#and my social life began around this winter when people started celebrating their birthdays and inviting me and hanging out and inviting me

[starpros-sunshine]

Also I have to confess when Eichi does the the "I've heard usually people do this and this" or anything in that vein as a statement it's so real to me

[hateswifi]

Rising from the Ashes: Of Galas and Fires

So this is Part two here is to my Master List and Part One. Enjoy

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When she woke up to the bright light peeking through her windows the next morning she decided to get up and go to the park to design. Near lunchtime, a shadow fell over her.  "Hey Mar," Chloe greeted, looking down at her bluenette friend. "You realize its one and you probably haven’t been responsible by eating anything today."

"Hey Chloe, no I didn't realize it was that late and no I haven’t eaten anything," Marinette said, looking at her phone. "Since we're already going to be at your hotel, can we just turn it into a sleepover?"

"Ya sure, why not. I'll call up Kagami and tell her to bring her stuff. Movie marathon and spa night?" Chloe asked now sitting as she looked through contacts. Marinette nodded in agreement. “Hey Blueberry, I’m here with Mar. We want to have a sleepover after the gala. Yes, movies and spa. Cool, gala starts at six-thirty to around ten o’clock tonight. Bye love you!” Chloe finished hanging up. 

“Cool want to head to your house for lunch?” Chloe asked, standing up. 

“Ya mama made quiches don’t worry spinach and feta,” Marinette said standing up and holding arms with Chloe. They take a nice but short walk to the bakery. “Mama I’m home and I brought Chloe,” Marinette greeted as she entered. 

“It’s good to see you. We, Tom and I, are going to the gala tonight,” Sabine said, hugging the two girls. 

“So mama you know how I’m hanging out with Kagami, Luka, and Adrien during the gala because Kagami and Adrien’s parent won’t let them go,” Marinette said as Sabine nodded. “Well, we all want to sleepover at Chloe’s after the gala are we allowed to?”

“Of course it’s nice that you’re staying with your friends. I’m sorry you couldn’t get out of It Chloe,” Sabine said, looking sympathetically at the girl she started to see as a daughter. 

“I’ve learned to deal with it. Anyways, after I get to hang out with my family,” Chloe says with a smile. 

“Awww, Chloe!” Marinette said hugging her. “We’re going to steal your quiches bye, Mama!”

After eating the quiches it was already three. They were watching Yuri on Ice, Adrien had gotten the miraculous squad into it and anime in general. 

“Hey, Chlo, I’m going to grab my night bag. Tomorrow morning, want to go shopping for the winter social? It’s next week?” Marinette asked, standing. 

“Sure Mar, but I don’t know why you’re worrying over it, you already graduated. I don’t understand why you don’t just take a break from the stupid people we call our classmates. Also, can you come to the hotel before to help me with my makeup?” Chloe asked, standing up and turning off the t.v. 

“You know the only reason I’m still in school is that I’m class president,” Marinette sighed, taking their quiche plates to the kitchen. “And I didn’t want to be accused of wanting attention.”

“Well Mar, I’m proud of you. I’m going to head to the hotel to shower and by the time you get there I should be out and maybe dressed, depending on how I feel,” Chloe said, waving bye to her friend. 

Marinette climbed to her room and grabbed the essentials like her hairbrush, two outfits, always prepared for a disaster, a toothbrush, her favorite color nail polish, her super cute and comfy pajamas, and a fluffy blanket. She also stuffed the Miracle Box in her bag; she never leaves more than twelve hours without it. She grabbed most of her cash; she was hoping to buy some fabrics. She also grabbed her stash of snacks for the movie night. 

“Bye, Mama!” Marinette said leaving the house, but she didn’t hear her mama’s response and her papa went out to buy Sabine flowers. She didn’t worry about it, she’ll see them tomorrow after shopping. 

When she got to the hotel, she was let inside because Chloe and Marinette are now friends. She found Chloe’s room within the maze-like halls and entered. She took a seat on Chloe’s bed after she dropped all her stuff. She had fallen asleep but woke up when her vision flashes orange and she wakes up to Chloe standing by her bathroom door in a white fluffy bathrobe. 

“Mar, you ok?” Chloe asked, stepping closer to Marinette as she pats her golden-blonde hair dry. 

“Ya it was just a weird dream,” she answered, sitting up. “You want me to help with hair and makeup?”

“Yes, your makeup style makes me look naturally beautiful and would you be able to put my hair in the braided bun,” Chloe said as she dries her hair. 

“Ok,” Marinette said, standing up. “I’m going to do three French braids into a princess bun.” After she finished Chloe’s hair she started working on her makeup. Thankfully Chloe had stopped wearing the super pigmented blue eyeshadow; she toned it down for more natural color. “And you’re all done. Do you want to get changed now and have a small snack before the gala?” Marinette asked, appreciating her handy work. 

"Let's have a small snack before I get changed. I have cookies here for Tikki if she would like them," Chloe said, pulling off the cover to the cookie plate.

"Thank you, Chloe!" Tikki said, flying over to grab a cookie. Pollen was already sitting on the plate eating some honey.

“Want a smoothie as your snack, the one I ordered is blueberry, and honey," Chloe said, putting a straw in her cup. She had grown accustomed to honey after Pollen started staying with her permanently. "But I'm going to guess you would like a strawberry smoothie." Marinette nodded in agreement. 

After they had finished their smoothies, Chloe got changed into her baby blue shoulderless dress with a puffy skirt that landed around the knee. Marinette had made this dress for her friend's birthday a couple of months prior and it would be the first event she would wear it to. This was an MDC original. 

A couple of years ago Marinette started selling her designs to people like her Uncle Jagged, Clara Nightingale, and people had fallen in love with the designs, so much so that Gabriel requested a line with her. She had created the line and it had been a big hit. She put most of the money in her bank account. The money would help her parents if she had died as Ladybug, but if they weren't around to collect it the money would be split up amongst her friends, except for Adrien after he refused.

"Mar, you gotta get going my daddy will be here soon to escort me down," Chloe said, breaking her out of the past. 

"Oh yeah I also have to get going I'm supposed to be meeting the rest of the miraculous team at the Eiffel Tower," Marinette said then transformed. "Chloe, you look extra pretty tonight." Ladybug and Chloe hugged until they heard a knock on her door, her dad was there to pick her up. They broke away and Ladybug jumped off the balcony and ran towards the Eiffel Tower. When she dropped everyone was already waiting for her.

"Hey, Mar. Do you think I can drop my stuff in Chloe's room before heading down?" Ryuko asks, switching her bag to her other shoulder.

"Ya you don't want to show up at the gala with your bag, that would be weird," Ladybug answered, hugging the rest of the group. "You all ready?"

"As I'll ever be," Viperon grumbled, not wanting to be stuck at a stuffy gala all night.

"Don't worry about it the pain only lasts for the first couple hours," Chat jokes, then jumped towards the hotel. 

They all wait on the roof of the hotel for Ryuko to come back so they could enter together as a squad. They heard Ryuko join them so the miraculous team jumped down towards the red carpet entrance that was surrounded by paparazzi. Flashes from the cameras blind the heroes as microphones were shoved in their faces. 

“Chat! Are you and Ladybug dating?” 

“Who is Hawkmoth? Is it true you know who he is?” 

“Are you guys gonna keep being heroes?”

“What is your statement towards Hawkmoth if he is watching tonight?”

“Viperon! are you in love with Ladybug? Do you and Chat secretly despise each other because of it?”

"Who are you all really behind the masks?"

They ignore the questions and enter inside where clapping began as soon as they entered applause broke out throughout the room. They saw all of Paris there to celebrate and raise money to help people in need. Ladybug smiled knowing that she helped make these people happier and safer. She picks her parents out in the sea of faces, that she and her friends stood in front of, and is happy to see them enjoying themselves. She also saw her classmates everyone was fawning over Lila’s ‘MDC’ original dress, specially made just for her. She also noticed Chloe approaching the group. 

“My dress is an actual MDC dress because I actually know her. That’s right, MDC is a girl and her name is Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” Chloe said, spinning to show off her dress.

“That’s a lie. Why would I lie about this beautiful dress?” Lila said, crying. 

“Because your life sucks,” Chloe stated, crossing her arms. 

Gabriel walked over to the girls, hearing the conversation of his prodigy. “You’re talking about MDC?” 

“Yes, Mr. Agreste, he’s quite nice, right? He could also be a model with his looks as well,” Lila cooed. 

“I believe you mean, Miss Dupain-Cheng. She is quite nice and talented. Chloe, I saw your dress as she was working on it and it turned out quite nicely,” Gabriel said, confirming Chloe’s statement. 

“Oh I’m sorry I must have been thinking of MAC,” Lila lied while glaring at Chloe before anyone could question. 

“Of course you did,” Chloe fakes a laugh while brushing her off. All of Lila’s group genuinely laughs along with Chloe. 

As time went on, she saw many people, by now her parents were long gone. The number of people was starting to dwindle all that was left is quiet chatter. That made it quite easy to hear the news reporter, who had been standing near the heroes. 

“There was a fire three dead, two bodies were recovered,” the reporter said. “Now sending you to the scene.”

The heroes immediately left the gala. They saw the lights and realized it was Mar’s house. Her parents had been home. They saw police and firefighters there along with paramedics. 

“What’s the situation,” Viperon asked, landing along with the rest of the team. 

“Three dead only two bodies were found though,” the fire chief informed the heroes. “We couldn’t find the daughter’s body. We think since she was smaller all that’s left is ash. The parents' bodies were recovered. The cause of the fire a silk dress left to dry by the stove, but was too close and caught fire.”

“Are we sure the parents are gone and how do we know the daughter was home?” Ladybug asked in a more timid voice than normal. 

“There bodies are bad, they’re on a stretcher over there and she wasn’t at the gala. We found something that looked like could have been remnants of her,” the paramedic answered. 

“Anyone know about their family situation?” Officer Raincomprix, Sabrina’s dad, asked the four young heroes.

“Besides one of Tom’s parents, who live here in Paris, and the other who travels and all of Sabine’s family from China there’s no one else,” Ryuko responded, looking to the stretchers. 

“Anything salvageable?” Ladybug asked, trying to gain control of her emotions. 

“There’s a safe with some stuff inside, Chat can you open it?” Officer Raincomprix asked.  

Chat shows some hesitation, subtly looking towards Ladybug for confirmation, which she gave. “Yes show me where.”

“It’s already out here, we don’t want anyone else entering. The building is too unstable and will probably collapse soon,” the fire chief said leading them to a medium-size safe that must have taken two guys to move.

Chat opens it with cataclysm, which he learned to control to smaller places, only breaking the lock itself. Inside was all three of the family’s wills. Marinette’s will surprised everyone because she was so young. She had written hers a couple of months after becoming the beloved hero, Ladybug. She wanted to make sure everything was sorted and hopefully helpful for her parents. Her will reads: 

‘If I die an untimely death, everything I own goes to my parents. If they are no longer here with me, then everything that I have is to be split up between my friends. Specifically Chloe, Kagami, Luka, and Adrien. If they are unwilling or not around donate it to a children’s charity.’

Her parents' will said:

‘Everything is to go to our daughter, Marinette Ann Dupain-Cheng. This includes our bakery and bank accounts. If our death comes before she’s an adult her Grandfather Dupain, Tom’s father has stated he would take her in and support her until she can support herself. If something happened to Marinette with us, follow her written will.’

Her grandmother’s pearl necklace and earrings were placed in a traditional Chinese jewelry box along with her grandmother’s engagement ring. There were also many family photos starting from Tom and Sabine’s wedding, all the way up to Marinette’s graduation. There was also quite a lot of money, but that was not too important at the moment. 

The heroes disappeared after that, leaving for Chloe’s room. Everyone was silent in shock. When they arrived Chloe was already there looking at her friend worriedly: she had heard everything from the reporter after the heroes had left. “Hey Mar, it’s okay to cry. You just lost everything and everyone thinks you’re dead,” Chloe said, rubbing her back in a hug. 

“You’re right,” she paused, letting out a cry. “Everyone thinks I’m dead. I have nothing left here, I can start a new life somewhere else. Maybe America.”

“Mar that’s the grief talking,” Luka said, joining in the hug. 

“I have no family left here, my classmates hate me, I already graduated, and you guys know I’m alive. I have the Miracle Box, which has the horse miraculous meaning I can stay in touch with you guys. You can give a statement I’m retiring as Ladybug and everything will... be.. fine,” she said, crying into Luka’s shoulder. 

“Mari, don’t make a decision tonight, at least wait till we can collect everything to give to you and after the funeral,” Adrien reasoned walking to the side to hug her, Chloe and Luka. 

“You can wear a mask, black wig, and grey contacts and say you’re a cousin or something,” Kagami said, finishing the group hug. 

“Chloe, Honey?” came a knock and call from the other side of the door.

“Mar, Luka, Adrien get in the closet,” Chloe whispered all breaking away and pushing them towards the door. 

“Why us?” Adrien asked as he stuck his hand out to stop the door.

“No boys in my room without daddy’s knowledge,” Chloe said, running back towards Kagami. 

“Come in,” Kagami called. 

“Ummm... Chloe, Kagami, your friend's house had a fire tonight and neither of her parents or Marinette made it out,” Mayor Bourgeois said, slowly. 

“No.. No! That can’t be true! She was just supposed to grab something. She said she would be right back!” Chloe screamed, falling to the ground Kagami following to rub her back and cry. 

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. The funeral will be held next week,” he said before leaving. 

“Nice acting Chlo,” Luka said, stepping out of the closet with Adrien and Mari following shortly behind. 

“Can we get changed, eat lots of ice cream, watch movies, and do a spa night,” Marinette whispered, hugging Adrien this time. 

“Of course Buginette, I’m going to jump home and grab some stuff. You’ll probably need to do the same, Luka,” Adrien said, calling his transformation then jumped out the window with Luka jumping out not even a minute later. 

The girls got changed, prepared the spa stuff including facials, nail polish, and a hair mask. They want to pamper themselves after being sad. 

When the boys arrived the girls were in their comfy pajamas and face masks, now they were working on mannies and peddies. Marinette’s were already done and drying. 

They decided on some wholesome Disney movies. They watched some of the Disney Princesses, everyone but Adrien agreeing that he is Rapunzel’s twin. They fell asleep during Snow White and stay curled up with each other till morning. 

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Tag list (Open):

@northernbluetongue @melhuney @ladysblackcat @sturchling @otaku4312 @g-arya @smolplantmum @bluefyoto94 @echpr @moonlightstar64 @thesunanditsangel @cutechip @heaven428

[ravenwolfie97]

2020 Art Summary

Yep, it’s 2021 already. 2020 is finally over. It felt like it lasted forever, and it felt like the end would never come, but here we are. Crazy how the time flew by.

I felt like I didn’t get much art done this year because of Current World Event, but I made a lot more than I thought I did. Even some of my new favorite pieces came out of this year, so I think that’s worth celebrating and looking back upon!

I was insanely productive during the first month of 2020, and looking back I was surprised at all the stuff I did, but then I remembered that that winter season was actually one of the best times of my life! I started being more socially involved, and I think my newfound drive at the time translated into all the art I pumped out this month. This is just a small fraction of what I made in January, but I only have so much space. Quite a few complex pieces in both style exploration and polishing my own style.

Apparently February was a rather intimate month. Things began to slow down in terms of my own art here, with me spending more time in social settings and school work ramping up, I didn’t have as much time to coop up in my room to draw. I did wanna do something for a friend’s Valentine’s Day OC art challenge, so I drew my lovey-dovey couple from Dance of 1000 Words havin’ a dance. Nothing actually came of that challenge, but it was fun to do regardless.

One of the things I was most proud of in the winter season was making more friends, and one of the closest friends I made was completely coincidental. I met a person named Kiri on the bus one night I decided to volunteer somewhere by myself, and we ended up chatting and getting along. They quickly told me their tumblr username, and I shot them a message immediately after they left. A couple days later, we met up for brunch, and we started becoming really close friends and creative partners!

Not much else happened in March cuz that’s when Current World Event started becoming an issue, but Kiri and I still kept in close touch and we randomly started developing a concept for a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Galar Edition. These are a handful of characters we thought up, with Skipper the Scorbunny and Dross the Dreepy as the main characters, Morgrem as the main antagonist, and some shopkeepers such as those of the Greedent Bank and the Indeedee General Store. This was also my first time drawing all of these Galar Pokemon (except Scorbunny, but I also made Skipper a bit more unique than a regular Scorbunny).

Lots of events happened this month. First of all, Steven Universe Future ended, one of my favorite and most influential shows was no longer continuing. I had to do something as tribute, both as a send-off to one of the greatest cartoons in the world and as a cathartic release for my feelings towards it.

A while later, I got the opportunity to start playing an MMO in beta called Fer.al, by the same people who made Animal Jam, which coincidentally I had also beta tested for back in the day. I ended up getting really attached to my first character, a Senri I named Sasha, and though I’ve made more characters than them since, they’re still my absolute favorite. Though I haven’t touched the game in a few months, I was really engrossed for a long time and enjoyed playing through the beta and early access phases.

At the end of the month, some friends of mine invited to a roleplay group with some mutuals, and we all played characters in a crime syndicate. Just a bunch of ragtag thieves and criminals who ended up together in order to protect an artifact called the Crown of Thieves, which was essentially a flag to be taken by other groups to prove that they are the best thieves in the land. My character was based heavily on my sona (if it wasn’t obvious) and was also influenced by Cloud Strife, since the FFVII Remake had just come out and I was super into watching the cutscenes at the time. My character’s (code)name is Valkyrie, and they are a mercenary, going between multiple different employers to carry out whatever duties they need to do. They have a more complicated backstory, but presently they were recently hired by recommendation of their friend Shark (played by @shmoots-universe​ who is also My friend now ily maya) who works with a group called the Court Cards who are currently in possession of the Crown of Thieves. Valk never really had a place to call home, but staying with this group of people had to be the closest they could get to that feeling. They still sleep with a knife under their pillow because of trust issue but that’s okay.

Okay, so technically these examples started in April, but I continued making content with them in May, and the month was just pretty void of art in general, so here I am addressing them.

There were two main things I worked on this month: a Steven Universe AU of my own and the whole #sixfanarts thing that kicked off around then. Let’s start with the fanart bits. I did two and a half of them (six in April and nine in May), and it was so much fun to be able to draw stuff I don’t normally do! My personal favorites are shown here: Blake Belladonna from RWBY, Roll from Megaman, Yuki Konno from Sword Art Online, and Link from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The other thing I’d been planning for a while was a Steven Universe AU, probably to cope with the show being over but also because I was inspired by a lot of those SU AU artists I started following at the time. I won’t share the details here because it’s gonna have its own blog at some point, but the example I’ve shown here is of a comic I made loosely in order to introduce a divergence in the plot of the story as well as introduce a character unique to my AU. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to draw the characters and get a feel for the style.

As the year progressed, my amount of art I made per month began to dwindle, this time mostly because school was kicking my ass especially hard with finals. However, I took what time I had to get some backburner pieces finished, like the Tigerlily picture which I sketched out a couple months back, and the Gunvolt picture which I started working on SIX YEARS AGO. I don’t quite know why I got the urge to work on it again after so long, but it was nice to finally realize. The other drawing for DOTS was done in the dead of night but I was really happy with how it came out.

Despite only having two summer classes left of school, this month was really rough because they demanded a lot of my time and attention. I did not have the gumption to do anything digital, so I stuck to my sketchbook to get out what I felt like getting out.

My friends and I did a stream of the game Helltaker, and I really enjoyed the concept, so in following my friends I made my own Helltaker demon OC named Raksha the Ravenous Demon (it’s a pun but also got mythical insp). I also got super into Hazbin Hotel at this point, mostly because the Addict music video dropped and I couldn’t get enough of it, so I doodled Angel Dust cuz I felt like it. The other drawing I did was actually a free commission I gave a friend of mine as a prize for a trivia game show I ran back in June. He along with a couple other friends got some free drawings from me for getting the top three scores, and this one in particular was fun because of how interesting it was. He wanted me to draw a video game reviewer called the Irate Gamer from a specific moment, and I decided to go ham and just make it as dramatic as possible.

University classes finally wrapped up and right after that I was in the process of moving out of my apartment and getting adjusted to living with my parents again. I did a couple of agg.io drawing sessions with my friends from the Court Cards group as well as a new Dungeons and Dragons homebrew group I had joined. I drew some more of Valkyrie and came up with a design for my DND character Qakuqtuq (or Kai for short). He is monkey grandpa and I love him.

My main focus was on finishing a polished piece for my friend Cake, whose birthday was in the upcoming month. I wanted it to be as amazing as possible, so I put a lot of time into getting more detailed and making them look good. In addition to that, I did a few TOME doodles just for fun. The creature on the bottom was for this month’s art challenge on my Discord server where we made original TOMERPG monsters, and I created Hundylow, a Crystal-element monster based on the Grindylow from English folklore.

This month was a lot more productive than the past few had been. I tried to do a 31-day art challenge called Creatober but failed to get past the third prompt because I was still swamped with other work. I’m still happy with what little I did, including the piece with my characters Kyle and Guarudan from DSWD.

I don’t remember how, but I also suddenly rediscovered an old Flipnote Hatena series called Tales of LostClan, a Warriors fan series that I would say was the most obscure thing I’ve ever been super invested in. It was what got me into the actual Warriors books, and I liked it so much I redrew the animations into a comic... twice. Didn’t get nearly as far the second time but clearly my love for this little fanfiction had not waned after nearly a decade. I felt like drawing a book cover/movie poster for the series, just to get it out there and see how much I’ve improved over all that time.

Also I felt like making a vampiresona just before Halloween because I never dress up for Halloween in art (or real life anymore, for that matter), and I wanted to do something like that for once. It was short-lived but I really liked the design!

The focus of this month was definitely on Pokemon stuff. As per usual I contributed to the current Gotta Draw ‘Em All collab, and I was tasked to draw Regieleki. It was really fun to figure out how to make it stand out and look like it was made of electricity.

I also committed a lot of my spare time to my Fakemon Gym Leaders, as I had been working on bringing them to life in the past year or so now. As of this post, I’ve finished rendering their full body poses and gym badges, but I’m still working on completing all eight VS portraits, the first half of which are shown here.

I... didn’t draw anything this month, actually. What I’m showing here was worked on in the last few days but has actually been in progress for a couple of months, and I just finished it earlier today, in 2021. But I needed to show something off, and it’s also about time I mentioned it.

