It's on

Tickets are booked, visa is approved, hotel is reserved, house-sitters are secured, and this thing is happening. After Easter it'll be a short layover in the Pacific Northwest, overnight to London, then a quick flight up to Aberdeen.

22 hours of flying makes time changes easy because your body doesn't know what the hell just happened, you just fall like a log when the sun goes down and your brain cuts circuits. 

I am going to eat every meat pie and try every soup that I see (my last trip basically became a soup tour, fresh soups are so good). And then I will remember that I'm there to work my tail off painting landscapes, my natural enemy*. The whole point of this grant is to get over my bad attitude about landscapes; I figured ancestral land and elderflower cider would push me through the learning curve. Also, I'm going to visit the university and make a cheerful nuisance of myself in the registration offices so they remember my kid when he applies to the engineering college (a few of the painting sites are on campus, so I'll be there anyway). 

My mother and aunt had a spring break visit to Australia to visit the Sydney opera house, and I took a couple days off during the week to take the kids on adventure. We couldn't afford adventure, though, so we ended up on a food quest, instead. There is a local restaurant (E.A.R.L.) that claims to have the best burgers on the island, so we drove all the way over there to confirm. Verdict: yeah, they were good burgers, but a burger is still a burger. We walked off the meal in the H&M next door, and by the time we left with all the clothes they needed, we could have maybe afforded adventure after all. (I got a cool jacket for my trip, though.)

For our quest the next day, I suggested visiting Paalaa Kai bakery to get donuts, but Zenny wanted to stay home and read her book, and Leif had a driver's ed behind-the-wheel session, so I went by myself. And then the cat sat on the box of pastries and smashed it flat. To console myself, I decided to dye my hair dark brown. I've never had dark hair, and I thought it might make me look more sophisticated, so I picked up a box of brown hair color and dumped it all over my head. Except it turns out you really have to look at the back of the box, because some brown dyes are for people with black hair. Guess how you turn black hair into brown hair? Yeah. Bleach.

So spring break was a bit of a bust. 

Wednesday, though, was a state holiday, and we spent the day in the sunshine doing yardwork and washing the cars. Leif had to detail my car for driver's ed, so I bought all the car wash things - sponges, brushes, drying cloths, wash, wax, leather conditioner, wheel shine, headlight de-hazer - and he spent 4 hours vacuuming, buffing, and even picking grains of sand out of the seats with tweezers. I heard him singing over the noise of the vacuum, he was in the zone. Glad the kid has pride in a job well done. The car looks a lot better than my half-assed habit of just spraying it with a hose and sponging off the bird poop.

While he was undoing all my vehicular neglect, I was repotting a few hibiscus plants and found another invasive Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle grub in the soil. I love a big shiny beetle, but these guys have been decimating all the palm trees on the island, including three on our street that are now just dead gnawed-up toothpicks. I couldn't squish it, but I tipped it into a flower pot full of water, apologized, and reported it to the CRB taskforce. Felt like both a good citizen and a narc. 

My chickens are not doing their grub-eating duties because they're brooding on imaginary eggs. One of them sat on a dud until it exploded (which is why we call them 'grenades') and she's still sitting on the broken shells - you can smell her coming when she sneaks out for a snack, covered in rotten egg. Plucky is stubbornly pretending I didn't take her eggs as soon as she laid them, and she's just sitting on dirt. It's fine, keeps them from annoying the neighbors for a little while.

There is a lot to get done in 3 weeks, but I'm getting excited. I've got the panels, panel carrier, historically accurate paints, a half box easel, new sketchbook, pens, and fresh brushes. I am ready to not be helping people print their taxes and find the toilets all day long.

* other natural enemies: board games, kid parties, the color green, salt water, and blue drinks

12

This year the girl hit her growth spurt, and her legs shot out the bottoms of all her pants. We had to start shopping in the smallest size of the teen section just to get jeans that go all the way down to her feet. She joined cheerleading, discovered manga, and groans when she’s asked to help around the house, so that’s all right on schedule. She’s a happy person, funny and bright, and the thought of anything coming along and dimming her shine makes me want to fight the world.

To celebrate, we went ice skating with her two best friends, ate out at her favorite restaurant, and did cake and presents at home. Leif was a solid big brother and held her hand on the ice when her friends took a break to eat pizza. They’re getting along better and better as they get older, and I really hope they stay close as adults.

Love these kids. Happy birthday, baby girl. Question authority, trust your instincts, check your sources, speak up when you see cruelty, stare down bullies, and let your weirdness shine. 

Also Leif said I need to write down this dumb thing I said over cake: “Right about now is when he would have gotten pregnant with himself.” 

I was going to type out context, but nah. 

Back to normal

Leif brought home a virus and got sick, too.

