Sam's Backup Page

BTW WRITIN' A NANO.

I was going to use November to work on Tunnel, but it's been fighting me so hard that I'm pretty sure its time is not yet come. I don't know what to do with it yet. I'll get there.

In the meantime, I'm writing Reverend Buddy's Everlasting Life Evangelical Church And Small Engine Repair. I mean. Talk about your awesome book titles. Anyway, it's the novel you were all thinking I was living in when I flew home to salute the death of the last of the Southern Belles. So it'll be a monument to Mama Tickey, I suppose, and an excoriation of Crazy Aunt M. Should be fun. Cheap therapy, if nothing else.

I'm not posting it as I go because it's terrible right now, but to keep myself honest let's see how long I can go posting the first, last, and favourite lines each day.

First line: "Well, this is what I heard," Anne said to me, as Mike brought the beer in. "That the real way to christen a new home is by peeing in the sink."

Last line: And then I had a happy meal from the airport McDonalds, because that's appropriate when going to a funeral.

Favourite line: She's a sociopath. I can say that, because she doesn't read books, so she'll never know.

With my luck lately this will crash and burn after two days, but let's give it a shot.

This funeral business is all very interesting and strange.

I've never been "the bereaved" as an adult, in terms of having a job and having to inform coworkers and such that I'm leaving for a funeral. It's immensely awkward; I've been on the other side many times and it's oddly comforting watching them flail for how to say things the same way I have in the past. Tomorrow I go to Texas and become the outsider again, because really the rest of them are mourning more than I am, or deeper anyway. It's a surreal experience.

There's a narrative aspect to it, too. Because the estate is paying for our travel, everyone can come home; the only one who won't be there is Bernard, who couldn't get here in time and probaby wouldn't come anyway. Plus Mama Tickey made her displeasure with him very clear when he left for Australia. The other grandkids once joked with me and Emmy that we all had quite a lot of leeway to screw up before any of us managed to beat him out for Most Disgraceful.

It's going to be probably the biggest family reunion in years, in a family that was not small to start with. My blood family inherited this enormous clan when Mum married Lucky, and having been a very small unit, we never quite know how to cope. Plus there's an entire Eastern Star chapter, several members of Mama Ticky's church Women's Board, and three lawyers involved. And Crazy Aunt M, one of Mama Tickey's daughters-in-law, who insists on setting everything up (she did cede "memorial donations and charitable notifications" to me; horse for courses, I suppose) and who definitely wants to get the funeral out of the way so we can get to the will.

I don't know much about the will, but it's bound to be complex, given Mama Tickey's vast charitable, real estate, and investment interests. I don't know if they're going to read it after the funeral or what, and I have no idea what she thought ought to be left to me, though she's told me I'm in it. For all I know, it's her largish library of history books, which wouldn't in any way displease.

I won't say I'm looking forward to the funeral, but it certainly won't be boring. Plus I get to meet Other Favourite Grandchild; my stepcousin E and myself are the oldest of the grandchildren and I'm reliably informed the best-liked, but since we both live out of state we've never properly met. He's an artist, so I'm inclined to like him already.

And we all come back to the ranch (literally, there's a ranch) to pay our respects to the Last of the Southern Belles.

Dear Sam,

Sorry this card is a little late. Around here everyone is starting to rebuild. Even if there was no obvious damage to our property the loss of familiar landmarks makes us stop and think. Everywhere there is a real 'can do' attitude.

I heard you got some rain two weeks ago, which surprised me, as I thought we got all there was to be had. Hoping you are well and not as damp as we!

I love Mama Tickey. :D

The building cafeteria had a chinese food buffet today. And now I am dead from potsticker.

Over lunch I was working out some Jack&Ellis in my head, and I realised that I was writing it all in present-tense, which is not the way that Jack&Ellis has been for, you know, the past 110,000 words or so. I think it's because I've been writing a lot of present-tense fic in Torchwood, which in turn is the result of my unconscious but highly valuable instinct to mimic. I've read more Torchwood fanfic than any other fandom for ages (mainly because HP fandom is FULL OF CRAZY and most of my other fandoms are teeny tiny) and a lot of the writers in Torchwood that I admire or enjoy write very edgy present-tense stuff.

Present-tense is a good look for shows about time travel and people who have a lot of rage to spare (metal men from a parallel universe killed my girlfriend horribly and all I got was this stupid pterodactyl).

Then after lunch I came back to my desk and checked my phone and discovered that Mama Tickey's been in the hospital for two days with the flu. Way to keep me in the loop there, Mum.

She's fine, apparently, but she's also eighty. We're all glad she has excellent health insurance.

Good morning world, and Happy Birthday Mama Tickey!

