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I really wish stars of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would stop dying. Three now in less than a year and a half, and every one of them younger than me (Anthony Stewart Head was born four months after I was).

When I think of Buffy, my mind automatically goes to the Core Four: Buffy, Giles, Xander, Willow. However, Michelle Trachtenberg was the first to go — the first blow to our memories — which means I have to expand my view of those I consider foundational. If Dawn was one of those, we have to count Cordelia, and then Joyce, and I’d probably have people calling in artillery strikes on me if I tried to leave out Tara.

(And there’s Angel, of course; once he got his own series, I keep forgetting to count him as a Buffy character.)

Even with that expanded list, nearly half of those pivotal actors have died, and Head was the only one who could be considered to have had a normal lifespan. Moreover, though Buffy was the first place I paid him much attention — I remembered the classic Taster’s Choice commercials once reminded of them — he kept appearing in other things, and it was always a treat to see him.

I’ll follow some of the tribute posts I’ve seen listed on Su_Herald here and here, linking to Giles stories of mine in memory of the man who played him.

Starting in 2013, I participated in Summer of Giles every year except 2015, so I’ll go from there.

“Under the Gun” was my first such story. To cross-post with another event I was involved in at the time, I wrote it as a remix. I did my best to showcase Giles’s forceful rationality and underlying ruthlessness, both of which were essentially created by Tony Head’s portrayal.

“Into the Abyss” was almost certainly my best Giles story. I don’t have any problem dedicating it to the man who made the role his own.

“Listen to the Mockingbird”, while not my most recent Summer of Giles fic (that was last year, while this one is from 2023) is, I think, better representative of the character who came to mean so much to us.

Finally, moving outside my own work, “the Mirror Broke (But All My Friends Were Laughing)”, by 23Murasaki, is just plain good enough that I’d hate to leave it out.

We’ll miss you, man. We’ll miss being in a world that contains you.

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Susan and I are finally away from ‘home base’ again: spent a weekend back in Branson, and now we’re in Iola, KS for maybe a month. Susan has family here, and doubtless she’ll find museums or other stuff for us to visit.

She’s currently at 58 pounds lost following her gastric bypass surgery; in fact, she’s barely a pound heavier now than I am, which hasn’t been the case for several years. Unsurprisingly, some of her clothes are too big for her now, but she’s in no rush to buy new ones because she doesn’t know how long she’ll keep losing weight. She thinks she’ll take a try at getting by with stuff from Goodwill till she stabilizes.

Finally, the wife of one of my nephews is due to give birth sometime in the next 2 to 4 weeks. Currently, my brothers and I are tied in number of descendants; I have two children and two grandchildren (4), my younger brother has one daughter and three grandchildren (4), and my youngest brother has three children and one grandchild (4) … but the impending birth will break the tie, and not with me the winner. I like winning … but then, my grandchildren are the most adorable BY FAR, so that counts.

Earlier this week, I was guessed at fifteen years younger than my actual age. (So was Susan.) Even if the guesser was deliberately underestimating, I figure he was trying to stay within the bounds of plausibility, meaning he probably did think I was 7 to 10 years below what the calendar tells me. I’ll mark that as another win.

Hey, we take what we can.

So, our ‘international family’ continues to live up to the designation. Kevin (our son) passed through Turkey the other day on his way to his current location at a conference in Germany; meanwhile, his wife Mei-li — who got laid off from her job after her most recent pregnancy, and promptly landed another one — is in Singapore for something she didn’t specify.

It’s funny; I was nearly 50 years old before I ever set foot outside the U.S. — not even dips across the border into Mexico or Canada, both of which I’ve done since — while my children were both world travelers in their 20s. (My wife had done a mission trip to the Netherlands before we met, and made day-trips into Canada when she lived in Detroit with her mother; aside from that, her most extensive foreign visits came after we were married, most of them both of us together.)

She and I will probably wind up living outside the U.S. (China being the basic default, because that’s where out granddaughters are). We’ll be expats, living among expats and spending most of our time with our expat son and his Chinese family.

Maybe as soon as the end of the year.

Not yet, though. Not quite yet.

While I spend most of my days on internet browsing (political blogs, fanfiction, sometimes online movies), my wife is more inclined to read Kindle and follow various interests on her smartphone.

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(Yes, today’s userpic is chosen for irony.)

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Though Susan’s gastric bypass surgery has been successful overall, a follow-up has been necessary.

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Ironically, her weight loss stalled while the nausea made her almost unable to eat; it’s a careful balance of diet and activity, and she was sidelined for both of those. Now we can get back to what was working so well for the first few months.

Meanwhile, I dropped another five pounds myself. We’ll see how well that continues, as well.

Got these from spikesgirl58, who cites nondenomifan as the source.

• What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?
  Graduated high school in 1972 (meaning attended 60s/70s), took 14 years to complete my undergraduate degree (70s to late 80s), then back for a Master’s mid-90s.
• What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?
  (Sticking to high school for this one): Bellbottoms. I hated bellbottoms while they were happening, never changed my mind. Also not a fan of tie-dye, but some of that can be tolerated in tasteful moderation.
• Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?
  Some, yeah. I rejected the zeitgeist of the Sixties while I was in them, meaning ALL of the ideological music, but there was still more than enough left for pleasant nostalgia.
• What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?
  My hairstyle was — and remains — minimalist: cut it short whenever it grew out enough to be annoying. In my sixties I grew out a ponytail simply because I never had before, but cut it off once I’d made my point and have never been tempted to go back.
• What was/is “the cool thing to do” while in high school/college?
  I was never cool, so I didn’t have much of a clue on that. Smoking pot was, obviously, a big thing, and I aggressively rejected THAT social imperative.

We had another tornado warning last night, spent an hour in the shelter while monitoring weather reports (with all the other people likewise following the same alert, too many of whom brought their damn dogs in with them). The warned tornado, if reports were accurate, passed over — or nearby — without ever touching down anywhere close.

It was 1:00 in the morning before I made it to bed. I didn’t have any trouble getting to sleep, though (I almost never do), but Susan basically didn’t sleep until after a morning medical appointment.

Yeah, yeah, done and gone. But that’s our life these days.