self-portrait WIP

This is as young as I'm ever going to get. A self-portrait has been on my year's to-do list, and I might as well get cracking on it before gravity gets another 6 months to pull my cheeks down into my neck.

This is my first go with Arches oil paper, and I LOVE IT. It has the surface of a board, but without the pressure not to screw it up, because it's only about a dollar a page. I am not so worried about my paintings lasting 1,000 years, but the paper can be mounted to board if someone gets a wild hair for preservation.

Also this weekend, I painted some elephant ear pods at the request of my boss, who has a special relationship with them because he parks under the famous Exceptional Tree behind the library and it dumps pods on his car every year. Our elephant ear pod tree has been in books, has local arborists throwing parties for it, and enjoys hugs from tree-lovers around the world. Really.

 And now my tables are covered in pods and I feel weird about throwing them in the green waste bin.

Related: in a fit of homemaking, I got it into my head that I would frame all the decent paintings and get them out of my basement studio, so I drove all around town buying up all the thrift store frames. Now my basement studio is filled with empty frames, because most of them were the wrong size. That is called "spring cleaning".

I hid the naked paintings in areas where guests won't find themselves eyeball-to-buttcrack unless they wander out of the living room - in which case, they GETS WHAT THEY DESERVES.

j/k, I don't have any guests.

Last week of school! Summer is my favorite and my best.

end of an era

For the past 15 years, I have had a preschooler in the house. Today the last baby aged out. REJOICE, FOR THERE ARE NO MORE TUITION PAYMENTS. Until they all go into college, one after the other.

And somehow, in all these years, we had managed to avoid the ceremony that has become some kind of cultural standard since the days when they just chucked us out to the curb in our little moon boots: the preschool graduation. Have noticed that the 100th Day of Kindergarten is picking up steam on the pinterest-activity-turned-mandatory-function horizon, but we will trample that when we get to it.

So we didn't actually know what we were doing with this thing. Bring a potluck item! the email said. Great, there are what, maybe 10 preschoolers graduating? I cooked up a bowl of mini wieners, dropped it off, and we sat on a bench waiting for the event to start. Parents began to swarm in. And then aunts, and cousins, and neighbors - all of them carrying massive aluminum trays of fried chicken, pancit noodles, chow mein, kimchi rice. A herd of cheesecakes and cupcakes and full goddamn Costco sheet cakes stampeded by. I realized that I had massively underestimated the volume of weenies this event necessitated.

"Shit shit shit. There are a hundred people here. That guy has an entire industrial crock pot. I am going to break into the kitchen, steal my sad weenies, and run for it," I said.
"Nobody is going to notice," the man said.
"EVERYONE IS GOING TO NOTICE."

Nobody noticed. Someone else brought a huge tray of cocktail weenies and they just sprinkled mine on top of them and then mercifully hid the bowl. We never found it. After the leis and cake, we did an Irish goodbye and wished the tupperware good fortune. Embarrassing.

and also adorable

In the afternoon, the newly-minted kindergartener asked for a pie. THIS is a thing I can do. She and I made enough dough for a fat apple pie and three miniatures; apple, blueberry, and chocolate walnut. Zenny made the leaves to decorate the tops.

Having some feelings about this whole growing-up business.

flailing at the news

Here is a rant about the news:

It is buried in lava. You guys.

1. The Big Island is an active volcano. It has been erupting for more than 30 years. You know what will happen if lava eats the geothermal power plant? It will shoot steam up in the air where the wells are. It will not cause a nuclear explosion. Just keep us posted on damages and closures, we don't need 11 articles a day.

2. Lost in the pile of lava articles, seems there was a shooting at the beach near my library last week. And nobody was caught. And it probably involved a couple of my library patrons. Which ones? WHO KNOWS. Have some lava.

3. Oh look, there was a murder near my house, too. Found the article buried at the bottom of the page because HEY LOOK MORE LAVA.

I do read non-local news, but I'm spending my energy on being mad about this today. Making good decisions.

the kind of sport I am being: the poor kind

I am throwing 'therapy' into my personal quackery compost bin, right on top of alkaline water, Nicholas Sparks, and veganism. You cannot improve upon nature. If we were meant to survive on vegetables, we would not have canines and razor-sharp talons and the ability to run 60mph. If we were meant to heal faster by tearing open old injuries, we would not have invented stitches and the poking of wounds with hot metal rods.

