ok, I'll play again

copying Jiveturkey for two years in a row.


1. What did you do in 2010 that you’d never done before? ate tiny tacos, saw a real hipster mustache, made cryptozoological porn.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don't remember. That points to no.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Rose! Rose did! And I totally noticed on her fb feed days before she gave birth! I am a terrible, terrible friend.

4. Did anyone close to you die? if "anyone" includes "a dog", and "close" means "a few feet away", then yes. Humans Family are all accounted for. DON'T GET ANY IDEAS, PEOPLE. edit: I failed to note the horrible, sudden death of one of Mike's close friends. I try not to catalog his griefs among my own, but it is terrible not to mention it.

5. What places did you visit? New York, some Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011? Fidelity. OH SNAP. Ok, that's out of the way, let's proceed.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Haahaha, no. Erasing them all with booze - applied straight into my ear.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? This is depressing. Wait - a book! I published another book! Why do I keep forgetting this?

9. What was your biggest failure? I'm on application number THREE for childcare assistance, because shit keeps happening to my paperwork month after month. I would like to get that hammered out so I can buy food again. I was only half-kidding about sharing the cat food when I fed the horrible cats tonight.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? injury of most pride: cut my thumb on my oatmeal. Also: ongoing mystery ear problem, split my foot on a stocking holder, got my first inhaler, and fell down stairs again.

11. What was the best thing you bought? the Harley jacket - except I didn't get to wear it, because I kicked out the guy with the motorcycle before I could learn to ride. So... not that. The red dress, then.


12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Leif, for not peeing on my rugs anymore.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Well, I did listen to the new Nickelback album. Also, the cat has been peeing on my rugs.

14. Where did most of your money go? rent. Half for a house I loved, half for a house I do not.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? I get a kick out of packages in the mail. Especially when they contain paintings of Bakersfield, giant robots, Steelers merchandise, tiny bottles of cognac, homespun, and Aero balls. You guys blow my kilt up.

16. What song will always remind you of 2010?
This song by this guy who looks disturbingly like me.





17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? sadder
b) thinner or fatter? very slightly thinner
c) richer or poorer? kind of a lot poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? naked sunbathing

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? talking to people after 2 drinks. SHUT UP, SELF.

20. How did you spend Christmas last year? walking around the mall, getting up at 5am, eating things.

21. Did you fall in love in 2011? Ahh, no. I really did not.

22. What was your favorite TV program? Misfits. Being Human. Doctor Who. Parks and Rec. Dexter kind of tanked this season. Psych couldn't decide when it was on. I'm waiting for a new scifi series, syfy.

23. What did you do for your birthday in 2010? drink moscato and eat cake with my mom.

24. What was the best book you read? The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor. Just started reading The Scottish Prisoner, Diana Gabaldon's latest, and the first sentence has "cock" in it, so that's off to a good start.

25. What did you want and get? coffee from space.

26. What did you want and not get? Childcare assistance. Attention from someone I have no business wanting attention from.

27. What was your favorite film of this year? I think I'm going to have to sneak behind Harry's back and say True Grit for this one, actually.

28. Did you make some new friends this year? Yes, but he requires a lot of paperwork and I'm scared of his wife. Also I found a kitten. Because I needed 4 cats.

29. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? ... a yule log.

30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010? lazy Hepburn

31. What kept you sane? friends, running, my sons, passive internet stalking

32. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Nathan.

 and Mitchell.

I like mops of hair and eyebrows, I guess.

33. What political issue stirred you the most? The whole pay cut for state employees thing really blew.

34. Who did you miss? B, G, H, M, P, J, J, J and R. That was illuminating, wasn't it?

35. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010. Don't set your pot mitts on fire while you're wearing them.

Christmas 2011

Christmas Eve - my mom's house

Roast beast, yorkshire pudding, neeps and taties, moscato, pear tart with gorgonzola. After the feast, we all sacked out in front of a Christmas Story, the boy wrote his letter to the fat man, we put out a shot of the Glenlivet for Santa, and my mom found the cat up on the table gnawing the roast. He's old and decrepid and mostly toothless, so we were kind of impressed.

how I want to spend my old age

Christmas Morning

 The boy dragged his granny downstairs at 5:00am. I woke up to the glow of tree lights in the hallway and prodded the sleeping child next to me. Halfway through the candy and present fracas I discovered that Santa had somehow misplaced a Beyblade arena in the closet, and I nearly took out the tree by falling off the stairs with it. As I went down in a shower of ornaments, the plastic arena flew behind the branches, and nobody was the wiser. Smooth.

It was the year of the Zim for the boy. Through a hassle involving defective used electronics and a tired Apple Genius, Gavin had a gleaming new iPod deposited into his hands, and we didn't see him again for two days.

My mom inspected her new DDR and ate dubious Japanese melty candies while the infink and I set up an imperial bagel shop.

On my part, it was the year of the caffeine. My mother gave me a device that delivers coffee from the future, humming from a little red craft that punctures foil pods and beams them into steaming single-serve cups of stimulant. I have named it Dr. Brew.

and I love him

While my mom laughed with her baby sister in Canadaland on the phone, I assembled the Christmas meat pie with the surplus roast beef (trimmed of old-man cat slobber), with little dough cutouts of the boys on top, all crafty-like. By 7pm, Leif had just about enough of this festivity shit.

