Leif turns 4

Today, I have one of these.

He's stubborn and loving, smart and straight-forward. He twines his fingers in my hair at night when we read stories, grabs my face with both hands and kisses me in the mornings, runs across the house to hug me when I get home from work, lays on the floor with his brother for hours playing with Legos and building dragon houses on my iPhone, and watches Futurama with us after helping make the popcorn. I love him so much.

Happy Birthday, Leif.

This time for sure

I am making a thing. I am tired and mangling it and can't seem to count to 10 consistently, but I am making a thing.

More of this thing later.

Have finished reading 11/22/63 (fantastic) and The Wind Through the Keyhole (chilling and excellent and gave me supremely messed up dreams) and am working through Blood Sucking Fiends (fun), and have just chucked The Wolf Gift into my bag. My mother would remind me that I am supposed to be ILLUSTRATING HER DAMNED BOOK, but I am crippled by not-wanting-to-do-anything-ness. I think I am a bit depressed, but I will ignore it and read things and rip out all my knitting instead of addressing it at all.

Ravellenics - thbbt

I'm trying to be a good participator-type person, but it is ending badly all over the place.

The Ravellenics are a time when ambitious knitters band together into bloodthirsty teams to watch the Olympics and do ridiculous things like knit estonian lace in 2 weeks. Or amigurumi Avengers. Or dozens of willy-warmers.

I am on team Bok Bok Motherfucker, and I decided to knit a cabled sweater. On size 4 needles. In 2 weeks. Oh, and I could only really work on it during my lunch breaks.

I got this far before realizing I was stupid.

So I grabbed my bag of hibernating projects, and decided to finish the Rockaway hoodie. I finished 1/4 a sleeve before realizing that I don't actually like watching sports. I am a fan of internet videos, with highlights and injuries.

The inside of this sleeve is terrible.

I just... no. I just can't.

So I am totally losing this competition which I am in no way obligated to participate in.

Something great will come to me.

Probably.

RAWR FAIL

The kilt hose are beautiful. 

And I am going to rip the everloving shit out of them. 

 Kilvarock Kilt Hose

The pattern is one-size, relying on ribbing to keep them form-fitting with no decreases. So they are tubes, and the ankles are the same size as the calves. 

NO. 

The ribbing fit my not-quite-4-year-old. 

When I squeezed them on, my legs looked like spiral hams.

Also in FAIL, I hauled the shmoopy shcarf out from under my desk and bound it off. The last month was all contented grey, and it was really boring to work on, even at 2 rows a day. Instead of a snapshot of a year, it is a snapshot of a breakup, over a period of about 7 months.

It's an interesting visual study. And I kind of hate it.


SO ANYWAY

The kids have been building skateboards through a program with the school. For $25, they get the forms, glue the layers, sand them down, paint them, put on the hardware, and leave with a contraption with which to break their faces.

Gavin has more sci-fi nerdliness than athletic grace, and covered his board in spacecraft, robots, and aliens. It's pretty fantastic.

A box of yarn is coming. Big plans.

crap at social activities

We went to a kiddie party yesterday evening, and I realized again how completely crap I am at talking to people without a desk between us. In the midst of guitar music and clinking beers, I feel like a boring, mushy, dull thing. The young farmers laughed and talked about clearing land, breeding goats, making kava, cooking with edible flowers, and I just had the ERMAGERD CLERP CLERPS horse in my head, not helping at all. Bounced on the trampoline and laid on lounge chairs, instead. Leif found an enormous ball, and we pelted each other in the head for the better part of an hour, until the herd of children roared through, got in a dog pile on the trampoline, gave someone a bloody nose, and buffalo-stampeded back toward the food table. I was fine until they relocated to the barn for party games, where the bigger kids started riding bikes through the crowd and mowing down the littles. After a bit of ineffectual flailing, I went outside to wait in the dark with the barn cat, who had similar feelings about the mob scene inside.

Despite my personal fail, it was a really lovely evening with ridiculously lovely people. And chicken wings. Lovely, lovely chicken wings.

time travel

Working with the public gives me a wide slice of humanity. I don't have to chase people down, clean up expired shut-ins, or pull guns on assholes like other branches of public employees, but I do talk down drug addicts, investigate trash-can-poopers, and listen to a stream of scandal and grief. One of our teens was killed in a terrible accident, and the neighbors who dragged him from the wreckage are still processing their horror. One of our missing patrons is rumored to have been involved in a shoot-out with police and has been on the run with a new haircut and a stolen car. Someone has been ordering fraudulent credit cards in their ex's name. One of our mentally ill patrons has just figured out he can get free movies due to his disability, and has been proselytizing to all his friends, so that we have had a lurching, clot-dropping stream of Walking Dead library visitors all week.

Sorry, no, 'Tin Tin' has already been checked out.

I realize this analogy seems harsh, but none of the normal hobos will go near these guys. Not sure where he found them.

My co-worker went to get the mail and stopped someone who was beating up a homeless guy on the street corner. She got in his face, told him off, got the cops, and called his mom. It was beautiful.

Meanwhile, the kid I pulled out of a pool in 9th grade is running for Senate. And his new album won a bunch of local awards. I am insufferably smug about how he's turned out - as if I'd done any work at all since whacking his head off the pool deck in 1993.

Also, my pen is poised over my time-travel to-do list, just in case he turns out to be an evil overlord, after all.