My feelings are not supposed to be spare parts for other people's recovery. I have them for a reason, and they get hurt.

I spent the day after the feelings-reaping shopping online for paint, plane tickets, and one-room cabins in the woods (which I did not have 50k on hand for - YET). Then went home and baked some bread.

 "Look," I told the man, "The future can't be fixed. The past is no good. What we have is right now. And right now can have bread."

So.

Do art, build furniture, raise chickens, brew beer, sharpen talons, make secret plots. Find that brain-calming space and be in it. Japanese milk bread is a good place to start.



**This is not to say that therapy and psychoanalysis (or veganism, or Nicholas Sparks) are bad or useless. They are just not for me.

*** Ok it is to say that about Nick Sparks. FIGHT ME.

strangling hands appeased

In this last week before summer break, normalcy visited briefly and I had Monday to myself again. Put a loaf of bread on to rise, spread out my paints, and worked on my backlog of moleskine drawings.

The legs got away from me, but the fluff was a lot of fun to paint. 

Leif is a hard character to catch a good likeness of, but I think I finally got him.

In other news:

* took a couple of eggs that our hen laid in the basement and stuck them in the fridge. We had run out of room in the egg carton, so I carefully put them in an open box of beer. Yelled to family, "CAREFUL WHEN YOU OPEN THE FRIDGE, THERE ARE DOS EGGIES IN THE DOS EQUIS." Felt great sense of accomplishment.

* spent Mother's Day with my mother. This was fun, except for her latest home improvement. Of all the rich cultural and technological innovations of Japan, the thing that most entertained her was the bidet in every toilet. So she came straight home and ordered an installation kit. Now her toilet shoots terrifying jets of cold water right up the unsuspecting undercarriage, and she laughs at the screams.

* the kids found an Easter egg in the board game cupboard. A hard-boiled one. It smelled like rotting butt. We laughed very hard and then put it in the trash can, where it will sit until one of us forgets about it and smashes some garbage down on top of it until it breaks. Then we will have to burn the house down.

* to delete later: therapy is happening. Not sure what the end goal of this thing is, but I am being a sport and coming along. So far I have cried about being sad that maybe I'll never feel deep love and connection with another person ever again - that I'll just hold onto this want and then die. She said she thinks I will feel feelings again. I asked how a person goes about doing that. She said she didn't know. So that is going well.

* amazing bread recipe has been unlocked, which I will share in next post. Everyone must make it immediately.

expert expertise

A second opinion revealed that the head gasket was not blown on the truck. Instead, the problems were coming from the old cracked hoses that were just kind of... taped into place. With tape. Tape which the guys who were de-greasing my entire engine while fixing the oil pan just somehow failed to notice. I am going to assume that major hoses covered in cracks and tape are a thing that any seasoned mechanic might easily miss - perhaps due to their protective casings, camouflage patterns, or armored defense systems. And easy to mistake for a head gasket. I guess.

standard 2002 Nissan Frontier head gasket

Anyway, the truck is fixed. And the man has been using it for his commute because, I suspect, he does not want to admit that the motorcycle is buried under a ton of shredded roofing material and he can't actually find it.

It has been 3 weeks since I've been able to paint, and I am having some feelings about this. Decided to return to Whidbey Island this fall for another workshop because goddamn it all. Instead of art-ing, I have been keeping my strangling hands busy learning cup games. This falls under "professional development" because I will be forcing 120 middle-schoolers to do it with me.

Without the reindeer jammies and cat. Probably.

ready, set...

FWOOSH SO FAST 

VERY IMPRESSIVE

inevitable outcome

It is important to continue developing your professional skill set even after mastering melodious quacking and woof-woof noises.

Medias

(Note to people who have been texting me - it was the Big Island that exploded, not Oahu. We might get some vog, but otherwise we're cool. Thank you, though.)

Thanks to a fumble while trying to quit Pandora, I accidentally subscribed to an upgrade. Then it ignored my cancellation. Now my phone plays entire streams based on algorithms I don't have the patience to learn, and it helpfully removed the skip button because PREMIUM, so I've basically just been listening to these two on repeat.

Am still reading the Expanse books, two pages at a time before falling asleep at 9pm. One book to go.

Watched the new Lost in a Space with the kids, A+ family trash-talking entertainment. Everyone is very sad that the dad survived.

The roof is still mangled. 

In which I have not been invited back up onto the roof

Well I thought we were having a moment.