Hurricane prep action

Tuesday, 9:30pm

Actual prep action so far: NONE. But I’ll update this space as the hurricane figures out what it’s doing. The after school programs have been cancelled, but as of bedtime, schools and work are still open tomorrow. The night is quiet and the air is still. I filled up the Brita pitcher and counted that as a job well done. If everything gets cancelled tomorrow, we will consider covering the windows and fortifying the basement. Hopefully we will lose power and cell service before I start tweeting out last words and love proclamations. Embarrassing.


- - -

Wednesday

8am: Schools and work are still open. Everyone just trotting along as usual. If it's not raining right now, nothing bad can happen ever.

12pm: conspiracy bros are sending panicky chain emails to everyone saying the government secretly knows the hurricane has taken a sudden turn RIGHT FOR US and the devastation will be worse than Iniki and destroy all of Oahu.

2pm: turns out the hurricane made a sudden turn and is heading right for us. Closures! Statewide school and office shutdown! Time to board up the windows and batten down the chickens. The wind is kicking up.


6pm: we are under official warning now for incoming storm. Phone alerts going off. Feeling a bit somber about this now. Sarah, remember your oaths. Tell the people I love them, and knit my queue. Heather, bring Muu home for me.


- - - -
Thursday

7am: Well, it isn't even raining. That is what I get for posting last words. Will have to lock my phone in a drawer when the wind starts rocking the house.

8:30am: went outside to take pictures of the house and found an injured baby bird blown from the lychee tree.

Like an idiot, I'm about to drive into the hurricane to deliver it to my mother, the Bird Witch.

update: made it! Sheets of wind and rain on the Windward side. Still quiet on ours. Emergency vehicles lining the insides of the mountain along the tunnels.

- - - -

Friday

6am: Here we go, the winds have arrived. The chickens are pissed about being stuck in the coop.


- - - -

Saturday

6am: womp womp, the invisible shield ate the hurricane. The storm dissolved and it's just raining a lot, the winds have died down.

9pm: Drove across the island to hang out with family and eat tacos. Calling it on this storm. And good thing, because we never did find the missing window louvres. Water would have come shooting in like a fire hose.

This concludes Hurricane Freakout 2018.

Picture dump:

 

finished painting this

 varnished these 

(very secure painter's tape window barricades)

 selfie with hurricane

three days of this

FREEDOM

Not pictured: endless hours teaching the kids card games and making them watch 1980s adventure movies to get them to stop fighting over Monopoly rules and individual Lego pieces.

 

burn-your-own everything

A small painting

The kids went back to school, all our library staff returned from summer trips, and I immediately called in a vacation day to catch up on my painting queue. Ruined two small studies in a row, realized I was garbage at painting and had no business pretending to be an artist at all, and then sat down and slowly pulled off one I was happy with.

 and which the family thinks looks like an autopsy scene

I've been doing this thing for one full year now. The first part of the year, I was learning how to handle the paint, see color, and use proper techniques (ala prima, grisaille, underpaintings and wipeouts, etc). In recent months, I've been trying to figure out which of those things works best for me in particular.  Basically, it comes down to just painting the damn thing however you like. And that is HARD. 

Thriftscore

I am in perpetual denial about my coffee addiction and always looking for ways to make it harder to drink lots of it, on the grounds that I am always quitting. So I was delighted to find - in its original 1970s packaging - an adorable stainless steel single-serve drip coffee filter.

This is how you use it:

Step 1: pour a couple spoonfuls of grounds into canister

Step 2: turn screw to tighten filter so it doesn't drip

Step 3: pour in a bit of boiling water to saturate the grounds, put the lid on, and let it sit for a minute

Step 4: reach into BOILING HOT METAL CONTAINER to turn the BLISTERINGLY HOT screw to release the drip

Step 5: Use your shirt to insulate your fingers when the screw won't turn because the metal expanded with the heat just enough to stick shut

Step 6: continue filling canister and letting it drip until you've got a cup of goddamn coffee to go with your burned fingers and stained shirt

Why did these things not become more widely popular? It is a mystery.

 so cute though

Another rescue 

The very dim bulbuls behind my house dropped another baby. This is the third one we have had to rescue and rehabilitate. The babies fall out of the nest when the wind blows and then the parents can't figure out how to call them back up into the tippy-top skinny branches of the tree, so they just scream a lot.

