the goddamn marauding rooster

Every chicken owner will tell you that if you post anything about a problematic bird, you must be prepared to pop open your umbrella and endure a deluge of HAR HAR KILL IT AND EAT IT jokes. It is the "shave and a haircut" of animal discussions, people can't not finish the thought. And that's ok. But also, stop it.

Recently, a rogue rooster went traveling in search of his spirit and decided that the flow of the universe was leading him to the place he was truly meant to be - parked in front of our chicken coop. Our girls are normally free-range, and spend their afternoons napping in the lychee tree, but nobody has explained the tea metaphor to this guy, so we've had to lock them up while we chase this asshole around in circles. We have shooed him, sprayed him with a hose, rigged stick-in-a-box traps, ambushed him with towels and sheets and blankets. The humane society wants a $200 deposit to borrow a chicken trap, and oh yeah, they don't have any anyway. The man actually bagged the rooster, using one of my good quilts, and drove him around town in circles before chucking him over the fence into the gulch by the botanical gardens, a quarter of a mile away. He ran straight back, covered in mud and lured by the seductive honking of Sirius the Lovelorn Hen. She is pretty sure he can change, that she can tame his wild love, and that we just don't understand her LIFE. She is wrong. Sorry, Sirius.

This has been going on for two weeks now. We have had to explain to all the neighbors that it is NOT our goddamn rooster, and that they are free to trap and remove him, too, when he's crapping in their yards. Twitter wants me to eat him. Leave aside the fact that I have never killed an animal in my life and I would cry my damn face off trying to rip his little guts out on my front lawn - the whole problem is that I CAN'T CATCH THE ROOSTER. His drumsticks run faster than mine, and he can fucking FLY. If I had to survive on a homestead, I would have a neat little garden and fat farm animals that would be easy to murder, not wild lusty gulch roosters.

I told the boys to apply all their robotics ingenuity to solving this problem, and they became very involved with watching roomba gifs.

I am getting ready to hand over all our Most Dangerous Game credentials and feed myself to a lion; we are clearly unfit to survive in the wild.

Lurid flowers

My new paintbrushes arrived, and they are beautiful. The kids spent a solid 10 minutes gently bushing them down each other's noses and fingers. These are the brushes all the famous folks use, and I bought the Kate Stone set, so I expected some results. Good ones, even. And so far, I have not been disappointed.

The background is just blocked in; stupid-elaborate background pattern still to come

Garish fake flowers are very fun to paint. Art historians of the future can study them and marvel over how we used to glue fabric and plastic together to make flowers instead of just printing some. Or marvel about how we wasted fabric and plastic on something as stupid as flowers, as they're using the paintings for kindling in the wasteland. Either way, you're WELCOME, future.

"So," I said to the man, "If it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, how long is it going to take me to be a master painter?"
"8 hours at a time? 2.5 years."
"NICE."
"But you only paint on Mondays - 24 years."
"Oh, okay, cool."

Every third Sunday is Free Family Fun Day at the Honolulu Art Museum, so we went down and had a nice long visit with the dead artists. The security guard bounced on his toes and chased my face away from Van Gogh's haystacks when I got up close to look at the paint blobs, even though there was glass over it because of hungry fingers. Said hi to Sargent, and then ran past the walls of volcanoes and Gauguin to visit my very favorite Hawaiian painting; the Lei Maker.

The Lei Maker, Theodore Wores, 1902

She's luminous in real life, with transparent shadows and soft layers of light. Just look at those petals, and that woven mat. I bought a big print at the gift shop, to replace the one I used to have hanging in my room as a teenager, and carried the roll around for the rest of the trip, ready to thump security guards.

What else would I want to do for the next 24 years, anyway? I'll take it.

back to normal

So the sirens did go off in some parts of the island, we were just in a lucky spot. (A lucky spot with a malfunctioning nuclear siren. GREAT.) People sent out last messages to their loved ones, poured last drinks, said sorry to the pets that wouldn't fit in the bathroom with them. Someone had a heart attack. A mother climbed down into a gutter with her children. An old man with dementia ran away and got lost; the police came to look for him at the library. Walmart is in some shit for throwing all their customers out to face annihilation in the parking lot. The old sugar mill next to the library - made of solid concrete - locked everyone from the farmer's market outside. People are displeased.

