The gift of not being able to find anything

My mother and aunt have run away to Japan for the weekend (Scoot airlines had a $275 round-trip  deal, wtf) so I am housesitting while the man rips our roof apart with his crew of large friends. My mother thinks I use these house-minding overnights to throw all her stuff away, and she is CORRECT. Looking into renting a flamethrower for her mail pile. She is not a pack rat, particularly, but gets overwhelmed by the places where clutter accumulates; recycling, papers, the shoe pile, art supplies. I am hauling everything away and blaming it on her cats. Whatever it was that’s gone missing, the cats peed on it. The old lids to lost plastic containers? Yeah, I don’t know how the cats got into the drawer, it’s amazing. The Guinness that was in the mini fridge? Fuckin cats these days, I tell you.

A body needs someone to toss the detritus and do a hard scrub once in a while. Probably, you’d want them to warn you first, but OH WELL. She’s not old enough to have a cane to hit me with, so that is just poor planning on her part.

Edit: I found a cane! Should probably either hide it better, or plan preemptive strike.

shut up, self

I don't write about day-to-day life anymore, I thought. Everything is so routine and easy and boring.

And then I looked over my shoulder anxiously, realizing what I had done.

TOO LATE.



cracked a tooth, resulting in two root canals on single molar

roof leaked, damaged ceiling

man went into attic to find leak and found hammer-shaped hole in roof with an old aluminum baking pan under it

kids flunked dental exam; one is mysteriously missing two entire teeth

teen went on $2000 trip to robotics world championships

Stupid Fancy Preschool* chipperly informed me that they were cancelling after-school care for the entire last week of school

truck blew head gasket

* fun dinnertime conversations have included "Jesus is a ghost made of blood and he watches you all the time" and "NO MOM MILK DOESN'T COME FROM COWS MILK COMES FROM JESUS". Counting down the days to public school.

Painting leather and getting mad at noses

A few weeks ago, I started painting husbandface. Somewhere in the process, I screwed up my lower proportions, and I think the only thing for it is to run the damn board through a circular saw and trim it down to a smaller head & shoulders portrait.

(The board was slightly tilted between these two shots, but you can see yesterday's progress on the jacket.)

Heartily, I say MEH.

Sat down with my moleskine and painted the teenager.

Picked up a "habits of painters who know more than you" book and realized that I am guilty of highlight-down-the-noseness, which is a newbie mistake. Even if you see it, it doesn't improve the painting to put it in. Highlights are fickle, ignore them.

So now I've got a pile of noses to paint over. Or ignore. Ignore, probably. I'm already drawing out the next painting, and it isn't anything on the list of paintings people have asked me to make. Have also been willfully neglecting the "draw me a tattoo" queue. Sorry, friends. I have to focus on painting the stuff that blows my skirt up right now.

Weekend things

Wherein I eat something that was probably pork


In a fit of spring cleaning, my co-workers dug in the office freezer and thunked down a package of mystery meat.

"What is it?" they asked.
"Looks like something Officer BBQ might have given us," I said.
"He retired a year ago. Has this been in the freezer for a year?"
"Yeeeep."

They put the scary old meat in the microwave and the office immediately filled up with the stench of smoked animal. We shut all the staff doors and turned on the fans, then stood around the plate, watching it steam.

"Try some," they said.
"You try some," I said.
"It's probably still good. It's smoked. Smoked meat lasts forever, maybe."

Everyone took a step back and left me standing by the plate. It is well-established that I'm the office raccoon. I took the knife and sawed off a tough square of meat. Put it in my mouth. Chewed for a long time.

"Well, it hasn't gone bad. But it definitely isn't good," I said.
"We can't throw it away, that's wasteful."
"It's only wasteful if it's delicious. This is not delicious."
 I scraped it into the garbage and buried it with paper towels. We fled the break room like we had dumped a body.

"It's a good thing Officer BBQ retired and wasn't here to see this," my co-worker said. "He was so proud of his smoked meat, and we just left it in the freezer for a year. Remember that chicken he gave us?"

That chicken had tasted like something pulled out of a peat bog. It ranks just below the Corpse Turkey of 2013 in my personal history of undesirable meats. It isn't even that it was bad barbecue; smoked foods just smell a lot like formaldehyde, and I have been around too many medical cadavers to appreciate the aroma. Peaty single-malt scotch goes down the sink, too. Even raccoons can't survive everything.

Officer BBQ was enjoying his retirement. He had grown a beard and only visited the library from time to time to show horrifying accident scene photos on his phone and talk about cooking meat (hopefully not related subjects), but he hadn't been around in months.

