Things I Learned Last Week Watching Television

A "glam wedding" does not mean everyone looks like Ziggy Stardust.

Mike Rowe from "Dirty Jobs" and Gene Simmons from "Kiss" are interchangeable.

It is possible to hit someone hard enough to "knock their socks off", provided (a) they aren't wearing shoes, (b) they are wearing low-friction material socks, (c) they shave their legs, and (d) you hit as hard as a five-ton steel beam traveling 65 miles per hour.

Idiot young women from the Jersey Shore grow up to be idiot Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Somewhere, there are parents gullible enough to believe their children's imaginary playmates are real.

Motorcycle racing is not, in fact, completely safe.

Walking around with a big rock in your pants will make people not vote for you.

So Much For That Friendship

About 2 years ago, BBB announced on his blog that he was quitting his raiding guild and opening up Sidhe Devils as a social guild. I was one of the first to join, first with a little level 1 gnome warrior, and soon after I created Palintera, one of my favorite characters. I made new friends in that guild, including Bellwether, who has been a close and valued friend, who has been incredibly supportive through the ups and downs my life has gone through. SD was not my primary guild - it was always a lower priority than my weekly sessions with my RL friends and my raiding with Aetherial Circle. But it was always a comfortable place to escape to a few times a month. It was something I valued, and my level of involvement seemed to be fine with everyone.

Last summer I decided to consolidate all of my Alliance toons on one server. Because I felt I no longer fit well in AC, but SD was still a pleasant place, it made sense to move them all to that server. So in came Kinnavieve and Ratdorf, Phoenicia and Vyp. Based on my recommendation, several of my blogging friends looking for a more casual guild chose to transfer there. And, to my surprise, Julie decided to leave AC and move her characters as well. It was a good time. I got to do heroics, Julie and I could play together as a way to bridge the distance between us, and the guild was a happy place.

Last October life took a horrifying turn, when Julie was diagnosed with cancer. My involvement with the guild, and everyone else, dropped off. I stopped writing Need More Rage. All that mattered was focusing on supporting Julie as much as I could.

About this time I was vaguely aware of issues cropping up in Sidhe Devils, but I wasn't paying close attention. The guild had started raiding on Thursday and Friday nights, neither of which I could make, and apparently there were some tensions between the more focussed (compared to AC I would hardly call them hard-core) raiders, and some more casual guild members. Then, suddenly, Bear announced he and Cassie were quitting the guild, effective immediately. But they didn't leave; instead, people started getting kicked out of the guild. Bear had always struck me as a little heavy-handed with insisting on certain rules, such as logging in regularly to avoid being removed, but this was new. Long-time guild members were being kicked with alarming frequency. There were a few posts on the guild forums about issues being talked out between the GMs and the officers, and all was cool now, only to have the gquits and gkicks flare up again. Some of the former guildies started a new guild called Parallel, and apparently it would focus on casual raiding, while SD was going to be a non-raiding guild. However, it quickly became clear that moving one toon to Parallel mean that all your alts would be immediately kicked, and your guild forum access removed. Morale within Sidhe Devils plummeted, and the exodus accelerated. Stop took his main out to join a raiding guild on another server, and within an hour all his alts were kicked. It became very clear to we who remained that we were to be Bear and Cassie's friends and no one else's or we were out, as if we had never existed.

Like I said, I was busy dealing with Real Life during this, and I pretty much kept my head down. I thought it sucked, but I wanted to be loyal to the guild that had been my home, and I hoped once things settled down that there could be a recovery. But there never was. In the end, there were only a handful of people left. Even Bear, who hadn't been around much for months, bailed, converting his main toon to a Tauren and finding new opportunities to raid on the Horde side. So Julie and I talked about it, and decided that being members of a social guild with no one left to talk to was just too depressing. Rather than sneak off into the night, we posted our intentions to leave on the forums. Since the guild was clearly dead, and abandoned by its leaders, we didn't expect much of a response. Silly us.

Bear replied with one of his enormous walls of text, mostly complaining about how much he and Cassie had put into the guild, how hard they had worked, and how unappreciative everyone was. How terrible it was that everyone had walked away from them. But he also found time to tell me what a crappy guild member I had been, how I didn't say enough in gchat or participate in enough activities. Apparently there was a secret quota he hadn't bother to tell anyone about, and I was lacking. When Julie responded that he was being unreasonable, he ran off to his blog and posted a couple of rambling, vague, whiny posts about how mean everyone had been to them. Nowhere did he mention that he had been absent for months while pugging heroics with random strangers, or that people who had tried to fill the leadership void had been squashed because they didn't follow his vision of how a social guild ought to be.

