spooked

I've been listening to the Spooked podcast lately, and it's cool what people will reframe as paranormal when they're in the right mindset. It's probably not a ghost staring in your window at night, Chuck, CALL THE POLICE. 

I submit for spooky consideration: The Lemon. This story is not paranormal unless you insist it is - it's just a gross story common to Hawaii, and has happened to me more than once, so you'd think I would learn, but I do not.

 A few weeks ago I left a lemon out on the counter overnight. It was perfectly fine and firm the next evening when picked it up, cut it in half, and held it over the mixing bowl to squeeze it. This was a store-bought mainland lemon, wax and GMOs and pesticides and all, and as I gave it a nice squeeze, a couple of tiny seeds pushed themselves out of the pulp. It's bad enough watching seeds bulge out of a lemon's flesh, but then, along with the seeds, the lemon birthed an entire, live, shiny brown baby cockroach. I dropped the lemon, the cockroach bounced off, and it ran for cover under the coffee maker. GHOST COCKROACH. Or maybe it squeezed through the nub on the end of the lemon during the night and was trying to live in there, who knows.

Ghosts, probably.

Defensively, I'll add here that we use good cockroach bait in non-poisonous-to-children-and-cats locations throughout the house, because it pisses me right off when they lick the oil off my paintings (the roaches, not my kids and cats), so our house is pretty devoid of B-52s. Still, the babies show up from time to time. In my produce, evidently.

This week I rescheduled a root canal so I could finally have a day alone to paint after weeks of interruptions. The painting needs another sitting or two, but I like where it's going so far.

Finish the shirt and vest, touch up the eyes and jawline by the ear, 
lower the shadowed eyelid a hair... It'll get there.

During lunch breaks I've been watching Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, which is nice little British art competition where painters get 4 hours to panic and ruin a painting in front of a live audience.

I like it because everyone is very kind to the each other, and because the art process is fun and inspiring even if it's stressful and embarrassing for the artists. Plus, a few of them have followed me back on Instagram, and it's like the tiny wave bikers give each other when they pass another motorcycle. Sometimes the internet feels wholesome.

Painting and gross lemons aside, February was almost as rough as January. A work friend was killed in a plane crash, we had a small run of injuries, and the old cat has decided the bed is for peeing on - but REJOICE, it is Girl Scout Cookie season, and even though it was the first day of Lent, I let a small child shake me down for all my cash yesterday. That is the rule, and it is one of the rules my kids encourage me to follow the most; right under "always check to make sure the chocolate chips aren't poisoned".

Stuff your wallets with 5 dollar bills, folks, they're coming for you.

tired

Had an hour over the weekend to sketch out the beginnings of the next painting; not enough time to put any serious work into the two paintings already in progress, but enough to bump my internal battery from red to yellow.

Feeling scraped thin and sad again, and the nightmares are back, so I lined up all my vitamin bottles next to the coffee maker and put my rain coat on for a nighttime walk. Vitamins and walking aren't going to solve the busy schedule of doctor appointments, work problems, family events, and school obligations, but maybe they'll help the little heart-rate monitor on my watch go back to a steady rhythm.

Someone come and pitch me out of the building, I need a day off.

 Go take a nap!

The youngest aunt & family came to visit from Canadaland, and we all ate wheat- meat- sugar- peanut- citrus- oat- garlic-free foods (ok, I had a Guinness) while she told stories about living in a house so cold their socks froze to the floor with every step, and about a neighbor who panicked during a Chinook and tried to shoot the wind, but shot their house, instead (with them inside it). The teenage cousins filled the living room, laughing about memes, playing minecraft music on the piano, and screaming, "WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT JUSTIN TRUDEAU AGAIN?" The youths have big opinions about Canadian environmental politics, but can't argue the fact that Trudeau's beard is very handsome.

Trudeau has a beard - YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID

It was wonderful to see them again, and really weird to be around so many incarnations of my own face. Sorry, kids, I blamed the in-laws, but that forehead is all ours. 

kids not pictured were in the kitchen, snuffling out all the chocolate chip cookies I had hidden 

I've been half-reading a lot of books on my lunch break and tossing them aside. I keep getting attracted to complicated, gritty, epic novels, and what I probably need is some satisfyingly quick garbage to tear through until things settle down. Anybody read anything good  entertaining lately?

nah

Did not go down to Kalihi to make prints on Monday, so I missed the mid-afternoon machete attack. Gotta do better than that to get me, Kalihi.

