rainy October

5 days on Oahu. Drove car onto ferry, ate nachos, did not see any whales. Gavin spent the ride pretending to be a zombie and getting shot by another child. Went to street fair, watched fire thrower twirl burning batons and then burn himself laying on hot pavement in cruel bit of irony. Was ungraciously greeted by RSCDS after more than a year away; "You're late! Where's your mother?" Knitted half a cardigan while listening to my mom's stories and drinking tea. Yelled at Mike for staying out late drinking at a 4-year-old's birthday party. Bought green girly shoes that match everything and nothing. Was defeated in Battle of the Overalls; spent years sneaky-like throwing out my mom's overalls. Mom spent years sneaky-like hiding her overalls from me. This time she found the only size 6 overalls on the island, bought them for Gavin, and dressed him as her twin. Giant toddler twins. I quit. Discovered that our return ferry home didn't sail when we thought it did - stranded extra day. Was yelled at by Superferry manager and stranded another day. (paperwork problem = their error. Am mentally writing complaint letter against manager, wondering if "ham beast" would work as identification in lieu of name.) Mike used logic to deduce that stranded-ness meant he needed to purchase a flat-screen tv. Left a sausage on the Pali lookout. Hunted for wine based on very fuzzy recollections of a sympathy bottle given to me and consumed in one sitting during the peak of my pain and heartbreak in November '06; it was red, in a dark bottle, with a low-sitting beige label with no fancy logo/name. Surprising how few wines actually meet all those criteria. We speculated that the friends who gave it to me probably shopped at Costco, and ha - it was found! Then we left it at my mom's, so we still don't know what it was. But it's at Costco, in the aforementioned bottle, costs $9.99, and is nice. Woke up at 4am for the second day in a row, stuffed obese cat in carrier, left eldest child with grandmother, drove across Oahu, rode on boat for 3 hours, drove 2 hours home with screaming infant, and went straight to work until 7pm. Not recommended. Gained 4 pounds. Lost 2 pounds.  

Death by Cute Mother dropped off child and superfluous kitten in Kahului yesterday. While the man went to pick them up, I stayed home and spent the day knitting with a baby sleeping on my chest and watching Carnivale with a cup of tea and the cat snoozing in a patch of sunlight. Mike arrived home with half the meat department of Costco. Gavin ran for his computer games, the kitten streaked through the house like she had on a jet pack. After hours of her savaging my ankles, I put away the dinner leftovers and suddenly found the house peaceful. Ah, she must have finally found a place to nap! I thought. No, she did not. Detecting a faint wail, I ran into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and out she popped. Fantastic, one day with the kitten and I've already closed her into the fridge. She thought that was the greatest thing in the world, and now I have to wrestle her out of the fruit drawers every time I get something from the fridge. By bedtime, the kitten (originally named Cece, then Zeze, then Intarsia, and now Sookie) was ready to curl up and suck on my earlobes  (gross) while I nursed Leif to sleep. Somewhere around 3am I woke with the alarmed notion that something was terribly wrong with the baby, and looked down to see that, no, he had not transformed into a fanged demon child; Sookie was trying to worm her way between Leif's mouth and my breast, and was flipping back and forth, chewing on my boob and using the baby's head as a scratching post. I tossed her onto Mike and we went back to sleep. About an hour later, in a sort of zombie half-sleep, I distinctly heard someone calling my name, twice, in a "wake up and come here" tone, and I jerked awake to discover that the house was quiet and dark and asleep. I later asked Mike if that had ever happened to him, and he said no, but I said that it happened to Kermit the Frog, and he did not seem to think this made things better. Finally, too early, the kitten and the baby woke up for the day and were adorable. I explained that 5:30am was no time for cute, but they did not listen.

   

Tired.

Calico crisis

My mom is one of those people that others turn to when something horrible happens. My whole life, I've watched people come running when the car catches fire, when the dog's been quilled by a porcupine, when someone has been shot in the leg or has suffered a head wound, or when there's a rattlesnake outside the 4th grade classroom. After one of her students got sick at school, she painstakingly cleaned the shit out of his boots because she knew they were his only pair of shoes.