So after diligently trying to reunite the baby with its nest, I gave up and drove it over to join its sibling in my mother's aviary. As the Bird Witch of the East, she has rehabilitated and rescued so many wild birds that the birds themselves come looking for her help. Last week, she went out for her evening walk and two frantic cardinals came caroming down the driveway and dive-bombed her head, leading her like winged Lassies up the road to retrieve their dropped baby. She wonders if she had rehabilitated one of the parents as a nestling. Birds are smarter than people think, and they teach their mates and children when they learn a useful survival trick.

Also, they make good art models.

I didn't think much about birds as a youth. They aren't cuddly and don't have friendly ears, but I am starting to understand why people go crazy and spend years touring the world with binoculars just to spy on them.


FIRE

The hobo encampment caught fire again.

the view from my roof, where I sent my child up to take a picture for me like a good parent

Also there is an arsonist on the loose on the other side of the island. The villains been having a hard time starting a good conflagration because, you know, we live in the tropics. Our air humidity is nearly 100%, we are going to be the first humans to evolve gills.

Luckily, there is another hurricane coming, and that'll sort everything out.

edited to add: Oh, and my passport was rejected, unless we can find my mother's childhood report cards from typhoon-decimated 1960s Guam.

drinky and woe

The kids went to grandma’s house, and I painted until my face fell off. Letting it dry and taking a break to grow back a new face.

Having a glass of cognac and feeling bad about going to bed. Have had nightmares four nights running. Dead children, dead birds in forgotten cages. And without the kids around, I’m gonna need to sleep in the grownup bed instead of crashing in the girl’s room, because I guess that’s what married people are supposed to do if they don’t want to keep getting dragged to therapy.

Did a tarot reading on the subject of art and relationships and whatnot. It said I would travel over water and meet someone of lawful morality and feel happy accomplishment and then DIE. So that was helpful.

Will dump this cognac down the sink and go flop like a starfish on my own bed and then get up and paint some more. Fight me, therapist.

DEATH MATCH

Wherein I do a dumb thing and still manage not to get murdered

The boy turned 10 this weekend. We celebrated with breakfast at the pancake house, and then picked up the cousins for a party at the mall because I can't be arsed to book a proper venue. The kids had an idea that they'd like to try breaking out of the Escape Room, and I had an idea that locking all the kids in a cage and taking myself out for a cookie sounded like a good kind of party, so we went over to check out the prices. The prices were not great, at just about $30/head. This is an adventure aimed at people who want to make very sure their dates can't get away for 60 minutes, I think. In this life, there are a few experiences which I refuse to pay people for. Being thrown out of a plane, for example. Or getting clipped to a rope and pushed off a ledge. I will not give someone money to put me in an underwater cage and dump chum on me, or tie me to a string of people hanging off the face of a cliff. Some things you shouldn't even have to pay for in the first place; stepping on burning coals is free for anyone with a charcoal bbq and a disregard for park disposal rules. So it seemed like getting locked into a holding cell should be a much more affordable adventure, and I wasn't that devoted to the cookie.

"To the glo-putts!" we cried, and charged away.

The glo-putt manager has seen us before. We exchanged jokes at the expense of the teenagers and then I followed the kids around while they putted and trash-talked for an hour, which was $26 well spent and nobody had to solve casino-themed riddles to unlock the exit.

feeling spiffy in new dress with pockets I wouldn't shut up about

deluxe mall entertainment

Afterwards, while waiting for the other family members to meet us at the burn-your-own-bbq restaurant, the kids beat around in Hot Topic. I stood outside waiting for them because I have officially reached the age when the cashiers start looking embarrassed for me, and that is when things started getting weird.

"Oh, you're over here now!" someone said behind me.

I glanced around and saw a guy I vaguely recognized, and guessed that it was the glo-putt manager, who maybe looked different when not lit by black lights. "Oh yeah," I said, unconcerned, "We're just hanging out before heading down to Gyu Kaku."

"Oh, cool! How many kids do you have?"

