Belated Birthday Loot

My local family and I finally got to see each other. It was a struggle, fraught with incompatible schedules and capped with some horrible miscommunication yesterday that meant that my sister & I each waited around for hours wondering when the other person would arrive.

The best gift is having some time with my sister and my nieces. (My brother-in-law was at work, still.) But I also got loot! I'm very much looking forward to cooking with my new kitchen equipment! It's a small, red dutch oven: exactly what I have been wanting but not wanting to shell out the cash for. My younger niece made me a candy bar necklace. I've actually really wanted one of those, but it's a thing below my age group, normally. Candy bar necklaces weren't "invented" when I was a school kid. So, as silly as it sounds, that was a really super gift.

In another act of almost-made-me-cry, my not very technically minded sister scanned, resized, printed and framed a copy of our family coat of arms (Borja). When she and my eldest brother went to Spain, they brought back a gilded copy of our coat of arms. Because I'm using Borja as my pen name, she wanted me to have it, but since it is large, she made me an apartment sized one. {wibbles}

Start with the ending...

...and then find that my ending is not the ending.

I'll accept it.

I had a lot of ending. I had the climactic scene and some wrap up. But it's been soooo long, and this is one of the stories that I have thought about sooo much, that once I caught up to the "ending," I found that there was still more to say. And then the "more to say" needed to be a conclusion. That's what I'm doing now. The ending scenes are not written for a lot of other things. I'm definitely going to be doing this. I don't mean a summary or sketch of the big ending, but all the important, thrilling, heartbreaking, and/or heartwarming pieces.