So this weekend I wasn't entirely surprised to see that it had happened again. A good-intentioned co-worker adopted two newborn kittens, nursed them through infancy, and fell in love with them - despite the fact that her large dog had killed the last kitten she tried to adopt. Last week the kittens started walking, one toddled too near the dog's dinner bowl, and my mom unexpectedly found herself running from the school (where her co-worker rushed to hand it off) to the vet with a dying kitten. Her friend cried as she handed over the second kitten, and now my mom has a new kitty in the house. Xebo and Hurcules, tottering into their 15th year, are pretty pissed about it, and Gavin can't stop talking about the tiny calico, so it looks like we'll be bringing the kitten home when the boys go to Oahu to pick up our quarantined cats. Three young cats and a baby. We are in the heyday of our young adult lives, framing the childhood memories of our sons. The days you look back on later with nostalgia - and hey, here we are, and we get to be here all day.

The only event of the week

ring ring
"Hello, tiny rural Hawaiian library, this is Harpy speaking."
"Hi, do you have a laminator I can use?"
"Sorry, we don't have one for public use."
"Would it help if I said I was a cop?"
"Are you a cop?"
"Yeah."
"Well then, yeah."

And so I spent a nice half an hour in the dank production room getting to know Officer Skippy*. We poked at the ancient behemoth of a laminator, rattled the knobs, jabbed the buttons, managed not to catch it on fire, and got the guy's permit thing plasticized all nice and pretty. While waiting for the machine to heat up, I learned: we have 8 cops, and no dogs. The police firing range is up the road from my house (suspicious that this is just a pasture with paper targets tacked to hay bales - hopefully not cows). And the firemen use the jet skis to go fishing and drinking. (Which is to say, my guess that the firemen use the jet skis to go fishing and drinking was not denied.)

After shutting down Bessie the Laminator and waving goodbye to Skippy, my co-worker came back from break, listened to my retelling, smiled, and pulled out a tiny, cute little card laminator from our supply shelf. "Next time you can just use this one." Damn it.


In other news, I finally finished my dummy book. Scribbled the last thumbnail this morning.


In other other news, I finally read the credits on Bones, figured out that the show is based on a book series by Kathy Reichs, discovered that we had 13 of them at work, and yanked them all off the shelf like Christmas presents. This will keep me busy until I figure out how to pirate episodes of Trueblood.

Am currently reading: Grave Secrets, by Kathy Reichs, and Fray, by Joss Whedon.

*name changed to protect dignity

spreading out

Our belongings finally arrived via a hugely oversized Matson freight container and slightly frazzled semi-trick driver. After negotiating the narrow gulch bridges and cliffside curves, he had no problem crashing through the foliage up our driveway to dump everything in front of the house. Our lanai is clogged with boxes, and it is exciting cutting them open to discover what the movers did to our things. Unloading a box of my clothes, I picked up a gauzy white skirt and held it to my waist - it looked like I had laid a tea towel on my stomach. My running shoes are waiting for me in the closet. I will reclaim my former athletic whatsits as soon as my vacancy sign goes back on. 

We stuffed the car with just-in-case hospital junk and went into town yesterday to meet Dr. Z (for real, that is his name - he is a rock star in a tiny preoccupied middle-aged Japanese body), then spent the day exhausting ourselves in the organizational departments of Home Depot and Walmart. Having all our crap means we need a bunch of additional crap to keep it tidy. Gavin and I hung on the overloaded cart as we waited in line. "Mom, you make my heart sing. It's singing, 'Moooom, I loooove you! Tummy tummy baaaaaby!' What do I make your heart sing?" I sang a bit of Wild Thing. He grinned and bounced a bit, "What does Dad make your heart do?" I snorted, but was spared from answering when he suddenly bounced up and landed on the mirror stuck under our cart, shattering it into pieces. We stared at it, particle board frame cracked in two and shards of mirror reflecting a hundred of our saucered eyes. A bored cashier dragged it off and dumped it at an empty register without making us pay for it. Sign of pride in quality merchandise. I was impressed it had actually been made of glass. 

It was dark when we finally arrived home. Gavin was slumped sleeping against the foam cooler in the back seat, so for a moment we let him sit and got out to stare up at the clear night sky. Even at the lake there were never this many stars. "There's the milky way," I said, pointing. Mike made a wry noise and touched my arm. We stood for a moment, leaned against each other, nodded, and popped the trunk to unload. Today I am up and eating cereal in a real bowl, sitting at my own table, and feeling ready to slice open some boxes and get my nest on. I have a new toy; a gleaming blue label maker. Nothing will escape my librarianly wrath.

