Covid

My aunt tested positive on Friday (college faculty) and she’s very sick. My mother tested positive yesterday (public school teacher) and she’s medium sick. Now Leif has started coughing. We have tests scheduled for today. The only one of us who isn’t vaccinated is Zenny, and she’s got a kidney issue that could complicate things. She seems okay so far, but there were 10 cases in her elementary school in the past 2 weeks.

So that’s not going so well.

Backlog of making stuff:

I’m still painting lucky cats for a gallery show in November.

In progress

Finished the painting of the not-dead-in-the-photo cat for Salvo.

Been glazing mythological animals onto pottery.

Top is finished; bottom two are glazed and ready to fire

And I’m working on mittens for my boy. Again. I’m just going to send him a box stuffed completely full of knitted stuff.

Fingers crossed for everyone’s lungs this week.

 

update: young cousin has tested positive. Our tests have come back negative. Waiting on Leif's test.

Home

I was okay with saying goodbye. I was okay with the airline accidentally deleting our tickets. I was okay running across the Philadelphia airport and getting crammed into toilet aisle seats at the last possible second. When our ride forgot us and we sat at the Honolulu curb until midnight, I was okay. The next day we had a houseful of guests and 4 kids banging on the piano, and was I okay? I was.

But today I got into the car to drive to my mom’s with a bag of Trader Joe’s candy and RIT swag, and as soon as I was not surrounded by guests or children or strangers, everything caught up with me and I suddenly started crying. Stopped at a long red light and sobbed into the steering wheel.

I’m missing my boy. This swift and fleeting life, damn.

Last Day

Emptied the travel budget in the school bookstore. Fucking textbooks. Thank goodness for his Military History professor, who did not assign a book. Why are computer engineer majors required to take military history? They are the ones who make systems for guided missiles. I’ve been breaking out into song ever since learning this. “GUIDED MIIIIISSIIILES.” I’m four days short of sleep and running on decaf, this is my time to shine as an embarrassing parent. (Gavin is interested in autonomous cars, not missiles, and has strict instructions to thwart the rise of the murder robots if given the chance.)

I did not want my child to face his first winter without waterproof, insulated boots. We finally found out-of-season footwear in the dead animal emporium; the hunting and fishing store. Now he has sub-zero footwear that is also resistant to blood-born pathogens, perfect for wading in snow and the blood of your enemies.

I was going to claim this massive store as my post-apocalyptic bunker, until I realized I’d have to share it with these guys, along with about two dozen stuffed wolves. That is a lot of bodies to hold funeral services for while also surviving an apocalypse.

Survival boots! With teenage stink protection!

$500 worth of textbooks that don’t even come with covers, just pages with binder holes

After sending him off to orientation, we drove into downtown Rochester to find a proper brewery with Salvo, and the Rohrbach nailed it. They even have a view of the armory from the parking lot, which is an actual castle. An actual castle which is now screening Gojira. Armories are not as well armed as they used to be, I guess.

Love

Old people who spent an hour drinking and trash talking college loans and 90s cartoons

That vanilla porter

Castle of LIES

The boy is settled in, parents have been chased off campus, and it’s time to go home. He’s been texting me memes to soften the transition. Salvo headed back to Toronto, and we feel good that Gavin has an adult within driving distance in case of an emergency.

Heading back over the continent and the ocean. 

Day 3: move in

The campus is a mile long, surrounded by forest paths and filled with little circular courtyards and spiky sculptures to disorient you. My legs have fallen off. It’s a good thing my kid is going to be engineering microcircuitry so he can design my new antilock autonomous self-guided legs.

Move-in was basically us setting up his room while he set up his computer. I hope his roommate doesn’t need to sleep in darkness.

With a few hours to kill in the afternoon, we drove into downtown Rochester to visit the famous Genesee Brew House next to the falls. The view was beautiful. The beer was of a quality one rarely experiences in a brewery — a gas station, maybe. A late night run to a grocery store with $6 in your pocket. Hardly ever a brewery. It was almost enough to make us buy a Genesee beer glass just to serve sad batches of homebrew in. 