Immediately after the event, everyone laughed weakly and went about their business. Storytime was crowded with parents who just wanted to sit with each other while their children were occupied with a normal activity. I read a bit manically, and people laughed with just a touch of hysteria. It was okay.

Got home, and found the man's missile defense system on the stove.

After the relief, the horror set in. People started needing to talk. Strangers asked each other, "Where were you when it happened?" Buying a newspaper. At the market with my 80 year old mother. Nursing my baby. Wherever you were, that was where you died. This was the sound of 2 million people collectively shaking off a sudden and upsetting experience.

Then people stopped wanting to talk about it, and plans began to form - selling and moving, renewing passports, reinforcing sheds, stocking 2 weeks of food and water. Suddenly everyone has a reason to buy all the cool survival gear we've always eyeballed in catalogs. Water purifying straws! Gas masks! Freeze dried stroganoff! Hand-crank phone charging radios! Yes, an actual nuclear attack is unlikely (until it is suddenly happening) but hurricanes roll by every year, it only makes sense to build radiation-proof heat-insulated bunkers with enough food and water to last a fallout period of 2 weeks. For, you know, the hurricanes.

These would have been the last pictures on my phone (I have been abusing/forgetting to turn off live photos):

kids eating garbage after shopping at Savers 

Pan laying like a corpse on my arm, looking like he has too many limbs

This would have been the last dumb picture I texted to a friend:

This was the song playing distantly in the back of my head while it went down (the chorus, mostly):

It's been a weird week.


(This is just a processing dump, I'm not moving and I'm not going full-Prepper - sorry, Arizona relatives.)

Missiles in the Morning

I was sitting at my desk, pulling up storytime craft ideas, when my student helpers walked up, pointing their phones at me.

"Um, there's a missile incoming? We have to take shelter?"
"What?"

There was nothing on the news, the sirens weren't blaring. Checking my phone, I saw I had missed a call from my mother.

I am a goddamn wordsmith

My boss called the staff together and everyone compared phone alerts.

Seeing them all together like that, my stomach and limbs suddenly went very cold. I suggested we move away from the windows, and we shuffled as a mob into the media closet, which is just large enough to hold the 6 of us standing close together. I wondered if I should have peed first, but decided that maybe dying on the toilet wouldn't be the way I'd want to go. Did a quick mental inventory: Incoming missiles take about 8-12 minutes. About 5 minutes have passed since the first alerts. Gavin is in Honolulu, at a robotics meet. Schools are pretty well built, and the buildings are up on the mountain a bit, so if Honolulu got nuked he might survive. Zenny and Leif are at home with their dad. The basement has windows, but at least if the house fell in, they might be safer down there with the concrete walls. My mother is trying to find a place to shelter in her house. 

I texted the boy to make sure he was in the gym and away from windows. I texted the man and told him to get in the basement. I texted my mother with an update on where everyone was. How many minutes was that?

We all stood very still while my boss talked soothingly about the missile defense system and sturdy library structure, refreshing the news station website on his phone. Should I send a last message? How? Twitter, probably - that's fastest. We listened and waited. It seemed like more than 12 minutes had passed. I hadn't checked the time when we went in. What would I even say? If I post something and then don't die, that would be embarrassing. I'll wait until I hear a blast. If it's quick, then it's out of my hands. Gavin texted. I tried to reassure him, saying that a missile is hard to aim and that Japan gets warnings like this every time there's a test. There still weren't any sirens. I wasn't going to tip into terror until there were sirens. Something should have happened by now.

One by one, the alerts binged on the screens. False alarm. We all shuddered and laughed and went to have a nice sit-down.

So now that the nerves have settled, I'm noting what I did and did not do in the face of mortal fear. I made sure I knew where my kids and my mother were, and did not think of any other family members at all. I remembered my aunt after it was all over. I didn't think of friends on Maui for hours. My pets would have been toast. The sphere of concern shrank the world down to my kids, my mother, and a parting thought for someone I love.

