tidings of great joy

For a year, I have been explaining the new library print system to patrons. All day. Every day. It's a multi-step system, in three different parts of the library, and not at all simple or intuitive or convenient, so people find it very aggravating. Over the days and weeks and months I worked out the perfect combination of encouragement, sympathetic noises, comedy pantomime, and surprised dismay to keep people from getting angry at me instead of the stupid goddamn print system. Every reference phone call is, "Does the library have a printer I can use?" and every answer is a chipper, "Yes, we sure do!" Weariness set in. This is my life now. I am the print doula, guiding boarding passes from email to paper with the least amount of crying. Maybe I needed a vacation. Maybe I needed to change careers. Something more interesting and meaningful, like a coroner’s assistant, or a pet groomer.

And then this week the printer died. It just dropped stone dead, right in the middle of a print job, and I couldn't get it working again. It took all day for I.T. to install a new printer, and it worked just long enough for them to drive back to Honolulu before it also died. I.T. can't get back out here until next week. After an initial pileup of panicking, angry people, everything went quiet. I haven't had to help anyone print in three days. I can relax and have better conversations with book-seeking patrons, instead of being interrupted every two minutes by someone flapping their phone or flash drive at me. I remember why I like my job.

It's a HOLIDAY MIRACLE.

Everyone please buy your relatives printers for Christmas, save a librarian.


In other news, Plucky is molting and Tiny has become a teen mom.

In the cup: hot cocoa with tequila. On the screen: Watchmen. Festive.

powers of observation

(I updated the last post with background information about the exploding tail incident, sorry rss feeders)

In unrelated but very important news, today I was this far into a hat when I realized I had knitted the colors backwards (skulls were supposed to be light on a dark background):

pattern: We Call Them Pirates, free on Ravelry

That's fine.

a sad tail

Edited to add backstory: a few months ago the cat's tail developed a bump. The x-ray techs said it looked like she broke it bad enough that an entire vertebrae was practically missing, but the vet didn't want to do anything because it wasn't infected. If anything else happened, they'd recommend amputation, which they don't do. We asked a second vet to look at the scans, and they said they didn't do amputations either, so just ‘wait and see, maybe’. We asked a THIRD vet, and they said it seemed fine to let it heal ("scar over"), and amputate if needed. 

Well, it did not heal, it got infected, and we didn't notice because she is lazy and sleeps on a lawn chair all day, then eats when we're all in bed because she hates the other cats. The abscess burst on Thanksgiving. She had to take antibiotics for a few days so that the swelling could go down enough for a good x-ray, and the vet finally decided that the tail was no good. One of my library patrons is a retired vet, and she thinks it's a common congenital tail defect that got infected, while the pet hospital guys are getting excited about tests for rare, aggressive bone cancers. I'm siding with the simpler explanation for now - her tail has always been a bit droopy, maybe it wasn't broken at all, maybe she's been missing most of a vertebrae all along and it finally became a problem. 

- -

So.

The vet charged half a year's savings and only returned most of the cat. It seems like it should be cheaper to chop off a cat's tail.

Edited for modesty - it looks like a grey nose with stitches

Even so, I am very glad she's alive and no longer in horrible pain, and also that I was not the one who had to cut the tail off. Moura is our best face-scratching girl, and she deserves an entire salmon in her stocking, even though she had to choose the worst pay period of the year to suffer a critical containment breach. 

In other news, the freelance work is finally done. Suddenly got my lunch breaks and evenings back, so I knitted some tiny sweater ornaments for the cats (because the teenager told me to) and painted a pretentious portrait of my daughter.

I'll have to chop one of the arms off Moura's sweater

For the portrait, I ordered an oval piece of wood for extra old-timeyness. It was really nice to work on, and there's a keyhole drilled in the back so you can just slap it on the wall immediately.

I told her to make "fancy face"

(ok, I know that rose plant in the foreground is totally dead, but the weeds in it are doing so well I haven't stopped watering it)

She wants me to tone down the chin because it looks "round and stupid", but that is how she looks. Clients are the worst.

