from Stockholm the day before yesterday

OMG. PS: Beijing Traffic Lesson: Left Turn. WITH DIAGRAMS. Hand-drawn ones. I'm in love with this article.

pancakes don't but m&ms might

"Pancakes don't make you fat! It's like milk. And flour and stuff."

the nebulous neverending quest for family history and my coolest recent direct ancestor

This is a photo of my great-grandmother Sylvia, who died a few days shy of her 100th birthday about 6 years ago. She was a flapper, and this photo was what made me decide to adopt the hairstyle I wear.

She was the one who was married to the rich Russian opium smuggler who later did the whole murder-suicide thing and she's also the one who spent decades in crippling depression.

I have a lot of cool jewelry from her, through the combined circumstances of her having been a girly flapper party girl and then married to a rich older man who showered her with presents for several years before she kicked his ass to the curb and raised my grandfather alone. And I have a lot of cool stories about her too¹, because she was pretty cool. What I don't have is much knowledge about her early life, because she left England alone at the age of 18 and never had any contact with any of her family again. But I learned a bit more about her on this trip, including the fact that I don't have to feel guilty anymore about my real name's being of eventual Welsh origin because she was half Welsh, which makes me 1/16th Welsh and completely entitled. ( The Welsh story is... )

1. Like how, when she was a flapper and working as a nurse in Toronto, she jumped into the river in January on a dare and got pneumonia.

dis party sux (word)

I really need to switch to Linux so Jabber will work again without having to download a completely fucking separate program. The Trillian plugin works about as well as Windows 95.

I'm really bouncy so I am totally the Frank in this relationship

Guys. I'm so accomplished today. Let me tell you the nesty stuff I did. ( The nesty and arty and stuff I did, LET ME TELL YOU IT. )