If you don't shine

The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds cut out of the sun

The full moon passed over us again, a blood-tinged yellow over the rainforest. Mike watched it wane with grim satisfaction. "Got away from it this time." For 2 years now, I've looked up at the sky during nights of pivotal change - love, grief, loss, discovery, travel - and found myself staring into the eye of the full moon. I said as much, Mike now distrusts it. The moon is wily.

My mother brought the boy home this weekend. We waited for the Superferry to arrive in a dirt lot with PROHIBITED signs posted along it, listening to a Charlaine Harris audiobook. Windows open, I tucked my shirt up to let my belly cool in the evening air and took out my knitting. The prim voice of the narrator took a break from the murderous plot to give a detailed description of the characters' snow-bound sexual exploits just as a burly man with an old poodle pulled up alongside our open window. They looked at the car for a moment; knitting pregnant woman with huge bare belly listening to cock talk. Lovely. Mike stared down the poodle.

Gavin ran to the car when he saw us driving slowly through the disoriented moo-ing ferry-goers. I hopped out and pulled him away from the road in a shower of kisses as my mother hurried up behind us. My family! We drove home in the dark and watched Gavin breathe as he slept beside us on the air bed, perfect and small and safe.

My mother smiled like a cat into the wind while we drove into Hana, agreeing that it feels right out here. "It's like a cross between Molokai and the res, with a bit of Bloomington." Sleepy small town, horses and cows grazing, barefoot children, tattooed locals and tye-dyed hippies kicking around the general store. I relaxed against her approval. We may have found our way home at last.

itchy britches

We sat under the trees in Kapiolani, admiring the ocean waves from the banana hammock section of the beach park; aging leathery men in tiny colorful thongs were laying all over the grass. We ate lunch with a handful of other new LIS grads. One of the SOs jumped up to play football with Gavin. When he plopped back down with us, he looked at my belly, declared he wanted a son, and his girlfriend sipped her drink pointedly.

I covered Gavin in SPF 50 and followed him down to the water. Gavin ran back and forth from the crashing waves until it was time to head back to the car to over to quarantine to spend some time with the cat. Back home, Gavin peeled off his swim trunks and realized he was wearing a second pair of shorts made completely out of sand. He laughed and turned around to show me, and just then, a small face appeared at the window and the girl next door yelled, "Can Gavin come out to PLAY?" Gavin yanked down his shirt and ran into the bathroom, raining sand. I was a terrible mom and laughed. Age 5, Gavin discovers modesty.

Saturation

1) There is a Hawaiiana cover of Cat Steven's 'Wild World'.
2) They play it at the DMV.
3) This is no good for me

Sitting in a hard plastic school desk with the tinny warble of ukulele on the overhead speaker, I white-knuckled the pencil through the driver's test in a state of distraction. Evidently this is the key to DMV success; I slapped the finished test up on the desk, did a little happy dance at my best score ever, made a lemur face for the camera, and 30 seconds later I was walking home with a shiny new Hawaii license. The sky was blue, the trees were green and red and yellow, and the world is no longer monochromatic California brown.

Gavin has been spending his days playing with the girl next door, a nice kid with a swingy cropped haircut and big dilated anime eyes. We extracted him from her house and headed to the hardware store in the afternoon. I spent $7 on specialty dish soap and bought Gavin a twisty popsicle. Halfway to the gas station, he began making distressed noises, and I looked back to see his popsicle streaming like a fountain down onto his lap, the twists acting as irrigation troughs. "Disaster!" he wailed, licking frantically. "Let me show you how to do that," I said, then half the popsicle broke off and I accidentally inhaled it. We disposed of the popsicle at 7-11 and got a Slurpee instead.

We drove over H-3, happy to see the mountains, and spent a while lying in Maura's quarantine cell during visitor's hours. The animal quarantine units look like a cross between chicken coops and an internment camp; rows of large outdoor sheds partially walled with chain-link fence. Not so bad, really - I had been envisioning something like a Japanese capsule hotel.

So, not this:

through a day, and in and out of weeks...

It is our last week in Bakersfield. Instead of packing up our suitcases for a summer vacation in upstate New York, we are packing ourselves permanently back to the Pacific. Despite the excitement of going home and settling our family, I've found time to be wistful and sad about missing our trip to the lake this year. In planning next year's trip, we've had to accommodate the fact that Mike's father has moved down to North Carolina, and our promises to visit him are met with wary stares across each other. Which of us would be more likely to crack, with only a short car ride and a midnight Lifetime moment between us and certain disgrace? I assured Mike that I would keep him staked in the yard on a chain, so not to worry. I think he plans to lock me in his dad's basement.

