My sister, SC, has invited me to dinner with the kidlets and her tonight; she's even buying with a gift certificate.

This could go so wrong on so many levels, but I think the key for me will be to be cool and non-specific. And to pay lots of attention to my niece and nephew, who I finally met a couple weekends ago.

Ah hell, I might as just tell y'all about that now while I'm here, right? I got a second before I jump in the shower and get down to the guvmint complex for some more investigative work.

Yeah, so anyway, a couple weekends ago, I'd gotten my nephew, who turned 6 just this past weekend, his birthday presents and was all set to either mail them or give them to BFKAS to get to the young sprout when BFKAS calls me and tells me she's going to this fundraiser in her town with some friends -- do I just want to meet her there? Well, all right, I said, so I went and couldn't find her or her friends (not that I knew what her friends looked like, anyway), so I called her and was like, "Hi! I'm here and you're not." She laughed and said that she decided not to go because SC and the kidlets were there (which I knew they were supposed to be in), so I told her that I had the gift, and she said come on over.

Let me start by saying that the kids are JUST BEAUTIFUL and have now commanded every last discretionary dollar I have for things like this, which my nephew is SO GETTING. Well-behaved, sweet, articulate, just like kids are supposed to be. My sister, on the other hand? You could feel the drop in her demeanor the minute I walked in the door, you could say. I mean, she could've been tired from the drive, sure, and it wasn't like she was ignoring me or anything, but ... you could just tell there was something hanging there in the ether, plus a couple questions she asked me about certain things were put in a way that you could tell it was meant to sting. But whatever. Prior to this, though, she and I had been e-mailing, and at one point she said that we need to sit down and talk about our stuff and how we're going to proceed, and I agreed but said that I wasn't ready to go there just yet and that if I was going to end up getting the ass end of everything, there wasn't going to be a conversation at ALL, because there just won't be.

So, is this a trick to get me somewhere to talk, or is it an opportunity to put another pleasant experience behind us so that when we DO eventually talk, we won't want to kill each other? We're going to find out, because I'm meeting her at 4:30.