The moment he realized he still had get through a meal before he could go to bed

He managed to drowsily eat all the beef out of his pie without passing out face-first into the gravy before I brushed him up and chucked him in bed. When I skidded back downstairs and reclaimed my glass of cherry wine (from French Lick - which got funnier and funnier the more of it we drank), mom pulled out the old bottle of Braddah Kimo's Undrinkable Grain Alcohol Rum and set fire to the plum pudding.

secret ingredient: your eyebrows

It didn't seem to be enough of a fire hazard, so she poured on more, and the flames shot a foot up. It was magic. Flaming pudding is one of the best things ever.

Boxing day


Terrible DDR dancing, stories over coffee, leftover gorgonzola on pear slices, and then back to the airport.

I had a horrible moment in the airport when I had kissed the kids goodbye, gone through security croodling my appliance box, and a woman at the gate turned to admire it. "Oh, is that a single-serving one?" And I started crying, because I was leaving my children behind and going home with a single-serving coffee machine.

Felt better when I saw the Tardis-coffee in the morning, though.

What's been going on

My doctor would not give me fancy drugs to make me happy, because my anxiety is "situational". I know, right? What a quack. Sure, I'm stressed because of money and time and responsibility, but does knowing that make me any less likely to drive the car off a sea-cliff? Well, yes, but only grudgingly. I'm loading up on 5htp, instead, and waiting for the hallucinations and lucid nightmares.

This would be a good place to note that the kids are not with me, because they are spending winter break with grandma and their father on another island. So I'm by myself, which makes it totally ok to be irresponsible with vitamins.

And because I am the sort of person who worries about dying from vitamin overdoses, I've been jogging and cleaning and knitting and in general getting on in a really impressively boring manner. I am filling the time and loneliness with paring down - my belongings, my expenses, my underpant size. I don't need to be able to afford meat, because homemade bread and soups are fantastic. My furniture is good quality, my dishes are sturdy white china, my blankets are hand-quilted, my sweaters are hand-knit, and all I have to do is get rid of the detritus - junk mail, old toys, unused diapers, ratty blankets, that pot mitt I caught on fire - and try to keep the place simple and clean. Ta daa. Take pictures of my house for Shack Chic, I am Amanda Blake Fucking Soule.

Clearly, the 5htp is working.

And my patrons keep me engaged. There is the hobo who spends all his crumpled, sweaty dollars on our book sales, hoarding hundreds of books in mouldering piles for an orphanage in Thailand he claims to be starting. There is the muumuu hobo with a little dog she scoots around in a baby stroller, with a card to show it's a service animal - that service is elusive until you realize that baby-dog is the thing keeping her heart afloat. There is the hobo we all suspected of being a crazy child abuser, who was just arrested for being a crazy child abuser. My hobos keep me strapped to humanity, which is tender and tough and horrible in ways that are really important and funny and scary. I love them. Except when I hate their fucking guts.


And here is a draft I wrote a few weeks ago and never got around to posting because PATHETIC:


-------------------------


12-10-11
I took Friday off to attend Christmas program and fundraiser stuff with the boys. Dropped them off at school and had a few hours to kill. The landlord had not paid the garbage men to pick up the Thanksgiving refuse, so I pulled on my shittiest jeans, opened all the windows of the car, and loaded two garbage cans of rancid rotting turkey into the hatchback for a ride to the dump. Chased an optimistic stray dog away from the maggoty bones I dropped. Drove off with my head out the window, trying to find a song on my ipod loud enough to drown out the smell. The wind sort of whipped the putrid carcass odor around in circles inside the cab. It was a tossup between forensic anthropology and library science for grad school; my current profession at least gets me laid more. Which is to say not at all, but at least I smell better while not doing it. Did not gag, though, which was a nod toward my ass-kickingness as a would-be corpse-examiner. As I pulled out of the dump, I passed a good-looking man I have been passively keeping an eye out for, and gunned it when he braked and waved because, well shit, maggoty carcass stink is not the best way to earn a place in a man's heart. I hope.

You know what kind of men love smelly carcasses? Bears.

There is something empowering about throwing all your shit out at the dump. I peeled out of my clothes, burned them*, found my running shorts, and went sprinting outside to run down the road to the bay. I didn't even stop to walk and pretend to fiddle with my ipod when trucks drove by, so they received the full visual impact of my jiggly parts, which are unexpected and alarming. The beach was empty, billowing with cold mist from the surf, and I did a skipping-hop-run to the music down to the pier and back again. Nearly died of muscle spasms on the way back up the hill. Showered all the garbage and running off, collapsed on couch. Much better than crying into knitting. Idiot-epiphany.

Lost it at the Christmas program, though. The kiddo was adorable and a bit of a ham, Leif sat on my lap and clapped dutifully, and all the other parents had plans for the weekend that did not include hanging out with my sorry ass. 'Holiday baking with family', and that kind of nonsense. I took the kids home and cried quietly into the laundry for a minute or two, then washed the car, grilled some sandwiches, made cookies, and put on a Christmas special while handing out egg nog. Mine was mostly brandy. Gavin curled up and said, "Ahh, best day ever," and I said, "Huh, where?"

Because when you can't make it, fake it. Their memories are more important than mine right now.

*threw them in washer

lizards, wolves, and a red sweater

Look. THERE WAS YELLOW. And then there was black and grey and purple again. It makes me mad looking at it. I want to slap it and tell it to put some pants on and get its fingers out of the nutella, life's not that bad for fuck's sake. Then I hear a wolf howl somewhere off in the middle distance, and knit another row of purple and grey.

