mostly so that anyone who comes wandering by wondering who that girl was that just commented on their story, post etc.

i just noticed that i left you with quite a bit of a cliffhanger 18 months ago, didn't i?

well, to sum up:

2007 sucked the big one, with one bright and shiny counterpoint: my daughter. no, she hasn't quite eclipsed the bad (my father, my mother in law, and a few more important relatives all passed away that year, to say nothing of the non-death tragedies we dealt with), but she's the most amazing thing ever and if anyone could do it, it would be her.

2008 is much better, but is full of it's own less-intense trials.

being a mom is now my full-time job, and sadly i've found little time to do much more than that, or recover from that. i have bits of original fiction floating around my head, but nothing i've committed to paper. fanfic is even lower on the devoted-time and while i find time for quick reads from all the journals i lurk on (gotta love rss), i haven't really done more reading that that (you know, like those book things that i have a stack of next to my chair).

"wow," you may be thinking. "that girl is seriously depressed."

eh, not really. just kinda tired. i'm well aware of what depressed me is like, and this girl is just a melancholy version of normal me.

so...that's where we are right now. no promises that there will be something more worthy in this spot for another 18 months or anything ;)

it is time to start spilling secrets, my friends. (or, rather, my imaginary lj readers). i'm venting a bit more here than i would on my "real life" blog because ... well, i don't know, there's just not enough anonymity over there.

you may have noticed that i sort of disappeared mid-february fests. i posted a reference to one of my gifts, but have left the other one (and all the feedback i'd received on both of my stories) virtually ignored. i was considerate enough to say "hey, i don't have time to read this now, but i wanted to say thanks" but that's been pretty much it.

and it sort of eats at me.

so i'm going to try and fix some of that today, right after i finish explaining/whining and such.

my family received some awful news just before christmas: my father has pancreatic cancer. this is one of those fast acting "blink and they're gone" kinds. prognosis was "some months, probably less than a year." looks like "some" is turning out to be "about 4" ...if you're doing the math, he was diagnosed 4 months ago saturday. i will be surprised if he made it to the anniversary. he's been in and out of the hopsital for pneumonia and treatment/cancer-related blood-clotting, but has taken a serious nose-dive this week. to the point that i'm keeping vigil at his "bedside" instead of working.

but wait! there's more! (sorry, it's not that i'm not broken up about my dad, trust me. inappropriate humor is my favorite defense mechanism).

i will spare you most of the work-related details, but it started getting extra messy after the turn of the year (the other reason i sort of checked out in february) and then got worse for other reasons, and then ... just... ugh. i won't lie, part of the reason i'm sparing you is because as drama and angst-filled as it can be, it's not like we're trying to cure cancer or teach the next generation of thinkers or anything. it's not quite as bad as when i worked for the phone company (it's not even the phone bill. it's an application that audits the phone bill. that data will still be there tomorrow, i promise!), but it's not too much better.

anyway.

in early march (the day of one particularly "you have got to be kidding me!" cataclysmic event at work), i found out i was pregnant.

this is a very cool thing. we've been trying for over a year. i was thrilled to be able to tell my father that even though he may not be there for the birth, he was going to be a grandfather.

and then it looked like there might be problems with the pregnancy. there's a point at the beginning where there's really nothing much anybody can do to prevent what's possibly inevitable except wait for it to happen, and "take it easy."

and there was this week that looked like i might miscarry the same week my father was going to die (the blood clots).

that was just under a month ago. the doctor put me on progesterone since the baby was doing it's job of growing just fine. i'm past the first trimester, and seemingly quite pregnant, but it'll be another 2 weeks before my next checkup and i'm weaning myself off the progesterone now. until i hear the heartbeat at that appointment, i won't believe everything's okay. ...i may not even then. let's not kid ourselves.

so i wait.

at first, while i waited, i couldn't concentrate on anything worthy. it killed all my desire to be creative and most of my desire to even absorb the creativity of others. i try to tell myself stories while i fall asleep at night, to keep me from thinking about work or life or whathaveyou. it's been failing, too.

the last couple of days however, have felt different. perhaps i've slipped so far into needing to escape that my brain's picking up the slack. which is cool. i'd like to have time to write some of this stuff down, or really just give it a good, entertaining thinking, but at least i know it's still in there. :)

anyway, um...thanks for listening and stuff

quick! go read Diverse right now! (well, you know, unless girlsmut isn't your thing)

it's a beautifully written Hermione/Pansy coming out fic that i was lucky to receive as a gift in the hpvalensmut gift exchange. hooray!

While I was going back through old posts to tag them, i realized i'd never posted my hp_backtosmut entry from this year in my own journal. Enjoy?

Title: Final Exam
Recipient: melusinahp
Pairing(s): Harry/Tonks with mentions of Harry/Ginny and Remus/Tonks as well as Harry/Rosmerta!Tonks, /Angelina!Tonks, /Narcissa!Tonks and /Bellatrix!Tonks
Rating: Adult/NC-17 (maybe just a very hard R?)
Summary: Sex with a metamorphmagus, should never be underestimated, no matter what the circumstances.
Warnings: mentions war-related deaths, borderline dubious consent, shape-shifter sex, and of course...smut and foul language.
Author's Note: This started out as a ball of unhappy angst with a (planned) happy ending, but they wouldn't let me turn it around. So, I started over and tried to borrow the bits of flashback from the original version. If it seems a little uneven, that might be why. Also, I've never written this pairing (or Tonks at all), so to make up for any out-of-character-ness, I included references to all 5 pairing prompts. And finally, there's a line that Harry/Hermione shippers might take offense to, but none was intended. I just needed to make an example out of someone and she volunteered. She's good about that.

( read it )

god bless the theme makers. i started this lj up ...whenever i did and tossed a couple of colors at it that matched my then-default hand-made icon with the intent of making it prettier sometime.

and then one day i ran out of icons and thought "now that i dropped the cash, i can really make it pretty." (that may or may not be accurate, but i was given the impression that personalization came at a price) i also thought i would fill up those 35 icons as the whim struck me. so far i have the one. one $20 icon of a pumpkin and a heart that i used for about 3 days near halloween.

and that's just silly.

so today i started poking around the setup features to see how easy/hard it was going to be to start customizing things and discovered that much like wordpress and other popular blogging application, many people had done the work for me. i like the color scheme. i like the image on the border well enough, and it got messy when i tried to poke further and see if i could easily swap that out, so for now it's staying.

there should be more icons soon, too. i seem to get the itch whenever i start commenting, and for someone who writes HP fic exclusively at this point, there's an alarmingly small number of HP icons in my gallery. none, in fact.

edit: woo! there are sexy new icons now!