Humbug

Dear son,
Please do not put cat toys in my knitting basket.

Dear cat,
If you're going to be in my knitting, at least finish the stocking for me. Also please stop crawling across my neck at night to suck on the baby's eyelids.

Dear stocking,
You suck. Fix your own damned stranding.

Dear work,
Not a fan right now.

Dear sink at work,
Exploding is not funny. Well, it kind of is, but not when the water is boiling hot and I have no witnesses. The grimy stuff I found in the bottom of my tea cup is especially not funny - that had better not have been lead in the water.

Dear Christmas,
Disenchanted with you since 2006.

Dear birthday,
You, too. You can go sit with Christmas in the corner and think about what you've done.

In fact, I can't think of a single holiday without bad feelings attached to it at this point. Except maybe Martin Luther King Jr. Day (because THAT'S a happy story /s). Should convert to something with different holidays.

Anyway -

Dear scale,
Out the window you go. You don't get to have 7 lb fluctuations unless it's lower.



Stupid week.

work trip

152 (-28, 17 to go)

Friday. Stranded at my mother's house. Looked for lunch, found leftover Halloween candy and cans of pork 'n beans. Ate my candy with the pork and beans before realizing what I had done.

Interesting week. Went for drug training, stayed for the weekend to attend a Friends of the Library meeting.

Spent almost 5 days out with the baby, with only 3 bottles and no breast pump, which made babysitting interesting for my mom.

Arrived at training and walked in on the burly middle-aged presenter topless, with a tank-top tan. He pulled on an aloha shirt and turned out to be an important Human Resources person. He used "I" instead of "you" while making up hypothetical scenarios: "So I use a lot of meth and decided to admit it, but that didn't get me out of the reasonable suspicion drug test." Bold move.

Saw gruesome drunk driving police scene photos. Wondered why they were all of South American accidents, according to the captions. Maybe so there's less of a chance they're using someone's family members over here. Also saw pictures of drugs but no explanation on how to use them. What kind of training is that?

Stole a nun.*

Got my leg stuck in the back seat of my mom's car.

Got sick.

Bought new pants in a size smaller.

Discovered a yarn I hate. Too bad I have 5 balls of it.

Leif hit 3 months old; rolled from back to front in his sleep, and has started having success getting his hands on his toys and the toys to his mouth.

Sat next to a dad with a baby the same size as Leif, but 3 months older and crawling. Leif is so big.

Failed to buy X-mess presents. I used to live for the holidays, but after the December divorce and then last year's holiday barfiness, my feelings for the winter months have ended. I'm trying, though.

All in all, exhausting but good trip. Capped it off by flying home with a stomach flu and an infant and driving home for 2 hours in the dark, which went as well as it could, with only a little crying (mostly from Leif).

Ready to hibernate until spring now.

* the nun was very interesting, a registered nurse practitioner from the leper colony on Molokai. I gave her a ride and she told me medical and supernatural horror stories. I had to give her back, though.

Halloween 2008

Last year we had 3 kids show up for trick-or-treating at the apartment complex, so it was nice to return to the huge crowds of kids at my mom's house. Gavin was 3 the last time we walked the neighborhood with cousin Chris, now he is nearly 6 (how? We were only gone one year!). It used to take 20 minutes to wear the kids out and come home with a half-full bucket of candy, but now the boys can power up and down the street for an hour. We saw a haunted miniature village, Gavin accidentally dumped his candy on the sidewalk, the boys squawked "pencils!?" at one house, and they both avoided the fog-machines and plastic corpses. I left Mike to finish trick-or-treating with the boys and went home after an hour, loaded down with sleeping infant and costume accessories that they didn't want to carry. Two Halloweens ago, in the middle of our divorce, Mike had decided to dress up as V. When you have just found out that your husband has been leading an adulterous double life, you do not want to see him in a stupid wig and creepy leering mask. I was dressed up as Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, and really wanted to kick him in the nuggets. Last year was a bit quiet and uncomfortable, and this year was mostly okay again. I still didn't feel like dressing up, though. My mom jammed Gavin's old mouse ears onto my head and stuck Mike in a novelty tattoo shirt, and that was it for us. Still, it was better than the last couple of Halloweens.