But there is also red. Am making a sweater out of babby-melter acrylic, since sheep hate me, and because it is very slightly cold outside. I promise not to wrap any babies in it and set it on fire.

And I am drawing giant hair-snatching lizards. 

Since my computer died and I got left with the laptop and no wacom tablet, this next book is going to be fancy, with paper and pencils and paint and all that. I am excited about this one, because I get to do stippling and also because the lizard horrifically maims the protagonist.

Which reminds me, I completely neglected to mention the new book. Sometime in October, I received a nice box with a big stack of pantless Christmas mice, said, "Ooh! That's lovely," and then forgot to show anyone or do anything with them. Partly because there won't be any book signings this year, since all the book stores went out of business. It is a hollow accomplishment without the free lattes and harassment of Nook salesmen.

Now I am sad and have to take my scarf out to Hot Topic.

not the new normal

After my mom flew home, I cried all over everything. Doing the dishes, in the shower, into couch pillows. I didn't mean to, it just happened; some instinctive response to stop us from getting separated from the herd and falling into a tar pit. I didn't need a tar pit, though, because I also had a head cold, and was busy burying myself in soggy tissues. And I couldn't sleep, except long enough to have short, crappy dreams about not being able to sleep.

After a few days of this, though, I was feeling bushy-eyed and overtired. Maybe it was just because I changed out of boots and into sneakers during lunch break. Sneakers are made out of the hides of very energetic creatures. Wikipedia tells me that they are made of "vulcanized rubber". So in my Vulcan-hide sneakers, in the late evening, when the library was quiet and empty, I raced my book cart around the stacks. I dug out all the sex and gore books hidden by 5th graders behind the comics and replaced them with better ones. Found a novelty cookie cutter in my bag and took a picture of it. Felt kind of okay for a bit.

In the morning I hid my face in my coffee cup, embarrassed about acting like a damn idiot. Is this like when someone dies and you feel guilt the first time you laugh? Nothing wrong with being a damn idiot. I put on Hepburn swoops of eyeliner, dressed in new pants and a nice black shirt, adjusted my bosoms, and found some stupid stripey green fleece socks. Start small.

I walked Leif into preschool, eyeing him for signs of my head cold. He looked fine. A few small sniffles, a cough over his cereal that morning, but nothing gooey or rattling - and anyway, his teachers would call me at work if he started spouting green snot. One of the dads walked by.

"How's that cough?"
"Oh?" Leif isn't coughing, was he coughing yesterday? Our kids aren't even in the same class. "Seems ok. He has allergies, a bit, so it's hard to tell what's cats and what's cold." What am I talking about?
The dad said, "Because he can just keep that cough to himself! Haha."

I started to say, "HAHA. IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE I'M DOING THIS ALL BY MYSELF," but I did not say that, because that doesn't even make any sense. Holy shit, I'm already turning into an unhinged hermit. I need to get a trespassers will be shot sign and a string of squirrels. (Fun fact: when I do a google image search for "hermit with squirrels", I get a bunch of furry porn. Don't do that.)

The "new normal" is going to find me soon. And I won't be a crazy-eyed, squirrel-porn-nightmare-suffering  person when it comes.

clink clink clink

Yes, I'm doing this again, shush everyone. Do I look ok? I'm wearing red, I'm fancy. Did anyone else snitch the turkey? It's ridiculously good. I'm a little worried about it. They must be injecting them with something new this year, because turkey isn't supposed to taste like that. WELL. It's a smaller table this year. Unless you count the cats. We seem to be overrun. If things keep going like they have been, we might be having smaller roasts next year - yeah, watch it, Po. So this wasn't the best year we've had. It was pretty spectacularly crap. Nice touch there, mom, breaking your toe for the holidays, I saw that. Still, it's like I've been saying, the bigger the disaster, the better the story. So there was the layoff, and moving, and Josh died, and the dog got run over, then there was the pay cut, the ride in the ambulance, I developed that allergy to all my wool, my favorite patron died, mom's bird was murdered, and now we have the breakup ordeal and childcare issues. But we're all still alive. That sounds flippant, but it's really not. The spectre of Death has been in the wings - but we can come to this table, and sit here together, and eat until we're sick, and drink until Charlie Brown is funny, and everything is ok. We are all here, right now. And that counts for so much - we would claw through the years just to get back to this time, some day. I hope your shirt is absorbent, mom, because I have some crying-on-my-mom to catch up on this weekend. And I made the casserole without onions, just because they make you violently ill and you're tired of throwing up every holiday. No respect for tradition, I tell you.  So let's eat, and sit around trash-talking the tv and listening to the kids sing muppet Christmas carols. And everyone get along, because the pie is watching us.

Cheers.

Week 1

It isn't really week 1.

Week 1 happened 5 years ago. I watched the car drive away, turned away from my father-in-law's front door, and realized that everything had changed. I was standing in the first minutes of a long walk through a lot of years. I think Oliver Stone did a rack focus on me. 

But in this most recent reset, things are easier. Still complete shit, with the lonely nights and detached limbs and financial landmines, but not bleak or hopeless or lost. I'm just hanging around, with the dinner dishes and bedtime stories and laundry folding and bitten fingers from pilling my asshole cat (who is still peeing on everything, just more comfortably). 

