‘Nai ‘Nai…

So the funeral was… sad, but happy to, in the way that someone who has lived a really good life surrounded by friends is happy. The best ‘happy’ part was the gathering at my parents’ house–I got to see cousins I usually don’t see, and I’ve got a few ‘funeral’ stories that actually, uhm, put the ‘fun’ back in funeral.

The first one was when I was talking to a cousin I hadn’t seen in a while, telling her “Oh yeah–you live near the school where I work!” and then I started talking about the writing and suddenly the cousin looked at me and said, “Wait a minute… do you publish under another name?”

I said, “Yeah… Amy Lane!”

And she said, “I WONDERED who that was–I looked up Grandma’s obituary and there was your blogpost and I couldn’t figure out WHO that was who knew so much about our family!”

I got a laugh out of that–and so did my dad!

And then, later, I was talking to another cousin. Now this cousin I knew slightly better–and I love her to death, but, well, we don’t see eye-to-eye on some things. She doesn’t get the whole ‘put the kids before the dream’ kind of thing–when I say “I don’t have enough money to go to San Francisco to schmooze with the agents/publishers” she says, “Cut the milk with powdered and go!” She doesn’t understand that my family makes plenty of sacrifices (including clean laundry and a house that’s un-embarrassing) so that I can chase my dream–I’m not making them give up anything else. So, well, when she started to show the (inevitable) prurient titillation at the sex scenes in my books, well…

It was impossible not to mess with her.

She wanted to know where I got my material for my sex scenes. This comes up a LOT– and you’d be surprised how many people don’t believe that it’s just my filthy imagination and a lot of in-house monogamous practice. I tried to give her that answer and she was like, “Yeah… but it’s… you know… TWO MEN! Or MORE!”

Now the thing is, anyone who can write a simple, straight, one on one sex-scene with two consenting adults can mix it up a bit–either gender, you’re IMAGINING how the other gender feels. One man, two men, it’s not like I’ve got experience with my own marriage tackle, right? I’ve got a whole different set of parts! But I’ve got a VERY bi-partisan imagination.

But people don’t buy that–and my cousin wasn’t buying it either, and, well… like I said, I messed with her. I looked her straight in the eye and said, “youporn.com. Lots and lots of youporn.com.”

Her eyes grew the size of dinner plates and she said, “I don’t even have a reply to that,” at about the same time a friend of the family (who knows that I can be very evil) practically spit out his lasagna he was laughing so hard.

“Call it research!” he giggled, “Reasearch!” and I laughed and moved off to speak to someone else.

*sigh* Family–good times.

And I mean that. The really sucky thing about seeing your relatives at a funeral is that you wish there were other times you get to see them, because holidays always find you spread a bit thin. I mean that. There are too many good people in the world–and in my families–to get enough good, good time to visit.

It was hard to leave–but leave I did–because I had some promises to my children to keep. And I promised Knittech pictures or Grilltech will give me spoilers for my show on Thursday night and that would SUCK. (Tell him I lived up to my part of the bargain Saren–please?)

Anyway…
So yesterday, after the funeral, there was this…

And then there was some of this…

And then today, there was a lot of this…

And then some more of this

And finally, not too long ago, there was this…