Back in October, I kept seeing people rave about this game called Genshin Impact, and I was interested but not so much as to start playing it... until my friends started playing and I was like “fuck it, let’s download it”. Since that day, I have been super immersed and in love with this game, to the point I came up with my own canon based on my gameplay experiences. This also included the creation of an original player character: Astra, the non-binary Traveller. And now, I’ve finally drawn them and brought them to life.

It has been one hell of a year. I had some of the highest highs and lowest lows in 2020, lots of changes, and I have now officially moved onto the next chapter of my life now that my time at university is finally over. I’m very excited for what 2021 has to offer, and I’m going to go forward with great ambition.

[rossmccallsqueen]

Smile (Joe Mazzello Imagine)

Pairing: Joe Mazzello x Reader

Summary: You, Joe, and the gang have a weekend away with a few surprises in store.

Word count: 1.4K

Warnings: None! JUST LOTS OF FLUFF

A/N: This is dedicated to @sohoneyspreadyourwings ! HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY MY GIRL! You are one of the most special people I know, thank you for being in my life. I hope you enjoy this! Love you!

Also it goes with this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klNkjnJtFig just for reference!

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A cozy winter weekend, that's what you were looking forward to the most. As someone from Southern California, you never thought you’d find yourself saying that but here you were. Your boyfriend Joe suggested a weekend away with your friends in a cabin in the mountains, and it sounded perfect.  All of you were stressed thanks to work recently, and a weekend away was just what you guys needed.

Your hand was intertwined with Joe’s the whole time, which already made things feel a lot better. There wasn’t much talking though, as you were looking out the window at the mountains. You hadn’t seen snow since you were little when your family used to get a cabin for the holidays. This trip already made you smile, it reminded you of your family.

Every so often you would look over and see Joe looking at you with a smile. You’d catch him out of the corner of your eye too, and you would have to remind him to look at the road again, but his focus seemed to be on you.

I just want to make you smile

I just want to make it last

I'll go the extra mile

Just so I can make you laugh

“Something wrong babe?” You asked when you caught him smiling at you for the millionth time.

“Yeah, you’re just beautiful is all.” He squeezed your hand in response.

“That's all huh?” You asked and he nodded and making a kissy face at you since he couldn’t kiss you while driving.

Ben and Gwil were cuddled up in the backseat, and Rami and Lucy were in the car behind you. When you looked back, the two of them were asleep on each other, and you wished you had your phone out to take a picture. You thought it could be their Christmas card.

“Could you guys keep it down? We’re trying to sleep back here.” You heard Ben mumble.

“We’ll do our best loverboy.” You told him, and you saw him cuddle into Gwil in the rearview mirror. Those two were definitely something else for sure.

“Almost there babe, don’t worry,” Joe told you, and soon you were pulling up to the cabin. It was absolutely beautiful. It was one of those picturesque places like you’d pulled the scene in front of you right out of a movie.

You and Lucy tried to help the guys take the luggage inside, but they wouldn’t let you. So you just went inside and got comfortable. You watched as Joe carried the giant pile of board games he insisted on bringing with you inside. He was determined to make sure you all had a good weekend away, and apparently, board games were the solution to that. He always knew how to make you smile.

“Whats that look?” Lucy asked you when she sat down, she caught you staring at Joe.

“I just love him so much ya know? He's right over there and I miss him! How sad is that?” You laughed a little.

“It’s not sad Y/N, its cute.” You knew she was your best friend for a reason, she always knew what to say.

Once all the luggage was brought inside (and the very important board games), Gwil started a fire in the gorgeous fireplace. Ben started making dinner, while Joe and Rami started setting up Monopoly.

“Joe, don’t you know Monopoly has the power to end friendships?” Lucy asked.

“And relationships!” You chimed in. Joe stopped in his tracks and looked at you, concerned.

“Babe that's not funny! Don’t joke!” He said You laughed and gave him a kiss to remind him that you loved him. Sometimes he just knew how to be extra cute, and right now was one of those times.

We're all around the fire

Feels like the holidays

You know my style

I'll do anything

To make you smile

You decided to play in couples, with Ben and Gwil playing together. It would have taken forever if each of you played individually (plus you didn’t want Joe to get worried again). It was going well so far, except Joe felt the need to buy everything you guys landed on. You tried to tell him you needed a strategy, but he was very insistent.

“Come on Y/N, I really like this one!” He gave you his famous puppy dog pout.

“Joe honey, you love every property! We don’t need this one!” You kissed his cheek, letting him know he wasn’t going to win this one.

“She has a point.” Ben commented.

“SHUT UP BEN OR ILL GET CARDY B FROM THE CAR.”

“YOU WOULDN’T!” You didn't know what was making you laugh harder: the fact that Joe had managed to hide Cardy B somewhere in the car, that he had brought Cardy B all the way up to the cabin with you, or Ben’s response.

After the whole Cardy B fiasco, you all needed a break. Gwil tended to the fire with Rami, and you watched as Lucy and Joe went into the kitchen. When they didn’t come back a few minutes later, you got up to investigate. You saw the two of them together, looking thick as thieves. You knew they had to be up to something.

“Whatcha up to guys?” You asked stepping into the room.

“Nothing!” They said in unison. Yeah, they were definitely up to something. Lucy smiled at you and walked back into the living room.

“You two worry me sometimes.” You walked over to him and hugged him. He wrapped his arms around you and smelled your hair. He began rubbing small circles on your back with one of his hands, and you relaxed into him. This was absolutely perfect like you almost wanted time to stand still right at that moment. You even looked out the window to see it was snowing.

Catch me smiling ear to ear

Everything I need and want is all right here, yeah

That's the greatest gift of all time

Joe released you from the hug and looked down at you, smiling at you like he had been all day. What you hadn’t noticed was that the rest of your friends were standing in the entryway to the kitchen, watching the two of you. But your eyes were locked on Joe’s and you never wanted to look away.

“You know I love you right? And your happiness is the most important thing to me?” Joe asked you.

“Of course babe, why?” Now you were the worried one.

“Your happiness will always be my number one priority. You will always be my number one priority. I want weekends like this one all the time, for the rest of our lives.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Far from it. What I’m trying to say Y/N, is that I love you. I can’t imagine you not being in my life. You have the most beautiful smile and heart, you always know how to make me feel better, and you’re quite literally my other half.” He stopped talking and got down on one knee, pulling out a ring from his back pocket. “Will you marry me?”

Your mouth dropped to the floor, and then you realized it was Lucy’s ring.

“Joe isn’t that Lucy’s ring?”

“Y/N! Focus and answer him!” You heard Lucy say from the entryway. You looked back down at Joe, who was still offering you the ring.

“Of course I’ll marry you Joseph Mazzello.” He placed the ring on your finger, and stood up to kiss you. All of a sudden your friends engulfed you in a huge hug, and it became a celebration. Rami popped a bottle of champagne as if from nowhere, and you started to think this was planned.

“Is that what you two were talking about in here?” You asked after Ben had given a toast that had made you all almost cry.

“Yeah, he forgot the ring at home so he asked to borrow mine. I couldn’t say no! I wanted to see my best friends get engaged!” You gave her a hug, and there seemed to be a lot of those going around.

“I promise I’ll go get it tomorrow!” Joe insisted.

“Joe you don’t have to! Besides, look at this snow.” You told him.

“I’ll drive carefully I promise!”

“Since when do you drive carefully?” You asked, raising an eyebrow. Everyone was looking at him because they wanted to know the answer to your question.

“Since I know I have a future with you.” And that was it. You knew you would never stop smiling.

I just want to make you smile

I just want to make it last

I'll go the extra mile

Just so I can make you laugh

-------

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[softkitten]

months in music 2018

Welcome back to another year end round-up. Longtime readers will note that there is not one of these for 2017. That’s because 2017 was no damn good, and writing about it once it was finally over felt like no kind of fun at all. 2018 was much kinder. 

January: Finn - “Sometimes the Going Gets a Little Tough” January’s song plays like an overture for the year to come, an uptempo, retro house track about perseverance and forgiveness. I don’t remember January very well at all, and it wasn’t because I was partying so hard. I spent the first month of the year in the car, back and forth between Calgary and Saskatoon, back and forth over and over, trying to secure employment and housing. It was exhausting and incredibly lonely. The bright chords and pitched-up vocals here promised future happiness and stability, and that was what I was counting on when I played it on repeat all alone. 

February: Mija - “Notice Me” Sheena and I spent all of February in different cities, our longest time apart since getting together in 2010. I was living in my best friend’s basement and in my first month of a new job, Sheena was working herself to the bone packing up our old life in Saskatoon box by box. February was hideously cold in Calgary, and this was what I’d play when I’d shiver down cellar, missing home and warmth and love. 

March: Låpsley - “Operator” (DJ Koze’s Extended Disco Version) On Sheena’s birthday, I played a Thursday night gig in a tiny Calgary club, and the only people in attendance were other DJs. The first guy on sounded like Black Coffee, the dude who played after him sounded like Marcel Dettmann. I was third up and I leaned on vocal-heavy disco and house and all 15 people in attendance agreed that this was the vibe. Getting the tiny room sweating to “Operator,” a song known and beloved to daily Resident Advisor readers and few others, was an early high point in the year. 

April: Calvin Harris ft. Dua Lipa - “One Kiss” Winter lingered in 2018 like a bad cough, with miserable regular snowfalls continuing well into April. “One Kiss” dropped near the middle of the month and signalled carefree times ahead, hot nights and long swims, summer’s inevitability. It was what I desperately needed to hear at the time and I still haven’t stopped playing it. 

May: The 1975 - “Give Yourself a Try” The first single from The 1975′s third album, my favourite LP of 2018. This song scans to me as a reassessment of one’s priorities and one’s capabilities. I was a few months along into a job wherein I ran a day program for disabled adults. Prior to taking that job, I’d worked graveyard shifts in a group home for three straight years, where I was paid to be bored, stay awake and see no one. Switching back to a daytime schedule and having a job where I tested and developed my actual skills made me feel like my personality had changed overnight, as if I’d just kicked some awful habit. I had more energy, more patience. I was a much kinder person, and someone with a focus on my career and my closer relationships, rather than the messy, overextended person I was in previous years. 

June: Disclosure ft. Fatoumata Diawara - “Ultimatum” After a few months on the shelf, I started getting gigs again, including a few nights at a local watering hole downtown. Getting back into DJ’ing after a winter and spring spent on my ass and out of practice was difficult, but after a few sessions I found I was sounding better than ever. I did some of the best DJ’ing I’ve done my entire life this year. I found a sound that’s unlike anyone else local, and found new ways to play to crowds who are decidedly not my people. I’m very excited to double down in 2019 and find more spaces to play the music I love. 

July: Kloves - “Trigger” Compared to previous years, I didn’t get out to as many shows as I’d have liked. Once moved, it took me until December to even get out of Calgary. That said, I saw one of the best shows I’ve ever seen at the Junction this July when Kloves came on before Thor. Kloves began their set playing well above 133bpm and didn’t let up once, delivering relentless, pummelling techno that left the room panting with exhaustion. I’ve learned so much about the role of the DJ from Kloves, and their entire set that night made me feel like I was the coolest person. I think that’s what you ought to be doing, giving your audience space to perform the version of themselves they find the most exciting. 

August: The Midnight - “Endless Summer” I felt cheated in August, pulled in too many different directions. I had gigs most weekends, we had friends and family coming in to visit us, I signed myself up for a three-day camping trip out in Alberta back country with the day program I worked for. It wasn’t without fun, the gigs were well-paid, it was fantastic to see friends I’d missed dearly, but I left the last month of summer wishing for more time to myself. This song reflects the fantasy of that. The Midnight create a world where it’s eternally the last night of summer vacation, and your friend’s just pulled up in a coke-white IROC. I wanted to escape to that place whenever I could, and forestall the warmth and pleasure whenever I could find it. 

September: Robyn - “Baby Forgive Me” September was tough on both Sheena and I. I started a new, better-paid job working with incarcerated women, and the new opportunity was great but also daunting, much harder than my last gig. Sheena’s workplace, meanwhile, went septic as her depression flared. Neither of us were perfect during the month of September, stress did what it usually does to long term relationships, but both of us took care of each other during our low points and talked through the problems we had with tools that weren’t available to us in the year before, or the year before that. 

October: Pulp - “Dishes” A man told me to beware of 33. He said, “It was not an easy time for me.” But I’ll get through, even though I’ve got no miracles to show you. I’ve listened to Pulp, and This Is Hardcore, for literally half my life, but I found myself returning to it frequently in my birth month. Its lyrics about aging, being childless, holding on to persona and wondering what that means as youth slips off made a lot more sense to me than they did at 17. I found a lot of peace this year in being ‘the man who stays home and does the dishes,’ rather than the man out in public doing just anything for approval. I have been slower on the draw to make friends since moving cities. That’s because I absolutely refuse to participate in a social circle comprised mostly of people I don’t like and who don’t like me, as I’ve done in Victoria, Vancouver, and Saskatoon. 

November: Pale Waves - “Drive” This choice is pretty straightforward - I got a new car in November and it’s as goth as Pale Waves are, sexy and fast and loud and cavernous. I can’t wait to road trip in it out to Vancouver in April, to see Pale Waves when they open up for The 1975. I’m already dreaming of putting it into Sport Mode on the Coquihalla and scaring the hell out of the local wildlife. 

December: MK - “17″ I hate Christmas. I wish I didn’t, but, boy, do I ever. Every year, it’s something. Last year I had something like $2500.00 worth of car trouble starting on the 16th and continuing straight through to the 23rd. This year, I stocked my schedule to the absolute breaking point in attempt to see absolutely everyone and please absolutely everyone, and then got the flu on Christmas Day. I write this from bed; today is the first day I’ve felt fully well in about a week. I had to cancel on several friends, an act that I will go really far out of my way to avoid because it triggers all my anxiety and guilt. Fuck Christmas, past the age of about 12 it’s nothing but a regularly scheduled disappointment. 

This is about cutting yourself loose from all that. In the middle of the month, Sheena and I saw Sonny Fodera play a basement venue in Calgary and the set’s highlight came when he dropped this upbeat UK house tune. I felt completely overjoyed and completely free when I heard it, and looking around, it’s safe to assume that the room did as well. It was reassuring, it felt safe. If Sheena and I renew our vows or do some showy anniversary celebration in the future, I want this song played. I want to live up to its promise, I feel every day that I’m hearing it back to me, and I really want to reciprocate. 

Songs of the Year: Nine Inch Nails - “Shit Mirror”

Is it a sign of arrested development that, occasionally, it feels like Trent Reznor is talking directly to me, just like it did when I was 14 and looking for my identity wherever I could find it? “Shit Mirror” is about becoming something new, being surprised and delighted and scared. I tested myself a lot in 2018 and I find I like myself a lot better than I did 365 days ago. 

[mrtroy]

The Scores Have Changed, My Childhood Is Over, and I Think I Might Understand How Other People Look At Sports

Originally from December 5th, 2010

To say that the last twenty plus years of my life have been completely and  hopelessly consumed by sports may be the grossest understatement I have ever put into print, yet until just recently, I don't think I had a grasp on what a more "normal" sports following could be like. I'm still not sure I am willing to accept this concept of "social sports fan-dom" as I'll call it, but it might be worth a prolonged look.

Let me explain.

I suppose that to best understand where I'm at now, it might be best to understand where I am coming from. I think I need to blame my mom for setting me off on this crazed obsession, or maybe the blame should go the  Oakland A's for the utterly disappointing display they put on in the 1990 World Series. As I had really started to get into baseball in the Summer of '90, Mom had the great idea of taping the World Series. While other 5 year-olds were perfectly content watching Mr. Rogers zip up his cardigan every morning, Mom knew that if she was lucky a good World Series could provide my baseball fiending mind with seven games of pure VHS-driven bliss. At roughly 3 hours a game, played back ten times each, Mom would have 200 hours of fodder to answer the question, "Mom, when are they going to start playing new games again."

And then, Jose Rijo, Barry Larkin, Chris Sabo and the Don't Stand A Chance Reds had to ruin everything. It wasn't so much the fact that they won the series as it was that they did it in such decisive fashion that added insult to injury. Four games, and it was over. The minimum. The very least. And worse, Game 1 was a 7-0 blanking, and Game 3 was a convincing 8-3 rout in which the Reds put up 7 in the third, and the rest of the game was a mere formality. Translation: My to-be friends of 18 years later,  Nathan Clinkenbeard, and Nate Kohrs, rejoiced as their Reds won it all, but more relevant to the situation at the time, I was left without much good winter baseball to tide me over until April.

I watched the tape, and all I wanted to do was to be able to break a bat on my back the way I had seen Reds journeymen outfielder Glenn Braggs do it. I emulated the overly pronounced batting crouch of Rickey Henderson, and began to wonder how Harold Baines could hit a ball so far, despite never looking like he was even swinging hard enough to hit the ball as far as I did in T-Ball.

In '91 things worsened. For some reason I got the Pittsburgh Pirates lineup in my head, and every day in the back yard I would  throw the ball up to myself, hit the ball, run around imaginary bases, take a break to become an imaginary outfielder to retrieve the ball, and then switch back to being the base runner to continue running. Every day, it was Cubs and Pirates. I can remember getting mad at myself, and actually sitting down and pouting for extended periods of time because when it came time for Sid Bream's at-bat I ran too fast. Sid was a notoriously slow runner in real life, and I wanted to maintain a certain level of realism in my one-man re-enactments. Apparently in my excitement  I had forgotten who I was supposed to be impersonating, and run too fast. In my six-year old world, this was enough to ruin my day.

The Fall came, and with it a Fall Classic for the ages. Why Mom didn't tape this one, I'll never know. Although, if she had, I may still be watching it. The Braves and Twins treated me to seven games of pure ecstasy. Although, all I cared about was the sweet headstand that Greg Olsen went into after a collision at the plate. Sports Illustrated put Olsen on the cover, and I spent all winter trying to duplicate the feat in my basement. Here's a look at the photo; it's a miracle I didn't break my neck. ( http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/cover/featured/9301/index.htm )

It was also in '91 that I first realized there were other sports other than baseball, as the Bulls were on their way to capturing their first title. I don't remember much of the season, other than laying on the floor with a basketball in my hand trying to mimic the Michael Jordan poster in my room.

History seemed to repeat itself over the next few years. The Bulls won another title and the Braves were in the World Series again in '92. I was incredulous to the fact that Otis Nixon would try and bunt his way on while representing the Atlanta's last shot to extend the series. I was mad about that until about March of '93 until  Mom and Dad packed my brother and I into a conversion van and we set our sites on Mesa, Arizona for Cubs spring training. We ran into Cubs' pitcher Mike Morgan in the parking lot, he gave my mom his hat, and sent me into a swoon of idol-worshiping that would last even longer than Morgan managed to bounce around the big leagues.

**Side Tangent** I remember being in a bar in the Phoenix area eating dinner, and everyone was going crazy about the Phoenix Suns as they were on their way to meeting the Bulls in the Finals. And yet, all I cared about was that Steve

Buechele, Cubs third baseman was sitting a few tables away. I remember my French fries getting cold because I was too mesmerized to eat.  

Later in '93 the Toronto  Blue Jays won another World Series, and I began to understand for the first time what it was like to feel compassion. Mitch Williams gave up the famous home run to Joe Carter that sent  Canada into a a frenzy, and while everyone was celebrating, all I could think about was how mad people were going to be at Mitch Williams for blowing it.

1994, my life almost came to a screeching halt. The day before I turned 9, the Major League Baseball Players strike started, and eventually culminated with the cancellation of the World Series. You may as well have cancelled my birthday, Christmas, New Years, Easter and any other meaningful holiday. We're talking total devastation.

Luckily in '95 baseball came back with a new playoff system, and I had spent the entire off season reading. It was about this time in school that we had to do free reading every day, and we had to write about it. Our school library had a seven or eight book series highlighting the different aspects of baseball that someone could be good at. The books were entitled, "Speed," "Power," "Pitching" etc. I read these books over and over. They were large format books that I think I would consider to be rotating coffee table material if I came across them today. Little matter, I read them cover to cover, and they had these charts that listed the all-time leaders in many of baseball's statistical categories. After a while, I'd just read the charts. Time, and time again. For some reason, knowing who was the best at certain things excited me. Even if this person had been dead for 60 years. The pages came alive in my mind, and even though I had never seen Ty Cobb play, never known anyone who had, or had any rooting interest for his team, the Detroit Tigers, I was fascinated by what  the numerical data next to his name could teach me about him. I would later go on to read that Tyrus Raymond Cobb (I developed a penchant for knowing players full names) was not so much of a good guy, but actually was a mean spirited bigot. It was at this time that I remember being glad that many of his most hallowed records had been broken.

Around this time I also discovered that each morning the glorious, glorious sports editors at The Chicago Tribune published box scores for all the major sports action from the night before. It was an unbelievable development. Now I had happened upon a way to read new and evolving history, every morning. League leaders in all the statistical categories, short recaps of what had happened, and overall numbers galore; every day was better than the last. Ken Griffey Jr. was tearing up the American League with home runs on what seemed to be a daily basis. On the other side of the page in the paper, Greg Maddux was shutting down the National League, and further cementing himself as the best pitcher of his generation, (in my mind at least) and elevating himself to Greek God-like status in the mind of my father.

It was at this time that the foundation for my current sports revelation first planted its seeds. Although, I didn't know it at the time. I was too busy counting home runs to realize what was going on, but inside there was also this great love of Maddux developing as well. This really had nothing to do with Maddux himself, as he had moved on from the Cubs to the Braves a few years earlier, and I could no longer watch him on a day to day basis. This had all to do with Pops. Seeing my father get such enjoyment out of simply reading that Maddux shutout another opponent was very cool to me. And, as is the case with many father-son duos, I loved Maddux because Pops loved Maddux.

These trends continued. I read as much baseball statistical data as I could get my hands on, and I looked to Pops to find new interests to follow in the paper each morning.

Lots of guys rose to prominence at this time. But it wasn't necessarily the guys that were established that caught my eye. It was the young guys. Despite the fact that Maddux would go on to play for more than twenty years, he was old news by the time I really got into following this sort of thing. He was Pops' guy. Pops didn't much care for the new-age stars like a Ken Griffey Jr., but we could agree on a guy like Chipper Jones, the all-American can't miss kid, or Derek Jeter the emerging star of the Yankees. We weren't fans of their teams, but they were in the post season every year, and it was easy to watch them progress.

Then came the star of stars for Pops and I. Tiger Woods. Pops had been reading up on him for years, and by the time he burst onto the scene in '96, Pops had already drank about six quarts of the Tiger Koolaid. Every week our love grew, with every major championship, it wasn't just that Tiger had won, it was as if Pops and I had won. We won because we had followed him, we had read about him, and along with millions of others, we knew  he was going to be good. And, every time he won, he elevated himself further into this land of unthinkable admiration. Never before had there been an athlete of whom I had come to expect so much from that had actually been able to deliver. Not only had he been able to deliver, but each time he delivered, he seemed to do it in such a way that I couldn't help but just think, man, I love this guy.