There is some laying around on the floor listening to Led Zeppelin, the Black Keys, trashy angst rock, and the Muppets with John Denver.

and noticing that the rug smells funny

And I drew a bit.

Gave up on knitting when I got to the armpits, because armpits take counting and I am too damned lazy. And because the cat barfed on it. Twice. In the same spot. I hate her so much. She's just lucky she's so skilled at tap-dancing, or there would be no reason to keep her.

There is the shmoopy shcarf, which I have been adding a row to every day based on my feeeelings. The yellow was clearly a waste of $2.99.

read from the bottom up

Grownup bed! Slept in! All night! Memory foam causes instant comas. It's magical stuff.

I'm a jerk and I hate my cat

Still haven't had those gimlets. And I'm not going to. Drinking isn't therapeutic when you're the only person around to drive to the emergency room if the kids roll out of bed and crack their heads open on a cat or something. The plan now is to just ignore everything and see how long it takes before I have a horrible meltdown at an inopportune moment. The last time I did this, I made it two months without crying about losing the house before bursting into sobs at the word "avocado". Three days in, and so far so good. I am a bit grumpy, and sometimes I start to well up when people say things like "What did you do this weekend?" or "How are the kids?" or "Do I have any late fines?" but I'm cool. When people talk about their babies and husbands I totally don't say, "I SMASH YOU IN THE FACE WITH YOUR STUPID ADORABLE BABY/HUSBAND," because, as I have just said, I am cool. Cooly crumpling my emotions into a cool little wad and cooly stuffing them into a bottle of coolness. Case in point: earlier today I made fun of my co-worker for trying to walk next to an old lady without her feeling embarrassed about how slow she was, so he was sort of zombie-lurching and pretending to be very interested in the thermostat. Cool people mock their friends and the elderly. So there you go. I'm fine.

Now, at the library we keep the new issues of Cosmo under the front desk, because our copies get stolen by masturbators. I take the magazine out and flip through it from time to time, and it has assured me that by talking about my living arrangements, I can expect psychopaths to immediately come crashing through my windows, ready to throttle me with shoestrings. But I am going to do it anyway, because I am daring and stupid and I have pepper spray somewhere. Psychopaths are here encouraged to stop reading.

So I'm living alone now, with the two boys, and it is slightly unnerving being the only adult in the house again. After going on a manic cleaning and furniture-rearranging spree, I took the kids to the beach, thinking that seemed like a safe enough way to spend an afternoon, and there I discovered a dead kitten in the sandy walkway. It was still fluffy and adorable, curled under a stick which must have broken beneath it from the tree overhead. I paced around for a bit, thought about pretending I hadn't seen it, looked for someone to come dispose of it for me, got mad at myself for being an asshole, and finally decided to make a run for the car before the kids could see it and get upset. There was a box of to-be-donated-clothes in the trunk, so I grabbed a shirt, ran down to the kitten, and gingerly swaddled it up. Ideally, I would have liked to lay it in the forest under a dignified scattering of leaves and flowers, but my kids were trying to get eaten by sharks (which I could tell because they were whacking the waves with sticks and yelling, "RAWR, COME ON SHARKS!"), so I ran to a trash can and laid the little bundle inside with an apology. A picnic bench full of people was watching me throughout all this, so I gave them a Disapproving Librarian Stare and ran back to the water to scrub my arms down with sand.

This was not the best way to start my new chapter of single-parentness. I decided that the next thing to do would be to sleep in my very own bed like a proper adult, instead of cramming up against the wall on the bottom bunk in the kids' room. This has not happened yet.

Night 1: Changed all the bedding, for a fresh start. Po jumped up, purred at me, squatted in the middle of the bedspread, and peed all over it. I chased her around the house with a spray bottle, changed the bedding again, started the washer, and slept in the kids' room, because that was all too much work.

Night 2: Sniffed the bed, got under the covers, turned off the light, and made myself lay there. Managed it for about 20 minutes - eyes bulging, searching the shadows for shoestring psychopaths and listening for telltale scrabbles at the windows. Po jumped up, purring in a comforting manner, and - of course - started to pee on me. So I went running all over the house chasing her with a squirt bottle, changed the bedding again, thumped back onto the bed in a stubborn manner, and then heard a WHAM from the front of the house and sprinted to the kids' room - only to find it was my neighbor closing her car door outside. Slept in the kids' room, because that was all too much work.

Night 3: Put the spray bottle on the nightstand, got under the covers, and read a book until I was sleepy. Flicked off the light. Kicked Po when she jumped on the bed. Heard a scratching by the hamper. Turned on the light, caught Po peeing on a sock. Chased cat around the house with the spray bottle, put sock in washer, got back in bed, turned off light. Heard a thump. Turned on light, caught Po peeing in the closet. Chased her with spray bottle, threw her into litter box, cleaned closet, closed bedroom door, and went to sleep in the kids' room, because all that was TOO MUCH WORK.

Fuck it.

In other news, I changed my hair, because something had to happen to it and I can't bring myself to cut it.

My one and only wrecking ball

The plane departed. The kids cried, then fell asleep in the car. As I drove along the edge of the island in the dark, my brain reached out to feel the cracks of my heart to see how deep the injury was. It isn't safe to have an emotional breakdown while handling a car for two hours, so I shoved my brain and heart into opposite corners and drove home with red, tired eyes. After the kids are safely tucked in bed I can reunite the brain and the heart and lose my shit as much as I want.

