update

SOMEONE ATE ERIC THE CATERPILLAR. Or he crawled off to metamorphose and didn't leave a note. I would have expected to find a pile of yellow-and-black-striped barf or a sick chicken if he had been eaten, but there's no sign of him. He left plenty of nice milkweed uneaten, so he didn't just crawl off in search of milkier pastures. I hope he's sentient goo in a chrysalis somewhere, and not inside Plucky. 

Also, Steve the Rooster has been rehomed. And the tree limb has been removed. 

To balance things out, the sink has filled with dirty dishes, and the pile of unfolded laundry on my bed has reappeared. Nature is magical.

End of the staycation

I woke up to Steve the rooster cockadoodling. He startled the flock of doves that gathers on the porch waiting for me to feed the chickens, and they exploded into flight with a huge FWOOOMP, which scared the hell out of Steve mid-doodle and sent him screaming around the house. Very brave. Plucky loves him, and has been taking him everywhere, teaching him how to rooster. I like the guy, but chickens don’t have predators here, and we’re only allowed 2 chickens per household. We’ll have about 2 dozen every month if the girls start hiding their eggs from me again. He’s got to go.

In the meantime, I needed more invasive species for my painting. Our stupid conscientious neighborhood is really on top of it and nobody has let invasive species take over. I walked over to the botanical gardens and immediately found every plant I wanted, but there were “don’t pick the plants” signs everywhere and we all know that birds are drones and will report if you try to steal one, so I just took some pictures, instead. 

Surprise! Kahili ginger isn’t Hawaiian, despite its name - it’s one of the top 5 invasive plants in the islands 

Spot the park employee making sure I don’t pick anything

So then I had a terrible idea. If I was very careful… and kept them all in containers or raised beds… I could make my own invasive species garden and then have all the flowers I want, year-round! 

The botanists at the Department of Land and Natural Resources

Look, if they sell the things, people will buy them. Take it up with the Department of Agriculture, DLNR.

Walmart did not have any invasive plants, specializing mainly in ornamental plants that will die immediately in our climate, and I walked away with a $1.00 pansy just because it was cute. Driving out of the parking lot, I spotted a new garden center at the hardware store. Not only did they have an bunch of invasive plants (lantana, allamanda, and ground orchid), they had an entire section of native plants, including one of the early varieties of hibiscus I’ve been looking for! I walked out with a cartful of plants. One of them is a tree. Oh no.

That night I was down in the studio, painting one of my new flowers, when after about two hours, out of nowhere a skinny teen kitten with patchy black and white fur just stood up in front of me, stretched, gave me side eye, and trotted past me and out the door. Excuse me? Does a cat live in my studio? How long had it been in the room with me? I found an egg under the table, too. Presumably not from the cat. I’ve named him Spaghetti, after the cat in an episode of Phroggers I had been listening to (a guy was pulled out from the underside of a couple’s house and told them to take care of Spaghetti, who was still under there somewhere).

Couldn’t sleep. Picked up the family from the airport with purple loops under my eyes. They had flown all night and were exhausted, too, but were so excited to tell me everything, share pictures, and pull out all the Japanese candy they had brought home. After a couple hours they all crashed into naps. I put on a hunk of beef to braise and made a loaf of bread. I'm a bit sad about having to leave my studio and go back to work, back to painting one day a week or in one-hour scraps in the evenings. Still, it's a good life, and I just need to be glad for the time I've had. 

And to keep making plans for the future.

(disclaimer because some people don't know if I'm joking: no, I don't think birds are robots, but it is my favorite online conspiracy theory.)

Launch me to the moon

Yesterday evening I was down in the studio, painting a trumpet flower and feeling pretty good about having 3 hours to finish it before bed, when suddenly there was a terrible loud groaning, creaking, splitting noise from the back yard, then a crack like a gunshot. It sounded exactly like a large tree falling over. I was in a concrete room, half underground, the only exit was toward the noise, and the kids weren’t home to be smooshed if a tree went through their bedroom, so I just stayed very still right where I was. The lychee tree crashed into the house and shook the entire basement. 