Time continued on, and my enthrallment with the games that these men played continued to grow. '96 marked the beginning of the Yankees run of dominance, and with it much reading of Yankee lore. Also I remember teaching Mom how to keep a proper score book for a baseball game. We'd watch the World Series, and while she didn't know Mariano Duncan from Duncan Hines, she came to learn that if there was a ground ball to Mariano at second, she would enter a 4-3 in the score book as soon as he recorded the out at first base.

As the  numerical world inside my head  expanded further, It may not shock you to learn that my abilities on the field experienced an inverse reaction. Once in possession of an above average fastball and an hefty appetite for shagging fly balls, by the  time freshmen year of high school rolled around, my role on the high school baseball team had been reduced to pencil pushing scorekeeper, infield practice facilitator, and blowout mop-up inning specialist. This didn't so much bother me, as I recall an instance where I rushed out of an early season practice so my mom could drop me off at a fantasy baseball draft where I was the youngest guy in the room by about 30 years. (I picked up  Mike Sweeney late in that draft, and was smiling cheek to cheek all season as he hit well over .300) My uncle Tony was nice enough to let me tag along in his fantasy league for years, and I remember the best day of the week being when the old stat packets would show up in the mail, and I'd spend all afternoon breaking down what the other team owners were doing, and what we could do to improve on our perpetual 7th place standing. This was before all of the fantasy sports had moved to the Internet, and while I have come to appreciate the ease in which I can stay connected to fantasy sports nowadays, there was something magical about tearing open that envelope to find out that we'd moved up a half a point, and were now only a point and a half out of 6th place!!

Eventually the Internet won out for statistical tracking, and while I was sad, this transition gave me access to entire portals of data that were completely dedicated to my passions. Living with my buddy Ed Liss my freshmen year of college, he must have thought I owned a partial stake in www.basketball-reference.com. While I wasn't much of an NBA fan at this point, the historical standings, all-time leader boards, and player searching capabilities kept me occupied for hours on end. In fact, my choice of the University of Illinois to go to college in the first place was a choice that I made in large part due to the Big Ten sporting atmosphere that I knew I'd experience while I was there.

Jeff Renfro and I lived and died along with every play of the Illini's historic run to the Final Four in 2004-05, and  I'll never forget going to games in the years following with Melissa Colgan, Suzan Balch, Gregg Conn, and countless others. I wore my Luther Head # 4 shirt to every game, and for something like 41 times in a row, if I wore the shirt, the team didn't lose. It was unbelievable.

In 2008, the Illini football team made a rare appearance in the Rose Bowl, and took on the heavily favored Trojans of USC. The family made the trek out to Pasadena for the game, only to watch our team get  thoroughly trounced. Walking out of the stadium, if I would have had a tail, it would have been tightly tucked away between my legs as if I were a puppy who had just ruined a garden full of freshly planted petunias. The Illini had been humiliated, and so too had I.

I'm not sure if my transformation really started because the teams I rooted for never won, or if it was just gaining a new perspective that can only come with growing up, but I started to realize, maybe the keys to the games didn't so much lie in the encrypted world of statistics.

Time passed and one by one, the sports heroes of my childhood faded away. Maddux retired after the '08 season, and watching Ken Griffey Jr. limp through his final days in Seattle early in the 2010 season really put the nail in the coffin of my childhood. Sure, I was 25 years old at this point, and far from actually being a child, but here was the guy whose jersey I had, baseball cleats I had, video games I played, baseball cards I collected, and the guy who I had simply first known as "The Kid." And here he was, 40 years old and unable to keep his legs healthy enough to play every day. I may not have been a kid anymore, but Ken Griffey Jr. was my childhood.

And so I thought, "This is what it was like for Yankee fans as they watched Mickey Mantle hobble around the bases in 1968? This was the anguish of watching Johnny Unitas try and hang on with the Chargers, or Willie Mays with the Mets?" The unmistakable ending of an era, right before your eyes.

It was awful.

No amount of statistical data could save me, either. On the stat sheet, Griffey Jr. may have hit 630 career home runs, but that was just it, at this point, those were just stats. They were history. The guy who could never get old, got old. And just like that, he was gone. Next thing I knew, Chipper Jones tore his ACL, and there is a good chance his career could be  coming to an end shortly. Somehow Derek Jeter is 36 now and has just negotiated the final contract of his career. All of these guys that I associated with my childhood, they're old. Sure, there are always new players, and there will always be guys to make assaults on the record books, but unfortunately for me, for every new young star that comes along, I'm no longer going to be that little boy who  doesn't know any better than to worship the ground on which he stands. The innocence it takes to one day envision yourself running the bases at Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium, these thoughts can only be conjured up by the mind of a pre-pubescent teen. I'm sure a new young star will enter the game in the coming years, and there's a good chance I'll admire the level at which he's honed his skills, but there's no way he'll turn me into a major leaguer, the way I thought Ken Griffey Jr. could.  

Maybe that's why golf, despite being what most would call a boring game, has endured over time and remained relevant. In no other sport can a guy like Jack Nicklaus win major championships 24 years apart, or a guy like Tom Watson compete a few months shy of his 60th birthday for an Open Championship. For any average 50 year-old watching Watson toil at Turnberry, an opportunity arose for them to remember back to when the same guy did they same thing at the same course- when they were in high school. Just think of that.

All of this leads me back to Tiger Woods. My sports equivalent to a Lord and Savior. Mine and Pops guy. The same guy who prompted Pops to call me in June of 2008 when I was at the College Baseball World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, just so Pops could channel his inner Dan Hicks and give me the play by play of Tiger's famous  putt.

"He's lining it up. Now he's walking around it. You know, looking at it from every angle, like he always does. He really seems to be taking longer than he usually does on this one..."

At this point, the baseball game I'm watching is in between innings, and not much was going on, but Pops continued.

"Alright, I think he's finally ready. I think it's about 18 feet or so. He putts it. And....Ohhh my gosh Matt, HE MADE IT. HE MADE IT. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. HE MADE IT!!"

At this point, I let out a loud cheer 450 miles away in Omaha. I'm sure the people around me were looking at me like I was crazy, but at this point, I didn't care. Tiger had done it! The guy was playing with a torn ACL, and a broken leg, and the next day he would go on to with the U.S. Open. This is the kind of legend that Mark Twain couldn't write, and Steven Spielberg couldn't make any more sensational.

A year and a half later when the world came to find out that Tiger wasn't exactly the guy everyone thought he was, I was crushed. While his feats on the golf course should not be diminished in light of the details that came out of his personal life, the mystique and the aura that he carried with him could never be the same. Steroids rocked baseball, the NBA after Michael Jordan lacked the luster that it once had, the NFL, while great, had never had quite standing in my sports universe, but this was more than those combined. This was fifteen years of bonding between my father and I that all the sudden seemed hollow. Sure, those events that we cheered about still happened, but the big part of what made it so special was the fact that it was Tiger, and up to that point, he had represented all of the things that my parents had tried to teach me to be. A hard worker, a fierce competitor, and a well-rounded individual away from sports. I should be clear in emphasizing that my parents never told me to emulate Tiger, or any athlete for that matter, yet his case just so happened to be one was easily relate-able. With the deeper meaning of what Tiger meant to my father and I now in question, I was sent searching.  

This all helped me realize that being a sports fan is not about the people who play them, or the stats they accumulate.

You can say that I'm going "soft," or that in this moment in time I must be feeling overly sentimental, but, I think I'm ready to come to grips with the fact that being a sports fan is about sharing your rooting interest with those around you.

Really? You had to spend thousands of words to figure that out, genius?

I never thought I'd say it, but being able to share these moments with others means more than a box score ever could. Sure winning helps, but the jubilation I watched my friends experience when the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, or the way people partied when the Bears advanced to the Super Bowl after the 2006 season, none of that would have existed in a vacuum. Sure, you'd be excited if a team you'd rooted for your whole life finally achieved their goal and won something, but being able to call up your dad, or party with your buddies, or text your uncle, those are the things you remember.

I look back fondly on that U.S. Open, not for how it turned out, but for the memories I have with my father. I think back to the Final Four with Renfro reduced to tears as we watched players from North Carolina cut down the nets. I remember an Illini basketball game where it appeared as though Rich McBride had hit a last second shot to beat Penn State. The shot was later overturned, but my memory of clutching the arm of my friend Jessica Young, hoping against hope that somehow they'd overrule the call can't be taken from me. The Rose Bowl from '08, my most indelible memories are of my friends Tim and Meghan Michaels having a comical battle with their GPS as we drove around LA. To this day I don't watch an Illini fooball game without thinking of Steve Contorno and his detest for my old E.B. Halsey Illini football jersey. Halsey has moved on, and the jersey is gathering dust in my closet, but that one little morsel of a fact has been enough for Steve and I to remain friends five years after the fact.

The fantasy sports I play today, I no longer have  rabid tendencies to devour stats, or prove to anyone that I'm smarter than they are. In fact, the playful ribbing of a Steve Hild, or the incessant banter of Jeff Lizzo, Kevin Barry and Drew Stiling mean more to me than winning a fantasy league title ever could.

I often wondered as people sat in the stands at games, or watched on TV, how they could fully enjoy the experience without knowing that the last time there had been a statistical oddity like this or that was in 1974, and before that 1921, and so on and so on. Rather, I've moved on. Beyond all the statistics, and all the analysis lies the significance of human emotion. And while I may never be able to quantify it, and it may have taken me longer than most to come to this conclusion, it really is what sports are all about.

[rilenerocks]

This is Pete Yorn in a screenshot I took of him yesterday at the end of a livestream concert he’d just performed. I bought a ticket for this show, paying more money than the minimum charge because a portion of the funds collected are being donated to Covid19 relief. I also bought a t-shirt designed especially for this event. I’ll probably get it in a couple of weeks. Pete performed an acoustic version of his breakthrough hit album, Musicforthemorningafter, which was released in 2001. During the pandemic lockdown, Pete has played seventeen live shows on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. I’ve watched all of them. On some days, they’ve been the only thing that got me through the murk. So how did I wind up with Pete? I’ll tell the story which is one of those serendipitous little deals that subtly shift the trajectory of a life.

In 2001, I’d never heard of Pete Yorn. He was a 27 year old musician trying to crack his way into the big time recording world. I was coming up on my 50th birthday. I’d been living with Michael since 1972. We were going to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary that May. The previous year we’d made a huge transition in our lives. Michael had decided to leave Record Service, the music business that had been the center of his daily life for 27 years. With the advent of free music downloads from the internet and big box stores selling CD’s for less than the cost of purchasing them from the record labels, the writing was on the wall. The day of the small independent music stores was coming to an end. Michael’s degree in political science wasn’t much use for a practical job. He was 51 years old. So he’d decided to return to college, pick up 30 undergraduate hours of education classes and acquire a teaching degree as a secondary school history teacher. Eventually that move turned into his also adding a master’s degree in US History.

We told our kids about the new plans on our annual holiday trip to Starved Rock State Park. Our daughter was a sophomore in college and our son was in eighth grade. They stared at us, stunned, across the dinner table. A parental job change is a big deal. They loved their cool rock and roll dad who knew everything about music and got great tickets to concerts and sports events through the major record labels.  Going back to college when you’re an old guy? That was a challenge for them. We laughed out loud when our son asked, “are you sure you’re not going to become one of those dads who lays around on the couch all day, drinking beer and watching game shows?” We did our best to reassure them although we too were uncertain about how all this would work out. Michael got his substitute teacher’s certificate and took on as many jobs as he could, teaching everything from kindergarten, to special education to the occasional high school history class. He went to school a few nights a week, studying and writing during the days he wasn’t subbing. Student teaching would be coming up in the fall of 2001, followed by the daunting search for a real teaching position. I was the primary breadwinner, holding things together as we all made our adjustments  together.

Our daughter was a college athlete, playing volleyball for her university in an athletic conference that had other colleges within driving distance of our home. We spent time on the road going to watch her play. Our son was an athlete, too, so his games occupied us as well, Michael attending as many as he could given his demanding schedule.  Spring was a busy time for all of us. Our wedding anniversary was on May 1st. Given the fact that we were living on a modest single income, good sense dictated that we probably should minimize our celebration. But me being me, always with an eye toward the future, pointed out to Michael that we only got one 25th wedding anniversary. Ever convincing, I melted his resolve and off we went on a Caribbean cruise. We sailed on the Norway, a ship that looked romantically like the Titanic, although without the threat of icebergs. It was referred to as the last great ocean liner.

We sailed to the Bahamas where we swam with stingrays at Stingray City, to Roatan for snorkeling and diving off beaches covered with iguanas, and finally to Cozumel where we spent time in a magical water park alive with beautiful fish, birds and exotic sea creatures.

We wound up at the ruins in Tulum, Mexico, where we wandered about, marveling at the incredible turquoise water and the remnants of the fort walls, intended to be impregnable but easily violated by conquistadors whose horses easily vaulted the barriers. While there, we had our wedding date preserved like a Mayan calendar page.

We had a wonderful trip. On our actual anniversary we ate at a small intimate  bistro where Michael, proving himself as fiscally risque as me, slid a box across our table right before dessert with an amethyst ring inside. I remember my shock and my tears. So romantic.

May was a busy time. We returned from our trip and celebrated my 50th birthday. A friend had my yard decorated with 50 flamingoes in honor of the event.

A couple of weeks later, we were off on another adventure. Our son had qualified for the National Spelling Bee for the second year in a row. The local newspaper sponsored the bees leading up to the national one, and paid for that trip. We were joined by our daughter who flew in to Washington, DC because this year was the last for which our son was eligible. We stayed in a beautiful hotel downtown where we were feted in style.

In addition to the spelling there were barbecues, trips to surrounding historic sites and general great fun. Our son wound up in third place, getting his first paycheck at age fourteen. What a glorious time.

Summer came and zoomed by. Michael was still in school and the kids were busy with their activities. Our daughter returned to college in the fall, our son was a high school freshman and Michael was doing his student teaching. In October, our aged dog Sydney, had to be euthanized. We were all heartbroken.

We celebrated Thanksgiving and then winter was upon us. We were going back to Starved Rock after a very full 2001. Pete who?

Fast forward. The year is now 2017. Michael died on May 28th after his five year cancer journey. My son, now a biology postdoc, transferred all Michael’s iTunes files to an external hard drive for safekeeping for me before he returned to his field work in Guam. I was alone in my house. Recovering from the massive fatigue of being Michael’s caregiver, I set myself to the task of planning the large exhibit of Michael’s life which would be held in December of that year. He’d become a well-loved teacher in his unfortunately shortened career and I felt that an event near Christmas would allow former students home from college to attend. This would be a big public gathering. While I worked, I decided I would listen to the 2507 songs on my external hard drive. Michael and I were music lovers our whole lives. When he left the Record Service, he was slightly out of touch with current music but after starting teaching, he quickly developed a class which combined modern American history with film and music. He encouraged his students to share their favorite songs with him and continually added new tunes to his personal library. Although we listened to that library a lot, the music was on shuffle which meant there could be hundreds of songs I’d never hear. I wanted to listen to every single song, our old favorites and the ones he’d picked up during his teaching career. Some were great and others I could’ve done without. One afternoon, I heard Pete Yorn’s Life on a Chain for the first time. I was instantly hooked. One of my habits is that when I like something, I have to consume it. That first day, I probably listened to that song 50 times. Then I listened to the album it came from, Musicforthemorningafter, the big breakthrough for Pete in 2001. I ordered a CD and kept it in my car where I played it every day. I also loaded it onto my phone. There was one track in particular, June, which made me cry the second I heard it. I know this sounds weird but the melody sounded like the inside of Michael’s soul to me. Hard to explain-it’s just how it was.

Eventually, I started listening to more of Pete’s music. I read his biographical information and learned about his family. I started to like him. He said great things about his parents and brothers. I found him attractive. He took awhile before marrying and having a baby. He is unabashedly adoring of his little girl. He talks freely about emotions. I was hooked. I started following him on Instagram so I could keep up with his career. Last year he was performing at the Pageant Theater in St. Louis. My son went to college in that city. He was back from Guam and graciously attended the concert with me. We had great seats and I was elated.

For me, Pete was a gift that Michael left me, like so many other things that I’ve stumbled on since his death. Michael always told me I was the most loyal person he knew. That loyalty extends to those people who I’ll never really know, but feel I do because I’m just strange, I guess. Pete is the musical version of my beloved Roger Federer.

  When the pandemic hit, Pete began showing up on Instagram to perform live shows from some house in the California desert where he was sheltering with his wife and daughter. He had one acoustic guitar and a piano from his childhood. I can’t tell you how I loved watching him sit right in front of my face for these concerts which he played because he needed to for himself and to help all the shut ins out in the ether. He’d wait for a few hundred people to show up on his feed and then play, tell stories and chat. When it became clear that the pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, he partnered with groups to raise money for Covid19 relief, food pantries and the like. As I noted earlier, he performed 17 times. I missed him when he disappeared for awhile. Then all of a sudden, he announced last Saturday’s concert, a live acoustic stream of the entire Musicforthemorningafter album. Tickets were $15 and up, with each level getting a different perk and again, funds being donated to Covid19 relief. Unique t-shirts and a face mask with the words “Strange Condition,” one of Pete’s song titles emblazoned across the front. I so looked forward to this show and it was everything I dreamed it would be. Personal, empathetic Pete and great music. Nothing fancy, just him. One of the best hour and a halves I’ve ever spent. And I’ve been to more concerts than you can possibly imagine.

When the show was over, Pete asked people to let him know how they felt about it. Lots of people sent him screenshots with decorative, appreciative emojis. I wrote him a note, which is more like me. He took a second to answer me.

  Yup. Me and Pete. Who’d have known. I’ll be his loyal fan until I disappear. Life is full of surprises. Look him up. Have a listen. I hope you like him too. 

Me and Pete This is Pete Yorn in a screenshot I took of him yesterday at the end of a livestream concert he’d just performed.

[mnranger5]

Coronavirus Will Be Remembered Very Differently By Our Family

Coronavirus, also known as, Covid-19, and while not politically correct, The Wuhan (Josh’s preferred name), The China Cough (Brianna’s preferred name) or The Chinese Disease (Ashlynn’s preferred name), Kung Flu, The Rona (my favorite) is the pandemic flu virus that originated in Wuhan, China.  This virus profoundly impacted the world in early 2020, killing a small percentage of those who contract the virus, wiping out trillions of dollars of wealth in the stockmarket and causing panic and social distancing like nothing this world has ever seen.

The virus is an upper respiratory infection that can cause severe trauma to the lungs.  For most people, the virus ends up feeling like a cold or flu, but for others, hospitalization is required and the harshest cases have resulted in death.   While it’s believed the virus began impacting China and other SE Asian countries in the Fall of 2019, our media coverage in the states was largely just snip-it reporting of it being “their problem.”  After all, there were no known cases in Europe or the United States.  But in hindsight, you can’t have any cases if you aren’t testing.  The United States had yet to develop a widely used test to detect the virus even though there were likely hundreds of thousands of undocumented cases from NY to LA.  Out of sight, out of mind.  For months, these cases probably passed off as just a run of the mill colds and flues.

January: The first time I really started hearing about the Coronavirus was in late January.  I was in the middle of the refinancing process on my mortgage.  I was watching interest rates daily.  Typically, mortgage rates follow the 10 Year Treasury Yield.  The 10 Year Yield is a fairly stable yield curve that really doesn’t have huge sways, unless there is some kind of global pressure.  Well, in late January, the 10 Year Yield started plummeting due to an outbreak of documented Coronavirus cases in China.  China’s stock market was in disarray and although the downstream impacts on other countries markets had yet to be felt, the uncertainly led to a steep downturn in the Treasury Yield, and therefore a cliff in mortgage rates.  On a daily basis, I was in contact with my mortgage broker getting the latest rate and lock recommendation.  In late January, I contracted a rough upper respiratory infection.  I had a fever that came and went and a sharp cough that lasted a week.  At the time, I thought nothing of it, as the virus then circulated through the rest of the house over the coming weeks. But in hindsight, the symptoms were perfectly aligned with that of The Wuhan.

February 13: With the stock market at an all-time high (DOW 29,423), Blue Cross sent out our first company-wide email notification providing general information about Coronavirus.   At the time, BCBS’ statement was that Minnesotans and those in the United States were at low risk for contracting the Coronavirus.  Although a handful of cases had been confirmed in the United States, there really was no cause for alarm.

February 20-29: One week later, the media coverage began turn.  As more and more cases were confirmed positive, the US also recorded it’s first death from Coronavirus.  During the final week in February, cases began popping up in nearly every state and person-to-person transmission of the virus had been confirmed.  Travel to China was banned.  The media started running with wild stories about the virus giving way to politicians lining up on their side of the aisle to either commend or find fault with the response by the Trump Administration.  This was the beginning of a new era for Americans.  The stock market started to nose dive..

March 1-7: By the first week in March something was brewing in our way of life that didn’t quite seem right.  Every news cycle was about a worsening doom and gloom picture of Covid-19.  I will never forget the pictures of stretchers carrying body bags out of a Seattle-area nursing home that was plagued with the virus, killing at least 35.  Early on for the United States, Seattle would serve as the epicenter for Coronavirus.  The impacts of the virus were impacting our everyday life too.  That same week, BCBS issued a statement to employees indicating all non-essential work travel was being canceled.  That meant Dyan’s trip to San Diego (that I was hoping to piggyback along with) was canceled as well as her upcoming trips to Vermont and Baltimore. The virus was steamrolling the stock market.  The DOW was down nearly 20% since mid-February.  I was watching my 401K hemorrhage value daily, err, hourly.  This felt very different than any other stock market correction we’ve had.  EVER.  This one had no end in sight.  Scary.  And to make matters worse, people began panic shopping, completely wiping out shelves at the grocery store.  It was so surreal walking around a store with completely empty shelves.  This isn’t supposed to happen in America.  This has to be a dream.

March 8-19: By the second week in March, Coronavirus was all anybody could talk about.  BCBS issued a statement to employees that Friday, 3/13, would be a mandatory “Work For Home” day, as the company wanted to test network adequacy and bandwidth in the instance we all needed to work from home in the future.  The following Monday, 3/16, BCBS announced that BCBS employees would be required to work from home, through the end of March.  Just two days later, the governor of MN announced that all schools would be closed through early April.  That meant parents pulling double duty – homeschooling while trying to accomplish their day job from home.  Aye-yai-yai!  By the end of the week, the market was still plunging into an unknown abyss, down 30%.  

