Meanwhile, at the library

First off, in very important news, I got a haircut. I don't take many pictures of myself anymore, but when I do I take lots of them and post them all. Here you go, posterity. I've got crow's feet now, and that's fine. And look, you can barely see where I was strangled in my sleep. Things are looking up again.

Recently in Working with the Public:

* Drunk patron came in while we were hosting a chamber music performance with 60 kids, threw money for DVDs at me, and yelled, "HONEY, I hate to TELL YOU THIS, but you work at the LIBRARY, your job is BOOOORING." It was 9:30am.

* A vacationer came in looking for the toilet, then stopped with her hand on the key. "I am not using this bathroom," she said. "I am clairvoyant, and someone put a secret camera in there so they can watch people pee." We have been very paranoid ever since, looking under the sink and soap dispenser for spy lenses. Thanks, psychic lady.

* The shirtless Vietnam vet with the knife-sharpening stand beside the library who would come in and ask me to help him with his marijuana applications and reward us with mystery-meat jerky he made on the dashboard of his car (where he lived) has died. He had a heart attack and didn't make it through the emergency surgery. I am sad about it.

* One of our library patrons was shot to death at the beach in front of his kids. Evidently he spotted a guy he knew who had already shot him and decided that getting into a fist fight was the best idea. Instead of, you know, gathering his kids up and leaving. His kids are my kids' classmates. So that was not good.

* While prepping for Banned Books Week, I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand the correlation between Green Eggs and Ham and early Marxism, as seen through the lens of the Communist Party of China (as far as I can tell, it comes down to the establishment/dismantling of class systems through materialistic circumstance vs. violent ideological overthrow, and Sam I Am spent too much time wheedling about eggs instead of just ordering them eaten at gunpoint). Despite this, I managed to pull off an entertaining storytime without driving away all the parents, and afterwards one of the moms came up to me with a copy of Peter Rabbit. She turned to the illustration of Mrs. McGregor and explained that she had never seen the picture before, because in Japan the bit about Peter's father getting put into a pie is removed from every book. Her husband, from Germany, couldn't get over Rupunzel being challenged for depictions of unwed pregnancy, because bodies just aren't as big a deal over there. I love these kinds of conversations, it's fascinating to learn what subjects are censored from country to country. 

Being a librarian is rewarding sometimes. And nobody has spilled body fluid on the keyboards in months.

PIE DAY - 2 recipes

Canadian Thanksgiving is a day to celebrate our frozen brethren and to console ourselves for being rejected for a passport just because we can't prove we're American. This year, I embarked on the perfect peach pie. I wanted an apple pie, but everyone yelled "PEACH", so here we are.

This is a recipe that will be more comfortable to bulk shoppers, because Costco still has good peaches for cheap (the yellow ones, NOT the white ones - I have become a person who has Opinions about peach varieties) and also because the quantity of butter will make you cry if you aren't breaking it out of a 4-box package. I'll tell you now - it takes 3 sticks. Just take a breath and do it anyway. Give yourself 3 hours for this thing, start to finish.


Perfect Perfectly Fine Peach Pie

Get your pie dough in the fridge before starting the filling, it has to chill twice.

The very best pie dough, which is actually more of a tart pastry

1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup sugar
4 cups flour
3 sticks of salted butter, chilled

Mix sour cream and sugar in a bowl, set aside. Put flour in a big bowl, chop up your chilled butter, and blend in with your hands to a mealy crumble. Pour in the sour cream and toss with a fork until it comes together into a soft dough. Divide it in half on two sheets of plastic wrap, use the plastic to smoosh the balls of dough into fat rectangles. Wrap them up and put them in the fridge for an hour. Remove from fridge, open them up and put another piece of plastic wrap on top, and roll them out into large legal-paper-sized rectangles. Use the plastic to help fold them over in thirds like a paper going into an envelope. Re-wrap and put them back in the fridge for another hour while you make the filling.

Does that look like a lot of dough? That looks like maybe a lot of dough. Ignore that for now.

Filling

4 cups of peeled and sliced peaches
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons corn starch
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice, because that is what I had, or just cinnamon and nutmeg if you've got it
pinch of salt
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon of butter

Peel and slice the peaches, put them in a big bowl. Sprinkle on the sugars and gently toss to combine. Cover it and let it sit for an hour. Your crust needs to chill, anyway. Make a cup of coffee and knit for a bit or something.

When you can't take it anymore, roll out one crust and put it in a deep-dish pie pan. Put that in the fridge for a minute, turn the oven on to 400 degrees, and prepare the filling.

Drain off the sugary liquid from the peaches and save it. In a saucepan, combine cornstarch, spices, and salt. Stir in sugar syrup from the peaches. Bring to a boil, stir for a couple minutes until thick, remove from heat, and stir in lemon juice and butter. Fold the lovely goo into the peaches. Dump all that into the pie crust. Nice and overloaded is fine. Roll out the remaining pie dough, cut it into strips, and try to make a lattice crust that doesn't look like hell. Trim, seal, and flute edges. Or smash edges with a fork, if you get mad fluting. Tear a strip of tin foil and gently cover the edges so they don't scorch. This is where I realized I was out of tin foil, of course.

