spooked

I've been listening to the Spooked podcast lately, and it's cool what people will reframe as paranormal when they're in the right mindset. It's probably not a ghost staring in your window at night, Chuck, CALL THE POLICE. 

I submit for spooky consideration: The Lemon. This story is not paranormal unless you insist it is - it's just a gross story common to Hawaii, and has happened to me more than once, so you'd think I would learn, but I do not.

 A few weeks ago I left a lemon out on the counter overnight. It was perfectly fine and firm the next evening when picked it up, cut it in half, and held it over the mixing bowl to squeeze it. This was a store-bought mainland lemon, wax and GMOs and pesticides and all, and as I gave it a nice squeeze, a couple of tiny seeds pushed themselves out of the pulp. It's bad enough watching seeds bulge out of a lemon's flesh, but then, along with the seeds, the lemon birthed an entire, live, shiny brown baby cockroach. I dropped the lemon, the cockroach bounced off, and it ran for cover under the coffee maker. GHOST COCKROACH. Or maybe it squeezed through the nub on the end of the lemon during the night and was trying to live in there, who knows.

Ghosts, probably.

Defensively, I'll add here that we use good cockroach bait in non-poisonous-to-children-and-cats locations throughout the house, because it pisses me right off when they lick the oil off my paintings (the roaches, not my kids and cats), so our house is pretty devoid of B-52s. Still, the babies show up from time to time. In my produce, evidently.

This week I rescheduled a root canal so I could finally have a day alone to paint after weeks of interruptions. The painting needs another sitting or two, but I like where it's going so far.

Finish the shirt and vest, touch up the eyes and jawline by the ear, 
lower the shadowed eyelid a hair... It'll get there.

During lunch breaks I've been watching Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, which is nice little British art competition where painters get 4 hours to panic and ruin a painting in front of a live audience.

I like it because everyone is very kind to the each other, and because the art process is fun and inspiring even if it's stressful and embarrassing for the artists. Plus, a few of them have followed me back on Instagram, and it's like the tiny wave bikers give each other when they pass another motorcycle. Sometimes the internet feels wholesome.

Painting and gross lemons aside, February was almost as rough as January. A work friend was killed in a plane crash, we had a small run of injuries, and the old cat has decided the bed is for peeing on - but REJOICE, it is Girl Scout Cookie season, and even though it was the first day of Lent, I let a small child shake me down for all my cash yesterday. That is the rule, and it is one of the rules my kids encourage me to follow the most; right under "always check to make sure the chocolate chips aren't poisoned".

Stuff your wallets with 5 dollar bills, folks, they're coming for you.

tired

Had an hour over the weekend to sketch out the beginnings of the next painting; not enough time to put any serious work into the two paintings already in progress, but enough to bump my internal battery from red to yellow.

Feeling scraped thin and sad again, and the nightmares are back, so I lined up all my vitamin bottles next to the coffee maker and put my rain coat on for a nighttime walk. Vitamins and walking aren't going to solve the busy schedule of doctor appointments, work problems, family events, and school obligations, but maybe they'll help the little heart-rate monitor on my watch go back to a steady rhythm.

Someone come and pitch me out of the building, I need a day off.

 Go take a nap!

The youngest aunt & family came to visit from Canadaland, and we all ate wheat- meat- sugar- peanut- citrus- oat- garlic-free foods (ok, I had a Guinness) while she told stories about living in a house so cold their socks froze to the floor with every step, and about a neighbor who panicked during a Chinook and tried to shoot the wind, but shot their house, instead (with them inside it). The teenage cousins filled the living room, laughing about memes, playing minecraft music on the piano, and screaming, "WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT JUSTIN TRUDEAU AGAIN?" The youths have big opinions about Canadian environmental politics, but can't argue the fact that Trudeau's beard is very handsome.

Trudeau has a beard - YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID

It was wonderful to see them again, and really weird to be around so many incarnations of my own face. Sorry, kids, I blamed the in-laws, but that forehead is all ours. 

kids not pictured were in the kitchen, snuffling out all the chocolate chip cookies I had hidden 

I've been half-reading a lot of books on my lunch break and tossing them aside. I keep getting attracted to complicated, gritty, epic novels, and what I probably need is some satisfyingly quick garbage to tear through until things settle down. Anybody read anything good  entertaining lately?

nah

Did not go down to Kalihi to make prints on Monday, so I missed the mid-afternoon machete attack. Gotta do better than that to get me, Kalihi.

