New stash

My boyfriend Adam Rex* is growing a mustache for charity - get over there and give the man money. Don't do it for the kids, do it for me. I want to see the mustache.

I don't have any money, but I grew my own mustache in solidarity.









I expect this is a fairly accurate depiction as to the outcome of Adam Rex's 'stash.

*shhh don't tell his wife. Or my other boyfriends; Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Seth Green, that guy from Top Chef with one testicle, etc. Or their wives. Just give him the money and shut up!

Did someone say tropical knitwear?

I have begun making hats for the trip to New York. Which is in February. Did I mention it is in February? Because it is.


ok, this one is a santa hat, but it is a hat nonetheless.

I would rather be vacationing in New Zealand, but hey, at least there will be the Bagel Train.

At the grocery store, I stood behind a man who was declaring his birthday to be on Thanksgiving this year. "Me, too!" I chirped. "I don't think you're turning 58, are you?" Tactful gent."No, but I get to turn 30." The cashier leaned forward to hear over the beeping foodstuffs, "23?" I almost kissed her.

Am not exceptionally interesting tonight, but I do have new underpants and a bag of discount Lindt halloween truffles. High living.

Holly's Harpy Hobby

I have name ribbons! Now I can label things I have made. Like tropical knitwear. And my offspring.

Hunting the wild banana

Get out of my head, the Killers!




Fruitricide

"They're looking at me. Just hanging there, all yellow and smug."
"That's it. Get me the mormon-lady knife."

Banana-hance action:


The jungle fell silent as the man disappeared into the foliage. WHACK! Crash. The tree disappeared. The cats leaped onto their tippy-toes. The boy hooted in triumph. The man hacked the stump down for good measure, and sauntered up with his dripping trophy.



Rejoice, for there will be food this winter!

In other news

Am despairing for lack of productivity time. Have a whole bag of plastic eyeballs and noses and no monstrous stuffies to show for it. Stash full of Anna Maria Horner fabric and no sewn objects to stroke lovingly. Evenings consumed by hunching over coffee-table computer desk and painting on wacom tablet while swigging down pain killers for the backaches. Considering trading in birthday "augh I'm 30!" makeover for a proper workstation. Will have scary-white teeth, at least; received dubious envelope labeled "discount razor blades" in the mail, wondered if I had maybe overdone it with the turn-of-the-decade angst, and opened it up to find a loose pile of Crest whitening strips. Yay, ebay!

Halloween 2009

Another magical holiday comes to a close.

At dusk, we arrived in town, pulled the tots from the car, jammed the baby's hat back on his head, and Mike dropped his pants and donned elf trousers in the parking lot behind the hotel laundry. Mr. Ferrell he was not; he had accidentally sewed the wrong parts of the legs together, had a mishap with the hat band, and didn't manage to get any buttons on the jacket, but it was dark and his bits were all covered, so we counted it a success. (Though he did almost get chucked out a window for seaming the pants with my special metallic gold quilting thread.)




Our cohorts arrived, and the children took off ahead of us as we trekked into the subdivision. The entire town turned out for the festivities, the school kids giving me the hairy eyeball for appearing without my librarian disguise and skirting warily around the man-elf. Leif was unconvinced about the trick-or-treat bit, but dug around in his bucket with satisfaction and temporarily forgot to rip the hat off and beat us around the face with it. The streets were crowded with princesses, super heroes, and adults with beer holsters. We trailed the kiddos up the two streets and back down them again, finished all too soon and bunching back into the cars to go home and roll in the candy. Thems the breaks in a small town.

I went over the pictures to see if my lazy Twilight vampire sparkles had shown up, and saw that Mike had taken a bunch of pictures of some tart in a wig. Realized it was me.



I suppose Sandra Lee is about as scary as sparkly vampires. Oh well.




Not as fun as a night at my mom's house, but better than the year in the California condo going door-to-door to sex predators and drunk college kids. The first kid is the practice one anyway; we should get it right by the time the second one cements permanent memories.

Severed head

Found self with an entire day to squander. While the man and the infink took to town for provisions, the boy and I took out all our choking hazards and luxuriated in a day of recharging our inner whatsits. For Gavin, this meant spreading himself on the floor amidst every lego he owns, and for me this meant breaking my thumbs against a lump of 2-year-old super sculpey.

I made this little guy as reference for my new book project:





Cookies were made to call in the beginning of the holidays; I have not yet started tippling rum and eggnog while crooning "Baby it's Cold Outside" when nobody is looking, but it isn't far off now.

Disaster house!

First off, my cat is a lunatic. And she thinks she is a dog.




Secondly, brownie is not a proper medium for [haunted] gingerbread house construction.





[Note to Yuri: no, the baby was not allowed to eat the candy corn. Your candy-corn-of-death nursing school story scarred me for life.]