Yesterday, a teen fell off this bridge and died while trying to take a picture over the guardrail:

We have to drive through herds of tourists clogging the bridges every time we go to Costco. Seriously, visitors, they are fucking huge cliffs with raging waterfalls and rivers under them. There is mud, and slippery moss, and crumbling rocks, and one-lane roads where drivers will zoom around and scare you into losing footing. One of our patrons pulled this kid out of the water, our emergency guys brought him in, and my doctor declared him dead. Hopefully not on the same table I have to have my lady-business exam on. DO NOT PRANCE AROUND WITH CAMERAS ON THE EDGES OF CLIFFS, FFS.

Home, to my knitting and children and dinner. I like a calm and quiet life, because damn.

1 day to moving day

CT scans feel like bad heatstroke. Nobody told me this, and I started feeling distressed and confused about 20 minutes after having my head in the giant microwave. Shoulder and knee joints froze up into stiff knobs of pain. 

But it was worth it, because my otolaryngologist had a look at the scans and said,"Erm, I have no idea. You should see a neurologist." So that's just great.

Oh, I dunno.

On the plus side, audiologist said I have perfectly normal hearing. The kids finally believe me when I indiscriminately yell, I HEARD THAT.

And that was yesterday. 

Today, talked with my boys on fb video chat before they ran off to play with machine guns(??). Finished illustrations - ALL OF THEM. Moved two carloads of crap. Packed all the silverware, and had to eat dinner with pink plastic elephant forks. 

Tomorrow: fun with Earblowers and heavy furniture.

physically improbable

Saturday morning, I sat on the bed folding laundry, stood up, brushed my hand against the leg of my jeans, and somehow tore off part of my thumbnail. I blame rivets. Which I don't appear to actually have on my jeans, but how in the hell else does one achieve this?

Within hours, the side of my thumbnail had swollen and blossomed like a lurid organ. I applied antibiotic ointment and disinfectants and tried to drain it, but it just throbbed and oozed and turned alternately green and red.

I complained about my gangrenous thumb on twitter, and Mr. HS sent me a picture of his broken foot. But unless he's been using his feet for coding instead of his hands, my whine still stands. Every little bump and chafe causes shooting, blinding, knee-watering pain. I have decided that this must be what it is like having testicles. Growing off your thumb. For this reason, I heartily do NOT recommend peeling an orange with your testicles.

So I was moaning on about my hand, powering through illustrations despite the disgusting pastel-smeared thumb gore, when suddenly a new house fell in my lap. And just like that, I'm moving in by the 1st.

Which is in 3 weeks.

Which is also my illustration deadline.

And all this without a thumb.

Well, crap.

Monday: fun with otolaryngology.

the jog, the moth, the noose

Got off work at 7:30pm. Still light out. Yanked on running pants and sneakers, stuffed ipod down jogging bra.  Ran down to the bay at twilight, dodging toads on the roadside.

Running back up, the sporadic cough I've been having expanded into an asthmatic gasp, and I walked in the headlights of cars, hoot-wheezing toward the house.

A moth flew straight down my throat.

I tried to spit it out, which is when I discovered that I do not know how to spit. A rope of saliva and bug parts fell out of my mouth, dangled somewhere down around my thighs, and swung back to splat across the length of my torso.

Started jogging toward the house, coughing and spitting and gagging. Made for the shortcut before my driveway, down a short hill of rocks between the mango trees. My ipod cord caught in the branches, I managed to get it wrapped around my neck, and fell down the hill. Legs went into violent muscle cramps from lack of use. Rode a cat back into the house, got into shower, and climbed under my quilting with a beer.

Well played, nature.

A quilt for Leif

Leif has been taken away by his father. Mike flew over, and we spent Saturday wandering the mall, watching the boy climb foam whales in the kiddie mosh pit area, drinking pints at the Mexican cantina, and awkwardly edging around difficult topics. Leif ate a sundae as large as his head. With two spoons. 

I've had the kids away for vacations before. I have been looking forward to the productivity time, since I have 3 weeks left to illustrate an entire book. So it was a bit unexpected for me to start crying suddenly in Costco, pretending I had something in my eye and hiding behind a sample of guacamole with my sunglasses on. I made it out and sobbed into the cilantro lime shrimp in the car. 

So I bought tickets to see the Avengers. It was awesome. Then I listened to shitty music and got shmoopy and cried some more on the drive home.

Today was my first day without children. The house was empty. I finished a two-page illustration, ate some sashimi, chatted with Mike about Leif's first night and then with my mom in Indiana, walked to the beach, found S. and his boys, caught a ride home, and knocked out the rest of Leif's quilt top. 

The visiting boys liked the quilt, so I promised to make them one next. It is always a surprise to me that I can make a nice dinner and kids will say, "eew, is that sauce? I wanted ketchup," but when I knit or sew things, they spread out on them and ask for more. I do not understand the difference.

Someone - and I really do not know who - weed whacks my front yard and clears out all the rotting mangoes while I'm at work. I do not have yard service. All the yard men I know have blamed each other. I am going to start leaving baked goods tied up in bows in the leaf pile - which they will then have to scrape up with a rake after the weed whacker finishes with them.

Next - sandwich, quilt, and bind. The binding will be black and color scraps*, the quilting will be by hand. I love the squooshy loft and bold detail of hand-quilted blankets.


* right at this point, the artichokes boiling on the stove blew up in a burst of electrical fire that left a hole in the stove coils. Fail. Get the ketchup.