Burns Night 2017

For the past umpty-whatever years, we've been attending the Hawaii Scottish Association's annual Burns Night Dinner. When I was 23, I wore one-month-old Gavin to the dinner in a sling. At 24, I noticed the decorative 1-foot-wide cutouts all along the second story balcony right at crawling-baby height, and caught him before he tumbled through (we now refer to these as the 'murder holes'). I discovered that scotch is my natural enemy when I was 26, and confirmed it just to be sure when I was 27. We didn't even attempt to bring Leif the Destroyer to the dinner until he was 5, but baby Zenny came along the year I almost stabbed my cousin's horrible husband in the arm with a fork. 

This year, Gavin is a patiently bored teenager who is discovering that Scottish poetry is worth sitting through when there are plates of haggis*, a slab of prime rib, and slices of cake put down in front of you at regular intervals. Leif smuggled three mini whiskey bottles full of water in his sporran and drank out of them while posing casually, but if he was trying to get someone to call the authorities on us, he chose the wrong venue. These are the same people who told me I should dip his pacifier in scotch to get him to sleep at night. Zenny was so adorable in her formalwear that one of the tipsy old ladies in the restroom got down on her knees to touch the little shiny black shoes and reminisce about the buckle shoes she wore as a girl. Zenny rewarded her with an impromptu tap dance. When we got back to the table, Leif fell asleep and keeled over onto my lap. I checked his whiskey bottles. Still water.

It was a good year, even though I was reluctant to go to another late-night event after coming home from A Streetcar Named Desire the night before and almost getting killed by a stolen car speeding down the wrong side of the divided freeway into oncoming traffic. It missed me by a foot, and I was NOT HAPPY.

But I'm still here, and that is worth a toast.

the tights! the shoes! 

Leif feeling fancy and smuggling contraband.

Nice try, kid.

 golf course at the Oahu Country Club, dayum

waiting for the pipers to march across the golf course

not a fan of the bagpipes actually

AWA' YE DEVIL DRINK. Oh, just the one, then.

CHILD DOWN

* As much as we strive for authenticity, Hawaii haggis is basically just a meatloaf with oats, and is not full of mutton parts or cooked in a sheep's bladder. It's hit-or-miss, depending on the chef, which makes it more exciting, and the ode to the haggis has a lot of screaming and sword-waving, so it's always worth the gamble.

wherein I get a new book deal and talk trash about opera

I've received another manuscript from my editor, and I'm in the bushy-tailed happy sketching stage, certain that this one will be the BEST BOOK EVER. And then I look at my old work and bury my face in embarrassment because it's so awful and I have no idea how any of it got published. Why did I think walleyed children with fat heads were somehow cute? Wtf was I doing with my color? Some people can line up their old work with their new work and go, "Gee, it's so neat to see how much I've grown, lol look how bad I was", but I was not born with grace or confidence. I'm the sort of person who wants to bury my work in the woods and never speak of it again. I will try to be appear less mortified by myself. Maybe. Does it even matter, so long as I keep working? Probably just keeping my nose to the page will make up for being cripplingly self-conscious.

SPEAKING OF CRIPPLING SELF CONSCIOUSNESS. Last night, my grandfather came to visit and we went to the opera to see A Streetcar Named Desire. If you are thinking, isn't that a play, not an opera? you are correct. Is that the one with Marlon Brando or Ned Flanders? Both. Not at the same time, though. In this case, someone decided that the play would be better if the actors were made to discordantly wail all the lines without tune or melody, much in the same way I pretend to be a soprano while warbling out recipe instructions. Surprise. It was not better.

pretty close, Marlon

But at least this time I wasn't wearing granny loafers.

screenshot from instagram because I accidentally 

wiped the image off my phone after posting it

Everyone was trying to get dinner on the table as I was leaving, so my 3 year-old was the only person who would take a picture of me.

she needs some practice maybe

much fancy, very sitting

edited to add: aha! Found the missing photos on the big computer.

The attendance was a bit sparser than normal, because a lot of people were maybe suspicious that an operatic Tennessee Williams play with a rape scene wasn't going to be a peak of cultural achievement, but we still managed to go through our sight-seeing checklist and punch each other each time we saw a guest wearing crocs. 

disclaimer: yes, the news is still terrible and I am not okay with a lot of it. I am okay with Richard Spencer getting punched in the face for a second time, though. Small joys, people.

Everything is on fire and now we have ghosts, too

Home for a few days while the babysitter takes a short vacation, I logged off to spend the morning working on my book and hanging out with the sprog. When I logged back on to check for messages from my other kid, the EPA and National Parks had been silenced, the pipelines are back on, the global gag rule had been reenacted, the White House is straight-up lying about things we saw on live television, the Pope is giving warnings on the rise of the next Hitler, and Oklahoma decided that oral sex is not rape if the victim is unconscious.