With no travel being advised, and new social distancing rules in place (stay at least 6 feet apart in public spaces), we were spending a lot of time inside with the kiddos.  Since the weather wasn’t really cooperating like and ideal spring quite yet, we needed to come up with some fun things to do indoors.  One of my favorite things to do is break boxes of baseball cards.  One of my favorite boxes when I was a kid was 1990 Score (Mom and Dad bought me a box of 36 packs for my birthday that year).  The reason it’s my favorite is that it contains a hard to find Bo Jackson insert.  Flaunting shoulder pads and a baseball bat, this black & white card is one of the most iconic of a junk card era.  I found a box online for relatively cheap and it was in my mailbox 3 days later.  On 3/19, The kids helped me re-live my youth, by tearing into these plastic packs.  I had given the kids a description of the exact card we were looking for, so the hunt was on.

Brianna pulled the first BO!

Scarlett and Ashlynn followed up with two more Bo Jackson cards!

In all, it took about thirty minutes to blow through all 36 packs.  But wow, so much nostalgia, and so much fun.  That Bo Jackson card is worth about $1 today, but the excitement we had together ripping those packs open made the investment so incredibly worth it!

March 21: Minnesotans were in full lockdown on Brianna’s birthday.  No restaurants, entertainment venues or shopping was open.  Therefore, we had to celebrate Brianna’s birthday quarantine-style!  Brianna wanted to have a bake-off for her birthday, so Brianna and Scarlett made vanilla birthday cake while Ashlynn and Felicity made chocolate cupcakes.  Both were off the charts good….there honestly was no loser between the two!  For her birthday, she received two 5lb tubs of slime as well as a new bike.  

Later that evening (after a family bike ride), we watched Jumanji 2 in the basement with theater popcorn and mega candy boxes!

March 22: This is the day why we will remember the Coronavirus Quarantine a little bit differently than most families.  WE BOUGHT A PUPPY!  Here is how it all went down.  Dyan and I have been talking about getting a puppy for a long time…like for the past 3 years at least.  We’ve just never pulled the trigger.  Earlier in the week, I began thinking of ways to entertain the kids should this quarantine really eat into the spring and summer months.  All I kept coming back to was: a puppy.  I mean, it’s the perfect time.  We’d all be at home to take care of the dog for a prolonged period of time.  Plus, with spring on the doorstep, training outside should be a lot easier than it would be in the dead of winter.  I had planned to find the perfect puppy and surprise everybody…including Dyan.  I texted and emailed with breeders all week, but was coming up empty.  I had one pup in SW Minnesota that I could find ready, but quite honestly, the dog wasn’t very attractive.  I needed help finding a puppy, so I decided to tell Dyan on Sunday morning.  SHE ADORED THE IDEA OF A PUPPY!  Within an hour, Dyan found a litter of AKC Yellow Labs in a town southwest of Rochester, near the border of Iowa.  And within two hours, we had placed a hold on one of four males in the litter, specifically, “Red Collar.”  

We didn’t tell the kids yet, however.  We had them all get ready for the day and head out to the car for a nice little quarantine-busting road trip.  The kids thought the drive was just so we could get out of the house for the first time in a week.  After an hour of driving, the kids were getting antsy, asking questions.  They knew something was up.  Finally, ten minutes before we arrived at the Hayfield farm, we told the kids we needed their help picking out the perfect puppy for our family.  I have never seen so much joy and excitement from all of the kids, EVER.  There were tears, shrieks and screams.  The puppy, these kids have so patiently waited for was finally over.

And when we stepped foot in the garage of the breeder, there were puppies from two different litters.  “Blue Collar” and Red Collar were just inside the door, while several other puppies were in a large cage.  And while all the puppies were absolutely adorable, Red Collar, the puppy Dyan picked out in the pictures posted on Facebook, was going to be ours.  No question about it.  

He was bigger than the other puppies with floppy ears and so much skin that his wrinkles rolled in all the right places.  The breeder told us his mom, Lady Red Fern (Fernie) was 80lbs, and his dad, Healthlands Love My Charger (Charger) was 95lbs.  

She fully expected Red Collar to reach 90lbs.  With his massive paws at only 9 weeks old, there was no denying this puppy would grow up to be a biggun!  The kids took turns holding the puppies, but Red Collar never left our sight.  Within 20 minutes, we were headed back to the car, with the puppy swaddled in a blanket.  Welcome to the family, Red Collar!  

Your new name is Ranger.

March 24 - April 25

Ranger really did help to break up the monotony of our daily grind from home.  

The kids were always ready to put up a good fight over who got to take him for a walk, give him a bath, cuddle with him on the couch or play in our last spring snow storm.  

The pup never had to walk.  He was constantly carried around the house and neighborhood by the kids.  As soon as one would put him down, somebody else would pick him up.  He was treated like a Prince.

But even though our family had a new puppy to love, life was still at a standstill in so many regards.  We didn’t leave the house the entire week.  We had Hy-Vee and Amazon deliver all of our groceries.  We were in the process of trying to find the right balance of being school teachers and BCBS employees throughout the day.  Not going to lie, it was tough.  All of us huddling up around the kitchen table with laptops, notebooks, text books and iPads seemed foreign and severely tested boundaries.  Our kitchen table has never been used so much...

On March 29th, I was going stir crazy.  I needed to get out of the house.  So Mike and I hatched a plan to get on the water and do a little social distance fishing at the Red Wing Dam.  Temps were in the 40′s with a howling 30 mph wind out of the north and light showers that turned to sleet at times.  It was absolutely the most miserable fishing conditions I have ever fished in.  But, being on the water for the first time this year was worth every moment of the experience.  Mike even salvaged the fishing day with a GIANT 10″ Sauger!

On my way home that night, I found the cheapest gas I recall in my lifetime.  Oh Coronavirus, I love how you are making the gas cheap!

Over the next month, Ranger brightened our lives so much.  To the point where it’s hard to imagine a life without him.  He attached to our family (and us to him) so quickly, that we didn’t leave the house without him.  He came on our walks, trips to Target, pick-up & drop-off of the kids, food take-out runs and any other time we had to leave the house.  We just couldn’t imagine him being home alone.  

Way back in the day...like at least 4 years ago, when Dyan and I first discussed getting a dog, we always said we’d get two at the same time, so that they would be best buds and always have a friend to play with when we weren’t home.  Our plan was to find a litter that had both yellow and chocolate males.  For years we searched on and off for the perfect littler of pups, but could never find a large breed mixed litter.  During that time of looking, Dyan and I put deposits on two pups (separate occasions), which we disappointingly backed out on because of bad timing.

But timing wasn’t an issue this time.  In fact, timing was working out to our advantage.  We had nowhere to be but home, for the foreseeable future.   So how about that second puppy, Dyan?

April 26

We had once again scoured the puppy pages online looking for the perfect Chocolate Lab.  Dyan would once again get the credit for finding this one.  He was located in an obscure town in eastern Iowa.  We’d make plans to drive three and a half hours and meet at Bass Pro Shoppes in Des Moines.

We arrived at 9:00, and when I say we, I include Ranger, because again, we don’t leave home without him.  We were the Welcome Wagon contingent.  The breeder pulled up shortly after us, with a puppy in his lap.  Our puppy?  Not so fast.  We took to the puppy immediately.  He seemed perfect, and at barely 8 weeks old.  The breeder went on and on with stories about breeding world class coon hounds.  We just wanted to get on the road!  The puppy snuggled in tight to us, never touching the ground in the 20 minutes.  As we were wrapping up, I decided to put the pup on the ground to meet Ranger.  The pup had a severe limp on his rear right leg. The breeder was very honest about it indicating he had stepped very hard on the pups paw 3 hours earlier that morning.  He indicated there ��could” be some damage to the paw, or, he “could” be just fine.  The entire conversation changed in that moment.  It had been three hours since the incident occurred, so he should be feeling better if there was no damage, right?  What if it was a broken paw?  Having a broken paw cared for could be several thousand dollars depending on the damage.  The puppy gingerly hobbled around the empty Bass Pro parking lot.  Neither of us were comfortable bringing an injured puppy home.  Finally, the breeder offered to drive home, pick up the next largest male in the litter, and meet us at this same spot in a couple hours.  That seemed like the best option at this point.  

Since Iowa did not have a Corona-related stay-at-home order in place, most stores were open.  We leisurely walked around Bass Pro for an hour looking at puppy toys and puppy treats.  

Around 11, the breeder arrived at Bass Pro for the second time, with his second dog.  He profusely apologized for the entire ordeal, and for not being able to have given this second pup a bath.  He pulled the pup from the back cab of the truck. 

Now, I should rewind here just a bit for some additional context to the story.  As Dyan and I walked Ranger around Bass Pro I think we were both leaning toward walking away from the sale anyway because the overall vibe the breeder was giving off wasn’t exactly selling us on his litter (but that’s another story.)   We also both agreed that this second dog was NOT the dog we chose from the litter.  We had no pre-attachment to him like we did over the limping puppy.  We had gushed over the other puppy for two weeks as we secretly waited for pick-up day.  But this second dog only had one picture posted online.  He was Male #2, or “Blue Collar.”  

Our agreement was that if Blue Collar didn’t seem like a good fit, or wasn’t cute, or wasn’t what we were expecting, we’d walk away and not look back.

So, when Blue Collar was pulled out of the cab of the truck, and we got our first look at him, it was game over.  Immediate.  Period.  Done.  Blue Collar was ours. He was absolutely adorable.  I asked Dyan the question (full well knowing the answer,)  “What do you think?”  Obviously no response was required as the baby rubbed up against Dyan’s cheek before nuzzling in under her chin.  We put him on the ground, for safe measure.  Had to make sure Blue Collar didn’t have a limp!  He cautiously moved around the parking lot, all paws fully functioning. 

Ranger seemingly towered over Blue Collar as the two sat side by side.  Neither quite sure what to make of the other. The breeder wasted no time and was gone quickly this time around.  We stared at the two puppies, wondering what we had just got ourselves into.  At this point one of us finally called Blue Collar by his new name.  Moose, let’s take you to your new home!

The drive home turned into a much longer journey with several potty breaks along the way.  Ranger and Moose shared a bed n the backseat a majority of the drive home.

And when we arrived home, we broke the surprise to the kids by walking into the room holding him.  The kids went nuts!  Hysteria, tears and shrieks of joy.  The Blaniels Family was now complete!

And even though Minnesota is still on lock-down from Coronavirus, our family is quickly building new bonds and soaking up moments of excitement and joy caused by the two guys!

[thelucienblog]

LIVE IN ST PAUL | 11/18: St. Vincent

In the U.S military, every prospective Navy Seal is subjected to “Hell Week”. Hell Week can begin anywhere between 6 and 12 PM on the night before the third week of Navy Seal training. It is announced by high ranking officers bursting into the trainee’s sleeping quarters and rousting them with a round of machine gun fire (the guns are filled with blanks, but they sound just as loud as live ammo.) From that point onward, Hell Week consists of a series of brutal physical and mental challenges, which range from cold, wet combat simulations to only being allowed five hours of sleep over the entire five day period. Roughly 75% of trainees drop out of the Navy Seal program during Hell Week.

After learning about all of this (yes, I have an unfortunate habit of reading irrelevant Wikipedia articles at unholy hours of the night—don’t judge me) I thought it’d be fun to design my own little music critic Hell Week. I would attend five shows in four days, and write full-length reviews of all of them. “It’ll be fun,” I thought to myself. “I love going to shows, right?”

By the time I arrived at my final trial, St. Vincent at the Palace Theater, I was utterly defeated. Thanks to the previous four shows, my back, calves, ankles, and feet were on fire from the moment I got off the bus. From there, I navigated my way through a winter carnival full of unnecessarily loud children in order to get to the Palace itself. The show was sold out, so once I arrived I had to wait in line outside for twenty minutes next to a bunch of middle-aged MPR members fiercely debating the wattage of the marquee’s light bulbs. By the time I got inside, I was ready to go to bed, not attend a concert.

The show began with a screening of The Birthday Party, the St. Vincent (a.k.a Annie Clark) directed segment of the anthology horror film XX. The short film is about a mother hosting a birthday party for her daughter. Before the party, the mother finds out that her husband has overdosed on pills. She tries to hide the fact that he’s dead by dressing him in a panda costume. The whole thing is a metaphor for how society forces women to act like nothing is wrong when (surprise surprise!) something is very wrong. It’s a great concept, but the end product is marred by lack of subtlety, unconvincing acting, and über-basic shot-reverse-shot direction. Plus, there’s unnecessary jump scares every thirty seconds—something I’m guessing is meant to be ironic, since Clark has stated that she doesn’t enjoy horror movies because they “scare her too much to watch.” All in all, a well-intentioned but poorly executed film (if you’d enjoy hearing an in-depth take on The Birthday Party, click here). The whole light bulb wattage guessing incident had been one thing, but I think what really pushed my respect for St.Vincent’s fanbase over the edge was the moment they all started chuckling smugly at the “The Memory That Lucy Suppressed From Her Seventh Birthday…That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault” subtitle tactlessly pinned onto the end of the film. I would only grow to hate the people around me more and more as the evening went on.

Forty-five minutes after the conclusion of The Birthday Party, St. Vincent appeared onstage, sporting a neon pink leotard and a matching pair of thigh-high stiletto-heeled boots, and began the show. She performed an hour of cuts from her pre-MASSEDUCTION records in chronological order. No band was present- the entire show consisted solely of her guitar and vocals underpinned by a pre-recorded backing track.

What could’ve been a chance for a unique, intimate performance was reduced to St. Vincent ruthlessly mangling her own back catalog, armed with only her own skewed sense of artistic license. She always ensured that there was something standing between me and the song I knew and loved. A cheap, trebley string arrangement? Check. An obnoxious, muddy EDM bassline? Check. Lethargic, plodding tempos plaguing nearly every song? Check. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Why would St. Vincent want to bastardize her own material?

Suddenly, it hit me. She was pulling a late 90s U2! This was her PopMart tour! All the pieces were there. The gaudy costumery. The “satirical popstar” persona that she was projecting via forced, intentionally awkward stage banter. The intentionally flat delivery/kitschy, overcrowded arrangements. Now that I knew that this is how the show was going to go, I wasn’t looking forward to sitting through the rest of it, to say the least. I’d always thought of myself as concert-savvy enough to steer clear of tours like this. Oh well. I suppose nobody’s perfect.

After making a mockery out of most of my favorite St. Vincent songs, Clark granted us a brief intermission. On his way back from a beer run, a short, stubbly, fifty-something man became angry with me because I was blocking the way back to “his spot”. Now, any experienced concert-goer knows that if you find yourself in the position of beer run guy, you can A) just find another spot, or B) do your best to slither back into your old one. But this guy. This guy was so unbelievably entitled that it was beyond him to even consider doing either of those things. Instead, he decided to come up to me and scream the word “REALLY?” as loud as he could directly into my ear. In all my life, I don’t think I’d ever considered punching a random person in the face as seriously as I did in that moment. Sure I’d probably get kicked out by security, but at least I wouldn’t have to sit through another hour of St. Vincent. However, I knew from setlist.fm that on every stop of this tour, St. Vincent plays MASSEDUCTION in its entirety after intermission. Regardless of my ill-advised urge to give beer run guy a bloody nose, I couldn’t resist my morbid curiosity about how she’d approach her new material, considering she’d treated her old stuff with all the respect of Father John Misty performing the hits of Taylor Swift.

The way St. Vincent played her character during the second act was even more aggravating than the first. During this set, she held her fist in the air, civil rights-style, at the climactic point of nearly every song. Just like her stage banter, it was kind of clever at first. Yes, popstars and celebrities often appropriate the imagery of social justice movements. You made your point. Well done. However, as the set went on, the gesture gradually moved from amusing, to gauche, to distasteful. Just because you’re doing something disrespectful ironically doesn’t automatically nullify the impact of the gesture. Musically, Clark failed to break out of the cold, detached cage that she’d established for herself in the first act, putting little to no effort into key vocal moments like the bridge on “Los Ageless.” It’d be one thing if she only did this for MASSEDUCTION’s pop songs, but it pervaded throughout what were supposed to be the “emotional” numbers as well, making the set even more of a monotonous slog. I did appreciate that in this act, the instrumentals hadn’t been reduced to plastic surgery disasters, but regardless, I was still left unsatisfied.

Believe it or not, I actually like MASSEDUCTION. It’s St. Vincent’s weakest album by far, but it that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. The lyrics are a balanced mix of clever pop culture criticism and heartfelt emotional confession. The music is hit or miss, getting too poppy and repetitive at times for my taste, but the songs that do hit both the conceptual and music targets that she’s set for herself are some of the best of her career (“MASSEDUCTION”, “Los Ageless”, “Smoking Section”). It succeeds as an “indie artist pokes fun at pop music/pop culture” album, which is really something considering how many other artists have attempted to do the same thing and failed (e.g U2’s Pop, Arcade Fire’s Everything Now, Father John Misty’s entire miserable existence.) One of the reasons I think it works so well is that it mocks pop culture without completely turning St. Vincent into a soulless, ironic caricature. It’s a good satirical album precisely because it isn’t just a satirical album—it contrasts its satirical elements with the vulnerability of songs like “Happy Birthday Johnny” and “Smoking Section”, thereby keeping the listener in touch with the emotive, somewhat human St. Vincent that they know and love. Nonstop satire over the course of an entire album can easily become heavy-handed and repetitive, so it’s refreshing to hear an album that knows when to give the listener a break. Sadly, for some reason, St. Vincent failed to retain this sense of balance in a live setting.

After “Smoking Section” reached its conclusion, the curtain was drawn and the show was over. I was done. I had beaten Hell Week.  After waiting in line to exit the venue for ten minutes before I figured out that it was actually the line for coat check (apparently, everybody in the audience except me had paid $5 for coat check), I marched out into the freezing November night victorious.

Sometimes live music is a spiritual, life-affirming experience. Sometimes it’s garbage. Sometimes it’s a little of both. The most important thing Hell Week taught me was the fact that even if I go to a concert and hate it, I can still gain something of value from it. Over the few months that I’ve been writing live reviews, I’ve learned more about music than I ever could have imagined, so in the end, I have no regrets about any show I’ve gone to. Except for this one. I want my $40 back.

Edited by Sarah Bel Kloetzke

[mirkwoodshewolf]

Sleepover comfort; Sebastian Stan x teen reader

This was a recent request from my wattpad account that I had just posted today. This request was inspired by one of my favorite Full House episode and I hope you guys enjoy it. Now there are some major sensitive topics mentioned so I’m just gonna say, TEXTING OR DOING SOCIAL MEDIA WHILE DRIVING CAN WAIT!!! DON’T END A LIFE JUST BECAUSE U WANNA SEE WHAT YOUR FRIEND JUST SENT YOU. IT CAN WAIT SERIOUSLY!! One swear world is said, but all in all there is fluffiness in the end with daddy Seb. I hope you all enjoy it :)

________________________________________________________

I rode up to my backyard and just dumped my bike on the ground before storming in the backdoor of my house. I saw my dad, Uncle Chris, Uncle Anthony, and Aunt Scarlett all sitting in the kitchen.

"It's official! I quit! I'm quitting the Dance team!" I proclaimed as I handed my dad Sebastian Stan, yep that's right I am the 14 year old daughter of the Winter Soldier himself, Sebastian Stan.

"(N/n) you can't quit, I just spent 25 dollars buying you this Dance Varsity jacket" he said as he pinched the collar of my dance jacket.

"And there's no way I'm going to the Varsity sleepover this Saturday!" I then ran up the stairs leading up to my room.

"What was that about?" asked Anthony Mackie.

"I know what," Sebastian stated solemnly. He then walked towards the kitchen table and sat down on one of the chairs and he said to his Marvel friends, "those sleepovers are for Mothers and Daughters".

"Ohh man poor (n/n)" said Chris Evans.

"It's gotta be devastating for her" said Anthony

."At times like this, especially now I wish (y/n) had a mother" said Sebastian.

Now I wasn't really told this because it was always so hard for my dad to speak it to me; but when I was just 2 years old, my mom and I were driving home from the mall my dad was away filming Infinity War when it happened, a young teenager texting on their phone didn't pay attention and rammed into my mom's car. It flipped a total of five times and was completely totaled. It took over and hour and a half to get me and my mom out of the car.

When my dad got the news, he immediately booked a flight from Atlanta to New York and rushed to the hospital asking where we both were. For 2 weeks my dad refused to leave both me and my mother's side, unfortunately my mother was soon pronounced dead after failing to get out of her coma but I came around.

The young teenage girl who was texting on her phone went to trial for reckless manslaughter and attempted manslaughter on an infant and was sentenced to 25-40 years in prison.The press was all over my dad after the trial, asking him questions of what he was going to do now. Did they give him a fair trial even though he was a celebrity? His only statement was this before refusing anymore questions.

"Kids today do not realize the pain they can give to another family. All they care about is what's on their phones or what text they've received than the life of someone else. I'm only grateful that I get to take one of my girls home today".

After that my dad went out of the spotlight for a while to raise me, he had only just started back into acting just a few years ago after I had watched him in the Marvel movies and asked him to be an actor again so that I could see him on TV and say 'that's my daddy!'

Sebastian raised his head up in an idea and turned to Scarlett and said.

"Hey Scarlett, I know this is a big question to ask,"

"No Seb I will not marry you". Which got Chris and Anthony to call him out on it, Scarlett smirked knowing what Sebastian was really meaning and said, "But I will be happy to take (y/n) to the slumber party. I'll be in Boston Saturday morning for a photoshoot but I'll be back in plenty of time".

"Thank you Scarlett, and know that if little Rose needs someone and you're too busy, I'll be there for you". The two actors hugged each other before Scarlett went up the stairs towards my room.

I was currently on my bed holding my 'Bucky-bear' given to me by my dad as a birthday present when I was 6 years old when I heard a knock.

"I'm fine please go away".

"(Y/n) it's Scarlett" I heard her say.

"Come in". My door opened and in came in my Aunt Scarlett

"Hey Big (n/n) can we talk about this Saturday?"

"Sleepovers are so boring, all you do is just sleep on the floor and eat junk food, besides Uncle Don would have my head if he found out about that".

"Well gee that's too bad cause I was hoping maybe you and I could go to that party?" My eyes widened in hopefulness.

"You mean it? You'd go with me? AWESOME!! We're gonna sleep on the floor and eat junk food!" I jumped on my bed and hugged my Aunt Scarlett who chuckled and hugged me back. "Thanks Aunt Scarlett, I can't wait till Saturday!"