The winter rain arrived, blowing trees and chickens all over the place and knocking out half the street lights, so every intersection became Fury Road. We stayed inside and baked cookies. Made some progress on the painting of the boy. He shaved his baby beard after this, but TOO LATE. It is captured for the ages now, kid.

Got back to the library and discovered that someone had Hulk-smashed the book shed again. People keep thinking there's something important locked in the plastic shed behind the library - but what, exactly? What would a library keep in a plastic outdoor shed? Bricks of gold? Cases of liquor? Valuable electronics? It is full of old books, folks. But if you're ramped up on meth, a plastic shed is like a giant oyster shell, and if you believe hard enough and summon the strength to crack it open with your bare hands, there just might be something magical inside. And there is, depending on how you feel about torn cookbooks and old copies of Reader's Digest, but they never seem to take anything. Pity.

In knitting-in-front-of-the-Witcher news, I have been repeatedly starting and ripping out my knitting, trying to make a cardigan out of one ball of leftover sock yarn. It's not going to happen, but I don't want to buy more yarn because... well, because I did, in fact, order more painting panels. Kind of a lot of them. Any time I say I'm not allowed to buy something until I've used up what I've got, it is a sign that I already have a full online cart that I'm about to click "submit" on after my Sunday pint of Guinness. That is nature, there is no point fighting it.

And while I was mangling my knitting, I mentioned that I read on the news that some blind person had declared Robert Pattinson the most Handsome Man in the World. The news did not say who declared this - maybe his mother? - and then, as I was saying this, I noticed that Mike was nodding thoughtfully, like this made perfect sense to him.

"No. How can Robert Pattinson be the most handsome man in the world when whoever plays Geralt is also in this world? And Yennefer. And the horse. That is a very handsome horse."
Mike looked like I had slapped him. "GERALT? Look at him."
"Yeah, and?"
"And his face. His nose is all messed up."
WHAT.

 I have to divorce him again, folks.

very romance

Good news, everybody. It seems I have accidentally been dating a retired Russian professor. I thought I was just helping him find English learning resources, but today he started negging me about how I'm too dumb to learn Russian and then asked if I liked how he looked. Joke's on him, I'm also too dumb to get a passport, so he can't stuff me on a plane back to Russia no matter how sweet he talks.

The test prints came today and they are way too dark. Goddamn it. I’m going to have to drive down to Kalihi and go to a local giclee printer, and Kalihi is full of stabby weirdos. I don’t want to die for these things. But I WILL.

Prints-to-be

Have scanned & ordered two paintings on different giclee papers to see which looks best. And I've learned that my phone autocorrects "giclee" to "fuckers", so that's going to make the promotional tweets exciting. This whole process makes me feel like a fraud and amateur, but the only way to do a thing is to just do it.

The teenager's robotics trip to Taiwan is still happening, despite the nearby plague outbreak, so I finished knitting his hat. Taiwan only has 11 cases of the virus, and they probably won't all be at the robotics competition. Still have time to knit a matching surgical mask, though.

Leif gave it a test drive to make sure the cat ears were in the right spot, and he was smart enough to tell me they totally were, because there is no way I was ripping them off and re-stitching them.

While the neighbors got their barbeques going this weekend, Zenny and I walked with pockets full of quarters to buy a round mirror at the thrift store and raid the grocery store's used bread shelf. On the way back we stopped at the playground to check on all the little graffiti dicks, and we can report that the population is flourishing.

Got home, hung the little mirror on the wall, and painted it as the border for the round portrait I've been working on. It will either look clever or weird when the picture is finally framed.

Gavin is the least-painted of the kids, because he spends the daylight hours locked in the production lab with his teammates, but I caught him and his tiny teenage beard while they were home on Sunday morning.

underpainting 

Those chin whiskers need documentation for posterity. 

Holding still and waiting for February to decide which way it's blowing. January broke a tooth, popped a tire, killed a friend, diagnosed the cat with cancer, caused a bank error that broke my account, and gave us the flu. 

I've got my eye out for good signs, though. There are fruits on the lilikoi vine, baby bananas on the tree, and eggs in the tool shed. Delightful.