So of course he walked in at just that moment.

"Did I hear my name?" We all jumped three feet in the air. "What's that smell?"

My co-workers all sang out greetings and tried to change the subject, and I yelled, "MEATBALLS."

Am very smooth at obfuscation.



The Highland Games

Last weekend, our Scottish dance group set up the tea tent at the Highland Games, selling the usual scones, boiled eggs, and hot cups of Tetley. As a teenager, I helped serve the biscuits and performed with the group for the festival-goers in Waikiki, but in recent years the Games moved to an enclosed pavilion in Ala Moana, and attendance dwindled. These days, I have too many children to chase to be much help as a server or dancer, so I just went along on Sunday for moral support and photography.

There were a lot of small highland dancers visiting from Scotland this year; all white eyelashes and tightly-scraped hair and freckles. When the hula halau lined up to perform, the Scottish girls turned and stared very hard at the rows of bare feet and midriffs. The hula girls stared back, sizing up the kilts and white undershirts with lace napkins pinned to the fronts. I was trying to get a picture of the two young groups staring across either side of this cultural divide when I recognized a man I had gone to high school with, milling around in the crowd. For 4 years, I spent every day swimming with this guy, with dozens of overnight trips for inter-island swim meets and countless hours rattling around in our coach's van. I had to sneak into the only drug store on Molokai to buy our teammate a pregnancy test after he climbed into her sleeping bag at Regionals - which set off a very interesting year of rumors about my non-existent sex life, let me tell you.

So I did what any reasonable person would do and threw myself behind a vendor's table to hide. Spent the rest of the day running behind poles and shrubbery whenever he came around the corner with a hot dog. I'm probably in the background of all his selfies, looking like a person being chased by bees.

Am very smooth at interpersonal skills and improvisational camouflage, too. 

dieting with gravel

Have been stuck at the same weight for the past 5 years. Decided (again) to just knuckle down and do the thing. Ramped up the weight lifting and rope jumping. Immediately gained 3 lbs. Screamed.

This week the scale finally began to tick downward again, and the thing that made the difference was swapping my lunch foods for dwarf bread. Similar to elvish lembas (in the way that rocks are similar to elvish lembas) dwarf bread is hard, gritty, and good in a fight. Just four of these Belvita Throwing Biscuits keep me from stomaching other food for hours.

And they cost much less than the fancy dietary bars which contain the same calories and nutrition. Wash it down with milk so you don't choke to death. You're welcome.

Am now anticipating a wave of granola ads in my sidebars. The eye of commerce has been watching. A few weeks ago, while the girl-child was on spring break, I told her we would go to the swimming pool after picking up the boys. So of course we drove all the way to the North Shore before realizing that we had forgotten her swimsuit on the coffee table.

"WE WILL BUY A SUIT," I said. "A PROMISE IS A PROMISE."

The closest stores were on the tourist strip in Haleiwa. None of the overpriced surf shops had little girls' suits. And why would they? Who forgets their kids' swimsuits on a trip to Hawaii? Every parent with a coffee table and a rush to the car, that is who. The closest thing we could find was a $50 pair of tiny toddler board shorts, which caused me to laugh very hard. We finally ended up at the overpriced-but-cheaper-than-board-shorts ice cream shop, where the kids were satisfied to pick out scoops of the worst flavors based solely on their color (blue) and pose with the photo props.

swimming ACHIEVED

By the time we got to the car, my sidebars were full of children's swimsuit ads. I had not posted anything about swimsuits. I don't have the friendface app. I didn't tag anything. My phone somehow leaked my goddamn beachy-tourist geolocation information to advertisers. In real time. The bastards. I share kind of a lot of stuff, obviously, but opting in has importance.

Off to the woods we go. To live off the land and hunt the wild granola bars, like our forebearers.


UPDATE: hours later

Goddamn it

Easter 2018

Another holiday successfully wrapped up without any screaming, bleeding, or head injuries. I am getting so good at these things.

... Actually, that’s only if you don’t count Zenny falling off her brother while riding him like a pony, and Gavin stepping on Leif’s face while dancing with the cat. I am getting better at these things.

After creamed eggs and biscuits, we drove to my mom's place, where she and I hit the kitchen for feast preparation (which is to say, I peeled carrots and trash-talked while she cooked). The lamb was fork-tender. The Yorkshire pudding was 8 inches high. The Brussels sprouts were all eaten - for which there is no higher praise. We did not set the oven on fire; the drippings just got excitable for a few minutes there. Leif dropped the leftover lemon meringue pie, and didn’t even have the good grace to nail anyone in the face with it in the process. Just smashed it onto the driveway. Lost opportunities, kid.

