In like a lion...out like a lunatic lamb

To the trees!

Twas the night before Easter... and I've got a dozen and a half hard-boiled eggs cooling and a 20 lb ham in the fridge. This is not a drill - I've got teenagers coming dinner tomorrow. Have you ever fed teenagers at a feasting holiday (or, you know, in general)? They're a cross between rabid hyenas and starving raptors. Pile it high and stay the hell out of the way. To be completely honest, feeding them keeps the passive aggressive (or blatant antagonism) back and forth between them to a minimum. So I'll prep a double-sized po-tate-er casserole and practice hurling asparagus spears aimed for their mouths without a second thought in the name of my own personal brand of holiday sanity. Mmmm, taters...

Visiting relatives, especially of the sibling variety, bring out a special blend of my mom's personalities. This is an evolving thing lately as well though. Most of my life, Mom's managed to hide a lot of what I've seen from my siblings, which made it easier for them to believe whatever stories about me she'd make up after I hit puberty (the magical age when everything turned to shit).

The trouble she's had day-to-day over the last few years has erased some of the magic she's used to keep the facade in place and now she's more flaky, less stable and sometimes down right weird around them. It's uncomfortable for my siblings but like a day ending in -y around here. I'll admit to some mixed feelings where my mom's illness and my siblings are concerned, but they grew up with her issues, and if I'm being fair, are entitled to however they deal with it. Or not.  And for at least one or two of them, there is some kind of resentment back my way for how close I am with our parents. Which I find hilarious, but that's a topic for another day.

Just kidding. Not really. 

Girding my loins for family drah-ma aside, I had a good day today. I got errands taken care of. I finished reading a good book. I wrote. I had a carefully crafted coffee beverage. I frenetically fangirled, babbled, and extensively critiqued chatted with a friend about the latest blockbuster movie we both saw with our respective snuggle bunnies. My husband and I sat on the glider swing on our back porch while it rained. He read & I worked on some French lessons. I nuked leftovers for dinner. Winner winner, leftover bbq chicken for dinner. It was a delightfully ordinary and completely wonderful kind of day.

What came to mind as I was driving home tonight is how nice it is, at this point in my adult life, to have happily married friends. People who understand venting is at worst a blip of a rough day or period and at best commiserating shared peccadilloes of significant others. When I was first married, all my friends were young and single, some not even sure who or what they were attracted to. If my husband didn't put the toilet seat down, or some equally goofy but annoying offense, they swiftly advised me to divorce the vile heathen. FYI, I can count on one hand the number of times my husband has forgotten to lower the seat in our entire marriage. #toiletseathero

Years and a fairly clean sweep of friends later, we graduated to married, in committed relationships or divorced friends. This seemed super cool to us. Couples dates! Shared experiences! We laughed at the newer couples' foibles - "What do you mean you've never left the bathroom door open? It'll happen, just wait until you share a stomach bug or get dicey takeout one night." We watched marriages/relationships disintegrate and nervously reassured each other it wouldn't happen to us. But even there, the people we hung out with the most, whose own relationship issues erupted in public and private, seemed to thrive on our run-of-the-mill rough patches. He's a butthead, I'm a harpy. You know, the snipey stuff that comes out when you both need Midol and a candy bar. It's not like he bought drugs with the mortgage money. (Hand to God, I knew someone...) It's not like either one of us ever hit or abused the other one. (Witnessed it. Made sure the abused party got out of the relationship.) We had what was our garden variety marital growing pains. You figure out and grow closer or you grow apart. But some 'friends' seemed strangely fixated on us splitting up.

So it's nice to start having more and more friends who are clearly good matches for each other. It's nice to be able to blow off steam about some silly nothing I won't remember happened in a week with another person who gets it. Group chats with wildly inappropriate gifs, dinner out, movies, theme parks, grabbing a drink. Really, this adult thing doesn't always suck. But it probably helps that I still laugh at poop jokes like I'm in elementary school.

We're a little more cabbage patch and a little less tango.

Writing: Wrote more days this week than not.

Reading: Finished 2 books, picked up 4 at the library and promised a nibling I'd start reading his/her newest favorite book. In other words, I've fallen off the careful self-pacing wagon and reverted back to picking up too many books at once. :-D

Foreign Language: I have met my daily course goal for more than 20 days.