"Hey I'm there for you babe" She rocked me back and forth and then as we separated she told me that even though she had a photoshoot for People Magazine, she would be back in plenty of time to pick me up and take me to the sleepover slumber party.

*FF to Saturday*

It was Saturday afternoon and I was busy packing up for the slumber-party when my dad came in with a load of my clean laundry and when he saw my packing my sleeping bag he said.

"Whatcha doin packing now? I thought the party wasn't for another 6 hours?"

"You know the Varsity motto. 'Always be one step ahead'" I said. My dad smiled then he said,

"Well can yah take a break and help me with your clean clothes?" I paused my packing and went over to help my dad with my clothes. I put my underwear and bras into my top drawer, my pajama shirts in the middle and pajama pants at the bottom drawer.

Suddenly I was glomped by a mass of fur and next thing I know something is licking me. I looked up to see Dodger standing over me.

"Hi Dodger!" He barked and I ruffled his head and face as I playfully wrestled with him making him growl and grunt.

"Dodger! Dodger where did you get to you mangy mutt!?" Uncle Chris soon came in and saw us playing together then he said to my dad, "Sorry man, as soon as we came in he just got away from me".

"No worries Chris, we love having Dodger here, out house is his house, so long as he doesn't shit on the carpet".

"Uncle Chris! Tati said a bad language word!" I proclaimed.

"Did Robert tell you about that?" he asked. I smirked then next thing I knew I was in between my dad and uncle who were now tickling me. Dodger soon turned to my team and he would get on top of either my dad or uncle and lick them trying to get them to get off me.

*FF 6 hours later*

I was downstairs on the couch with my bag all packed up, Dodger was lying on his stomach just a few inches away from me. Now should've been the moment when Aunt Scarlett would come through the front door ready to take me to the slumber party. I soon heard the sound of footsteps coming down the staircase and soon my dad and Uncle Chris were just getting on their jackets and baseball caps on.

"Dad, where is Aunt Scarlett?"

"Calm down squirt she's only 20 seconds late she'll be here. Now your Uncle Chris, Anthony and I are gonna meet with your Uncle Don and the other guys for a Nightly gym session before having our own Guy's Night Out while you're at your party. I want you to text me whenever you get leave, when you get there and have fun and be safe, okay?"

"Alright". Dad then kissed my cheek and hugged me goodbye then Uncle Chris gave me a kiss before saying.

"Have fun tonight with Scarlett, you girls are gonna have fun tonight".

"That is if she gets here" I stated.

"She'll come, Scarlett isn't one to dump you without good reason, just be patient, and you know how traffic is on a Saturday afternoon between Boston and New York". He gave me another kiss on my temple and soon the boys left saying bye to me and I told them bye back.It was then my cellphone rang. I turned to Dodger and told him.

"I got it," I reached out for my phone and saw that it was labeled 'unknown landline'. I slid the answer button and said, "Hello?"

'(Y/n) it's Scarlett'.

"Aunt Scarlett where are you!?" I asked.

'Honey I'm in New Haven. I've finally managed to get to a phone since my phone died, look my car broke down. I dropped my transmission'.

"Well pick it up and get your butt over here we're gonna miss the party!”

'Honey I don't think I'm gonna be able to make it, I feel terrible' she stated solemnly. My heart dropped but I told her.

"It's okay. Thanks anyway, bye". I hung up and just sat there on the couch broken-hearted. "I didn't wanna go to that party anyway Dodge, it's just a bunch of girls with their moms, how boring. We'll have much more fun by ourselves, won't we Dodge?" Dodger then leaped onto the couch and placed his head on my shoulder as I turned around and hugged him.

I decided that since Aunt Scarlett wasn't coming, there was no point in having my bag still packed. I walked upstairs back to my room and began unpacking. I then heard a flush from the bathroom across the hall and it was then my Uncle Anthony came pass my room and saw me.

"Big (n/n) what are you doing? Scarlett's gonna be here any second".

"No she's not, her car broke down in New Haven" I told him solemnly.

"Aww (n/n) that's awful". I looked down sadly when he then suddenly proclaimed, "Hey! I'll take yah!"

"To a slumber party?" I asked skeptically."Hey I slumber and I bring in the party, ain't no party starts without the Mack-Attack!" He stated strongly.

"But it's for Mothers and Daughters, and you're a guy. Plus you only have a son, no offense but you don't know what girls do at slumber parties".

"Well I won't tell if you won't. Come on Little Stanner your friends all know me. Now we are going to that party and we are going to have a ton of fun!" He said as he walked right up to me and put my Bucky-bear back in my sleeping bag.

"Are you sure about this?" I asked him skeptically.

"Hey I'm there for you my little Stanner-rama!" He wrapped his arm around me in a one armed hug. But I had a little voice telling me that this was going to end badly.

Anthony drove us to our Head instructor's, Amy's mom's place. I rang the doorbell and answering it was Amy herself.

"Hey (y/n)"

"Hi Amy".

"What'd yah bring Anthony for?" she asked confused.

"Oh don't mind me tonight I'm just one of the girls". We entered inside and soon my instructor Mrs. Perry came up and she and Anthony exchanged some words.

"Hi Anthony".

"Hello Deb, ladies"

"Where's Scarlett I thought she said she was coming?"

"Oh she had car troubles so I'm the DDM. Designated Dance Mother".

"Well you and (y/n) are just in time for some Monster".

"Oh none for me thanks, tried it once didn't like it". I mentally face-palmed and explained it to him as my dance team all looked at him confused.

"Uncle Anthony, that's Monster High Dolls".

"Oh well now—hey that's even better I love those crazy High school girls!" We set his sleeping back down while Mrs. Perry told me where to set mine at while Uncle Anthony went to sit down on the couch with the rest of my team and their moms and he grabbed Lagoona Blue. "Oh look its Aqua-girl. Sea-creatures come forth" he then began making beeping noises acting like she was sending out a telepathic signal.

"Her name's not Aqua-girl. It's Lagoona Blue" stated Tayandra.

"Oh yeah I knew that, well I'm—I'm more of a manly monster anyway". Uncle Anthony said as he picked up Clawd Wolf and stated in a deep, masculine voice. "Hey she-wolves, looks like we have a lot in common. I mean, we howl at the moon, we're real werewolves and we're a whole lot better looking than those Twilight pups. So let's Boogie baby!" he then moved Clawd side to side making him dance.

"Hey Mack-attack. Cut. The. Check!" I used his catchphrase against him as I sliced my finger across my neck telling him to just stop.

"Mother-Daughter Double-dutch!" exclaimed Allie. The girls all cheered and we all got up and Uncle Anthony said.

"Alright (n/n) let's show these girls how we superheroes do it!" I looked up to the ceiling and muttered.

"What am I doing here?" Then as Tayandra and Amy held the two jump ropes and began turning them around and around. I leapt in first and the girls and their mom's plus my Uncle Anthony began doing the Teddy Bear rhyme.Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around, 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, show your shoes, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear that will do!Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, call a friend.

"Anthony Mackie!" I proclaimed. It was then Anthony jumped in successfully and the rhyme continued.

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, go upstairs,

Teddy, Bear, Teddy Bear—

But it was then Uncle Anthony got caught on the rope to his right and he joked out.

"Get caught in the rope like a big dumb dope".

"Next" I said as the two of us left the ropes and Amy and her mother came in.

Out in the streets of New York, Sebastian, Chris, Don and his workout team were walking from the restaurant to the gym.

"I'm wondering why (y/n) hadn't texted me yet?" said Sebastian

"Maybe she's having such a good time with Scarlett maybe she just forgot, don't worry Seb, she'll be fine". Said Don as he placed a strong hand on his shoulder.

"I hope so. I just—I just worry about her that's all, especially now. Starting next year she can legally go out and test for her diver's permit then the next year, her license".

"I know how much you worry for her Seb, even after all these years but you can't go about your life always worrying about her. Yeah it's scary out there on the road, hell I was a nervous wreck when my sisters first started driving, but if you keep holding onto that fear forever, how will you trust her out there on the road. She won't be like those other teenagers". Said Chris.

Sebastian took the advice from his friends and nodded. That's when his phone began to ring and on the caller ID it said 'Chocolachino'. He swiped to respond and he said.

"Hey Chocolachino where were you? You didn't follow us after we left".

'Scarlett had car troubles so I'm here with (n/n) at her slumber party'

"Is she alright?"

'Oh yeah she's doing great. By the way I took second in the PJ competition'.

"Not gonna comment to that".

'You just jealous cause they made Falcon PJ's and not Winter Soldier ones'.

"Shut up!"

'Alright hey listen I gotta go they're about to start the relay race!'

"Okay, tell (y/n) I love her".

'Aww I love you too Papa Bear'.

"Seriously Mack-Attack".

'Yeah, yeah, yeah I'll tell her, bye!' The two then hung up.

"So he went with (y/n) to the slumber party?" asked Chris.

"Yeah apparently Scarlett had car troubles so Anthony stepped up and took her there".

"Oh man that must've sucked for (n/n). But bless Anthony for taking her there" said Don.

"Yeah well at least now we'll actually be able to work-out without the Mack-attack bringing us out of focus" joked Sebastian which made all the guys laugh as they continued walking towards the gym to work out their meal.

Back at the slumber party, all the girls and their mothers plus Anthony were now all in their pajamas.

"Okay now girls, mothers—I mean parents—uhh.... Adults" Mrs. Perry began but as she took notice of Anthony she tried to come up with a better word for the grownups in the room until she finally stuck with a good one before continuing. "The object of the race is to carry an egg and a spoon without dropping it but the tough part is...we'll be wearing High-heels" my friends all laughed and giggled out as their mothers held up their high heels but I just looked down embarrassed.

"Hehe silly me I guess I left my High-heels at home" Uncle Anthony stated jokingly.

"Don't worry I've got an extra pair" said Mrs. Perry. Then we all began to prepare for the relay race. First me and my friends wore the high heels as Mrs. Perry explained, "Alright everyone we're gonna go three times around the coffee table then back to your starting places, you'll hand off your eggs and your spoons. Girls go first, ready. Set—go!" I then took off like a shot and circled the coffee table three times without dropping my egg.

The mothers and Uncle Anthony were all clapping for each of us then as I came back Uncle Anthony proclaimed.

"Yeah gurl! Cut the check!" I then handed him the egg and spoon and quickly took off the high heels and Uncle Anthony tried to get his big feet inside them before slowly starting to walk as did the rest of the mothers as we now began screaming and cheering.

The rest of the mothers then began to pass him with no trouble at all and in the end Mrs. Perry won while my Uncle hadn't even completed one turn before falling to his knees on the carpet floor dropping the egg.

"Ahh Mack-attack" I said shamefully as I walked up to him. He breathed a sigh and said.

"Sorry there Big (n/n), if these heels were my size we'd have definitely won, besides the blonde cut me off". I placed my hand on his shoulder and admitted to him.

"I knew this was a bad idea".

"Let's do Beauty salon. Daughter's makeup mom's, then mom's makeup daughters" proclaimed Amy. The girls and their moms all cried out at what a great idea it was then all gathered around the couch and chairs while Mrs. Perry looked at us mainly my uncle worriedly.

"No, no this works out fine, my wife sometimes tests out her makeup on me".

"Umm, why don't we skip Beauty salon and do something else" Mrs. Perry said. All the girls whined then Amy whined out.

"Why can't we do the makeovers?" All the girls soon turned to me and that's when I finally snapped.

"BECAUSE OF ME YOU DUMB BITCHES THAT'S WHY!!!" I then turned and ran out the front door and slammed it shut. Uncle Anthony took off the heels and ran after me calling out my name.

Back at the house, Sebastian and the guys were now settling down after a quick workout at the gym just talking and drinking a couple of beers.

"So then Ton here comes up to the Bell weight and he—" the door suddenly opens revealing me stomping in the living room.

"(Y/n)?" My dad stated in disbelief.

"(Y/n) will you just stop and talk to me?" said Uncle Anthony. I whipped myself around and faces all my dad, uncles and a few of my dad's workout friends before exclaiming.

"There's nothing to talk about! I don't have a mother and there's nothing you guys can say to change that! Right!?" They all remained silent before I finished, "See". I then took off up the stairs towards my room. I shut my door loudly before knocking random objects off my drawers in anger before ripping the sheets off my bed and threw my pillows at the wall before finally sinking to my bed.

My door slowly opened and I felt a dip in my bed and I heard my dad's voice say.

"I'm sorry you had such a bad time tonight baby girl. I know exactly how you feel". I sat up and choked out.

"No you don't! When you were a kid, you had grandma to take care of you and go to anything that required a mother!" He looked at me sadly and said to me.

"But that doesn't mean I don't miss your mother just as much as you do".

"IT'S NOT FAIR DAD!! ALL THOSE GIRLS WITH THEIR MOMS TONIGHT WERE SO HAPPY! Why couldn't I be happy too?" Tears spilled down my face and next thing I know, dad scoots himself closer to me and I'm crying against his chest with his arms wrapped around me.

"Iubita mea it's okay. You know I look at guys with their wives and feel the same way". He rubbed my back and that's when I finally had to ask him.

"How did it happen?" I felt him tense up and he finally confessed to me everything all the while holding me tightly refusing to let me go. After hearing the full and heartbreaking story I asked my dad.

"How do you deal with something like that? How do you make the feeling go away?"

"It's hard. But something that helps me is, I try to think of the things I gained, instead of what I lost that day" he said as he lifted my chin up. I sniffled before asking him.

"Like what?"

"Well your Marvel aunts and uncles were really supportive of us. Whenever your old man wasn't being such a stubborn ass they'd send in money, clothes and gifts for your birthdays and Christmases. They were there to help keep the press off my back even after the trial, but there's one thing I will always be grateful after all that".

"What's that?"

"I got to keep you". He choked out as he smiled at me with tears glistening in his eyes. I hugged my dad and he hugged me back as the two of us just sat there in silence with tears falling down our faces. "If I had lost both my girls that night I don't know what I would've done. Your mother must've made a deal with whoever is up there to take her soul instead of yours. And even though I had to lose one of my girls in the end, at least I got to see you grow up into this beautiful, strong, determined young woman. Your mama would've been so proud of everything you've accomplished in your life".

"Te iubesc tata" I said.

"Si eu te iubesc ingerul meu" he said back to me lovingly as he peppered my face with kisses making me laugh and giggle.

After our little moment together, papa called up Mrs. Perry and told her that Anthony would be arriving to pick up my sleeping bag as well as his and told her that everything had been taken care of but I wasn't going to go back to the slumber party.

When Uncle Anthony came back with our stuff, I thanked him for taking me to the slumber party and I apologized for running out like I did. He said it was no prob and gave me a hug and a kiss then the guys all left to head back to their homes leaving me and my dad alone again in the house.

We then decided to have our own slumber party. We did a three legged race, nerf gun war, pillow fights then to end the night, we got our sleeping bags, made ourselves a blanket fort and decorated it with beautiful lights and stars and we just lay there watching some Disney movies before I finally fell asleep curled up to my dad.

He smiled down at me and wrapped a blanket around the both of us before wrapping his arms around me. He kissed the crown of my head and whispered softly.

"Thank you God for allowing me to keep my little girl. And (m/n) I know you're looking down at us now, being our Guardian Angel". Then my dad fell asleep holding me in his arms never letting go.

[gracebella-sinclair]

“oh i’m so- oh.” I paused and looked up at Asht- King Ashton.

“It’s you.” I sighed with a bit of a bitter tone. Twenty years later and you’re still bitter, really Gracey?

“Gracebella. I heard you were coming back.” Ashton replied.

“Ah yeah for the new selected. I’ve heard rumors you’ve aged horrible, glad I can now confirm them true.” I spat at him.

“I’d prefer we didn’t fight, Gracey.” He replied, trying to avoid my venom.

“Right. Don’t call me that King Ashton, I’d prefer you refer to me as Ms.Sinclair. Anyways, the only reason I came, aside from Yanely wishing to come for some reason, is that my daughter seems to find you greatly impressive for one reason or another. She wants to meet you if that’s alright.” I explained as my daughter samantha had made a beeline over to us once she saw me bump into him and was now hiding behind me. I didn’t want them to talk but I couldn’t bare to see Samantha so sad.

“Of course.” He allowed causing Samantha to let out a giddy laugh.

“Um! Hi! I’m Samantha Sinclair i-it’s a pleasure to meet y-you sir…I mean! King Ashton!” She introduced with a shaky voice and held her hand out for him to shake.

Ashton took her hand and shook it to her deep excitement. “It’s nice to meet you Samantha.” He said. Just then I thought I heard a painfully loud noise and looked towards the window. However I suppose it was just me.

“How old are you?” Ashton asked.

“I turned 20 last month, I’ve gotten to be so old now yet I still have got no clue what I’m doing.” She laughed as I tuned back in. Fuck. I would have stopped her Ashton didn’t need to know her age. Stupid noise.

“Well… what are you thinking you like?” He asked as he seemed to be thinking about something.

“I’m not really sure. I don’t take after my mother sadly so me memory is about that of a fish. Mo- i mean Yanely tried teaching me how to do gymnastics since i’m pretty tall again unlike my shorty mom.” She paused to laugh. Yes, very funny Samantha you’re 5’11 super hilarious.

“I’m not really good at anything and i don’t really like anything that I’m good enough at to use as a profession. I like soccer but i’m too much of a klutz.” She added with a nervous laugh.

“Maybe we could play sometime while you’re here. I know my younger brother has been itching to play.” He suggested. No no no no I’ll be stopping you there. Too close to my daughter.

“Hah maybe, my mom doesn’t want me to stay here too long, I had to fight her to let me come, she doesn’t like me being around too many people she says they’re dang-” samantha started to say but was cut off by me.

“Samantha doesn’t have the best social skills and got in many fights with people as a child for being too blunt, simply trying to avoid that.” I explained.

“I see. I’m sure a quick game with Cody, Winter, the kids and I doesn’t pose too much of a threat. What do you think, Grace- Ms. Sinclair.” He almost said my name, good correction.

“maybe not winter, as she once said I have claws the same goes for her. I wouldn’t want her to be too competitive against my little sammy.” I paused to think once more. It’d seem petty if I didn’t let her. Plus Samantha would likely cause a scene.

“But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt too much.” I added with a sigh.

“yay! We live by the beach so I especially don’t get to play often since it’s hard to play soccer in sand. Anyways, my mother told me once that apparently my fath-” er used to play soccer. I’ll be stopping you right there Samantha. You know we don’t talk about him

“I think that’s enough soccer talk, didn’t you have something you wanted to ask King ashton?” I prompted.

“Ah right! I was wondering how you never mess up when you talk on the television, like is there some trick? I always used to panic during presentations in school, and i still have issues with job interviews and not stuttering.” I asked.

Ashton laughed “Practice makes perfect I guess. I’ve always been decent at talking to people, but the key is to just keep doing it.” He answered.

“yeah decent.” I scoffed dryly.

“mom! That’s mean.” Samantha said growing embarrassed. Ah right celebrity crush, should be nicer.

“not mean, honest. Anyways I think you should go and go to bed sweetheart you get crabby when you don’t get enough sleep.” I suggested hoping she’d leave. She didn’t need Ashton’s influence. She was so sweet and pure, even with me as her mother she probably doesn’t even know how to swear.

“I’m 20 years old I can monitor my own sleep, thank you very much.” She replied smugly.

“fine.” I gave in not caring to fight with her right now.

“Maybe I should leave you two alone?” Ashton suggested causing Samantha to look incredibly depressed. Fine I’ll leave then. See how well you do having a conversation with him by yourself.

“no it’s fine. However I’d like to excuse myself being Winter is here and I haven’t seen my snowh- friend in ages.” I excused and made my way across the room, however was sure to hiss “if you’re mean to her your head will be on a stick in the morning.” as I passed Ashton.

After a few moments Samantha came back to me. “Mom, he wants to talk to you alone.” distress filled me immediately. No its probably nothing, maybe she told him how much I talk shit about him.

Once we walked back over to him Samanth excused herself to go to the snack table.

“What?” I asked using impatience to hide my fear.

“We need to have a conversation.” Ashton said sternly.

“About what? The fighting? Since I agreed not to so there isn’t much else to talk about.” I asked trying to now seem nonchalant.

“When is Samantha’s birthday?” He asked. no

“Why do you want to know?” I asked but berated myself for my voice shaking for even one minute, already thinking of every law I could use to defend her. He couldn’t take her away.

“She’s twenty.” He replied. A month older than Haiden. She’d have to have been conceived before Ashton’s selection ended. No let’s go with what we’ve planned.

“Yeah so? adoption’s a thing.” I replied putting up my act again.

“She looks like you.” He replied.

“Maybe I chose a kid who did.” God I shouldn’t have said maybe, how is he supposed to believe this if even I don’t.

“Gracebella. Is she my daughter?” He asked no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no don’t do it

“No she’s not… You are the person who… assisted, in her creation, but you are not her father and she is not your daughter.” I let out. God well she’s sure to be killed, kidnapped, or locked away from me forever now.

Shock hit him first then,“Where the FUCK did you get the idea that you could keep this from me?” He yelled at me.

“Gracebella do you have any idea what this means?” He asked, yes I do. Which is exactly why I can’t let you take her.

“It means nothing. Clearly I can keep this from you as I have for twenty years. Her blood relation means nothing. You did not raise her, she is not yours. You have no legal or personal claim to her.” I replied preparing my legal argument next.

“You had no right. My ASS I have no claim. She is technically the rightful heir of Illéa!” Ashton yelled. Technically she wouldn’t live long enough to be the heir. But Ashton wouldn’t kill her he’d probably have her legally legitimized too, perhaps he doesn’t know he can though, and I have the upper hand with legal experience.

“No she is not. It’s not your name on her birth certificate, and her last name is not Schreave. She is legally not the heir of Illéa, and you are legally not her father.” I said. That would only stall though, he could hire a lawyer and change her birth certificate after a paternity test.

“Why? Why keep her from me? Why do you hate me so much?” he asked.

“I don’t hate you, I didn’t do this out of hate. I don’t want to have a child as an heir. I work hard and I have a legacy of being able get people to transfer their castes, i constantly speak about the freedom to chose your own life, what kind of person would I be if i said those things and then chained my child to this life. Sure I may have started off by hiding her in rage, but that was just because you already had so much going on, not to mention it’d be very much legal for you to kill her as she was born out of marriage.” I defended.

He sighed “I wish I’d known.” He said.

“Why? So you could take her away from me and either hide her away or force her into a life of unhappiness?” I hissed.