Later.

waiting game

I tried to bow out of the party, which was mostly for the men anyway. Nobody wants two people in the middle of a breakup at their birthday party. It's weird and uncomfortable. I explained this to the host, but with some teasing and painful elbow nudges, I was egged into coming over.

By 7:30pm, I was laughing and trash-talking the dart night guys. Something seared into the side of my face. It was the man's staring eyeballs, from where he sat like a basilisk on the kitchen landing. I stuck out my tongue, and he got up to use the bathroom. At 8:00pm, Leif tromped in and announced, "Time to go home and go to bed. 5 minutes, mom," and tromped out again. Someone looked around. "Where's Mike?" I found him outside in the dark, sitting on a lawn chair. "I can't do this," he said. "Oh, for fuck's sake," I replied. "TWO MINUTES," Leif yelled from the toy bin.

When we got home and the boys were passed out in their beds, the man took me aside and made his announcement. "I think I'm going to move back to Oahu." He cried. I didn't.

This is good. This is the sound of wheels gaining traction after spinning uselessly. This is moving forward with a feeling of relief, and suddenly realizing you are sliding toward a drop off. Oh shit, childcare. Oh shit, no backup for parenting, sick days, holidays, grocery shopping.

I'll figure it out.



Turning comments off again.

Beatnik sweater

It is done! A finished sweater that I am allergic to! And it is very unflattering!

After discovering the rogue ball of tweed in my basket, all it took to finish it was some misdirected anger, three episodes of the Walking Dead, and half a bottle of my kid's allergy medicine.

And I totally had yarn left over.

What was I worried about?

Finished objects mean action shots. Which mean balancing the camera on the weird window/hole between the livingroom and kitchen, focusing it haphazardly because the auto-focus is broken, and running down with 5 seconds to think of something action-y to do.

Which is usually the chicken dance.

Which, I am realizing now, makes me look as if I am holding two giant invisible cocks.

Get your goggles on, folks.

On the pattern for the sweater, there is a cute photo of a woman jumping. I tried jumping, too. 

sweat-hurr

So there it is. Done. 

Note my amazing seaming. I don't understand the flailing about having to seam a sweater; it's still just needles and yarn.

And now I have to focus on other things. Like getting this MAN OUT OF MY HOUSE. I threw him out on Wednesday, and he's back again. I got a drunky email from the next room last night, saying how sorry he is and how pretty I am. 

Maybe I should take up pan-throwing. Or archery.

"It's all just knits and purls!"

LIES. 

I am trying to cast on my first shawl/triangular neck thing ever and this makes no sense WHO DOES THIS.

Crochet chain 4 stitches pick up and knit 2 stitches through bumps on the reverse side knit 7 rows TURN 90 DEGREES CLOCKWISE KNIT 1 STITCH IN EACH RIDGE UNRAVEL YARN PLACE LIVE STITCHES ON NEEDLE WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS.

All this because I have determined after 5 weeks of coughing and two runs of antibiotics and two chest x-rays that I am probably not dying of tuberculosis, but very probably allergic to the tweed sweater I am knitting.

Which I have run out of yarn for at the fucking COLLAR. And I can't afford to order another ball of this death tweed for another month. So I'm trying to use stuff I already have for other stuff. Which may or may not also try to kill me. The likelihood that it WILL kill me increases with these instructions.

RAWR.

Instead of knitting, I will jab the needles into this man who refuses to move out.

grief bacon

It's the same old story. You meet a guy, fall in love, get married, have a baby, go to grad school, find out he's cheating on you, get divorced, move to California, take him back, move to Maui, have another baby, publish some books, catch him at it again, kick him out, replace him with cats.

It happens to everybody.

There really isn't much to say about it. I am turning off comments for now.

The tenting

The house was fumigated this week. This type of thing is usually an excuse to check into a hotel and eat a lot of Chinese food, but it becomes harder with 4 hamcats to smuggle past the office. How did I end up with 4 cats? They are like tribbles. I was only joking about becoming a cat lady and replacing Mike with a man cobbled out of cats. This is why I hate the Secret. The author and its followers completely forget the original secret; "be careful what you wish for."

So because we are terrible at making phone calls and everyone we know suddenly became allergic to cats, we were at the mercy of the landlord - who booked us a room at the cheapest inn and said "Oh, and no pets allowed. Good luck with that." My solution was to go to work and pretend none of this was happening. Mike was left to bag up all our belongings and herd cats. He got them into pet carriers, went over to a friend's house, and propped them under an umbrella. Like coyote bait.



When you get booked into an inn next to the beach on Maui, it suddenly feels like PARTY TIME - even when that inn is just across the street from your own house. It was not party time, however, because all the booze was bagged up with packing tape and trapped in a house filled with poisonous gas, covered in a giant purple tent.

The man and boy went off in the evening to visit the cats and let them destroy the friend's bathroom, so the baby and I were ditched by ourselves. The threadbare aloha-print bedspreads and painting of Jesus blowing a conch shell were kind of creepy, so we ran off on foot to find something to do.

The bay was deserted because of an outbreak of jellyfish. We ran through the surf anyway. Going out at nightfall with no wallet and no phone to run down a deserted beach sounds like a nice setup for a horror novel, so despite the fact that we were armed with sticks and dead jellyfish, I hoisted the child up onto my back and trudged back up the hill to the tin-roofed inn to watch Shawn the Sheep on the laptop until the boys came home. We waved goodnight to our shrouded house across the street, and slept like groaning, uncomfortable sleeping things.

