strangling hands appeased

In this last week before summer break, normalcy visited briefly and I had Monday to myself again. Put a loaf of bread on to rise, spread out my paints, and worked on my backlog of moleskine drawings.

The legs got away from me, but the fluff was a lot of fun to paint. 

Leif is a hard character to catch a good likeness of, but I think I finally got him.

In other news:

* took a couple of eggs that our hen laid in the basement and stuck them in the fridge. We had run out of room in the egg carton, so I carefully put them in an open box of beer. Yelled to family, "CAREFUL WHEN YOU OPEN THE FRIDGE, THERE ARE DOS EGGIES IN THE DOS EQUIS." Felt great sense of accomplishment.

* spent Mother's Day with my mother. This was fun, except for her latest home improvement. Of all the rich cultural and technological innovations of Japan, the thing that most entertained her was the bidet in every toilet. So she came straight home and ordered an installation kit. Now her toilet shoots terrifying jets of cold water right up the unsuspecting undercarriage, and she laughs at the screams.

* the kids found an Easter egg in the board game cupboard. A hard-boiled one. It smelled like rotting butt. We laughed very hard and then put it in the trash can, where it will sit until one of us forgets about it and smashes some garbage down on top of it until it breaks. Then we will have to burn the house down.

* to delete later: therapy is happening. Not sure what the end goal of this thing is, but I am being a sport and coming along. So far I have cried about being sad that maybe I'll never feel deep love and connection with another person ever again - that I'll just hold onto this want and then die. She said she thinks I will feel feelings again. I asked how a person goes about doing that. She said she didn't know. So that is going well.

* amazing bread recipe has been unlocked, which I will share in next post. Everyone must make it immediately.

expert expertise

A second opinion revealed that the head gasket was not blown on the truck. Instead, the problems were coming from the old cracked hoses that were just kind of... taped into place. With tape. Tape which the guys who were de-greasing my entire engine while fixing the oil pan just somehow failed to notice. I am going to assume that major hoses covered in cracks and tape are a thing that any seasoned mechanic might easily miss - perhaps due to their protective casings, camouflage patterns, or armored defense systems. And easy to mistake for a head gasket. I guess.

standard 2002 Nissan Frontier head gasket

Anyway, the truck is fixed. And the man has been using it for his commute because, I suspect, he does not want to admit that the motorcycle is buried under a ton of shredded roofing material and he can't actually find it.

It has been 3 weeks since I've been able to paint, and I am having some feelings about this. Decided to return to Whidbey Island this fall for another workshop because goddamn it all. Instead of art-ing, I have been keeping my strangling hands busy learning cup games. This falls under "professional development" because I will be forcing 120 middle-schoolers to do it with me.

Without the reindeer jammies and cat. Probably.

ready, set...

FWOOSH SO FAST 

VERY IMPRESSIVE

inevitable outcome

It is important to continue developing your professional skill set even after mastering melodious quacking and woof-woof noises.

Medias

(Note to people who have been texting me - it was the Big Island that exploded, not Oahu. We might get some vog, but otherwise we're cool. Thank you, though.)

Thanks to a fumble while trying to quit Pandora, I accidentally subscribed to an upgrade. Then it ignored my cancellation. Now my phone plays entire streams based on algorithms I don't have the patience to learn, and it helpfully removed the skip button because PREMIUM, so I've basically just been listening to these two on repeat.

Am still reading the Expanse books, two pages at a time before falling asleep at 9pm. One book to go.

Watched the new Lost in a Space with the kids, A+ family trash-talking entertainment. Everyone is very sad that the dad survived.

The roof is still mangled. 

In which I have not been invited back up onto the roof

Well I thought we were having a moment.

The gift of not being able to find anything

My mother and aunt have run away to Japan for the weekend (Scoot airlines had a $275 round-trip  deal, wtf) so I am housesitting while the man rips our roof apart with his crew of large friends. My mother thinks I use these house-minding overnights to throw all her stuff away, and she is CORRECT. Looking into renting a flamethrower for her mail pile. She is not a pack rat, particularly, but gets overwhelmed by the places where clutter accumulates; recycling, papers, the shoe pile, art supplies. I am hauling everything away and blaming it on her cats. Whatever it was that’s gone missing, the cats peed on it. The old lids to lost plastic containers? Yeah, I don’t know how the cats got into the drawer, it’s amazing. The Guinness that was in the mini fridge? Fuckin cats these days, I tell you.

