Got a couple of pages done on "Little Sister" Thursday night.

Friday night we got haircuts.

This morning we took the cake topper over to the bakery (We couldn't find one I we liked at any of the nearby decorating stories, so we went to Michaels last weekend and bought some silk flowers and stuff, and I made our own. Hopefully they're not too big for the cake.)



After that we took all the animals to the vet. ::bill shock:: I swear, once this lot pass to their rewards, no more pets. This time I mean it!

Then we did Mom's grocery shopping, took our accumulated aluminum cans to the recycling place, did our own grocery shopping, came home, and I washed old wallpaper glue off the bathroom walls and re-textured them, with some timely assistance from framefolly. They aren't quite done, since I still have to wash down the walls over the shower stall before I can do anything up there, but we should be able to primer the rest of it tomorrow.

But the best thing? pfeifferpack sent me a link to celebrate_luv Thanks, guys. This is just awesome beyond belief. I'm all verklempt.

::sniffle::

I am obviously thinking WAY too much about lunch.


Second Helpings
By Barb C
Pairing: B/S
Rating: PG-13
Author’s notes: Barbverse, but it would work perfectly well as post-NFA, too.

Didn’t take a genius to see fretting put Buffy off her feed. It was a point of pride for Spike she was nicely rounded these days, plush curves over steely Slayer muscle. They’d both sleeked up since he moved in - his mission, wasn’t it, ensuring she never fit into size 0 jeans again? Not easy, considering Slayer metabolism, but he’d spent a century cozening Dru to eat up. Least he didn’t have to deliver Buffy’s meals alive and kicking.

“That was fantastic.” Buffy snuggled closer. “Hey. You hungry? I’m starving.”

‘Course, the best part was working up an appetite.

END

It is always cheaper to keep an old car running than buy a new one, it is always cheaper to keep an old car running than buy a new one, it is always cheaper to keep an old car running than buy a new one, it is always cheaper to keep an old car running than buy a new one, it is…

In conclusion, ouch.

Since I had to leave early to catch the bus, I skipped breakfast and am now starving.

Poll #1274871
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should Barb eat lunch early?

What should Barb eat?

Thanks to everyone who contributed to my fundraising efforts. In gratitude, have some fic. :) (ljs, I'm trying to come up with something for you that doesn't have any Xander in it.)


And Do The Things My Fathers Learned To Do
Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: G
Pairing: X/A, B/S
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I'd just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: Xander takes a break.
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as "Raising In the Sun," "Necessary Evils," and "A Parliament of Monsters." It's set about one year after POM.



Xander was never quite certain how he ended up sitting on the roof of Sunnydale Memorial Hospital, listening to the roar of the air conditioners and drinking warm flat beer with a vampire. He was sure it had seemed like a really good idea at the time. He took a sip of whatever weird imported shit it was that Spike was drinking these days, and grimaced. "I'm going to screw it up," he announced.

( Read more... )

This.

That was actually a much more interesting debate than the presidential one.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As some of you know, I work for the American Cancer Society. My stake in the fight against cancer is not just professional, it’s personal; my father died of colon cancer at the relatively young age of 69, and my younger sister is a cancer survivor. Many people on my friends list are cancer survivors, or have family members who are, or who are currently struggling with the disease.

As you may also know, after 20+ years together, my partner and I are getting hitched on the 17th. In lieu of gifts, we’re asking anyone who wishes to celebrate this event to give a donation to ACS. You can go to the ACS website, http://www.cancer.org to give a general donation, or you can donate to the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Tempe Beach Walk I’ll be participating in in November. (And if any of you folks in the Phoenix area are interested in participating as well, let me know! It’s fun and philanthropy rolled into one!)



In other news, tired. My own fault; I stayed up late attempting to compose a civil reply to something that irritated me. Result, reply only marginally civil, and I’m exhausted and cranky and woke up with a crick in my neck.

But it made me think again how many arguments, both fannish and less so, are exercises in futility because the principles are arguing from different sets of basic assumptions. When neither side acknowledges the validity of the grounds upon which their opponent bases their argument, any debate is bound to go in circles forever. It’s as true for ship wars as for political brouhahas. I noted, on my flist yesterday, people bewailing the possibility of a certain ship becoming canon, because it would mess with a UC ship they favored more. No one would come out and say “I just like X/Y better than Y/Z.” Nope, it was all “If they make Y/Z canon it will ruin the characters!” Never mind that all the arguments mustered against Y/Z could be equally well applied to X/Y.

