Halloween

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, mostly because it's one of the only days of the year that it's socially acceptable, nay, even encouraged to cosplay er, dress up. For the last 10+ years, I've dressed up every time. Except for the one right after I'd given birth to Katie. Because C-sections and costumes don't go very well together. I mean, I was lucky if I was able to wear clothes at that point. And I was still too exhausted to figure a costume out.

Ares, Venus, Hermes, and.....Cinderella

Well, this year we've been in the wake of moving, and yes, I know it's been 5 months that we've been in our house here, but there's been never ending stuff to do. So I did what any self respecting Megan would do, and lied out my butt about a costume. We went to our church halloween party, which is one of our favorite events every year. I wore clothes. Regular ones. And then told everyone that I was a nudist on strike (thanks, pinterest). The kids got SO MUCH CANDY. The thing about our ward party is that they do a trunk or treat. Everyone brings way more candy than is necessary, and the kids usually make at least 3 rounds of the parking lot. We had some kids come by our car at least 8 times. So with our three kids, we came home with far more candy than we brought. Seriously, we scored. Skor-ed? I don't know if we actually got any of those....

Red Riding Hood and the Huntsman, holding Peter Pan and Tinkerbell

Anyway, so the actual day of Halloween comes around (the church party is usually the friday or saturday before), and Eliana comes down with a fever. And Liam is convinced that he is dying because his hip hurts. I have no idea what he did to it, and it looked fine on visual inspection. He insists that it didn't get bumped or anything, it just hurts for no reason. Katie is grouchy and wants to be sick because Eli is. So we cancelled our plans to do a little party with a friend, and planned on just staying in. Well, of course, once the trick-or-treaters start making the rounds, all the kids insist that they want to go trick or treating. So Brian and I rounded up the crew, told them all the get costumed, and leashed the dog.

Black Canary and Green Arrow, accompanied by Supergirl, Cinderella, and a Pirate

Pokemon Trainers with an adorable Charmander

 Now, part of the annual tradition of my children is that they use a different costume for every Halloween activity. So for the church party Eliana was a witch, Liam was spider-man, Katie was Princess Sofia the First, and Brian and I were lame parents. Well, I was a nudist on strike, so maybe just Brian was lame. On Halloween itself, Katie and Liam had decided in unison that they wanted to be dragons, and luckily we had a dragon costume and an alligator or dinosaur or something.....Katie decided that it was also a dragon. I figure it had scales and a tail, so whatever. When it came time to suit up and get going, Eliana grabbed the Charmander costume that I made last year for Katie. Which is hilarious, because Katie swims in it, and on Eliana the legs end halfway down her calves. They then ganged up on me. My mom got me a dragon onesie pajama for Christmas last year, and the kids insisted that they needed a momma dragon to go with their baby dragon costumes. So we had 4 dragons (some of which may or may not have been ill. Probably a good thing they weren't actually dragons, can you imagine them sneezing fire and immolating the neighbors and their candy?). Brian decided to join in on the fun and put on his Batman onesie pajama (my Mom again). So this year? We were 4 dragons and the (dark) Knight. Didn't manage to take any pictures, but I'll share a fun one of  Liam and Katie putting their pajamas on badly.

My children clearly don't know which clothes belong to which kid.

Ranting prevents murder, y'all.