The ranch restaurant does not sell breakfast. In a town that has an economy based around the spending of hungry tourists, this makes no sense. We bought pop tarts and milk at the store, I drank about a quart of coffee, the kids went to school, and we arrived at the friend's house to discover that one of the cats had torn out the top of her carrier and made a bid for freedom. Hey, one less ham to feed. Mike was a bit touchy about it, because it was his face-eating hellbeast of a cat that was on the run. I said nice things to my passive meatloaf kitties, set them loose in the friend's yurt, and ditched the man for the relative comforts of the library. The runaway cat was discovered under a bush. By one of the other cats, who also escaped. How we have gone this long without losing either of the kids, I don't know.

And MAGIC! The house was untented and the kitchen unbagged when I got home at the end of the day. That is the story I was given, anyway. Since I have not actually seen any of the bags, I have been holding up every item of food before tasting it. "YES, IT WAS BAGGED. IT WAS ALL BAGGED. IF IT IS FOOD, YOU CAN EAT IT, BECAUSE IT WAS BAGGED."

Men are so hysterical.

Found in donation bin

People dump old books and magazines off at the library. I was cruising past a box of mouldering donations and a magazine on the top of the pile caught my attention.

"Conscious Dancer"

Which immediately begs the question, do dancers have a problem remaining conscious?

Answer: evidently so.

New title suggestion: Semi-conscious Dancer.

hearts and their breakings

This week I walked in on the man again. And it wasn't a large thing, but my heart has been worrying me lately - in a meat and blood sort of way - as I've started having weakness and pain and palpitations in the days after these sorts of events. I was musing on it earlier this year when my long-missing father touched bases and mentioned his heart surgeries. That's the problem with wayward genetic histories. I suppose I need to go see a doctor about it instead of laying on the couch flexing my fingers and wondering what a minor heart attack might feel like. At the very least, I have decided that I can't keep walking in on things. Next time, I pack a bag. Next time. I know how that sounds. People say things like, "You're too sweet" and "You're a good woman", which I think are code words for "doormat" and "dumbass". It is better to mess up your life through action than inaction, I know this. But when do a string of small things amount to one big thing? When I go urk and fall over dead, I guess. Not the sort of romance I am looking for. I'll take tawdry or steamy - or even lost - over tragic.

Next time.

New York pt 2

Day 4? 5? I don't even know anymore - We went to Trader Joes and bought absolutely fucking everything. I went all nostalgic over frozen enchiladas I ate as a sad single person in Bakersfield, as if that was a high point in my life or something. Bought another .99 grocery bag, since the one I have been using as a book tote for work every day for 4 years finally crapped out. I am classy. The boy won after chanting "Red Lobster Red Lobster Red Lobster" for a week straight, and we ended up in a booth with 7 children at lunch time. The waitress actually trembled. Gavin realized partway through his lobster tail that he actually preferred my crab legs, which was both annoying and a relief to my future vacation budget.

 Day... Wednesday - we went to Target, because suddenly it was cold and blustery instead of hot and sweltering, and the kids had no proper clothes. Seasons are freaky and unnatural. I convinced my tiny sister-in-law to take us to Cornwall to visit the yarn store. Mike's sister's husband ran off with his mistress and took all his belongings with him (the dark haired lover!!). Mike's brother made a pie and screwed it up, so the caramel was all heaped in a mess on the top of the crust. He declared it unfit for human consumption and went home, so we ate it with a fork while telling their sister we'd be happy to put a brick through her husband's windshield.

THE WEDDING DAY FINALLY: We ditched the kids with Mike's brother and his tiny wife. Their large dog was doing backflips of excitement, flailing claws at my precious panty hose as we stepped inside, so Rob grabbed her by the collar and hauled her up off her feet to toss her out the back door. We gawked after him. "He won't do that to the kids, right?" Mike made an ambiguous Scottish noise.

We drove to the city and ended up getting stationed at the top of the hill guarding the flower arrangements for a few hours. We chased squirrels, heckled old ladies eating sandwiches, and I demonstrated my plans for the open bar by posing for a photo in my nice dress and pretending to throw up into a trash can.

 Mike meandered off and disappeared, so I finally abandoned the flowers and ran down the hill, right into the mess of photographers and posing groomsmen.

Salvo was kicked out of the pictures for wearing a bow tie, so he and I stood to the side and talked smack about the photographer's mustache. I kept an eye out for Noah, the jerk from Binghamton who told me the book I was reading sucked back in 1999. "I am going to tip him down some stairs," I promised. [I ended up kissing the guy on the mouth and eating a cream-filled donut with his girlfriend. Close enough.]

The ceremony was beautiful. Salvo officiated in his fantastic bow tie. Lorenz wrote his vows a few minutes beforehand and read them off his iphone.

It was perfect anyway, and he had to stop for a full minute to cry. The audience did, too. After all the weeping and kissing and ring exchanging, we broke out mini maracas and everyone - including a few optimistic hobos - danced down to the reception, where we were greeted with Elderflower cocktails and TINY TACOS. In all-caps, because that is how I said it every time the servers came by with them.

The Korean ceremony that followed was very fun, with tossing of dates and chestnuts and a piggy-back-ride exit for the bride. Mike took a lot of pictures of Lorenz's mom, because her boobs looked fantastic.

There was a photo booth, and fancy miniature food, and dancing, and endless cocktails, and then all the kissing of hapless men, and I broke a potted plant.