Instagram 

My panorama skills are not amazing 

Downtown Rochester. I want to go into those holes in the cliffs and meet some goblins 

It looks good, anyway. Hire a new zymurgist, Genesee

Salvo (one of our oldest friends and Gavin’s unofficial godfather) drove all the way down from Toronto only to get dragged on a terrible sweaty hike around campus while we looked for the orientation groups. We ditched Gavin for his icebreakers and hung out at the hotel to catch up on ten years of stories.

Salvo and Gavin in 2003. 

Long, exhausting, good day.

Day 2

Woke up unreasonably early and it was already 10:30am. What the hell, eastern standard time.

Driving around Rochester, the radio created a time warp by playing all the same songs it was playing back when we were in college and driving around New York as youths. The music cut to talking and after a minute Gavin said, “This is a weird podcast.” Child, I was feeling young until that moment.

Target was full of other parents charging around with carts full of dorm supplies, and other moms pressing warm clothes on teenage boys who looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. All the men in New York are wearing black jogger pants, so that is what I bought them. They complained about their ankles, but looked spiffy anyway. 

So much walking and shopping 

The boy’s first diner 

RESULTS

Two story Barnes and Noble! I thought they were extinct!

Sticky Lips Barbecue 

We ate very good food, hit Trader Joe’s for a bag full of snacks, and got locked out of the hotel room in our swimsuits. 

Amazing day. Rochester is beautiful and forested and full of houses that look like gingerbread. Screw dirt farming.

Day 1.5

(Saturday) Midnight: plane ride to LA. Napped for a few hours with a parka draped over my face. Gavin used me as a body pillow.

(Sunday) 5am: LAX. Navigated the warren of stairwells, empty halls, and half-constructed tunnels that have been unfinished since the first time I got lost in them in 1989. At least they’ve removed the curtains of plastic sheeting and the brief runs across open tarmac.

8am: paid $30 for three bagel sandwiches because it was literally the cheapest fucking meal option in the terminal.

10:30am: boarded flight to Philadelphia 

Noon: deplaned without going anywhere because the fuel lines were malfunctioning and they needed to remove an entire fuel tank from the plane. Watched people yell at the desk guys because they paid FIRST CLASS SO LET’S GO while we sat and drank mocha Frappuccinos. First class people are okay with exploding in midair so long as it’s on schedule I guess.

1pm: re-boarded and flew to Philadelphia. Drew in my sketchbook and watched Outlander over my neighbor’s shoulder.

10:55pm: Why is Philadelphia airport so big?! We had 10 minutes to get to the gate before our flight left without us, and had to sprint nearly a mile. Sent the boys ahead and jogged behind them like someone with the cardiovascular strength of an 80 year-old man and the pelvic floor strength of a 41 year-old mother of 3. Passed about 14 defibrillators, which were installed exactly for ding dongs like me. Did not faceplant while running off the moving walkways. Skidded in just in time to board the plane last. WE WIN. The fashionable 15 year old passenger next to me loses, because I smell like a goat. Sorry, kid.

(Monday) 1am: ROCHESTER. I don’t know what it looks like because it is dark. And cold. We have a sweet black SUV and we are pretending to be feds at the Taco Bell drive through. Our luggage was left in Philadelphia, so everyone is going to be wearing my pants until that gets here. (I am a suspicious traveler who crams all my belongings into one giant carry-on backpack.)

Tomorrow later today: exploration and shopping before checkin at the university.

Day 0

Dudley the chick has been re-homed with a chicken breeder. The babysitters have arrived. The house has been... sort of cleaned.

This thing has started happening.

Aunt Sue and the cousins are here to kick the kids into the car for school every morning

I have not packed my backpack yet. 

It’s a bad time to travel. My mother is sick, Zenny’s kidneys are still acting up, cases are surging and the governor is thinking of taking action again. 

