you take me for?)

...I should really be looking for jobs. Uh, constructive procrastination?

So it's just as well that teenybuffalo and sovay weren't available for dinner Saturday night, 'cause that's about the worst batch of Vegetarian Heart Attack I think I've ever made. Moral of the story: taste the basil before you buy it.

Sunday I skipped bellringing (unnecessarily, as I realized later) to haul up to New Hampshire for this big family reunion thing my Aunt had organized. This would not, frankly, have been my first choice for the day: in additional to my campanological commitments, I hate driving,* I don't really have much of anything in common with my cousins anymore, and given my finances I'm kinda feeling like the black sheep of the family. But she was going to feel hurt if I didn't turn up, so...

And actually, it was ok. I mean, I still don't have much in common with my cousins (and almost feel more at home with my cousins-once-removed, the elder of whom has grown about a foot since I saw her last), but I really shoulda caught up with my stepcousin K., who (I learned) had just moved to within a few blocks of me. (wtf?) And the food was tasty, and I got to see my brother and get the latest from him.
More importantly (and this was an even bigger shock than the suddenly 5'6" cousin), I got to see my uncle. RM... huh. That's a story.
See, about, ooo, a year and a bit ago, RM. found out that the weird digestive problems he'd been having were, in fact, bowel cancer. And that would be bad enough, but, well, he was the one kid whom Grandma succeeded in bringing up as a Christian Scientist, and if you're a Christian Scientist and get cancer, the options are supposed to be 1. Miracle** or 2. Die faithfully. RM. ultimately went with option 3., which is Stop Being A Christian Scientist (I guess?) and actually get modern medical treatment; but when Mom visited him last spring, he looked about on his deathbed anyway, and I hadn't gotten an update since, so I was amazed he'd made it up. ("Your mom's always been the worrier," was his [typically] sardonic comment.) In fact, though, he'd apparently made the drive up from Ithaca just fine, and while he had lost more weight than was healthy, he was a lot less corpse-like than I'd been expecting.*** And not super energetic, but seemed to be mostly his old self.
So yeah. That was my weekend. Well, that and reading too many fantasy novels (and I owe you a post on that, too), with less than optimal results for my census productivity. I should get on that. First, job searching.

Nine days til I leave for England. Still don't know which city.

* The drive up, at least, was substantially better than I'd anticipated--in terms of driving time. What I ALSO hadn't expected was that they're still in the process of widening I93, thus simultaneously rubbing your face in the fact that they're tearing up the landscape so as to cover more of it with tarmac AND the bits where extra lanes might actually be useful still aren't done yet. Like seriously, guys, why was the interchange at the south end of 293 not the FIRST thing you did? And why do I suspect that the answer is somehow connected to the fact that there are still hundred-foot piles of gravel by the roadside?

** I don't know whether or not that's EXACTLY how people who go in for faith healing would describe it, but f--- them, because if it isn't, than they're even more irrational than I think they are anyway.

*** I also noticed he'd lost some hair, but then Grandpa was mostly bald by the time HE hit 65, and my brother's at least heading in that direction, so I don't actually think that's significant.