(no subject)
Back from the beach. Overall, I'd say things added up to a mostly positive experience.
Hil and I had our own one-bedroom condo unit, a couple of floors away from his mom and stepdad, grandparents, aunts, and cousins, which was awesome. It had a balcony directly over the beach, which was double awesome, and I spent several mid-days sitting out there reading or handsewing, which was better yet. I suffered a bit from the lack of brain-candy, but otherwise was quite well off.
Relating to Hil's mom's family went smoother than it has in previous situations- Hil has acknowledged that their tendency to treat him (and by extension, me)like a cherished but bumbling/inept twelve-year-old isn't anything he's tried to remedy. So I basically set out to hack their matrix of "adultness" (Help with household-y tasks as soon as you sense a need to be fulfilled, especially as relates to care of the elders, make pleasant, affirmative, *direct* social noises, even when you're not an expert and feel a little at sea, take charge of projects that you care about before someone else decides they have a better idea of how to execute them, et cetera). Having the internalized voices of my parents, particularly my mom, in my head helped a lot. I'm actually thinking about writing a post to intj about "How being raised by Extroverted Sensors did not Ruin my Life." :) My relationship with my folks has in many ways not been easy, and they will never be my "friends," but I am now more aware than ever that their corrections to my behavior were not about trying to turn me into something that I wasn't, they were in the spirit of "You are a wonderfully weird being who will need the tools to cope in a world populated mostly by other extroverted sensors." It seems to have worked. By the end of the trip, various members of the clan were commenting about what a perfect match I am for Hil, how well I fit into their extended family, and how "if you two break up, Hilary's going to have to get used to your other boyfriends, because we're keeping you."
One of Hil's cousins is both trained as a professional chef and married to another wheat-intolerant lady, so he kept turning out awesome things like bread, brownies, cookies, sauces, and salad dressings that I can eat. Needless to say, I consumed mass quantities. I'm going to to have to eat like a Buddhist monk for the next couple of weeks to make up for it.
We've been spending the drives between Atlanta, Columbia, and Myrtle Beach reading Budiansky's Her Majesty's Spymaster aloud. Tudor/Elizabethan history in general is fun to read, but Francis Walsingham is a fascinationg character in particular, and I mostly like Budiansky's voice. Hil, who resembles contemporary portraiture of Walsingham more than a little, now wants a set of Tudor-era Puritan (darkish, plain) togs. I might just have to take him up on that.
I got a letter from Valdosta State and their version of how far I've gotten on completing my Grad School Application and mine are congruent. Yay. I hope to have everything pretty much wrapped up in about a week and a half.
Hil and I had our own one-bedroom condo unit, a couple of floors away from his mom and stepdad, grandparents, aunts, and cousins, which was awesome. It had a balcony directly over the beach, which was double awesome, and I spent several mid-days sitting out there reading or handsewing, which was better yet. I suffered a bit from the lack of brain-candy, but otherwise was quite well off.
Relating to Hil's mom's family went smoother than it has in previous situations- Hil has acknowledged that their tendency to treat him (and by extension, me)like a cherished but bumbling/inept twelve-year-old isn't anything he's tried to remedy. So I basically set out to hack their matrix of "adultness" (Help with household-y tasks as soon as you sense a need to be fulfilled, especially as relates to care of the elders, make pleasant, affirmative, *direct* social noises, even when you're not an expert and feel a little at sea, take charge of projects that you care about before someone else decides they have a better idea of how to execute them, et cetera). Having the internalized voices of my parents, particularly my mom, in my head helped a lot. I'm actually thinking about writing a post to intj about "How being raised by Extroverted Sensors did not Ruin my Life." :) My relationship with my folks has in many ways not been easy, and they will never be my "friends," but I am now more aware than ever that their corrections to my behavior were not about trying to turn me into something that I wasn't, they were in the spirit of "You are a wonderfully weird being who will need the tools to cope in a world populated mostly by other extroverted sensors." It seems to have worked. By the end of the trip, various members of the clan were commenting about what a perfect match I am for Hil, how well I fit into their extended family, and how "if you two break up, Hilary's going to have to get used to your other boyfriends, because we're keeping you."
One of Hil's cousins is both trained as a professional chef and married to another wheat-intolerant lady, so he kept turning out awesome things like bread, brownies, cookies, sauces, and salad dressings that I can eat. Needless to say, I consumed mass quantities. I'm going to to have to eat like a Buddhist monk for the next couple of weeks to make up for it.
We've been spending the drives between Atlanta, Columbia, and Myrtle Beach reading Budiansky's Her Majesty's Spymaster aloud. Tudor/Elizabethan history in general is fun to read, but Francis Walsingham is a fascinationg character in particular, and I mostly like Budiansky's voice. Hil, who resembles contemporary portraiture of Walsingham more than a little, now wants a set of Tudor-era Puritan (darkish, plain) togs. I might just have to take him up on that.
I got a letter from Valdosta State and their version of how far I've gotten on completing my Grad School Application and mine are congruent. Yay. I hope to have everything pretty much wrapped up in about a week and a half.