Hurricane gif time!

Gif removed because the storm is over 

This gif will self-update as the hurricanes bounce off our invisible shield (hopefully). 

We are on Oahu, the second-to-top one, and we live up near the pointy bit. 

Current status: Everybody is freaking out because the storm headed slightly north, bypassing the Big Island's storm-shredding mountains.

Still haven't replaced the missing window louvers or found oil for the storm lamps.

Today in poultry cuddling

Today in poultry cuddling

Guess who has been having ADVENTURE?

Not me. I have been having doctor's appointments. But that is fun in its own way, because I get to drive around in my truck and sing along to Black Sabbath with the windows down*. There are a couple of musicians who have the same sort of short mid-pitch vocal range that I have; Ozzy is one of them. Miss Piggy is another. I like the time alone, and car singing is good warm-up for my storytimes.

REEEFLECTS IN THE SKYYYY WARN YOU YOU'RE GONNA DIIIIIIE

Anyway, the doctor visits. One of the things I do with Zenny to teach critical thinking and descriptive language is to sit and tell her what she looks like. Kids love hearing about themselves, and it helps to learn more adjectives than "cute" and "pretty". So I take her on my lap and trace her features with my finger, "You have strooong eyebrows, and looong yellow eyelashes, and laaarge blue eyes," etc. So of course she started doing this back to me, running her little hands over my face and saying, "You has a biiiig forehead, and a huuuuge nose, and a nipple right on yous face." Damn it.

So today I had the nipple** taken off by a dermatologist. This was a bit of a feat, because they didn't tell me when my appointment was, wouldn't answer my calls, sent a confirmation text the night before for a time that could not be worse, closed their parking lot, and smiled like sharks while asking if I had found my way from the temporary parking area easily. The temporary parking area was a patch of grass way up the hill, marked with a wet piece of paper taped to a box with "temp park" scribbled on it in yellow marker and an arrow pointing straight down at the ground. "I am smarter than a parking lot," I told them, and then they said, "So would you like an excision or a shave biopsy?" and I went, "Whut," and they shark-smiled again. I thought about pushing over their floor-to-ceiling Botox display. I did not do that, though, because a) I am a nice librarian and b) I had had two G&Ts the night before and was convinced I smelled like a hobo even though I had thoroughly bathed, brushed, and gargled, so I was sitting absolutely still and holding my breath, which takes a lot of concentration. Turns out they wouldn't have noticed even if I had been swigging gin in the waiting room, though, because they used a cauterizing iron and the room filled with the smell of burning skin. I went back to work just in time for toddler time and said, in front of 44 moms and babies, "Don't mind the bandage, I just had my nipple taken off." Then I had to explain, and it wasn't as fun for the kids as Itsy Bitsy Spider, even though the story contained many of the same gestures. So today isn't working out very well for me.

Coming soon: terrible pictures of my face.



*Because my Freon is leaking. It is so hot and wet this summer that the pavement is steaming and the windshield fogs up unless the windows are all the way down, creating something like the windy inside of a cotton candy machine for my hair.

**The nipple was a mole. On my face. Not one of my actual nipples. I have an unremarkable number of actual nipples, and none of them are on my face unless I'm using a jump rope***.

***Lies. Attempt to sound fun and bouncy; truth is, I am in no risk of hitting myself in the face with a walnut in a sandwich baggie. Give it ten more years and they'll be bread bags, and then we'll have some jump rope action.

Things get weird for Freddie

On Freddie's name: a lot of my library kids speak Tagalog at home, and you can't assume they're boys or girls based solely on their names. Some parents give their children American-sounding names so they fit in better, and miss the gender cues because English isn't their first language. It's not a big deal and nobody cares, it's not a thing the kids tease each other about. Mercado is a super common last name, and when she goes to college, people would just assume her name is Frederica (it's not, it's just Freddie). 

Things get weird for Pupu

Insider trivia, if there is such a thing at this stage: Pupu is left-handed. All the cool people are, you know.

(I'm not.)

Again, text is just slapped in there on its own layer, temporarily. I think I'm going to push the pidgin into full hard-to-read slang, like Scottish brogue. She'll be expressive, so its ok if mainland readers miss some of what she's saying.

