stickers, stink fruit, and MORE BIRDS

August 28, 2014tempestpilot

Took entire day to run automotive obstacle course and acquire expensive stickers that don’t even smell like anything.

Killed time at mall while the car was inspected. Zenny got in a fight with her stroller and lost, ending up with her feet on the seat, harness tangled around her knees, and head stuck between the back of the stroller and the underside of the cup holder, arms flapping in panic. Had to pry her out, shrieking (her, not me), and clean all the black stroller-underside dirt and scream-snot off her face with a butt wipe while people went in and out of Sears, shaking their heads. Was not a winning moment for motherhood.

House smelled like jet fuel. This was emanating from the 30lb jackfruit on the table, which we had been too squeamish to cut open before it rotted. My mother rolled it over the fence into the jungle under cover of night.

Adorable kid saved a baby bird from a very lazy cat outside the library, and I somehow ended up coming home with it. Am considering a picture book about bird rescue, with little illustrations of hand warmers and syringes and powdered bird formula. I’ll call it, “LEAVE IT ALONE, IT WILL BE FINE.” (Except, of course, when it won’t, and that’s when you need the other things.)

Baby bulbul, new household overlord.

Jackfruit.  Named for a reference in naturalist and physician Garcia de Orta’s 1563 book,Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, wherein he writes, “That fruit is jacked.” (Paraphrasing)

In which motion blur gives my baby scary needle teeth, and I spend the next 10 minutes fighting off Sam and Dean Winchester.

Reading: The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.

And things are happening here. (I am burying this at the bottom here because I am iffy about sharing.)

Dangers of cars

August 24, 2014tempestpilot

Went to Costco. Left dregs of frozen yogurt in car to melt in the beverage holder. Accidentally dropped the car charger into the melted yogurt. Cleaned it off with a butt wipe. Forgot about it. Tried to plug in ipod, and charger jammed. Seemed sticky still. Put it in my mouth, realizing just as I did so that I should have unplugged it first. Failed to electrocute myself, to Darwin’s annoyance.

Shoved that aside and grabbed my bag of dried mango. The day before, ants had gotten into it, so I spanked the bag to get them running for safety, left them to escape for a few minutes, and then put the bag in the fridge. When I grabbed it on the way to work, there were no ants. I was glad they had all gotten away. Except they had not gotten away. They had died and fallen down into the bottom of the bag, where I was now rooting blindly. I had a searing moment of sharp, peppery metal, and started salivating like a basset hound. Ants are not delicious.

Made it mostly home when a blue light lit up my rear view window. Pulled over.

“Your stickers are all expired. All of them. Who’s car is this?”

“… Mine? My husband’s? Both of us, maybe? I don’t know. That is embarrassing.”

To my credit, I got the glove box open on the first try. The officer helped me find the registration, because I didn’t know what it looked like. She seemed to relax. It must be comforting to realize that you are dealing with someone too stupid to operate a weapon.

So, you know, it turns out being the kind of person who will eat rocks is the least of it.

Dangers of staff rooms

August 21, 2014tempestpilot

It is a fact of human nature that if you leave a bowl of rocks out on a counter, someone will try to eat them. Usually me. I am the trumpeting vanguard of buffet tables and drink coolers and boxes with only one chocolate in them, because it saves everyone from shuffling and demurring when they really just want to eat the damn mini cupcakes or open the next layer.

So when everyone was staring into the bowl and wondering why there were rocks in the staff room, I just went ahead and put one in my mouth.

It is also a fact that when someone gets a mouthful of stale apricot disguised as a rock, they will still pick through the pile and continue eating them, just to be sure there isn’t something better hiding in there. As it happens, there was some sort of peanut butter marzipan, a crumbly orange fondant, and a bit of discreet spitting into a paper towel.

Still, nothing ventured. There are few rocks that will kill you very quickly when you suck on them. Arsenic. Uranium. It’s a safe enough bet that they won’t be in a paper bowl by the microwave in the staff room.

So – the socks. I added a bar of ribbing to the bit of cabling that will run across the top of the foot, and went up to a size large. IT IS WORKING.

Buttons and frogs

August 19, 2014tempestpilot

Because we are a family of squirrels, the perfect buttons for my ridiculously green cardigan were stashed in my grandmother’s button box. They were affixed by the half-dozen to little yellowed cards with 10 cents stamped in the corner and “safe for washing!” printed reassuringly beneath. Not coated with water-soluble film that will stain all your clothes and poison your children, it tried hard to not to say. I committed a terrible crime against textile history by prying the buttons off the little rusty staples and sewing them onto my sweater; imagining them traveling from Guam to Indiana to Newfoundland before hitching a ride in my mother’s stash and following us through Arizona and Hawaii – waiting half a century for me to serendipitously knit a sweater in just exactly the right color.

When I finished it and buttoned it up, I expected to be transported a few inches off the ground in a fountain of golden light. I took a crappy phone picture to commemorate the moment.

