yesterday in my garden - comic

Leif has started filling up scraps of paper with little comics about cats and robots and killer cyborg snowmen, so I got him a proper sketchbook. He sits in the back seat on the way to school, drawing and writing. 

I said to him, "And if anything funny or stupid happens to you during the day, you can draw a short little comic about it. Just like 3 panels or something."

And I realized that I don't even do that. Why don't I do that? I MUST DO THAT.

So I did that. Here is yesterday's gardening incident. 

Yarn and baby poop

For when you are trying to nonchalantly put distance between yourself and the Holiday of Shame.

12 hats in 24 days: a knitting challenge

This did not work.

Onward to baby poop. Sorry.

The poo fairy takes a day off, is replaced by spoon

The infink was finally displaying charm and humor in front of my mother. He had a habit of greeting her by getting miserably sick with whatever seasonal grossness his brother brought home from school, and my mother had taken to grunting skeptically whenever we insisted that he was not normally a complete jerkface. It went well for two days, and I got to bask in smug-parent-smugness after his adorable bathtime antics and perfect bedtime routines. Then it all went very wrong, and he spent most of Saturday screaming on the toilet over a log of concentrated Thanksgiving that was refusing to vacate his tiny body. His doctor offered him a spoon (a SPOON), and then - when that was gently declined - a spoon filled with laxative instead. That evening, there was much fanfare over the resulting brick in the potty, and the man was set off on a nostalgic diatribe about the Biggest Poops I Have Ever Seen (which it turns out boys in locker rooms have a lot of experience with), until we kindly told him to shut the fuck up.

On Sunday, cheer needed to be re-asserted, and that cheer needed to involve a lot of chocolate and brandied eggnog, so the tree was set up two weeks early.



The gargoyle cat menaced our feet from her foot-blind.



(Bonus glimpse at last year's grocery store clippings - we maintain our waistlines because we cannot afford to eat)

My mother flew back to Oahu the next day, and I realized I had been laying down her presence like a comfortable padding of fat over my seasonal unease. As I drove back toward the mountain, the insulation tore away and I cried into the steering wheel. I'm a sucker for tradition, you know.

vanity and amputation

A gross post. For posterity. Because they obviously need to know these things.


One of the things I never really liked about myself was a birthmark - ok, a mole, a big, hideous mole - on the back of my head. It is the reason I have shrunk from hands plunging into my hair and hairdressers wielding pointy combs, and why I secretly fear that someone will offer me a million dollars to shave my head on television and I will not be able to do it. I am of Nordic descent; we are blue-eyed, white-skinned, sunburned, and speckled with rich, meaty, knobbly moles, so as to better sneak up on spotted baby seals and, maybe, to provide snacks on long journeys. Thanks, viking ancestors. I had mine clipped off today, starting with the monster growing out the back of my head - uncreatively dubbed "Voldy". (To be fair, perhaps not quite as large as a second head, but at least the size of a pea. That is huge when you are only seeing something with your fingers. Just ask my high school boyfriend. HAA HA. I am vain and mean.)

I also had a couple on my neck, not so nightmarish. Before:



Aw, happy moles are happy. Ignore the green throttle-marks left by my cheap jewelry.

I imagined it would be a neat and tidy process, and I would trot in to work blemish-free and smoothy-smooth. Doctors use Photoshop to do cosmetic procedures now, right? But no - there were scissors and needles and scalpels and cauterizing rods and stitches and bandages involved. "Fine," I said, "Take them off with nail clippers if you have to." My doctor put me up on a table, cut a bald patch out of my hair, stuck me with a needle, cut and tugged and pressed gauze to my head as blood ran down the back of my neck, and asked for sutures. "My first stitches!" I said. "Wait, no, come to think of it, when I gave birth I think I got about 8 of them. But that doesn't count." "Nah," she agreed. What? Why did we just agree on that? I needed my henparts sewn up after being torn open 3 inches by the blunt force of someone's head. That should probably count more than having a mole nicked off. When she was done, I asked to see it, and it was... oh god. I looked at it, with my eyes. And it really did look like Voldemort. Only Voldemort has Ralph Fiennes underneath, and this really, really did not.



Yes, I had to resort to lolcat for that. Also, thank you internet, for giving me this while I was at it:



Also true.

Anyway, the rest of the nicks weren't so bad, and they shooed me out into the waiting room with a bottle of antibiotics and a giant bandage taped to my forehead. I fluffed my locks to arrange them over the bald spot, and a giant hank of hair came out in my hand. I looked around in horror at the empty room and then buried the hairball in the garbage like it was someone's tiny dog I had sat on.

Pulled up to work, and an odd hiss emanated from beneath the car. Specifically, from a big gaping wire-laced crack bulging in the side of the right rear tire. Oh no. I do know how to change a tire, just as I know how to drive stick, start a fire, behead a zombie, and punch a shark. I did not have to do it, however, because my janitor is awesome and he loooves me and I bribe him. I did help lug the busted tire around to the trunk, though, and got greasy dirt all over my work pants. To cheer myself up, I peeled my forehead bandaid off in the mirror, expecting to see something magical and cute, and shrieked at the big gruesome hole cut in a jagged star and burned black in the middle. By the time I walked in to work, I really wasn't feeling too good about the bandages, clumps of missing hair, burn hole in my face, stitches in my scalp, and filthy pants - and there were the two good-looking A/C repair guys who I had forgotten were coming to replace the Singing Compressor of Doom. "I got in a fight with a bear in the parking lot," I said defensively. Damn.


After:



Oh yeah, that's a real improvement there.

My forehead looks much better, too.



moral: remove your moles with nail clippers.