On Pupu's name: Punahele is a very common first name. Pua is a common last name. That's a lot of Pu in a name, so she gets called Pupu affectionately. "Pupu" means "snack" or "appetizer". Nobody notices that they're calling her "Poops" for short, because in their heads they're saying "PU-ps", but I'm spelling it phoenetically because it's easier to read and funnier. Because poop. Png hears it as Poop because her parents are from Oregon and she doesn't speak Hawaiian.

Things get weird for Png

This is a first draft, so text is still just place-marked and scribbled in (on separate layers, so I can make nice word bubbles later). Some facial expressions are going to change, now that I'm looking at them all lined up together. Helpful to lay it out like this! 

We are following each of the girls home as their dip in the toxic Ala Wai takes effect.

I... win?

So I did not actually back away from facebook, because of course I didn't. I don't really post anything, I just trawl through and click "like" on whatever isn't eye-meltingly horrible. Including, recently, a series of pictures of a really cute french bulldog, which turned out to be a bad thing because the dog was actually kind of dying and now I look like an asshole for liking it. Read the posts first, people.

The other thing I go on there for is to see what my more articulate friends have to say about current events, because a couple of them can do things like remember dates and names of policies or conventions or trade agreements - things which I can only barely be arsed to remember enough to look up later if necessary. I have the nebulous shape of the thing, and I can form a coherent argument if I have time to study it and identify all the reasons something is bothering me, but mostly I panic and block the thread if it gets hot.

So I was surprised the other day when my most articulate of friends summoned me with the dark mark of messenger to back him up on something. Someone responded to a happy post with the most deeply offensive and hateful imagery they could copy and paste, my friend replied at length with dignity and reason and intelligence to no effect at all, and when I saw what was happening I just kind of jumped in flailing obscenities. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. YOU CAME IN HERE TO SHIT ON A HAPPY POST. LOOK AT THAT. RIGHT THERE. CLEAN THAT UP WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. And the guy apologized, which surprised me. I guess sometimes you just need a hysterical asshole on your side - and when that time comes, friends, I am your lady. Evidently.

And... more chickens.

School is back in session, and that means orphaned chicks. Partly because a few of the school kids are vicious chicken-trampling horrors, and partly because chickens are really bad at keeping all their babies alive. Now that everyone is back on campus, people are finding chicks orphaned in garbage cans and under the classrooms, and my mother (the school librarian) is coming home with them stuffed in her motorcycle carrier.  And then she calls us, because we have the yard space for farm animals, and the children to bribe with allowance money to care for them. 

Good thing the coop seats 4. Sorry in advance, Bucky the Teenage Chicken.

Bucky just wants the chicks to go to bed so she can order pizza and watch Netflix.

*incoherent babytalk from everyone in 3-foot proximity*

They'll be re-homed with us as soon as they are larger than cat-mouthful size.

relevant to Stella's interests

The face you make when Bucky horks down entire grapes without choking herself to death

The lychee tree is full of fruit, the chickens are thriving, the kids are learning to muck out chicken crap and make compost, the veggie garden is growing up lush and glossy and green with the new nutrients - I think we are finally getting the hang of this Good Life thing. I'm going to go full small-scale-homestead and start making soap and candles any time now. Are tiny cows still a thing?

*google*

edit -

YOU GUYS. MINIATURE GOATS.

life goals

Eight years

This boy. 

Eight years ago, I was making desperate grabby hands as the delivery staff worked to get my strangled baby to breathe. He finally hitched in a good scream, turned from blue to pink, and he hasn't stopped making noise ever since. He's a rascal, a reader (with sound effects), and a constructor of instruments of DOOM. He's a happy person, and if he gets snarky he does so under his breath and then runs for it. His heroes are Reese from Malcolm in the Middle, Milo the farting airbender from Legend of Korra, Fred and George Weasley, and Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony - the slapstick troublemakers. His favorite comics are Calvin and Hobbes, the Lumberjanes, and Nimona. The man he most idolizes and wants to be when he grows up is Dav Pilkey, author of Captain Underpants, and he writes pages of stories with explosive little drawings in his spare time. He's the best kind of trouble, this boy. I love him so much.

