In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone messed up her finger and has to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to do this recap, so expect some typos. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
21. The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
22. Smoking is evil.
23. Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
24. How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
25. Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
26. Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
27. Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
28. Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
29. The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
30. This show caters to the straight female gaze like whoa.
31. Sunnydale General is the worst hospital in the world.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it. WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone has not caught up on her work after vacation. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
21. The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
22. Smoking is evil.
23. Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
24. How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
25. Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
26. Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
27. Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
28. Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
29. The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
30. This show caters to the straight female gaze like whoa.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 

So, you guys know that I rarely make sponsored or commercial posts. When I do, it’s usually because I think you can take something away from the post, even if you don’t necessarily purchase or utilize the product. Or, it’s because I can get free sunglasses and put them on my dog. In any case, when I do a sponsored post I’m always up front about whether or not I’ve been compensated for making the post. In this case, I have not. But when Marianne from Personal Capital contacted me about doing a post on female financial role models, I thought “this is something I probably need to address more in my own life, and I’m sure some of my readers are in the same boat.” So that’s why I’m bringing you this commercial-oriented post today.

After reading a CNBC article wherein she learned that only 53% of women have started planning for retirement (in comparison to 65% of men), Marianne was inspired to reach out to bloggers to ask them, “who is your female financial role model?” And when she reached out to me, I realized that I didn’t really have one. All the women I know are in the same boat I am. The boat is leaky, and full of holes through through which debt swamps us, and all our money gets washed overboard. And depending on your generation, socioeconomic status, level of education, and all kinds of other variables, some boats are More leaky than others.

Such is the case with the woman I decided to profile. Because even though she isn’t necessarily doing better than any of the other women I know, I thought she was a pretty good example. This wonderful friend of mine didn’t want to share her real name when talking about money, and I told her that I would refer to her as Cherie. But I lied. I’m going to refer to her as Professor McGonagall, due to the fact that she is a cat lady.

Professor McGonagall  is a single woman who has recently bought her first house with some help from family. She’s an office manager for a small local business, and she keeps a budget religiously. “I keep a little notebook where I track every transaction, so plus or minus. It’s just like keeping the check register that the bank sends you. I just know how much money I have left for groceries and gas and fun things, after all the bills, because all the bills get paid first,” she says.

Even though her budget structure is fairly simple (“I get paid every week. I have a master list of when everything is due every month. Like, my cable is always on a certain day, or my mortgages on a certain day. And every week, I budget out what’s due. Even though I don’t pay my mortgage every week, I deduct a certain amount from my checking account so it’s like I don’t have the money.”), Professor McGonagall stresses that keeping track of her finances is a priority: “If you live paycheck to paycheck, you know that you have to keep a strict weekly or biweekly budget, because otherwise you’re just going to run out of money.”

When I asked Professor McGonagall how she learned to do this, she answered, “By f–––ing up by not doing it in the first place. It just made sense to me.”

This highlights one of the major problems Gen Xers and Millenials are running into: no one bothered to teach us any of this. Even in economics class in high school, we learned precious little about keeping a household budget, balancing a checkbook, or navigating credit card interest. “I really wish I would have known how credit cards work,” McGonagall  says. “Even in college, I didn’t realize how debt worked. I didn’t realize how interest works. I just wish I could have known how credit worked when I was younger.”

Professor McGonagall isn’t a fan of credit cards. “I feel like they are the devil. But unfortunately, in this economy, you have to have a credit history to get anything. When I wanted to buy my house, I didn’t have any credit cards. The first thing the bank told me was, ‘you have to get a credit card.’ I had to spend  small amounts on it to boost my credit, because no credit is worse than bad credit. So basically, because I didn’t have a car payment or anything else I was doing that wasn’t just bills for utilities or cable or rent or something, I didn’t have that. If you are operating without credit cards or loans of any sort you don’t have a credit history.” She says she would absolutely live a debt-free lifestyle, “If that made sense in the world economy, I would do that.”