Naturally, since I am too sleepy to string words together, today’s the day I feel a burning desire to work on “Little Sister,” since I have definitively solved the niggling little character arc resolution thing that has been bugging me. (Weird how often the solutions to story dilemmas arrive when you’re too zonked out to put them into practice effectively.) This story is probably not going to go down in history as one of my greatest hits – it’s far future fic, it’s got a lot of original characters, it’s just too far removed from canon to attract a lot of casual readers. Unless you’ve read the entire rest of my oeuvre, it loses a lot of its emotional punch.

And yet… I really, really like it. I love the ideas behind it, the concept that you have to pay for everything, and the price may not be what you anticipated, and it may not fall on the person you expected. I love the uncertainty of it, that the characters will never know with surety whether the prize was worth the price – they all have to decide that for themselves, and not everyone makes the same decision. I love that they’re all right, and they’re all wrong, and there really aren’t any villains, just a lot of people trying to do the right thing, with no agreement on what the right thing is. (In that way it’s kind of a thematic opposite to “Lesser of Two Evils,” where everyone is doing the wrong thing, and knows it, and the reader has to struggle with the question of who’s being the least villainous.)

But since I’m too groggy to write that today, maybe I’ll just do something lazy and self-indulgent, with rain on the windows, and the infrequently-lit fireplace blazing, and Buffy and Spike curled up on the couch with hot cocoa and a crappy movie or three. Maybe with the kids arguing upstairs about the things that kids invariably argue about. Something with Our Heroes a little older (if not always much wiser) than canon allows them to get, but still willing to get up and answer the door when an ominous knock sounds out of the storm, and something large and shambling brushes past the front window, leaving a mysterious package on the front doorstep. Something with a fight, and long, rain-soaked kisses, and Buffy Summers and William the Bloody trying, in their very disparate ways, to do the right thing.

Why is it when I go trolling for fic these days, EVERYTHING is either human AU or a claiming fic? (OK, that's a slight exaggeration.) WOE. Why is there never a fad for Stories Barb Would Like? (OK, there was, back at the end of S5 when S/B was new and shiny and I was much less particular, and everyone was writing long, plotty canon-based S/B adventures. Damn kids today. I'm going to sit on my porch and wave my cane.) Still. PEOPLE! FRIENDS OF MINE! ONCE IN A WHILE SPIKE AND BUFFY CAN FALL IN LOVE WITHOUT A MAGIC GUN BEING HELD TO THEIR HEADS. SRSLY! (n.b. CAPSLOCK OF EARNEST ENTREATY.)

Did absolutely nothing this weekend. I had cramps and haven't felt very productive. We went to the gem and jewelry show downtown on Saturday, and I saw some things I really, really, wanted, but it would have been completely irresponsible to buy them at this point, so I didn't. Sigh. There was a ring in particular that I loved, but it was not to be. Later we went over to tiirz's place to see their new kittens, and edgedancer made awesome braised pork. So not a bad day, but I felt somewhat sluglike.

On the other hand, I did manage to get a little bit done on "Little Sister" Sunday, and worked out some kinks in the upcoming chapters. There are three to four installments left to go, depending on how complicated the final big confrontation gets, and I'm going to try to finish the whole thing for seasonal_spuffy

I'm not sure how I feel about the bailout failing - having read up a little on the potential problems with the credit markets, I can see why some people think it's necessary. But on the other hand, this is the federal government, yo, and they're kinda known for screwing stuff up, so even if it passed I have little confidence that it would be managed well. Both our jobs are fairly secure, for now anyway, so I'm kind of tentatively in the "Don't panic and ride it out" camp at the moment, but hey, I'm forty-six and I've only had a 401k (well, a 403b) for three years, and even before the current mess, there wasn't enough in it to make a cat laugh. So I've always assumed that I'd either be working till I dropped or living in a cardboard box in my old age, since it's damn sure Social Security is going to collapse well before I do. The only difference is how many people will be keeping me company on the sidewalk.

Oh, well. As long as it's a sidewalk with wireless internet.