Too cheap to buy round panels

Bad dreams, woke up composing “if you’re reading this, I am dead” letters in my sleep. Something about getting trampled playing frisbee - very deep and meaningful stuff.

Alexa, slap me out of it. 

Thank you.

Baked a few loaves of raisin bread and started another painting of Zenny. The portrait seemed like it should be round, but I don’t have any round panels, and I’m not allowed to buy any more painting stuff until the last 3 aluminum panels are used up, so I put a trivet down and traced its circle onto a square of ACM. 

First layer - still need to do the headband and figure out what is going on with the background 

Put my mask on and varnished the recent flower paintings. Eyeballed the commission I am neglecting because I'm mad at the hands in the picture. Avoided working on it by coating some tiny cheap Walmart wood panels with linseed oil to build up a paintable surface that won't bleed or warp, and now they are drying in the metal sink outside just in case they burst into flames. My can of linseed oil is rusted and old, and I have been assured it will spontaneously combust, so I handle it like someone defusing a bomb. This is where it's nice that we have the air humidity of a swimming pool.

Am getting overloaded with these paintings. The goal for these next few months is to get an etsy shop together and move some things out. Then I'm going to buy all the round panels I can eat.

Philip

One of my friends died. I am so fucking sad.

We sat next to each other in most of our high school classes, sharing paperback books and talking shit about conceptual art. As a joke, he jammed a plastic fork into an orange, put it in an empty fish tank, called it a "time piece", and won a national student art award as it molded and rotted. Take that, banana duct-taped to a wall. 

A couple months ago we were talking about the Piers Anthony books we read as teenagers, trying (and failing) to find online images of the old Xanth art calendar I loved with all my baby-fangirl heart when I was 11. Last night I went to look for a picture of Philip in our yearbook, and opened it up to find one of the calendar pages tucked inside. He would have laughed.

Those nipple feathers and tail sparkles were instrumental in the switch from wanting to be a zoologist to wanting to be an artist. 
Still have not fulfilled my boobie-centaur art aspirations - I'm wasting my LIFE, Philip.

He made beautiful cakes with wild flavor combinations like purple sweet potato & baby coconut, and soy sauce caramel & passion fruit, decorated with perfect, brightly-colored sugar flowers and buttercream succulents. When I learned that he had died, I cried very hard and then started baking a cake. It looked like the cat made it, but it tasted good.

Vanilla elderflower cake with homemade lemon curd and whipped cream frosting. 
I murdered the swiss buttercream flowers and they went in the trash, sorry.

Was still depressed, so I painted a cat skull. A bit on the nose, angst-wise.

Next time I'll jam a plastic fork in an orange and paint that, instead.

If you're an old friend lurking around here, please just go ahead and send a message on Instagram or something. I am a terrible correspondent, so this is low-commitment; we can just trash-talk each other's posts from time to time. 

And don't die, ffs.

flower and wasp

Painting

Been alone with the kids for a bit now, throwing out clutter, installing under-the-cupboard lights, tripping over kittens, rescuing injured chicks, dealing with flat tires - the usual things that happen when there's nobody to complain to. But finally, for the first time since mid-December, school schedules reasserted themselves and I had all of Monday to paint again. I laid down another wilted hibiscus from my garden, and then got on my tiptoes to take down my box of horrors - an old Altoids tin filled with dead bees and wasps I’ve been collecting while cleaning windowsills. It’s hidden on the top of a cabinet where the kids can't accidentally discover it and traumatize themselves, thinking it's candy.

Wasps fall under the category of That Shit is Haunted, like broken dolls and old televisions. I have an early, dreamlike memory of walking through very green woods and entering an old overgrown house filled with tall windows that pulled open from the tops, like hinged oven doors. The windows were dusty, the light was heavy, and on every surface - across the floor, along all the windowsills, filling the partially-opened window frames - were dead wasps. An impossible number of wasps, like they had filled the inside of the house and then fallen dead at the same moment. I have asked my mother about this memory, and she gets a faraway look on her face and says, "That sounds about right." Very helpful.


Knitting 

Waiting rooms are knitting rooms. Gavin is flying into snow with his robotics team this winter, and he needs a hat.