By the time the man got home, I hadn’t been to work in nearly two weeks and was running on fumes. At the airport, I tossed a piece of banana bread and a drink at him as he got in the car, and he said, “Wow, thanks! How did you know I’d be hungry?” I held my hand up like it was squeezing a melon, "I'm a WOman!"*

Usually, not much changes in the daily routine while one of us is away, but that is not what happened this time. This trip was supposed to test our relationship progress by giving him a chance to collect some wins, while giving me a chance to see if I was happier without him, and nature was like, well that’s obviously a bad idea, and flipped on SINGLE PARENT DISASTER MODE. 

I passed off parenting duties like a football to the face and slept for 10 hours. Went back to work, got weird about planning a weekly series of miniature art activities and a tiny gallery show with mini refreshments for summer reading program. My boss tried to nudge me into volunteering to organize a big art show for the adults, too. Nope. When he drops hints, I watch those hints fall right to the floor, where I step over them. Ask directly and I'll do projects outside my position description, but I am not volunteering; there are no promotions or raises for people who take on extra work in our field, only complaints and trouble. Glad he's on board with my plan for a children's mini art show, though.

The kids are better now, routine is back on track. I got my shit together for Lent (workout every day, knock it off with all the baking), the girl is turning 12 next week (birthday cake doesn't count), and my mother is traveling to Australia with her sister for Spring Break (which gets me off the hook for not bringing her to Scotland). Appreciating the good things as they come.

* In 1997 - 17 years old and unaware of the dangers of Florida Man - I decided to walk down the busy main road in Sarasota from my dorm room to the Dollar Store. I was wearing jeans, a hippie halter top, and my oversized letterman jacket, trudging along with my hands in my pockets, when I stopped to cross a side street. A man in a pickup truck stopped and leered at me, leaned out the driver's window, made a hand gesture like someone weighing a cantaloupe, and said in a voice like Cheech Marin, "You're a WOman!" No shit, I thought, and crossed the street. He followed me in his truck, pulled into a parking lot in front of me, waited with his head and arm out the window, and finally realized I wasn't a prostitute when I stomped past without looking at him. He waited an awkward beat and then drove away (my peripheral vision was dialed all the way up). I never walked to the Dollar Store again.

"I'm a WOman!" has been a running joke for so long, it's just part of our lexicon now.

edit: sorry, I had to turn my blog on and off a few times to shake a bot. Also, yes, I went to Ringling; I have a degree in Computer Animation that I never used because every single interviewer without exception asked about my plans to have babies, and one even went as far as to say, "We don't want to hire mothers - erm, parents."

A week off

The boy flew to Canada with his robotics team, the man flew to North Carolina, and Zenny immediately came down with a high fever. She has a history of seizures with fever, so I've had to keep a close eye on her and keep the meds on schedule, which has meant NO SLEEP. My brain can't shut off if it knows I have to get up in a few hours to check temps/medicine, and I've been keeping the bedroom door open at night to listen for sounds of distress, so the cats have been trampolining off my face every time I get close to sleep. My mother came up to watch the girl on Saturday so I could go to work and perform story time. Some weeks the story time group is small and sweet, with toddlers singing and clapping. Some weeks it is a huge mosh pit of screaming and biting, with staff scrambling to find extra crafts because we planned for 24 (the average number of kids is 22) and 60 showed up. It was the Mad Max kind of story time, and I ran for it as soon as the last craft was snatched up.

The boy's team won the Canadian regional, qualifying them for Worlds, and he flew home with a suitcase full of Aero bars and Smarties in the middle of the night. The highway was pretty empty at that hour, and I was screaming along to Black Sabbath to keep myself awake. He was waiting by the curb, sweating in the puffy jacket he was too cool to take off, and on the way home he kept me laughing with stories about how the robot jammed in a critical match and everyone panicked, the autonomous mode went awry and shot projectiles everywhere except the goal, and how good a hot shower felt after freezing to the bone. (It was 40 degrees. The Canadian teams were enjoying the warm weather in shorts and t-shirts, and our kids were in puffer coats, excited to run through every melting puddle of slush.) I love having him home. With the extra set of ears in the house, I was able to close the bedroom door and sleep 5 hours uninterrupted. I am as fresh as the day-old bread bin at the grocery store.

No red flags from the man so far. His brother flaked and didn't join them, but Mike and his sister have been making their dad laugh hard enough for his wife to get upset that they might rupture his aneurism. The man has MS, cancer, and ballooning arteries; he hasn't walked in 15 years, and he's spending the end of his life far from family in a VA hospital. Let him die laughing if he wants. A few weeks ago, their dad had talked to his sister on the phone about his favorite memories of them growing up, and how much he missed the apple pie and cheddar cheese their mom used to make on holidays. His current wife won't let their mom see him or call him to say a last goodbye, so MIL baked an apple pie and sent it along with his sister. When they sliced it up and gave him a piece, he leaned his head back and said it was just as delicious as their mother's pie. He cried a bit when they told him it was from her. That piece of pie said everything. I remember the good times, too. I love you. I forgive you. Goodbye. I think that is pretty beautiful. 

He gets back in a few days. I think it'll be a green light to book those tickets soon.