Nobody needs your dinosaur chickens

Recently there was an article on BBC about the engineering of chicken embryos with teeth. This is neat-o, but totally unnecessary. Chickens already know they are dinosaurs. Give chickens teeth and you will basically just have regular chickens. And a lot more cats with their tails bitten off.

etc

Still, I have the ethical compass of a half-digested Jurassic Park technician and kind of want them to hatch the dino-chickens anyway.

I was thinking about this while I was creeping around the basement in the dark, looking for Chucky. All her chicken craters had been devoid of eggs for over a week, and now Herself was missing as well. I stuck my head in the gap between the basement and the underside of the house. "Chucky?" By my feet, something suddenly made a loud, horrible, gurgling crrAAWRRllgarble noise. Like a big damn hero, I panicked and ran away.

"HELP HELP CHUCKY IS DYING SOMETHING FELL ON HER MAYBE." I am not good with injuries. I am good with vomit and poop and gross bugs and homeless drug addicts.

The man dutifully found a flashlight and went down to the basement while I minced around behind him. He pulled the boxes away and Chucky started her death-crawing again. There she was, crouched in the corner, swelled up like a really angry loaf of bread. She bit his arms as he picked her up, wishing she had teeth, probably. "She's fine. Oh, geez." I pushed around him to see, and LO, there were all the goddamn eggs, hoarded in a clutch in the corner of the basement. I used my shirt as a basket and gathered them up while Chucky cussed at us. A fresh dozen! Eggs can sit under a chicken for a few days and be just fine. They are nature's perfect container.

Since this event, I have lost the chickens and eggs again. The hens come for snacks and hugs every morning and then vanish mysteriously until we fish them out of the lychee tree with the broom at bedtime. I'll be on the prowl for eggs like a wily mongoose during my next day off.



(I told this story on my livestream but I'm just noting it here for posterity. VERY IMPORTANT CHICKEN LORE.)

Livestream Monday - hula

I'm back, now that the kids are all squared away at school again.

Head over to the twitters to watch me draw gestures. I'll update this post with the results later.


UPDATE

Well, I kept it down to 25 min this time, but I lost my train of thought and just drew silently for the last 6 min or so. Still an okay demo for line work, maybe. And I only swore 3 times.

stabby hobos > homemaking

From the outside, a week at home with the spring-breaking preschooler looked like a great time. I would garden! Bake things! Sew stuff! Go to the beach! Catch up on housework! Work on my book!

And then it rained. And rained. The other kids needed school drop-offs and pick-ups, and their school is an hour's round-trip away, chopping the days into tedious hunks. Every time I tried to work on my book, the girl climbed onto my lap, put her feet in my face, and said she was bored. I bound (most of) a quilt I had been neglecting, painted (most of) her dollhouse, drew a portrait of Leif, made way too much kettle corn, read, mopped, swept, cooked, drove to drop off the boys, drove to pick them up, drove back again, drove home, drove drove drove DROVE. 

I liked how this turned out. The dollhouse has some... issues now.

It was okay, but I am not made for kid chauffeuring and endless cleanup. I yearn for adventure. For mysteries I am bad at solving. I made it three days before shaking off the Easter candy wrappers, passing the child off to husbandface like a sticky relay baton, and caroming back to work in my truck.

Ah, the library! My legs became chipper and skipped me across the parking lot. The homeless woman who tried to get us to call the humane society for a butterfly she found was asleep in front of the doors with a crack pipe cradled protectively in her hand. I stepped over her. Our janitor was watching from the hall, and said she didn't want to ask her to move, because another of our hobos had been arrested for cutting the throat of the shopkeeper next door. When I went to ask about that, I learned that the obscene caller had been ringing while I was out, and panted at my co-worker over the phone until my boss took the receiver and told him he had traced his address and put him under surveillance, which prompted a panicked hang-up. Also, the Swastika hobo has gone missing, and the homeless network tells us that she was arrested and then released across the island, where she is either in rehab or dead. We are trying to track her down, because she might be a pain in the ass, but we've known her for a long time and we sort of care about her. That stabby guy can fuck right off, though.

Home sweet home! 

Meanwhile (Edited to add: small-kine EXPANSE SPOILERS. Avert your eyes from the gif. The beautiful, beautiful gif.)

I've been really into the Expanse. It's the first time in a long time that I've felt moved by anything. I was starting to worry that I was becoming an automaton. 

D'aww, the little pat at the end. I want to feel that kind of (mostly) human connection. 

