You guys

I am having so much fun with these. 

I'm going to add proper text and color and everything, but I've got a bunch of these rough pages right now. This character yells in pidgin a bit, those aren't typos. 

ANTIDOTE

It's political season on Facebook.

Turn it off and step away. Close the laptop. Hide the app.

I was an only child with lots of opportunity to sneak into my mother's room and blast her stereo if life felt very grim. When my dog got a face full of porcupine quills and we had to pull them out with pliers, or when the neighbor had to put down an injured stray outside our trailer with a shot gun, or when it rained so hard the mud sucked onto my boots as I ran home and launched me out of them face-first into the muck, I went home and took a hot shower and put on Led Zeppelin or Alice Cooper or Queen and sang along as loud as I could.

This is still effective while driving to work. Especially if you add in a little shoulder/elbows dance routine.

If your uncle is being an asshole on facebook, or if your cousin is quoting white supremacists, or if your childhood friend is flailing about conspiracy theories, do this thing. Click play.



Sing it loud.

THAT'S WHY I'VE GOT A LOT OF WATER IN MY BRAIN! OH, TECUMSEH, I'VE GOT NOBODY LEFT TO MAKE TEA!

I DON'T KNOW NOBODYYYY IN STARFLEEEET!

(That record didn't have lyrics inside the album cover.)

Deep breaths, folks.

It's self-updating hurricane gif time again!

Gif removed because the storm is over and it was a really distracting image

This image will update itself as the storm clobbers us. We are on Oahu, the second Island on the left. Up at the pointy bit at the top.

Work has been cancelled for the big island, but not for us.

Edit: winds! Rain! Staying in today.

Edit edit: basement flooded. RAWR.

I'm on to something. Maybe.

You know what Hawaii does not have? Awesome comics about local superheroes! What we need are a trio of crime-fighting girls. With powers. But not good powers. Like, spectacularly crap powers. And together, they harness their terrible newfound abilities to battle the dark forces of whistling dogs, menehunes, snarky shark men, and disappearing owls.

SOMEONE SIGN ME ON, I'm already drawing this thing.


Oh, and I'm back from vacation. THANK GOODNESS. There is so much body fluid involved in stay-at-home-ness. And people hanging around your knees. And everything being spilled, all the time, everywhere. Basically it is non-stop shuffling between the washing machine and the refrigerator.

Bless you, sturdy work desk. Bless all the little post-its and the pile of backlogged reports I have to file and the umpty-billion urgent emails about things that haven't even happened. "URGENT REMINDER - the deadline is next week and you haven't sent your forms in!" WELL NO SHIT. Wait - I mean, BLESS YOU.

Happy to be back.

keeping my day job

I am back from vacation, and so glad - not just because my library is made of leftover military shelter supplies while a hurricane heads for us. Staying at home with kids and cats and chickens is basically just a constant trip from the laundry to the kitchen and back again with someone wrapped around your knees. 

 
The smallest child, who had not said anything macabre since her whole "I had 5 babies but 3 of them died in a fire" thing a few months ago, was in a really good mood on the way home yesterday when she asked, "Which way are we going, left or right?" "Left." "Which way is left, this way or that way?" She pointed out the windows. "This way." "Oh, good! Because if we went THAT way, the man would kill us." "Um, what man?" "The man with the sign. The red sign."

We did not go that way.

Fly by update

Buck is a Cochin. That looks like it might be French, but the feed store guy wants you to say Koe-Chin and not Coh-Shen. So just say "coh-shen" under your breath when he turns his back to get your cedar shavings.

You be what you want to be, Bucky.

Buck is also smart enough to know that you are trying to trick her back into her coop with grapes, and she turns into some kind of ninja the moment you hold one up. In half a second you are on your butt and she is in the bushes murdering a grape. I don't know if chickens are supposed to eat grapes, but as far as I can tell they are just raccoons without hands, and they'll eat whatever garbage you give them. (Along with crumble and scratch. Garbage is just a nutritional supplement.)

The boy found a baby mejiro that fell out of its nest and banged up its wing.

Larger than actual size. Commonly known as "weenie birds" around these parts. 

Around my house, specifically.

We managed to keep it alive overnight with baby bird formula on a plastic darning needle and a hot potato wrapped in a sock. Returned it to its parents the next day when it felt better. It fluttered right up into the tree and climbed up the branches like a dragon while its parents chirped excitedly. Congratulated each other on being good witches. Witches seem to follow the 80/20 rule, like librarians (and police officers and social workers and teachers and tech support). A bit of the job is magic, and the rest is getting dirty up to the elbows in other people's problems, because someone has to. "You do the good that is in front of you," Granny Weatherwax always says.

The lychees came in, and having a teenager with a fruit picker keeps the little guys happily shelling fruit for a couple of hours while you loosely supervise from behind a book on a lounge chair. And the hose has a mist setting, so the plant watering takes care of itself while the kids run through the clouds of water and shoot cold jets down their shorts. I've got this situation sorted.