Well shouldn't he know, since we had just been glo-putting about 10 minutes ago? Maybe he thought all of them were mine. "Just three of them, it's a birthday." I took a closer look at him. Even under black light, I was pretty sure the glo-putt manager had been a skinny old guy with a mustache, and this guy didn't seem to be those things. And I felt like I remembered the glo-putt guy having glowing blue teeth, and this guy was missing a few in front. Who the heck was this? He made some polite comments and then waved and walked on. One of his legs was a prosthetic, and the cogs in my brain clunked into place. Oh, this was one of my library patrons! Well, that was ok, then. I was glad I wore a librarianly dress.

I didn't think much about it until an hour later, when I looked up from our table at the restaurant and saw the man in the entrance, pretending to talk to the cashier. When the cashier turned away, he leaned over to look at her screen, then scanned around the restaurant. I puffed up like a hedgehog, kicking my aunt and mother under the table. "Holy shit you guys, I ran into one of my library guys upstairs and I accidentally told him where I would be and how many kids I have and now he's here looking in the door."

A few minutes later he was back again, looking in and then leaving. A few minutes after that, Zenny had to use the bathroom, and I walked with her like a bodyguard to the toilets. From inside one of the stalls, I heard the ladies' room door open, and then the stall knob turned and began to open. I quickly pushed it shut, "Whoops, forgot to lock it!" and the footsteps retreated. When we came out a few minutes later, nobody was waiting, which seemed odd. We went back to the table, I laughed about my paranoia, and then the one-legged man came walking out of the bathroom alcove.

I jackhammered Mike in the ribs and pointed with my bulging eyeballs as the man walked right by the table and on out the front doors.

When he was gone, I slapped down my chopsticks. "NOPE. I am NOT HAVING IT. If he comes over here again I am going to be knocking down a one-legged man and you all will have to explain it to the reporters."

"Now, now. You're not staying here for long, there are lots of us, and he doesn't know where you live," my mother soothed. "Anyway, I can knock him down."

When the man stuck his head into the restaurant again, my mother and I were engaged in some vigorous pantomime, demonstrating the Model Mugging defense methods of nose-breaking and eye-gouging. He retreated to rummage a trash can and pretended he hadn't been looking.

"I will defend you," Mike said, putting an arm around my shoulders. "I'm in my motorcycle gear."

And that might have been a good deterrent, except he was also wearing the pink sequined cat ears that Zenny had put on him earlier in the evening.

In the end, we walked out of the restaurant in a blockade formation, idiot children straining at the ends of our arms like dogs on leashes because they hadn't picked up on the tension among the adults, and we trundled past the one-legged man while he was temporarily distracted by a mall kiosk clerk who was telling him off for digging in their trash.

VICTORY.

Except he still knows where I work.

Anyway, the birthday was fun for the kids, and the cake was FANTASTIC. My mother made pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows, and Zenny cried when she cut one of the cream puff unicorns in half and killed it, face split down the middle and eyes bulging. Poor child.

10!

EXTREME WEATHER UPDATE: The hurricane hasn't decided what it's doing. We are ignoring it.

the you that makes you you

My aunt walked down the hallway, scrutinizing my paintings with her reading glasses. She stopped at my majestic self-portrait.

"Nope," she concluded, "It doesn't look like you. This makes you look... German."

I am German, thank you very much. But okay, yes, mostly I'm a round-chinned Celt with a thin upper lip, like everyone else in the family, and unrepentantly guilty of down-playing those features.

She moved on to the second of the two self-portraits. "Nah. Something about the nose. I don't know. They just don't do it. These don't capture the you that makes you you."

Goddamn it. I measured those suckers out, I know they are proportionally accurate. But she's right, they don't look like me.

For the next three days I was pacing around, staring at the paintings and muttering. "The you that makes you you." There isn't time for this, with an unfinished painting in the basement and a queue of family members to get through, but this thing has stuck in my brain like a fork. I stood in the mirror and wondered if I should be posing with a particular gesture that is me me. Twiddling hair into slip-knots. Tapping collarbone to banish demons. Standing with arms folded and feet in a too-wide stance, accustomed to standing at a desk that is just a little shorter than I am.

all the totally natural poses

I did these things, and the person in the mirror still didn't look like me me. How is this possible, when this is the same stupid face I see in the mirror every day while I'm brushing my teeth or putting on makeup?