There was tie-dye, egg-dye, and a plastic egg hunt on my mother’s Jurassic patio that ended in shrieks when the kids found piles of stinky old wild chicken eggs in the plants. Gavin cleans them out periodically, after checking them for viability, and calls them “fart grenades”. Very festive.

It was a good year.

biker gear and an existential crisis

I think I love painting leather jackets. I'm going to make my mother wear her vest and patch for her portrait, sitting on her big red Shadow.

 

The hands look like hands this time! I can put away the gloves and mittens I was going to make everyone wear.

I've come to think of this thing as "paint for your life". If a person had only two years to paint, what record would they want to leave behind? Prioritize. Two years can become five. And ten. And thirty. Best to start at a run, though, just in case.

Queue:

The family. A portrait of each child. Of the man. My mother. Myself. The cats. Maybe the chicken, if she stops biting me. My aunt, the two cousins.


When that is finished, there are the places where I would want to hide a horcrux.

On Black Mesa, there is a little cliff you can sit on and watch the horses in the valley, and a hidden cave down the hill to climb into and pretend you're surviving a harsh winter.

At Lake George, there is a long dark rock to swim out to at night and watch the stars for UFOs while you sit shivering next to someone you love so much you'll vibrate into little pieces.

Near St. John's, there is a beach with grains of sand the size of Le Cars where my grandmother stood and painted the shoreline before she died, and blueberry fields with steaming flat patches of grass where moose have been napping.

In Bloomington, there is a well house with a hot metal drinking fountain in the middle, and at sunset the bats fill the sky. There are statues in the woods, if you can find them.

On Molokai, there is a deer path that leads down through the trees to a waterfall with a pool at the bottom, where you can jump and swim and then lay on the warm rocks while a friend confesses that their dad died that morning.


And in between, there is a life's worth of well-loved objects; worn leather gloves, old silver necklaces, tokens hidden in boxes, sheafs of old paper and notebooks and scribbles that tell stories that will never get typed up.


There is still time to make the things we want to make, and visit the places we want to see - GO GO GO.

painting with moleskine

I needed my painting to be more portable and less expensive while I work on skill-building, so I took a page from Nicolas Uribe and bought a moleskine to paint straight into.

This has been pretty great, because I can tote the sketchbook around while I work on the underdrawings, then spray-fix and gesso them, and sit at the dining room table to paint in the evenings instead of waiting for my Mondays - which I can devote to working on longer paintings.

I'm having strong feelings about the clear gesso. Feelings that may be hate. Regular gesso is slightly glossy and smooth and water-proof, this stuff is matte and gritty and SUPER absorbent. This might a good quality, if you know what you're doing. Which I do not.

First try:

I didn't have the scary gesso, so I painted over the drawing with watered-down white gesso.

Second try:

I had to sand down the gritty clear gesso, which might be why it bled so badly, but it made the painting really soft, which I kind of like.

Next up:
The man painted the celtic dragons on his helmet himself, so I think it merits recording for posterity.

Meanwhile: REJOICE - Zenny has survived 5 years.

My last baby is officially half a decade old. She hasn't smacked her head and had a seizure in a whole year, and kindergarten registration has started. The ever-present knot in my chest is relaxing. I still make her wear her crash helmet when she sits in the truck's jump seat, though.

My mother pulled off another weird and amazing cake, made to the child's specifications.

 YES

There was Japanese bbq, and cuddles with the new 5-toed chicken, and a fight over how many teenagers could fit in the new 3-foot-high pop-up play castle (none, incidentally - and now I have some castle-repair sewing to do).

 aunt with beer, mother with giant invisible hamburger

ready to extinguish fires at the burn-your-own-children bbq restaurant

 those feet

Happy birthday, kiddo.

a small feathery loss

My best girl, Sirius, died suddenly yesterday. She wasn't egg-bound, she hadn't been sick long enough for sour crop - she just felt poorly in the morning and died while we were rushing her to the emergency vet. Am having dark thoughts about the neighbors and rat poison.

Sirius was 3 years old, a good chicken who gave hugs and rested her head on your shoulder while you carried her around like a loaf of bread. She survived the pox, and had a close call while egg bound as a youth, which was a bonding experience for the two of us. Her eggs were the daintiest and most adorable, barely bigger than a quail's. She loved cookies and grapes, and had a chance to know love when the handsome gulch rooster showed up and romanced her for a few weeks.