Had to go to work for toddler time with all the kids in tow, because I'm the only one who knows the scarf and shaky-egg rhymes. Also have to go to work today and wrangle a magician. WHO DESIGNED THIS VACATION? It turns out that going to work halfway through your lounging-with-a-chicken-and-a-book time is complete balls.

I read a book! A paper one! In 2 days! Like a person who actually sits and reads books! Am now in post-book withdrawal and really annoyed.

Taking series suggestions at this time, folks.

I'm on vacation!

At home. Because of childcare. But whatever. Summer! Vacation!

Supervising the chicken requires hours outside on the lawn chair with music and books.

We planted a banana grove! Well, we planted two banana trees. But it has grovey aspirations.

The boy wants a 2 foot tree house, because that's all the room there is up there. I told him that is called a branch. 

Took one for the team. Verdict: just as good as the real stuff, if you haven't had the real stuff in like 6 years.

Buck's bell-bottom feathers. I have no idea what kind of chicken she is. Hopefully the kind that lays eggs.

Much lounging. Very summer.

Question du jour

"I'm looking for a book, but I can't remember what it was called. It had two words. Can you use some kind of searching machine and find pictures of it? I'll know it if I see it."

Lost Lake, by Sarah Addison Allen.

4th of July in bullet points

Because I'm not feeling funny or insightful but I don't want my most recent post to be about my insides erupting.

* 4th of July isn't really a thing over here. So there aren't rampant fireworks or jackasses firing guns in the air, but everyone still loves an excuse to drink and eat barbecue, so the meat sections of all the stores were respectably pillaged over the long weekend. We managed to get our hands on some cheddar brats and do our duty as good citizens by eating until we were remorseful.

* Husbandface learned why you don't let a 3 year old use a banana slicer. A BANANA SLICER. She still has all her fingers, but I combusted in flames.

The blades shoot up toward you when you squeeze it. It's awesome. 

Except in the hands of a toddler. As if that needed to be said.

*Went bowling. Discovered the invention of baby ramps! Still got a score of 47. Mike performed his one-finger-spinning-strike trick, where he sends the ball arcing toward the gutter and then swooping over to smash all the pins like some kind of wizard in black-light-glowing shoes, and I forgave him for the banana slicer thing. Mostly.

* Water balloons - you know how kids spend an hour filling and dropping and tying tiny water balloons, only to bust them all in 30 seconds in a water fight? Well now for only $8, you can buy a nifty invention with a trypophobic's nightmare of straws, which fills all of them in just 60 seconds! So they can spend a total of 1.5 minutes playing with water balloons. Folks, just make the kids fill them by hand.

* Realized I could still afford to go to Maui to meet the relations if I only took one kid and spent the night camping in the no-cell-phone area of the wilderness. Also realized I was in the first chapter of a horror novel about a woman and child getting murdered while camping alone in the wilderness outside of cell range. Did not do that. But now I am feeling wistful about embarking on some impulsive travel adventure. Made pact that if my book gets picked up by an agent in the next 2 weeks, will fly to the Oregon Brewers Festival to celebrate. TIME IS TICKING, AGENTS. *thumping pint glass* Once that passes, I can make a pact to go to Rhinebeck in the fall. And when that doesn't happen, there is still the midwinter ALA conference in Atlanta. This can go on and on indefinitely, so it works out pretty well.

* While at the mall, I discovered myself thinking, oh, it is July. Maybe I will stroll by Hallmark and see the newly released ornaments. It used to infuriate me that Hallmark starts Christmas in July, but now I find myself spreading the holidays further and further between paychecks, and it's kind of nice to see what the new themes will be. We buy one new ornament a year, based on whatever big event warrants commemoration/infamy, so if there's an ornament I really like, there is still time to coordinate a terrible misadventure to earn it. And so I strolled over to the Hallmark store, and saw that the entire wall was covered in red curtains, with big signs announcing the GRAND REVEAL of the new ornaments in a week's time. For a moment I was actually annoyed, and in a horrifying moment of clarity I realized I had entered the demographics for Hallmark's target consumer: the lady in comfortable pants who browses holiday ornaments in July. Ran from mall screaming. (Mostly because I was chasing a 3 year old.) AGENTS. SAVE ME SO I CAN GO TO BEERFEST. The Hallmark store has the most adorable little beer stein ornament to go with it.

Fourth of July PHOTO DUMP

Happy chicken looks remarkably like dying chicken. I can relate to this.

The one that is too cool for photos is also the one who likes fleece slippers 

and cuddles a stuffed ferret.

Have bowling alleys always had these baby ramps? 

WHY HAVE I NOT USED THESE ALL THIS TIME.

Why I am not a sports photographer

Ordering at a chain restaurant with 3 kids is the reason I opt for 

a large draft instead of food for lunch.

Chowing through $8 of bag-your-own candy in 60 seconds.

"MOM TAKE PICTURE OF ME." "Can I wipe your face?" "No, I'm smiling."

Employing alternate face-washing methods.