How to storytime

Spent an entire week filming storytime videos, following the state guidelines.

Shoot in landscape. Long, separate clips. Dress professionally. No background music. 

So, not any of this. 

(I’m on tiktok now, I guess - same user name)

The beaches reopened, and the kids went to maintain social distance with the sea turtles while I had the house to myself for the first time in 2 months. Painted another African Tulip - local flowers that look like demogorgons.

Next week we interface with the public.

Well

It’s going great, everyone. 28 takes and I finally pronounced my own name correctly. Wrapped my scarf around the mic three times. Got mad at my own cheeks.

Acting is hard.

Phase 1

Officially back in the library every day, though we’ll remain closed for checkouts for a week or two. My main job is to film storytime and how-to videos, which is fun except that my hands have been shredded into bloody ribbons by the kitten. I‘ll need to muppet-flap fast enough to keep them blurry, wear sock puppets for everything, or tell stories dressed in a cotillion gown and elbow-length gloves.

Pleeease may I gnaw your remaining fingers off

During these mostly-homebound weeks, there was one thing I said I would do and had been putting off; paint a landscape. I haven’t painted a street scene since my workshop two years ago, and I have an attitude about the color green, so it seemed like a good time to stretch myself. But I did not. Now my time is up. When I received the news, I got off the phone with my boss, marched straight outside, and painted a potted taro in my yard until the rain mercifully chased me inside. It is not a landscape, but it was painted outdoors, SO THERE.

The chickens dug through all my barricades and murdered the apocalypse garden I had been trying to grow. In an actual apocalypse, they’d better watch their drumsticks. Luckily, three of the banana trees are growing bunches, and the lychee tree is fruiting. We’ll live.

And so I have traded in my hippie clown pants for jeans and cardigan. I’m glad to get my hands on some fresh books and warm up my quacking voice again. A change of scenery is nice, because the neighbors have purchased a trampoline and let their preschool boys jump on it naked while riding BMX bikes with their dog. The sight of flying dog paws and bike wheels and unprotected wieners in that netted battle arena is more than my “this is about to end in an ER visit” alarms can comfortably handle.

I’ll post links to the videos on the library website once the editing committee finishes with them. There will be clapping, mooing, and a stuffed cat pillow being jostled like a baby. Quality content, folks.

Maybe we can qualify as a nonprofit

Midmorning, three days ago, Leif looked up and shushed us. “Do you hear that? It sounds like a kitten.”

There was no kitten. There were baby birds in the tree, some crooning chickens, a cooing dove, but no phantom kitten. We looked around anyway. “Huh, it really sounded like a kitten that needed help.”

A few hours later, a distressed teenager showed up at the house with a very small and desperate kitten in her passenger seat. The humane society told her they wouldn’t take unweaned kittens, her mother wouldn’t let her keep it, and Gavin is the high school ‘cat guy’, so there she was. We took it.

This is Leif’s fault. He summoned it. Luckily, he’s focusing his powers on summoning mug cakes now. He found a recipe in his mug cake cookbook that called for mayonnaise, and made an awful face, but I assured him that mayo makes a good substitute for oil in some cake recipes -  20 minutes later I got Twitter ads for mayonnaise in mug cakes. Smashed my phone with a hammer.

Babies are intense, even the ones that weigh as much as a sausage. Driving to the school today to pick up worksheet packets, I turned onto the winding road and was halfway through the snaking curves when the pavement suddenly seemed to rise up and roll like waves toward me. Realized I had slept a total of 6 hours in 3 days, and would have been safer driving tipsy. Not going out again until the night bottles stop.

Before getting completely derailed by bottle feeding, I painted another portrait of Plucky.

I wonder if painting while having sleep deprivation hallucinations would be better or worse? Like the LSD portrait experiment. But slower, and more confused, and with a call to poison control after dipping the brush into coffee and drinking paint thinner.

Probably going to pass on that.

GO TO BED

Bad news, good cookie recipe

Mike’s sister has the virus. She’s a police dispatcher in New York, where they have hit 10,000 cases. Their brother is a police officer in the same department, and her husband is a fireman, so the whole bunch of them are right in the middle of this thing. It is not great. She’s recovering without it getting too serious, though. She’s got champion lungs, that one.