But not alongside a nuke while hurtling to my death, maybe. 

So I ordered the books. And now I can't stop reading them. I've got it in paperback for daytime, on my kindle for night, and a backup on my phone in case I'm stuck somewhere without it.

You guys, next time I am missing out on a great sci-fi series based on even better books, TELL ME. I'm a children's librarian, my life is all piggies and quacking. And crack pipes. And poop in the bushes. I'm in need of a good book. And also maybe a booster shot.

bird witch/peeping tom

So. The thing about the bird and the penis.

The little chicken had just died. I was looking at the growing cemetery in the back garden and doing the math - 3 animals in less than 2 years. At this rate, I am going to have the Paris catacombs in my back yard by the time I retire.

A few days later, I was filling the kettle for my morning tea when the birds in the back yard started going ballistic. It was the very particular screech and hysteria of a fallen nestling, so I ran out in my jammies to make sure the cats or chickens weren't murdering anyone and found a baby bulbul in the leaves. Its parents threw themselves down on the ground and dragged their wings around like dying things to lure me away, so I gave them a chance to reclaim the little thing, but it was shivering and hungry and injured, and they were really bad at baby rescue. Birds need to evolve a piggyback system or something. 

So I found myself cuddling the little thing up to a warm potato, feeding it some baby bird formula, and driving it clear across the island to ditch with my mother, the designated bulbul depository. I'm the screeching chicken witch, and she's the adorable songbird witch. This is okay, because I don't have to feed chickens with a toothpick, I can just throw garbage out the back door. I've got the easier job, if she's got the cuter one. 

I was feeling pretty good with the karmic balance of this rescue, after losing the poxy chick, when the phone dinged. My cousin's beloved old family rabbit had died, and they wanted to know if they could bury it in our yard.

It's fine. It's fiiiiiiine. 

The grave digging was kind of harrowing, because we tried to keep it in the same plot as the cats, and every shovelful carried the threat of accidental exhumation. But in the end we got the little bun-bun to rest without extra trauma to the young cousins.

The baby bird, meanwhile, was thriving. In just two days it was healed up and thinking of flying, so my mother brought it back to my house to try to reunite with its parents. Birds will accept their babies for about 4 days, and will even recognize them later as adults, if they find their way home, so it was worth a go.

It did not work, though, and I ended up in a tree watching my neighbor pee into his bushes. Not on purpose. He didn't seem bothered, and just finished his business and went inside, talking on the phone. Men are mysterious.

I felt really acrobatic, hauling myself up into a lychee tree and then managing not to crash through the roof into the garage. After 35, I thought, you're practically 40, and 40 is only a few decades away from retirement, if you think about it. So really, this is an amazing feat of athleticism for someone very nearly almost an octogenarian. I took an ibuprofen.

We were both relieved to have the little bird back in hand, safe and warm, as night fell and the rain came down. It is continuing to do really well over at her house.

And then on Easter my mother found a dove with a broken wing in the Costco parking lot, because OF COURSE SHE DID. Birds fall out of the sky when they see us coming. We need to carry parasols when we run to the car. 

GET THE MILK IN THE TRUNK AND LOCK THE DOORS KIDS

Luckily, doves fall in the adorable-songbird category, so all I had to do was look in at it while drinking wine after dinner and report that it had fallen over and gotten its leg stuck in its splint. She fiddled it back into place.

These BIRDS, people.

Easter 2017 - revised

Lo! The official holiday portraits, with the traditional bloody stains all over our arms from tie dying.

MUSTACHE

That dress is actually salmon, and not pink, I mention with unnecessary defensiveness 

But this one is 

Zenny does a pulse check on Mr. I'm-too-handsome-to-smile

TRADITION #1: egg and tie dye with the cousins

Verdict: the Tulip dye from Walmart is pretty good, but you have to set the color in salt or vinegar after they sit overnight or they fade and look old after one wash.

This year we tried the fancy gilded egg kit and it was complete bullshit - the glue takes 5 minutes to get tacky and the foil doesn't peel off well, and by the time you agonize over one egg, the kids have dunked all the rest of the eggs into purply-brown mud and run away.  But these two turned out ok.

The cute little egg on the right is from our own Chucky the Chicken

Madame Dainty Eggs herself

"LEIF LOOK AT THE CAMERA."

all the ham we need

TRADITION #2: basket hunt, candy binge, and breakfast of creamed eggs on fresh biscuits 

.5 seconds before getting his squirter taken away

This was the year the boy grew 6 inches and ate all the bickies. Teenagers are the best rewards for the home cook, because you can just stand over them and tip the whole pan into their faces.