My embarrassing advice to the groom: "You will meet other people. Several of them. And you could fall in love and marry them and be happy. When you meet these people, recognize them for who they are, and then never speak to them again." I may have shaken him a bit.

Because I asked about 6 different times and made absolutely no mental effort to retain the information, Sal finally wrote the cocktail recipe down for me:

Here it is:
1. St.-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
2. Earl Grey infused gin
3. Lemon juice
4. Simple syrup
xoxo

For the fancy bartender-invented Earl Grey infused stuff, I'm pretty sure a warm tea bag in a bottle of gin will do the trick. There will be some experimenting with this in coming weeks.

At about 1am, Mike tipped me into the car, spent a few minutes getting lost in the city after a detour that led to nowhere, and we got home to find the kids safely asleep on the couch-bed in tv-watching position. Giant win, all around.

Friday: oh god, elderflower cocktails. Why does grandma only have pre-formed meat products in her freezer? Let us lay around watching the F Word on BBC, and then lay in the grass by the lake, and nobody will speak to me of gin.

Mike's brother came over with another pie, and I ended up cooking chicken francais for 16 people. I waited until the aforementioned brother was carrying two of his sons, then hugged him from behind so he couldn't escape. It's been 14 years. I will force my affection on him until he learns to like me. I told him so, and he said, "Oh, huh."

Saturday: flew everywhere. Pressed face to plane window and watched gridwork of farmland turn to crumples of desert mountains turn to endless carpet of LA rooftops. Got home at midnight - exactly 24 hours after heading out from New Windsor - to find that the cats had completely hosed the house down with pee and shredded the memory foam mattress like raccoons. Considered using their pelts to mop up with.

Home again. Skin rehydrating and lungs re-inflating. Kissed my coffee pot and stood under the cascading shower head and talked to my mom on the computer. A big chunk of my love lives on the East Coast, but I'm happy to be in my own bed again. I hope it won't be too many years before we return.

New York pt 1

Day 1: sprinted through a maze of temporary construction walls in LAX while personel popped out of panels and yelled, "Run! Run!" and flapped their hands like characters in a really crap video game. Made it to Cincinnati, which surprised us by being as hot as balls, and finally arrived in Newark to collapse onto grandma and aunt Sue. Saw a squirrel while driving home, which I found more exciting than the missing bridges and flooded fields.

Day 2: Mike left for the bachelor weekend at Lake George. Leif discovered motorized kiddie-ATVs. Gavin got onto the internet with porn-curious pre-teen cousins. I had a series of small strokes.

Day 3: Head attempted to invert itself, dragging along bits of my lungs. Crawled into couch to die, slugging bottles of Robitussin and Benedryl without regard to drug interaction or dosage. Leif ran up to wipe his nose on me periodically. There was wii bowling, and family wrestling. I was drugged enough to roll around with the mess of cousins and in-laws with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

Night 3: Leif stopped breathing at 3am, barking out "help" and "medicine" while turning colors and going limp. Grandma called 911. We got to ride in an ambulance for the first time. I took pictures, since I would be paying for the novelty. The ER staff all stopped to sympathetically exclaim, "Oh! He's so beautiful!" as we rolled by (loved this, despite distress). He drank his steroids without complaining and we were chucked out by 7:30am. Went home and slept until noon.

Day 4: disoriented and couch-bound. Gavin did homework, Leif played with Legos, the family left to do errands. By evening we were going stircrazy, and walked across the street to the lake. There were worms and further ATV terrors and meatloaf for dinner. I had scotch.

Day 5: Went to Target, got very giddy. Went to Super Walmart, stared too much at comically appalling cross-section of humanity. Saw more squirrels. Mike got himself stranded in Suffern after the rehearsal dinner. Nobody was surprised.

This is all sort of un-vacationy for a vacation, but I have spent much less time staring moodily up the road and retracing old footsteps in the driveway this time. Also, there is family drama, which has turned into an unexpected opportunity for sisters-in-law to finally have something in common to bitch about. I am pushing for a car egging or run-by kick in the shins. (Next update from police station.)

one of those day in the life posts

Jiveturkey wants to know what we do all day. Here is what.

5:30am - sneak out of bunk bed, having fallen asleep while tucking the midnight-waker back in. Try to use toilet and make coffee without waking kids; fail. Leif calls from bed, where he is rubbing his eyes with all his hair frizzed up or dangling like a monkey from the bunk bed bars; he goes limp and pretends to be dead when I pick him up. I flop him onto the couch and he either says, "bread and nutella" or "banana" ("pwease"). Boy shuffles out in jammies, I assemble bread and cereal and coffee.

6:00 - 6:30am - breakfast and cartoons and email-checking. Wake man, shoo cats out of bathroom, take shower. Or skip shower in favor of second cup of coffee. Especially if the pilot blew out again and there isn't any hot water.

7:00 - 7:20am - Mike makes sandwiches while I put my face on and dress the infink. Gavin ambles around getting dressed, brushing hair, and playing Bey Blades. Brief flurry of shoe-finding and people-kissing, and out the door. Mike walks the little one to preschool, Gavin and I drive the 5 minutes to school.

7:30-9:45am - work; hobos, typewriter, fax machine, checkouts, sorting mail, storytime, endless cups of Lipton tea.