“So I could know her. You know better than anyone that I wouldn’t wish this life on anyone. But I wish I’d been able to talk to her, to know my daughter.” He replied.

“Well she’s not your daughter. She’s my daughter, you’ve already got plenty of kids: haiden, eloise, elaine. Samantha is mine and you can’t have her and never could have. In fact I’d like to send her home early so she won’t have to talk to you ever again.” I replied and crossed my arms.

“I am your superior, Gracebella. Or have you forgotten? It is complete within my power to keep her here, at the palace. I could even demand a paternity test. The second she is linked to me, you forfeit all claim to her. I am your King, Gracebella. It would do you well to remember that fact.” He threatened. I bit the inside of my cheek as I thought.

“You wouldn’t be able to do that, as her biological and legal mother I have the right to claim her regardless of the father unless there is significant reason such as abuse or neglect. And Ashton, I doubt you remember this but after you eliminated me I was able to entirely vanish, I could easily do that again and then you wouldn’t be able to do squat, you can say something all you want but if you can’t act on it there’s no point.” I threatened back, god I want to push him he’s so annoying.

“Think about Samantha, Gracey. She doesn’t deserve this.” He tried to reason.

“You’re right. She doesn’t deserve to have to live entirely hidden, that’s why i’ll only make her if you force me. But she doesn’t deserve to be forced into the life you want her to be in just so you can bond with a girl you don’t know, and don’t call me Gracey.” I replied.

“I don’t want this life for her. But I want to know what she’s like! I want to talk to her.” He argued.

“Does she know?” he asked.

“No, she doesn’t and it’s going to stay this way. She’s happy as she is now, what you want will just make her confused.” I replied now trying to reason with him. If he told her it’d be game over.

“Gracebella, please…” He begged.

“Please what? You told me to think about what’s best for her now you do the same. Do you really think what you want would be good for her or make her happy?” I argued against him.

“I think she deserves to know the truth.” He said.

“Well I don’t think so, and I’m her mother so that’s that.” I said running out of arguments.

“How is this good for her? Don’t you think she’s ever wondered?” He asked.

“Yeah she did, and I told her her father was an asshole golfer from clermont. At least one aspect was accurate.” I mumbled the last part.

“I know we’ve had our issues Gracebella, but this is low, even for you.” Ashton hissed. That hurt I already said I’m not doing this for me.

“Again I’m not doing because I hate you. I’m doing this to protect Samantha.” I replied coldly.

“This is not protecting her!” He yelled.

“Yes it is! I’m protecting her from the stress and the aspects of living as you had to. I’m protecting her from the people who would wish her dead for being illegitimate, and I’m protecting her from all the other dangerous in your life.” I listed.

“You won’t even let me talk to her!” he yelled. “Because you’re going to tell her and who knows what she’ll do once she knows.” I defended.

“I won’t. If you let me talk to her, if you let me get to know her, I swear to you, Gracebella, I won’t tell her anything.” He pleaded. I grinded my teeth as I thought. There was no good reason to deny that request.

“Fine. But you have to do it in a discreet way. Find a good reason to talk to her and I want to be present when you talk.” I bargained.

“Tomorrow. I’ll invite her to play soccer with us tomorrow.” Ashton suggested, that’s it. After that he won’t see her again and we can go back to our happy normal life.

“Fine. Who are all of the others playing I want to know who’s going to be around her.” I asked.

“Cody, maybe Haiden, though he hasn’t played in years.” He said. Prince Haiden, I didn’t trust a single cell in his body. He’s much too similar to Alizé. The twins were better.

“ Do you really think Samantha and Haiden should hang out? Couldn’t you see that going horribly wrong?” I suggested hoping he’d catch that I meant Haiden finding out.

“Hasn’t it already gone horribly wrong? Did you really think I wouldn’t put the pieces together?” He asked.

“No I didn’t think you would. I didn’t see a reason why she would say her age or why you asked and if that happened I could say adoption and change the topic.” I defended. I’m not a moron.

“Give me a little credit, Gracebella. I’m not that daft.” He replied.

“I don’t know you’re old and have a crappy memory and I was hoping she wouldn’t talk as much as she did.” I grumbled.

“We’re basically the same age.” well, I’m at least a year younger.

“Yeah but like I have and had a good memory and you haven’t and don’t.” I insulted.

“It was basic math. Doesn’t have much to do with my memory.” Ashton replied.

“But maybe you can’t remember how long ago the selection was or the specific month I was eliminated.” I suggested.

“I think about it all the time, you know. The Selection.” Ashton said.

“Why? Shouldn’t you be happily married and at peace only focusing on your country?” I asked.

“I am happily married. I know I made the right choice. I would have regretted it for the rest of my life if I hadn’t chosen Alizé. But by not choosing all of you, I lost friends. I thought we were friends, once.” He said. Right, friends.

“Yeah I’m sureeeee you saw me as a friend, not anything more than just someone to fuck around with.” I replied with more than just a hint of sarcasm.

“No matter how many times I tell you you that whatever you think I felt for you is wrong, you’ll never believe me.” Ashton sighed. He’s still such a freaking liar.

“It’s not my fault that you chose to do with me what you did. I believe what I believe off of facts, the actions that you did. Not off of what I want to believe.” I retorted.

“You know it never would have worked out between us, Gracebella. You would have hated it here. None of that means that I didn’t love you.” He seems to think I’m bitter I didn’t win. At first though the idea of forgiveness for what he did to me came to my mind. But he’s not really sorry, he doesn’t deserve it. And me being bitter? That’s not it. I’m perfectly happy and love Yanely. I would never want to change that. What hurt me was the way he was able to act like he enjoyed me and wanted to spend time with me. That he’d lay in bed with me one day talking about how wrong the world is, then the next be throwing me away like a piece of trash. He could have at least told me first that he was going to get rid of me rather than just listing it aloud and not even telling me without me hunting him down. It made me feel used and hurt, and he couldn’t even try to understand how I felt.

talking about this made me vulnerable and I hated it, well he wasn’t going to get away with hurting me, if he wanted to get yelled at a second time he’d get it. Lucky for him though Samantha came back. She mumbled something to me, I think it was a question involving the roof? Maybe she wants to go up for some fresh air.

“Yes.” I replied hoping that would fit with the situation. What is wrong with my tonight? Maybe I need a new medication.

I turned to look at Samantha as she left but saw her leaving with Haiden.

“wait, what did she ask?” I asked Ashton trying to catch up. He smirked before saying

“Seems it’s a little too late for you to try and keep her and Haiden apart.” He said. Haiden and her hanging out on the roof. It just screamed danger.

“I don’t think it’s very appropriate for your son to be going up on the roof, what if someone tried to break in that way?” I suggested trying to reason with Ashton. Though really I shouldn’t Ashton was the one who would get drunk with me, talked about doing drugs, and rode terrifying roller coasters back in my risky days. He probably couldn’t see any harm in them being on the roof.

“He’s a good kid, Gracebella. Cut him a little slack.” Ashton replied, no I’m not worried about Haiden hurting her, she’d beat his ass

“Fine I suppose. He seems weak though, and with issues with rebels lately, i mean they killed that one selected Azalea. Is it legitimately safe for them to be up there?” I asked.

“They’re fine.” He said. Not very assuring. I sighed and decided I’d just have to go and watch them. First I’d have to get out of this conversation with Ashton.

“Don’t tell Alizé about this, or anyone else for this matter. More people than I would like already know but as of now it’s only me, you, winter, yanely, and cillia and that’s it.” I added almost forgetting. That bitch would dig my grave and push me in it.

“I’m not going to keep this from my wife. Liz and I don’t have secrets.” Ew Liz. That nickname is meant for cute people not for bitches. We tried to resolve things but we didn’t have the time, so if she still hates me good for her the feelings mutual.

“Alizé already hates me. Adding that on she’d probably take it out on Samantha.” I reasoned.

“We’ve all grown up. She won’t do anything, but I will not keep this from her.” right, maybe everyone but you.

“Fine. If she does do something though I will be printing out a card with I told you so on it.” I replied stubbornly.

“Have a little faith in people, jeez.” Ashton said.

“I have faith in people, I don’t have faith in Alizé. Regardless of how much time has past I make my judgements off of my experiences and my experiences with her are not pleasant ones. Maybe that’ll change but that depends on her actions.” I defended.

“Loosen up a bit, would ya? We’re all here for a party, are we not?” He said. Oh there he is the Ashton who can never take anything seriously.

“Right. Well then I’ll go talk to someone I enjoy like Yanely. Have a nice rest of your day.” I said and turned around. I’d have to find my way to the roof next. Cillia led me there once or twice.

“I’m sure I will.” He grumbed.

[shirlleycoyle]

What the Pandemic Felt Like From an Icebreaker Trapped in the Arctic

This is part of a special series, We’re Reemerging. What Does the World Look Like Now?, which considers in real time how we cope while living through a historic time. It’s also in the latest VICE magazine. Subscribe here. 

After months of living and working in perpetual darkness, the crew of the Polarstern research icebreaker gazed in awe as the delicate glow of twilight illuminated the seascape around them. But as the sun staged its annual comeback in the northern reaches of the world, a deadly pathogen was sweeping across major cities thousands of miles away.

It was February 2020, and the largest Arctic expedition in history was near the North Pole. The Polarstern served as the centerpiece of the mission, called the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), which was led by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. After the ship was deliberately locked into sea ice in October 2019, the Polarstern spent months drifting with the floe across the Arctic as researchers investigated the impact of climate change and other factors on the evolving polar region.

The vast and mysterious expanse of the Arctic has attracted explorers for centuries, and MOSAiC’s mission was unlike any other in scale, scope, and purpose: It took about a decade to organize, involved 500 field participants from 37 nations, and cost a hefty $154 million. The overarching goal is to understand the mysterious far-northern climate, which is shaped by the complex interplay of its atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and wildlife. As global temperatures rise due to human activity, the Arctic is changing more rapidly than any region on earth, a trend that will have consequences well beyond its borders.

To understand the future of the Arctic, and the world, the MOSAiC team planned to perform countless measurements and experiments over the course of the yearlong effort. But despite all this preparation, there was something else coming that no one involved could have foreseen.

As the virus emerged that winter, the MOSAiC team kept up-to-date, thanks to the expedition’s daily journal and WhatsApp conversations with family and friends. But as February gave way to March, members watched in horror as it rapidly spread and turned into a full-blown global pandemic that necessitated quarantines, lockdowns, and severe travel restrictions.

This sudden shock was particularly acute for Giulia Castellani, a sea ice scientist in the AWI research group Polar Biological Oceanography from Italy’s Lombardy region—one of the first major epicenters of the pandemic. By the time Italy went into a national lockdown, Castellani had left the Polarstern to board the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn, tasked with delivering researchers to Tromsø, a port in northern Norway.

That plan fell apart when Tromsø closed because of the pandemic, leaving the returning researchers temporarily stranded onboard the Dranitsyn with no place to go. Castellani remembered seeking out an internet connection on the Russian icebreaker’s stairs so that she could connect with her family and friends about the increasingly grave situation in Lombardy. “I was very concerned,” she said. “It was really a bad time.”

Meanwhile, MOSAiC members around the world were scrambling to come up with solutions to the unexpected curveball of the pandemic. Matthew Shupe, a co-leader of the project and an atmospheric scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) a project of the University of Colorado in Boulder and NOAA, had been on the first leg of the expedition, from September to December 2019, but was back in Colorado when the pandemic began to spiral out of control.

“It started to become a bit of a dire situation because the folks that were out on-site, well, we lost our ability to get them out,” said Shupe. “They were feeling trapped, and morale started to really decrease.” For several weeks, the fate of this unprecedented expedition hung in the balance.

“Some people didn’t know what was happening back home with their parents or with their kids,” added Shupe. “They wanted to get home, but we had no way to get them home.”

Verena Mohaupt, a logistics coordinator at the AWI, was among the many MOSAiC members searching for answers. Like Shupe, she was on the first leg of the trip, but had returned to her home in Potsdam, Germany, by the time the pandemic broke out. Mohaupt remembered morning meetings where plans would be drawn up, only to be abandoned by the end of the day as leads evaporated. There was a tacit understanding that if there was no way to bring members home from the second leg—and eventually exchange the teams conducting the third and fourth legs—the entire mission would have to be abandoned.

Terminating MOSAiC would have been disastrous not only for the organizers and members, who had invested so much time, money, and effort into the project, but also for climate science writ large. The expedition had set out to fill a crucial information gap by providing a full year of comprehensive on-site data about the annual winter growth and summer melt of Arctic sea ice, which had never been done on such a large scale before.

Arctic sea ice is rapidly declining because of climate change, a trend that is contributing to rising temperatures in the region, which makes MOSAiC’s observations crucial for calibrating accurate climate models of our future. MOSAiC also aimed to study the connections between climate and the incredible diversity of microorganisms that live in the Arctic, providing the trophic foundation for larger animals such as polar bears, walruses, and birds. While valuable data had been collected over the winter, MOSAiC was still only halfway through its journey when the pandemic hit, with much research left to be done.

“Nobody wanted the expedition to end or to have them leave completely,” Mohaupt said. “But it was clear to everybody that if we didn’t find any other solution, in the end, that’s what was going to happen, because we can’t leave those people there forever.”

Four weeks later, after a delay exacerbated by ice conditions and a refueling stop, the Dranitsyn was finally able to dock at Tromsø on March 31. The expedition then obtained special permission to fly the second-leg team back to Germany in April.

MOSAiC’s pandemic-related troubles were not over. An air campaign that had been planned for the spring had to be canceled after one of its members tested positive for COVID-19. Another complication arose when the icebreakers originally scheduled to deliver the fourth team to the Polarstern, and return the third team back to port, were no longer available because of the new travel restrictions.

As a result, the Polarstern had to leave its valuable spot in the sea ice to make the exchange with two hastily arranged German research vessels. Prior to the swap, the incoming team spent weeks in quarantine to prepare for the trip to the edge of the ice floe.

“The design was to be out there for the whole year, staying with this chunk of ice,” Shupe said. “It was also a very inopportune time for the ship to come out. It was right as the transition into the melt season is happening, which is, scientifically, a really important time. Fortunately, we could leave a lot of equipment there on the ice to keep making measurements.”

Despite the setbacks, the team averted a total cancelation of the expedition—or worse, a COVID-19 outbreak on the confined and remote Polarstern, an environment where social distancing was impossible. MOSAiC members were relieved to be somewhat back on track by the end of June, under the endless sunlight of Arctic summer.

The mood onboard brightened not only because of the season, but because expedition members were able to resume a somewhat normal life, with no masks or limits on gatherings. Though the hectic schedule of research kept the team busy most of the time, members also occasionally grabbed spare moments to watch movies, play games, barbecue on the deck, host craft nights, or throw dance parties and sing-alongs. An onboard bar was sometimes opened to celebrate special occasions, like birthdays, while a small swimming pool and gym on the Polarstern allowed members to compete in athletic events. During the summer months, especially, members were able to leave the ship for long walks on the ice, admiring the majestic polar environment.

Castellani, Mohaupt, and Shupe all ended up on the fourth leg of the expedition, and separately recalled the moment on the way to the Polarstern when team members were finally allowed to embrace after weeks of tests and quarantine. The voyagers had to be wary of threats like polar bears or the capricious sea ice, but they were both physically and mentally able to escape the virus raging across the rest of the world.

“That was a great feeling, to be able to let go of the constrained life of COVID back home and be in our own safe haven out there, which was really probably the safest place on earth,” said Shupe.

Shupe wasn’t originally scheduled to join this part of the expedition, but as a co-leader, he felt compelled to return to the ship as soon as possible once the pandemic hit. Castellani also took the opportunity to return, as travel restrictions had axed her original plans to visit her family in Italy in the spring and summer. “Going back to the Arctic was the easiest thing to do for me,” Castellani said. “I felt like I never really came back, because I was home for just one month. Was it my life? No. Was it home? Yes, it was my flat—but everything was weird… It was not life as it used to be.”

Mohaupt was also eager to return to the Arctic, so much so that she stayed on for the fifth and final leg of the expedition, which ended in October 2020. As the Polarstern approached its home port in Bremerhaven, Germany, the expedition members prepared to return to the stultifying rules outside of MOSAiC. “As soon as contact had been made with the real world, we had to wear masks, and hugging was no longer allowed,” Mohaupt said. “We all met on the helicopter deck to have one last hug and say goodbye, in that form, as long as we still could.”

An expedition of such scale and complexity was bound to leave people feeling wistful at its completion, but those emotions were amplified by the odd experience of returning to societies that had been entirely upended by the pandemic. “We’d been together for a number of months in the Arctic, so you’re already just naturally a little sad because you’re leaving this group of people that have been your family for a while,” said Shupe. “But then, you also look around and the world is different… So, it was kind of a downer to come back into that reality and away from our fantasyland out there in the Arctic.”

Castellani felt a disorienting delay in her adaptation to pandemic life after the expedition compared with her friends at home. After the initial relief of being able to see her loved ones in Italy, at last, in September, she recalled the sense of dislocation when she was finally back after such an eventful year. “I’m starting to experience the challenge of being in the pandemic, whereas my friends have been in this situation for one year already,” said Castellani. “I came back to a place that is not my life anymore. Sometimes I think I’m still struggling a bit; sometimes I’m asking myself: ‘Okay Giulia, are you really back?’”

Mohaupt felt similarly. “Honestly, I was really surprised how relaxed people were,” she said. “When I came back, the [COVID case] numbers were higher than what I had seen in May when I left, but people were acting more open… The general sense was, really, everybody’s gotten used to it, and I wasn’t there yet.”

Now, several months after MOSAiC’s end and more than a year into the pandemic, the team is unpacking new data sets from the mission and decompressing. Castellani and her colleagues are currently poring over “the huge amount of samples” they collected from the year, she said, which have confirmed that the Arctic winter, despite its cold and sunless months, is a time of astonishing biological activity.

“We could really follow, during the winter period, certain species,” such as microbial zooplankton, Castellani said. “In general, the most fascinating part was to see the same system and follow it day by day, week by week, month by month and follow the seasonal progression and how it changed.”

Eventually, the team members will piece together an exceptional portrait of the Arctic that reveals the dynamics of its climate systems in an era of rapid change. As the ice pack thins over time, the transfer of energy and heat between the ocean and atmosphere will also transform, which will impact the climate of the region. Current projections suggest that the Arctic may experience ice-free summers by the middle of this century, a reality that will open new shipping routes and could challenge species as large as polar bears and as small as algae, as well as the Arctic’s human population, many of whom are Indigenous.

MOSAiC’s efforts over this turbulent year will provide a crucial baseline for understanding this key region for many decades to come. But beyond its research goals, the expedition is an example of the large-scale international collaborations that will be needed to combat global crises of the future, from short-term disasters like pandemics to the long-term effects of climate change.

“One thing, to me, that was really compelling about MOSAiC was the way in which we, as an international community, worked on this collective view of priorities,” Shupe said. “Here’s this collection of scientists—we had people from 37 nations involved, and that’s just remarkable—all coming together.”

Follow Becky Ferreira on Twitter.

What the Pandemic Felt Like From an Icebreaker Trapped in the Arctic syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[cynicalchurchgoer]