A body needs someone to toss the detritus and do a hard scrub once in a while. Probably, you’d want them to warn you first, but OH WELL. She’s not old enough to have a cane to hit me with, so that is just poor planning on her part.

Edit: I found a cane! Should probably either hide it better, or plan preemptive strike.

shut up, self

I don't write about day-to-day life anymore, I thought. Everything is so routine and easy and boring.

And then I looked over my shoulder anxiously, realizing what I had done.

TOO LATE.



cracked a tooth, resulting in two root canals on single molar

roof leaked, damaged ceiling

man went into attic to find leak and found hammer-shaped hole in roof with an old aluminum baking pan under it

kids flunked dental exam; one is mysteriously missing two entire teeth

teen went on $2000 trip to robotics world championships

Stupid Fancy Preschool* chipperly informed me that they were cancelling after-school care for the entire last week of school

truck blew head gasket

* fun dinnertime conversations have included "Jesus is a ghost made of blood and he watches you all the time" and "NO MOM MILK DOESN'T COME FROM COWS MILK COMES FROM JESUS". Counting down the days to public school.

Painting leather and getting mad at noses

A few weeks ago, I started painting husbandface. Somewhere in the process, I screwed up my lower proportions, and I think the only thing for it is to run the damn board through a circular saw and trim it down to a smaller head & shoulders portrait.

(The board was slightly tilted between these two shots, but you can see yesterday's progress on the jacket.)

Heartily, I say MEH.

Sat down with my moleskine and painted the teenager.

Picked up a "habits of painters who know more than you" book and realized that I am guilty of highlight-down-the-noseness, which is a newbie mistake. Even if you see it, it doesn't improve the painting to put it in. Highlights are fickle, ignore them.

So now I've got a pile of noses to paint over. Or ignore. Ignore, probably. I'm already drawing out the next painting, and it isn't anything on the list of paintings people have asked me to make. Have also been willfully neglecting the "draw me a tattoo" queue. Sorry, friends. I have to focus on painting the stuff that blows my skirt up right now.

Weekend things

Wherein I eat something that was probably pork


In a fit of spring cleaning, my co-workers dug in the office freezer and thunked down a package of mystery meat.

"What is it?" they asked.
"Looks like something Officer BBQ might have given us," I said.
"He retired a year ago. Has this been in the freezer for a year?"
"Yeeeep."

They put the scary old meat in the microwave and the office immediately filled up with the stench of smoked animal. We shut all the staff doors and turned on the fans, then stood around the plate, watching it steam.

"Try some," they said.
"You try some," I said.
"It's probably still good. It's smoked. Smoked meat lasts forever, maybe."

Everyone took a step back and left me standing by the plate. It is well-established that I'm the office raccoon. I took the knife and sawed off a tough square of meat. Put it in my mouth. Chewed for a long time.

"Well, it hasn't gone bad. But it definitely isn't good," I said.
"We can't throw it away, that's wasteful."
"It's only wasteful if it's delicious. This is not delicious."
 I scraped it into the garbage and buried it with paper towels. We fled the break room like we had dumped a body.

"It's a good thing Officer BBQ retired and wasn't here to see this," my co-worker said. "He was so proud of his smoked meat, and we just left it in the freezer for a year. Remember that chicken he gave us?"

That chicken had tasted like something pulled out of a peat bog. It ranks just below the Corpse Turkey of 2013 in my personal history of undesirable meats. It isn't even that it was bad barbecue; smoked foods just smell a lot like formaldehyde, and I have been around too many medical cadavers to appreciate the aroma. Peaty single-malt scotch goes down the sink, too. Even raccoons can't survive everything.

Officer BBQ was enjoying his retirement. He had grown a beard and only visited the library from time to time to show horrifying accident scene photos on his phone and talk about cooking meat (hopefully not related subjects), but he hadn't been around in months.

So of course he walked in at just that moment.

"Did I hear my name?" We all jumped three feet in the air. "What's that smell?"

My co-workers all sang out greetings and tried to change the subject, and I yelled, "MEATBALLS."

Am very smooth at obfuscation.



The Highland Games

Last weekend, our Scottish dance group set up the tea tent at the Highland Games, selling the usual scones, boiled eggs, and hot cups of Tetley. As a teenager, I helped serve the biscuits and performed with the group for the festival-goers in Waikiki, but in recent years the Games moved to an enclosed pavilion in Ala Moana, and attendance dwindled. These days, I have too many children to chase to be much help as a server or dancer, so I just went along on Sunday for moral support and photography.

