2 months early - I WIN

I made a stocking for the baby.

It is bigger than the baby. Santa had better stuff it with wadded up wrapping paper and stuffed animals.

ponies and birds

First, a note to the cat: You know, cat, if you're going to tangle yourself around someone's legs while they are holding a baby, you run the risk of being barfed on. Don't act so surprised. I've been barfed on three times today, and I am not biting anyone.

So,  I've been trying to get Halloween squared away. I don't know what to do in costume aisles. None of the merchandise is clever or good quality, and yet most of it is something I want to buy anyway. I would have a whole menagerie of plastic rats and mangy crows and giant rubber spiders, all dressed in little handmade sweaters. But I get overwhelmed, and then angry at the toddler French maid costumes, and I just start grabbing things and run for it. This time, I left with a dwarf beard, tattoo sleeves, green face paint, and latex viking armor. The kids can figure out what to do with it, or I will wear it all by myself.

I was planning on dressing Zenny as Lydia the Tattooed Lady, one of her lullabies, but then I got sidetracked by paper mache.

Kids are sleeping, make ponies!

I didn't wait until the paint was dry to try it on her, and it turns out acrylic is really hard to get off of babies. I am working on it. 

OH BOY MORE BIRDS

I have put it out there that we need to focus on raptor rehabilitation and get some owls or hawks in here, because they are much more exciting and could keep the cats in line, but my mother keeps coming home with little weenie birds. A week after releasing a pigeon, the cat caught a ratty old mynah bird with a bad wing. Then two days after returning Mundungus the Mynah to the wild, someone gave us an orphaned zebra dove. 

The next day, someone made us take an injured cardinal. 

He's kind of pissy about it, and bites a lot. So now we have three Java finches, three rice birds, a surly cardinal, and a fledging dove. All of them chirping and throwing seeds and shaking bath water everywhere, and none of them producing wool or eggs or anything useful. I'm just putting in my time as caretaker until I can upgrade to a falcon and wear big leather mitts. I will name my falcon Simon, and train it to pluck out the eyes of my enemies. And then I will go make some enemies. Probably by sending a falcon after them. It all works out pretty neatly.

Costuming and kitty litter

The large boy wanted to be Doctor Who, until we said he could make his own sonic screwdriver instead of buying one. The small boy wants to be Michelangelo the ninja turtle, because of nunchucks. He is narrowing his eyes at me when I offer to make them out of toilet paper tubes, but still has enough belief in my magical craft skills that he imagines I'll pull off a real pair of them somehow. "It isn't about getting toys!" I howl. "It's about getting candy. Focus, children." 

So this morning I asked again, "what do you want to be for Halloween?" 

And the boy said, "A ghost! And Zenny is a cherry, and dad is Pacman."

"Oh! Ok. Maybe a banana, because cherries have connotations I don't think are - *cough* - hey, so what am I?"

"A dot."

Great.

So that's where we are with that. Nowhere.

Disaster litter

Our philosophy with allowances is that everyone does normal chores just for being part a household, and kids get paid extra for (competently) doing things we really, really don't want to do. The small boy can't do anything competently yet, and has almost broken all our necks while learning to spray oil on the wood furniture. The large boy gets to do kitty litter for a dollar a day, because it's gross and we don't want to do it. We have litter upstairs for the old arthritic cats, and litter downstairs for the assholes who would rather pee on the stove than walk upstairs. Twice a week, the garbage goes out, and the boy has to add bathroom trash to the litter bag. So on garbage day, I yelled up, "Don't forget the dirty diapers!" and he obligingly dumped them on top of the dirty litter, then he came downstairs swinging the heavy bag. Leif was playing Legos in the livingroom, and looked up just in time for Gavin to turn the corner, the bag sailing out gracefully in an arc to smack him square in the face like - well, a sack full of poop. The boy walked over his stunned brother. While I helped Leif up, my mother praised Gavin for his dutiful garbage collection, and he hoisted the bag and beamed, "It even has Leif's face imprinted on it!" Brothers, I tell you.