just massive story

Hi, I would really appreciate some third party input (of course from a Biblical perspective) on experiences at my church. I have included the following information for context, and the matter I need help with is determining whether 1) this is a toxic? church environment, 2) whether I took the right step to take a month off from this place to check out other churches, 3) what I can do about my situation in a biblical way.Context:I have gone to this church since I was in sixth grade, and I have accepted Jesus as my Savior and been baptized at this church, under the same pastor (let's call him Pastor Guava). I am now 22, and I have been serving for almost three years now in the high school ministry, served in the children's ministry for three years during high school, and regularly attended Sunday services except for a two year gap in which I was living in my university dormitories. So in total, about 8 years of full attendance at this church. It is a homogenous Presbyterian Korean church.When I was in middle school and high school, I always felt excluded from the main clique-- I would cry after coming home from every retreat that I went on because I would try to sit and have conversations with people, but there was no attempt to connect. Even when I responded to the Pastor Guava's call to become more involved in church, there was still no change in my friendships with my age group. I remembered a moment where I witnessed a girl, let's call her Apple, gossip about another girl in our grade, asking other people if they thought she was weird, and everyone in my grade stopped talking to her-- I later saw her begin to hang out with the grade below us. It sticks in my mind still. I felt like I was seen as a weirdo, and I felt majorly outcast. The only times I had friendly interactions with people were when we were talking about others. One person, let's call her Berry, was friendly with me for hearing her vent about someone. During the small group sharing time, she broke down when she was sharing about her struggles, and I tried to be comforting-- yet I was kind of distant, so the closest place I could reach out to her was her knee, and I rubbed it thinking that would help her feel less alone. I realize now that that could have been seen as socially awkward-- but I was unaware at the time, and after that, the majority of the grade lessened their interactions with me. They didn't invite me to events, like celebrating others' birthdays-- they would switch the times of the service they would go to, going to the opposite one of me, because I tried to be friends with them still-- I started going to 9:30am service, they went to 11:00am service. I switched, they started going to 9:30am service. It was so strange. Berry started only saying hello to the one friend I had, but not to me in the hallways. It happened multiple times, enough times for me to ask her what she thought about it. She responded saying that they might not have seen me, and logged off immediately. I didn't even understand what happened, but I knew I felt upset. Apple and Berry were good friends.I do think what happened during that time helped me cling to God all the more-- I am thankful for it in the end because it helped me not to become too wrapped up into social conformity, social pressures, social standards-- the people I saw there had great concern for being part of the in crowd I suppose. It was also strange because this church places a big emphasis on family connections, and Apple was the daughter of a prominent church member-- so she was known well among the teachers and staff, and became a middle school teacher while still in high school. It bothered me that there was this connections based kind of deal-- even though this person may have been hurting other people, they were deemed mature enough to lead.And so I went through high school feeling uncomfortable there every week, hearing the Pastor Guava say that it's on you to become involved with church community over and over again, but I knew that wasn't the case because of my unsuccessful attempts to do so. It was finally time for college acceptances, and then I was off to college. I made it into the school I had hoped to go ever since I was young-- I was so blessed to meet so many wonderful people, people who really showed me what it means to love each other and serve each other in community and fellowship-- people who understood that Jesus was above it all, Jesus was the one who brought us all together. Jesus loves. Jesus cares. How glorious God is, and the weight of His sacrifice. We were joyously learning and growing and walking together, there was no comparison or inferiority, we supported and shared honestly, there were no petty rivalries or competitions.I began to commute my junior year of university to save what I could because I knew my parents were stressed about the cost of college, especially since my younger sister had been accepted to the same school that year. I wanted to show them that I do care about what they do for me, that I don't take their money and sacrifices lightly, and I wanted to show them they were important to me ultimately. So then I came back to this church, with the intent to serve in the high school ministry that I had felt so much stress in, so that I could help make a difference with the high school students who may have been like me, outcast, alone, and unheard. I also had had a bad relationship my senior year of high school, one that hurt me deeply and traumatized me-- which also motivated me to serve in this age group, since I had no one I could share such pain with-- I wanted to be there for students who may have to experience such difficulties, and I wanted to be used in the ways God wanted me to be there. I wanted to be a listening ear for others like the people who helped me through my struggle had been for me. I wanted to share the love and guidance I was blessed with, essentially.The first two years of being back, I had a few good friends at this church who I could talk to and be myself around. We hung out and shared life together. (They left due to distance about a year ago). Serving in high school ministry was going well-- I was building a lot of connections with quite a few of the students, including my small group. I was learning a lot about myself and my own walk with the Lord through teaching. I got along with many students, and as a result, there were some minor instances of passive aggression from Apple (she had been at church the whole time; as noted before, her family is there), like her hinting towards students only liking me because of the college I went to. I could ignore such remarks as I had enough on my plate to deal with at the time, since I was taking five classes per quarter on top of extracurricular activities and commuting while continuing to upkeep cherished intentional relationships. Yet I often found myself at the butt of her remarks-- at a White Elephant gift exchange we had among college peers, I received some cocoa cans, which I was not necessarily glad about, but trying to be ok with-- and she proclaimed rather loudly, "Look at that reaction!" and moments like those made me uncomfortable briefly-- the purpose of her being excessive about things that were intended to make me feel "shameful" was not lost on me. There was also an instance where I was sharing how upset and discouraged I felt about my relationship with my dad with the other teachers, and I started crying because I felt really strained-- and then she shared right after how lonely she felt at church, and she started crying as well. I tried to respond to her, but to what I said, she said she knew already. After, I went up to her in an effort to be in community with her in response to her struggle, and she talked about how she didn't have a boyfriend-- to which I felt bothered that she was concerned about her own issues, but I simply said I also did not. I ultimately went on with my life.During the first year of serving in the high school ministry, I also met a teacher who happened to be my ex-boyfriend's cousin-- and on the topic of his cousin, I got to express the pain I had felt during and after my relationship with him. We became friends, and I eventually met his girlfriend, who we'll call Citrus-- and she seemed to be nice at first. We had gone on a wilderness leadership outing, and we had some brief conversations in which she asked me about myself and how I enjoyed college. I thought I could share life with her, but whenever we were alone together, she would immediately shut me down and tell me that my life was not that bad, while hers was much worse. I ended up praying for her despite sharing my struggles during a high school summer retreat, but I still tried to be her friend. During the winter retreat this  year in January, she asked me if I had had a boyfriend before. I told her that I have, and that it was actually her boyfriend's cousin. She acted surprised and asked how old I was. I told her, 21. She then asked me when my birthday was. I replied, and she acted as if I were lying about my age, stating that I was actually going to be 22 and that her boyfriend's cousins were "babies." She then asked me which one I dated, and I told her the older one (who was clearly in the same grade as I was). She said that that was good, since if I had dated the younger one (who was two years younger than me) that would have been extremely weird since he was a "super baby." I didn't know how to reply to such a remark, so I simply asked her to not tell anyone because I didn't want anyone knowing the identity of my ex. She then asked me why it was such a big deal, and I told her that he was just a terrible person. She then proceeded to reply, "If he was terrible, then why did you date him then?" Which blew me away-- the difficulties I had endured about my identity and self-worth were trivialized by someone who had told me about her past toxic ex-boyfriends less than an hour ago. I told her that no one really knows until you date them, and I left. I was upset and reached out to Apple-- another girl we will call Durian came along-- and I was able to explain my unsettled and emotional state. They supported me in this, and I was thankful for a time-- this was the friendliest Apple had ever been, so I thought it was a step towards a peer friendship. After this retreat, I asked Apple if she wanted to meet up weekly to share life together, and she agreed. Yet whenever I talked to her, I ended up asking her about her life mostly, with brief inputs about mine. She never asked, and I wasn't sure to take it as her not knowing how to be friends or her not wanting to know. One week, I told her I couldn't meet, and she replied to me saying that she already had plans with her friend she was investing in. I felt as if this friend took more precedence over me, despite me asking to meet regularly-- and it told me it wasn't like she didn't care about people, with the amount of effort she took to reach this person. During our talks, she misinterpreted my struggle with masturbation to be a desire for attention, which extremely bothered me because I thought I had clearly articulated that it was a struggle with knowing that God still loves me despite my sin and wrongful behavior. It made me feel like she thought I was just an attention seeker before I told her about it, and that she was exerting strong confirmation bias. Another time, we took our love language tests, and my top result was quality time. She asked if that was why I hung out with her, because she gave great quality time-- and that was an insanely weird moment for me because as I mentioned before, during our meetups, we hardly talked about much besides herself. I didn't reply because I didn't want to be like, "No."Durian was upset that Apple and I were meeting as she wanted to be part of it, but I was confused because I knew she was in class at the time of our meetings-- I knew it wasn't possible for her. We began a book study group with the three of us though, and it went for a little-- but I was the only one initiating discussions or reminding them to read. I stopped, and no one initiated it again. I even had been following up with them on their applications and such, but no one was really replying. Our discussions were somewhat strange as well-- when we shared takeaways, Apple shared hers, and immediately after would say that it was a deep insight, which Durian would confirm. It told me that there was insecurity, but I didn't think too much of it. I thought that God would be able to work in that over time. I also remember Apple was having a particularly bad day, and then I called her late at night so we could talk about it. She had talked to the pastor and the pastor's wife about how she felt really bad about herself those days, I think because of the book study insecurities-- and a particular friendship she was anxious about. I was listening to her and affirming her, when all of a sudden she asked me how long my commute to school was. I then told her it's usually an hour going one way-- to which she responded that it wasn't that bad, that she thought it was two hours. I told her it can be when traffic gets bad, but I was ultimately thankful that it was a bus I commuted on-- but she was quiet. I didn't understand why she felt the need to tell me that my life was not that bad, especially when it was draining to commute early and late at night every day. Especially if she herself was not experiencing such a commute every day. Apple, Durian, and I went to Disneyland one day. Durian had initiated the get together-- she had asked me what I had wanted to do, and I suggested Universal Studios, but she didn't seem to like that option and said that I wanted to go because I had a season pass. She suggested Disneyland, which Apple had a season pass to at the time, and so we planned to go. Durian had been kind of tense around me I think because I had confronted her about her attitude towards her younger sister-- she never shared anything positive about her. The night before we went, I asked them how the retreat had been that they went on together, and after a brief group talk, we decided to watch Netflix. Apple suggested "The Office," which Durian opposed. We ran through some suggestions, some of which some of us had watched already, and Durian suggested Korean dramas, to which Apple replied that I didn't like them. I made some non-serious suggestions that I thought would lighten the atmosphere, like "The Great British Baking Show." It went unheard, or ignored. They were still searching for something, so I said "Shrek," and Apple turned to me saying that it was a bad movie because it had the word "ass." I said that a lot of Disney movies have inappropriate references too, and she asked "Like what?" I named the example where Syndrome implies that Mr. and Mrs. Incredible get "busy" in "The Incredibles" and Apple replied that it wasn't that bad. Durian proceeded to laugh at me like the way she does at her friend that she considers to be wrong a lot, and I felt rather uncomfortable. We went back to finding movies, and I suggested the documentary Blue Planet, and they ignored me again. I realized that my suggestions were unwelcome, and I didn't necessarily care about the choice, so I went on my phone. Then Durian told me to get off my phone, and Apple asked me what I wanted to watch. Durian told me to say what I wanted, which irritated me immensely because they were acting as if I wasn't saying anything before, and I said I had been saying stuff before. They then asked me what again, and I said I didn't care, but they kept asking as if they were talking to a sullen, spoiled kid. Apple asked if I watched "Legally Blonde" before, and I said no. She said she thought I would like it, and we watched it-- what irritated me way more was that "Legally Blonde" had way more vulgarity than "Shrek," but I had been put down for making such a "bad" suggestion. Then we just went to bed after watching it. I was dreading Disneyland the next day because I felt that it would be that way the whole day. I was quiet on the way there because I felt rather shut down-- they asked where people wanted to go, but I said I didn't have a preference. They began to be quiet too, and a lot of the time they would only be talking to each other in the lines, where the person in the middle would turn their back on me. Even when I tried to ask about the Pinnochio ride's line length in the Peter Pan line, Apple would flat out ignore me or Durian would say that all the lines were the same. I only spoke if spoken to. Apple asked me what I wanted for lunch and I said I didn't care-- especially because Disneyland food was all the same to me, overpriced and with the same tasting food. Apple looked mad and walked away, with Durian rolling her eyes to the side and telling me to just choose. I was stunned, and it told me that that was what they thought I was mad about. We rode Peter Pan, and Apple took us to the side after to ask us what we were doing next. She stared directly at me and didn't ask Durian. Durian asked me if I wanted to eat now, and I said I didn't have a preference-- she asked me again, asking if I wanted to eat a lot then and eat a little later, or a little then and a lot later-- I was so weirded out by this question, and I replied I didn't have to eat then, but I could have if they wanted to-- and it depended on how hungry I was anyway, whether I ate a little then or a little later. They looked irritated-- and I was getting more irritated at this point, wondering how I ought to bring it up. They decided to go get kebabs, so we went; while we were eating, I asked them if they thought I was upset because of last night, and Durian said no, she didn't even notice, but she couldn't speak for Apple. Apple said nothing, but she just looked at me. I asked them why they were behaving that way only towards me about the food, and Durian said that she just wanted to give me the option since I hadn't been there in a while. I responded by saying that I had a 3day pass, so it didn't even matter anyway, and she just said that it was true. I still sensed tension from Apple, so at another point where we were waiting for Durian to come back with fast passes, I tried to address it again by saying that I was upset because I felt shut down the night before, to help her know what the issue was. She said sorry, and at that point, Durian came back, asking what brought the conversation up again-- and I told her that I was upset the night before because I felt shut down, but Durian interrupted me asking if I was upset because I didn't get to choose. I told her no, because I felt really shut down and invalidated-- I didn't have to watch a particular thing, and then she said sorry, she didn't even notice-- then she immediately blamed me for not saying anything and told me to say something in the moment. Apple was quiet the entire time, and I didn't feel like anything had been resolved at all. Like, if you were really sorry, wouldn't you try to change it instead of throwing it back at me? Then we kept going, and throughout the day it was just them being really considerate of each other, with Apple complaining that people don't buy her food but she's always buying other people food-- despite telling me that we were celebrating my birthday-- I came out of the bathroom to see Apple and Durian talking about something, but changing the subject when they saw me. I found a Buffalo Wild Wings card on the floor and gave it to a little boy nearby, and Durian asked me why I didn't give it to them. At the end of the day, Durian asked everyone if they had fun, and when I said yes after Apple, Durian made a remark about my response sounding "unconvincing." I confronted Durian and asked her why she said that, and she said she didn't know-- then she said she thought it sounded like a subdued yeah. Durian then bought boba for herself, Apple, her sister, and her sister's boyfriend-- everyone except me. Durian also stuck her foot out on the chair so that I couldn't sit next to her, but she removed it when Apple came out. I've never seen them the same way ever since. They're good friends now. I feel insanely uncomfortable being around them.At the high school summer retreat, Apple and I worked together on creating a mad lib theater scene for the high schoolers to perform. I came up with two out of four of the ideas, Apple came up with one, Eggplant came up with one, and I prepared the cue cards with Eggplant. Later, Apple said she wanted to perform one I wrote, and I was fine with taking the other one I wrote. Apple informed Eggplant who was doing what, and seeing Eggplant's expression, she asked if he wanted to do the one she was doing. He said no, but I noticed that she didn't even ask me which one I wanted to do-- like, it was no problem taking what she wanted from me, but she can clearly be considerate when she wants to be. Then, at the time of the performance, Apple told me I had to go to the teacher's meeting-- when I got there, the pastor asked me what I was doing there because they were doing the mad libs for the kids during the teacher's meeting. I told him that Apple told me to come there, and he said that I have to go and tell her I want to be part of it. I went back, and she told me she had forgotten I was a part of it. I dismissed it, but when we got to the stage, she went first, Eggplant went second, I was supposed to go third-- Eggplant told everyone that Apple came up with the idea she was performing, and she didn't say that it was actually me-- then she kept insisting she fill in all the words and hold up all the cue cards while I just sat on stage. Time passed quickly, and Eggplant said we should skip mine so that the pastor could perform the last skit-- after which she turned to me, speaking as if I were a five year old child, "Sorry you don't get to act." I said it was okay, but I felt insanely uncomfortable with the tone and the fact that she was saying it in front of the whole audience. I think it's possible she meant well, but it didn't bide well with how she didn't give credit to me / acted as if she forgot I was part of the skit project when there were only three people involved.During the same retreat, Apple was making encouragement cards with Grape, and I asked them if I could have a green color if there were any. Apple told me that that was selfish, and I responded, "Well, if it's my card..." to which Grape replied that it was true. Apple told me that there were no green cards, which wasn't a big deal-- and then Grape got a white card and lettered my name in green ink, which I really appreciated. Later, I was talking to Grape, and then Apple got in between us, interrupting us-- but I continued what I was saying, and Apple looked irritated. Apple moved Grape along a little past me, to get me walking behind them, and Apple told Grape that working was harder than studying, loud enough for me to hear-- Apple knew I was studying for the MCAT at the time, while she had just finished their first week of work. They sat down, and Apple told me to sit on the other side of her, making her in the middle. I kept standing because I didn't really want to sit next to her. I was tired of her trying to one up me all the time.Apple's mother also makes pointed statements about me not working or making any money after graduating-- which is weird because I am, just not a full time occupation. I think it's an attack on my education, to make Apple feel better about not making it into this school. Apple's mother also became legalistic towards me when I had a drink with me in the main sanctuary, saying that I was not allowed to have that in there. Yet Apple had also brought a drink in the main sanctuary along with me, but threw it out before her mother could catch her. Yet no one mentioned this rule to me, especially Apple. They both acted as if I should have known that all along. At the end of service, the mother asked an odd question: “Are you staying at home?” instead of “Are you going home now?” I responded, “I am living at home, yes.” She said, “Oh, so you are living at home.” I was thinking I could stand this community as long as I have a peer I can share life with, but I have been wondering whether this church just attracts certain people. Especially because recently, a new pastor (Pastor Honeydew) and his wife, who I will call Fig, have been brought in. One Wednesday service, Pastor Honeydew was attending. He had just finished giving me feedback about my teaching, and I went outside to collect my things. Pastor Honeydew came out after me, and Apple asked Pastor Honeydew if he wanted to go with her and a few students to go get popcorn chicken. I was right next to her, but she didn't ask me to go with them. I would never invite myself because I would feel rude, and I would look desperate. So I just left-- Apple and I had not talked for a while; I stayed in the parking lot, talking to a few students until they left. Then Apple and Pastor Honeydew came down, simply saying bye-- I do not blame Pastor Honeydew for not knowing. I strongly feel like Apple clearly knew what she was doing.Fig was friendly in the beginning. She asked to meet, and I was thankful for a while. Yet, I was talking to Fig after adult service one Sunday about one of my small group girls I had been anxious over, and Apple, who had intentionally excluded me, came over to insert herself in the conversation. I felt super awkward because I remembered how I felt when she intentionally excluded me, and the fact that I didn't want to share anything about my life with someone like this. Apple made eye contact with me, asking if she could sit with us, and Fig looked at me and at Apple, saying sure-- while Apple quickly said "No? Okay" and left, while I had not done or said anything. I feel that without context, the whole thing made me look like I was playing some kind of game, which I absolutely abhor. I saw that Apple would always talk to Fig a lot afterwards, and always ask Fig or Pastor Honeydew to hang out on Sundays or Wednesdays, but she had never once done that with me even when I was friends with her. So she and Apple are really close now; Fig always says that Apple is the best.Recently, Apple has been studying for her CPA exam and now she won't stop talking about it. When I was studying for the MCAT, she never cared, and I'm sure she judged me for it. Apple also complains about it being an expensive exam, even though she's getting reimbursed for it in the end. Then they said they were thinking about getting ANOTHER Disney annual pass, which is half the cost of the exam they are getting reimbursed for. Those are way more expensive...Fig recently has become really hostile and I can't help but feel even worse-- On Friday, at the high school Christmas party, there was this moment of tension where she was sharing about a bad experience she had with a White Elephant gift exchange because she had the #2– and I also shared that last year I got a later number but I still got the item I wanted stolen from me. I thought we would share a laugh over it, and I said it with the intention of showing that the bad experience can come for all numbers.She didn’t take it that well– after a moment, she turned to me and quickly asked me, “Couldn’t you have stolen it back? There’s a cap to the steal amount.” I was surprised. Why was she even questioning that; if I could have, I would have. The limit was two steals per item, and I had already stolen it once– the person who stole it from me was the second steal. I explained it to her and she just nodded, but she still looked irritated. I couldn’t figure out why.Yesterday, she asked me if my sister and I had plans for Christmas. We said we thought we were going to stay home for break, and she said she was too. I also made a venture to make conversation, saying that we hadn’t even set up our artificial tree yet. She replied, “We don’t even have a tree.” I said, “Aww..” and she kept talking about how she didn’t think they would get a tree unless they had kids. I nodded and didn’t know what to really say– why would she make that a competition? I was thinking of a question to ask and then she asked if we were going to go to retreat, and I said “I think I have to see where I am with the MCAT…” but while I was saying it, she started talking over me and said “Oh you have to see where you’re at with your test,” and after I finished talking, she said “Yeah a lot of people have a lot going on right now” and I felt that it was a weird response. Why wouldn’t you even ask how that’s going for me and act like it isn’t really abnormal… I know that Fig has been really encouraging about Apple's exam.This was so different from how she talked to me before. I can’t help but think there has been gossip exchanged somewhere. Like every time I share about myself, she shuts me down now. She suddenly became really disinterested in getting to know me / do things together and I can’t help but feel even more estranged– am I doing something wrong? I brought up small bits of this to Pastor Guava, and I get the feeling he told Apple how I have been feeling at church because he told her that I did not get a job I recently applied for, but he had been the only one I told. He also had frequently let Apple sit in on conversations I've had with him or asked if she could come along, and it really bothers me that he does that. She recently told me she hates church politics, and I stated that I felt the same way. Yet... ??? I feel like this whole thing is political. So far, I have confronted Apple about Disneyland and Citrus about her hurtful behavior about my past relationship. I have tried to meet with Durian in the past, but she told me she was busy and hasn't replied with an instance in which she was free. Apple and Citrus have said sorry, but I have not seen changes in their actions or efforts in their friendships with me. Durian has constantly made passive aggressive remarks whenever she talks to me. She especially acts friendly towards my sister, while making "jokes" that I am immature and that my sister is better than me. Durian is also weirdly competitive towards me, since we are both in charge of the same grade of girls, during different service times. I can understand since I am friends with all her students, but still, I strongly feel that we should be joyous and cherish each other well since the common cause is glory to God ultimately, not to ourselves.

[gardencityvegans]

Weekend Reading 9.2.18

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This summer began with the weight of my expectations bearing down on it, no matter how much I wanted to keep an open mind. It was to be my first summer without any graduate school classes since 2008, which alone felt major, and I was hoping to spend at least part of it celebrating graduation.

I was also intent on it being a summer of rest and restoration, friend time and play time and free time. Having worked myself into a state of burnout in the spring, I wanted to savor unstructured hours and to feel unattached to deadlines and projects for a little while.

Things didn’t quite go as planned, at least at first. I spent nearly all of May with various viruses and infections; by the time my birthday rolled around in June I was exhausted and battling waves of hypochondria, which tend to hit me when I’m anxious and have been somatizizing my stress. I didn’t want to catch up with friends or to enjoy summery, New York activities; I wanted to be home, by myself, where it felt safe and slow.

I gave myself permission to do that, which is the best thing I could have done. I took seriously the advice of a reader who emailed me “to echo the benefits—physically, emotionally and spiritually—of just staying put for a while and pulling your energies in.” It was better medicine than I expected it to be, both an affirmation of how good it feels to stay put and also the restorative time I needed in order to venture into the world a little more.

The second part of the summer has been the opposite; it’s felt full and energetic, sometimes downright hectic. I took on some work that I did expect to get, and wasn’t sure I could manage right before the DI, but was glad to be offered. The job made my summer more stressful than I’d planned on, but it was a good experience; it reminded me of how well I do with immersive projects, especially when I’m able to focus on them one at a time.

I said yes to things spontaneously this summer, which was intentional on my part and a new practice for me. Doing so made me realize how often I tense up against and resist opportunities to socialize and connect; it gave me a lot of interesting food for thought about how the suggestion of making plans often feels impinging to me. I’m still considering what that means and why it’s the case, but it’s been good—and occasionally uncomfortable—to set it aside and allow myself be a little more accessible to other people.

Now it’s Labor Day weekend, and everything is about to shift. I begin my DI on Tuesday, which is a day that I thought I could prepare myself for entirely, when of course I couldn’t. I don’t feel nearly as organized or prepared as I wanted to; I haven’t finished up all of the household tasks I wanted to check off my list before the fall. I haven’t batch cooked my meals for the week ahead. I only just wrapped up the study guides and coursework that I need to have completed beforehand. There are work projects that I entirely committed to wrapping up before my start date, which aren’t finished and will need to squeezed in when I can find the time. Oh well.

And of course there are things I wanted to do this summer that I didn’t do. There are so many more activities I wanted to share with my mom—plays I wanted us to see, dinners out that I wanted to treat her to. There are friends I meant to text and didn’t, people I wanted to catch up with and then dropped the ball. I had a now ridiculous-seeming fantasy of cooking tons of recipes for this blog and photographing them, so that I could seamlessly roll out content throughout the fall and early winter. That sure didn’t happen

But it’s fine, because among the many ways that this summer was good to me, it pushed me one tiny step closer to living in the present. Sometimes that meant throwing away my plans and doing nothing; sometimes it meant saying yes to things unexpectedly and allowing myself to enjoy them. I welcomed a few new experiences and new people into my life, and I’m so glad that I did. I spent a lot of time with my mom, not necessarily in pursuit of culture or shared meals at nice places, but sitting at home in her apartment, my childhood home, and that was sweet in its own familiar way.