Mama Tickey, for those of you who are new, is my stepfather's mother, and two years ago I got to spend some real quality time with her when she took me for a holiday to Galveston, where she has a vacation timeshare. I squired her and Aunt Lily around the city and discovered the true definition of the Southern Belle in those two women. Despite not being blood related and her having a whole brood of grandchildren already, I am something of a favourite because I'm an artist and the only one, and this is not bragging, who can hold an intelligent conversation. My new cousins are...

You know, they're not even that nice, they got into a food fight the last time I was at a family meal with them. They are my age.

They're not offensive or particularly deeply stupid, they're just not very well-spoken or thoroughly educated. Which is fine, as I don't have to deal with them very often. Though I suppose they will all be there today; Lucky has several siblings and all of them have bred with varying degrees of ferocity. The party's going to be about fifty people and mexican food, so I plan to hide in the corner with a cola and only emerge when Mama Tickey wants to talk to me. Seems safest, and there's the least chance of being in the crossfire of any impending refried-beans flinging.

With her usual impeccable timing, my brother's wife wrote mum an email this morning. Way to ruin the first weekend I've had with my family since you left, Bernard. High five. Oh wait, you're an asshole, and so is your wife. So, no high five.

I'm sure it'll be fine, it was inevitable that Bernard would come up in the course of the weekend, but I'm hoping we'll all be distracted by Birthday Shindiggery.

Also, I have shown off the scar from my broken wrist and been petted and made much of, so that's all right. :D

I was thinking this morning about why I cook, and why I like to cook even though my dishes don't always turn out as planned. There are a couple of reasons, aside from the fact that eating is fun and good for you -- one, that it's a creative adventure which explores not only your own senses but also allows you a peek into other cultures and lives; two, that it's a touchstone with family and friends.

When I cook a new dish, especially an ethnic dish from some other culture, I find myself wondering how people treat the food, what kinds of memories it brings up for them, what their lives must be like. But, more importantly, I can reach back and touch family and friends who've taught me how to cook, and it's not a conscious thing, it's just something that's there. Muscle and sense memory. Like using a wooden spoon to stir cookie dough, which is what my mum always did once we added the flour because our teeny tiny stand mixer couldn't cope with stiff dough. The rattle of chocolate chips against the spoon as they're stirred reminds me of being four and standing on a small wooden chair to get enough height that I could see into the bowl on the counter. Kitchens, in my imagination, are always the long, narrow, yellow-lino kitchen in the house I grew up in.

This morning I made egg salad, which I've never actually made before. For some reason it wasn't on the menu in our house; deviled eggs and hardboiled eggs with salt and sliced egg as a salad garnish, but never egg salad. To me it became this mysterious dish that was only sold in delicatessens and was akin to Japanese Pufferfish -- you took your life in your hands if you tried it. I didn't eat an egg salad sandwich until I was at university, and the whole time I expected to be seized with sudden food poisoning.

Anyway, this morning I got some mayo and mustard and curry powder and made some curried egg salad for a sandwich for lunch. It's sitting in a thermos box in my backpack. What was interesting to me was the memory it did bring up for me -- my "new" gran, my stepfather's mother, when we went to Galveston last summer and I spent a week chaperoning two southern belles around the island. Mama Tickey saw me trying with utter frustration to peel a boiled egg for breakfast and laughed.

"No, you do it like this," she said. "You crack the pointy end on the counter, and then crack the blunt end. Then you lay it flat and roll it with your palm against the counter. Not hard, you'll smash it!"

Magic. Twenty-five years old, I finally learned how to peel a goddamn egg. And now, every time I peel an egg, I think about Mama Tickey. And since I know that the recipe for deviled eggs is similar to egg salad, I use dressing instead of mayonnaise, which is what my mum taught me.

Not to mention she gave me the chicken-shaped egg slicer. :D

From a distance on an overcast night, Austin is marked by what appears to be a giant mushroom cloud, the illusion of which is created by light bouncing off the clouds.

Aside from the above observation, which I think is intriguing and hope to have taken some successful photographs of, today was a complete writeoff after 11am.

A quick primer: Lucky is my stepfather. Mama Ticky is his mother, who has adopted me as favoured grandson because I have manners. Lucky has brothers, who have wives, and they are fairly nice people, but his nieces and nephews are ridiculously horrible. They're my age, and act as if they're thirteen.

Anyway, we went down to see Mama Ticky, since it was her birthday a few days ago. I should have stayed in Austin, but she specifically wanted to see me and in that sense it was worth going down, because she's feeling so much better since her hip replacement. The change is remarkable, and she wasn't exactly lacking in feist to begin with. So it was good to see her.

But.

Well, there's the three hour drive down there, including the Harrowing Passage through Giddings, which is creeptastic at the best of times. I slept for about two hours of it, but I'm a tall person and our car, while roomy, is not THAT roomy, so by the time we arrived I was distinctly creased and cramped.