9:45am - BREAK TIME. A few minutes to knit a few rows, scarf down bananas, and read a chapter of whatever book is on my desk. Currently A Secret Rage, by Charlaine Harris and And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer pretending to be Douglas Adams. Then back to work until lunch.

12:00pm - LUNCH TIME. Exactly the same as break, only longer, and with a meal bar or Lean Cuisine.

1:00pm - 4:30pm - work that usually involves budgets, numbers typed on tiny labels, someone yelling, someone refusing to pay .25, someone pooping on the floor, phone-in book renewals, and complaints about how slow the computers are/why I have to have a library card to use the computer/why I have to prove I live here to get a free resident's card/why I can't charge my phone/why I can't bathe in the urinal.

Gavin runs in after school, kisses me, and runs to catch the bus home. I stay and yell at teens for drawing cocks on our EXIT signs.

4:35pm - HOME FINALLY. Leif throws his toys down and tackle-hugs me, Gavin waves from over his homework, Mike waves from computer. I ask about everyone's day and pull things out of the fridge to start dinner. If work was more yelling than typing that day, I crack a beer while cooking (except not lately, because diet blah blah). We eat at the kitchen table and everyone tells about 3 good things that happened that day, then 3 bad things and what they did about it. If I have had a beer while making dinner, there are usually cookies or brownies in the toaster oven while we wait for Gavin the Slowest Eater Ever to finish spearing all the individual kernels of corn off his plate.

5:30 - 7:00pm - Commence wet blanket action. If I have been invited anywhere, I skip it. If we have hang-out plans on a Friday night, I pass. I am an introvert who works with the public all day, after which I just want to be left the hell alone for a while. The kids play on the rug, the man studies beer recipes or does chemistry in the kitchen, and I knit or help set up train tracks or go for a jog.

7:00 - 8:00pm - tag team bedtime. I give Leif a shower while Gavin gets some brother-free time playing computer games. The infink breakdances on the slippery shower floor for a few minutes, then I truss him up in a giant towel, carry him out and yell, "I HAVE THE CUTE!" to which brother and father squee dutifully. Then I drop him on the bed into kitten pee, and spend the next 10 minutes changing bedding while he runs naked after the kitten. By the time he is in his jammies, Gavin is showered, and we exchange goodnight kisses as we cross paths brushing teeth. I lay down with Leif in the boys' room to read Little Bear, and Mike reads a few chapters to Gavin in our room. In a few minutes the infink is asleep and I sneak out. Gavin sneaks in and up into his bed.

8:00 - 10:00pm - Mike pops a beer while I do a few pullups, and we settle onto the couch for an episode or two of whatever show we are currently obsessed with. If I'm lucky, I'll get to sleep in the grown-up bed for most of the night before lurching to the bunk bed for tuck-ins. If the rain is drumming down on the tin roof I will slip in next to my baby on my own, in case I can't hear him call. I don't mind either way; falling asleep next to my children is still top on my list of wonderful things. Being alone in a bed with Mike feels kind of weird after all this time.

It's a good, simple, comfortable life.

So there it is. If I had any intrigue, it is now gone. Are these posts stalker fodder, or what? Luckily, I have only 12 readers, and I'm pretty sure none of them want a coat out of my skin. Still, if you do, um... don't.

Kitten

The kitten has no name. We didn't intend to keep it, but nobody wants a stray kitten and I am too soft-hearted to put it out in a box, so a name is in order.

So far it identifies to a mangled string of exclamations - tearing across the back of the couch and savaging our heads as we all yell out names. "Astrid!" "Ass-turd!" "Nargles!" "Ripper!" "SHNORF!" Whatever random words the chorus contains, it doesn't end until Mike yells, "SHNORF," so that will probably be the thing that sticks. Nice.

This kitten has weird hand-paws with long knuckles, and claws up between the window and screen like a bat thing. The man absentmindedly plucked her up and dropped her off the edge of the couch, and she managed to land on her head instead of her feet. Clearly not entirely cat.

more hats

This is getting ridiculous. Finishing nearly one a day. I have been carrying half-knit hats under my arm, worrying at them - during lunch break, waiting for the kettle to boil, watching Being Human on BBC, driving to the general store.


So, this week:

 Infant size, for new nephew. Still needs tassels. 

Improvised from Snowtracks hat. 

 Proverbial cap.

Habitat. Love this pattern so, so much.

First time trying the fabled and fawned-over Malabrigo, and I was skeptical at first. 

Felt like regular yarn to me. Knits up into marshmallows. MAGIC.

I am calling this Love at Sunset. Here used as Angry Birds privacy tent.

Tearing through stash ottoman for the odd balls of good stuff I've hidden. Haven't gone for baggies down the back of the toilet yet, but it won't be long.

I made some hats. And I am wearing them. Shh.

Two more x-mess presents finished. The man's family doesn't read my blog (or care about hats), so I can put them on and ponce around for pictures.

The Vorderrhein hat (or "The Hat I Can't Pronounce"). Ran out of yarn on this one, three rows from finish. I wanted to rip it up, but the man rescued it and made me order more yarn because he liked the cables. MADE ME, I say. That ball of Malabrigo that arrived in the box was just a consolation.

All the hat models I've seen wear them ridiculously far back on their head like this.

After Kittiwake kicked my ass, I went for something zenlike and knit up a Little Things hat in the car yesterday. It's a long drive to the grocery store.

I really dig the decreases and dumb little loop at the top.

Next on the needles: MORE HATS. I am making an industry of ennui.