TRADITION #3: dinner at grandma's house

MOAR CANDY

 my mom's murder cats watching the bird feeder 

I make a point of taking proper pictures of my cousins with the high-res camera every Easter.

 Guess which one is the "Well actually" cousin? (Also I will note that the two boys on the left are the same age. I promise I feed my kids.)

My mother had two mimosas and became too silly to finish cooking the feast, so I stopped rummaging her media cupboard for Deep Purple and the Guess Who albums and took over the kitchen. Lamb! Fresh mint sauce! Glazed carrots! Creamed peas! Cherry custard meringue pie! First-rate Easter, folks. 

Cheers to the good old days, and being here in them right now.

Library beefcake

One of our elderly patrons called the library and asked for help carrying a box of book donations. I went trotting out into the parking lot to find her struggling to get it out of her back seat.

"I just had knee surgery, I don't trust it."

"Yes, stay off that knee, I'll carry the box."

"My husband packed it, and I'm just trying to see if it's too heavy." She looked over her shoulder and gave me a quick up-and-down appraisal, "Oh, you're not very strong, either. I'll just carry it."

WHAT.

I hauled the box out and threw it into the library like Mjölnir.

We are going to assume she was calling me dainty. Not a librarian-shaped sack filled with pudding.

Livestream monday

I'll update this post with the saved stream later. Starting in a few minutes, head over and hang out with me here. Come for the drawing, stay for the vague & distracted storytelling. Or vice versa.

Update: it went well except that I crashed it mid-way. So there are two 15-min-ish demos now, posted  on the twitters.

Question du - OH GOD NO

So the news is horrifying.

Here are library stories, instead:

A couple days ago, as we were setting the table, husbandface asked how my day had been.

"Oh, I had a really interesting reference question and it's just so frustrating because I haven't been able to solve the mystery. This guy from the mainland called and said he needed to know the date of an incident that occurred while he was stationed here. He was a soldier from 1981-1984, and one night in 1982 or 1983 he and some buddies left the base and went into town to go to a club. He didn't drink, so he went outside to have a smoke, and suddenly everyone was screaming and running. He went back inside and found one of his friends shot in the head, bleeding everywhere. He couldn't remember the name of the club, or the name of the friend, but he needed the date for his PTSD paperwork. I searched every news database we have, called all the local bars, called the military library and the military museum, searched court records, nothing. I found a different murder in our area that happened in 1983, but only because the victim's family wrote about it in 2008. Nothing is digitized before 2001. Nobody working at the bars remembers an incident like that, and a murder on the premises would probably be memorable. He did say club, though. I don't think we have any clubs, maybe that's just what they call bars where he's from?"

"Maybe he meant that strip club on California Ave, by the pancake place?"

"What?" I said.

"What?" he said.

"What?" Gavin said.

And that is how I found myself on the phone with a strip club, trying to convince some lady that, no, I was not a cop, I just wanted to know if anyone remembered someone getting shot in the head in 1983. Oddly, this did not yield any results.

I got to work the next morning feeling determined to crack the thing. Before I got in the front door, however, our janitor headed me off, brandishing a hose. "I found more doo doo." Oh yay. A new transient, having left a trail of poop complaints all over the North Shore, has started crapping on the library walkway. And down the stairs. And wiping poop all over the walls. She was nowhere in sight at that moment, so we decided to spray it off and carry on. A few hours later, the gin-tippling, Hells-Angels-blaming swastika hobo came stomping in. "That new lady is shitting herself all over. It's disgusting, it's running down her leg. There are flies everywhere. She's wiping it on the stairs and the walls, all the way down to the laundromat." This counted as a complaint from the public, so we called the police to report a nuisance. I went on a recon mission to determine whether there were shit smears all over the neighboring buildings, and found a trail leading to the liquor store, where the poop lady was emerging with a giant can of Mike's Harder Lemonade in her hand. I pretended to casually turn on my heel and run away, sprinting around the corner inconspicuous-like.

Officer Skippy came skipping into the library a few minutes later, and he gave us the scoop on the pooper.

"We asked her to move on, she's packing up. We thought maybe you were talking about that other lady who's been hanging around up here, the one with the hair." The one with the hair is an older woman who sleeps in our flower bushes.

"Oh, she comes in to answer internet dating ads, she's fine."