CO 146 stitches; chart from Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible

The stitch pattern looks like angry cats. He wants me to put pointy ears on the top instead of a pom-pom. Kid, I will knit you a full onesie if you ask me to.


and a very minor accomplishment

When the electricians re-wired the house, they didn't put a switch on the dining room side of the kitchen, so I've been slapping the wall where it ought to be for 4 years now. Instead of walking across the dark kitchen to get to the light switch, I've been performing a blindfold act with the coffee pot every morning. This week I finally installed a motion-activated light, and it has saved my early-rising life.

(boomerang gif, no actual strobing happening)

I have dreams of living in a cozy cottage with oil lamps and candles, but I also have dreams of not burning my house down, so this is where we are. The coziness factor improves if you say Lumos when you enter the kitchen.

2020 so far

In the last 3 days:

Spent half a paycheck on robotics travel for the teenager.

Went to Honolulu to renew Gavin's passport, growled at three men who creeped up on my daughter and tried to talk to her about how pretty her hair was.

Trying to find a public toilet downtown, I walked four blocks to a Walmart and ran into the homeless guy who was thrown out of the library for rubbing my hands in grad school 15 years ago (he was rubbing a cashier's hands, with security headed for him). Almost interrupted to give him a high-five for still being alive, but he might have kept my hand for good this time.

Got home and said how relieved I was to have all the big expensive stuff taken care of - immediately broke a tooth on my salad.

Got back to work from emergency tooth repair and had to call the police because the "stranger danger" guy was dropping his shorts and flapping his dick around in front of the library.

The cockroaches licked the face off one of my paintings.



If the rest of the year continues this way, I'm going to file a grievance.

edited to add: flat tire!

Happy mew year

Yep, that’s the title I’m going with. First post of the year/decade. Decisions were made.

2020: Year of the Wet Blanket

New Year's Eve is not my holiday. You spend all that money on Christmas, wade through meats and cheeses and chocolates for a week, and then in the same pay period you have to host another feast, stay up half the night, and politely drink a beaker of poison because "we have to finish this bottle, it's expensive". This seemed like a problem of attitude, one I could solve by taking the reigns and making it into a holiday I enjoy. I wasn't sure what that would actually look like, though, since what I enjoy is staying at home and going to bed early with a book, and I felt too crappy to make a good plan. So I opted out instead, rattling my bottle of antibiotics and the new kitten as an excuse to stay home and comfort the animals.

What breed is he? 'Scapegoat'

Hawaii explodes at midnight, with so many illegal aerials that the police would need bulldozer buckets on the fronts of their cars to scoop everyone up and take them to jail. The best they can do is drive around the neighborhoods with their blue lights on and cause a 15-second pause as everyone holds the bombs behind their backs until they pass by. It's an impossible thing to enforce, and it's clear the majority of people are in favor of blowing shit up. There are bad spirits to be driven out, even if it means driving them straight into the lungs and brains of everybody else.

For our part, we are too lazy/cheap/flammable to set off so much as a pop-it. The family went to my aunt's scary high-rise apartment to watch the island light up below, and I spent the night alone, painting and reading as the explosions gained momentum.

portrait of the artist skipping a NYE party

At midnight, I ran out on the lawn just as the neighbors sent up the biggest, most professional fireworks show you could ever ask for, almost setting the lychee tree on fire. It was amazing. At 12:10am, while the neighborhood still roared and smoked, they brought out leaf blowers, blew all the debris into a pile, and the kids lit a bonfire to burn the red paper and cardboard casings. The dads said, "Jump over the fire!" and the moms said, "Nooooo," but let them jump over anyway.

None of the kids went up in flames.

By 1am, the neighborhood was quiet and clean again, the driveway was no longer on fire, and everyone was home safe in bed. It was a good night.

On New Year's Day, we packed up Christmas without trampling or boxing up the kitten, then drove over the mountain to my mother's house.

The kitten's name is Yulik, after Baba Yaga's cat. 

He spent the holiday falling off of things and getting his face munched. 

Get the ball rolling is the theme this year. In that spirit, while my mother laid out a medieval feast of cheeses, fruits, breads, ham, and smoked turkey legs, I aggressively tossed her kitchen, cleaned everything, and threw garbage bags out the back door before she could catch me.

Delicious! btw I threw out all your empty sour cream tubs for storing leftovers. HAPPY NEW YEAR.

She likes that kind of thing, though. Don't try it with your in-laws or boss.

We ate enough Cambozola to keep us fed until spring, then watched the season finale of The Mandalorian, which was a thing of beauty and perfection, even though we were all yelling about the lava. We don't like lava over here.

This is the year! Get the ball rolling, there is still time!

xoxo
h