One day of work left, one day before the movers take all our worldly belongings and leave us in an empty apartment with a litter box and a fridge full of half-empty condiments. I've enjoyed it here; though the first months were slow and sad, my job and co-workers were brilliant. My first apartment, failed romance, nightlife disasters, misty days in the mountain redwoods, the city lights and fragrant foods of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle... it's been a good place to tend wounds and wait for everything to clear around us.

At work, it's business as usual; pulling toddlers out of the shelves, helping old ladies decipher the handwriting on their book club reading lists, leading preschoolers in choruses of quacking, and shushing myspace teens. My best query recently was, "I need to know what temperature I need to incubate peacock eggs", and the worst was, "If it's 11:59am... and it turns 12:00... is it pm at 12:01... or at 12:00?" The most disconcerting was, from a breathless-sounding elderly person on the phone, "I need to know more about TIA... [insert my long researched explanation of symptoms] oh, it's a small stroke? Ah... I've gotta go." o_0

I'll miss my library.

DV at TJs

Tuesdays. Payday, and no work until 12pm. As I dropped off Gavin at preschool, I asked him if had any requests from the store while I was out. "Oh yeah," he said, gripping his pants, "I was wondering if you could buy me more shorts that are easy to close, like these." He showed me the clasp at the front, a departure from the standard snap or button closures he struggles with every day in the bathroom. "Ok, I'll try," I promised. Of the three things on my list - cat carrier, jewelry box, and alternative-clasp size 6 shorts - I thought the last would be the hardest to find. Wrong! After two hours wandering around Target, I ended up at the checkout with several pairs of the easy-clasp pants (also various underpants - boys might have no clothes selection compared to girls, but girls don't get glow-in-the-dark underwear) and no pet/jewelry isolation units.

"Find everything you need?" the cashier asked, looking through my head.
"Well, I couldn't find a jewelry box."
"A large one or a small one?"
"Either. Any."
"We only carry jewelry boxes at Christmas."

I shrugged and paid and huffed back to the car. If I had more time and endurance, I might have tried all the nearby stores for the unattainable boxes, but I decided to just stop by Trader Joes for food.

My TJs shopping strategy has always been very simple; if it looks good, throw it in the cart. TJs is no place for lists and budgets and practicality. I had just thrown frozen creme brulees into my basket and decided my stamina could hold out long enough to get me past the cupcakes when I suddenly made a complete ass of myself. An employee was standing attentively by the freezers, looking behind him and calling to someone. I glanced in the direction he was calling, and became the very thing he was standing guard for; the idiot who might run through a melted puddle of ice cream before the mop arrived. My slipper hit the puddle, my foot flew out, the basket clattered to the floor, and I fell down gracelessly on knees and elbows. The clerk looked horrified as he helped me sit up and realized I was pregnant, and I huffed for a moment to collect the damage report before letting him pull me to my feet. Normally, I would laugh in embarrassment and keep going, but this did not happen. As I gathered my basket, people were yelling across the store to ask if I was okay, and I realized that I was about to start crying, even though I was not particularly upset. I needed to make a run for it. I took one step when an old man said, "There's still ice cream on your shoe! Wait!" and the employee ran off to get a paper towel. "No, that's ok, I'm fine -" I tried to move again, and the old man put his hands up, "You'll slip! Wait, there's ice cream on your shoe!" Shut up, shut up, stupid concerned nice old man! My eyes started burning. The employee skidded back in with paper towels and went at my shoe, so I kicked it off and let him wipe it, then thanked him hurriedly and skittered around the corner. Cupcakes be damned, I needed to get out of the store. I got halfway through the register, wiping at my leaky eyes as if I were just working out a speck of dust, when the manager popped up at my elbow. This was too much, and I started really crying. "It's ok!" I croaked at him as word spread from the frozen aisle and people began yelling Is she ok!? across the checkout stands, "It's just hormones, I can't help it!" They offered to carry my bags, to sit me down and serve me water, to take my phone number, and I waved them away as I frantically punched in my pin number and took my receipt from the confused cashier. The clerk who had witnessed my fall pressed an open box of kleenex at me, so I pulled one out. "Take the whole box!" he said, which made me laugh. I waved the tissue over my head and ran for it with my bags.