And suddenly the very big dumb obvious epiphany arrived - other people don't see you with your cheeks slack and eyes staring blankly off into the middle-distance while you’re brushing your  teeth, other people see you grimacing like a lemur while talking about how you had to ask a guy to stop drooling into the library keyboards AGAIN.

you in mirror vs. how you look talking to others

I make faces and bulge my eyes and smile with my lips rolled up into a thin line because I don't like to show my teeth. I have dimples that change the shape of my face, angry parenthesis lines between my eyes, and one eyebrow that goes up higher than the other.

the standard by which all my relatives judge my likeness

AHA. I lunged for my sketchbook suddenly enough that the cat startled and rolled off the table like a sausage. I HAVE CRACKED THE THING. The thing that was not even hidden in the first place.

Still don't have any time to paint, and now there's a hurricane coming, but it's a start down the right path.


(Hurricane Hector is due around Monday/Tuesday. This gif should self-update every few hours as Hector heads over for a bit of Leif's birthday cake.)

oh no a birthday party

The man and I have very different ideas about what having a home means. He sees it as a nice place to invite people over for drinks and card games. I see it as a fortress for escaping exactly that.

Aware of this, he waited until 2 days before his birthday to text me while I was busy at work and say, "Oh hey, I invited all my co-workers and their families over for a bbq."

For a hot moment, I earnestly tried to get down to the passport office in the hopes of a speedy deportation, but the desk was closed for the weekend.

Fine.

I was going to host the best damn bbq I didn't even want to be at.

On Saturday I hauled home a pile of meat and sausages. Mopped, scrubbed, bought new couch pillows, hid the rips on the leather armchair with a quilt. I drew the line at snaking the laundry sink and blasting the wasp nest in the eves of the house, on the grounds that I was handling food and just didn't want to, so the man spent all afternoon pulling vomitous gunk out of the drain and fighting with angry wasps in his motorcycle gear*. This seemed fair.

On the day of the event, I laid out big trays of pulled pork and carne asada, made a killer coleslaw**, chilled a variety of craft ales, prepped plates of appetizers - and DUN DUN DUN, all the co-workers cancelled when they realized it was more than a 20 minute drive. I sat on the new fold-out bench with my aunt and laughed into a glass of mango beer. If nothing else, big parties are good for spurring frantic attention to all the terrible tasks you've been successfully avoiding for months.

It was fine anyway. My mother dragged herself in from the foundry late in the day, ringing the little bronze bell she had sculpted, and we hung out discussing maritime serial killers over cake. The man played with his new homebrew toys, shooting everything in the living room with a temperature-seeking laser. The kids played bocce ball with the cousins until Leif pulled out his homemade root beer and made ice cream floats for them all. THIS is the kind of gathering I can handle. The same people doing the same things as always. Perfect.

Now we get to do it all over again in a week for Leif's birthday. *sob*

 

a 39 year old and his temperature zapper

 

beer aerator was a success

 

exhausted sculptor - how sweet is this celtic bird bell?

* On the subject of wasps, the internet says, "do not under any circumstances set fire to the nest". I ask you, what is even the point of the internet if it does not encourage you to shoot your own house with a flamethrower? Lapsing standards.

** Turns out the secret to a restaurant-worthy coleslaw is sweetened condensed milk. Kind of a lot of it. Just close your eyes and do it.


ACHIEVEMENT  but maybe actually failure

The best way to make sure nothing bad happens is to pretend you are fully expecting it to happen. So of course when I finally made it down to the passport office, they accepted my paperwork without even batting an eye. Well, with just a bit of eye-batting. And concerned squinting. And checking with their supervisor. And then shrugging. "Weeeell, it might be fine? But if not, you'll know in 2-6 weeks, and then the feds will probably contact you and -" she cringed elaborately. Success! Maybe!

After deciding I'd have to skip the painting workshop this year, disappointment kicked my knees out. I spent weeks slogging around with a mechanical smile and a weight in my chest. Gavin was excited by the prospect of traveling to Japan for his 16th birthday, and as it stood, I'd have to stay home and watch the chickens while the family went to Harry Potter World without me. The disappointment solidified into self pity and pulled my face down onto my desk. That was no good. To heck with it! Everyone should have a chance to travel this year, I will make it happen! So I threw it up to the fates; if I get the passport, I will join the family and visit Japan this winter. If I am denied, I will go to a plein air workshop in Portland and learn how to paint in the rain. If I have to get a green card, I'll start shopping for jobs in Canadaland. Lobbing a bunch of things in the sky and waiting for one of them to fall back down and hit you between the eyes is better than being sad that nothing ever happens to you. Like aiming a flamethrower at a wasp's nest, you know you will get results, in one form or another.

deal

Fresh from a close encounter with what could have been a dead animal or a hunkering monster, I walked into the livingroom and made an announcement.