But Sue is a police dispatcher and knows how to handle an emergency. 

And Gavin is so excited. 

Maybe we can sell up and buy a cabin near Rochester and live as hermits while painting ducks and trophy fish for a living.

Bird update

Dudley is still alive. She’s a terrible specimen of a chicken, but she’s on antibiotics now and eating better. Can’t walk a straight line, but doesn’t seem interested in dying.

The baby bulbul is finishing fledging and doing great, now that he’s got an endless supply of nutritional bird formula and all the attention a baby could want.

6 more days until we pack our bags and bring Gavin to New York to fledge. I’ve got my travel sketchbook and a half-dried painting of a dead cat* to give to Sal, in exchange for a bag of mint Aero bars and Big Turks.

Having big feelings about this transition.

*cat is alive in the painting

Teenager #2

A week from losing Gavin to college, Leif stepped into the role of resident teenager. We went through photos from the day he was born, and he fell over sideways, laughing at his unflattering newborn faces. 

"Wow, mom, did you ask dad if he was part gremlin before you had me?"

"You had a hard day! You almost strangled to death!" I said defensively. “I thought you were perfect.”

 

  gremlin baby

And I still think he's perfect. 

 

The boy is a comedian, a perpetual sound-effects machine. He gets solemn about how quickly our lives pass by, he’s kind and wry and thinks about people. He tells stories with wild gestures, hops on the piano to bang out a soundtrack, draws action-packed comics, and he's obsessed with Lego - so much so that he plans to get a degree in industrial engineering and work as a Lego designer in Denmark. "That's not going to happen, and I’m not buying him any more Lego, he has enough," Gavin said, because he is tired of stepping on them and listening to endless rummaging for individual pieces. Well, those jobs exist, don't they? Someone has to design those things. So I bought a bunch of Lego sets for his birthday and made everyone's feet and ears wince. Do the damn thing, kid. Or just enjoy them while you're young enough to be excited by them, that's fine, too.

Happy 13th birthday, baby boy.

Dept of bad ideas

Rescued another baby bulbul that fell out of the lychee tree and tried to get eaten by chickens. 

Two days later, I stepped out of the car and almost put my foot on a lost chick. Picked it up, walked all around the library looking for a hen with small chicks, couldn’t find her, and now I’ve got a ward of the state in a quarantine box, napping on a hand warmer rolled up in a sock. Trying to determine whether he’s a late hatcher or a plague carrier before dumping him off with the other two orphaned chicks (ahem, and a baby bulbul) that my mother is already raising.

Baby birds warming under boobs:

So besides decaffeinating and getting weird about the stock market, I also ordered a nonfiring theater replica of the gun my mother was so in love with at the Kingman swap meet (which is out of character for her, but as a 4th generation Kingmanite, odds are it was probably her actual gun from a former life, which she used to shoot people when they asked her for a ride to Oatman). FedEx labeled it with the wrong address, stuck it on a boat, and three weeks later a box turned up at the neighbor’s house. The neighbor helpfully brought it over, Gavin accepted it, “Thanks!” and then he turned around and yelled into the house, “HEY, MOM’S GUN IS HERE.” Sorry, neighbor. 

It’s really a high quality prop, heavy and seemingly fully functional. It says it can fire flash rounds, and I’m too dumb/disinterested to know how that would differ from firing actual bullets, if anyone got hold of some and stuck them in. Part of me is suspicious it’ll come to life and fire a hole through the wall while I’m messing with it, so it’s in time out until I’m ready to pose it for a painting.

Add that to the painting queue, which starts with my friend's ex-husband's dead cat and ends in a November gallery exhibition. The show is themed “Maneki Neko”, so I’m gathering lucky cat figurines for a series of little still life paintings, which I can sell and then buy one of the giant scary porcelain lucky cats with a huge mouth filled with a bunch of tiny less-lucky cats.

Or my next opera outfit:

If I can paint with all these birds stuffed down my shirt.