Even living on a budget for fifteen years isn’t a guarantee that things will always go smoothly. McGonagall reevaluates her budget every single month. “I feel like, and this just happened to me, I was trying to use a sliding budget instead of a budget every week, and it bit me in the a–– to the tune of I don’t have any money left in savings. So I have to reevaluate every month. Usually I plan on a set amount. I’ll budget a hundred dollars for my electric bill, even if it’s not going to be a hundred dollars. But I already planned on how to cover it if it was higher. And then all that money ends up going to something else that I need.”

I asked Professor McGonagall if she’d put away anything for retirement. “Frankly, I can’t afford to save for retirement. I’m basically, at this point, just making enough to cover my bills and my groceries and my gas. Certainly nothing is going to retirement.”

I feel like universally, women make less than men, and I think that the money they do make is expected to go back into the household. I think that a lot of times women saving for retirement takes a backseat.” Since her answer echoes the statistic that so alarmed Marianne, it seems like we may be seeing a bit of a crisis when Gen Xers reach retirement age. They may find themselves working well past the average age of retirement we expected in years past. More positions occupied by workers who should be moving on to retirement spells trouble for the generation entering the workforce.

So, what’s the solution? Saving money for retirement.

While it’s not possible for everyone, it doesn’t hurt to check into the possibilities. Personal Capital has come up with a retirement calculation app to help you do just that. I believe you have to sign up for a free account on the Personal Capital website to use it. I haven’t used the app myself, so I can’t endorse its services, but if you decide to use it, please share your experiences in the comments. And if you have a female financial role model story of your own, you can share it there, too!

The Baby is available on Amazon and Smashwords TODAY!

When life unravels, someone has to wind it up again. Sophie Scaife has found herself in such a position one time too many. She should be celebrating a new year and bountiful success; instead, she’s trying desperately to hold her world together as it tears apart. 

For Sophie and her husband, billionaire Neil Elwood, coupling the domesticity of marriage and their steamy games of Dominance and submission comes naturally. Rekindling their sinfully kinky affair with an old flame makes their passion burn hotter than ever, and Neil’s lust for Sophie is matched only by his drive in undertaking an ambitious new philanthropic venture. 

But in the wake of Neil’s greatest triumph comes a staggering life change neither of them are prepared for. Overnight, Sophie finds herself in a new reality, wholly unlike the life she’d planned. As emotions run high, Sophie struggles to reconcile the husband she cherishes with a man she no longer knows; a man she loves too much to let go without a fight… 

Content warning: contains mention of suicide and suicidal ideation, as well as recovery. 

Ebook available now at Amazon and Smashwords!*
Paperback available from CreateSpace.**
Available in audio from Tantor Media December 22, 2015.

*(All formats, including .RTF and .HTML are available at Smashwords. Third party retailers such as iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo receive the book from Smashwords and list the title when they receive it.)
**(Paperback available on Amazon and at third party retailers soon.)

WARNING: THE COMMENTS ARE NOT A SPOILER-FREE ZONE.

It’s time for another watch along with Bronwyn Green and Jess Jarman! Our new banner is made by the lovely and talented Isabel, who also made our Merlin Club banner (I’m the sleepy centurion)!

Anyway, this watch-along party is a lot shorter than our previous TV watching club, because are only two seasons of Rome. So enjoy this one while it lasts, and join us on Monday nights at 9 PM EST. This one is only available on Amazon prime or DVD. Sorry about that, but I really wanted Jess and Bronwyn to watch this one, so I can destroy their lives the way I did when I made them watch Game of Thrones.

Quick rundown of the episode: episode one speeds us through the demise of the friendship between Caesar and Pompey. Imagine if Obama and Biden had a falling out, and they started sending each other really passive-aggressive letters, and then Biden tried to steal Obama’s golden eagle, and then Obama cut the head off of Biden’s secretary and sent it to him in a box. That’s kind of how this whole ancient Roman thing goes down. Also, Pompey bangs Caesar’s niece, and then doesn’t marry her. There’s also this whole thing with a horse.

Related to the horse thing, Caesar’s niece, Atia, buys this horse (which is a really nice horse) and sends her teenage son through like, the most dangerous part of Gaul to deliver it to Caesar, just so she can get some brownie points. Octavian (the aforementioned teenager) gets captured by some bad guys. Like you do when you’re a completely unarmed kid just riding a horse through Gaul.