"I would like recognition for an act of bravery," I said. "I picked up a towel off the shower floor without knowing what it was. Although, to be fair, I did poke it with my foot first."
"A towel," said husbandface.
"Yes, a towel, but it could have been anything."
"Why didn't you have the lights on in the shower?"
"I don't use the lights in the shower. That is why I went a whole week shaving my armpits with a razor that had a lid on it. When I finally took a shower during the day, I thought the new vitamins I had been taking had caused rapid overnight hair growth. It was terrifying."
"A shower sounds good. I should go take one."
"Well, it's safe now."
"Because you picked up the towel."
"Yes. I won't be here to do these things for you after I am deported."
"Just so you know, I'm not moving to Canada until I learn how to surf. I finally have the boards now, after 15 years."
"The boards you pulled out of someone's trash."
"Yes."
"That is fair. See you in another 15 years."

This constitutes permission for me to pretend I've been deported and run off to a lakeside cabin in Ontario, I think.

to the blood

The summer is winding down. Already. There is kindergarten paperwork to chase, school supplies to purchase, orientations to attend, rotting lychees to rake up, new rakes to buy after snapping the old one on rotting lychees, and also I busted myself in the face with a box of cheerios. Kind of hard. Split my lip. I think I am only alive because I have a desk job. If I had been a lumberjack, I'd have died trying to catch a chainsaw with my foot by now.

Meanwhile, Plucky the Terrible Terror (our chicken) has emerged from her weeks of brooding and she has unleashed a plague of bird mites upon us. I've been wrestling her down to spray her butt with bird butt spray, and then stripping off my infected clothes next to the outdoor washing machine and running for the outdoor shower to decontaminate. So far, the new neighbors have not seen me do this - which is maybe too bad because it might deter them from letting their kid scream across the street, "HEY ARE YOU GOING TO INVITE ME OVER OR WHAT" while we are unloading groceries. Or from sending texts while I'm cooking dinner that say, "Hey he's really upset and crying, why can't he come play in your yard?" Folks, I don't have to supervise your kid because he screams. That is actually a reason I do NOT have to supervise him. I am cooking. And painting. And wrestling chickens. And stripping off mite-infested clothes in the backyard. Shush now.

At a push from my mother and our bronze sculpture instructor/longtime friend, I'm working on a textile-themed painting for an upcoming show. It's just Gavin wrapped in a knitted blanket on the couch, but that ticks off two 2018 goals: proper portrait of the kid; entry into art competition. I've got to get through the whole family in the next few months, and stop getting sidetracked by cats and horcruxes and flowers.

Another goal: get passport. This one is tricky, because in the 1980s you could come and go between the US and Canada pretty freely, and dual citizens were just kind of shrugged over and waved along, but at some point that all changed and citizenship certificates for foreign births became required, which HAHA I DON'T HAVE. "So just go for it and declare you're Canadian," my mother said. "You are trying to get me deported," I replied. "Meeeh," she said, reassuringly. So I'm going to show up at the passport office with my Canadian birth certificate and my American social security card and see where the cards fall. If I wind up at a holding facility in Vancouver, whoops. Will report. Maybe.

the poor little foot

In 1988, my great-grandmother typed out her memoirs and gave copies to each of her children. My grandfather lost almost everything he owned after grandma died, but he held onto this little book, and while visiting last week, my mother talked him into lending it to us for scanning. She sat in the Portland airport for about 5 hours on the way home, reading these grim and funny old stories. Great-granddad Casey died in his 30s, and getting to know him through Gran's writings has been really moving. And kind of horrifying. This bit is from World War II:

We’ll scan it and fix minor typos. If we can hunt down the artifacts she mentions, we can put in photos and illustrations. It's a nice preservation project.