So, folks, "cheaper than a cat's tail" is your new rationale for buying whatever it is you want until Christmas. That nice cut of beef costs more than you'd normally like to spend? It's cheaper than a cat's tail. It's a few bucks more for the better bottle of scotch? Cheaper than a cat's tail!

You're welcome.

Thanksgiving 2019: there will be blood

Our town put up the annual holiday decoration, folks. It's officially Christmastime now.

city council must have increased the budget

The meal was a success. My hostessing was... maybe not. One of our guests was a retired professor who has been showing too much interest in my mother, and I had to keep putting myself in time-out because my polite smiles turned into hisses and growls whenever he made eye contact. 

WOULD YOU LIKE ANOTHER BACON WRAPPED DATE?

On the plus side, pretending to check the turkey for three hours resulted in the most tender and aggressively-basted bird our table has ever seen. It was pretty great.

The other food winner was the Cat Foot Pie - named by Gavin because Po walked across the pie three holidays in a row. She didn't put her foot in this pie, and we discussed washing her paw and pressing it into the meringue, but we were vetoed by unfestive people who don't care about tradition. Gavin has a presentation pointer shaped like a cat paw, we'll jab that in next time.

My cousin, after our double-middle-fingered showdown at Easter over his use of a full-face chemical respirator to protest the cats, showed up for dinner wearing a surgical mask. He took it off after I burned holes through it with my eyeballs. Some of those laser-stares were actually directed at the retired professor behind him (ffs, self), but without the mask he was able to eat more cockroach clusters (bacon wrapped dates) and I didn't have to drop the open wine bottles I was holding to flip him off, so it all worked out.

As bad as I felt I was behaving, I think I pulled it off without anyone noticing. Just a lot of wild eyeballs and kitchen drinking.

 Mike took the carving knife away from me, though.

We didn't have enough chairs for 11 people, so my mother brought over a couple of nice sturdy upholstered fold-out chairs. She decided to leave them at our house for the holidays.

"They'll be safe here," she said.
"I'll take good care of them," I said. And silently apologized to the chairs.

Woke up at 5am to find a trail of blood through the kitchen. And I followed it, without even checking the security cameras for a home-invading ax murderer first, because my coffee pot was on the other side of it.

The blood was leading from the cat (eating kibble, not dead) to - where else? - the nice sturdy upholstered fold-out chair, where she had decided to sit comfortably and lick open an infected abscess she had been hiding from us.

Now the cat is in a neck cone with a prescription for antibiotics, and I'm working on getting flagged by the FBI for all these "how to get blood out of upholstery" internet searches. My backup career as a crime scene cleanup person is not looking so good.

I'm going to have to hide the other chair so Christmas doesn't get any ideas.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

40

I was never worried about turning 40. I was a little worried about not turning 40, so in year 37 I started painting with devotion and making impulsive travel decisions. In year 38 I decided to crack my heart open and see if anything was still burning in there. There was, and it's been hard getting the edges to fit back together during year 39.

So here I am, not dead (as of 6:04am). Maybe the things that didn't come to pass still can. There’s a long list of people I still want to paint.

40 seems good. My neck is still clinging on to the bottom of my face, if a bit more nervously, and all my original parts are still accounted for (although my knees are held on with athletic tape). Early in the year, I had a mishap with some varnish and my heart tried to stop working, but in the last few months the little heart rate monitor on my watch has gone from scary erratic spikes to a nice steady ribbon. I wear a chemical mask and keep my varnish/linseed bottles sorted properly now.

I want to say this is going to be my year, my decade, but saying things like that is an invitation to be smited. I am not looking to have a rock dropped on me from space. But I have hope, and love, and thats a lot to work with.

book signing

Sad about some stuff and having a hard time talking to people.