Bake at 400 for 50-60 min, until bubbly and golden. Make sure it cooks completely, and don't take it out after 40 min just because you ran out of tin foil and didn't want the edges to scorch, or your bottom will be soggy and your filling will droop and there will have been no point to making a homemade crust at all goddammit.

Anyway, let it cool. DONE. Amazing.

very yummy pie despite my inability to flute edges, buy tinfoil, or bake it quite long enough

Now, to nobody's surprise but my own, that crust recipe makes way too much dough. Oh shit, the oven is on and there is a single-crust-pie's worth of dough left. What is in the cupboard? HURRY, GET SOMETHING INTO THE OVEN TO BAKE.


Oh Shit I Need A Quick Pie

leftover pie dough
3 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup of corn syrup, because that is all that is left in the bottle
1/4 cup of brown sugar to make up the difference
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon (oh look, I had cinnamon in the back of the cupboard after all)
1 tsp vanilla
squeeze of that lemon you used for the peach pie
sprinkle of powdered instant coffee
2 heaping handfuls of chopped chocolate (I use Trader Joes pound-plus bars, but chocolate chips are fine)
2 heaping handfuls of dried cranberries or raisins or whatever dried fruit you have
2 heaping handfuls of chopped walnuts or pecans or whatever nuts you can find. Or forget the nuts. Nuts are stupid. I had a lot of walnuts leftover from Easter, though. Do nuts go bad? Don't overthink this, get the damn thing in the oven.

Roll out the rest of the dough and line a shallow pie pan or tart pan. Quick, grab your saucepan from the peach pie goop and melt the butter in it. Take it off the heat and whisk in sugars, corn syrup, eggs, vanilla, coffee powder, and cinnamon. Chop the chocolate and dump everything else in and stir it together. Pour it into unbaked pie crust. Pop into the oven next to the peach pie. WHEW.

not perfect, but very delicious

oh nooooo my scorched edges

I am going to line my suitcase with Trader Joe's pound-plus bars when I go to Portland in a few weeks. If anyone ever wants to commission a painting, you should know that I only accept payment in Trader Joe's loot.

in which I need my own bed

Woke up last night with someone's hands clamped around my neck, clawing up fistfuls of my throat. This was a very confusing way to wake up, and perhaps that is why instead of launching into action or swearing, I pried the fingers off my windpipe enough to say, "Are you okay?"

 "I DON'T KNOW," my kid yelled back, still asleep and trying to throttle me.

"I'm your mom, you don't have to kill me, you're having a nightmare."

"OH, OKAY."

She let go of my throat and flung herself over onto her back, breathing quietly again. I stared at her for a minute, like maybe I had just discovered a badger in the bed, then covered her up with the blanket and made a pillow barricade between us. Now I've got bloody rakes down my neck, which is not a good look for toddler storytime.

Are you okay? Honestly. If an actual nighttime strangler shows up, maybe they will be touched by my concern long enough for me to thump them with my kindle.

A couple figure paintings

After lopping my thumb off, a storm rolled in and blew out the power for half the island. We pulled out lanterns at the library and I sat at the desk laughing.

My evening walks have turned into evening trots that are quickly becoming evening runs. Partly because there is a van that has started following me and then zooming away when I start sprinting. They’re probably just looking for a quiet corner to deal weed on, but I have been changing my route every night anyway. I don’t have any pockets for self-defense items. Maybe I should stuff my bra with rocks or something. 

Anyway, I got some time to myself this weekend and painted. The wolves have been trying to eat me for the past couple of weeks, so it was good to grab some brushes and hold them back for a few hours. After painting on paper it was a bit hard working with the duralar again. It kind of kicked my butt a bit, but I’m getting a handle on it.

 

no good

Since the broken nose, we have had barfing, emergency dentistry, antibiotics, and then today I cut off the top of my thumb.

This is the time to buy scratch lotto, folks; doing our best to keep bad luck occupied over here.

Well, you don't need thumb-tips to paint motorcycles. Mostly.

Process pictures. You can locate the moment I realized the tail light was crooked - all the way at the flippin' end.

I have taped the thumb back together. The antibiotics will take care of the gangrene. It's sorted.

zenny breaks her nose

Got a call at work from the after-school program. "So, Zenny was swinging between two cafeteria tables and she fell down -" my heart tried to shoot out my neck and I made a sound like a kazoo, so they hurried on, "And she landed on her face but the bleeding has stopped and she seems okay."

By the time I got over there to pick her up, the bridge of her nose had swollen up and turned bright blue. So it was down to the Emergency Room with us, and YEP - her nose is broken. "No PE, no blowing her nose, and no sneezing for 2-4 weeks," they told us. NO SNEEZING.