Coffee: Happy medium. Less than I could be drinking, but enough to keep me going.

Nap: Not nearly enough.

Positivity: Not too shabby. I'll be dreaming of ab-a-licious super heros for the next few days, so that doesn't hurt.

Revenge of March

Spoke too soon. Or I wrote too soon, if you want to get technical. March is officially in full swing in my home, tears and all.

As I was about to get ready to head out and take one of my niblings to an appointment, I heard my parents raised voices. Well, let’s call it like it is. They were shouting back and forth, clearly frustrated with one another.

That’s my cue, one of many really, to put on my referee cap. Long story slightly shorter, Mom was upset because my dad only had time to run out to the nearest quick service food restaurant to grab them a quick lunch before I needed to run. We live a good 15-20 minutes away from the nearest drive-thru, which is good for our health but not exactly convenient when you’re in a hurry. She didn’t want the healthy, fresh sandwich option. She wanted a burger, fries and a shake - at least that’s the safest assumption of what she was after. 1950s malt shop/5 & dime counter service. My mother operates under the constant belief that life, liberty and the pursuit of junk food is being withheld from her. Oh, and that we’re going out partying instead of running errands. Cha-cha-ing the afternoon away sipping on boat drinks as I stand in line for the third day this week at the pharmacy, like the rest of the world does. You know how it is, hiding the secret ice cream and sneaking out for secret corn dogs and hidden onion rings under the guise of ‘adulting’.

I send Dad off, casually watching the clock. I had a teenager to pick up, which was only the beginning of my afternoon errands and appointments. I quickly realized my own grab & go lunch just fell off my to-do list. Mom started in. We were mean to her, it wasn’t her fault, we kept our schedules or plans hidden from her, etc and so forth. Bottom line? She thinks subs are healthy and are to be avoided unless she’s determined that she’s being left out of subs. It makes sense on an emotionally stunted level. This stems not so much (as far as I can tell) from being abused in her childhood as from feeling like her baby sibling was spoiled and ruined a lot of her own fun. You didn’t think horrific child abuse stopped things like sibling rivalry and middle child syndrome, did you? A book I read recently about another woman’s journey as she investigated the abuse of her mother and aunts confirmed that my mom’s 60-year sibling jealousy isn’t exactly uncommon in families like this. So maybe it does have to do with the abuse after all. Or just shitty family dynamics.

There’s only two ways things are going to go when I’m deflating Mom’s not so solid arguments when reality is far from her grasp: the soldier’s going to come out with sword ablazing and let me know in no uncertain terms what an evil, horrible, shitty person I have been and will always be OR painfully woebegone tears of the deepest self pity, wondering why she is as reviled and unloved as she is and what she could have possibly done in her life to be this way. Today was tears.

Lest you think from my… shall we say… snarky tone that I’m a complete dick to her, contrary to her own view, I’m not. I patiently reminded her that what was wrong with her brain was a mental illness and while she wasn’t a victim in this lunchtime bruhaha, she was casting blame with laser precision where perhaps no blame was needed. Dad returned then, both of us more grateful than a certain local grocery chain will ever know that a brand new store opened at the nearest intersection. His grocery bags caught Mom off guard. Goodbye tears. Warily, she remained where she was and watched him unload a few deli sandwiches, chicken tenders and chips. She had to be coaxed to sit at the table. Her mind couldn’t rework her arguments about what was for lunch when the picnic fare before her wasn’t what she was expecting. It took a few minutes of gentle arguing to get her to understand the ham sandwich she was demanding was the one I was handing her.

Food procured, set up and in hand, Mom’s mood vanished in a swirl of confused mist, her bravado deflating. I told her to color, something that has a very positive impact on her mood but she fights doing a solid fifty percent of the time, after she was finished eating. She argued that she was tired and needed to nap. I agreed that she needed the nap and likely an extra half of one of her medicines, but she needed the mental activity as well. Eat, 10 minutes of coloring, medicine, then nap. 20 minutes later, as I was racing to the door with a container of cantaloupe for lunch, she told me to drive carefully as she colored in her paisley coloring book.  

By the time I got home several hours later, she had settled into sitting alone staring out the window in unsettling silence while my dad took a nap. Creepy Mom is kind of her idling setting when she's in one of these roller coaster periods. She joined me & nibling #2 in the living room while homework was being worked on, not interacting with us in anyway, just there. She ended up taking a nap until dinner was ready. I made the safe choice and fixed one of her favorites, spaghetti with meat sauce, because God knows I wasn't about to go down a food meltdown twice in one day with her.