So back to this golden eagle thing. I’m not talking about the Midwest chain of grocery stores, but an actual golden-eagle-on-a-post thing that Caesar really enjoys having. It’s this emblem of his might in Gaul. Or something. Anyway, after Caesar captures Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, he makes the poor defeated dude kiss it, and then somebody steals it. So now someone has to find it.

Those someones are Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. They don’t get along real well. Pullo is a disobedient drunk, and Vorenus is a real uptight military dude. Also, there was this whole thing where Vorenus had Pullo flogged and sentenced to death, which is kind of a sore spot. They go on a buddy cop mission to find the eagle, and in doing so, also find Octavian, and Pompey’s slave who helped steal the eagle in the first place. And then Caesar sends the slave’s decapitated head back to Pompey and writes a letter that’s basically, “hey, I’m bringing the military back and I’m super pissed at you.”

 My favorite part of the episode: When Vorenus and Pullo rescue Octavian, and Octavian furiously bashes in the head of one of his kidnappers over and over and over. It looks a lot like this:

My least favorite part of the episode: the part were poor Octavia have to get all tarted up and paraded in front of Pompey to ultimately be publicly humiliated after he sleeps with her, then marry someone else. I want to protect Octavia at all costs.

Favorite costume:  Mr. Jingle Dick.

Team Atia or Team Servillia: Team Atia, always. Well, not always. But in many episodes. In this one, definitely, because she’s the most interesting.

Favorite watch-a-long tweet:

#LegionXIII pic.twitter.com/ynrBem0wuG

— Jessica Jarman (@jessjarman) November 3, 2015

What hairdo or costume would Bronwyn steal? Servilia’s party hair.

Guess Jess’s head canon. It’s probably way too early to start thinking of head canon, but I have a feeling Jess will be slashing Vorenus and Pullo before too long.

Now go check out Bronwyn’s and Jess’s posts, and join us on Monday at 9 PM EST for season one, episode two, “How Titus Pullo Brought Down The Republic”. Tweet to #LegionXIII to join us!

Hey everybody! We’re a week away from the release of The Baby!  I’m so excited for you to read this book. But so far, I haven’t posted much about it.  I previously released an excerpt (that hadn’t been through proofreading yet, so ignore the typos),  but today, I’m releasing the blurb (or, “back cover copy”, as we old-timers say).

When life unravels, someone has to wind it up again. Sophie Scaife has found herself in such a position one time too many. She should be celebrating a new year and bountiful success; instead, she’s trying desperately to hold her world together as it tears apart.

For Sophie and her husband, billionaire Neil Elwood, coupling the domesticity of marriage and their steamy games of Dominance and submission comes naturally. Rekindling their sinfully kinky affair with an old flame makes their passion burn hotter than ever, and Neil’s lust for Sophie is matched only by his drive in undertaking an ambitious new philanthropic venture.

But in the wake of Neil’s greatest triumph comes a staggering life change neither of them are prepared for. Overnight, Sophie finds herself in a new reality, wholly unlike the life she’d planned. As emotions run high, Sophie struggles to reconcile the husband she cherishes with a man she no longer knows; a man she loves too much to let go without a fight…

Content warning: contains mention of suicide and suicidal ideation, as well as recovery.

The Baby will be available at Amazon, Smashwords on November 10, and all other retailers as they make it available. If you read on Nook, Kobo or the iBooks platform,  those formats are always available from Smashwords, as is the option to read directly on the Smashwords site. The paperback edition will follow.

One thing I beg of you is to avoid spoilers for this book, and to avoid spoiling it for others. There is been a lot of speculation with regards to the title, and  and I’m sure there will be even more speculation with the release of this blurb. It would be awesome if you tag spoilers on social media for this one, and I would really appreciate it.

Since it’s Halloween, the internet is full of more scary stories than usual. At this time of year, people love to recount their tales of spooky encounters they’ve had, but you rarely hear stories of haunted houses that are positive.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned it on the blog, but I grew up in a haunted house.

When I was born, my mother and I live with my grandparents. Parts of the house we lived in were rumored to be two hundred years old; once during construction on the oldest room in the house (the dining room, which had been a single room cabin), my great-grandfather found a bottle of whiskey with the date 1773 molded into the glass. other parts of the house had been added on over the years, and for most of those my family owned it.