There were a lot of small highland dancers visiting from Scotland this year; all white eyelashes and tightly-scraped hair and freckles. When the hula halau lined up to perform, the Scottish girls turned and stared very hard at the rows of bare feet and midriffs. The hula girls stared back, sizing up the kilts and white undershirts with lace napkins pinned to the fronts. I was trying to get a picture of the two young groups staring across either side of this cultural divide when I recognized a man I had gone to high school with, milling around in the crowd. For 4 years, I spent every day swimming with this guy, with dozens of overnight trips for inter-island swim meets and countless hours rattling around in our coach's van. I had to sneak into the only drug store on Molokai to buy our teammate a pregnancy test after he climbed into her sleeping bag at Regionals - which set off a very interesting year of rumors about my non-existent sex life, let me tell you.

So I did what any reasonable person would do and threw myself behind a vendor's table to hide. Spent the rest of the day running behind poles and shrubbery whenever he came around the corner with a hot dog. I'm probably in the background of all his selfies, looking like a person being chased by bees.

Am very smooth at interpersonal skills and improvisational camouflage, too. 

dieting with gravel

Have been stuck at the same weight for the past 5 years. Decided (again) to just knuckle down and do the thing. Ramped up the weight lifting and rope jumping. Immediately gained 3 lbs. Screamed.

This week the scale finally began to tick downward again, and the thing that made the difference was swapping my lunch foods for dwarf bread. Similar to elvish lembas (in the way that rocks are similar to elvish lembas) dwarf bread is hard, gritty, and good in a fight. Just four of these Belvita Throwing Biscuits keep me from stomaching other food for hours.

And they cost much less than the fancy dietary bars which contain the same calories and nutrition. Wash it down with milk so you don't choke to death. You're welcome.

Am now anticipating a wave of granola ads in my sidebars. The eye of commerce has been watching. A few weeks ago, while the girl-child was on spring break, I told her we would go to the swimming pool after picking up the boys. So of course we drove all the way to the North Shore before realizing that we had forgotten her swimsuit on the coffee table.

"WE WILL BUY A SUIT," I said. "A PROMISE IS A PROMISE."

The closest stores were on the tourist strip in Haleiwa. None of the overpriced surf shops had little girls' suits. And why would they? Who forgets their kids' swimsuits on a trip to Hawaii? Every parent with a coffee table and a rush to the car, that is who. The closest thing we could find was a $50 pair of tiny toddler board shorts, which caused me to laugh very hard. We finally ended up at the overpriced-but-cheaper-than-board-shorts ice cream shop, where the kids were satisfied to pick out scoops of the worst flavors based solely on their color (blue) and pose with the photo props.

swimming ACHIEVED

By the time we got to the car, my sidebars were full of children's swimsuit ads. I had not posted anything about swimsuits. I don't have the friendface app. I didn't tag anything. My phone somehow leaked my goddamn beachy-tourist geolocation information to advertisers. In real time. The bastards. I share kind of a lot of stuff, obviously, but opting in has importance.

Off to the woods we go. To live off the land and hunt the wild granola bars, like our forebearers.


UPDATE: hours later

Goddamn it

Easter 2018

Another holiday successfully wrapped up without any screaming, bleeding, or head injuries. I am getting so good at these things.

... Actually, that’s only if you don’t count Zenny falling off her brother while riding him like a pony, and Gavin stepping on Leif’s face while dancing with the cat. I am getting better at these things.

After creamed eggs and biscuits, we drove to my mom's place, where she and I hit the kitchen for feast preparation (which is to say, I peeled carrots and trash-talked while she cooked). The lamb was fork-tender. The Yorkshire pudding was 8 inches high. The Brussels sprouts were all eaten - for which there is no higher praise. We did not set the oven on fire; the drippings just got excitable for a few minutes there. Leif dropped the leftover lemon meringue pie, and didn’t even have the good grace to nail anyone in the face with it in the process. Just smashed it onto the driveway. Lost opportunities, kid.

There was tie-dye, egg-dye, and a plastic egg hunt on my mother’s Jurassic patio that ended in shrieks when the kids found piles of stinky old wild chicken eggs in the plants. Gavin cleans them out periodically, after checking them for viability, and calls them “fart grenades”. Very festive.

It was a good year.