Sitting in the car, I saw shreds of skin hanging off my knees and started sobbing. Sobbing with deep, gasping hitches like hadn't done since last summer. At least that time I had been properly upset. Irritated, I started the car and the radio blared to life.

And the daaays come and gooo but my feelings for you are foreeeeever!

"I'm FINE!" I yelled at the car.

Fine or not, I drove home crying, walked in crying, put down my bags crying, tried to explain to Mike why I was crying while crying, and finally laid down on the couch and let it putter out on its own. We watched Beowulf (blaarg) and counted off my contractions until it was safe to say we would not have to name the baby "TJ" or "Organic Rice Cream".

And so Tuesday became Holly vs. Hormones, and I lost. Stupid Tuesday.

Self destruct activated

2 weeks and counting. We decided to ship the car back home, and then waited to see if it would spontaneously explode as a result. Indeed; no sooner had we arranged the loading date and paid the deposit than the driver's side window fell thunk! into the inner workings of the door. Great.

 Mike tore off layers of door, located the snapped pieces of window guts, drove across town to get the replacement part, spent all day drilling it in, discovered it was the wrong part, couldn't get the right one from any of the auto stores in town, ordered one online, and we resigned ourselves to a few weeks of tempting thieves with our open window. All of this distracted us from noticing that the car was up to something worse; when she ran out of gas in record time we chalked it up to the auto parts scavenger hunt, when she took longer starting on ignition we were too busy talking about the window to really notice. Just as we ordered the part and settled into the wait (a time we might have then noticed these underlying developments), Gavin began vomiting and running a fever, I began having contractions 15 minutes apart, and Mike got a cold. No problem; we smothered the ailments with fresh cookies, laid up in front of crap movies, and were back up and running the next day. As I returned to work and Mike took the still-recovering child on errands with him to mail the prodigal guitar (an ebay fiasco unto itself), the car seized its moment. With a farewell bing of the fuel light, it died in mid-intersection. Mike, while graced with physical dexterity and manly fix-it-ness, is not so skilled in crisis management. Although I sent in reinforcements and issued motherly decrees on negotiating the situation with a sick child, he showed up almost an hour later with none other than Dance Class Girl. I had a dog once who made little squeak-growfing noises when she was unhappy (say, after a 5 year old had trussed her up in play doctor bandages or she had eaten all the chocolate bunnies from the easter baskets). This is the same noise I make whenever Dance Class Girl appears. She is a sweet, good-hearted, pretty girl. The kind of girl you want to push off a ledge. Mike looked like I had his balls in my fist the whole way home, although truth be told I am too fat and sleepy these days to be fussed much with any of this. Cascading disasters are entertainment unto themselves. It's nothing if not a sign that change is truly underway, at last!

I wrangled a ride to work today, only to realize I had not brought any lunch. Boss offered use of car, which I am too stupids to drive because it is stick (in the zombie apocalypse I am sure I could dig up my high school stick skills and make a run for it, but I'd rather not practice on my boss's car in lunch traffic, however similar to zombies the doctors milling around Starbucks may be) so I found myself waddling to the Marketplace in the 98 degree afternoon, sticking to the shady side of the street and admiring the glimpses of red craggy mountain in the distance. Applebees was the closest food source, so I decided to luxuriate in the a/c with my book and an overpriced Weight Watcher entree. The waiters seemed stumped by my presence, staring first at my stomach, then at my book, and repeating, "One?" long enough that I had to laugh. The singleton restaurant experience isn't the mythical movie moment I supposed it to be. I sent Mike a message to assure him I had survived the walk. A bit later I was enjoying the murmur of afternoon lunch chatter (relationships, money, food) and finishing off the tilapia, when a familiar voice made me look up from my book. Gavin stood in front of me, and for a minute I couldn't understand what I was seeing. Mike grinned behind him, catching my knee-jerk expression of guilt as I determined whether or not I had been caught doing something bad. (I had not.) "We fixed the car!" Gavin exclaimed; climbing into the seat next to me, accepting a piece of broccoli, and ordering apple juice from the startled waitress. "It was a fooooose. Fa-yoose." "Fuse?" "Yep." Brilliant! Very pleased with Mike, and with $40 fuse, and with happily heat-flushed little boy with apple juice. They dropped me back off at work, and now we have just to cruise into the weekend - to poolside barbeques, Battlestar, and lazy knitting (am presently mangling a stuffed snail).

Eye of the storm? Who cares! We have ribs!