another burn-your-own birthday

My mother had the plans laid and the tickets booked; the day after her birthday, she was taking the teenager and hopping a plane to upstate Washington to visit her dad. From there, they'd ride the rails across the country to Indiana for summer parties and sneaky property purchases (she has a friend who wants to sell some land, but I am still lobbying hard for the haunted graveyard). 

So on the day of her birthday, we met at Gyu Kaku, our favorite restaurant for letting the kids play with fire while we talk trash over a pint. 

Probably not one of my kids' fingers

When it was time for cake, I dug in my bag and realized I didn't have even remotely enough candles. Roman numerals were too hard to engineer with wax sticks, so we figured out the number in binary and jammed the purples in for ones and the green in for zero.

on this, the occasion of my mother turning 111011

Then our waitress offered to take a picture of us. Result:

modern technology is no match for a stranger's cosmic mandate to take blurry pictures

This was all going pretty well, until we went back to her place for presents. As soon as we put the kettle on for a nice pot of tea, one of the wild chickens that lives in the gulch behind her house dropped a baby out of the roosting tree (a chicken baby, not a human baby), and the little guy started running in circles, screaming his head off for every feral cat in the neighborhood to come eat him. We spent an hour chasing the chickadoo around bushes and through fences until we finally mesmerized him with a flashlight and nabbed him, tucking him up for the night in the mini coop my mother uses for her foster chicks. She rehabs wild birds that her school kids find orphaned (sometimes because they themselves orphaned the things), and right now she's got a couple of half-grown chicks clucking around in there. With the chickens tucked up to bed, we finally had a cup of tea, tidied wrapping paper, and said goodnight. As we left, my mother planted a kiss on my cheek and said, closing the door, "Oh, and you're taking my chickens while I'm on the mainland, BYE."

WHAT.

So now the teenager and his grandma are off on adventures, and my coop is full of surly adolescent chickens. Plucky the Terrible Terror is pretty cheesed, and I keep having to peel the cats off the sides of coop because the little nuggets look so delicious in there.

But it began paying off immediately. The man decided that it is more gas efficient just to camp out at grandma's place with the kids while feeding her cats, and I suddenly have the ENTIRE HOUSE to my ENTIRE SELF for ENTIRE NIGHTS. Am going to eat shrimp, listen to endless crime podcasts, and paint until my eyeballs fall out.

(Note to ax murderers: please disregard.)

synchronicities and dumb injuries

* Two mentions of the Lindbergh baby within an hour; listening to Criminal podcast and reading new Stephen King book, The Outsider.

* Also in The Outsider: entire page with just HOLLY written on it.

* Stepped on a roofing nail and was supposed to get a tetanus shot, but my doctor's office said to use the emergency room because they were busy. PFFFFTTTT, naw. Taking my chances with lockjaw, in the tradition of my disease-addled forebears.

* Got my finger stuck in a package of fresh strawberries and cut my finger getting it out. So probably also getting gangrene. Whatever, it's my left hand.

* Painted while the kids were sleeping over at grandma’s:

 in progress, with smudge marks where I rested my stupid hand against the page

I think I'm getting the hang of this thing

And I peeled the tape off the edges of the one I finished over the weekend, which is the best part of any art project, so say we all.

The thing I was trying to do with the red-brown background didn't work, and the blue is WHOA CLASHING. Oh well, throw it on the practice pile.

Also, painted out the gold on the self portrait. It was too much.

* First lychees are turning red on the trees. The sun is setting late. The evenings are warm. Someone mail me a box of fireflies and some baby rabbits, and this scene will be just about perfect.

studio renovation: building a shadow box

Now that I have another student painter in the studio with me, it seemed like a good time to build a still-life shadow box. TO THE YOUTUBES.

The whole project cost about $50, including paint and lighting. The man assembled it, and I painted. It took a couple hours, plus drying time.

In addition to the shadow box, I painted one wall atelier grey and attached a curtain rod to the ceiling for a portrait-sitting corner. It is very fancy. As fancy as a corner of a basement with a concrete wall and a chair stolen from my mother's house can be.

SYNCHRONICITY SIGHTINGS: Picking the wall and shadow box paint colors, I just walked through the paint chip aisle and plucked out the two swatches that best looked like studio greys, and the darker one, "Tempest's Teapot", seemed like some kind of cosmic sign. So I just went with them both. This was the third synchronicity of the week; two days earlier, I was listening to a Criminal podcast about the illegal trade in Venus Fly Traps, and arrived at the grocery store to find an enormous display of actual genuine goddamn Venus Fly Traps in the floral department. Since when does a grocery store in Hobo-ville Hawaii stock carnivorous plants? Since NEVER, that is when. The next morning, during a library lecture on ancient Hawaiian politics, I checked in a book and the computer popped up an alert that said "Waikiki" at the very moment the speaker said, "Waikiki". Was I supposed to buy the fly traps and bring them to Waikiki? In a teapot? At twilight? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? Nothing. But I noticed it, and that is called "mindful living" - which is different than "delusional thinking".

