Uff da

I'm back from showing off the domestic partner this weekend at the every-other-summer reunion on the family farm in northeast Iowa. The farm was first settled by my Norwegian immigrant ancestors during the Civil War, and legend has it that they arrived too late in the summer that first year to get any kind of house built, so they dug a cave and lived there–even going so far as to give birth to my great grandfather in that cave in the middle of their first Iowa winter in their effort to set the Norwegian-martyr-card bar impossibly high from the get-go. Ever since I first heard that story, whenever I feel like the world is out to get me I remind myself that I'm not giving birth in a freaking cave in the middle of nowhere in a harsh Iowa winter. And then I feel a little better about myself. But just a little.

I thought I had a lock on minority show-and-tell this year by bringing my gay used-to-be-Catholic domestic partner to our hetero-Norwegian-Lutheran family reunion, but my jealous cousin had to trump me by bringing a black foster child. My domestic partner is pretty cute, but he just can't compete with an adorable black kid. Though the kid was only a few months old, so the domestic partner totally beat him in the math competition. Babies are stupid.

But we just drove six hours home on nothing but Diet Pepsi and Taco Bell, and I need my recovery sleep. I have only two years to think of a way to trump my cousin, so I have to get to planning and scheming bright and early tomorrow.