The winter rain arrived, blowing trees and chickens all over the place and knocking out half the street lights, so every intersection became Fury Road. We stayed inside and baked cookies. Made some progress on the painting of the boy. He shaved his baby beard after this, but TOO LATE. It is captured for the ages now, kid.

Got back to the library and discovered that someone had Hulk-smashed the book shed again. People keep thinking there's something important locked in the plastic shed behind the library - but what, exactly? What would a library keep in a plastic outdoor shed? Bricks of gold? Cases of liquor? Valuable electronics? It is full of old books, folks. But if you're ramped up on meth, a plastic shed is like a giant oyster shell, and if you believe hard enough and summon the strength to crack it open with your bare hands, there just might be something magical inside. And there is, depending on how you feel about torn cookbooks and old copies of Reader's Digest, but they never seem to take anything. Pity.

In knitting-in-front-of-the-Witcher news, I have been repeatedly starting and ripping out my knitting, trying to make a cardigan out of one ball of leftover sock yarn. It's not going to happen, but I don't want to buy more yarn because... well, because I did, in fact, order more painting panels. Kind of a lot of them. Any time I say I'm not allowed to buy something until I've used up what I've got, it is a sign that I already have a full online cart that I'm about to click "submit" on after my Sunday pint of Guinness. That is nature, there is no point fighting it.

And while I was mangling my knitting, I mentioned that I read on the news that some blind person had declared Robert Pattinson the most Handsome Man in the World. The news did not say who declared this - maybe his mother? - and then, as I was saying this, I noticed that Mike was nodding thoughtfully, like this made perfect sense to him.

"No. How can Robert Pattinson be the most handsome man in the world when whoever plays Geralt is also in this world? And Yennefer. And the horse. That is a very handsome horse."
Mike looked like I had slapped him. "GERALT? Look at him."
"Yeah, and?"
"And his face. His nose is all messed up."
WHAT.

 I have to divorce him again, folks.

very romance

Good news, everybody. It seems I have accidentally been dating a retired Russian professor. I thought I was just helping him find English learning resources, but today he started negging me about how I'm too dumb to learn Russian and then asked if I liked how he looked. Joke's on him, I'm also too dumb to get a passport, so he can't stuff me on a plane back to Russia no matter how sweet he talks.

The test prints came today and they are way too dark. Goddamn it. I’m going to have to drive down to Kalihi and go to a local giclee printer, and Kalihi is full of stabby weirdos. I don’t want to die for these things. But I WILL.

Prints-to-be

Have scanned & ordered two paintings on different giclee papers to see which looks best. And I've learned that my phone autocorrects "giclee" to "fuckers", so that's going to make the promotional tweets exciting. This whole process makes me feel like a fraud and amateur, but the only way to do a thing is to just do it.

The teenager's robotics trip to Taiwan is still happening, despite the nearby plague outbreak, so I finished knitting his hat. Taiwan only has 11 cases of the virus, and they probably won't all be at the robotics competition. Still have time to knit a matching surgical mask, though.

Leif gave it a test drive to make sure the cat ears were in the right spot, and he was smart enough to tell me they totally were, because there is no way I was ripping them off and re-stitching them.

While the neighbors got their barbeques going this weekend, Zenny and I walked with pockets full of quarters to buy a round mirror at the thrift store and raid the grocery store's used bread shelf. On the way back we stopped at the playground to check on all the little graffiti dicks, and we can report that the population is flourishing.

Got home, hung the little mirror on the wall, and painted it as the border for the round portrait I've been working on. It will either look clever or weird when the picture is finally framed.

Gavin is the least-painted of the kids, because he spends the daylight hours locked in the production lab with his teammates, but I caught him and his tiny teenage beard while they were home on Sunday morning.

underpainting 

Those chin whiskers need documentation for posterity. 

Holding still and waiting for February to decide which way it's blowing. January broke a tooth, popped a tire, killed a friend, diagnosed the cat with cancer, caused a bank error that broke my account, and gave us the flu. 

I've got my eye out for good signs, though. There are fruits on the lilikoi vine, baby bananas on the tree, and eggs in the tool shed. Delightful.

Too cheap to buy round panels

Bad dreams, woke up composing “if you’re reading this, I am dead” letters in my sleep. Something about getting trampled playing frisbee - very deep and meaningful stuff.