2 terrible hours

"He's done with the copy machine, but it still says he has .40 on it."
"Ok, I'll just push the return coin button..."
"Oh, you can do that?"
"Yeah, but it'll spit out the money whenever it feels like it." *push push push*
40 seconds later - *ching ching ching*
"Here you go sir, it even gave you an extra 5 cents."
"Whoa, girl, that's better than McDonalds!"

?


The Saturday that aged us 2 years.

In the mall bookstore, noon. 10 feet away from Gavin, spent one minute looking at books two shelves over. Turned to get Gavin from the children's section, found an empty seat and no child. Searched aisles, no child. Ran outside, scanned crowd, no child. Searched book store again, and again. Asked cashiers. Split up, Mike reporting to security and me running back into every store we had visited. Checked bathrooms. Asked cashiers. Ran to car. Ran to bus stops. No child. Ran back to security desk, Mike pacing with baby and no child. Described boy for tenth time; orange slippers, jean shorts, black shirt, shoulder-length brown hair, looks like a girl. Panic setting in, ran to play area, arcade, toy store, candy store, no child. Shuffling hobos and shifty-eyed men stood out in vision, families blurring into soundless colors, distant sirens causing visions of hit-and-runs. Time bent into endless loop of distress. Legs cramping, sweaty, I took the baby from Mike and stood vigil while he set off into the crowd. Security guard lifted radio to mouth and started running. Information woman appeared suddenly in front of me with walkie-talkie, "We may be on to something." Security guard appeared at upstairs railing and grinned, thumbs-up. Gavin stood by his side, nonchalant. Fear collapsed into relieved anger. "He was in Game Stop." "Mom, I saw a Lego Indiana Jones game! Can I -" "NO."

Yes, after all our talks about safety, kidnapping, and how to ask for help, Gavin had gotten up, wandered from the store, gone up the escalator, walked across the mall, and into the video game store (which we had never been in before). Trembling, we sat at the courtyard fountain and looked at the time. 2:22. Gah. More than 2 HOURS of horrors.

Frazzled, we set off to finish our errands; were stranded in Walmart while the car got new tires. Ate at the in-store McDonalds, a very sad thing. Crowd was stressful. Went to Krispy Kreme to alleviate stress before 2-hour drive home in the dark. Leif's diaper sprung a leak and pee ran down my arm and onto the floor. Wiped the floor with napkins while Mike changed the baby. Bought donut holes and a KK shirt for Gavin and tried to relax by the donut conveyor belt. Admired my happy baby, accidentally poked him in the eye, left store with screaming infant. Feeling terrible about hurting my baby, tried to kiss him and accidentally knocked his head off my tooth. Joined baby in crying. Mike took infant and pressed my head to his shoulder. Gavin hugged my legs.

What a terrible day.

Sunday was a day of healing; called mom, cleaned house to celtic music, baked cookies, drank tea, knitted with baby sleeping on chest, made chicken francais, poured a bottle of moscato into Mike, bathed and got the kids to bed early, watched Bones, went to bed.

Dreamed of people long gone.

And on the plus side, I lost 3 pounds over the weekend. That's for 2 hours of running laps in the mall.

Monday. Drinking fennel tea to boost milks. Sleepy.

Knitting notes

Plea for reason: people, I beg you - do not model knitted hats on doll heads. It is very creepy and does not count as an "action shot". Unless the doll is being thrown from a window. Which it should be.

Drinking game: watch all 7 seasons of Buffy and have a beer every time a character wears a hand-knitted sweater. Extra points for spotting the background extras in the previous season's garments (yeah, I noticed when Anya was wearing that beige turtleneck in season 4 that Buffy wore in season 3). Someone had a sweet commission as knitter to the Slayer.


Reading: Handknit Holidays, Stop in the Name of Pants, and some reference books about chickens and pug dogs for illustrations. Halfway considering getting a pug dog just because they are so funny and ugly. That used to be how I bought shoes, though, and that resulted in the green-tennis-ball-fuzz-shoe incident of 1998. So maybe not.


Oh, and unrelated to anything - this morning I pulled on a pair of jeans and couldn't get them buttoned before realizing they were Mike's. This might not sound like a good thing, but it is; Mike is a slender guy, so the fact that I could fit my legs and butt into them is amazing. I might not be losing weight as fast as I'd like, but my body is still changing back into a normal shape. Still, it's damn annoying to weigh the same as him and be pudgy while he can be all slim.

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.