So my sister's coming to live with us in Buffalo.

Well, I should clarify. I have three sisters. I'm #2 of 4. #3 of 4, also known as Fi (rhymes with B, right? So we match), had to share Middle Child Syndrome with me. I know. I didn't even get my own syndrome. She might've had it worse than me, because she got 3 years of being the baby before this kicked in. (#4 of 4 got to sit in Mom's lap for eight years, until she outgrew it. #4 of 4 just got Surprise Married in Reno, too, so you see where being the Baby gets you. And #1 of 4 served two tours in Iraq, so there's where being the Oldest gets you.)

So #3 of 4, Fi, has always had terrible taste in friends. This extends to men. She has terrible, terrible taste in men. She picks the ones who need her. She has just spent five years, six months, and seven days (yes, she worked it out because she's kind of a worrier and a bit OCD) supporting a man my age. Literally supporting him, to the tune of him costing her about ten grand in that five years.
He's going back to school to become a massage therapist. He couldn't afford this on his own, so she agreed to support him.
He is among 22-year-olds.
Several of them are hot.
One of them, he has decided, is his new soulmate.
He promised Fi he'd never cheat on her. He has achieved this promise by dumping her, fucking the new girl, and about a week later finally getting around to telling Fi she was dumped. To put it un-gently. So technically he didn't cheat on her, as their 'breakup' took place about ten minutes before he slept with this new girl, right, even though Fi didn't know about it at the time? That's not cheating.
Right?
This new girl "knows me better than anyone," he insists. They're soulmates.
She's 22 and has never lived on her own before. (He's a little older than me, so, pushing 30 rather hard. Balding, too, I might add.)
She doesn't know that he's thousands of dollars in debt and hasn't had a real job in years.
Basically, it's not so much that she knows him better, but that she knows a better him. Only knowing the good parts of him, she's bound to be a more entertaining companion than my exhausted sister, who is a saint but not a fool and has the terrible, terrible habit of keeping track of her finances. (Mean mean woman!)

Anyway. I don't know what he expected would happen, but Fi basically said, "Well, that's a damn shame, and I'm sorry it ended this way. The only reason I was staying in this godforsaken place was for you, so I'll be out by the end of the month-- you'll have to go too, since I was the one on the lease, but maybe you can renegotiate with the landlord. You'll need a new bank account and a new cellphone account. All the dishes belong to me and I'm going to take the one cat, but leave you with your dead mother's cat and the other cat, who loves you more. The furniture is all yours, including the bed, but all the sheets belong to me and I can actually use them so I'm taking them too. Also the video store membership is in my name so I'm canceling it. Have a nice life."

He seems totally shocked by this reaction.
But me, I know. We Kelly girls, we don't fuck around. She was heartbroken for about three days, but then she realized...
She's young, she's single, she's got excellent marketable skills (she works in sales for a clothing company and has been going to trade shows for five years), she's quite pretty (we Kelly girls all look alike, but she got the nicest, most conventionally-attractive mix of our mother's chin and our father's eyes and our grandmother's nose-- pale hair, dark eyebrows and lashes, strong cheekbones)... And she's moving to Buffalo. Without the albatross of this deadbeat around her neck, she's actually got a whole lot to look forward to.

Boy are we going to have a good time. So she's sort of guilty that she's not more upset about getting dumped, but mostly she's just relieved-- she'd never have been able to dump him without being consumed by guilt, so this way she basically gets out free. He's completely broke, and screwed, and has no way to afford anything because he's taken advantage of his family so much they won't help him anymore-- he's going to starve on the street or go begging. But he couldn't keep his cock in his pants for another six months, so it's not her problem anymore!
I think he's actually a little hurt that she's so totally not torn up over his sudden but inevitable betrayal. (All of HIS friends responded to the breakup by telling her they'd always thought she could do better!! And his family all cried and told Fi they'd miss her, and told her BF not to call them anymore!!!) But what's she supposed to do? She's been enough of a chump for five years when he at least claimed he loved her. Now that he doesn't anymore, what can he expect from her? He's lucky she didn't kill him-- I would have.

