DIY content

Tier 1b employee gets vaccinated

Took my turn sitting in a row of chairs to receive the first arm jab and knit for 15 minutes while they made sure I didn’t die. It was fine. The worst side effect was that I had to stop taking my daily doses of ibuprofen/aspirin a few days beforehand, and all the minor bodily pains I have been ignoring came running in to say hello. Turns out I’ve been having a searing chemical headache from the disinfectant we’ve had to spray every 45 minutes at work. Why have I been so grumpy? It is a mystery.

Knitting

My feelings about Rochester are still manifesting as hats.

Gokstad hat

Seeing the knitting, the girl asked for mittens. These checkered mitts have an “afterthought thumb”, which means I have to rip a hole open on the side and pick up all the thumb stitches, and I don’t trust the whole process so right now it’s a hand sock.

Finally finished my knit-along sweater. It is not flattering, except that it makes me look like I have boobs. Well, one, anyway. And very short arms. This is a Look.

Wandavision blew up my tv

Wanda broke the fourth wall a couple episodes early. As her powers went haywire, rainbow wiggly worms began raining down the television screen, and then it went POP and blacked out. 

Leif looked around at me. “Was that part of the show?” 

It was not. The television was dead. 

Put our masks on. Got a new tv. Threw the old remote into the drawer of old remotes*. Loaded Wandavision back up.

Just as Wanda got pissed and her eyes glowed red, Leif made a panicky noise and turned around with his hand to his mouth.

“My hair ith thtuck to my tongue!”

An individual strand of hair had knotted itself tightly around a single taste bud. This has actually happened to me before. It hurts, and you can’t see into your own mouth to see if it’s stuck to something or actually growing out of your tongue. Scary stuff for a kid. In the end, it took a flashlight, reading glasses, and a very sharp pocket knife to carefully carve the hair off his tongue without hurting his strangled taste bud.

WANDAAAA.

Studio 

Painting has not been happening. It is next to impossible to get time alone when your family is working and learning from home, which is why villains have lairs. 

My lair is downstairs. It is not great. Dust sifts down from people trampling the floorboards overhead, and the light from the ceiling bulb/cracked fish tank windows is terrible, but these are problems I can solve. It is time to get the lair in order. Then I can fuck off downstairs whenever I need time to myself and stop feeling sad about not having time to paint. I can make the time. Or I can hide a beer fridge down there.

So this weekend I went downstairs with a shop vac and mop, tossed out the junk people have been trying to sneak into storage, and installed blinds over the windows that are cemented right into the basement walls (wtf, Larry the Mason). Threw out a lot of dusty drawings and gessoed over bad paintings, so now I have a fleet of primed surfaces, ready to go. The electrician is going to install more light sources when he comes to wire an outlet for the kiln. 

ONE BLUE WINDOW, Larry.

Larry’s idiot children painted right over the door knobs and hinges to the basement door, so I took a razor and chipped the screws free, then took the hardware off and painted the door black. I have ordered shiny brass mortise knobs (the same kind as these - old fashioned with a key hole) and a door knocker shaped like an owl.

Yep, that’s a letter slot with a box affixed to the back. Send me notes when you’re hungry, kids.**

Now I’ve got to figure out how to install a drop ceiling with insulation, to catch dust and block the mind-splintering sound of never-ending lego rummaging in the bedroom overhead. But the room is at least usable for painting again. 

A few years from now, I want this studio to be a comfortable and well-lit space to host small groups for figure painting sessions. Mark it on the life goals list. It is a short list.

raise kids

get a dog

get a passport 

revisit old places/friends 

make ceramics

have a studio art group  

never go skydiving

buy a house

hang my work in a gallery show

buy an old truck

buy a slightly less old truck and maintain it properly 

 

There are things like “successfully grow roses”, “learn to braid bread”, and “make friends with a raccoon” that could be tagged on, but I don’t think I’ll haunt anyone if I don’t get around to them.

What’s on the list, folks?

* we have had one tv in 10 years, and it was a freebie. I do not know where all these remotes have come from. Remotes are like tribbles.

** I do actually have a comfy chair and a table with kids’ art supplies down there. Art is for everyone.

Transfiguration and beer

I turned an onion into a kiln. And a guava branch into an owl. 

Thinking about how to turn produce into tuition.

Stopped at Beer Lab Hawaii to buy a growler of Hakea Bohemian Blonde to support our neighborhood brewery and celebrate not dropping a kiln out of a truck.

I am having happy feelings again.

A hat for the boy

I do not have a face for hats. I have a face for dwarf beards. Why it has not become the fashion to rubberband long hair underneath your nose for warmth and cheek-flattery, I do not know.

See? Majestic. Subscribe to my YouTube tutorials.

The January Hat, by Courtney Kelley

Making pom-poms pisses me off, so I ordered a bag of fake fur balls. I'm going to sew tribbles onto everything, they're fantastic. After you beat the cats off them.

The mittens coming out a bit too big, but I don’t care. He will lose them the first time he wears them, anyway.

Persuasive arguments were persuasive

The scholarships apply to each year, the co-op program places him with a respected company that will pay full-time, grandparents/cousins live only a few hours away, and Gavin is going to be attending Rochester Institute of Technology this fall. 

Majoring in computer engineering. With a minor in ‘20-person hot tub’. I don’t know. The campus is ridiculous. They have their own hockey team and a vibration-proof building for nanotechnology and a sealed lab of cyber security computers for waging virus battles. 

So it looks like I’ll be in New York the beginning of August to deliver the boy to his dorm and have a midlife crisis in an Airbnb.

Have knitted a hat and I’m halfway through a pair of mittens. My Hawaii-born child will definitely lose all his fingers and ears to the icy winds of Lake Ontario immediately. Late September at the latest.