You know what, Bear? Fuck you. If you can't accept that you were the one in charge, the one who made mistakes, the one who tried to have his cake and eat it too, then you need to grow up. Attacking the people who stuck around the longest, who stayed with you while you were busy kicking out our friends for merely trying to enjoy the game, for "sucking the life" from your guild is bullshit. I valued our friendship, but you've gone too far. Way, way too far. Life is too short to waste with people who think that friendship means they can control what you do and who with. Most of us outgrew that sort of thing in high school. Why didn't you?

Book Meme

Picked this up from Bananrama Shoulders.

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi -Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Things I Now Know About Laundry

1) I am not qualified to operate the precise and delicate instrument that is our washing machine.

2) Dryer neither.

3) Folding my clean underwear is cute, in a quirky sort of way.

4) Folding Julie's underwear is cute and endearing, in a "Dude, I never bother to do that" sort of way.

5) Putting my t-shirts at the bottom of the drawer, so they all get rotated, makes me an "oh my god you are such a geek" geek.

Ah, Spring

When a young dog's thoughts turn to getting pulled through the grass on her back....

Been A Long Year

It was a year ago yesterday that I proposed to Julie. We knew it was going to be a long engagement, in part because we were both still married to other people at the time. Possibly also because, well, it was only the fifth day that we'd actually been in each other's physical presence. We didn't know how long my divorce would drag out, for absolutely no reason. And we certainly didn't know that we were going to have to deal with cancer. But we both knew it was what we wanted.

As I write this, Julie is driving across Texas, to our home. And when she gets here, she's going to stay. Forever. She is bringing Patrick, her fourteen-year-old son with her, and the last of her stuff that was still in Florida. In eleven days she starts her new job. And we will finally be able to start building our life, together.

Been a long year. So, so glad we went through it together.

A Warcraft Whine

We are such bloody amateurs.

Kinnavieve, my paladin, has 112 raid boss kills, versus 27 deaths. These were all done with appropriate level gear.

Since my Horde guild started raiding Naxxramas a few weeks ago, we have killed 7 bosses and I have died 17 times. Granted we only have 8 people, but we also have much better gear than what Naxx was designed for.

Gods we suck. Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall.

Holy Frickin Cow

Apparently ....

... I talk out loud while thinking about stuff in the shower. I have been told that it is a little creepy.

Your Mileage May Vary

So yesterday I get a text message from Julie: "OMG go read TJ's latest post!"


Followed shortly by :"You buy! You buy! You buy! You buy! You buy!"

So on the way home last night I did. It was on sale, only $15. I guess demand was off now that Valentine's Day was gone. Another text message: "Hurry home!"

I get home, take the dogs for a quick walk, and then we get busy. The sensations were ... novel. Certainly not bad, but hard to say it was better. Different, in a good way. Definitely got a FOGHORN, although the stuff only gets some of the credit.

Gonna try it again? Yup.

Nearing the End, Thank Gods

There are good days and bad days, but the bad days are getting worse, and more frequent. Julie is currently recovering from her fifth round of chemo, and it's pretty clear that the lining of her stomach is pretty much gone. Foods that she could eat fine a few weeks ago now trigger her nausea. Happens so often, that we are developing little routines and in-jokes while we sit on the bathroom floor next to the toilet, waiting for the next round of heaves. And she's getting weaker, not surprisingly. A couple of hours at the mall Sunday left her exhausted.

All this physical stress is tearing down her emotional state too. She feels horrid many days, she can't work, she's tired of playing computer games.... I'm getting worried about how much longer she can keep this up.

Fortunately next week will be the last chemo session. She'll get a few weeks to recover from that, which she's really gonna need, and then the mastectomy. Surprisingly, that will be much less stressful physically, because it doesn't involve cutting any muscle. The doctor says she'll recover in a week.

And then, mid-April, she is scheduled to start her new job, the one she was originally going to start six weeks ago. It can't get here soon enough - she needs to have this medical poisoning done with, and to get back to having a life.

Things I Learned Watching the Superbowl Commercials

1) Drinking Coke makes it safe to sleepwalk across Africa

2) You can fake your death and be buried with a week's supply of Doritos

3) Buying your car at CarMax will impress your gopher

4) Casual Friday means everyone shows up in their underwear

5) If pictures of naked women were allowed on the internet, gay men would slap each other

6) Being in a committed relationship with a woman will cause you to lose your spine, your penis, and your hearing. But purchasing the right pants / tires / portable internet device will get the first two back for you.