But then, March won 4 literary awards, so that stopped me from taking a hammer to my phone.

As I was sitting staring hollow-eyed at my news feed, I caught sight of something orange on the table in front of me and slammed my hand over it, "AHA. GOT YOU." It's a little plastic clapper toy, the sort that falls out of a piñata at a kid's birthday party. It's old and has been repaired with a little fraying rubber band where the hand fell off from overuse. And it's fucking haunted.

Last night, at 3:02 am, I woke up because the soft drips and patter of rain on the patio had changed. Above it was an erratic clatter, artificial-sounding and moving, like a person with a little plastic hand clapper. It was coming from the dining room. The cats were up on the dresser with their ears in varying angles of unhappiness. I got out of bed and tripped over a spilled lego bin, which had not been in the middle of the floor when I went to bed, but that is the nature of spilled lego bins. The clatter stopped when I crashed into the hallway. I walked through the house, looking out all the windows and straining my ears for the clattering sound. When I couldn't find it, I checked on the kids and went back to bed, and the moment my head hit the pillow the chatter of plastic started up again. The cats ran under the bed. I listened to it for a full minute - rattling carefully, slowing down, pausing, rattling frantically - and then I very quietly swung my legs out of bed and sneaked into the hallway. The rattle stopped. I breathed quietly and stood still, and after a few seconds it rattled tentatively. The cats panicked and charged out between my feet, skidding on the hall runner, and I ran through the kitchen and into the dining room under the cover of stampeding paws, but it was too late. The rattle stopped, and for the rest of the night I lay in bed half asleep, dreaming lucidly about defending the house against burglars with an enamel sink. (Not the most practical weapon, probably, but it swung really well.)

And then there it was this morning. The little orange plastic clapper, right there on the dining room table. The table had been cleared for dinner and the kids had been playing Jenga all evening, so how it got there I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

So. Ghost. I don't know what that was about, but you are welcome to sort the cutlery or straighten the book shelves if you are bored at 3am.

I'm going to leave the clapper and legos out again tonight to see if they act as a spectral lure, and then chuck cats at the ghost until they learn how to be better paranormal investigators. I've read that ghosts need high amounts of energy to manifest, and it seems to me that an angry cat should do the trick pretty neatly. 

Will report. If the internet is still up in the morning.

What did you do this weekend?

There is a lot to be said about the unqualified people heading government departments they plan to dismantle, and the friends I have who are in treatment for breast cancer and facing their deaths when they lose ACA coverage, and the outright lies about the education system being "flush with cash", and about environmental regulations being lifted so that we can drill and frack the country into ruin, and about bathroom bills and attacks on women's health services and threats against immigrants and SO MANY OTHER THINGS.

But.

I have a very clear duty and function as a children's librarian. I protect access to information. I teach children pre-reading skills. I read them stories that nurture curiosity and empathy. I organize programs and displays on civil rights, black history, women's history, censorship, other cultures. Only 4% of Hawaii is white, the rest are Pacific Islander or immigrants from the Philippines, Japan, and Southeast Asia. If I am asked as a "patriot" to report my storytime families as immigrants or muslims, I will not be doing that. I will not be providing information about the library books they read or the subjects they study. I will not be refusing service to people of particular descents or dress or gender. I will not stop buying books that depict marginalized people or scientific inquiry or "unpatriotic content". My lines in the sand are drawn. So if I don't say a lot about this mess as we head forward, it is not because I don't see it, but because I have my hands in it, and I want to keep them there as long as I can.

So today, we marched.

Three EIGHT thousand people - laughing and chanting and cheering as passersby honked their horns and waved from car windows. The crowd stretched around three blocks, even in the slashing rain and wind. It was really beautiful.

And then we went to Gordon Biersch and had a beer, because it's important to appreciate the good things while you have them. Like healthcare, and a paycheck, and microbrew beer overlooking the ocean.

And look what arrived today! So perfect. 

Figuring out how to upload drawing videos

Except not onto blogger. I'm giving this a shot, but the good videos are over on my website.

The view from my shower in the mornings. The sun cuts through the steam and you can pretend you are playing one of those air harps at Sharper Image.

here is the drawing

there should be a video here but the preview screen is giving me a pixelated arrow instead

And the mountain is visible again! I can breathe!

finished image

Aaand there is supposed to be a 20 second video here but it loaded

a blue box, instead. Thanks, blogger.

I don't think that worked. Sorry. Or  TA DAAAA.