Anyway, I'm all set up now for properly precious and pretentious portrait painting. Please come visit me, folks, because my kids won't sit still and I can't paint my own self while sitting in the fancy chair.

Just some of the many poses you can consider holding for 5 hours solid

COMING SOON: I am looking into getting giclee prints made, which I'll be selling on an as-yet-to-be-made etsy shop or something. On my way to the print shop right now.

self portrait: check

I got a little bit precious with this thing because of a tube of gold paint that I've been itching to try. The background design was supposed to be a very subtle darker blue, barely noticeable. It's a bit less noticeable in person, because the gold shifts in the light. Heavy-handed symbolism annoys me, but I DID IT ANYWAY. Take that, self. 

I'll probably fix the necklace a bit, but I can live with this state of done-ness. I'll take better pictures later.

(There isn't really a black dot on my nose, that's the shadow of a blorb of paint in crappy basement lighting.)

Leif earns his bristles

Summers are for fighting with the overgrown garden, and for picking fruits, and for children leaping up into your face like trout while you are trying to read a book or mix solvents or use a circular saw. You can lay out bowls of cereal in front of cartoons, you can bait the couch with piles of Adventure Time comics, but they will find you. Even people who don't have kids can hear the nazgul shrieks and rumble of scooter wheels in the streets, see the tiny fingers under the cracks of their front doors when they mix a pitcher of kool-aid. Get your hoses, folks, they are coming.

Mondays are normally painting days, but summer break has set a pack of children loose in my house. Yesterday I was hiding in the corner of the dining room behind my portable easel when Leif popped up at my elbow. "MOM." "WHAT." "Can you teach me to paint?"

I can barely teach full-grown adults to use the catalog computer at the library. My special skills are of the quacking, woofing, piling-books-into-the-arms-of-young-parents variety. Most of the time, when someone asks you to teach them something, they mean "show me the answer". Faced with a patron's limp-armed refusal to click a button on a mouse, I usually pivot on my heel and pass them off to a co-worker. There are paper bag puppets to assemble.

But why not? He's 9 years old, he won't eat the paint. "Okay, we can do this, but you need to understand that I am a terrible teacher and you will need to watch youtube tutorials with me." A bargain was struck.

The method I learned from is the student method taught by Mark Carder in his Draw Mix Paint videos.

We watched a couple demos, then ransacked the kitchen for an attractive piece of fruit and ran down to the studio. Zenny set up a still life with a plastic apple and some puddles of non-toxic acrylics, and Leif settled himself at the big easel for his first oil painting. We had a talk about how not to poison yourself and die, mixed his color strings together, and then I sat at his shoulder doing the intonations: check your color, make the mark. Look at the shape of the shadows. Squint. Step back. Check your color, make the mark. Slow down. Small strokes. Follow the curve of the surface. More paint. Check the color. Make the mark. Check it. Mark it. 

And damned if that kid didn't stay focused for a full three hours, until the last stroke went down - bloop, a dab of highlight - and he threw his hands up. Zenny had finished her apple ages ago and was laying on the studio rug with a bucket of Lego when we stood back and had a final look at the thing. We were all kind of surprised. It was really good.

When Leif gets excited or confused, he starts laughing maniacally. He has a laugh like a cartoon villain. He did that now, looking at his first painting and feeling big things about it. "I thought I would be bored by the videos, but they were really inspiring! I thought I would paint a big mess, but it looks like an actual pear!"

This kid.

I will buy the child all the paint he needs. Forever. Any canvas or board or paper he desires. Painting Mondays are back on, and for the rest of the summer they belong to Leif.

thanks, melatonin

In my dream, I was out for a walk and ran into someone I hadn't seen in years. He ignored me and went across the street.

"Still doesn't want to talk to me, huh?" I said to his friend, who was standing around waiting for a car repair.

"Yeah, seems that way. But don't go thinking he doesn't care at all - he did watch the video."

Uh oh. "What video?"

"The one of you getting that award? Everyone has seen it, it's all over." He pulled out his phone. On the little screen, I watched myself walk across a stage wearing a purple dress, looking self-conscious. "There, you got the award, you're shaking his hand, now you want to get off the stage..." The little figure of myself starts hurrying toward the curtains, looking for the stairs, and then decides to bypass the stairs entirely and just hop off the edge of the stage. She hoists her skirt and jumps, waving at the audience. "But, surprise! The floor drops off on that side and it's waaay higher than you think!" The tiny figure falls about 20 feet, flailing, and bounces off her face.

I woke myself up yelling, "LEEEROY JEEENKINS".

ffs.

(link for people not familiar with this meme)

self-portrait WIP

This is as young as I'm ever going to get. A self-portrait has been on my year's to-do list, and I might as well get cracking on it before gravity gets another 6 months to pull my cheeks down into my neck.