It didn’t look as a dramatic as it sounded, but a limb as big as my torso had split from the trunk and fallen onto the patio roof, and it was hanging by a chunk that was making noises like it wanted to rip the rest of the way off. If it did, the huge limb would fall and break the patio furniture, maybe see-saw down and flip, putting the jagged end through a window. I stood and watched the break for about a minute to make sure it wasn’t going to fall immediately, then ran under it and pushed the furniture out of the way. I went to the tool shed, got a pair of branch cutters, dragged the ladder out, climbed up onto the roof, and cut about a hundred pounds of branches and lychee off the cracked limb to lighten it, racing nightfall and humming “Dumb Ways to Die”. Home alone, up on a roof, in the dark, climbing around a hunk of tree that could break off at any moment and catapult me into the sky. With a lighter load, the split stopped groaning, and the tree settled down.

What kind of tree makes so much fruit it tears its own limbs off? That is bad planning. 

Today, I got back up on the roof and cut a few more hundred pounds off the tree, throwing branches and fruit down onto the patio. Ate a few of the biggest ones (fruit, not branches). The outdoor shower was buried under branches, so I had to excavate it and sweep the corrugated roof before I could wash off all the sweat and grime. That counts as a workout for today.

As a reward for all that, one of my library patrons brought me a plastic container with two dead rhinoceros beetles for my invasive species painting. These things are terrible pests, but also very hard to get hold of because they’re found high up in coconut trees, so I’m kind of excited to have some. 

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All my eggs in one basket

The family has flown away, every person in my life in one budget aircraft. I spent 9 hours keeping busy at work and cursing myself for watching that John Oliver episode on Boeing. When a text came in from Japan before bed, I was able to relax. Until they have to fly home. 

After yelling songs at my last class of summer students for the week, I took a few days off. It is my time to go feral. So far that has meant cleaning, doing workouts, cooking gross health food, taking walks to find flowers, painting the flowers, and then going to bed at 10pm. I did spend a lot of time chasing a wild rooster around the yard in my pajamas, though. I finally gave up and named him Steve*.

Gratuitous fitness cult progress picture:

(7 lbs to goal. I didn’t take “before” pictures when I started working on the surgery weight, but I’ll find a picture from last year and put on the same outfit or something.)

Why I’m blogging instead of working out right now:

ADVENTURE

One of the flowers I picked was crown flower (milkweed), and it came with a tiny baby caterpillar. It has doubled in size every day, and I’m getting kind of attached to it. Yesterday I went sneaking back to the neighbor’s bush to clip a bigger snack for it, but the neighbor was outside in the garden, so I kept walking. About 20 paces on, I realized I could just ask for a cutting like a normal person, so I turned back around, then chickened out again when I thought of her noticing the pruning shears sticking out of my pants and guessing what I had been up to, so I just went home. This is why I don’t work as a secret agent.  (Edited to add: to be clear, I only pick flowers growing on public easements by the road, I don’t mess with people’s gardens, I just don’t want them to worry that I will.)

Today I tried again, and walked in the other direction around the neighborhood until I found a different bush of overgrown milkweed to clip a stem from. On my way back, I stopped at a telephone pole with a faded flyer for a lost dog stapled to it - the lost dog we found last month! I texted the owners to see if they had been reunited, and they hadn’t, so I walked over to the neighbor’s house to find out if he still has the dog. His green truck wasn’t parked in front, but the folks next door peeked over their fence and confirmed that he still has the dog and it looks healthy, so I left a note with the flyer in his mailbox and texted the address to the owners. They’re so relieved he didn’t meet a terrible fate! I’m pretty sure the neighbor doesn’t know who I am, but of course now I’m home alone and imagining all the future true crime podcasts about my stupid meddling ass. Fingers crossed for happy people all around. 