Living in the big city is hard. I know that there are all sorts of people who absolutely love living in big cities, but I just have to say, I am not one of them. The street and traffic signs are covered in muck, making it hard to read them (I'm assuming it's smog settling on them. I'm pretty sure I'm not going blind). At night they are even harder to read, which granted, is the time of day when I think I might be going blind, but then I remind myself that light is required for vision, and I'm not a freaking elf with lowlight vision, no matter how often I play one in d&d.
There are so many PEOPLE here. Which is rather like, duh, you're in a major population center, so yeah, that's what makes a city a city. With how many people there are though, it makes it so there's lots of other things. Like targets. I'm pretty sure we have at least 10 targets in the 5 miles surrounding my house. It's weird. Because you can be driving to a friends house, and if you want to make sure they don't need you to pick anything up for them you can probably call them about a million times. "Hey buddy, I'm passing a grocery store, you need me to pick anything up on my way over?" My Ann Arbor bestie, Bre, would frequently ask me if I needed her to pick anything up from the local grocery when she was coming over to my house. Especially on days that she was coming to rescue me from my own depression and anxiety. And lack of milk or bread. Lifesaving, let me tell you. Of course, the drive between our houses was something between 30 and 45 minutes, depending on traffic (hahahaha, I used to think Ann Arbor had traffic), and to get the same distance here in LA takes 2-3 times as long, minimum. It's painful. Excruciatingly so.
Which leads me to one of the things I utterly despise. With lots of people come lots of cars. Traffic. Is. A. Thing. There's never not traffic. Ever. Not even the middle of the night, given how often I hear brakes screeching and honking at midnight or later. And we aren't even on a main road. I hate it. I hate watching it, and I especially hate driving in it. You know how people talk about California drivers being terrible? I thought it was a bit of a joke, or at least played up a lot. It's not. I have never seen consistently worse drivers. I mean, yeah, Michiganders have a bit of a problem with making sure that they're completely in the turn lane when trying to go left, and sometimes you worry you're cutting it a bit close going past them, but here they have bad driving down to an art. I assume that people here think that traffic laws are a suggestion, not a rule. Running red lights is assumed. I won't even go at a green light until I'm visually sure that the drivers on the cross street are done running the reds. No one uses their blinkers. Not for turning, not for merging, hell, I'm starting to wonder if most of them even know what a blinker is. When I use my blinker to merge, half the time or more the person in the next lane will speed up just to block me. And then slow down so that I can't get behind them either. They take aggressive driving to the next level. I'm honestly surprised that I haven't been in an accident. One of the first things my brother told me when I moved out here (he lives on the other side of this megacity, about an hour away in good traffic) was to get a dash-cam. Because if you do end up in an accident, half the time the person will do all they can to leave without exchanging details, especially if they were at fault. And yes, this had happened to him already. He's lived here about a year longer than me, I think. Thinking about it, I probably should get a dash cam.
Brian was heading to work yesterday, and he takes the bus. He's responsible, and doing what he can to not add to the massive amount of traffic on the roads. Well, that and we can't afford a second car, but hey, responsibility works too, right? Anyway, we live about 15 miles from his work. Which really isn't that far. You'd think, oh, so about 20-30 minutes to drive. And you'd be right, if we lived anywhere else. Even taking the bus it would only be about 45 mins in most places. On a good day, his bus ride is between an hour and fifteen and an hour and a half. Yesterday, we had rain.
Now, I'm not talking about a lot of rain. I'm talking about angels blowing raspberries and the spit mist being called rain. I'm honestly not sure that anything even hit the ground. Around here, that is a big deal. It's rained twice. In 5 months. Los Angelenos don't know how to deal with rain. It took him more than two hours to get to work. There weren't accidents slowing down traffic, there weren't more cars than normal, the only difference was the tiny sprinkle of rain. I'm assuming that it's the same people who don't use their blinkers. Because the blinkers and the windshield wipers are frequently on the same little stick near the steering wheel.

It's this one friends. It's this one.

I'm terrible at blogging

So, apparently it's been like three years since I actually wrote anything on here. Not that it's unsurprising, because if there's one thing that I'm really good at, it's starting things, and never finishing them. One great example of this is a baby quilt that I started sewing when I was 17. That's 13 years and three kids ago. And it's still not done. Also, I might have finally given up and gotten rid of it. I'm not really sure. I got rid of a lot of stuff recently. Because of moving across the country.

Anyway, we moved! So now I'm living in the greater LA area. Because technically I'm not really sure what city I live in. Because we're inside the city limits for Los Angeles, but our address is in Reseda. Which used to be a separate city. Maybe still is? I feel like it's like being an organ in someone's body. Like, whatever little molecule hangs out in the liver, but you wouldn't usually distinguish what it belongs to as being in the liver, you'd just say it's in your body. Unless California is the body in this question, Los Angeles is the digestive system, and Reseda is the liver. I have no idea where I'm going with this. Other than that I'm confused about this whole "Big City" thing. Is Reseda a neighborhood? Or it's own city? I don't even know. Because I mean, how do you deal with big amoeba cities eating smaller cities? It's weird. Not to mention the fact that I really don't even understand why anyone actually chooses to live in this big of an urban population center. I mean, we moved here because Brian got a job at UCLA, but of all the places that we could pick, city would never be my first choice.