It's a good sign that this late at night she's sleeping. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for Mom not to sleep for days at a time in March, her brain spinning increasingly more bizarre stories that get her more upset and confused.

March Madness

It occurred to me today that in just two more week's we'll be a quarter of the way through this year. Time flies when you live paycheck to paycheck, am I right? In all seriousness though, I've decided that what makes time seem to speed by so quickly as an adult is swinging from one moment/set of bills/responsibility/drama-filled meltdown/appointment/etc to the next. When I was a kid, the things I waited for felt like months or years away and time crawled across a partially inflated air mattress to get there. Christmas was always f-o-r-e-v-e-r away. Now that I'm the one in charge of holidays, they appear with no apparent warning, as though not clearly marked & advertised well in advance. 

Point being, the pace certainly has not slowed down as we skid past the Ides of March. 

My sniffly-ness has been (fingers crossed) cast aside. Although that thought reminds me that I forgot to pick up a refill on my now-empty new allergy medicine. Let's hope I remember to pick that up tomorrow. My back and I have reached an uneasy truce. I still walk funny & it hurts like a bitch, but I'm able to get around more or less and even stand up straight a little each day. I'm sure I'll push it a little too far too soon, but I'll complain about that when the time comes. 

Feeling the year racing away with me should make me feel like I'm running out of time to accomplish what I wanted to this year. And if I'm being honest, there are moments when I wonder where in the hell my life has run off to. But, however, not withstanding, so on and forthwith... Er... BUT, I feel like I'm starting to gain a bit of traction. I'm declaring the beginning of this year to be framed by the act of learning to accept what you can't change, adjust and do what you can. Decent advice in general obviously, but I'm stubborn and grumpy when it feels like life is going off the rails. It doesn't matter if I had a plan, if this is a seat-of-my-pants kind of time then go with it. 

So while life happens, writing is getting back on track. Had a minor setback when my hard drive bit it, but that set back was quickly overcome, my computer now in better shape than ever (knock on blessed, virgin wood). A few extra writing nights out to save my sanity over the last week or so helped as well. I will find a workable, productive rhythm. I will start producing enough material in order to get feedback to ultimately produce more material to publish. Deadlines here I come. You know, hopefully.

I've got to say, finally working on renewing my acquaintance with a foreign language I enjoyed learning 20 *coughchokesnort* years ago has been awesome. I am a quarter of the way through the program after 17 days of moderate use. It makes me feel good and I'm anxious to start a list of other languages offered. This is 100% just for me. It serves no definable purpose other than fulfilling a personal aspiration. And I love it. 

March is traditionally a difficult month for my mom, which in turn is a difficult time for us. She hasn't escaped the busyness of the year, be it a slew of her own doctor visits or just being discombobulated from the constant changing of schedules and coming and going of grandchildren lately. The extra chaos bothers her, but it's almost been too busy for her to have the usual DEFCON 2 level of problems. Not enough to need to be committed, but enough that day to day you know something's going to happen. Today was moderate passive aggressive martyrdom regarding my dad because he wasn't paying attention to her while he was reading. She didn't cry or become hysterical, though I think we were nearly there, but then again she had two pieces of pie today so that may have been what saved us. I'm completely serious.

I've got fun plans later on in the week, I'm productive, I may have binge-watched the Full House reboot while re-installing software on my computer & I'm almost finished with one of the two books I'm reading. Now to figure out how to humanely persuade the mockingbird outside my window to find a new home - somewhere I can't hear it's chattering from sundown to sunup. 

Doggie Update: Good days and enh days. He had been eating less and less, down to a few bites at most. And then the other day, after eating three bites of dinner and walking away, he started barking at my dad later in the evening. He ate part of a can of wet dog food and has been cleaning his bowl ever since. Today he got up and greeted me when I got home from the pharmacy. The cancer is still there. The end is still coming. But he continues to do it his way. Today goes down as a good day for him. I'm sure he would consider it a better day if he'd gotten a bacon cheeseburger. He's funny that way.

Writing: Writing several days a week for the last two weeks. Working my way back to where I want to be.