So I've been helping her pack up and move her stuff, and if I never see Cortland again it will be too soon. What a GOD-AWFUL little town.

But more to the point, or to the subject of the post...
The cat she decided she was keeping is a small gray girl cat. Just like Chita. Remi is a couple of years older (Remi is short for Remington, because of her gun-metal color), a few shades darker, and quite a bit pudgier than Chita, but is much more cuddly and friendly, albeit just as eccentric in her own way.
So the two of them have been attempting to divide our house up.
This morning I woke up when Remi and Chita both decided that the bed which I was then occupying was The Place to hash out their relationship once and for all. Remi sat in the corner growling. Chita would slink into the room, pop her head up over the side of the bed, and hiss. I was between them. I was the barricade. They yelled at each other over, around, and through me. It was very disconcerting, especially since it was so early I kept falling asleep.

So my house is a battlefield, but nobody's actually fighting-- just lots of shrill cussing and guttural hissing...

Anyway. I'll see if I can get Fi signed up on this site. She'll be around for Halloween, which is her most favoritest holiday ever and which she hasn't been able to celebrate for five years because she's been stuck with Idiot McBrokeypants. So we're getting her dressed up in a good and hobaggy costume (why not?!) and taking her out on the town!!! It'll be fun! So keep me posted on any upcoming parties...

And the most amusing part of this breakup, to me, is that when she was transferring all her photos from his computer (she deleted his copy of every photo of herself, and worried that this was bitchy. Why would you worry? Don't leave yourself vulnerable to him! If later he feels bad and apologizes, you can send him a few of the photos back, but don't do him any favors. Right now, he's enough of a fucking douchebag that he might use the photos to make fun of you or something. Fuck that noise) she found all the videos of him he'd made her stand around and shoot at the skate park.
Yes, he's a skateboarder. Pushing 30-- pushing thirty hard, I might add, as his birthday's this winter-- yes, this winner is older than me and dating someone younger than our baby sister-- and he's still an avid skateboarder and makes his long-suffering girlfriend stand around at the skate park and shoot...
video after video...
of him totally failing to perform basic skate tricks.

Is it just me, or are these videos about to be remade into an absolutely fucking hysterical montage?

It's a goddamn goldmine. And I promise I'll post about it here.

Looks like that news story didn't run. I keep meaning to email him and ask, but keep forgetting.

I had an awesome time at Pennsic. I posted photos here:

There are none of me, but lots of pictures of our incredibly elaborate camping setup, all of which we set up on arrival and took down before leaving. We had a sink with running water. We had a shower with a propane-fueled on-demand tankless water heater, and a platform constructed across a drainage ditch so that there were no mud puddles afterward-- it was curtained by a set of tarps, then there was a sheet wall around it, so no one could spy on you. And it was open to the sky, so the humidity did not build up. I took a shower in the rain once, and it was awesome.

Anyway, I had a great time.

In other news, the roller derby league sent a squad to a game in Syracuse, which our girls won handily-- not that Syracuse is bad, it's just that our girls are better. :) So that was fun. Photos of that are here:
and I recapped the game a bit here:
Though it's not my best work of blogging.

I am thinking of joining Allentown Athletix to get back in shape for the roller derby season. Does anyone still go? I'm going to see if I can still get the roller derby discount, but if not, I may be talking to someone about the elmwoodstrip discount. What's good to do there? I always meant to join but never did anything besides the Mia Mauler workout-- which, I have heard, may or may not come back depending on what kind of support she gets from the league.

Also, I don't know what Zobar expects me to comment on, in porn, if not the sheer amusement value of the whole thing. I mean really. Porn is silly. If you can't appreciate that, ur doin it rong.

Oh yes, I had also wanted to say, before I go, that if the news story does mention my blog at all, I wanted to link to the other blog that I had made just about size positivity issues since this blog is more about, well, you know, parties and Buffalo and lamb chops and cats. I had asked the reporter if he could link to that one but when I told him the URL he laughed and said the paper wouldn't print it.
Fat Titties

Because that's arguably my fattest part, I figured it would be a clever name for a blog. Silly me, not thinking about the media!

