never could get the hang of...

You know how sometimes, you sign up for a fic exchange and then you get your request, and then you spend a few days running in circles going, "Oh, God, what am I going to write? What was I thinking?" And then you figure out what you're going to write, and you plot it out...

...And then you kind of check off that mental box and stop thinking about it, even though you haven't actually written anything?

Yeah. Oops.

Other things I am plotting when I am not thinking about my exchange fic (which I am totally going to start! right now! any second!):

( Yeah, about that Man from UNCLE renaissance I'm having... )

Also--having gotten far enough into the fandom on my last pass to be aware of the particular stylistic heritage of Man from UNCLE fic--can anybody rec me some IK/NS? Especially any you know of that may appeal to the, um, modern slash sensibility? I don't think I've read anything in the last four years, and what I did read before I've mostly forgotten, so it's fair game all over again. (Except for that one story where Illya and Napoleon get sucked into some sort of Time Vortex and fall out in Russia in 2001--that one was awesome, does anybody know where that is?)

What did I just say about Thursdays?

My dad is going into abruptly-scheduled (but not emergency in the sense that he did not have a heart attack which precipitated it--they found the blockage during a test) open-heart surgery in about an hour. I'm... at work for the rest of the day, because there's kind of nothing else for me to do right now. I'm currently planning to go home tomorrow. I told my mom to tell him I love him. She didn't want to call and worry me, but somebody told her she should. I am not crying at my desk. I think I maybe embarrassed or worried my boss when I asked for tomorrow off. My dad's birthday is on Tuesday; he'll be sixty-two.

I apologize to anyone who knows my dad and finds out about this from this post; my brothers and sister-in-law know, and if Iulia can't answer her phone she's probably not checking lj, right?

Thoughts, prayers, etc. greatly appreciated.

I can't decide whether to go to archery tonight.

I suppose this could be construed as liveblogging my dad's heart surgery, yes.

Heard from my eldest brother, who got the halfway progress report from the doctors: surgery is textbook, dad is doing great. Things were found not to be maximally bad, though still, you know, bad enough to warrant a quadruple bypass. iuliamentis is on her way to keep me company for the evening; I may make humorously-deployed lemon meringue pie from these lemons and make her watch Man from UNCLE with me.

Thank you, everyone, for the good wishes and hugs and love. I don't have an emoticon for attempting to hug back half the internet at once, but imagine it here if you will. You guys are the best.


I went to the library to distract myself, because, obviously, what do I find most soothing? A small research project. So now I have my very own personally photocopied, uh, copy of the Wimsey Papers (fictional correspondence among members of the Wimsey family and their associates, written by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1939 and 1940 and published weekly in London's Spectator magazine). I also, thanks to the wait for the lovely people in the periodicals department to go dig up a bound volume of magazines from storage (and then also the second wait, for them to go dig up a bound volume of the correct magazine) have a couple of hundred words of the aforementioned exchange fic. Humorously-deployed lemon meringue pie indeed.

and again!

Dad is out of surgery, which went, apparently, just as boringly as could be hoped. \o/