We went out to dinner with Mama Ticky, Lucky's younger brother and his wife, and fortunately only one of the Horrible Nephews, the son of Lucky's older brother. I felt kind of bad for him actually, because prior to going out, Mama Ticky gave him a tongue-lashing that was well-deserved but perhaps better saved for a private moment.

And the thing is, we went out to dinner at Macaroni Grill. After last time, with the odious lasagne, I decided to order something I thought would be fairly safe, fettucini alfredo. And it was pretty tasty, comparatively, except for when I puked it all up in a rest stop an hour later.

Argh.

The ride home was even more unpleasant, between the stomach cramps and the shoulder-cramps after I fell asleep again.

On the positive side, we got more information about the family gas well that's set to go live in about two weeks (I might yet end up a trust fund baby).

Commentary post-hack: Two years later, I do not have a trust fund but my parents are significantly wealthier than we have ever been in my lifetime because of the gas wells.

And Mama Ticky taught me three new expressions:

1. Ring-tailed tooter: Really big deal. She used this in re the gas well, and what it is going to be.

2. Irishman's flea: Someone who is very difficult to get hold of. She used this in re my step-cousin, who was kicked out of the house this weekend.

3. Hollerin' Hole: a place to go and rant about one's problems. This one had no context, it was just in a yarn she was telling. Mama Ticky yarns like nobody's business.

Well, THIS is a fine howdeedo.

The woman who interviewed and hired me yesterday (who used to LIVE in St. Nowhere, omgwtfsmallworld) just telephoned to ask if I would be interested in working registration procedure (photocopying, handing out visitor badges, Looking Pretty) for her evening interview shifts until my scorer-training starts at the end of February. The shift would be late enough that I could get a ride over there with Lucky, who gets off work at four. I'm tempted to accept it, except it means that I will not have dinner with the family or see my mother at all until about nine pm, five days a week.

Which doesn't actually sound like much of a downside at all, now that I think on it...

The other problem is Mama Ticky, whom many of you will remember from my holiday in Galveston as the Last of the True Southern Belles, my stepfather Lucky's mother. She's having hip surgery on the thirteenth, fairly routine stuff, but she'd like me to come down and stay with her for a few days afterwards as amanuensis, chaeuffer, mailman, and fetcher-of-dougnuts-and-mexican-food. Which has its own issues, actually, because she doesn't own a computer, much less have wireless service. While I do have a dialup program, she also only has one telephone line, which she uses (lord does she use it).

I like Mama Ticky, I think I'd have fun, and I also like being Favourite Grandson because it's one in the eye for my unbearable step-cousins. Seriously. Let me tell you about the food fight these chilluns started at the dinner table at Christmas, and they're my age. One of them is in law school.

So I'd like to go down and spend a few days with her before my wage-slavery starts in earnest at the end of February. But I'd also like to 1. get in good with my new employer so that she loves me and 2. earn money.

Advice gratefully accepted. I have until ten tomorrow morning to decide, and I have no doubt it will be the number one topic around the dinner table tonight.

*dithers*

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Those of you who laffed at my domesticity earlier should know that I just served my family the driest porkchops ever. My mother LIKES dry porkchops and she said they were too dry.

I'm certain it's because I dislike porkchops -- probably stemming from my mother's love of dry ones -- and my innate dislike somehow seeped into the chops as I prepared them this morning. "Ha! You thought we were chewy and unflavourful before? WAIT TILL YOU SEE US NOW!"

Anyway, we ended up eating the tamales that mum had purchased for Christmas dinner instead. I don't know why we're having tamales for Christmas dinner or why she bought them two weeks ahead of time, but they came in handy and now I want to try making them myself. Perhaps I'll do it next week, when I spend an ENTIRE DAY making Stuffing Muffins for the potluck Lucky's attending at his work.

In other news, Mum says I should talk Mama Ticky into taking me to Paris (I was telling her about the "Parisian Fifteen Minutes" as was relayed to me by Rainette recently). I told her since Mama Ticky doesn't like to fly, we'd have to fly to New York and take a cruise across the Atlantic to get there.

Oh, the horror.

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Well, good news on the family front, Mama Ticky had her angioplasty already (sooner than anticipated -- she started having chest pains again this morning) and they're working to fix the issue, which is a 99% blockage in her ascending aorta. The blockage is NOT good news, of course, but it's being taken care of and she's probably going home on Thursday.

So, yay for that! Lucky will probably stay the night down there, so we've commissioned him to Bring Her Flowers. And he sounded a lot less strained on the phone. It's always good to know what the problem is, and of course he has zillions of siblings and in-laws and cousins and stuff down there as support network.

OMG his older brother's wife has the LOUDEST PHONE VOICE EVAR. *holds phone away from ear, gingerly*