retired terrible amateur detective

July 29, 2014tempestpilot

I formally withdraw my irresponsible ambitions to star in my own real-life BBC detective-librarian adventure.

One of our library patrons died this weekend. He was found by the gym on Saturday afternoon. The gym I went to on my lunch break earlier that day. The gym I went to, happily trotting along with my towel over my arm and taking pictures of a goldfinch, while WALKING RIGHT BY A DEAD PERSON. What is worse, I can’t even remember which hobo he was. Am counting our patrons as they come in now, mentally checking them off as not-dead, and feeling like an asshole. I do care about them, and I am sorry I let one of them lie out in the sun while I was jogging on a treadmill.

How many more people might be killed by careless misuse of the SEEEECRET? It is a dark and sinister force.

Erin cardigan – seamed!

July 28, 2014tempestpilot

The Erin cardigan has been on the needles for 4 months. It is as much an accomplishment that I kept the cats from peeing on it for that length of time as it is finally putting it together. Still have to do the button band. This is less exciting than doing, say, a rock band, but higher on my list of fun evening activities.

Worse than retrograde

July 27, 2014tempestpilot

In the weeks following our ER adventure, four friends have had their offspring crash over and break limbs or concuss themselves. Yesterday, Leif traveled across the sidewalk on his nose.

Conclusion: gravitational zephyrs; affecting the clumsier, lighter, more-frequently-airborn of our populace. Hang onto those safety rails, folks.

In other news: back to school supplies. SO MANY PAPER TOWELS. And they’ll need them, with the inevitable zephyr-related blood pools.

Same face I made at the register. 

The man installed a new screen door. It latches, and does not have ragged metal hanging out to slice your ankles with. This is an improvement.

The herb garden is still alive, owing to diligent daily watering and coaxing, “heejee beejee beejee.” We haven’t figured out what that translates into, but she’s pretty consistent with it, and it’s working, so slap it up on Pinterest and call it DIY plant-coaching.

She is so cute, I totally forgive her for waking up at midnight and puking – for no evident reason – all over the brand new pajamas I had just bought for her earlier that day. And the bedding, and my hair. And then, once the sheets were changed, riding me like a pony and singing, “rar rar rar rar!” (“Rough road rough road!”). “HOLE,” I said*, and she keeled over, giggling. Gawd. Nobody should be cute at midnight.

Coming up: very exciting knitting update – I AM ALMOST FINISHED WITH SOMETHING. Frantically seaming.

*Librarian’s note – take your child upon your lap and jostle them thusly:

Smooth road, smooth road, smooth road, smooth road (slow, gentle rocking on your knees)

Bumpy road! Bumpy road! Bumpy road! Bumpy road! (bouncy bouncy, quick now)

ROUGH ROAD ROUGH ROAD ROUGH ROAD ROUGH ROAD! (pretend you are speeding in a Datsun)

A hole. (drop child between your knees)

doll hoarders and neuroscience

July 23, 2014tempestpilot

My efforts to secure a lot of stuffed animals to donate to Queens Hospital has thrust me up against a roadblock of rabid eBay collectors. I’m going to have to employ an auction sniper and just run for it, before the stampede of Beanie Baby enthusiasts drags me on a muddy trail through the collectible toy underworld, filling my sidebar ads with Reborn dolls and real-fur cat figurines. I JUST WANT TO BE A GOOD CITIZEN, PEOPLE.

Strange happenings: as I noted in the comments, after the whack on the head, Zenny has started talking (not reciting prose or anything, just “baby” and “kitty” and “scuse me” [MOVE], etc, but still). And now she’s trying to take off her diapers and get on the toilet. Am locking the doors against the hordes of neurologists who will no doubt be flinging elbows to write scholarly articles about her trauma-activated genius.

Drawings: I have not been drawing. I have been knitting again, which is the fault of my friend who announced her pregnancy. Baby knitting! I thought. I need to finish the knitting I’m already working on! I thought after that. And then I can knit something for the kids and maybe finish the kilt hose and knit some socks for my mother and maybe I should make hats for our friends who are lending us a place to stay on vacation this fall, I thought while digging through yarn catalogs. So my pregnant friend won’t be getting anything for her new baby. Sorry, shivering un-sweatered baby.

I win, dirt

July 18, 2014tempestpilot

And now Tropical storm Wali is on its way to drown all my plants. The skies have cleared and gone over all innocent, to lull us into planning beach barbeques.

Also thriving, besides my very impressive and important potted herbs: Zenny’s noggin. At her follow-up appointment, Zenny tried to box the doctor, and when they used the opportunity to sneak in her latest round of immunizations, she saw the nurse with her tray of needles, flipped over, and tried to hide her legs in my armpit. “Smart!” they said. “Feisty!” they said. And then they held her down and stabbed her, anyway. Them’s the breaks, kid.

close call for Zenny

July 14, 2014tempestpilot

You spend 20 minutes looking for your new shirt, and they cut it off of you in the emergency room.