Harry Potter and the Emergency Room

Opt for adventure, I always tell myself. Usually with gritted teeth, while throwing back an ibuprofen. That motto gets a bit harder to follow as my knees slowly age and turn into stiff knobs of rawhide, but that's why it's so important to keep saying it. 

Opt for adventure is the weekend motto; if you have to choose between two tasks, choose the one that will make a better story later. There are several other mottos. The dealing-with-family motto is I AM SUPPORTIVE OF YOUR ENDEAVOR. In all-caps. That one is tricky sometimes, because there are a few people in my family who make almost as many bad decisions as I do, but that is also exactly why I need to give it back to them. 

Then there is the dealing-with-the-public motto - don't shit on other people's yum yums. That thing they are excited about might be annoying or mildly inconvenient, but shut your mouth and let them be happy about it for two minutes before life kicks them head-over-arse again. Yes, folks, you can look for Pokemon in my yard. Yes, I'll drive to the right and slow down to carefully pass cyclists dressed as pirates and tampons in a ridiculous bike race. I will not tell you that the show you love is stupid, or groan about how little I like that sport you're happy about. In life, you've got to make room for the cheerful people who are charging through in their nuddy pants, or what's the point of anything else?  

So in that spirit, on Saturday, for the first time in almost ten years, we loaded up the family and spent the night at B&N for the midnight release of Harry Potter.

The kids were good sports, going from booth to booth to participate in craft activities and stuffing themselves in among the Hogwarts-robed twenty-somethings to buy snacks at the cafe. 

That was, until the dementors were released to organize everyone into lines somewhere around 11:40pm, and all the children in the store sank to the floor in exhausted misery as the final minutes dragged by.

But they won't remember that bit later on. They'll remember ADVENTURE. And COOKIES. And being sorted into SLYTHERIN, because they were both wearing black and dueling like dark wizards through the sorting ceremony. "It's okay, because Slytherin is the new Griffindor," Gavin said. This is true. (SPOILERS!)

After way too little sleep, we spent Sunday laying around in pajamas, reading the play in terrible British accents and eating leftover birthday food from the man's 37th. In the afternoon, Zenny got a bit ramped up on cheesecake and charged into the living room, clocked herself on the corner of the rocking chair, and gave herself a bit of a shiner. We iced it down and then danced it off on the porch while hanging out with Bucky the Chicken.

And then yesterday, while sweeping up leaves after the rain, Zenny came over to help and spotted a puddle on the back porch. "Don't jump in that puddle, you'll slip and fall and hit your head," I warned, putting down the broom to intercept her. "Oh, I won't!" she said cheerfully, and immediately jumped into it. And slipped. And fell. And hit her head.

I picked her up, she screamed once, and then she had a seizure. Not a very bad one - not like the last ones - but scary enough to send me charging to the ER with her. It has been two years since her hospital airlift on Maui, and I had hoped we were done getting to know the local trauma teams, but there we were again. And with a black eye. Of course.

She checked out okay, no fractures or vomiting. They decided not to scan her, and kept us around to observe for a while.

"I still have her helmet," I told the ER doctor. "I stopped making her wear it when it looked like she had grown out of the seizures, but maybe I should...?"

"Nah, I wouldn't," he said. "She's going to hit her head from time to time, and at some point she's got to be able to just be a kid and live her life." 

I really appreciated this, because it's been the thing I tell myself every time she charges onto a playground. It helps to hear it from a person who puts people's bodies back together for a living.

So that all really sucked, and we decided we needed ice cream.

Our nerves were still fried when we headed back home, and as we passed the park we saw some boys murdering a chicken with their bare hands. I pulled over and screamed incoherently at them through the car window. I forgot the word for "chicken". I forgot how to swear. I said something like, "HEY. NO. CHUH. CHUCK. FICKEN - LEAVE ALONE!" I had to move along because I was blocking traffic, and Leif said, "Well, that was embarrassing." But I hope those little turds paused long enough for the rooster to escape, and that every time they chase one down now, they'll look around guiltily for insanely screaming moms.

This week, I tell you. And it's only Tuesday.