There are some great perks though. I got rid of all our snow scrapers. And snow shovels. And snow pants. I kept a sled though. I hear that those are good for dragging things along at the beach. Let me tell you, tires don't work super well on sand. I tried that once. ONCE. It was a bad decision.

Anyway, it's warm here pretty much all year. The locals might disagree, but if it's only below freezing a couple times a year, and then only at night, it's warm. And I can garden year round. I am counting the warm and year round gardening as enough of a bonus to get over the preference for not being in the city. Oh, and did I mention that the beach is less than an hour away?

Creation, Salvation, Exaltation

There's been a big stir recently about the Ordain Women group. Those in the group say that it is a matter of human rights and equality, while leaders in the LDS church say that it is about doctrine. Unfortunately for everyone, the church is highly unlikely to change due to outside pressure, as evidenced by the recent excommunication of Kate Kelly. But on the other hand, leadership saying that it's just how it is and to stop complaining about it isn't really going to win any fans either. Even if it's God who said that it's the way it's going to be.

A few years ago, I was on the same page as these many members who didn't understand why women didn't have the priesthood, and I was on the verge of leaving the church that I was raised in and love because of it. Many conversations and prayers accompanied these feelings. I felt as though if I wasn't good enough to hold the priesthood, then I was nothing. The thing is, though, it's not about whether I'm good enough. I am. Worthiness for something doesn't automatically grant that thing to you. And it doesn't mean that you necessarily should have it, either.

One night as Brian and I were talking about it, he asked me to just keep going to church and doing the things that were expected of me for the sake of our family. And I agreed. On one condition: that if I kept doing what I was supposed to do, that God would teach me why women don't hold the priesthood, and what my worth was if the idea of equal but different really was true. And so a bargain was struck. I didn't think asking God to answer my questions on the subject was out of line if He still wanted me to keep doing the whole mormon thing.

And over the next two years, God taught me what I wanted to know.

Know that these are the answers that were given to me for my situation, and while I firmly believe that they are absolute truth, until someone over the pulpit at General Conference (or in a First Presidency letter) says them as bluntly as this, please don't take it as absolute doctrine. Pray about it. If it's a truth for you to know, God will tell you. I just want to share this in a spirit of love and an explanation of my feelings on the matter, because it's been on my mind a lot.

If you are a member of the LDS church, or if you've ever taken the missionary lessons, you're probably familiar with a little thing called the Plan of Salvation. I'm absolutely in love with the Plan. It's one of my most favorite things about our doctrine. It outlines more or less where we came from, why we are here, and what will happen after we die. Now, every single one of us is firmly in the why am I here stage of things. It's a little thing called mortality. And if you're only thinking of this life as you know it, you might look around at the church and say that it just isn't fair. And it may not be. And for some folks, the explanation that it's just how it is is enough.

For others it isn't though. I'd like to talk to them. And even if you don't agree by the time I'm done, at least we might understand each other a little better.

Basically what it boils down to is this: the job of priesthood is to prepare God's children to receive Salvation. That's what all the ordinances that our men administer to are for. And the church is organized to make sure that the men whose job that is are in charge of making sure that it gets done properly. Are there places where a calling could be given to either gender that is currently only held by men? There may be those callings, but it sure as anything isn't callings like being a bishop.

Now here is where we are going to get into a little bit of the speculation. I don't want to have to list everything that I've read and studied to get to this point, though if there's enough demand I could do so later.