It's going to be beer and cake for dinner tonight, folks.

work in progress

The axis of the week is back in place, with all days rotating around Painting Mondays. It is such a relief. So of course the kids are all off school for a holiday next Monday, but TOO BAD. I'll put bowls of food out and they can fend for themselves. I've got some garish metallic gold flowers to paint.

this is just blocked in, don't hold me to those feet and hands

In still-insisting-this-is-art-related news, I have been lifting weights regularly again. Also I have replaced food with a 5-lb bucket of organic vegan protein powder that my mother foisted on me in a desperate act of self-preservation. So far I look exactly the same, but angrier.

qualitative art content

It will be a relief to drinking song aficionados to know that I looked up the words to "Show Me the Way to go Home" and have been singing it correctly ever since. Badly. Incessantly. But correctly.

The kids are going back to school tomorrow and there is much excitement. From me, mostly. Between the holidays and the illnesses, I haven't been down in the studio for nearly a month. A month. My skin feels like it's crawling off.

SPEAKING OF - one of my Christmas presents arrived late, and it is wonderful. And also terrible. And smelly. I am suspicious that they used some kind of toxic gas to murder these things, and that the gas leaked out into the packaging. Here's hoping they're all actually dead. I am going to paint some beautiful, awful pictures.

While I was not painting, I drew a little portrait study.

Having a child with a unibrow, wide-set eyes, and tiny mouth was the best thing to ever happen to my drawing style. Love her.

My "draw me a tattoo" queue is kind of backed up, so I drew a mermaid instead of anything anyone actually asked for.

Call it a warm-up for the full sleeve Sarah is going to wind up with after I get all the cosmic elements into her tattoo of Saraswati.  Hindu goddess, knitting, in Swedish folk art style - with alien abduction!

I will include a letter of apology with the final design.

Synchronicity spotting!

I typed up that last post - "Show me the way to go home" - hit publish, then went to the shelves and picked three books to bring home for Zenny. I picked stories I didn't have to bend over for, because my head was throbbing.

At bedtime, I helped the kid into her pajamas, singing/hollering, "Show me the way to go home! I'm tired and I want to go to bed! I had a couple drinks about an hour ago and they went straight to my head!"

Zenny said, "Did you really have a couple of drinks?"

And I said, "No, that is part of the song. I don't remember the rest, though."

"Well you can stop singing now."

Philistine.

We got into bed, I pulled out the stack of library books, and the first one was Zeke Pippin, by William Steig. I hadn't read this one before, but I liked Doctor De Soto, so it had seemed like a safe bet. Zeke is a pig who finds a magic harmonica, and runs away from home after his family falls asleep during his performance of La Traviata. While rafting down the river, he realizes the harmonica is enchanted and suddenly panics because he thinks his mother will be so upset he's run away that she'll shoot herself. In his desperation to get home, he gets mugged by a pack of dogs and then attacked by a wolf. Just as the wolf is about to eat him, he plays the only song he can think of - and that song?  SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME.

So that was weird.

The end.

This is how the year is going to be, sorry, folks. I was going to design qualitative, art-based content on a moderated schedule, and I have just been swigging Dayquil with office coffee and typing stream-of-consciousness, instead.

show me the way to go home

Am sick. Fever-delirious, trussed-in-a-blanket, flat-on-couch, face-rubbed-raw-by-tissues sick. The family hauled my carcass over to my mom's house for NYE, so I had a brief change in couchy scenery while the kids played Exploding Kittens and ate barbecue. Am now back at work, propped up at the desk like an art mannequin, pretending to be alive for the public. Realizing that at some point over the weekend I drank a bunch of cold medicine and bought a cartload of handcrafted paintbrushes from England. What is a 'goat hair mop'? I AM GOING TO FIND OUT.

Ffs.

I am adding some chainmail to my amazon cart in case I make any more robopurchases between episodes of Dirk Gently later tonight.

2018 LIST OF RESOLVE

* get better, get fit, get metallic pants

* paint everything

* renovate some stuff


Keep it simple, improve your skill set, and chase the shiny thing.