Good deed for the day?

Yesterday I got an email from Marie about a recent phone call with her "little" brother Hermanito. It seemed pleasant enough: kind of aimless, but chatty in the way that sibling phone calls can be.

Had a very nice chat with Hermanito.  We talked about my upcoming trip to Paris, his proposed big motorcycle jaunt next summer with his girlfriend (who was in the background, occasionally chiming in), his generator and home repairs (he's replacing his plumbing, his water heater, and his generator, all in the next two weeks), his proposal to visit Auntie for Thanksgiving if his girlfriend can get enough time off (she said she could, but he seemed more doubtful), [and so on]. It was a good conversation.  He once made a comment about liberals like me and Natasha, but I deflected with a question about his summer plans.  And he teased me about my book collection, so I agreed, compared it to Mom's doll collection, and recounted the story of how I showed pictures of her house to a doll-phobic coworker.  So we happily agreed that I was evil, and that was that.

At the end he said love ya sis.

Maybe I'm learning how to talk to him again? 

Vacation

It's not always clear to me whether to treat this blog as a repository for Important Thoughts, or just as a diary. It started out, way back when, as a tool to try to understand my marriage. Once I understood it enough to realize I had to leave Wife, I started to collect "diary" entries about times that Wife was particularly awful, in case I needed to bring a portfolio of documentation into Court. (Also I back-added the "diary" tag to earlier posts as well.) Since that time, it has bounced all over the place, with rapid tonal shifts between the superficial and the disturbing sometimes all within a single day. In fact I've talked about this confusion before.

Well if it's a diary, I should have posted three weeks ago that I had just finished spending a week vacationing with Marie's family at their summer cottage, the same one I wrote about here, and also in these three posts.* This year it was a reunion of all the siblings:

1. Marie's older brother, his second wife, and (for a couple of days) one of his sons;
2. Marie, with me;
3. Marie's younger brother, and his current long-term girlfriend;
4. Marie's younger sister, Cuñada, and her daughter Natasha.

The ones who were new to me were the older brother's son, the younger brother, and his girlfriend. So from the point of view of the four siblings at the core of it all, that means that only Marie's younger brother was new to me. Let me call him Hermanito—partly because it means "little brother" and partly because he was physically the largest of us all.

Mostly there's not a lot to tell. It was a very quiet week. I did manage to provoke a spot of unpleasantness, but only through being a clueless jerk. Nothing more malicious than that.