Women are told over and over in the church that the most important job that they can have is to be a mother. And some women feel that isn't good enough. I would have to politely disagree with them. Sure, it's wearying, tiresome, and mostly thankless work, but what is forgotten is that there is an entire act before mortality. The premortal life. We've been told that we prepared there and had to qualify to receive the great gift of a body. Mortality is something that we had to make covenants to achieve. And along with covenants here in mortality there are ordinances required. Why should it have been any different before? And all ordinances have one thing in common: Blood, water, and the Spirit. Baptism and confirmation? Has them represented. Sacrament? Listen to the prayers, all three are also there. The Atonement, which is one of the greatest ordinances that ever happened has all three in spades. And you know what else has those three important things? Birth.

I see birth as being the crowning ordinance of women's work. Priestess-hood, if you will. It is absolutely requisite for our progression, there is sacrifice involved in exchange for the promise of later blessings, and most importantly, a Veil must be passed through to attain it. Some of my personal spiritual experiences have led me to believe that women guide and administrate the work required to organize spirits coming down here. The same way that men do so here to organize those things required to pass through a second veil to attain Salvation. And anyone familiar with the doctrine of Temple Marriage will recognize that Exaltation can only be achieved by a man and a woman bound together through the power of God. Both of whom are equal in His sight.

I know that God lives. That we have both a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother who deeply love their children. That through a relationship with them, we can learn about who we can become. I know that we have a Savior, Jesus Christ, and that He loves us and will help us as we strive to become better than we are. That is my testimony.

I don't feel as though I must be less anymore for not being allowed the priesthood. I've come to realize that my brother having a gift that I don't does not in any way make my gifts less important. Nor does it make me less important in the sight of God. Mine is the power of Creation. His is the power of Salvation. And ours together is the work of Exaltation.

Lost things

Best buddies

I was vacuuming the house the other day. It was a miracle, believe me. It needs to happen more often than it does, but that is beside the point. Whilst I was doing this most mundane of chores, an oft treasured memory flitted into the front of my mind.

This memory heavily involves my brother Alan. When we were small children, Alan and I were the best of friends. Nigh on inseparable, you might say. And also needless to say, we were frequently known to borrow each others' things.

It looked exactly like this.

Now, it happened that one day my darling brother borrowed a ring of mine, because quite obviously, it was a magic ring. Now, this ring was very dear to me due to it's origins. My Grandma Lin had a gorgeous amethyst ring that she always wore, and as most little girls would be, I was fascinated by it. It was beautiful, all soft purple and sparkling. My Grandpa had given it to her, if my memory serves me correctly, and I asked him if one day he would get me a beautiful ring like hers. He told me that he would see what he could do, and the next time that he visited, he brought me a beautiful ruby ring. My grandparents had moved houses and found it in their new home, and thought it would be a good gift for a little girl who had asked so pleasantly for something sparkly. And thus, I had a magnificent and magical red ruby ring. One that was utterly irresistible for any little fingers that could find it.

It was this ring that Alan borrowed on that day. And when I came looking for it, the ring had been tragically misplaced. Lost. Hopelessly. After searching with all of my little schoolgirl might, I went to bed bereft. I thought about this ring for years, and would occasionally look for it, hoping against hope that it might turn up.

Someone's treasure chest key too? Bint.

And as I ran the vacuum in my daughter's room, and sucked up something large enough to ping in the vacuum but small enough that I hadn't seen it, I finally realized what had likely happened to that ring. Chances are good that my mom vacuumed it up. And it took my twenty years to realize this. Don't judge, I was expecting it to show back up. It was magical, after all. The only other option is that it went to were all lost things are: Pixie Hollow. And that damned Tinkerbell refuses to give it back.

Deadpool is a Disney Princess

See? Disney Princess. Sort of.

So Brian and I were having an awesome conversation the other night about Disney characters. We were talking about the fact that Olaf's song in Frozen completely takes the characters out of the story and breaks the fourth wall just a little bit. You know the part, where Christoff and Anna are sitting on the picnic blanket and staring around them with the "WTF is going on" look on their faces. You know, it's funny when they start becoming self aware. As we continued along Brian asked me if I could name any Disney characters that would completely break the fourth wall.

Megan: Deadpool.

Brian: Deadpool isn't Disney.