7) Superbowl commercials have gotten truly lame

Real Quick Cancer Update

With two of the planned six chemotherapy cycles completed, today's scan shows that Julie's tumors have greatly decreased in size. Hooray! Is very good news.

And The Winner Is...

Possibility Number 2. Brett did not show up. So my lawyer and I ran down all the assets and debts and child support plans and how we wanted it all divided, and the judge said "sounds fine to me. you're divorced." I'm not even required to notify Brett or anything. She does get 30 days to claim I pulled a shenanigans, but the burden of proof would be on her, and since I didn't she would lose. I just, you know, didn't go out of my way to act as her unpaid personal secretary.

I am still in shock. It was over so damn fast...

So, What's Gonna Happen?

Today is the day of my divorce trial. I read recently that only 15% of divorces in the US end up going this far, and half of those involve allegations of abuse. All I can say is, my lawyer and I have tried repeatedly to negotiate a settlement, only to be met with hostility or silence. The most recent attempt was eleven days ago, when my lawyer and I were up half the night assembling all the financial documents Brett said she wanted to see before she would sign the agreement, only to have her cancel the meeting at the last minute with a truly vitriolic e-mail.

No wonder we couldn't make the marriage work.

I figure one of four things will happen today:

1) Brett shows up with a recently hired lawyer, who immediately asks the judge to postpone until she's had time to prepare. Brett asked me for $1200 just a week ago to hire an attorney, so it could happen.

2) Brett doesn't show up. I win by forfeit, but Brett gains another platform to tell our daughter how I screwed her. Since the check I gave her for the lawyer hasn't been cashed yet, it could happen.

3) Brett shows up without a lawyer, and begs for more time and rants about how unfair it is that she is going to have to, you know, get a job some time in the next couple of years. Probably would be awkward as hell.

4) Brett and her newly hired lawyer spring some sneak attack that neither my lawyer or I anticipated. I don't see how, but that is the nature of sneak attacks.

Meanwhile, Julie is getting her first chemotherapy treatment today. I would so much rather be with her.

Serious But Not Dire

Julie got the full diagnosis and treatment plan from her oncologist yesterday. Her cancer is in Stage 3 and has spread to two lymph nodes. She's going to need months of treatment, first chemo and then a bilateral mastectomy, but she will probably beat it (survival rate for people at this stage is something like 60%). This is tough, but it's much better than if it had metastasized and gone to Stage 4, in which case we'd be looking at a survival rate closer to 20%. So, we are both feeling relieved and optimistic today.

Many, many thanks to everyone and their kind thoughts.

Time For Something More Light-Hearted

Past time, in fact. So here's some pics of Taylor's Halloween costume. She decided she wanted to be an Ent, and designed and assembled her costume in the space of a few hours Saturday.

Knee Deep In Financial Documents...

...for the divorce. Gods, I want this to be over.

Luckiest Man In The World

The results of Julie's biopsy are, to put it simply, grim. She has a fast-growing, very likely to metastasize, cancer. There doing more tests now, to find out what the full picture is, but if indeed it has already spread then the odds of her surviving five years are not great. It would be so easy to curse the universe for teasing me, for dropping this woman who is perfect for me in my lap, only to threaten to take her away again. But that's not how I feel. I'm scared, I'm worried, but I also know that I have a wonderful, smart, funny, sexy woman to share my life with. A woman who thinks I am wonderful, and is happy to show me that she does. And, no matter what happens, no matter if our time together will be years or decades or only a few months, I still feel I am the luckiest man in the world.

It's Not Right

Julie and I both feel we've been waiting our whole lives to find each other. All the bad marriages, bad relationships, missteps, miscues, have taught us so much about who we are, and about what we want. Had we met twenty years ago, neither of us would have been the least attracted to each other. But now we know that we belong together, that we can be happy together. And everything is going to be as it should, finally.

This morning, Julie found out she has breast cancer. We don't know yet how bad it is, what the prognosis will be. But even best case, it won't be good. Physical pain and misery, financial stress, worry. And it very well may not be best case. The thought that I could lose the woman I belong with, now that I've finally found her, is terrifying. But I know Julie needs me to be strong for her, to help her, to be with her, because as bad as is this for me, it's much worse for her. I don't know how I'm going to do this, I just know I have to.

This just isn't right.

Update: Talked to a good friend whose mom is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer. It helped a lot. I feel a lot less panicky now. No matter what, I am so, so glad Julie won't have to be alone.