More than anything, I know that my heart softened up a little at the edges this summer. After more than a year of processing a heartbreak, then pushing myself into a mode of “doing” in order to finish grad school, then feeling chronically unwell (and all of the vulnerability and protectiveness that can come with that feeling), I began this summer a little defended and shut down. Through acts of connecting, savoring nature, and inviting myself to perceive peoples’ friendliness and attention in a new way, I welcomed more tenderness into my life, and I opened my heart up along the way. I became willing to receive. What more wonderful thing could I say about the past few months?

On Tuesday, I’ll begin my first assignment, which is at a nursing home. The hours should be manageable, which will give me some time to keep up with writing and work. My first substantial clinical assignment will come later this fall, starting at the end of October. There will be a long commute and more demanding hours, and I’m expecting life to feel a bit turned on its head once that begins.

As I was telling someone close to me last night, though, it’s OK. Anticipating an uncertain schedule and having no “control” over my day-to-day routines certainly isn’t my comfort zone, but I’ll do my best. Another gift of the summer is a strengthened capacity for self-compassion, hewed especially in the last few weeks, as I navigated a wave of anxiety. If can remain connected to that—if I can take care of myself even when things are messy, uncertain, or a challenge to my need for order—the rest will follow.

Maybe you’ve got fun Labor Day plans for tomorrow; maybe you’re in a quiet, reflective mode like I am, thinking about the summer that’s about to be tucked away behind us. Maybe you’re simply experiencing the weekend. No matter what, I wish you a good Sunday and Monday, and many good things for the fall. Here are my recipe and reading picks for the past week.

Recipes

First up, Lindsey’s beautifully simple charred corn and poblano pepper soup.

Sarah’s vegan ranch bacon pizza is comfort food bliss!

A stunning whole roasted, spicy cauliflower from Erin, whose recipes are always so bold and flavorful.

I’m loving Miranda’s pumpkin and hemp seed granola—a perfect option for my make-ahead breakfasts this coming fall.

Finally, Hannah calls this “cheesecake for the ages,” and what an apt description it is!

Reads

1. It’s a couple days behind us, but I’m glad that Vox called attention to International Overdose Awareness Day.

2. National Geographic has published a pretty amazing, longform piece on the face transplant of Katie Stubblefield, the youngest US citizen so far to receive this still experimental surgery.

3. Also in medical news: Texas Monthly reports on the race to create the first artificial heart.

4. The Atlantic just published a piece about incrementalism and vegan activism—is animal rights outreach actually more effective when it’s less flexible? I see great value in an incremental and inclusive approach, and it’s the kind of activism I’ve always shared, but it was interesting to be exposed to a different perspective.

5. Finally, a new study from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health underscores 5 habits that contribute to longevity. It can be so difficult for consumers to parse through complex (and sometimes conflicting) information on how to foster and maintain health. I appreciate this study for its breadth and the evidence-based, intuitive, and well-reasoned strategies it identifies.

Enjoy these awesome recipes, and I’ll be back later this week with a little comfort food of my own.

xo

[Read More ...] https://www.thefullhelping.com/weekend-reading-9-2-18/

[brianplayssometimes]

'92 to Bendis: Why I Love X-Men

Genesis of X

The year was 1992. That summer had seen my 8th birthday. It also saw my 4th open heart surgery. Born with a severe heart defect I endured hospital visit after hospital visit. Throughout those 8 years I spent many days and nights in the hospital. Truth be told most of it I don’t remember. Whether because of being so young or because my mind blocks it out I do not know. What I do know is that in October of that year X-Men: The Animated Series debuted. Until now I thought I merely loved the show because of it being a great cartoon with fantastic characters. However, as I typed this I realize a deeper reason connected me to the show.

As someone with a severe heart defect you become limited in what you are allowed to do. I couldn’t play sports. I couldn’t be outside in the heat or the cold. I couldn’t do many physical activities. Basically all of the things that a normal 8 year old boy wants to do I couldn’t do. I grew to appreciate things in doors such as; movies, TV shows, video games, and playing with action figures. While I had friends growing up my limitations inevitably led to feelings of alienation. In hindsight, I never really felt normal, and in October of ’92 I saw for the first time a team of people who knew what that was like. It’s no wonder I became a bigger fan of X-Men than any other cartoon. It appealed to me in a deeper, subconscious way that I didn’t understand until now.

I grew to love this show more than any other by watching the team struggle with prejudice, rejection, fear, and being outcasts. As they battled these social and personal issues I received inspiration from their ideologies and hope from their personal redemption arcs. This love for the show led me to convince my mom to buy me the comics. I remember her taking me every week to the comic book store. She would buy me the X-Men and Uncanny X-Men issues every month. My collection grew and grew to the point that I had filing cabinets and storage bins full of comic books. Some Batman, Spider-man, Nightwing, and others were amongst my collection, yet X-Men outranked them all.

I can recall stories such as the Phalanx Covenant, X-Cutioner’s Song, Onslaught, and Age of Apocalypse. Having grown up when I did these are the “classics” when I think of X-Men stories. I read every issue I could, and some multiple times. I still have storage containers full of comics from this phase in my life.  Then somewhere after the Trial of Gambit the stories seemed to shift and I began to mature. I wasn’t as attached anymore and interest waned.  The stories didn’t seem as well crafted, and characters like Marrow and Maggot couldn’t keep my attention. Once the X-Men film came out I attempted to get back into the comics, but ended up not enjoying them anymore. I had officially moved on from my first love.

Marvel Unlimited

Years later the Marvel Cinematic Universe was born. These films sparked a wildfire of interest in comics across the globe. They brought former readers back while simultaneously creating new ones. Around this time Marvel Unlimited had launched as well. Not nearly the behemoth it is now, it still had a solid 2,500 comics in 2007 at launch. Marvel created a way for the newer generation of readers to attach to them instead of the competition, and at the time of this writing they now have over 17,000 comics available.  Between the films and this new service I subscribed to Unlimited and tried reading Avengers, Magneto, X-Factor, and Iron Man comics. I enjoyed the app, but my phone couldn’t handle it well and the stories weren’t gripping me. Ultimately I cancelled it.

The year was 2016. By the time summer began my daughter had finished 1st grade, my son turned 2 years old, and my wife and I celebrated 9 years together. My life had changed, and I was much different than that 8 year old kid who fell in love with X-Men. Adulthood in full swing I became a responsible husband and father. My life focused on providing and taking care of them. Their safety, future, and happiness became all that mattered to me. Never could anyone have known that during this phase of my life Brian Michael Bendis was about to make me fall in love with X-Men all over again.

During July of 2016 Marvel Unlimited ran a $1 for a month promotion. After realizing how many comics they added I decided to try it again. The updated app combined with my upgraded phone made reading comics a breeze. I could read a couple of pages here and there throughout the day, and couldn’t praise the service enough. Winter Soldier, Black Widow, and Captain Marvel were some of the comics I started reading. Then it hit me. In ’92 I fell in love with X-Men and the time had come for me to read Bendis’ All-New X-Men.

I began reading All-New X-Men and couldn’t stop. I flew through the entire 41 issue series plus tie in issues during the course of 6 days. Everything in me couldn’t get me to quit reading them. The series quickly became one of my favorite ever, and will likely stay that way. Once I finished this I went on to read all 35 issues of Bendis’ Uncanny X-Men run, and found myself as infatuated with it as All-New. Bendis provided something scintillating to the franchise that I personally hadn’t seen since the ‘92 X-Men: TAS. He gave a depth to each character during his run, and made everyone feel different from each other. There were no caricatures. Everyone came off unique, and the decisions they made fit within their personalities.  Out of all the positive things I could say about his run my favorite things are the original five, Cyclops’ revolution, and the team ups.

The Original Five

In a society inundated with fictional heroes how could Bendis make the original five X-Men appealing? I mean they were created in 1963. A lot had changed over that time frame. Look at a Batman comic from the ‘60s vs now and you could easily see the tonal differences. The bright, colorful palettes of that time easily stand out against the dark, gritty concepts of our day. Yet Bendis found a way to keep these characters true to the Stan Lee versions and appeal to the modern generation of readers. It’s a testament to his skills as a writer. He crafted an overarching storyline about the original five X-men being brought from the past into the present. The idea being that current day Beast wanted to stop the Revolution of Cyclops.

His vision saw Beast becoming so obsessed with stopping modern day Cyclops that he brought the original five X-Men from the past to the present. This concept created a wonderful dynamic whenever the original five saw what type of people they grew up to be. From Beast’s reaction to the blue fur to Jean freaking out about her “destiny” of marrying Scott, becoming the Phoenix, and eventually dying. Watching these X-Men see what their lives become brought uniqueness to the comics. Over the course of the 41 issues of All-New X-Men they wrestled with their place in the current time stream and struggled with what fate really meant. Seeing them wrestle with this, with each other, and with the Revolution of Cyclops, in particular, provided a dynamic unlike any other that I have read.

Cyclops’ Revolution

Bendis made me do the unthinkable, fall in love with Cyclops. The perfect storm occurred. I had matured into the responsible family man when I read the revolution of Cyclops. His character took it upon himself to be the champion of all homo sapien superior. His team of Magik and Magneto were virtually unstoppable. He stood up to S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers never for a moment backing down. He placed the mutant races survival as priority number 1, and didn’t flinch at the opposition. His own son and daughter might not have been the focal point, but Cyclops as a father was evident with how he fought for his kind.

I had been unfamiliar with this aspect of Cyclops. Nothing in the runs I read prior to this had ever painted this picture of him so strongly. His new mindset (which in reflection started before Bendis’ run) felt like a mixture of ideologies; Magneto’s and Xavier’s. Try for peace, but do what it takes to guarantee the survival of his “children”. As a husband and parent of two I can relate to this. I would do whatever it takes to ensure the protection of my family. Perhaps this relatability is why I grew to rank Cyclops near the top in terms of favorite comic characters. Bendis provided an angle and depth to him I hadn’t previously known.

The Team Ups

Throughout his run on both Uncanny and All-New Bendis infused the stories with team ups that made sense and felt unique. Yes, we have seen the X-Men and Shi’ar interact before, but Bendis made it compelling while appealing to nostalgia. The X-Men have long been known for their space exploration, but having them cross paths and work with The Guardians of the Galaxy felt natural. The move should have been done years ago, and on the surface looked like an opportunity to promote the MCU films. However, when reading the story, it clearly shows that the team up was seamless and fit the overall storyline perfectly.

The Trial of Jean Grey was a fantastic idea. Crafting a story that united the Guardians and Starjammers to battle the Shi’ar felt compelling and natural. The interplay between the groups created some hilarious moments as well as heartwarming scenes. The slow build between Star-Lord and Kitty could change the minds of even the staunchest Colossus/Kitty shippers. It didn’t feel like a normal comic book relationship where two people randomly hook up. Substance was provided to it by building it up with playful, flirty banter. I will always remember that part of his run.

Rebirth of X

I wish I could remember every detail of my feelings when first reading the Bendis run, but unfortunately I can’t. What I do remember is that I felt the rebirth of a love that had grown cold. From getting older to the arrival of the Marvel Cinematic Universe my original love of X-Men had dwindled. Thanks to a promotion for Marvel Unlimited & and incredible run from Bendis that love sprang forth again.

     do�2�|��

[nicksstoryvault]

Brennen Barnes didn't like girls. Unlike the monumental sum of boys his age, he didn't think they had cooties or some weird jinx that came with getting too close to them. But as an only son growing up with what was now a trio of daughters—siblings—he thought girls were annoying and bossy. He didn't like to be bossed around. He hated it in fact. Each time he heard Rora's pushy voice telling him what to do or not to do, the young wolf felt a scratching sensation against his back, as if nails were being dragged up and down his body.

So the fact that all the young girls at the party kept following him to pull him into silly games like patty-cake, made him all the more frustrated. He hated this party. He hated the uncomfortable clothes daddy made him wear. He hated these girls who looked at him with stars in their eyes. And most of all, he hated the little punk who was the celebrating his birthday at this party. A pretty boy who was used to having everyone gush over him, and having everything. He was skinny, prissy and Brennen wanted to punch his face. But he promised daddy he'd behave. Sitting at a chair at a table with Rora and some of the other kids, he taps his foot impatiently, just waiting for the stupid cake to be served so they can go home. Dressed in the elegance of a young princess, with her virbrant chestnut whorls hair done up into a chignon that had a white rose pushed attached to the clip, Aurora embraced the air of royalty, wearing a sleeves crimson flower beaded dress, and matching ballet slippers; she truly carried the visage of a princess, caging her brazen fire as she tried to engage the other kids attention. That soon became obstructed when she gazed at her moody and irritable twin brother, ignoring the protesting growls that he emitted against his clenched teeth. Brennen looked menacingly adorable like a cantankerous kitten with unkempt fur and piercing frosted azure eyes.His wolfish mane of dark chestnut was tied back into a knotted ponytail, his slender and hardened body of chiseled muscle garbed in a tailored charcoal gray suit, with a few buttons undone. He carried the distinct and boyish visage of his father, the same lethal edge and stubborn temper --he was a dwarf sized version of the Winter Soldier; on the outside, he wore a semblance of a Brooklyn charm, behind that guise, he was little roguish pup who desired to roam back into the darkness. Smirking beautifully at his temperamental display, Aurora couldn't restrain a giggle, as she watched Brennen tighten a little hand into an effectual fist. She nudged him forcibly in the shoulder, feeling the vicious pulse teeming in his rigid body. "Bren, you gotta stop," she urged lowly, saddling him with an imploring stare of icy sapphire. "Daddy wants us to play nice, so no puttin' anyone crossed in your sights on the ropes tonight, kay?" Hearing the bossy voice of his twin, Brennen's eyes squint into a pinching frown. Rora wouldn't let up, even for one night. "Stop bossin' me. We're at a party, and it sucks," he felt the need to voice his displeasure, uncaring if any of the other kids heard him and decided to tell a grown-up. He glances at Aurora beside him with something resembling a pout. "I just wanna go already. Why can't they hurry up and serve this cake!" He whines, dropping his head back dramatically which seemed to incite the group of kids sitting with them. "Don't go eating the end piece, that's mine! I call dibs!" One of the kids, an enthusiastic Asian boy with glasses yells from over the table. Brennen glares at him as if spotting a challenger. "I wasn't talkin' to you! I don't even want cake!" Brennen huffs with agitation. This drew the attention of the son of the esteemed host. A snobby brat who thought he was so pretty and better than everyone. "Good because you're not getting any, chubby. It's my cake, and I decide who gets a piece." The little brat smirks cheekily, feeling as if he were a little prince among a crowd of peasants who didn't even deserve to be here. Brennen's face began to turn a shade of red, a throbbing pulse of fire ran through his veins that began to fuel his movements as he rose from his chair. "Oh yeah? I'll tell you what you can do with that cake you little—" "Bren, that's enough," Aurora growled tersely while flashing a kittenish smile at the arrogant raven haired host, who twirled a pale finger over the rim of his raspberry punch. Her chance of making friends was vanquished by her brother's sourness and untamed temper. He was a power keg of raw emotions, any little thing would trigger an explosive reaction. Extending an arm over Brennen's waist, she desperately tried to restrain him. "He's not worth it, Bren, back down..."

--------------

The outdoors was a spacious arena of calm and levity for Bucky Barnes compared to the turbulent noise that waged inside the estate. Parties weren't his idea of fun, despite how outgoing and lively he had been as a kid in Brooklyn who took pretty dames out to dance. He wasn't sure if it was old age setting in, or the fact that he had changed so much in so little biological years that stretched to decades in history. But somehow, the sight of little children, so innocent and full of life, reminded him of happier times. They were the light which sparked a beacon from within, drawing his inner-child back into the older shell. He loved kids—to be exact—he loved HIS kids, which were by far his primary mission in his modern life he'd built for himself. The soft coos and baby gibberish in his ears warmed his heart while the smell of mint and baby formula touched his nostrils. Shifting his stare to the precious bundle he held against his chest, he smiles warmly at the sight of his 1 year old daughter, Frost, just beginning to come out of her small nap with a cute yawn. "Hey there, snowflake, did you sleep all right?" He whispers against her brunette locks.

Listening to her father's soothing timbre, so deep and jovial, the baby girl cooed in a hushed response, fluttering open her tiny eyelids, revealing the vivid shades of frosted azure, that were bright as distant starlight. She tilted her head against the crook of Bucky's angled cybertronic metallic arm, still nestled cozily against the solid planes of his thick chest, where the steady thump of his heartbeat served as a pacifying rhythm. Now, she was alert-fully engaged and ready to take on the night--wiggling slightly against the wake of hunger, she fussed and thrusted her fisting hands upwards, seizing his long dark tresses with a firm grip. "Dada..." she gurgled out, staring into his mirroring steel-blue depths.

A hearty chuckle blew past Bucky's lips as they pulled into a breathtaking grin. "Moroznyy (Frosty)…" he chimes, lifting up his little angel until she's carefully nestled against his chest. "Hope my little snowflake, had a nice rest. The party is just beginning." He says to her. Frost had only started talking a little over a month ago, tiny word fragments in the usual baby-talk pattern, but her first word had been clear as he just heard it seconds ago. She had been full of surprises since the moment she'd came into this world. The many people who saw her tonight were in awe of her natural pale skin and her icy blue eyes. They complemented her name as being quite fitting. He dressed her in a small baby-sized dress that was entirely cotton on the inside to keep her warm and cozy. Her growing length of hair was still short, but thickening strands were pulled into twin pigtails that rose off the top of the left and right of her head. Her tiny head bobs slightly as she gazes out with big blue eyes at their surroundings. They were in the garden of the estate, which was awash by the radiant colors of twilight. They sit against a stone stairway and watching the numerous little kids play with each other on the grass, among them being his precious Mattie. A few adults stood by also watching their children while catting among themselves. Bucky had politely withdrawn from a number of conversations, particularly with a few singles women who were enamored with his good-looks and the very sight of him being such a joy with children. He didn't come to make new friends. Which was why he and his kids were just enjoying their own company until the festivities came to their conclusion. "Look at your big sister, snezhinka (snowflake)." Bucky coos against Frost's ear, watching just as numerous kids were as little Mattie Barnes sways across the grass and stone floor with the grace and poise of a ballerina.

Evading herself from the cacophony of the opulent party goers inside the mansion, Madison carved to feel the soft caresses of the night air and the luminescent power of the moonlight. She welcomingly cherished the contrasts of darkness, an element she effortlessly mastered when she strayed away from parties. She was considered an outsider in social groups since her angelic and enchanting beauty was incomparable to most girls her age. She was a dark little swan, friendless and gracefully elegant in her lithe kittenish form. Tonight, Mattie wanted to sit with her twined siblings, pretend to wore the visage of a princess, but she had an audience to impress, watching her perform her balletic twirls with fluid precision and feline grace. Her movements flowed in sync as she balanced her lithe weight on an arched foot, hoisting the other with unfaltering control until she reached her acquired stance. Her Auntie Tasha would be so proud of her. Spinning around on a pivoted heel, she gazed at her father stood near an arched stone gate, looking dangerously alluring in the shadows, as he cradled little Frost in his arms, rocking with a gentle sway.

"Snova! (Encore!)" Bucky cheers with genuine awe at his little girl's natural display of grace and agility. Her form and skills had improved greatly over the last couple of years, especially since she had begun to practice with Romanoff each time he and the kids visited the Avengers compound in New York. His former Russian rival had even complimented Mattie as being a prodigy whose talent should be explored to its fullest potential, something that had thrilled his little girl and likewise, made Bucky proud. To show his encouragement, he softly claps his hands while keeping Frost secured in his arms. Surrounding them, even a few adults and kids shared in his support and appreciation of Mattie's display.

Performing a climactic bow, Mattie smiled brightly at her father's echoing applause, whipping her head up as long silken mahogany strands lashed over her cool alabaster features; suddenly her mother's cunning and hyper-aware instincts detected ominous danger, while her inner wolf spirit vigorously caught a wafting and reachable stench of rank fat coming from the other side of the lavish estate. Her delicate nose crinkled against the distinct redolence of distressed pig. Her uncertainty betrayed the delighted glints shining in her dark eyes, as she quickly grabbed her slippered shoes and raced towards Bucky. "Daddy, what's that smell?" she asked, her lyrical voice held an edge of alarming dread.

Confused at his daughter's question, Bucky concentrates on the scents surrounding them. At first, he could detect nothing unusual behind the smell of baby formula, pine and mint. "I don't smell…" Then there was the smell of something that reminded him of a filthy barnhouse where animals lived in squalor. That was when Bucky's sharp ears registered the sudden commotion that was as alarming as a sea of panic, and devastating as a car crash. It was coming from inside the estate. Dread clawed in his gut, one that he loathed as it brought him nothing but fear against the most terrifying of possibilities. His blue eyes are wide and unblinking as he sees a horde of guests exchanging shocked looks with each other.

His sense of danger and foreboding triggered inside of him, and that had Bucky rising to his feet and gesturing for Mattie to take Frost. "Hold your sister, Mattie." He is quick but careful to rest his baby into her arms before he makes a beeline for the inside of estate.

Feeling her little infant sister writhing stubbornly against her secure embrace, Mattie was dueling with rampant emotions, she refused to stay outside with the group of strangers, not when she detected an impending presence looming over the estate. Veering her dark eyes towards the patio, she watched Bucky slip back inside the glass doors, his movements frantic and unhinged. Gearing herself up to sprint across the grass, she cradled her hand delicately over Frost's tiny head, breathed deeply and then gunned with momentum to the glass door, instincts shot off an alarm, haphazardly as she felt an unnatural coldness rake over her svelte body. The apparitions of danger were close, as she resolved to call after her father."Daddy, wait, don't..."

Five minutes earlier… The mounting sense of irritation and anger had neared the tipping point for Brennen as he felt himself being dragged, like dead weight, towards the large banquet table where a crowd of kids and adults gathered just in time to see the rich snob get his precious cake. His little hands tightened into fists, but he made no move to fight back as Rora pulled him to join her and the others kids watchin'. "I can walk, Rora," Brennen scowled with a shrug as he forces himself to match her pace. He bumps into a fat man's stomach, then proceeds to glare at him as if he would eat him alive. "Hey, watch it," he grumbles, still following Rora's lead.

"Bren, stop actin' like a jerk," Aurora seethed against gritted teeth, her grip tightening with a pulse of urgency as she continued to drag him away from the chair before he unleashed his extent of his anger on the smug brat. His steel-blue irises radiated with an arresting gleam of predatory malice exhibiting a notch of his unrestrained aggression, as he sneered darkly at his target. She needed to cool him off. "C'mon, don't rise up to it, Bren, remember Uncle Stevie told us that stupid bullies are always lookin' for a fight?"