So that was nice. And the whole thing was loaded with so much sentimental weight that I should have known better than to expect the next project to be anything other than a complete and face-raking failure.

These socks. Woe-socks. Socks so tormented, they are practically setting moors on fire and climbing roofs in their nighties.

Firstly, I knit three inches on the wrong needles, and the sock was too small to cram my hand into. Frogged it, cussing.

On my second attempt, I knit all the way down to the heel before realizing that my math was wrong – so while the cuff was now bigger than my wrist, the heel was narrow enough to fit my toddler.

At this point, I decided to plug stubbornly along anyway, thinking that it might somehow get bigger through denial and optimism. Got almost down to the toe and then struggled it onto my 6 year-old. Howled in anguish.

Frogging something this complicated usually requires a bit of crying and a glass of bourbon, but it was only 8:30am, so I just looked up at the ceiling and thought about photoshopping my MLIS degree to claim I minored in Morbid Bibliomancy while blindly unraveling the sock and winding it into a ball of crinkly ramen-yarn.

I have cast on for the third time. I will win, sock.

socks and cowboys

August 14, 2014tempestpilot

Have knitted half a sock during my lunch breaks, hunched over Walt Longmire. I’m supposed to have a chair for this, I complain to myself, not just a stool in a break room. A big leather chair by a window, in a house I have fixed up myself, with a cup of coffee and a mystery novel and a wood stove and OH GOD I AM A 65 YEAR OLD MAN.

 Deflect socks – knitty

Public service announcement to persons under the age of 11: the adults in charge do not care if you get up to trouble, so long as you are discreet and we can reasonably pretend not to notice. Suddenly going still and silent and turning to stare as one multi-headed organism does NOT COUNT AS DISCREET. How many juvie adventure novels end with all the heroes staring blankly at an adult until they are busted? Nobody wants to read that. Learn to be more subversive.

Guava jelly

August 11, 2014tempestpilot

The strawberry-guava tree in front of the house has started spewing fruits everywhere. I stood on tip-toe and tapped them off the branches into a bag, while Zenny sat beneath the tree loading rotted fruit into a bowl. We carried them back to the kitchen, washed them off, I deftly tossed the contents of her bowl down the hill to start a new generation of trees without her noticing, and it was jelly time again.

Here is my recipe, brought over from the old blog:

1. Gather ye an arseload of fruit.
2. Wash it and chop it and cover it with water in a giant pot.
3. Heat it and run screaming across the house when it boils over and catches your tinfoil oven liners on fire.
4. Simmer for an hour or two, skimming off foam and spider legs as required.
5. Strain. Strain again. Mop up spillage and bandage burns.
6. Get the sugar out of the freezer, pick out all the dead ants you can. Don’t worry, they’ll be sterilized.
8. Match juice cup-for-cup with sugar and pour back into your stock pot (or Mormon-lady pot, as ours is fondly called).
9. Strain again for good measure. Because eew.
10. Boil for another hour or so, until the brew is thick and syruppy and deep in color. But not dark and gooey, because that is turkish delight and we’re not making crickey-a-gogo food here.
11. Boil up your empty jars, even though it feels wrong. Chase away cats and children at this point.
12. While the jars and jelly are still scalding hot, pour the one into the other [jelly first], and quickly top them with lids. Do it, you pansy. Tighten the lids with a rag.
13. Ta daaa! Line them up and enjoy the periodic pinging of sealed lids. Send to relatives. Do not tell them about the ants.

Dying eggs with Leon Varjian

August 9, 2014tempestpilot

A soggy political lackey arrived at the door, his arms covered in flyers on rubber bands. “Have you voted?” “No.” “Can I ask who you’re leaning toward?” “No.” He shrugged, fair enough, and trudged on.

The politicians have been doing an amazing job at avoiding campaign promises, newspaper articles, and any useful information at all. They are lined up along the road in the morning, waving to commuters like pageant contestants, with every color of sign except the ones that would indicate which party they might represent.

“I read the paper at work every morning, and the only candidate I know anything about is that surfer who got pulled over for driving without a license and got tasered because he was an asshole. Now he’s running for mayor on an anti-police-taser campaign. How do we get these guys?”

“Oh,” my mother said while writing in her journal, “Leon told me about that while we were dying Easter eggs in People’s Park [in 1976 or 1977]. He said that if you raise a certain amount, the state matches you. So he would borrow money, get the money from the state, return what he borrowed, and make his living on the campaign money, giving mayoral speeches. [Do they match you plus some? Unclear on this.]He was a wonderful public speaker. He promised to exchange all the money in the city for parking tokens. He won the election for student body president in Ann Arbor later on. They built a life-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty’s head and arm, and put it on the lake as if it had sunk. And covered the lawn in pink flamingoes. We read about it all the way up in Canada, it was international news. And he had a great memory. The next day, after we had been dying eggs and talking, someone asked if I was Mary Braffet, and said they had found my egg. How do you know? I asked. Leon told me.” She beamed. “He had a point to make about politics, and he made it.”