So. I have been accused of being dead by online persons (well, just Heather), but I am not. I have been busy preparing for the launch of my comic, since I've decided I am too much of a weenie to keep getting rejected by agents, and it's not like I don't have a job with a decent salary anyway, so I'm just going to upload it as a web comic and if the publication truck wants to hit me on its own, that's fine. The point is to do the thing and finish the thing, and uploading as I go has been working for my momentum on the Muu project. So. That.

Also, I totally have not lifted any of those weights. I painted the linen closet, though, and that is almost like lifting weights, in that my arms moved up and down. I will lift them. I'm just not feeling well. The vog has been thick and Bakersfieldian. I might not have gotten sick if I hadn't been sucking in giant lungfuls of air to belt out songs beyond my vocal capacity while driving to a librarian meeting (ayyyayyyy NEEEEEED YOUNG LUNGS). But I did. And I'm sick now. Which is good for my laying-around-drawing-in-front-of-Sherlock-ness, at least.

Here are things:

* Almost accidentally flew to Oregon with my mother this week because of a facebook dispute (“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it,” said Sir Terry Pratchett) but decided to pool our dollars and take the kids to Harry Potter Land over spring break, instead. Assuming, you know, nothing major breaks or springs a leak or needs emergency dental attention and OH NO I HAVE JUST BROUGHT RUIN UPON THE PLAN**.

* Been really into Johnny Cash this week. Well. One song, really. But I mentioned it and now husbandface is being supportive and playing every album Johnny ever made. I don't want to be an asshole but I really want it to stop. 

* Leif has rediscovered Jolene and has been alternating between Miley and Dolly's versions on infinite repeat. Between that and the Johnny Cash now I don't know what's happening in my home, music-wise. Help.

* Last week someone gave me a bag of tangerines from their tree and I was going to make marmalade but now all I've got are some videos of me drawing my shower and a bag of rotted tangerines.

* A colleague I respect said something very nice to me as I was walking away and I wasn't prepared. 

This week: weights. Yes. Weights, and probably also ibuprofen.

**the plan knows I haven't felt like getting on a plane in years, so it will probably be more difficult to thwart than this. 

Did someone say "oiled bikini-clad bodybuilder"?

Yesterday I went to the store for brads and came back with a weight bench and free weights. I was not looking for a weight bench. I was looking for brass fasteners, which are such an outdated office supply item that NOBODY stocks them anymore.  After gesturing in exasperation at all the bradless shelves in FIVE stores, I finally ended up at the thrift store, rummaging fruitlessly through miscellaneous bags of office garbage, and ran right into someone's New Year resolution from last year - fresh and never used and all for the price of just one of the giant free weights it came with.

POWER OF THE SEEEEECRET.

So I came home with the weight bench. And no brads.

Goddamn it. Now I need to use them. I will take a "before" shot. As soon as I find my jar of coconut oil.

The reason I am not using them right this second, and am instead sitting on my butt writing about it, is because I am pretty sure that being home alone, drinking a beer, and getting covered in coconut oil is the best way to murder yourself with a set of free weights. I am not an expert, though. But I will use them. SOON. TOMORROW.

Resolve

Instead of resolutions, people in our family form themes. One year it was "I AM SUPPORTIVE OF YOUR ENDEAVOR", which was a great theme for everyone except me. But it was payment for everyone else being supportive of my (terrible, terrible) decisions leading up to that year, and that is how you balance the books to avoid being hit by a falling tree or a meteor.

Another year it was redouble my efforts, which was a good one because it made me a homeowner and got another book published. It did not, however, make me into an oiled bikini-clad bodybuilder, which is sort of what I was hoping for, but that is what happens when the thing you are redoubling is "getting up for snacks occasionally". 2x nearly-zero is still only slightly more than zero. I struggled on a chin-up bar and did 10-minute yoga a few times and called it a year.

Last year I forgot to set a theme, and society collapsed and everyone died and chickens took over the wasteland. Poor planning.

THIS YEAR, there will be a theme. When my mother asked what it should be, I told her, "running away to live alone in the snowy forests of Ontario with a bunch of sheep". This was not out of some sense of preparation for any hypothetical nuclear dystopia, but because I was in the middle of a domestic quarrel over a gross misuse of socks.

squad goals

She told me I can't do that yet, so what we should do instead is 'whatever it takes'. Whatever it takes to get back into that fancy dress from 8 years ago. Whatever it takes to carve out time to make art and read good books and knit things. Whatever it takes to do what is right for the people around us without becoming bitter, angry old assholes - starting with not running away to Ontario over an argument about socks, probably.