On the next garbage day, we asked him to empty the litter pans and refill them with clean stuff. "Dump the litter into a garbage bag," we said. Surprisingly soon, he was finished, and came in with his brow furrowed.

"Wow, done already?"

"Um, yeah."

"Great, do you need help taking the garbage bag outside?" 

"Um, no." 

"Really? That must have been heavy." 

"Well, the pan was heavy."

"But you put the litter in the garbage, right?"

"... Most of it?"

"Wut."

As it turns out, he had decided that a plastic grocery bag was easier to reach than the roll of garbage bags, and took the pan of litter outside, in case some spilled. Which it did. Because he was dumping a big pan of litter into a little plastic grocery bag. So there was a big pile of dirty clay litter on the grass behind the house. And it was raining. It turns out that raking clay sludge out of grass is harder than it sounds. The boy cried in embarrassment while we tried to clean it up, and then we all hid from the yard men when they came to collect the garbage bags from the outdoor bin. There was a WHOOP and someone sailed past the window. We hosed off the evidence afterward and pretended to know nothing. 

It's a learning curve. I consoled the boy by telling about how I had discovered as a child that if it was too cold to take out the cat litter, I could open the door and hurl the turds outside, and feral dogs would come sailing out of nowhere to snap them out of the air and hork them down like bacon treats. The downside of this, besides being revolting, was that when I did go out to put the litter bags in the trash, I had to do it at a sprint, chased by hungry dogs. I did not always make it. 

A learning curve, I say.

fall happenings

Pumpkin Patch 2013: the Sweatening

I get a bit pissy when people assume I'm military, just because I'm white and overrun with kids. So once again, my Molokai High pride cost us a discount when, at Military Appreciation Day at the pumpkin patch, all the minivans ahead of us were waved in without charge and I demanded to throw money at them because RAWR NO, I'M FROM HERE. My integrity looks a lot like my pig-headedness.

It was the first day of the season, and there were so many huge pumpkins. The cousins tried to lift every pumpkin they came across before finally resigning themselves to small ones.

The walk back through the fields was a huffing stream of complaint. Especially when we passed the kiddie field right next to the gates, full of perfect little round pumpkins. The kids stuck with their warty little squashes out of spite.

The man chose as big a pumpkin as he could carry. I am suspicious that he plans to put the baby in it.

And then there was beer

The Märzen has been in the closet for a month, failing to ferment properly. The yeast did something weird, and the man had to syphon as much off the top as he could to save the batch.

There was a lot of grumbling over a beaker about gravity and clarity, but it's in the bottles and carbonating, which is the part of this process I am most attentive to. 

In the meantime

Caramel apples. I added vanilla and sea salt to the melted candies, because I felt fancy.

Gathering good memories like bricks and mortar to wall off the bad year.

nope

It's fall break, and I've already lost track of the days, thrown off by the blur of the passing school year and a seasonal head cold. We don't have falling leaves and snow to mark the seasons, but we like to keep the illnesses.

The tooth came in at 2:00am, riding a fever, and I was woken by hot little hands. Small dose of baby Tylenol, diaper change, tucked back into bed against me, and she murmured off to sleep again while my brain stayed awake, composing long arguments with people who were Wrong on the Internet. 

'Do whatever the fuck you want' is terrible, terrible life advice, my brain clacked.
Pleasure and happiness are not the same thing. 
Babies do not need flowers bigger than their heads strapped to them to show they are female. Let her just be a baby for a while, ffs.

Everyone is wrong at 2am. Nobody more so than yourself. Some words are etched night after night, and burn like the letters of the One Ring in the darkness. When these started up, I drag a pillow over my head and smother the noise.

And then it is day again.

My sense of immobility and failure is starting to make my family restless.