Sunday was a Very Bad Day. Zenny tripped and fell backwards while shopping, pivoting from her ankle onto her head on solid tile, and had a seizure. She stopped breathing, turned blue. My mother stayed calm, tried to help her breathe. I realized I had left my my phone in the car and begged one off a stranger, sobbed at the 911 dispatcher. The EMTs arrived and strapped her to a board with a neck brace. They closed themselves into the ambulance with her and made me wait on the curb while they worked to get her breathing again.  When she started coming around, they hurried me into the passenger seat and we drove to the hospital with a tail of cars like opportunistic dolphins behind a boat. The ER social worker kept me outside the curtain while I bobbed around, crying and trying to answer her questions and fill out paperwork. Zenny was admitted for the night for observation, and we get to go home today.

Assholes get all the press, but people are largely good. Onlookers formed an honor guard while we waited for the ambulance with her limp body. The doctors smiled and bent over her face to encourage her, even while there was blood all over the floor from a fatal shotgun wound they had just dealt with. A nurse brought her a stuffed frog. An ER patient’s family member bought her a stuffed toy at the gift shop. Zenny made friends in the hospital wing with a laughing 8 month old who had had his nose bitten off by a dog. That child’s parents are in the middle of a long stretch of horror as they wait to see if the bit sewn back on will reattach, but they brought a guitar, and they had smiles for Zenny.

I may owe it to the world to knit some hospital hats and donate stuffed animals to the ER.

Clue: old lady with a wagon full of fish guts

July 11, 2014tempestpilot

My co-worker was walking next door on her break when a woman rolled by with a wagon full of black garbage bags and a comet’s tail of flies. She started to wrestle with the lid to the gas station’s dumpster.

“What’s in your bags?”

“Oh! Fish heads, fish guts. It’s so stink. I get ‘em wrapped in paper, and it’s still so gross. How you get this lock off?”

“Where did the fish come from?”

“The store over there. This lid is stuck, I think.”

“Someone threw garbage bags of rotting fish in our dumpster, and there were maggots all over everything.”

“Ugh! That’s so wrong. Some people, they get no shame, yeah?”

Moleskine

July 11, 2014tempestpilot

Inspired by the roving artists at urban sketchers, I bought a Moleskine watercolor sketchbook. It is counter-intuitive for me to draw across two pages, but the panoramic layout is nice.

Watercolors still don’t agree with me. I made a horrible mess with the water and paper towels, until the pages were warped and bleeding, then left the sketchbook open on my desk, exasperated and wondering how in the hell those urban sketchers get through a whole book of mangled pages without chucking it into a lake.

I came back an hour later and discovered that the pages had dried flat.

SORCERY

Alright then, I am ok with this, so far. Will reserve a verdict until I have destroyed it completely.

Severed heads

July 8, 2014tempestpilot

The boy and his grandmother came home on the 4th of July, to cheers and Canadian chocolate binges. It was a happy, crowded family weekend that left me both relieved to have them home and totally eager to be back at work. Just as I slapped my tea mug into the microwave, my co-worker came in the back door, wiping her feet on the mat. “There are maggots swarming up the driveway.”

The ground outside was writhing, in a way that was both horrible and very festive. We picked our way across the driveway, popping and squelching.

The tiny bodies flowed in a mass away from the dumpster, which sat like a beating heart at the end of the driveway. We stood and listened to the drone of flies bumping around inside of it for a long minute before deciding it was our duty as nosy citizens to make sure the body inside wasn’t a person. Because there was definitely a body in it.

There was a black garbage bag tied up and thunked heavily just inside of the dumpster. We got a louver hook on a long pole and poked at the bundle. It felt like a body in a plastic bag. This is really not a pleasant sensation. The fumes were strong enough to smell with our ears. Between retreats to gulp fresh air, we took turns wrestling the plastic loose with the hook, very much hoping not to see fur or hair.

There was paper, and inside the paper were the remains of a velociraptor.

Or a deep-sea fish. Several of them, actually. The bag was full of large, toothy fish heads, and they were not laughing, happy, or roly-poly. We didn’t dust for prints, but it seems reasonable to suspect the man who drives the truck with FRESH AHI painted across the side.

And that was my Monday. My clothes smell like ADVENTURE! In mystery cozies, bodies fall neatly into hedges and off of balconies, to be puzzled over while eating chocolate biscuits. Miss Marple never had to open maggoty bags of rotting meat with a hook on a stick. Am not a very good amateur detective so far.

pudding muscles

July 3, 2014tempestpilot

Yesterday, I walked across the street to the park and signed up for a gym membership.

Today, I went to the gym on my lunch break.

I went, and now I want to throw up, and lie down, and maybe die for a little while.

It was a short workout, and a good percentage of it was spent getting my shoes stuck in my pants, but it was a start. The first machine I tried wouldn’t turn on, and I ended up standing there like a potato, pretending to be examining the settings expertly so that nobody would think I was too stupid to do anything but bang the ON button repeatedly, which is what I was actually doing. After a minute of this, I swanned away to the treadmill and spent the warmup time examining the equipment in the mirror, so that by the time I rolled off the machine I was able to do a round of weights in a fairly natural manner. Was pleased when I could lift the weight already set on the machine (German legs), and surreptitious when I had to slip the pin up about 6 notches (French arms). Have taken a before picture, which I will post if it ever becomes the left half of an inspirational transformation.