If I’m remembering correctly, the first generation of my family to live there was my great-great-great-grandmother, one Mrs. Euphemia Putman Pickles, famously arrested (well, famously in my family) for engaging in a “fisticuffs altercation” with a Mrs. Knickerbocker over some allegedly stolen hay. As far as I’m aware, she’s not one of the ghosts in the house. I guess she could be, but no one’s ever found themselves on the wrong end of the spectral punch, so I doubt it.

The house is located two miles outside of the very rural town where I still live. For many years, there was an undertaker here, but not a funeral home (there is one now; the family who used to own it gave out full-sized candy bars on Halloween and commended us for our bravery, as they didn’t get many trick-or-treaters). The nearest hospital is twenty miles away, a nearly insurmountable distance before the advent of cars In the early twentieth century. Our little farming community did see the addition of a small hospital (it is now closed), due to a flux of tourism relating to our many pristine lakes and the fact that we were a stop on the now defunct Chicago, Kalamazoo & Saginaw Railroad. The point of me telling you all this is to help explain that for a very long time, people in this community lived in their homes, died in their homes, and were prepared to go to their final rest in their homes.

One such unfortunate soul was my grandmother’s little brother, Tony. During a typhoid outbreak in the 1940s, he contracted the sickness at seven years old. He died on a cot in front of the window where my grandma now keeps her phone. When he was alive, he used to wake up his parents by running into their room, putting his hands on their bed, and kicking his feet up against the wall. That still happens; small handprints on the bed in the same bedroom push into the mattress, and kicking rattles the wall. Tony has also been seen walking around the house by various family members. I believe I’ve seen him once, though I mistook him for my son (who very much resembles him) until I remembered that my son wasn’t with me.

Another family member who’s been spotted is my great-great-grandfather. He’s been seen standing at the top of the stairs. I remember that every night, reliably, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. It wasn’t the creaking and groaning of an old house (when you live in a very old house, those fade into background noise you barely notice anymore), but the sound of a person coming down at a normal pace with weight on each step, exactly as it sounded whenever anyone came down.

When he died, his casket sat in the bay window in the living room, where the Christmas tree goes now. My great uncle was very young at the time, and was found sitting in the coffin with his grandfather, combing his hair. This is a cherished memory in my family, and spoken of fondly.

I swear we are not the Addams family, though I do wish they were somewhat distant relatives.

Another dearly departed family member who prefers to hang around is my great-great-grandmother, who died in the room that later became my bedroom. She loved children, my mother, especially, as she was a toddler during the years that my great-great-grandmother was bedridden, and would run into her bedroom every morning to greet her. When I was a child, I never had a creepy feeling in that room, though as I got older I became inexplicably freaked out by it.

A few months after my son was born, we stayed the night at my grandparent’s house, in my great-great-grandmother’s room. We put our son in a crib at the end of the bed and, because the room could get cold at night, hung a blanket over the end of the crib in case we needed it for him in the night. Sometime in the night, I woke to find my son lying perfectly centered in the crib, the blanket not only folded over his chest, but under his little arms and tucked into the sides of the mattress. The next morning, I asked my grandparents if they’d tucked him in during the night. My grandmother hadn’t gotten up in the night, and my grandfather said that while he got up to get a snack, he didn’t go near the room for fear of waking the baby. My grandmother’s explanation? “It must have been my grandma. There never was a baby warm enough for that woman.”

And that was the matter of fact attitude with which my entire family approaches the house. We all know it’s haunted, we’ve all seen and experienced things there, and it’s no big deal. Though one of my cousins is terrified of the place, and my aunts agreed that I was nuts for staying there alone when I was a teenager, the house doesn’t bother me. I’ve always liked the way it feels like you’re not alone. Being in a non-haunted house is lonely when no one else is there, but you can be the only living soul in my grandma’s house and still feel like it’s a busy house with lots of people in it.

The most recent person to pass away in the house was my grandfather, several years ago. While I haven’t seen him in the house, I do one day hope to. And I hope the house stays in the family for many more years to come. I’d hate to think of our departed loved ones trapped in some Beetlejuice-style scenario with people who don’t appreciate them.