Alexa, slap me out of it. 

Thank you.

Baked a few loaves of raisin bread and started another painting of Zenny. The portrait seemed like it should be round, but I don’t have any round panels, and I’m not allowed to buy any more painting stuff until the last 3 aluminum panels are used up, so I put a trivet down and traced its circle onto a square of ACM. 

First layer - still need to do the headband and figure out what is going on with the background 

Put my mask on and varnished the recent flower paintings. Eyeballed the commission I am neglecting because I'm mad at the hands in the picture. Avoided working on it by coating some tiny cheap Walmart wood panels with linseed oil to build up a paintable surface that won't bleed or warp, and now they are drying in the metal sink outside just in case they burst into flames. My can of linseed oil is rusted and old, and I have been assured it will spontaneously combust, so I handle it like someone defusing a bomb. This is where it's nice that we have the air humidity of a swimming pool.

Am getting overloaded with these paintings. The goal for these next few months is to get an etsy shop together and move some things out. Then I'm going to buy all the round panels I can eat.

Philip

One of my friends died. I am so fucking sad.

We sat next to each other in most of our high school classes, sharing paperback books and talking shit about conceptual art. As a joke, he jammed a plastic fork into an orange, put it in an empty fish tank, called it a "time piece", and won a national student art award as it molded and rotted. Take that, banana duct-taped to a wall. 

A couple months ago we were talking about the Piers Anthony books we read as teenagers, trying (and failing) to find online images of the old Xanth art calendar I loved with all my baby-fangirl heart when I was 11. Last night I went to look for a picture of Philip in our yearbook, and opened it up to find one of the calendar pages tucked inside. He would have laughed.

Those nipple feathers and tail sparkles were instrumental in the switch from wanting to be a zoologist to wanting to be an artist. 
Still have not fulfilled my boobie-centaur art aspirations - I'm wasting my LIFE, Philip.

He made beautiful cakes with wild flavor combinations like purple sweet potato & baby coconut, and soy sauce caramel & passion fruit, decorated with perfect, brightly-colored sugar flowers and buttercream succulents. When I learned that he had died, I cried very hard and then started baking a cake. It looked like the cat made it, but it tasted good.

Vanilla elderflower cake with homemade lemon curd and whipped cream frosting. 
I murdered the swiss buttercream flowers and they went in the trash, sorry.

Was still depressed, so I painted a cat skull. A bit on the nose, angst-wise.

Next time I'll jam a plastic fork in an orange and paint that, instead.

If you're an old friend lurking around here, please just go ahead and send a message on Instagram or something. I am a terrible correspondent, so this is low-commitment; we can just trash-talk each other's posts from time to time. 

And don't die, ffs.

flower and wasp

Painting

Been alone with the kids for a bit now, throwing out clutter, installing under-the-cupboard lights, tripping over kittens, rescuing injured chicks, dealing with flat tires - the usual things that happen when there's nobody to complain to. But finally, for the first time since mid-December, school schedules reasserted themselves and I had all of Monday to paint again. I laid down another wilted hibiscus from my garden, and then got on my tiptoes to take down my box of horrors - an old Altoids tin filled with dead bees and wasps I’ve been collecting while cleaning windowsills. It’s hidden on the top of a cabinet where the kids can't accidentally discover it and traumatize themselves, thinking it's candy.

Wasps fall under the category of That Shit is Haunted, like broken dolls and old televisions. I have an early, dreamlike memory of walking through very green woods and entering an old overgrown house filled with tall windows that pulled open from the tops, like hinged oven doors. The windows were dusty, the light was heavy, and on every surface - across the floor, along all the windowsills, filling the partially-opened window frames - were dead wasps. An impossible number of wasps, like they had filled the inside of the house and then fallen dead at the same moment. I have asked my mother about this memory, and she gets a faraway look on her face and says, "That sounds about right." Very helpful.


Knitting 

Waiting rooms are knitting rooms. Gavin is flying into snow with his robotics team this winter, and he needs a hat.

CO 146 stitches; chart from Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible

The stitch pattern looks like angry cats. He wants me to put pointy ears on the top instead of a pom-pom. Kid, I will knit you a full onesie if you ask me to.


and a very minor accomplishment

When the electricians re-wired the house, they didn't put a switch on the dining room side of the kitchen, so I've been slapping the wall where it ought to be for 4 years now. Instead of walking across the dark kitchen to get to the light switch, I've been performing a blindfold act with the coffee pot every morning. This week I finally installed a motion-activated light, and it has saved my early-rising life.