Where I am

Under deadline, 4 days to go. Been reading Rainbow Rowell between illustrations; the Simon Snow books were very fun, Landline kicked my guts out. Varnished some paintings. Accidentally dripped solvent onto the onion painting. Watched JoJo Rabbit with the boys and loved it a lot. Been listening to Radio Rental podcasts in the car, hosted by Dwight from the Office.

This weekend I had a book signing at Barnes and Noble for the new children's book, which I didn't tell anyone I was working on because I am terrible. Ate a kim chee pork burrito in the food court and my author didn't push me out of my chair for ignoring her suggestion to draw eyelashes on the bird, so it was a successful event.

Smiled for two solid hours with a mouth full of miniature candy canes so I wouldn't have to make conversation or breathe spicy cabbage on anyone

My oldest friend came to visit a couple weekends ago. He stood patiently while I hugged him for way too long, patting my shoulder, because he's weird about hugs but he knows that I know he'll allow it. We talked for 4 hours, and he was gone again.

It was like plugging in your dying phone and getting a 3% charge before having to unplug it. Enough to get on with, barely.  

glazed onions - not a recipe

I have been learning a new skill (glazing), and thought it would be comfortable to relax and paint like I normally do (sloppy) for bit. I was wrong. When you're in the middle of developing a skill, you are terrible at everything. Or you think you are, which is kind of the same thing.

I am at the bottom of that yellow line right now

I picked up some persimmons because they looked nice and simple, and started a fight which has lasted two weeks.

My first painting of the persimmons was messy and boring, and I wiped it out with a rag.

nailed it

Tried again on Monday. They still looked weird. Are persimmons dusty or brightly colored? What is going on with those crumbled leaves with rubbery nubs in the middle? They look fake. Get yourselves together, persimmons.

the beer tea towel is coming along, anyway

Threw the persimmons in the fruit bowl and worked on my onion, instead.

This onion has been slowly built up, layer by layer, for a few weeks. I am beginning to love glazing, now that I'm not doing it completely wrong.

4 layers of thin paint. Only 2-100 layers to go

Zenny likes the onion because it looks like a blossoming flower. I like it because it looks like an onion taking its bra off after a long day at the onion office.

I'm going to switch back to portraiture soon. My kids want me to paint them as 18th century vampires like the guys from What We Do in the Shadows, and that style is all about the glazing.

official vampire portraits by artist Freeman White

This might be a niche I'd be willing to fill if I turned to portraiture as a career. "You, as a distinguished dead person." Like those old-timey photo booths, but for $5,000 a picture.

But first I have to get good at glazing, so I'm back to digging in produce bins. I found chestnuts at the grocery store and decided they would make nice models. I didn't know how to choose attractive chestnuts for a painting (do you pick the ones with interesting cracks or dents? Skinny ones? Lopsided ones?) but finally decided it is fair to judge a food by how much you want to eat it, so I fished out the most delicious-looking ones and came home with a bag of chestnuts that were so huge, my family thought they were... things that were not chestnuts. At this moment I can't think of nuts that are bigger than chestnuts, but I am not about to do a google image search for "huge nuts" to find out. I learned my lesson with the "Prince Albert" tobacco cans. And the time I looked up "used tissue".

Google, show me images of "handsome chestnut".

good thing I didn't add "carved with X and roasted"

Nevermind.


Opportunity

I like painting my kids, but it would be nice to practice on some non-family members so I can comfortably screw up their likenesses a bit more, and I haven't made good enough friends with anyone at the library to invite them down into my basement to dress up as a vampire for "art". Luckily, a couple of old friends are coming to visit this weekend, and I can probably get them to pose for me. Without the neck ruffs, maybe. (I don't have any neck ruffs, I have tea towels with beer bottles printed on them that we can wrap around our necks like cravats.) Have been tidying up and doing yard work to get the place presentable for company.

Veteran's Day weekend is usually a time I am flying off to a painting workshop (cheaper than going back to grad school), but I couldn't do it this year, so it will be good to have friends over to distract me from impulse-booking plane tickets to Seattle. Or to talk me into impulse-booking plane tickets to Seattle. I'm flexible.