"Yeah, you know, it turns out she's married to the ex-head of the Hells Angel. "

WHAT.

The web gets webbier. I don't even know what to believe anymore. Just at this moment, as I was questioning reality, the phone rang, and I went to answer it.

"Hello, where are you located?"
I gave directions.
"No, like, what's the library's address?"
I gave the address.
"What are your hours today?"
I listed our hours.
"Can I come all over your pussy?"
I did not understand this and asked him to repeat the question.
He did.
I still did not understand and said our connection was bad, please repeat the question.
He did.
Why would I know if someone could come to the library? I can't see whether they have legs or a car. I was confused. I asked him to repeat himself AGAIN.
He did.
At this point I sounded out the words to myself and my brain clicked the pieces together. Come... over... your... pu... OH. "WHO IS THIS?"
He said his name.
I asked him to repeat it, just to see if he would.
He did.
"Well ___, we're open until 6 BYEEE."
"But can I come on your -" CLICK

Jumping Jesus, this week.

And then GUESS WHO CALLED AGAIN TODAY? He seemed put out that I hadn't answered his question yesterday. I tried to trick him into talking to my boss, but the creeper hung up as soon as I chipperly asked him to hang on a minute. Next time we are putting him on speaker phone in the back office.

Now I've got to update my incident report. Ugh.

Wherein I take no chances and reward myself with cake

My friends were passing around motivational tweets this week.

"It is only important to do the thing, it is not important if anyone notices."
"I didn't publish my first novel until 40, and didn't publish a successful one until 48. Take your time and work at your own pace."

If being unpopular is a sign of budding success, I am SO ON TRACK. *brushing shoulders

Still, I should maybe be better at self-promotion and marketing, I said to myself. On cue, an email from my publisher dinged in my inbox. "Any of our authors want to read at the upcoming book festival?" The room dolly-zoomed around me. I saw the scene unfold in my head - sitting in the festival tent, nervously clutching my board book in front of a small group of overheated kids who are all too old for toilet training. Just as I get to the part that goes, "Uh oh, doo doo! Gotta go poo! Run run run to the potty with you!" a shadow falls in the doorway and in walks that guy I had a crush on in college! Followed by that amazing graphic novelist I admire! Who is standing next to ahh goddamn it's the fucking Pioneer Lady why does she keep popping up everywhere?!

I die.

The end.


So I hid the email and baked a cake, instead.

I'm still fasting, so I went with Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall's almost-fat-free fruitcake. My raisins sank and I had a soggy bottom, but that is life after 35. It tasted good anyway, and it should turn out like it's supposed to if you read the recipe before starting it.

Here is the recipe, and it's fun because all you need is a mug to measure everything. Any mug. But probably not a huge two-handed mug, unless you have a loaf pan the size of shoe box.

HRH the Duchess of Cornwall's Fruitcake

per Good Housekeeping UK 

1 mug of hot tea with two tea bags in it

1 mug of sultanas (I used dried cherries)

1 mug of raisins (I was about to use dates when I saw that I actually had raisins)

1 mug of brown sugar

1/2 mug of citrus peel (thinly slice some peels from whatever lemons/oranges/etc you have)

1 egg
1 mug of self-rising flour (or regular flour with a teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda in it. I don't actually know what either of them do so I added both, and it turned out good, so there you go.)


So, either start this recipe in the morning if you want an afternoon loaf, or in the evening if you want a morning loaf. The fruit has to soak. This is where I went wrong.

Pour the tea, tea bags and all, into a mixing bowl. Dump in the mugs of fruit, the brown sugar, and the citrus peel. Give it a stir and let it soak for 8 hours.

When your fruit is all plump and has soaked up a lot of the liquid (not, say, after you've waited 20 minutes and gotten impatient), discard the tea bags and beat in the egg, then stir in the flour until just mixed. Pour the batter into a greased bread pan and bake at 300 degrees for 1.5 hours. It's going to look done after about 40 minutes, but pop some foil on it so the top doesn't scorch and bake it a bit longer or you'll have a soggy bottom. Ask me how I know.

Cool for a few minutes, turn out onto a rack, and then eat it up as soon as you can safely handle it.


I didn't get a picture of mine, because my kids scarfed it, but here is what it should look like if you soak your fruit properly:

edited to add the bit that says to REMOVE TEA BAGS. This is not high-fiber bread we are going for.

Livestream 2 was better

All 40 min of drawing and muttering can be viewed on my twitter feed.