Reading: Averaging about a chapter a day, more depending on doctor appointment wait times. Ready to move on to new books I just so happen to have already picked out. Shocker.

Language: Getting.it.done. 

Coffee: Synapses say thumbs up. Not too much but still room for more. 

Positivity: Still on board. Life is beautiful. Life is difficult. Still believe it's worthwhile to practice & share positivity. Basically, yeah, still trying to be positive and happy. 

I have to hope as this year continues, that there are some really awesome things in store. Because the ridiculousness and chaos of the year just keeps coming.

So being sick and having the tubes in my ears swell shut for several weeks ended up being from allergies. Adjusting my allergy medicine and adding a nasal steroid has me on the mend. Yes, just a high pollen season is enough of a weapon from Mother Nature to throw me on my butt for weeks at a time. Coming out of that, I hurt my back. Laundry, the real menace of the aging population. The fun thing about getting older is thinking you just pulled a muscle and coming to find out ACTUALLY you've got bulging discs because your vertebrae are aging and "losing integrity". 

This puts a bit of a damper on my brand-spankin' new annual pass to one of our local theme park resort type places. Apparently it's a good thing I rode 2 of the 3 thrill-ish rides I like before this happened, because for the time being I'm not even sure I can walk around one of the parks, let alone ride anything that has a warning on it. The idea of renting a scooter makes me grumpy, but I'll do it if I have to. Incidentally, I've got a sudden interest in full torso braces....

Anywho, I figured the crazy busy schedule that was February would give way to a less busy March, illness and injury aside. Ha. Ha, I say! Back to back to back doctor's appointments, minor surgeries, suture/stitch removal, various nibling assistance. This week alone there are 7 medical appointments, 3 nights of driving niblings places and near endless hours of school work help. To say nothing of the drah-ma involved in why the niblings need help. 

On the dog dying of cancer front, we're 5 months to the day after he was given 2 weeks to live. The last week he's become noticeably more sleepy and sluggish. He's famous (in our house) for checking the house at night to make sure the perimeter is secure and everyone is okay. That's stopped. He usually spends our dinner under the dining table. There's now a 50/50 chance he didn't bother to get up from his nap when we eat. He's a notoriously picky eater, so his refusing food or only eating part of his meals isn't necessarily something that we worry too much about on a regular day. (Before you freak out, his skipping a meal or only finishing part is usually made up for with gusto, if a scathing review of the cuisine, on his next meal.) But, today when we upped the tasty factor, he ended up eating about 2/3 of his dinner. The point being, it's coming. He doesn't appear to be in pain, some arthritis in his back legs from his age aside. What comes next, will we have to have him put down, will he die at home & everything that goes with that has us all on edge. I'm trying to do casual advance research to have in the back of my mind because when decisions will have to be made, I'm going to be a mess. A hot, toddler-level, mess. I pray every night now for the not just the strength to handle his loss and appreciate each day he's still here, but for the grace to do right by him and a painless, comfortable end for him. Sorry, that probably should have had a huge flashing trigger warning before I started. Give me a second to swallow back my burgeoning tears and I'll pass around a box of tissues. 

Writing: Bits and pieces. I have restarted a short story to get myself back into the groove. 

Reading: Still slowly going through the Stephen King short story compendium I've had for a while. Hoping to knock out the other book that I'm maybe 20 pages into during one of this week's doctor visits. Woefully behind on a advanced copy of a manuscript. 

Coffee: 3 today. Today was a good day for coffee. 

Language: Progress! Got into a free online language program a friend of a friend has been using for the last year. Duolingo. Create an account, choose a language, set a daily goal, download the free apps so you can practice where ever. I've met my goal 8 of the last 8 days (which is how long ago I signed up). I really like it. Some days I meet the minimum, some days I blow it out of the water. If you're interested (they really do have a wide variety of languages to learn or brush up on - you can test out of skill sets based on what you may already know) and/or want someone to friend up with on the site, just let me know. 

Positivity: I'm hanging in there, you know? I think I'm so busy with so many things changing every freaking day that it makes me appreciate the positive and not focus on negativity. I'll take it. There's a lot to look forward to this year, a lot of daily victories in the darnedest places. 

Once more unto the breach

I’m back. I think. (Yes, again.)

The beginning of this year started with such promise. I read. I wrote. The grand expectations of chewing bubble gum and kicking ass, sans bubble gum.