I took to the internet, and found a newspaper article from 1975 about Leon Varjian’s campaign in Bloomington.

And a few pictures from 1979, when he was student body vice president with his Pail & Shovel Party partner, Jim Mallon.

“With a substantial budget acquired from student fees they made good on many of their promises, including bringing the Statue of Liberty to Madison. Placing a chicken wire, papier-mâché, and plywood mock-up with 22’ head and 40’ arm on Lake Mendota. When they were told that students were offended that money was spent on the prank, they offered anyone who didn’t like the statue a rebate of a dime, which is what they calculated was the cost to each student. When about 60 students gathered outside WSA offices to collect their money, Varjian wrote each a check for ten cents. The mockup was mysteriously burned down the early hours of March 2nd.”

“They had a toga party for about 10,000 people, John Belushi called the party to give his blessings. 

It was about this time Varjian ran unsuccessfully for Madison’s City Council. He wanted to change the city name to ‘Cheesetopia’.

For the next year’s run at Student Council the Pail & Shovel party taunted students with campaign ads “Are you stupid enough to vote us in again?” They were. This time Pail & Shovel promised all the major monuments of the world. They did bring the Washington Monument, hiring a construction crane to suspend a five-inch bronze copper replica. In the fall, on the first day of classes, students were welcomed by over 1,000 pink plastic flamingos on Bascom Hill.

A toga party was thrown for the second straight year. The university relocated an appearance of the Dalai Lama for fear he would get caught in the festivities (which included a Dalai Lama look-alike contest). At the evening’s end, Mallon and Varjian discovered they had about $20,000 in one dollar bills. They stuffed all the money into grocery bags and jammed it into the night depository of their bank. They also brought the Statue of Liberty back for a second year. ” (source)

Varjian and Mallon

Leon’s BoomBox Parade

This is all so beautiful. And now, when the political trolls come to our door, we have our answer ready. “Who are we voting for? NOT LEON.” And then high-five.

A 16 year-old girl you dyed eggs with in the park in 1976 still remembers a lesson in politics, Leon. Add it to your legacy.

The official hurricane post

August 8, 2014tempestpilot

I’ll just put all my updates right here and edit throughout the weekend.

The hurricane made landfall and tore itself up on the mountain, so now we’re just expecting rain and bluster. This is good, because we didn’t do anything to get ready except to buy a lighter and watch Ponyo.

It is muggy and gross, and I’m still down with strep after a failed round of too-weak antibiotics, but the state has shut down, so I don’t have to use up all my sick leave. HA.

Update: storm appears to have passed. Julio is acting like it will miss us, but Iniki did a sharp right-hand turn and flattened Kauai in ’91, so we will watch it suspiciously.

Hurricanes and unpreparedness

August 5, 2014tempestpilot

Am in bed with strep, our vehicles broke down today, there are two storms on a beeline for us, and everyone on the island is stampeding to empty the stores of toilet paper and batteries. We are filling a bucket with a hose. Never fear: we have more oil lamps and candles than living creatures in this house, and that is saying something. And we will save on provision, because I’ve stopped eating.

So there you go.

Soursop

August 2, 2014tempestpilot

My co-worker and I realized that between us we have about 75 years of living in Hawaii, and neither of us know what most of the fruits at the farmer’s market are. Fruits that look like dragon eggs, or prehistoric thistles, or hacked limbs from giant insects. Ask what they are, and most people will whisper from the side of their mouth, “Those are Filipino.” That is not an answer.

We decided to buy one mystery fruit every week and figure out how to eat it, because this is embarrassing. To begin the endeavor, I picked one that was only a dollar. Start simple.

“What is this called?”

“One dollar!”

“No, sorry, it’s name, what is the name of this thing?”

“One dollar!”

“Ok, but WHAT IS IT?”

“Oh! Oh! OK. One dollar.”

Luckily, our custodian is from the Philippines, and she explained that it is a guyabano (gwai-a-bano), or soursop. This is good. Soursops have a friendly reputation.

I didn’t know how to approach this thing, so I cut it in half. That is generally a good way to handle things you are unfamiliar with. Ask the Romans.

Oh, it looks like lungs.

Oh, good, it feels like lungs, too.

It burbles, and oozes viscous white fluid, and tears apart like organ flesh, and it is goddamn delicious. You flick the seeds out and chew the pulpy bits and it is like a mouthful of sweet flowers.

“We make smoothies with it,” our custodian said. “And it cures cancer. Everybody eats it because they don’t want cancer, and then they boil the leaves and drink that. But when you boil the leaves, it can cause brain damage and make you go crazy. So don’t do that.”

There you go. Soursop: delicious and cancer-curing, when it doesn’t make you go crazy.