Megan: Yes he is! He's Marvel, and Disney owns Marvel. So that makes Deadpool my favorite Disney Princess.

Brian: Meg, Disney doesn't own Deadpool. Fox does.

Megan: Noooo!! That's just not fair. They don't love him like I do!

Brian: You haven't even read the comics. How do you love him most?

Megan: Because tacos. We're obviously soulmates. And I refuse to believe that he isn't a Disney princess. Don't ruin this for me!

Deadpool is a fangirl too.

Brian:.....

Brian:....Whatever. I love you. But you're crazy.

Megan: Bang. Bang, bang!


He might have a point. But I'll never tell him that. And I don't have to have read all the comics, I just have to like and want to learn more. And here's a really well put together argument for that:

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2014/06/06/fake-geek-girls-fiction-or-reality-video/

Go have a look. It's awesome.


And my Deadpool board on pinterest.

Getting married doesn't mean you can't be a crazy cat lady...

Believe me, I know, because somehow I've managed it. As of last month, we have 4 cats. Despite Brian saying that we were maxed out at two the summer that we got our own house and were no longer accountable to a landlord for our pet situation. Mind, our last landlord let me keep 2 chickens in the backyard, so I'm certainly not complaining.

Gratuitous chickens

So theoretically we were done with acquiring cats. Until there was an adorable stray kitten (I say adorable, most people would describe it as hell-cat, because he certainly wasn't tame) and I wanted, nay, NEEDED, to rescue him. And that is how Bellatrix became cat number 3. And then Brian said that we were definitely done, and that I couldn't have more cats until we had acreage. And a barn for them to live in. But he warmed up to Bella quickly, because we'd been having a little trouble with mice until we took him in. The biggest advantage of taking in a stray is that they have to learn to hunt, or they starve. Our mouse problem stopped within a week, and Brian accepted him as a contributing member of the family.

Now, I knew Brian didn't want any more cats. And I was pretty sure that I was good with that. Part of the reason that Bella got to stay was that he and Romi got along really well, and Tink (Brian's cat), hated everyone (including Romi), but him. Romi wanted and needed a friend. And things went well, until Bella caught up to Romi in size and still wanted to play ferociously. Romi is a great big fatty and loves nothing more than laziness. So Bella wasn't getting as much play as he wanted or needed.

And then I saw a sign that said "free kittens" the week after my birthday. I convinced Brian that we should just go look at them. He knew the look in my eye,

Kitten is cute. Want her, friend?

and said that we were not getting another cat. But he knew that if he let me look, we would probably come home with one. And he took me to look. And we came home with a kitten. The first couple days the other cats were rather displeased with their pets for having brought another master into their house. They didn't like sharing, you see. So I told Brian that if he wanted to we could take the kitten back. I had made sure that they had a return policy if it was needed for any reason. And Brian tried. They weren't home. So he asked one of our friends who adores cats if he wanted the adorable little girl. Our friend's spouse said no. So Brian tried again to take the kitten back. Still not home.

At this point, we were having to leave town the next day to visit friends. So I gave the kitten and Bella baths so that they would smell relatively the same, Brian tried once more to return the kitten, to no avail, and we locked the kitten (who Brian refused to let us give a name, as once you name it you can't get rid of it) into the children's bathroom for while we were gone. Mostly because I didn't want to come home to kitten shredded all over the house. Which probably wouldn't actually happen. Probably. And we left for two and a half days.

Seriously woman, we were sleeping!

When we got back, I let the kitten out of the bathroom. And she and Bella started acting as though they had always been best friends. They had played pawsies under the door the entire time we were gone, it seemed. Bella was mad at me for leaving him for a few days, but he liked the new pet that I had gotten him, so the three days of him hissing at me for leaving were worth it.

Jealous Tink

And today, I triumphed. Brian has accepted the kitten. Well, he accepted her a while ago. We gave her a name when we got back from vacation. She's now officially Lady Sif. From Thor. Because we're nerds. But today, it was known as true that Brian was glad we had her. Because Bella needed another playmate, and Romi needed someone else to groom.

And Tink still hates everyone.