Fish hooks and flowers

If pandemic job duties were a steel trap, I’d have chewed my own leg off by now. We’re all daydreaming about radical career changes.

“There is a new forensic anthropology program at the university,” I told my coworker. “I am going to take night classes and go work with dead people.” 

“See, that would be interesting. I always wanted to be a private investigator. Sneak around, catch people doing things.”

“You’d be good at that, you can run fast. I’d get beat up a lot. But I could probably win a fight against a dead person.”

“Some of those crime scenes can be pretty gross, though.”

A year in masks has taught everyone’s eyebrows to speak full sentences. My eyebrows said, pfft, I’m not even bothered because I’m a legendary badass.

Her eyebrows said, girl, I’ve seen you clean a toilet.

Ten minutes later she was handling some old picture frames for the film guys and got a rusty fish hook stuck through her finger. I did what any cool-headed forensics expert would do and freaked the fuck out. Ran around getting bandaids and pliers and wire cutters, handing them up to her on the ladder with my eyes squinched shut. We had to get the film crew’s medic (a retired PE teacher) to cut her off the wall and pry the hook out of her finger. “Well. If you were dead I could have gotten it out for you,” I said. 

I’m overqualified for a certificate in being an absolute weenie, at least. Put it on my resume.

And don’t use fish hooks to hang certificate frames, ffs.

Getting weird about hibiscus 

Doing the damn thing, because if I’m going to be painting flowers I should be painting local ones, not grocery store ones, and by the time the plants are big enough to produce blossoms I might have painting time again (RIGHT?). Plucky is into it, because rolling in fresh dirt and digging up baby plants are two of her favorite things. 

PLUCKY NOOO 

Drove up to Mokuleia to pick up the plant I bought from the hibiscus nursery. The flowers look a bit like a parrot tulip, which I think would be a neat twist on a classic Dutch painting tradition. 

An example of a thing that is not a tulip

 

An example of 17th century Dutch tulip painting by Anna Ruysch (1666-1754)

While I was up there, Jill the Hibiscus Lady gave me a box of loose blossoms, and I was SO EXCITED. Took a hundred reference pictures, because they wilt in a few hours. 

All the flowers I can eat. I’m about to evict the ceiling molding that has been squirreled into the studio while I was at work and paint hibiscus until my eyes fall out. And then buy every single one of these plants and let them take over the yard. Prepare your drumsticks, Plucky.