Burns Night 2025

The news is a shit show, but Saturday was fancy dinner night with the Caledonian Society. The RSCDS was performing, so Zenny and I came along for the haggis. (Leif has the flu, so we ditched him.) The Caledonia Society is the group that awards the scholarship/grant for project proposals, so it was also a chance to show my face and make a good impression on the committee members.

The bagpipe band had been playing since 9am for the funeral of a fallen firefighter and they were exhausted, but they powered through it and got to sit down to a slab of prime rib afterwards. 

Celtic Pipes and Drums

There was an entire portion of mashed potatoes and asparagus under that thing.

Z standing in for a RSCDS dancer during the walk-through

Oahu Country Club

Whoops, wore the same dress as last year because I forgot to buy boob tape for the new dress.

"long-suffering painter's model" face

cousins and aunt

After the walk-through, Zenny and I went up to the bar to get a Shirley Temple and a beer with our drink tickets.

As I was trying to pick my way down the stairs in my stupid 4 inch heels without spilling my Stella, one of the grant committee members called out my name and came over to talk. How did she know who I was or what I looked like? Who cares! This was my chance to pitch my idea and show her why they should pick me. Your 15 minutes are almost up, Quincy Jones is in the fourth row, now SING, bitch.

My mind went blank. What is art? Who am I? There was smiling and nodding, and I think I said "cool" and "awesome". Oh no. At least I did not fall down the stairs. She said they'll get back to me in a week or two, which is a lot sooner than expected. Fingers crossed.

Theater students reenacted Rabbie Burns poems with some pretty alarming stage fighting, and the singers hit most of the right notes. Zenny managed not to fall asleep on my lap this year, and we stole all the leftover bread pudding on the table to bring home for Leif. It was a nice night. 

And now I get to plan a hypothetical painting trip until I get the final word on the project. Take small bites of optimism where you can find them.

Better

Our therapist did, in fact, sort things out. Evidently I was intended to lose my shit over that homework assignment so that she could stick her hands into my pain/anger, pull it up by the root cause, and be like, “See? That’s how you do it.” 

Then she said, “Okay, so I’m going to have you move on to the next chapter, and then we’re going to come back and do this chapter again.” 

Mike:

So that's going okay. 

Meanwhile, my painting/research proposal* got a soft nod from one of the Caledonia Society grant committee members (won't find out for sure until May), so I'm busy gathering info and trying out different painting surfaces. Most 18th/19th century artists painted on linen, so I ordered a couple small linen panels mounted on aluminum, which is the modern version of the traditional canvas; light enough to travel with and sturdy enough not to get smashed in a suitcase. I'll figure out which one I like best and then get bigger ones for the project. Spent about 2 hours researching field easels, looking for something portable and lightweight, and narrowed it down to a folding French easel I liked before realizing it's the same one I already have. I am smart.

Anyway, when I wasn't doing that I was painting miniatures and Squid Game on my lunch break. 

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. 

― Kurt Vonnegut

*The proposal is to study historic Scottish art, travel to sites depicted in selected landscape paintings, document how the scenery has changed over time, and paint the modern view in the same style as the original - then come home and use the same techniques/color palette to paint a similar landscape here (eg, coastal rocks, cloudy mountain, etc), thus linking Scottish tradition with Scottish descendants in Hawaii. This is the year I win my fight with landscape painting, damn it.

January is fired

Double root canal. New crown. Hemorrhaging money. Aggravation at work. Dead pigeon tangled in a rope dangling from the huge tree over the library (how?!), and no way to get it down without a cherry picker, so it is just going to decompose and fall apart like the very worst piñata. I tried, though.

You know what you should not do while you are angry about endodontics and money and work? Therapy worksheets with your spouse. “Revisit a rocky moment.” That went about as well as a fork to the chest. 

Therapist can sort it out tomorrow. 

Should probably take a vacation or something. 

January is a speeding truck

The boys have gone back to the mainland, the kids are back in school, and the house is slow and quiet. My car has gas again, the cups are back in the cupboard, and we're going through the normal amount of toilet paper (I understand now why people with multiple young men in a household stockpile toilet paper like they're prepping for the apocalypse). I'd rather have the people than gas, clean cups, and toilet paper, but it's okay. I’m glad they had a good visit and got home safe. 

Other news:

* Got a new storytime rug with Elephant and Piggie all over it, and I was so excited to show my library kids! They did not care, because it is a rug. But their parents were super impressed, I could tell.

* Saved a bird! It died. Disinfected everything, because bird flu has hit our town and I wasn’t actually supposed to save any birds in the first place, but I thought it might have just gotten chewed on by a cat or something.

* There are no eggs anywhere on the island (see: bird flu). People are lined up in mobs to get into the egg farm, rushing the grocery stores for whatever they can restock, hoarding eggs like they’re rolls of toilet paper. I am not taking an elbow to the face for eggs. It’s time to practice some vegan baking until I can figure out where our chickens are laying their eggs this week.  

* Dental adventures. Today I learned that if you go to the dentist to investigate a mysterious tender spot on the roof of your mouth, the dentist will stick a metal pin directly into it like a thumb tack so it’ll show up on an xray. Result: referral to a dental surgeon because there’s a problem in there, oh yay. It's going on your performance review, skeleton.

* Still have not bought a used truck, because ever since paying off my car I have been handing that money over directly to our dentist every month. Add anything to your take-home pay and a sink hole of expenses will immediately open up under it. 

* Tried to take a picture of the full moon in a deep blue sky over silver-rimmed clouds with a single star and two pointy trees - "wow so pretty, this could be a nice painting" - and walked through a wall of crab spider webs in the dark. 

* Movies: Nightbitch. Please Don't Destroy: the Treasure of Foggy Mountain. I've got "Hundreds of Beavers" queued. 

* Art stuff: I've been working on some small paintings, and submitted an application for a scholarship to travel to Scotland for a painting/research trip. Also re-joined the Association of Hawaii Artists so I'll get emails about local shows to participate in. Throwing some mud at the wall to see if it sticks. 

Joyce

The new year is off to a rocky start. 

On Saturday, 10 minutes before storytime, a man we know came up to the desk, looking upset. Ivan is deaf, and the long-time partner of one of our best library friends, who we knew was having a long and difficult recovery from pneumonia. We hurried over to him, and he held up his phone, where he had typed: Joyce died this morning at 12:43am at the hospital. It was a punch in the gut. We all started crying, my coworker came around the desk to hug him. He vocalized and gestured, trying to tell us how it happened - he was sleeping... he got a call... he was not with her when she passed - but his hands were shaking too much to type out more. Joyce has been part of the library family since before I started working here, she organized the library art shows, made beautiful scrapbook-style book marks to give away at the desk, and gifted us books of stamps at the holidays because she worked as a postal carrier until she retired. She loved Ivan fiercely - they found each other later in life, after their children were grown. She was with him through his fight with cancer last year. Surviving all of that and then losing your partner is unspeakably cruel. 

He sent this picture:

Joyce, you will be deeply missed.