But anyway. That's where I've been putting my thinky posts about body politics. (Different from the body politic, of course.)

Well, I'm going out of town tonight (headed up to Hamilton to see the Madison, Wisconsin travel team take on the Hamilton league's travel team, in what should be an exciting bout). Then I'm getting home way late, and tomorrow morning I'm getting into the car that I'm loading up today (Yay for getting a ride to Canada so I don't have to load the car tomorrow at the crack of dawn!), and driving down to Cooper's Lake in PA for my first visit to the Pennsic Wars.
I'm very excited and have been working really hard to get ready.
To the point that I'm really tired and stressed-out and now just wish I was spending two weeks lying in bed instead of camping. But that's OK. I am pretty sure that once I get there, I'm going to have a blast, so I'm trying to just not think about how much work I still have to do right now. In a minute I gotta get up and start packing stuff, but right now, I'm totally fine. Yes.
So, I'll see y'all in two weeks or so. I will have my phone so anything urgent, people can text me with. I doubt anything will really be that urgent, though.
To find out what happened with the news and all that stuff, go check with (e:zobar). No, he is not coming with me-- he decided he just couldn't keep a straight face and anyway, he has work to do and a kitty to feed and a lot of beer to drink and the couch to keep warm, and so on.

Anyway-- hasta la vista, and if y'all have a party without me, take pictures, huh? Have a good rest of July / beginning of August.

So yeah. We're going in for a photo shoot with the Buff News. I guess the guy decided that me and (e:Zobar) were a good illustration of the article.
I had suggested I could wear my roller derby uniform, as it's quite form-fitting but athletic. I linked to that photo of me in it, that was taken for last season, and they called today and said it was too much skin for the Buffalo News to print! How funny. I said I'd wear some leggings underneath.
I'm bringing that, and showing up in a normal outfit-- a tastefully boobalicious shirt from Bravissimo because it's the only fitted shirt I own that fits me, plus some jeans that have a little stretch. The idea being to show my body shape without being gross about it-- nobody needs to see anybody's naked thighs in the newspaper, regardless of the fatness or not of said thighs, in my not terribly humble opinion. (e:Zobar) will be wearing one of his more form-fitting t-shirts. We'd joked about having him pose nude, but I bet the News wouldn't print that one either.

I'm worried about the story, of course. I am not exactly eager to be the poster child for the unrepentantly fat Buffalonian. Fat people will say I'm too thin; many people will just call me a fatass. And I fully expect that no one will believe that I eat the same as Z and exercise 10-20x more than him. People don't understand metabolism, and even my doctor just assumed I was lying when I told her how much I exercised.
This could go wrong in many many ways. I look a lot better in my normal clothes than in my uniform, but I just want the roller derby in there just so people understand, I'm not lying when I say I'm active and athletic. You can't even participate in a bout without having skated a certain number of hours that season and especially in the month leading up to it, it's part of our bylaws. Most people don't really know that, but there it is-- the fact that I am entitled to wear that uniform means that I absolutely cannot be lying about the amount of exercise I get.
I don't really have any way of proving that I eat what I say I do, but they want to photograph me holding a bunch of vegetables, so I can at least hope the article will make my case there.

I say from experience that nobody's going to believe me, just because I'm used to it. (Seriously. My doctor. Who I went to with an overexercise-induced injury. Did not believe me because the number on the scale was too high. Nobody who works out that much can weigh that much.)
Because the point I'm trying to make is that in order for me to meet the requirements for a "healthy" BMI, I would have to go on a starvation diet. I would have to get fewer calories than my body requires to maintain itself. And that is what I am protesting against. That is what, to me, "size-positive" means. That is what I mean by Fat Acceptance. I am the size I am, and do not need to diet, because I am already doing what my body needs to thrive, and this is the size it settles at when I treat it properly.

But you know, I'm glad the story is being done. I don't know who else he'll talk to for it, and what they'll say, but I'm glad my point of view is in there.

So anyway. Wish me luck, I guess.