Z, who has been sneezing nonstop ever since

The next day was picture day at school. Because of course it was.

But there were no seizures or blackouts this time, so I am counting this one as a victory. 

rude

It has been a hard week. Sad news for old friends, dentists shaking us upside down for all the money in our pockets, anniversary of my grandmother's death, and a stupid argument in which I started ranting in metaphors again ("A person can sit upright in a three-legged chair just fine, but sometimes, if you just trust enough, and lean back on the missing leg... THE LEG IS STILL GOING TO BE MISSING AND THE CHAIR WILL FALL OVER"). Also, one of the mail carriers got mad at my "GO AWAY" welcome mat and wouldn't deliver my package of paint, even after I signed the "we missed you" slip with permission to just chuck it anywhere, so I had to hoof it down to the physical post office to claim my loot. Like some kind of frontiersman. I'm going to need an addendum door mat that reads *applies only to proselytizers and that guy who sells sides of beef from his truck.

So I knitted some petulant "your mom" mitts.

Still having a hard time with my painting flow. Reminding myself that I'm only a year into painting, everything I do is still practice. It doesn't matter if my paintings look like student studies, because they are student studies. I can try to compose elaborate illustrations and dramatic pre-Raphaelite scenes after I learn to paint fruit and jackets and pants. 

not feeling it

boring

Wish I had more than one day a week to work on these things.

cityscapes and chickens

As workshop homework, we have to take photos of city scenes to share with the other painters in November. Except I do not live in a city, I live in an old residential neighborhood attached to a falling-down plantation town, and so far I've only had time to take pictures on my nightly walks while being chased by dogs.
It is not going so well.

We live behind the cop shop and I had to stick my arm through a fence to get a picture of the sunset. Luckily, it was not electrified.

Here I liked the power lines and the glowing street light - 

neither of which came out well in the picture.

I like symmetry, but someone designed this gate to be off-center to the light. WHY.

I liked the fading sky against the tower. Imagine painting all those lines straight, yikes.

I'll have to take a field trip to the main drag with the good camera during daylight. Over where the broken plywood and sleeping junkies are. Will be disabusing everyone at the workshop of any whimsical notions they might have had about Hawaii. Sorry, folks.

Raining chickens

The boys sleep over at grandma's most weekends, and we go over for family dinner on Sundays to pick them up. I was halfway out of the car last weekend when Leif came skidding outside and then ran right back into the house, yelling, "THEY'RE HATCHING COME ON." Oh no.

The wild hen who has been brooding on my mother's back porch finally hatched her eggs, and she began murdering them as they emerged. She had killed three by the time my mother went outside and noticed the peeping coming from the unhatched eggs and saw the little dead babies, so she confiscated the remaining eggs and put them on a warming pad to finish hatching. We watched them for an hour as they zippered out of their shells and plopped across each other, exhausted. It was pretty amazing.

A week later, she had found homes for the little fluffballs and we were going for our Sunday night walk when GUESS WHAT WE FOUND, fallen out of the bedtime tree and being stalked by a feral cat.

"I wonder if I killed a lot of birds in my past life and I'm making up for it," my mother said, tucking the baby onto the chick warmer for the night. She added it to the collection; earlier in the week, she passed a baby dove on the middle strip of the highway and stopped traffic to rescue it. And she still has the green weenie bird and baby bulbul I gave her from our lychee trees.

In the morning, she walked the chick back up the hill and reunited it with mom. Then she got home to find a cold, partially-hatched egg abandoned by the OTHER wild chicken who roosts on her patio. She popped it on the warmer and helped the tired little thing get out.

Honestly. She needs to wear a carpentry apron with 8 pockets so she can collect all the birds that fall in her path.


Knitting and painting

I can't knit or paint. Everything is garbage. The sweater yarn somehow became more allergy-triggering since last year, and my paintings are coming out overworked and muddy. Switching gears. I am going to win.

I booked the thing

So there. It's done. I have two months to knit a sweater. And buy a list of paint the length of my arm. Does it really take three different kinds of purple to paint a city street? We will find out.

Going to have a bit of a lie-down and get the blood back into my head.

West Coast Sweater - take 2

I have ripped the shit out of last year's robot-armed Seattle Sweater and I am knitting it into a cardigan for a as-yet-undetermined painting workshop this fall/winter. The idea is that if I do one workshop a year, it's cheaper than grad school, so I should really just pick one and stop feeling guilty about doing something for myself. The years will go by anyway.

If nothing else, I'll have a sweater to wear at work while feeling sad that everyone else is flying off to Japan.

This is the new design:

(Don't hold me to those scribbled cables, I couldn't remember what St. Brigid looked like. 
I'll take notes as I make the thing and post them on Ravelry later.)

Zenny documented the death of the old sweater. And part of her hand.

RIP, Seattle Sweater

And now I am staring at my balls and realizing that I forgot to take a swatch measurement while I had an entire sweater to measure from.

Swatches are for sissies anyway.

CASTING ON.