Angel's popped out three so far. She's a little past due. I gave her some watermelon and she started into labour, she's got a nice cold bottle to snuggle that's making her happy.

This is my first rat to have babies while I was awake, and it's adorable to watch her licking them all over to clean them up.

I wish it were cooler out, but they all seem to be doing okay.

Cross your fingers for her, please, and for them. I want everyone to do well.

So here I am in Iowa. Yesterday was the big family reunion, eight of ten of my mom's siblings were here (Uncle Dave had his flight cancelled, rescheduled, and then cancelled again at the last moment, so he couldn't make it and we're all a bit pissed off) as well as a bunch of cousins, maybe twenty of the thirty of us, and a few people from the older generation, plus assorted siblings' spouses.

That makes for a really full house.

It feels the same way family reunions always feel, which is intensely reassuring. My life's changed a lot on the ten-something years since I've been to one, and I am a different person here, but the cradle or the roots are still there if I look hard enough. It took me a day or two of looking to find them, of course. It's a bit of a gear switch. It's on the same lake it always is, at Rita's house, though she's in a different house this year. I had expected everyone to look much older, but they don't. I guess my eyes have grown as I have.

My mom and my aunt Rita are close, and Rita's kids are the only cousins I've kept up with regularly. It's been really good to see them again. The youngest is about three feet taller than when I saw him last, and he has brown hair instead of blonde now. Everyone else has filled out into these massive, tall boys built like sides of beef. It's such a beautiful thing to be connected to people in this way. I remember my older cousin Justin being sort of godlike in his abilities, and so old and world-wise. Now the little cousins can't tell him from an uncle, even though he's only five years my senior, and he's great with the kids. He did a ton of driving the boat around pulling a tube on the lake, and we talked well into first light one night. He'd worried about me, apparently, last time I came out-- he'd worried I'd go home and kill myself. These are the kind of people who think about you afterwards. I remember he drove me from one place to another in Iowa once, he put on cruise control and crossed his legs in the driver's seat and I was in absolute awe. We wrapped up some loose ends from the last time we'd seen each other.

The little wavelets on the lake are sparkling in the morning sun. There are fireflies in the evenings. It's magic.

My other cousin, Joe, is my age (I'm just about a year older, but not quite). He's so well placed,so suited to his environment, it's a joy to watch him. He has little mannerisms that I remember adoring when I was fourteen, like chewing on the edge of his drinking glass, and yet he's so changed and grown that recognising them is ... oh, I don't know what I'm trying to say. I see my brother, too, grown up with muscles from Ken-do. holding on to the back of a tube and dressing eccentrically, and they're all grown up, all young men. It makes me so happy to see, because this sort of flourishing growth and wellness and coming into oneself is part of the same cycle that death and decay and birth are. I have less experience with it in other people, though. It reminds me that summer also comes.

Anyhow, Joe and I traded memories (I remember when I came to Vancouver and went to /Dangerous Lies/ with your friends, I think because your mom made you take me; I remember when I came out to Iowa and you smeared fireflies and showed me how they left a glow). He brought me a dead firefly, that was still glowing, and was careful to say he had found it and not killed it. He brought me a live firefly.

This is the place I came when I was fourteen and sixteen, or something like that, when things were very bad at home, right before the divorce and maybe afterwards at some point. I definitely think of that as my coming-of-age summer, or maybe all the trips blur into one. Because my home life was so bad then, my family was so numb and incapable of giving much and my friends were too distant to adopt their parents and sort of graft myself on like that, I'd never really been in a place where everyone was freely and generously loving. I came here and they were, it was just here, I didn't have to be anything or do anything or project anything right, they just liked me and loved me because. Just because.

It probably was one of the most significant things in my life. Looking back, I realise that it's what made me think people might be worth giving a try. I learned there might be something special between people after all. I think it's also been a model I've imitated throughout the rest of my life, once I sorted myself out: love people fearlessly and freely, because it's okay. And you know, it's a good model. Love is okay.

It's a lesson I should keep. And it's a lesson I should expand: ten years of seperation doesn't diminish, it changes. I saw that this weekend. Changing is not a problem, it's often an enrichment to the people involved. That's good.

And I think this is the well my love comes from. The soil is deep, here, and it supports that sort of generosity. I feel replenished. I know I was feeling stretched, before, losing sight of what precisely love meant, and what it meant to give it-- I was getting the details confused with the thing, as so many of us do. I was going through rote actions in the hopes that the ritual would bring the feeling, but no, it's the other way around.