Halloween 2019

Aloun Farms feels closer to the sun than any spot in the Pacific. You can hear the crackle of people roasting when you walk through the crowd. We brought an umbrella this time. Rode the hay-filled tractor, let the kids trip over pumpkins, lost them in the corn field, and paid $5 for Zenny to ride a depressed pony. We all left with our own pumpkin - the kids grabbed whatever was closest to them on the way out, and I picked a "wizard pumpkin" that turns from green to orange before your very eyes. If you stare at it for three solid days, maybe.

We never did find the bin full of bees.  

Mjolnir chewed the leaves off Leif's pumpkin.

A few days later, he tried to chew the face off the giant goldfish.

  

Zenny wanted to be Deet from the Dark Crystal, and I spent weeks putting together clothes and making paper-mache gelfling ears, but on the morning of Halloween she got into the costume bin and became very excited about her old pirate and cat dresses, so I ended up in the fairy wings even though the child-sized elastic cut off the blood to my arms. 

I hadn't spoken to my teenage cousin since flipping him off at Easter, but we walked around and talked about sharks and coral infections without getting into a fight. Nothing mends family relationships like gross injury stories. And a very fast beer when you see them heading up the driveway.

Gavin made a brain jello. His cooking interests are mostly jello-based. If he learns to throw fruit or meat into it, he will definitely survive college.

And now it's November. Happy Pie and Bourbon season, folks.

Dead hibiscus

I've been sick this week. Quacked at babies for toddler time and then went home to work on freelance illustrations with a giant bottle of ibuprofen. When my tablet got too hot, I gave myself a few hours to paint a dead hibiscus. I get one blossom a week, and I was too late on this one. I picked it out of the dirt and shook off the bugs, deciding it could be a companion piece for the live one I painted last week.

Of course, as soon as I was busy painting the dead flower, the hibiscus plant popped open another fresh blossom. Too bad, I like the dead one better.

For the last few weeks I've been slowly dabbing away at a painting of Leif. This child is impossible to paint, but I finally got a reasonable likeness of him.

CLOSE ENOUGH

Another one of our patrons died, having somehow drowned after falling off a surfboard. I looked him up to see if his obituary had been posted yet, and found a newspaper article from 1999 about how he witnessed his friends murder two drug dealers, disposed of their cars, helped hide their bodies for maybe a month, dug a pit to bury the decomposing corpses, dug them back up a few weeks later, and weighted their rotting remains with cement tiles before chucking them into the ocean.

Holy shit, Mr. L.

And here I was getting excited about not getting eaten by a shark.

nope

I don't go to the beach. When I do go to the beach, I don't go in the water. When I do go in the water, I don't carry the kids around, because they're slippery and covered with sharp elbows. But yesterday we had a couple of hours to kill after parent/teacher conferences, so I took the kids to the beach, marched my sun-starved body down into the ocean, and coaxed Zenny into the water with me. I held her up and we bobbed like dumplings, chest-deep and jumping with the waves. Within 10 seconds, a couple of lifeguards in a nearby outrigger started screaming, "SHAAAARK! GET OUT, SHARK SHARK SHAAAARK!" and pointing to a spot right beside us. If the lifeguards are freaking out, I get to freak out. That is allowed.

It is very hard to run in a moving ocean while holding a 6 year-old. Instead of leaping out of the water like a penguin, I fell forward in the surf and tossed Zenny, pushing her ahead of me until she could run on her own, trying to keep my drumsticks between her and the shark. There was a lot of flopping and rolling, but we got out. It was not graceful.

Turned around in time to see the shark cruise through the waves we had just been floating in. It circled around a couple of times and headed for the kids surfing nearby. Everyone on the beach was screaming for them to come to shore, paddling their hands in the air to make them swim faster. Each one made it to safety without getting nibbled like a corn cob. Thanks to all our frantic air paddling, probably.

butts remain unmunched

So that all turned out okay. Nature is fun.