IN THE MEANTIME. I realized that peeling tape was the best reward for finishing a painting, and got a little carried away.

oh no

It takes too many hands to peel that much tape while also taking an instagram video, and I got a long blurry shot of my arm before knocking the painting onto the floor. It's a learning curve.

Clean edges:

yessss better

Dialed it back on the tape while painting my mom's cat, Stella. 

Stella, the only striped cat in our collective family. 

Stella, a cat we have known for 5 years. 

The man walked by and looked at it. "Nice cat! Who is it?" 

WHO IS IT. Goddamn. Pet portraiture isn't going to be my legacy. And body identification isn't going to be his. 

"But Stella has black stripes," he explained. 

"Wow. Just wow," has been a phrase that has made me irrationally angry for years, but it has officially been toppled by folks who describe brush strokes as "juicy". I am immune to the word "moist", but "juicy" is just an abomination. I will take all your wows if you take your juicies back*.

So this week I decided to loosen up and just slop a lot of paint onto a piece of Duralar instead of doing a careful under-drawing. I was happy with this. And we will all understand and agree that it is in no way juicy.

delicious, fat, unctuous, luscious, non-juicy brush strokes

Messy paint looks better when you back up a few feet.

There we go.

I never did get myself down to the print shop to make giclees. And the plan to visit Whidbey Island for another workshop isn't looking likely. I will remain here, singing barnyard songs, painting fat cats, and daydreaming about another life as a forensic reconstruction artist in Scotland - one who probably wishes she were a librarian hobbyist painter in Hawaii. That is gratitude for you.

*LIES. I will take neither. Get out of my house.

midsummer

The 4th of July was quiet up in our parts. Evidently this was because everyone on the island was down in Waikiki, getting drunk, falling off of boats, and drifting out to sea on inflatable sharks. That is nature for you.

With the neighborhood to ourselves, we sat around in the yard, playing cards and peeling lychees all day. Our two trees are covered in fat red fruit, and after a bit of prospecting, I decided that the best bunches were hanging over the back of the house. I grabbed the picker, pulled out the ladder, climbed up onto the roof, and then danced around with my feet burning on the flaming hot shingles before jumping onto a scrap of roofing paper from the as-yet-unfinished renovation. It turns out that some sorts of roofing paper are actually covered in tar, and where the plastic had peeled back, both my feet stuck to it like glue. This was kind of like wearing shoes, so I thought I would just hop to the edge of the roof with my 9-foot picker and cut some branches anyway - but then Mike popped his head up over the ladder, saw what was happening, took my picker, pulled the tar paper off my feet, chased me off the roof, and cut the lychees himself. I was very probably not going to fall off the roof and into a tree with both my feet stuck together, but whatever. I have a bucket of lychees to eat now.

A bit later, while preparing hot dogs for the kids, I decided to be calorie-minded and fancy, so I defrosted a lobster tail that had come free with a grocery store coupon. As it happens, grocery stores don't give away free lobster tails without a reason. Cooked up, the frostbitten little flipper turned into a thick rubbery hunk of smelly steamed sea cockroach. The cockroach aroma might have had something to do with the actual cockroach that somehow crawled into the foil packet and boiled itself in butter while the thing was in the toaster oven, though. Either way, the bugs went in the garbage, and I patted myself on the back for having prepared an elaborate 0 calorie meal.

 if you don't count the treeful of lychees that I ate beforehand

Now the man is back to pet-sitting at my mother's place with the kids, and I have the house to my very own self every night. It is amazing. Have been living off cereal, loose chocolate chips, tea, oil paint, and BBC dramas. I paint all evening, knit for bit, and then go to bed with a book and a bunch of cats. I was born for this life.

 a life which does not include clearing the table

(There is a very satisfying video of the tape getting pulled of this painting on my instagram account.)

 On the needles: MORE DOILIES.

Little Flowers doily

Which I haven't seen since, because they're under cat butts.

One of my friends said they were maybe thinking about possibly having a baby in the next few years, so I immediately started knitting a baby blanket.

It that doesn't summon a baby to roll up in it, it should at least get the cats off my goddamn doilies.

backup plan

This weekend I pack up my portable easel and take my turn housesitting with the kids, raiding my mother's Guinness drawer and secret stash of Canadian chocolates.

Summer is my favorite and best.