(boomerang gif, no actual strobing happening)

I have dreams of living in a cozy cottage with oil lamps and candles, but I also have dreams of not burning my house down, so this is where we are. The coziness factor improves if you say Lumos when you enter the kitchen.

2020 so far

In the last 3 days:

Spent half a paycheck on robotics travel for the teenager.

Went to Honolulu to renew Gavin's passport, growled at three men who creeped up on my daughter and tried to talk to her about how pretty her hair was.

Trying to find a public toilet downtown, I walked four blocks to a Walmart and ran into the homeless guy who was thrown out of the library for rubbing my hands in grad school 15 years ago (he was rubbing a cashier's hands, with security headed for him). Almost interrupted to give him a high-five for still being alive, but he might have kept my hand for good this time.

Got home and said how relieved I was to have all the big expensive stuff taken care of - immediately broke a tooth on my salad.

Got back to work from emergency tooth repair and had to call the police because the "stranger danger" guy was dropping his shorts and flapping his dick around in front of the library.

The cockroaches licked the face off one of my paintings.



If the rest of the year continues this way, I'm going to file a grievance.

edited to add: flat tire!

Happy mew year

Yep, that’s the title I’m going with. First post of the year/decade. Decisions were made.

2020: Year of the Wet Blanket

New Year's Eve is not my holiday. You spend all that money on Christmas, wade through meats and cheeses and chocolates for a week, and then in the same pay period you have to host another feast, stay up half the night, and politely drink a beaker of poison because "we have to finish this bottle, it's expensive". This seemed like a problem of attitude, one I could solve by taking the reigns and making it into a holiday I enjoy. I wasn't sure what that would actually look like, though, since what I enjoy is staying at home and going to bed early with a book, and I felt too crappy to make a good plan. So I opted out instead, rattling my bottle of antibiotics and the new kitten as an excuse to stay home and comfort the animals.

What breed is he? 'Scapegoat'

Hawaii explodes at midnight, with so many illegal aerials that the police would need bulldozer buckets on the fronts of their cars to scoop everyone up and take them to jail. The best they can do is drive around the neighborhoods with their blue lights on and cause a 15-second pause as everyone holds the bombs behind their backs until they pass by. It's an impossible thing to enforce, and it's clear the majority of people are in favor of blowing shit up. There are bad spirits to be driven out, even if it means driving them straight into the lungs and brains of everybody else.

For our part, we are too lazy/cheap/flammable to set off so much as a pop-it. The family went to my aunt's scary high-rise apartment to watch the island light up below, and I spent the night alone, painting and reading as the explosions gained momentum.

portrait of the artist skipping a NYE party

At midnight, I ran out on the lawn just as the neighbors sent up the biggest, most professional fireworks show you could ever ask for, almost setting the lychee tree on fire. It was amazing. At 12:10am, while the neighborhood still roared and smoked, they brought out leaf blowers, blew all the debris into a pile, and the kids lit a bonfire to burn the red paper and cardboard casings. The dads said, "Jump over the fire!" and the moms said, "Nooooo," but let them jump over anyway.

None of the kids went up in flames.

By 1am, the neighborhood was quiet and clean again, the driveway was no longer on fire, and everyone was home safe in bed. It was a good night.

On New Year's Day, we packed up Christmas without trampling or boxing up the kitten, then drove over the mountain to my mother's house.

The kitten's name is Yulik, after Baba Yaga's cat. 

He spent the holiday falling off of things and getting his face munched. 

Get the ball rolling is the theme this year. In that spirit, while my mother laid out a medieval feast of cheeses, fruits, breads, ham, and smoked turkey legs, I aggressively tossed her kitchen, cleaned everything, and threw garbage bags out the back door before she could catch me.

Delicious! btw I threw out all your empty sour cream tubs for storing leftovers. HAPPY NEW YEAR.

She likes that kind of thing, though. Don't try it with your in-laws or boss.

We ate enough Cambozola to keep us fed until spring, then watched the season finale of The Mandalorian, which was a thing of beauty and perfection, even though we were all yelling about the lava. We don't like lava over here.

This is the year! Get the ball rolling, there is still time!

xoxo
h