Obviously, if you’ve kept up with any of my new year whiny-ness, you’re aware that it all came to a screeching halt at the end of January. Life happened in spades. Nothing earthshattering. Nothing beyond the busyness of living and the irritation of an immune system that doesn’t like to cooperate in a traditional manner.

Wah wah wah!

I *think* I’m getting a hold on my immune system, or at least it’s so worn out that it’s becoming complacent. I may be exhausted, but I can still get shit done once my immune system goes into hibernation between flares.

And as for all the rest, the visiting family and local family mini-emergencies, I’m happy to have had the time logged with loved ones and to have been there to support the young ones in my life who needed it. I’m happy to have made new memories and to have found past experiences beneficial in improving the current lives and futures of family who needed it. There is a sense of continuity in using family history to pave a better road to prevent old crap from claiming a new generation. Considering how strongly family has come up in my life this month involving old family wounds and new generations, there’s a separate post in there somewhere. Hell, there’s at least a book or two in that as well.

I’ve slid into home in the most birthday-dense month of the year for my family. I’ve baked cakes, cooked favorite meals, wrapped presents and even managed to get a few balloons to the chagrin of the birthday adults. Did I pull it off with panache? Nah. And that’s becoming more and more okay. Acceptance is a beautiful thing.

I’ve had a few epiphanies this year already. One was very welcome: the only validation I need is from myself (relatively speaking). There’s plenty more that goes with that (yet another, other, post), but for someone who seeks approval in so many avenues, it’s an important idea to come to. At least this month. Who the hell knows what I’ll think about it in a few more months. The other epiphany, if it can be called that, has helped me understand even more why it’s best to let go of certain situations. Vague? Well, that’s as much energy as I feel it warranted.

I have not completely fallen off the reading wagon, watery eyes aside. I’m going between a Stephen King tome and what seems to be a lighthearted fantasy novel about a bookstore. But it’s been a nonfiction book I devoured that’s captured my thoughts of late. The daughter of an abuse survivor goes on a quest to find out what happened in her family’s past. This was my first foray into so-how-screwed-up-is-my-family-history-really. Geographical and personal differences aside, there were some uncanny similarities in my family’s story and this one. I was damn near giddy, compartmentalizing my horror, to see what was common. I was frustrated that the writer’s mother had found a way to thrive (seemingly at least) while my mother hit a brick wall during her ascent to putting her life together and never recovered. To clarify, I don’t begrudge the woman or her daughter a damn thing. Instead it makes the despair a little more tender at how my mom’s (and dad’s) life has turned out. Also, it gave me a baseline for how to approach telling a story of that nature. Someday, I will write a book about this area of my family’s history, about the rippling waves that still impact the generations further removed from it. I struggle with how in the hell to tackle such a project, knowing that this is a story I’ve been wanting, needing, to tell as long as I’ve been aware. I appreciated the author’s approach (Some reviewers didn’t, but I got it.), but there are completely different journeys. At least now I have some sense of one way it’s been handled.

And in the end, that’s kind of the point of these place holder blog posts. A personal Pensieve to unload extraneous bits of this and that to give my fictional muses and non-fiction family story more room to develop. A venue to ramble, to mold thoughts, to ponder in as much detail as I feel necessary while I continue working on the bigger picture. If a portion all have the same general content, then that’s the junk that needs to be jetisoned to get the cogs working again. Repeating myself here is at the very least cathartic ranging up to potentially helping me recognize what I need to work on for myself in the future. Then again, at the very, very least, it’s having written something. It doesn’t need to be eligible for an award or even interesting to other people as long as it helps keep me writing.

So, writing has been a bust. Working on getting back into a groove there.

Reading, not doing too bad.

Coffee, too sad to contemplate, although it’s on an upswing over the past week.

Foreign language, enh.

Napping, still not enough. Then again, I wouldn’t be satisfied until it was a nap a day minimum, so it’ll never be enough.

Sick again... again

The moral of the story for 2016 continues to be: when I set perfectly reasonable personal goals for myself to kick off my year, I will end up being sick more times in the first month and a half of the year than I've been in ages.

It feels like the first month and change of this year have been a whirlwind of activity punctuated with feeling like dog poop that's turned white and covered with decaying leaves.

