comics continued

The girls have a chat about what has happened.

Text is just slapped in there again. Will get better bubbles/edited dialogue later.

a playlist for productivity and wretchedness

I slam earbuds into my ear holes the second lunch break starts, and I refuse to take them out for anything short of a crisis involving spurting blood (this has happened three times). I have sixty little minutes to myself, and I draw a hard line around every scrap of it.

Someone vomited on the sidewalk again? NOPE, I'm not here.

I eat a meal bar with one hand and draw with the other, and the playlist goes like this:

1. Sad sad bastard 

2. Slightly pissy about being a sad bastard  

3. Existential sad bastard 

4. Someone please just hit me with a chair

5. DANCE BREAK BEFORE I JUMP OFF A BRIDGE

6. Guilty sad bastard who has made terrible life choices

7. Dial that back a bit and relax, Jesus

8. Hobbitses!

BACK TO WORK. 

If you give a mouse a cupboard full of crap

The man has been outside, sawing and hammering and injuring himself on the construction of an outdoor shower. I had asked if we could install a shower attachment on the tub, but that would have required knocking out a cupboard, and so he decided to erect an entire roofed structure in the back yard, instead.

I AM SUPPORTIVE OF YOUR ENDEAVOR, I yelled over the power saw, and then decided to be a good sport and destroy the kitchen in solidarity. 

Budget: whatever is left after buying groceries

Inspiration: hippie who doesn't shop at natural food stores but wants to look as if they do

What I want is this:

Jars! Plants! Shelves!

What I have is this:

*sad trombone*

Clean is free, I said to myself, opening up drawers and cabinets. We've got your average Island Family Cupboards; big plastic lychee jelly jars filled with rice, half-empty bottles of shoyu and mirin, fish sauce sitting punitively in its own corner, humidity-wilted cardboard boxes of mochiko and baking soda, jars of seasonings with the little desiccant packets from nori snacks popped into them to prevent clumping and weeping, unopened boxes of jello we are too frugal to throw away but too frightened to open (Schrodinger's cockroaches).

 for all your storage needs

It was a mess. I hauled everything out. Everything needs to be in neat little jars! I decided, putting batteries in my label maker and assembling a fleet of mason jars from my last canning episode. And then I lost control of the thing.

* Got everything onto the counter and became horrified by the state of the old shelves.

* Tried to wash shelves - ran out of spray cleaner.

* Emptied food into labeled jars - ran out of jars.

* Gathered up child to go to store for jars and spray cleaner and shelf liner.

* Arrived at store, got into kitchen section, child suddenly needed to pee.

* Nearest toilet was a brisk jog up the road to Jack in the Box - ran with child on hip.

* Made it to the toilet, a bit winded. Child became excited about chicken nuggets just as I was feeling bad about using the bathroom without buying something.

* Sat and watched child eat chicken nuggets at 9:30am. She insisted on using toddler high chair, which she got stuck in.

* Walked back to store with child, who had to balance on every curb and smell every flower. Did likewise.

* Forgot why I was in the store. Became distracted by Halloween glitter skulls. Left with two big jars, a bottle of fancy seasoning, and a discounted cat scratcher. Forgot spray cleaner and shelf liners.

* Stopped at second store. Could not find shelf liners. Overcompensated by buying three types of spray cleaner.

* Drove home, got stroller, walked to hardware store for shelf liners. Let the child choose floral liner and an orange push-pop, because I was DONE by this point.

* Got home. Put things into jars. Lined shelves. Cats got loaded on cat nip from the new scratcher and stole the backing to 9 feet of contact paper; shredded it down hallway while I reassembled the kitchen.

TA DAAAA! It's... better? 

I don't think Pinterest Bohemians are supposed to have Pam and Crisco, but OH WELL.

So that was 5 hours of work.

For one cupboard. Which is still kind of ugly and not at all bohemian.

I'm going to win, kitchen. You will see.

Oh this effing book

If anyone has decided to read In the Woods because I went and said it had an engaging premise, get up and throw that book out the window right now. Spoilers: THERE ARE NO SPOILERS. Because she doesn't solve the old mystery of the lost children and the blood in the shoes, because she doesn't even know herself, it just sounded good and she figured she would work it out. And then didn't. It just ends. And I skulked all over for spoilers of the next books in the series and interviews with the author, and no, seriously, it doesn't get solved. It ends with hints and shrugs, Did it even happen? Is he crazy? Was it supernatural? OH WELL, NO WAY TO KNOW.

Also, when writing a mystery novel, if someone in the beginning says the weapon was wood and rounded like a broom handle, and then someone almost immediately yells, "hey who stole my spade!?" it is only going to piss readers off for 300 pages until the detective has his epiphany that it MIGHT HAVE BEEN A SPADE.

So annoyed. Still going to read the next one, though, because sometimes you just really want to make sure you don't like something.

I discover barnacle scale and now I have to burn my house down

Labor Day is one of those holidays I don't have a knack for, like 4th of July or Memorial Day. I use these holidays as an excuse to buy lots of food and clean for company, mostly.

So amidst the mopping and dusting and pie baking and meat marinating, I rumbled the green bin out to the front yard and noticed all the little white carbuncles growing on the lilikoi vines that cover our trellis and windows. Fungus? Disease? I poked one with the handle of the rake and it fell off too easily. I picked at one with my fingers and it gave a compliant little pop of release. My trypophobia shuddered gratifyingly. So I popped a few off in my hand, tried to get a close look, realized I've become blind within 12 inches without reading glasses, squinted at them from a distance, and suddenly knew I was holding something evil. Possibly alien. Definitely going to crawl into my ears and burst out of my orifices in the middle of the night.

