Oh you guys

This morning someone dumped a puppy by the library bookdrop, covered in fleas and open sores. 

I wrapped her up in my old cardigan, gave her a warm bath with dish soap, killed & picked about a thousand fleas, put ointment on her sores, and gave her snuggles until the Humane Society truck showed up.

Mike vetoed the puppy, just because we have cats and chickens and work all day.

I wanted this baby, ringworm and all.

But the animal cop had bacon treats and a fluffy blanket, so I know she'll be ok. I can lurk on the adoption website and get her back when she's healthy, if I work on the family a bit. Cute puppies get adopted easily, even if I can't make a persuasive argument.

Good luck, baby girl.

Hurricane season

This gif self-updates. Our banana tree is just about ready to harvest, so if the wind knocks it down again, HA. We win anyway. Finally. Unless it also knocks the lychee tree down onto the house.

This week was eaten by work, and I've started a new freelance project with New Zealand, so I'm going to be living in the void for the next few months. 

Here's a fruit I painted last week.

The kids want to plant my model so we can have dragonfruit all the time, but I have explained that it is difficult to cultivate dragonfruit because first you need to punch a hole in our dimension, and then you have to wait for it to crawl over your fence and eat your cats before it produces any fruit.

We will see.

It's official

I am "griping about my medication" years old. After suddenly puffing up like a bufo toad, I have  given up naproxen and salt and also food, just to cover my bases. Deal with it, shitty knee.

Body parts are the kind of problems where if you ignore them, they will eventually go away. I’ve got it  sorted.

Heading out for evening walk

Coming home

Dept of good news: everyone had gone snorkeling with dolphins when I got home from work, so I had an empty house and time to paint. I decided to paint another horcrux. This was a good idea.

Cursed object #2: the skinwalker knife. This is the very knife dropped under our bedroom window by the dark figure staring in at us for three nights, before shooting his brother in law, getting mired in the mud, and eventually taking his own head off with a shotgun. I leave that last bit out when I tell the story to kids.

It doesn't feel bad handling the knife. It doesn't give off creepy vibrations or a menacing aura - it has always been just a battered old knife. It feels like a thing that wasn't, a broken thread that led somewhere bad.

I have feelings about it, though.

Proof of life

Have been rummaging old boxes for physical evidence to satisfy the passport authority that I am, in fact, a citizen despite being foreign-born, and unearthed all kinds of artifacts. Among them, old photos, jammed between pages in no chronological order.

1991, the year I stopped dressing up for the school photographer

1986, the best school picture I ever took

spring, 1997

November 1996

If I can't get a passport, I can't get the gold star on my driver's license. If I can't get the gold star, I can't get on an airplane. If I can't get on an airplane, I am stuck on an island forever. Problematic. I'm not that good of a swimmer.

Pine cone

Summer reading is DONE. The magician has been paid, the children have been stuffed with pizza, and I am free again for another year.

The family was out with the visiting mother-in-law when I got home, so I threw all my stuff down, pushed everything off the table, and painted a tiny pinecone as fast as I could.

Finally found my carmine pencils. I kind of dig how the red shows through where I left the paint thin.

Gavin brought me this pinecone from Point Roberts a couple summers ago, and it has just occurred to me that my teenager accidentally smuggled undeclared agriculture into the state. I'll have to burn the thing before it destroys the eco system. Unless it is too late.

Important chicken update

Chickadoo came around for cake and I figured it was a good time to go steal her eggs, but when I went down into the basement there was an entirely different chicken sitting on the clutch of [mostly stolen and replaced with plastic] eggs. WHAT. Who is THIS? Where are my chickens laying eggs? Why are wild chickens living in my BASEMENT? This is all terrible.

painting, bossing, swatting, and a recipe

I am just slopping around on oil paper until my next shipment of ACM panels arrives. Look, I made myself put in a background. ACHIEVEMENT.

