a weekend

Waioka is a riverbed of tall white rock and broken boulders, cutting away into a cliff overlooking a large pool by the ocean. The waterfall only runs after hard rain, leaving warm basins of green water in the dips and cracks. Young people leap from the edge of the cliff into the brackish water, their families shouting abusive encouragement from the sidelines.

This place, only with heckling dads waving beer bottles.

 

Gavin jumped from the lowest rocks into the water with his friends, paddling to the edge and floating in the shallow parts with giant goggles strapped to his head. Leif and I sat on the rocks, dipping our legs into the water and watching tadpoles nibble the bubbles on our skin.

Leif slid into the pool while I mentally considered the bacterial bouquet of the stagnant water, then grinned, "Help, mom! I can't get out!" and pawed at the loose gravel helplessly, sending tadpoles fleeing. I lifted him out of the water, and he said, "Thanks, mom, you're my superhero." My kids don't often express themselves in cute clichés, but it charmed the hell out of me.

---

Paia is a small tourist town with a beachy bohemian vibe; two intersecting streets lined with imports, hemp clothing, coffee shops, swimwear, and restaurants with lots of beer on tap. College kids with dreadlocks and flowing skirts walk around finding their spirits and eating gelato.

Leif and I had breakfast at an outdoor cafe, browsed shops to look at crystal jewelry, and wandered the health food store for obscure menu ingredients.

Children who go on solo excursions with their parent enjoy indulgence, and we filled the basket with  organic cheesy poofs, socially responsible chocolate, and rabbit-shaped mac and cheese.

Walking around with Leif is fun, because it is like walking around with Cindel, from the Ewok movies.

Everywhere we go, people stop to squeal at him about his hair. And I puff up like a proud thing because I was SO IN LOVE with Cindel as a child, I totally understand the urge to grab fistfuls of those curls and boing them. I do it constantly - it's amazing the child has any hair left.

The local radio stations haven't had any new music since 2006. As we drove to Kahului, the radio played a string of songs on my quarantine list, like punching me in the face repeatedly. Welcome to the Black Parade. Creep. Right Here.

I didn't switch them, because old familiar heartache is a comfortable place to take refuge when a new, scary one is looming over and around you. Black Parade played twice more before the afternoon was out, and I eyed the radio suspiciously.

Back home in the evening, my stomach rising up into my throat. I let my hair down and combed my fingers through, looking balefully at the strands lying in my hand. It's nothing, and everything.

But it was a good, sunny day with my boy, and Gavin curled up against me on the couch to watch Farscape in the evening and read The Search for Wondla before bed. These are the bits I pare off and eat.

This life, I tell you.

all the fails

Things are derailing, as they do when you get pulled along by someone because you don't want to hurt them by yanking your hand away and staying on safe ground. I once found myself trapped for a week at vacation bible camp because my high school boyfriend snowballed me into signing up, even though the roster of other campers looked suspicious. I suppose the good thing that can be said about this type of gullibility is that it almost always results in an adventure. The party you shouldn't have been at, the nudity that should have been avoided, the vehicle you shouldn't have tried to operate, the masseur you shouldn't have trusted, the drink concoction you were volunteered to taste test - adventure! Adventures are usually no fun when they're happening, though.

So I have done what I did at vacation bible camp; called my mom and cried to come home. I've also sent a whole bunch of flaily, hysterical emails to sarahapple, who mustered the forces and cried DEATH MATCH!

So next Friday TUESDAY (because I still can't count), we will be posting a new death match challenge. The theme: SPOILED EXPIRED MILK. Here's hoping it doesn't end up in a pile of torn scraps like all my other recent projects. I've already broken my sewing machine and taken to stitching the whole thing by hand. Can do this.

I fail at fake parenting

Things are not going well. There is no way to explain all the particular reasons why without hurting someone more than I already need to, so I will use "I statements".

I have been unhappy since combining households, despite the architectural excitement of the new place.

I am allergic to smoke.

I do not want 4 children. 

I don't like my hair falling out from stress. I'm going to look like Dobby soon.

I want to be with my family. My mother developed problems with the electrical systems of her heart over the summer, another of my aunts has moved to Oahu, the kids should be near their father, and I don't want to lose any more years with them all. 

I am making plans.

The party - posterity post

Top on my list of hateful jobs I never want to have is Wedding Planner. Followed by Event Coordinator. Followed by Performer of Any Sort. I hate entertaining. This is not to say I hate celebrating - I flip right the fuck out for holidays, and spend entire days cleaning and decorating and cooking and drinking. Family traditions are my favorite; party games are my natural enemies.

So I took the whole day off to tackle Leif's party. One hot plate and one toaster oven vs. 10 lbs of chicken, potato salad, and a birthday cake. Got up at 5:30am, rolled out the brioche dough I had made the night before, set cinnamon buns to rise, and managed to get them cooked and stuffed into the kids by the time Gavin had to get to school*.

This was a good start, and I organized an assault on the rest of the menu items, searing and simmering and broiling with my ridiculously inadequate appliances. By lunch, one of the part-time kids arrived home from school, because kindergarten lets out early in the first week.

Being an only child to a single mother, the dynamics of large families are confusing to me. And these boys in particular are difficult for me to relate to - they do things like deliberately break their toys, play games that involve crashing and throwing, and they hurt each other, then cry because they were caught, not because they realize what complete dicks they were. On Sunday our friends came back from vacation with their daughters, and when the boys chased the youngest up a tree to pelt him with hard projectiles like something from the Hunger Games, the girls felt so bad about it that they organized everyone into making flower crowns for the kid and dragging him around in a laundry basket like a sled to make him feel better. The girls have empathy. The boys have a sense of justice - and it is not yet in tune AT ALL.

This is all to say that I have not been dealing very well with suddenly having 4 boys around half the time. The volume and crashing and stampeding of feet makes me want to run away to Ontario. The  kindergartner in particular has been making my hair fall out (or it is falling out anyway, maybe because at this point I am about 70% hair) and so I brought out the mixer and made the two small boys help me assemble cakes - determined to be the model of serene matronly love and comfort, damn it. And it worked. They helped me stir, licked the beaters, ate the cake tops I cut away to level the layers, and tested the ice cream to make sure it wasn't poisoned. I WIN AT FAKE PARENTING. Or real parenting, not sure.

When stuffing the piñata, I made sure to only pack it with toys and chocolate, because hard candies are the turds of the devil. Conveniently, not all of it fit, and I put aside a pile of mini kit-kats as a grown-up tax. Gavin got home from school, found my stash, and helpfully crammed it all into the piñata. I was thwarted.

By mid-afternoon I had won the battle against the hot plate and toaster oven, so we packed the car and hauled everyone over to the ball park. Here I collapsed under a plate of potato salad and wings and let the party take care of itself. The guests arrived, the children played, the adults drank prohibited beverages from plastic cups, the men strung up the piñata, I lit the cake and made everyone sing, the boys went into a frenzy over the presents, and DONE. Home by bedtime. May secretly be a natural party-thrower. A skill which I never plan to hone or cultivate. Unless it involves panty-hose potpourri or cakes on fire like Amy Sedaris.

 

I like you, too, Amy.

 

* Oh yeah, and school has started ALREADY. I made him pose for a picture on his first day of 4th grade, and he slumped and made lemur face. I tried. 

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.