*Steve is an old family friend from Indiana who calls my mom at exactly the worst moments to interrupt us with increasingly weird Internet conspiracy theories and political rants. He was already on my shit list for arguing about Tolkien canon in favor of the terrible Hobbit movie and refusing to believe he was wrong even when I read the actual passage in the book out loud, mumbling something about the Silmarillion, which he hasn’t read since 1975 - and THEN he called during 4th of July to explain how the Palestinians are not actually humans, they’re all pure evil, even the toddlers, until my mom blew up at him and he realized he fucked up and she might cancel the packages of coffee and oatmeal she sends him every month. GET OFF OF YOUTUBE AND READ REAL BOOKS, STEVE. Anyway, the rooster interrupted my staycation and has been making a lot of aggravating noise, so he’s Steve now.

4th of July and art repairs

I've never known what to do with the 4th of July, it wasn't a day we celebrated in Canada, on the reservation, or on Molokai. Oahu has a bigger military population, and people generally like beer, bbq & beach holidays, so the neighborhood clears out. I decided to make an apple pie, and if the oven is on I might as well make bread. I decided on Kings Hawaiian Rolls, because they are expensive - so why not make my own? 

The recipe calls for pineapple juice. I had a container of fresh pineapple in the fridge. Some part of my brain dinged up a warning - didn't I read something about the enzymes in fresh pineapple killing the gluten or yeast or something? Shouldn't I go get a can of pineapple that's been pasteurized? Shut up, brain, fresh is best, the stores are going to be packed with people getting beer and meat, and I'm not going out in that mess. 

Well, I killed my bread, and made an enormous bowl of gluey slime. I was not prepared to add another 8 cups of flour to a single batch to try to force it together into a ball, so I let it rise, mucked it all into pans, and made very strange biscuit-bread (pineapple enzymes kill the gluten, turns out). Now I have something to prove, and can't stop until I make perfect Kings Hawaiian Rolls. Even though buying a package of them would be much cheaper at this point.

My mother came over, made guesses about what 2 loaves of pineapple biscuit could be turned into (bread pudding? French toast?) and we sat outside chatting until dinner. We watched the chickens dig around for fallen lychees, and Plucky hopped up onto our laps so we could peel off the layer of dirt that had adhered to the sticky juice on her face and dried into a face mask. She's gorgeous now.

My mom took Zenny home with her for a sleepover, and I spent the evening moving a big concrete head around my studio, trying to find the right spot for my next painting. 

I bought the concrete head knowing it would arrive broken. All the reviews said so. But I had an idea for a painting using my new neighborhood florist, who specializes in locally-farmed flowers. Flowers around here are big and heavy, more tree than flower, so I needed a big heavy planter to hold them up. If it arrived broken, I figured I could just glue it back together, and the cracks would add visual interest. Well, it came in 3 pieces, but her face was thankfully intact, so I put it back together with industrial epoxy.

I can bullshit some symbolism about the cracks if anyone asks about it. 

While I was in mending mode, I took custody of two of my mother's paintings. I've been trying to encourage her to paint again, after she showed interest, but she's waffling. I think she's afraid she won't be any good at it after all this time. When I went to college, she took a painting class at the university and really enjoyed it, but they didn't teach varnishing or framing, so her unfinished paintings have been hanging on nails in the bathroom collecting dust and gecko poop since 1998. She needed to be reminded how much she enjoyed painting, and shown that her work is valued.

So I kidnapped the paintings, cleaned them, re-stretched one of them because termites had eaten the wood support, varnished, and ordered good frames. First one:

Such a difference! I didn't take a "before" shot, so imagine it dull and streaked with dirt, with raw unfinished edges. I'm still working on the other one, which was near a window and had more damage.

She took it home, happy, and then pulled out her paints, and set up an easel with a little canvas in her living room. She hasn't started putting paint to canvas yet, but it's promising.

At work, my co-worker has returned, and I lost the nice office and processing work. I'm back at the front desk, pointing to the toilets all day. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.