A+ Bossing

While I am temporarily paperwork-filer-in-charge, the library has been assigned an extra employee and I thought, oh no, I should dress like a boss so this person thinks I know what I'm doing. So I put on a big necklace with my tank top and jeans. 

Should probably buy some slacks or something.

A+ Parenting

Introduced the kids to video games circa poor-kid-in-1988, the flyswatter, and Zenny was focused for a solid 2 hours. 

plastic eggs and tennis ball are tactical lures

D- Homesteading

The lychees are late, the lilikoi isn't fruiting, and I finally got an egg out of Chickadoo, but then I thought it would be cute to take a picture of it with her and she looked so offended that I had to put it back.

The banana tree is still standing, at least. 

Guava Cake Recipe 

While I admire fancy cake bakers, my baking style is "hot and on the table". Baking makes a place feel like home, and baking on Mondays makes everyone feel a little better about it being another goddamn Monday. 

This is an easy cake you can make with a can of juice. It's a subtle flavor, but a really nice and simple weeknight kind of cake.

Guava Cake

1 1/2 cups flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1/4 lb butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup guava juice

Preheat oven to 350, grease & flour a little 8x8 cake pan. In a bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Cream the butter and sugar, add eggs and beat well. Add flour mixture and guava juice, mix until just blended and creamy, don't overbeat. Pour it into the cake pan and bake it for about 25 min, until edges pull away from the pan and top is springy. Cool and serve with whipped cream, or frost with cream cheese frosting. 

Cream cheese frosting

Half a block of softened cream cheese

3 tbsp softened butter

2 cups powdered sugar, sifted

a couple tbsp of guava juice, as needed

Mix everything together until it's spreadable and get it onto the cake.

Improvement

Of all my duties as temporary boss of the library, the worst is the leaving of the answering machine recording. I can sing songs and make barnyard noises with groups of 60 kids, but reciting the library hours into a 20 year-old telephone is absolutely harrowing. I think I panicked at the end and said “bye-ee-eee” with at least 3 syllables and slammed the phone down. I don’t know. I didn’t play it back.

Anyway, after that I felt immortal and managed not to get killed by a sofa. Again. Survival rate continues at 100%. Maneuvered it into an impossible porch/walkway and did not take out the door frame or myself. WIN.

Po the Pee-bag (13 year-old cat) unleashed her weirdly-shrimp-scented bladder into our poor old hand-me-down couch when the kitten got into her space - and then into the bare cushions while we were washing the couch covers - and mother-in-law is coming next week, so we have to replace all our furniture before she gets here. OKAY THEN.

I want to call the library to see if I sound stupid but I’m not going to.

Chicken horrors

The only wild rooster we couldn't catch and relocate is a guy I've dubbed Blackbeard, because of his thick and luscious chicken whiskers. He's too smart for the idiotic stick-and-basket traps we set, and after he managed to get 10 chicks under my hen, I gave up. He's a good chicken dad, even if he does have two other girlfriends he brings around for free food. 

So we thought it was Blackbeard who was crowing like an asshole on top of our house yesterday, and went outside to find an ENORMOUS black rooster strutting around on the eaves. Huge. Part horse, probably. So we sprayed him with a hose and he came flapping down like a nightmare and we all ran for our lives. Fine.

Half an hour later, there was a fwupping, flapping sound, like pigeons humping each other. When it didn't stop, I went outside to investigate and found Blackbeard - who is easily half the size of this monster chicken from hell - holding the black rooster down and ripping his fucking head off. And he was doing it under the neighbor's truck, where I was not about to army-crawl just so I could arrive face-to-face with a head-ripping chicken. What I did instead was pace around in circles, threaten him with a broom, wring my hands, and finally run away to let nature take its horrible, horrible course. 

Blackbeard the Decapitator

So that was horrifying. 

Painting 

I haven't had time to paint. Been taking it in small bites where I can, making agonizingly slow progress on this huge piece of ginger, working from the bottom up. My wet palette is in the freezer so the paint doesn't dry, waiting to ambush people rummaging for ice cream bars.

I'll figure it out.