So I think I am going back home, when I do, a little bit soothed, a little bit reborn, and a little bit sad from missing these people. I'm trying to get Joe to come visit, maybe it will happen. Certainly I'll need to see them again before another ten years are up.

That's all I have to say.

Who's coming to the drive fest? Wanna stop by my place for breakfast first? I'll make food if you'll bring ingredients.

Tomorrow: cage cleaning, space, Drew
Fri: cleaning(?), Organix w/ Cat
Sat: Afternoon free. Bob eve.
Sun: Drive fest? Breakfast @ my place first? Juggler eve.
Mon: scheduling is reducing my brain to a puddle of drooling goo.
Tues: hear it drip out my ears?
Wed Picnic w/ Eva.

As if it were made for me!

It's possible that we'll be moving very, very soon. That would mean I could live with the rats for awhile before I go up to Kelowna, yay! Being parted from them is not good for me at all.

Sunday is at Lizzy's, being bred.

A new little girl, MLR Gaia, is three weeks old right now but will come live with me when she's old enough.

Angel is with Sunday, keeping her company until she needs to go into isolation. If we move soon enough, Sunday could even have her babies at home! *longing*

I am worried that I have some sort of asthma/permanent respiratory damage/something. It could just be some sort of lingering effect from being sick, but the centre of my chest out to below my collarbones tends to feel like someone's sitting on it some of the time, sort of a tight dull pain when I breathe, and my throat is chokey a lot. Step 1 in fixing this is obviously denial.

I am in the cramping stage of my cycle, a couple of days after ovulation and a week or two till blood.

I'm not fond of waiting for things to happen.

I'm not working this weekend, whee-hoo! That means I'll likely be free all Saturday (and packing all the rest of the week, so pfft!). Climbing might be in orfder, I went today and it was really nice. Maybe wandering around Granville Island eating olive bread is in order too, we shall see.

I'm a bundle of neurotic weird lately, between the darkness and the lack of rats and the life uncertainty stuff. I'm having the strongest escapist fantasies, so if I just disappear someday, no worries. I'm just hiding out.

The alarm just went off, time to make breakfast.

i just do not understand how the shift key is so random on this keyboard. electronics problem?

wednesday- work, climbing, karaoke
thursday- work, a.
friday- work, dinner at home, climbing, brenton's party
saturday- ubc sustainability thing, evening unplanned as yet
sunday- climbing?
monday- work, climbing, kynnin
tuesday- stretching/yoga/bellydance with eva
wednesday- work, meetup, climbing, karaoke
thursday- something was here too, what was it?
friday- unplanned
saturday/sunday- climbing in n van

Kurrs? I'm trying to get out to this, certainly Sat, with a fellow permie dude named Max... you in?

http://www.ams.ubc.ca/student_life/resource_groups/sec/sec%20conference.pdf

Helen goes in to get her lump looked at Satudrday at 4pm. Upside to having rats is they're wonderful. Downside is this part. It seems like I just got her as a tiny bouncing baby who was harassing my older ones, now she's sedate, retiring, and definitely the matriarch of the cage. She keeps even Bandita in line. That was a year and a half ago, though.

Yesterday I had a family dinner scheduled, but it got cancelled. Likely something weird is going down with my family, which is no doubt gonna suck. On the positive side, it meant I had a whole afternoon and evening that had nothing scheduled in it. No people pre-scheduled (Bob had a friend over and was playing magic, so was kinda-sorta occupied but not unavailable for snuggles), no things to do pre-scheduled, it was lovely. I played with the rats and napped and read some and computered a bit and made biscuits and... well, that's all, really, but it made me so happy. I actually lounged a lot too, on the sofa, just sort of randomly hangin'.

Haha. What a thing to post about.

Other things are comin' relatively thick and fast-- fulltime with the plant company next week and from then on, I need to consider whether to stay with them for various reasons or make the jump to outdoor landscaping; Lightning had an observed breeding with Rizzo; the babies are getting friggin' big; Trevor coming tonight; costuming is always fun; whatever it is that happened with my family needs to be told to me; I need to hang the original art by an awesome local artist that I impulse-bought today from a gallery in North Van (come see it! It's awesome!); I need to figure out my finances (now that I have money for more than rent and food, where should it go-- work clothes, leisure clothes, climbing gym, computer, rat cage, digital camera, books, winter coat, tuition saved for next year, pottery wheel, sewing machine, decent hand-built local-artist dishes, teapot collection?)

I need to name my rat-babies.

Back in stride.

No longer bleeding. I'm liking these very short, heavy ones-- not the heavy, but the short. I just hope I won't get ridiculously sick every time though.

Google it, UBC Apple Festival

It's such a generous time of year.