WHATEVER IT TAKES. Mark it, folks.

the wtf gift

I wasn't given any weird gifts, because I have a small family and they either know me pretty well or just send things off my wish list, but my mother got a $70 nightgown from her step-mother. It was... well made.

The table

I'm sitting here in stretchy pants and a Led Zeppelin sweatshirt, but I pulled off a decent formal dinner and here is the proof. Add platters of rosemary-rubbed roast beef and lamb, boats of gravy, bottles and bottles of wine, Julia Child's creamed brussels sprouts, a couple of pies, and there you have it. The cherry pie had a butt-cheek imprint in it because Gavin sat on it in the car, but it had foil on it, so we ate it anyway.

GTFO, CAT, I'M A FANCY HOME BLOGGER

Christmas 2016, revised

I'll write this thing up properly later. FLAMING PUDDING HAPPENING NOW.

Boxing Day update

You've got to do the work to make the magic is another family motto, right there alongside poor eating is good eating, clean is free, and don't do anything you wouldn't tell your mother. Christmas can run a person flat with the surge of expenses, but the work costs nothing, and that's where you can focus your efforts to summon the Holiday Spirit and put it to work doing something other than running over old ladies for parking spaces outside Ross. Pull out the splotched old cookbooks and perform the rites of confection even though the clean-up is a pain in the ass. Walk out into the woods to look at the snowy trees even though the kids are all falling and coughing and making you carry wet mittens. You do the rituals and make everyone happy, and then for a bit you remember how to be happy, too. It's old magic.

This time, I had a plan. I would host the feast - and I would do it like a proper adult, not like a college student pushing card tables together and digging out mismatching cutlery. All year, I hunted thrift stores until I found a sturdy expandable dining table that could comfortably seat a dozen people, and by some amazing coincidence, it was the exact make and model of the one we had in Newfoundland in 1982, so it came with +10 Holiday Charisma. I collected vintage serving ware with little silver feet on them, bought sets of plates and cutlery, assembled a fleet of wine glasses, and in the end we had a table that was - well, not astonishingly impressive or decadent, but respectably proper and fine. And which I forgot to take a fucking picture of. But it worked! The entire family sat down to feast on Christmas Eve, and the roasts were the size of small children, and the sun will continue to rise for another year. It was wonderful.

On Christmas Day, there were stockings! Chocolate oranges! Toys! A fog machine! Frikkin lasers! Opera dresses from two people who felt sorry for me for completely blowing it at the last opera! It was also the Year of the Bag - kid backpacks with cat ears on them, waterproof laptop totes, leather motorcycle backpacks, cartoon book-toting-librarian bags. It was happy, it was funny, and it ended with us setting my mother's tablecloth on fire. She got a new mold for the plum pudding this year, and this one had a hole in the middle. It looked great, and we poured rum all over it and lit it with lots of cheer and singing, but then all the rum pooled in the middle and it just kept burning, shooting fire out the hole in a manner that made everyone's bottoms clench sympathetically. When it wouldn't stop, my mother decided to move the flaming pudding to a dry plate, so that the rum puddled in the hole could burn off, and when she lifted it with a knife all the booze rushed out and exploded in a fireball. She hurried to move the pudding to the dry plate and dripped burning rum all over the tablecloth like napalm. It was the most exciting pudding we've had in years - right up there with the year we bought a bottle of rum that was so high proof that the flames shot up to the ceiling and tried to set the house on fire. Top-notch magic-summoning tradition.

And now we are fat and sleepy and laying around in a pile of candy, making vague promises to go jogging or do some sit ups or never eat again. There are gifts to put away and floors to vacuum and New Years resolutions to think about, but for right now we are just enjoying the lights and the rain and the good, hard work that is all finished for another year.

I might stage the table for a decent picture, if I can get myself out of the rocking chair. I suppose I'll need to put the kettle on eventually.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Crappy phone photo dump!

I made brioche cinnamon buns for Christmas Eve breakfast like a big damn hero

Yay wine

Yay meat

Tamp it all down with hot liquids

The presents were the only thing keeping the lower branches up, 

since the cat broke them all by laying in them.

"Is the fog going to set off the fire alarms?"

"No, I disabled all the fire alarms months ago, when they kept going off."

"What."

Upgrade from the ragged canvas tote I've been carrying my library books in up until now

Bags, bags, baggy bag bags

Guess who still doesn't have shoooooes

I don't do commissions - unless they are for friends who send me boxes of Trader Joes loot in exchange for portraits of their kids

The Christmas meat pie! 

All of the leftover Christmas Eve feast goes into a pie, and it is the BEST

FOOMP. "This reminds me of the night you were born."