So I will not be gushing about what a fantastic job my husband did on Valentine's Day for me, especially considering we had not discussed anything at all beyond 'let's grab a pizza and watch a movie at home'.

I also will not be bubbling over about relatives coming to visit from near and far.

And there will be no child's level of delight over going to visit THE mouse's kingdom last week or the momentous expensive decision to get annual passes for the first time in my life.

I've written squat. This vexes me greatly.

I've read very little. Focusing on books when my eyes are watering and head feels like concrete isn't happening.

Coffee consumption is piss poor.

I did sprinkle one of my theme park visits with a bit of foreign language. I'll consider that a teensie, weensie win.

And whatever else I was keeping track of, well, tough cookies.

This is me putting a pin in things until I can make something semi-cohesive later. After my sinuses drain and my coffee intake is on the rise.

Warm Fuzzies

When I started this blog, I wrote about one of my niblings coming out. It wasn’t a shocker, but I wanted to be sure to convey to them my unconditional support because for whatever reason in this day and age people still apparently have to come out. And my perfectly adorable nibling can’t be free to be who he or she is within her own extended family because of ignorant and oppressive views. Well not in my house, buddy.

Before coming out, we were together when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality. We cheered in delight as the nation took a big (and long overdue) step in the right direction on a government level. His or her sibling was with us, not understanding why we cared or that it even mattered. I tried to explain & received a shrug which was shorthand for “it doesn’t matter to me & I may or may not be hungry again” in kid-speak.

And if you haven’t read my little post about my nibling coming out to me, I will take this moment to clarify that I refer to no specific gender for the purpose of my nibling’s privacy. In my other posts, I stay pretty gender neutral when referring to any of my nieces and nephews (or sundry family members) as well, again for their protection and privacy. No shame, just protective.

Well, we reached another milestone around here. One of my siblings (& family) came for a visit. I invited my dating nibling to invite the signficant other to the family dinner. Before I could finish asking, fingers were flying on the phone. Signficant other asked parents, received approval and responded. I believe warp speed was achieved locally that night. Because I’ve never had to hide who I was with (at least not in this respect), I was a little taken aback to be asked if it was okay that this person be presented as the significant other AND did Uncle so-and-so know (of their same-sex-ness).

My response was that they would be in my home and in my home they could be exactly who they were. Always. I wasn’t sure if Uncle so-and-so knew, but I assured them that considering I know my sibling’s spouse has LGBTQ friends that there shouldn’t be a problem there. I added, because I realized that may not be reassuring enough when you’re young and not able to share who you are with everyone in your life, on the off chance that Uncle so-and-so not be okay, I would remove him from my house. My nibling’s mouth dropped. Yep, that’s right kid. I would throw my own sibling out of my house (& so much more) to protect your right to be who you are. Without hesitation. Who you love isn’t something to be ashamed of (In this instance. We all know plenty of straight and LGBTQ folks dating asshats regardless of sexual orientation. But I digress.).

So the day came and I picked everyone up. It was their first extended family get together as a couple. I made introductions and referred to this unknown teenager as our beloved nibling’s signficant other. Not friend. No veiled wordplay. Teenagers grinned then froze, their eyes zeroing in on facial expressions. A polite chorus of “nice to meet you” echoed. The grins turned into megawatt smiles. The earth did not shake. Fingers did not point. Bibles were not thrown at them.  Nibling significant other (from here forward, NSO) called me “Aunt” in front of everyone. I was taken aback, because when it was said, it was like someone new to the family testing out calling their new or potential in-laws Mom or Dad. There was weight and meaning packed into the title. I gave NSO a warm smile and handed over a drink. We piled into vehicles and went to dinner after an hour or two of banter and our resident love birds sitting together. Later, once the out of town relatives were on their way and the grandparents retired for the evening, the teenagers cuddled without a second thought in front of me. I took a ‘mom’ level amount of pictures. Before I dropped them off for the night, I double checked and confirmed which pictures could be uploaded to which social media sites. Zero indication of romantic status could go on ABC. Cute, romantic pics could go on XYZ. I added an extra level of privacy filter of my own and didn’t tag either of them in any pictures I did share.

I got a big hug from my teen nibling when I dropped them off. Later, I was tagged in his or her social media post (on XYZ, where they are openly a couple) thanking me for having them over together. Cool *cough* aunt was suddenly full of the warm fuzzies.