So I brought them inside, of course. The teenager hauled out his crappy kiddie microscope and we looked at blurry blobs for a while before packing a few up in specimen jars to take to the high school science lab.

Then I did the worst thing I could do: I googled it. Do an image search for "barnacle scale", and then barricade your door and prime the flamethrower.

The next day, as I sat eating my meal bar and flicking through soothing Instagram pictures of fair-isle knitting and misty landscapes, my son texted me an image, and my screen filled with the larvae-filled underside of an insect carapace at 500x magnification. "Definitely a bug," he wrote. My phone and hands combusted.

Going to battle with gloves, a ladder, and a bandanna knotted around my face. None of these little fuckers are going to use my insides as an incubation chamber.

Well that was anticlimactic

Which is how you want your climate events to be.

Cleaning house and prepping food for the holiday bbq with all the cousins. Well, more accurately, sitting on rocking chair, taking a break from scrubbing toilets and cleaning the fridge and tracking down the dead-animal smell in the garage (it was a rat).

Here are more chickens.

Chuck and I get each other.

Bill Weasley the primordial chicken. He feels the dinosaurs stampeding through his veins. Mundungus the Pigeon, Raider of Chicken Scratch,  is going to feel his raptor wrath. As soon as he weighs more than a hunk of bread.

Sirius, the sweetest little baby hen. Never lose those wide innocent eyes, love.

Scorpius is a creature of the bushes, lurking and hiding and scratching and then LEAPING AT YOUR FACE. We don't know if this one is male or female, because Scorpius rejects our gender norms. Built like a hen, aggressive as a rooster, we just don't know what to expect from young Scorpius, and that's why we love... um, Scorpius.

Mundungus would like to submit an application to qualify as a chicken and live in the coop with free food, plz.

Zenny is mad I won't let her throw chickens like footballs. Life is hard.

Wherein I fail to set a man on fire with my eyeballs

Working: 
Big, hairy, half-naked man walks in to the library.
"Oops, sir, you need a shirt on," I say.
"I just have a few questions," says man, walking closer. He has beads of sweat glistening in the black hair on the tops of his shoulders.
"Okay, but you just need to put a shirt on."
"I'm not staying long, I just want to know -"
"Sir. You need to put a shirt on."
At this point the guy decides it is important to him to force a librarian to interact with a half-naked man despite three requests to put clothes on. "I'm not staying long," he says slowly, "I just have some questions and then I will go put a shirt on."
I fold my arms and stare at him, trying to ignite his chest hair with my brain. It probably would have worked if he hadn't been so damp. He realized he needed to say something, so he pretended to look at a takeout menu he was holding and said, "I understand there is a craft sale here."
"No."
"No?"
"No."
"And... ummm.. if I used... a computer! There are computers over there. If I used one, someone could help me download things?"
"Yes. That would be me."
Silence.
"I'll go put a shirt on then."
"You do that."

And that was the worst patron of the week*. Well, him and the homeless couple who teamed up to steal all the used DVDs in the sale bin by splitting up and then claiming the other person had put money in the payment box when I had been looking the other way. Whatever, that is how we rotate inventory.

*AMENDED: Spoke too soon. That is what I get for writing my blog entries on lunch break. Mind you, I love my job and most of our adventures with weirdos, but this one wins the award for Worst Patron of the Week (warning: gross): lady who had explosive blood-laced diarrhea, tried to wipe up with an entire roll of toilet paper, realized it wouldn't flush, then ran for it and locked the key in the bathroom. The janitor had already left for the day, so I got to be the one who busted into the bathroom, discovered the gruesome scene, found the plunger, and fished a big dripping wad of used tissue out of the toilet with an extendable grabber.

I am going to assume/hope she ran out of the library to seek medical attention.

IN OTHER NEWS

Watching: The Get Down, on Netflix. Really good. Funny, smart, moving, almost makes me love Disco.

Reading: I have a 50-branch, multi-million-dollar library system at my fingertips, and I pick my books by getting annoyed when I don't have something to read at bedtime and arbitrarily uploading anything that's sitting in Google Drive onto my kindle. Last night it was In the Woods, by Tana French. It's an artfully written, grim-yet-wryly-funny Irish mystery about a detective who, at 12 years old, went missing with his friends and was found gripping a tree so hard his nails broke off, standing in sneakers filled with blood that wasn't his, with no memory of what happened or where his two best friends disappeared to. I'm one chapter in and hooked. So... who was it who recommended I read this? Thanks, friend/relative/patron - and sorry I can't remember who you were or why we were talking about it.

Drawing: I'm still working on the comic. Blocking out page 31 now. Something terrible has happened to the chicken.

Hurricane gif time!

Gif removed because the storm is over 

This gif will self-update as the hurricanes bounce off our invisible shield (hopefully). 

We are on Oahu, the second-to-top one, and we live up near the pointy bit. 

Current status: Everybody is freaking out because the storm headed slightly north, bypassing the Big Island's storm-shredding mountains.

Still haven't replaced the missing window louvers or found oil for the storm lamps.

Today in poultry cuddling

Today in poultry cuddling