I also feel hot, and not in that good "these are cute new pants" way

Long time no update, hm? This is what happens when you go out of town and then come back to a desk full of actual work and two trainees. As I said yesterday, it's like having the work equivalent of a toddler and a newborn, plus my own job.

Anyway, yes. Last weekend was my brother's wedding, which was less of a catastrophe than I expected. My sister-in-law looked beautiful in her dress, my brother only pissed us off a couple of times, and I got to see lots of relatives and friends I hadn't seen in a loooong time. I also got an invite to visit relatives in New Jersey, Washington, and Omaha, and an invite to have margaritas sometime from my pseudo-aunt Lois, who is wholly unaware of just how good my memory is and how much I like margaritas. I probably won't tell SB, though, because he got mildly annoyed when Lois's husband bought me a G&T at the reception.

Random amusing link: Reasons Why the Female Characters in Certain Male-Written Fiction Are Not Like Actual Women at All

I discovered a new thing this weekend which is actually very helpful. It's called Announcing Your Feelings. I've decided to stop expressing my mood solely through facial expressions and tone of voice, and just tell everybody how I'm feeling. On the way to my brother's wedding rehearsal, I announced to my parents, very firmly, "I feel crabby," because I did. I had no desire to attend a wedding rehearsal and pretend to be nice. My parents sort of laughed and SB asked, "Well, that's fine. It's just a matter of how you deal with it." I replied, "I plan to be sullen and withdrawn." Nods all around, and then I was sullen and withdrawn for about five minutes until my sisters started teasing M4 for crying at rehearsal. Then later I felt like I needed a drink, which I announced to my parents, my sisters, and the waitress at the rehearsal dinner, and still later I felt drunk, although I did not announce it because I was too busy shushing people and giggling uncontrollably.

So from now on I will be announcing my feelings willy-nilly, and people can just deal with them. Right now I feel like peeing. So...yeah.

I realize this entire post sounds like I spent the weekend in a drunken haze or contemplating a drunken haze, but I promise, I was sober for at least 95% of the five days I was in Nebraska. I didn't even drink the bottle of monkey wine I brought my parents. (Yes, I buy wine based entirely on which bottle is the coolest. I have a bottle at home right now that I bought because it was shaped like a cat. No joke.)

In other news, I went to the doctor on Wednesday, which was a whole new experience in competence. I know that sounds sarcastic, but it's really, really not. I haven't had a competent doctor since I was ten, and even then it was the same guy who'd managed to incorrectly predict the genders and birthdates of all four of my mother's children. But my new doctor is a woman who actually let me have an opinion about my own treatment. Amazing. So anyway, I found out I'm not dying, none of my moles are cancerous, and I need to have a glucose tolerance test, which is happening tomorrow. Evidently they make you swallow a lot of sugar and then try to extract it again by sucking it out your veins, or something. I'm not really clear on that. What I am clear on is that I'll get to spend the morning in the lab reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell while not doing work, so, you know, at the very worst it's a push. Also, my doctor put me on medicine to help me metabolize sugar better, which is good in the long run, but bad because it means that a margarita could send me into hypoglycemic shock. So that's a sad story.