Masks, carnations, and the smell of alarm

I‘ve been put on notice for redeployment to a public office, so the time has come to join the sea of people making (and posting) face masks. My hand-me-down fancy sewing machine was being an asshole, so I pulled down my battered old Brother, scrubbed the roach eggs out of the compartments, spilled oil all over the rusty bits, and cruised through a stack of filter-pocket masks. Coffee filters, specifically, because that’s what I’ve got.

If anyone complains that beer fabric is unprofessional, I can ask them to kindly back the fuck up, they are standing too close.

Got carried away and stitched a messy cat face onto one of them. 

It is stupid enough to make me feel happier about wearing it now. 

The governor is talking about a 20% pay cut for state employees and 10% for first responders, starting next pay period. We are state employees. The unions will fight that down a bit, but there is some serious belt-tightening about to happen. We have a plan. Kind of. We have a squishy blob of a plan, anyway.

Painted some carnations while chewing on these things.

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Easter landed like a guillemot.

The oven broke, the ham wouldn’t fit in with the turkey my mother was failing to roast, and we ended up eating bread and broccoli for dinner. My jello splatted out of the mold (“Hey granny, I found the blood you donated,” Gavin said) but the pies, at least, were perfect.

Mostly I just sat around drinking a Guinness and playing with an AI photo-to-painting generator. Maybe I’ll paint actual paintings out of the fake paintings.

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When I was a kid in rural Arizona, we went out hiking with a couple of the other young teachers my mother worked with. Just as we were realizing that it had gotten late and we should head back to the car, a smell surrounded us. Everyone went very still and silent. Thousands of years of being tasty morsels told us exactly what that smell was, without ever having smelled it before; mountain lion. My mother took me by the shoulders and put me in the middle of the group as we all turned to walk back. We found large paw prints on top of our own, just behind us. It became dark fast, and one of our friends had a pack of matches in her pocket. We followed the light of one match at a time, scared of the seconds of darkness in between, knowing there was something large stalking us.

This feels like the moment we smelled the cat.