Hi Sparky1! You are no doubt right on the once removed thing. We have bunches of cousins. It gets confusing so they are just cousins.

I have been up for 2 hours but haven't made coffee for myself. I need to get my tired self to the office and down a bunch that someone else has made.

Hi, Laura! I don't have a bunch of cousins (Hi, Sox! There's one!) and my mother only had one, so we always called them what they were - not in a bad way. Besides, I'm a librarian, I like to classify.

My baby is supposed to be sleeping now (my DH told me that's what she does this time of day!) but she's not, and I need to get ready for work. I think she's preparing a diaper for me, instead.

Lots of ~ma to your friend, DJ. It's been nice to see you around here again.

ma~to you friend and her mother , DJ

happy new cousin, shir.

I have twenty cousins-once-removed. (Cork families. Big.) We called them second cousins for ease of distinction between them and the two first cousins. I lost count of how many second cousins I have once it went past forty.

Yay for both the new cousin, and the gay cousin coming out, Shir!

Sushi for lunch. Mmm.

I CAN'T BELIEVE I MISSED THE CONVERSATION ABOUT SF AND ALIENS.

My biggest pet peeve SF trope is when aliens are fascinated by humans and humanity because we're all such beautiful unique snowflakes, or when a problem is unsolvable only until Humanity swoops in and applies our patented Creative ThinkingTM to the situation and saves the day.

If we live in a world where we are only one of several sentient space-faring species, then we ARE NOT THAT FUCKING SPECIAL.

Alastair Reynolds sidesteps the problem quite nicely by having all the aliens extinct by the time humanity takes to the stars, except for one or two really out-there intelligences like the Pattern Jugglers who are basically superintelligent colonies of algae.

The Irish side of my family had very large families a generation back 11/12/13 kids. The cousins are plentiful.

My biggest pet peeve SF trope is when aliens are fascinated by humans and humanity because we're all such beautiful unique snowflakes, or when a problem is unsolvable only until Humanity swoops in and applies our patented Creative ThinkingTM to the situation and saves the day.

But you have just eliminated about 83% of the saves the day storylines! Apparently my love for science fiction hasn't been affected by the @@. So many of my beloved series and movies are filled with oh puhleeeeze moments.

Thanks for the kind thoughts for K, y'all.

Will they be able to reconstruct the damaged parts?

I don't know. I didn't get to talk to her. My phone works for crap in my house, so I had one of our friends (there's like 6 of us) on fb chat while she was on the phone with K relating the conversation, which I was then pasting into a message for another one.

Technology makes worrying about your friends over long distances so much easier!

You know what'll really ruin your morning? Sitting next to a table of racist blowhards at weekly breakfast with hubby.

Ugh, DJ, that sucks.

IOmeN, I've got a wicked upset tummy today. Dunno why, exactly, since I haven't eaten anything that should've done this to me. Hope I'm not getting some form of plague. That would be VERY bad right now.

They seriously pulled out the "Yeah. That's really a place where you don't use (the n-word)."

What? Somewhere people might recognize you for the racist you are?

We've sat next to that table before and while they're usually talking politics of the "They're all bums/waste of my tax dollars/I haven't really thought of the policy implications of this, but it sounds like something Ron White would say/Aren't I pragmatic and clever if only people would listen to my glib one-liners we'd all be better off"-type, this was just head-exploding.

If you have to say that you can't say something because people might think you're a racist? It's because you're racist.