I am so, so sorry, Sirius.

babby Sirius

teenage Sirius and Plucky

My girl, annoyed that my necklace was not made of grapes

Summon the bloodletters

A few weeks ago, there was a thing that made me mad. And then tired. And then resigned. Unfortunately, while I was in the mad bit, the man helpfully made an appointment for me to meet with his therapist so that we could talk it out together as responsible adults.* 

I decided that I didn't want to go. 

He decided that I really should. 

I said, fine. 

My internal organs said, ABANDON SHIP, and tried to violently claw their way out of my rib cage.

So I spent the evening in the emergency room, instead. The doctors determined that I did, in fact, have organs, but couldn't figure out what they were doing, so they shrugged, filled me up with morphine, gave me a prescription for narcotics, and waved me off into the night without making sure I had a ride home. Why do we have an opioid epidemic? It is a mystery. 

I tore up the prescription. Where the IV was, my arm has blossomed into an amazing palette of electric green and deep purple and lurid pink. I feel like someone kicked me down some stairs, but do not appear to be actually dead. So that worked out. And the man gave me a gyro, which pretty much counts as marriage counseling.

*My last meeting with her was not actually so helpful. Or it was, but not in the way it was supposed to be, because I ended up buying plane tickets to Seattle. 


Librarian super sleuth knuckle-cracking action

I have a few pet research questions that I work on when things are slow at the reference desk. Among these is, Who was the serial killer who picked up my mother while she was hitchhiking as a teenager in the 1970s?

The story goes like this: my mother, a teenager, is walking home from school and hitching a ride. A man picks her up in a sedan - he's old, to her, so maybe in his 30s. She tells him where she's going, they chat a bit, and she notices that he's taking the wrong turn, heading out of town. She tells him he's going the wrong way. He doesn't stop. She tells him to let her out. He doesn't stop. She tells him to pull over NOW or she's jumping out of the vehicle. He doesn't stop. She opens the door and starts to jump out. He hits the brakes. She runs out, gets away from him, and walks all the way home. Some time after this, a girl goes missing. A body is found in the wooded area where they had been driving. Then others go missing, but they are never found. She realizes she probably met the killer, and she bets the bodies are still in those woods.

I knew my mother had been a teenager in Bloomington, Indiana, before the family moved to Newfoundland, so I started looking for murders along the main highway in the mid-1970s. I found a lot of serial killers. A LOT. There have been waaaay more serial killers in Indiana than you'd find comfortable, which is probably attributable to corn madness (says me, arbitrarily, after reading one article about cannibal hamsters). I never figured out exactly which one it was. And that is because it wasn't any of them. This weekend, my mother casually mentioned that she met the man again, years later, while walking home from the Memorial University. In Newfoundland.

All this time, the thing I had not known was that while my grandfather had been working on his PhD in Indiana, he had been working part of the year in Newfoundland, doing a professorship at the Memorial University. During those months, my mother went to a jr. high school near the university, and it was while she was walking home through St. John's that she was picked up by this man.

Years later, in about 1985, she was walking home from the university with her dog when she passed him on the sidewalk. He remembered her name, and called to her. She stopped, recognizing him. He had a cane. "Does your dog bite?" he asked. "Yes, but only if I tell her to," she said. He tried to be conversational, and explained that things weren't so great for him; he'd been in a diving accident. He'd been swimming pretty deep, thought he saw a shark, and panicked. Whether he had the bends or an injury, it wasn't clear, but she sized him up and decided that he probably wouldn't be murdering anyone else in that condition. She felt uneasy about meeting him so close to her home.


This is the timeline I've put together:

1972 or 1973 - my mother is picked up while walking home from jr. high school, and escapes after threatening to jump from the car.

1978 - Sharon Drover, 17, disappears while hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is never found.

1981 - Dana Bradley, 14, disappears while hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is found in the wooded area South of St. John's.

1982 - Henrietta Millek, 25, disappears at night. She is a student at Memorial University. A friend says she got into a car with someone in St. John's. Her body is never found.

1984 - Pamela Asprey, 20, disappears while walking home or hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is never found.

1985 - my mother meets the man again, and he is walking with a cane.

No further disappearances.


The fact that he remembered her name, and that she got away, leads me to suspect that she was one of his first attempts. She encountered him twice in roughly the same area of the city, so he probably lived somewhere around the university. If he's still alive, he may be in his 70s now. And he was injured while diving (or so he said), so OFF TO THE NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES I go. Maybe there is some mention of an accident in a small local article.

I'm coming to get you, old man. Very slowly. If you die before I figure it out, please mention the diving injury in your obituary so I can solve the mystery in a tidy manner.