Halloween limps toward us. The costumes for the little 'uns are bought and sewed, the big people fuss lazily. I gave up on the elf costume, so the man has been bending over the sewing machine whilst I drink booze. "I will go as all the members of OK Go, and wear a vest and break into dance when people ask what I am." "Nobody will know what you're talking about." "Well you could do it with me, and we could do slo-mo choreographed fighting." "I am an elf." "Elfs dance." "Not so much."


Well what is this, then? I win.


Doom strummeth

I felt moody at the library today. An elderly gent asked for something on writing nonprofit policy, so I walked him over to the legal books. He frowned at the first ones I handed him. "These are all written by women. I guess women are lawyers more and more nowadays. I don't think it's right. Women didn't used to try to work in men's fields. But it's ok," he said, casting me a consoling look, "I don't have many years left. I don't have to see it much longer." I carefully shelved the NOLO tome I was holding, and managed not to hasten his departure.

Stomped upstairs in the dark after work, and stopped when I heard the strum of a guitar, feeling an unexpected surge of anger. Shook it off, baffled by my reaction. Stomp stomp stomp up the stairs in my boots - strum. I stopped again, looked around, inexplicably pissed off. The moon cast silent shadows, the neighbor's windows were dark. Stomp stomp stomp across the lanai to the door - no guitar. But what was this? The house smelled like Krispy Kreme. Mike came trotting from the bedroom, having successfully laid the infink to bed, and stripped off his shirt and pulled homemade bread from the oven. Wooarr.



This is why I keep the man around.

The mystery of the phantom Guitar of Anger remains.

really gross DO NOT READ

My co-worker recently told this heartwarming tale: many years ago, living on an atoll, she took a spill and skinned up her leg something awful. A few days later, she proudly showed off her magnificent scab, which took up much of her thigh. Her husband said, "Um, honey, you should probably see a doctor, because that was coral you fell on, and that scab is like half an inch thick, which doesn't seem right." She went to the doctor, who promptly - cover your eyes here - ripped the entire scab off and found live coral growing in her skin.

Yeah. I know. I know. And I ruminated upon this. My life led up to and away from the events of three summers ago, like a punctuation mark - or a foul string of them - and I feel, finally, that I too have a magnificent scab. And I suspect, also, that if someone ripped it up, there would be things growing under it. Damned if I'll let that happen, itellyouwhat.

Sketches

Things need to be done.

1. There are about six finished stories stacked in my stash cupboard, and no excuse not to be working on turning them into graphic novels.

2. Supplemental income is needed, and my juggling skills are abysmal. Time to think about cracking into etsy.

On the first score, I did some character design for the first story on the stack. I'll go through the pile and see which ones lift my kilt.




On the second, I pulled out the acid-free heavyweight paper and brushed off my rusty figure drawing skills.




There were a few drawings throughout the pad which I had forgotten about.

Very serious man-knitting:




hamcats:




All this failing, I might try again to become a prison tattoo artist (minus the prison, mostly).

Wild-ish

Is there an ensemble more empowering than a black tank top and a pair of jeans? The shirt becomes a force that compels the hair to pull free from its ponytail and spill into the wind; it inspires the jeans to take life and grip the hips and swing them into a strut. I was thus overwhelmed by my clothing when I strode up to my mail box Friday afternoon, and a hapless man stood pinned between it and my runaway mojo. It looked as though I were coming at him to ask a question, so he stared expectantly with a polite expression, then jumped a bit as I ducked under his arm and said, "Oops, I'm underneath you!", jamming my key into the box. He walked off looking bemused, throwing a backwards glance as he went into the bank, and I admonished my outfit for acting like such a hussy. As soon as I drove away, I remembered that I needed, in fact, to also go into the bank. Rats. But maybe the poor man had already left, and I wouldn't have to look like I was following him. No, he had not. "You following me?" "A little bit." (what? shut up, pants!) He gripped my hand, introduced himself, asked if I lived hereabouts, and threw sheeps eyes at me until he left. The bank teller tipped a wink at me. I went skipping stupidly back to the car, indulgently pleased with myself, because this little scene marked the first time a random, reasonably good-looking man near-abouts my age has flirted with me in real life since the eye-patch exchange of 2007. A body likes to know where they fall on the attract-o-meter, and when the only people who talk to you are the homeless men outside 7-11, that's not so good.

I was thus invigorated when we headed out to a friend's birthday party. This particular friend is the father of Gavin's sweetheart, so at some point the friendship will be eclipsed by his need to throw our son by the ankles out of his house, but for now the romantic entanglements are at a minimum. The children split off and ran in a flock around the house as night fell, swarming through the kitchen periodically to savage the plates of cookies and cheesecake. The women migrated to the table in the back of the house with a jug of wine, while the men took over the beer coolers at the front of the house and threw darts. The baby fell asleep on me, and I meandered between the two groups carrying the sad mantle of designated-driver-sobriety. Alas. (Some pictures here.)

But, hey! I have begun to emerge back into adult life!