"I have to go to Anaheim for work in a few months, come with me!"
"Thanks, no."
"Let's sell the house and buy a farm in Washington! We can have apple trees and drive to Vancouver!"
"Nope."

I'm a trapped bear wrapped in a wet banket. No quick movements, I have learned. We had to come to Oahu to get Gavin. We had to go to California to retrieve Leif. We had to be on Maui to find Zenny. I'm finished with wandering for a while. The hiring freeze will lift. The new illustration site will be done soon. The next book is blocked out.

I'm not moving a muscle.

Teeth

Up since 3:30am.

3:30 am, I say again.

I had lunch at 8am, because it had been 4 hours since breakfast. My eyelids have started making a clicking noise when I blink. 

Teeth, man.

search for agent, cont.

For anyone interested in how this process works - or does not work. Mostly not working.

So FIRST. I looked up some agencies that represent artists I like, took some shots of my work, and sent emails to two agents.

THEN. One of them was kind enough to reject me with helpful feedback. I worked on honing my style down to something do-able on time constraints and pretty typically "me", and sent in updates to both agencies.

TODAY. I got another rejection from the nice agent, because my color palette isn't great. As it happens, I hate color, and evidently this is PAINFULLY OBVIOUS. I am good at lines, though.

Still an impenetrable silence from the other agent. So that's either 1, 2, or 4 rejections, depending on how you look at it.

So now I have to decide if I am going to get discouraged, or try again and work on something productive in the meantime. This would SEEM like an obvious choice, but I am kind of leaning toward laying under the tap of the beer bucket in the Harry Potter closet. It must be hard being an agent, when you know the artists you reject every day might go off and drown themselves in semi-fermented Irish ale. Although it kind of solves the problem of having too many artists to sift through, in the long run.

So instead of in addition to doing that, I am going to throw a whole lot more mud at the wall and hope some sticks, while dragging out the pile of graphic novel stories I have been hoarding in my knitting cupboard and seeing if I can make a go at making something WITHOUT my nemesis - color.

More on this as it fails to unfold.

6 months

I did a whole video blog thing, then took it down. I grimace while talking, like a pug who's just been turned into a human.

Recap: babby is 6 months old. I made a pie to mark the half-occasion. Did you know you can fold shit into cool whip and freeze it and call it a pie? Yes, you can. Maybe you can scoop it out with a melon baller and put it in your coffee, too. 

So here is the child.

And here is knitting. With superwash wool.

I did an experiment and tried to kill my mother with it, and failed. So, hurray. Not allergic to superwash, just the stuff with sheep body oil on it.

fails and fails

So I ran over a screw. And a nail. Now the bronze class fee is patching together our tires.

And then I got a rejection from one of the agents. It wasn't unexpected, and it was very kind, with good feedback to push me in the right direction. I'm taking the advice, and working on some samples to demonstrate my "signature". 

So that's progress, at least. It's hard to feel like you're going anywhere when your life has shrunk to the dimensions of a play mat, the hours marked by nap times. You become a creature of breasts and lap and fistfuls of hair, stretching to the end of the invisible tether to cook and shower and drink an entire cup of coffee uninterrupted. These months are fleeting, and this baby is easy and funny and loving, so I am not unhappy, but when the time shrinks around you, the wanting starts to press tight to its edges.

I want.

submission

Not too long ago, a friend asked if I was getting anywhere with my search for an agent.


So this week I finally sent my portfolio to a few representatives. Well, I say "portfolio", but our old computer is in the shop and I don't like our scanner, so what I did was take a few pictures of my books with my phone (#nofilter).  And I say "a few representatives", but by that I mean "two". However, most agents will say they would like exclusivity for a month while they kick you through a few deliberation meetings, so I'm actually being a bit of a tart by sending in more than one. But I liked them, and one of them said they weren't actively looking to add anyone, so hey.

What I did not send was a link to a website or blog, because I don't think my knitting and talk about beards is pertinent to illustration. But if any intrepid agent should find their way here...

I promise to make a proper site.