This is my first go with Arches oil paper, and I LOVE IT. It has the surface of a board, but without the pressure not to screw it up, because it's only about a dollar a page. I am not so worried about my paintings lasting 1,000 years, but the paper can be mounted to board if someone gets a wild hair for preservation.

Also this weekend, I painted some elephant ear pods at the request of my boss, who has a special relationship with them because he parks under the famous Exceptional Tree behind the library and it dumps pods on his car every year. Our elephant ear pod tree has been in books, has local arborists throwing parties for it, and enjoys hugs from tree-lovers around the world. Really.

 And now my tables are covered in pods and I feel weird about throwing them in the green waste bin.

Related: in a fit of homemaking, I got it into my head that I would frame all the decent paintings and get them out of my basement studio, so I drove all around town buying up all the thrift store frames. Now my basement studio is filled with empty frames, because most of them were the wrong size. That is called "spring cleaning".

I hid the naked paintings in areas where guests won't find themselves eyeball-to-buttcrack unless they wander out of the living room - in which case, they GETS WHAT THEY DESERVES.

j/k, I don't have any guests.

Last week of school! Summer is my favorite and my best.

end of an era

For the past 15 years, I have had a preschooler in the house. Today the last baby aged out. REJOICE, FOR THERE ARE NO MORE TUITION PAYMENTS. Until they all go into college, one after the other.

And somehow, in all these years, we had managed to avoid the ceremony that has become some kind of cultural standard since the days when they just chucked us out to the curb in our little moon boots: the preschool graduation. Have noticed that the 100th Day of Kindergarten is picking up steam on the pinterest-activity-turned-mandatory-function horizon, but we will trample that when we get to it.

So we didn't actually know what we were doing with this thing. Bring a potluck item! the email said. Great, there are what, maybe 10 preschoolers graduating? I cooked up a bowl of mini wieners, dropped it off, and we sat on a bench waiting for the event to start. Parents began to swarm in. And then aunts, and cousins, and neighbors - all of them carrying massive aluminum trays of fried chicken, pancit noodles, chow mein, kimchi rice. A herd of cheesecakes and cupcakes and full goddamn Costco sheet cakes stampeded by. I realized that I had massively underestimated the volume of weenies this event necessitated.

"Shit shit shit. There are a hundred people here. That guy has an entire industrial crock pot. I am going to break into the kitchen, steal my sad weenies, and run for it," I said.
"Nobody is going to notice," the man said.
"EVERYONE IS GOING TO NOTICE."

Nobody noticed. Someone else brought a huge tray of cocktail weenies and they just sprinkled mine on top of them and then mercifully hid the bowl. We never found it. After the leis and cake, we did an Irish goodbye and wished the tupperware good fortune. Embarrassing.

and also adorable

In the afternoon, the newly-minted kindergartener asked for a pie. THIS is a thing I can do. She and I made enough dough for a fat apple pie and three miniatures; apple, blueberry, and chocolate walnut. Zenny made the leaves to decorate the tops.

Having some feelings about this whole growing-up business.

flailing at the news

Here is a rant about the news:

It is buried in lava. You guys.

1. The Big Island is an active volcano. It has been erupting for more than 30 years. You know what will happen if lava eats the geothermal power plant? It will shoot steam up in the air where the wells are. It will not cause a nuclear explosion. Just keep us posted on damages and closures, we don't need 11 articles a day.

2. Lost in the pile of lava articles, seems there was a shooting at the beach near my library last week. And nobody was caught. And it probably involved a couple of my library patrons. Which ones? WHO KNOWS. Have some lava.

3. Oh look, there was a murder near my house, too. Found the article buried at the bottom of the page because HEY LOOK MORE LAVA.

I do read non-local news, but I'm spending my energy on being mad about this today. Making good decisions.

the kind of sport I am being: the poor kind

I am throwing 'therapy' into my personal quackery compost bin, right on top of alkaline water, Nicholas Sparks, and veganism. You cannot improve upon nature. If we were meant to survive on vegetables, we would not have canines and razor-sharp talons and the ability to run 60mph. If we were meant to heal faster by tearing open old injuries, we would not have invented stitches and the poking of wounds with hot metal rods.

My feelings are not supposed to be spare parts for other people's recovery. I have them for a reason, and they get hurt.

I spent the day after the feelings-reaping shopping online for paint, plane tickets, and one-room cabins in the woods (which I did not have 50k on hand for - YET). Then went home and baked some bread.

 "Look," I told the man, "The future can't be fixed. The past is no good. What we have is right now. And right now can have bread."

So.

Do art, build furniture, raise chickens, brew beer, sharpen talons, make secret plots. Find that brain-calming space and be in it. Japanese milk bread is a good place to start.



**This is not to say that therapy and psychoanalysis (or veganism, or Nicholas Sparks) are bad or useless. They are just not for me.

*** Ok it is to say that about Nick Sparks. FIGHT ME.