My dad’s wife lost her father to the virus a few days ago. 

Cases are still going up here, with clusters forming, but it’s slowing. Tourists have been trickling in and getting arrested almost immediately for breaking quarantine. Maybe don’t post geotagged Instagram pictures of yourself breaking quarantine, folks.

Here is the table.

Here is the couch.

And here is the cookie recipe the kids have been requesting on repeat. If you’re low on eggs and milk, this is a good one.

Cocoa fudge cookies 

1 cup flour 

1/4 tsp baking soda

Dash of salt

5 Tbs butter

7 Tbs cocoa powder

2/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar 

1/3 cup plain yogurt (or a little container of vanilla Activia, if that’s what you’ve got)

1tsp vanilla 

Heat oven to 350. Melt the butter. Mix in cocoa powder, then stir in the sugars, add the yogurt, mix in the vanilla. Sift in flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir until just mixed, drop in big spoonfuls onto baking parchment, bake 10 min. Let them cool for a minute before transferring them to the rack, they’ll be very soft and become chewy as they cool.

Waiting game

Still waiting on redeployment. In the mornings I’ve been shaking cats out of my sewing and knitting, and managed to finish the jackalope. Knitted an entire arm backwards. Calling it a design element.

Running dangerously low on a couple important paint colors, and finding them sold out everywhere online, in every brand. Titanium white is the toilet paper of painters, I guess.

Over the weekend, a hibiscus flower snapped off in my hand while I was looking at it in the garden, which made it a volunteer. Asked my tarot cards for a general sign of the times, and it gave me the Hermit. The Hermit represents isolation and soul searching, but, more importantly, it was used by Led Zeppelin to illustrate the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven, which makes this card mine. Instead of “2020”, I should have written “Zoso”.

The medallion is Saint Christopher, patron saint of bikers and bookbinders, warder of pestilence. The time turner is broken, so it can’t help us (Zenny and I have been reading HP). I had to paint all the line work on the card in one sitting and try not to make any mistakes. Screwed up the e in hermit, but OH WELL. There’s no erasing it, I just tried to clean it up with paint thinner and not make it worse.

Today I cut a gardenia, drew another card, and I’m doing another of these. At least this card (9 of swords) has no words on it. Just... a wall of swords.

More than a week after Easter, the chocolate situation over here is still out of control. I couldn’t make myself eat this small bunny because it was prettier than the others, so I painted it. Chocolate is as fun to paint as leather. And cheaper. And easier to chew afterwards.

The painting takes up about 2 hours of the day, while the kids are playing, and I paint at the dining table so I’m on hand to pour juice and make cookies. The rest of the day is spent on school work, gardening, cleaning, cooking, hugging chickens, and watching King of the Hill with the kids while knitting or stitching. Zenny was having trouble sleeping, so we added an hour of kids exercise videos in the evening, and that fixed things. Also, my pudding arms are becoming arm-shaped arms again. I’m poised to go back to work, concerned about pay and family health, but home is still my favorite place.

Masks, carnations, and the smell of alarm

I‘ve been put on notice for redeployment to a public office, so the time has come to join the sea of people making (and posting) face masks. My hand-me-down fancy sewing machine was being an asshole, so I pulled down my battered old Brother, scrubbed the roach eggs out of the compartments, spilled oil all over the rusty bits, and cruised through a stack of filter-pocket masks. Coffee filters, specifically, because that’s what I’ve got.

If anyone complains that beer fabric is unprofessional, I can ask them to kindly back the fuck up, they are standing too close.

Got carried away and stitched a messy cat face onto one of them. 

It is stupid enough to make me feel happier about wearing it now. 

The governor is talking about a 20% pay cut for state employees and 10% for first responders, starting next pay period. We are state employees. The unions will fight that down a bit, but there is some serious belt-tightening about to happen. We have a plan. Kind of. We have a squishy blob of a plan, anyway.

Painted some carnations while chewing on these things.

- - -

Easter landed like a guillemot.

The oven broke, the ham wouldn’t fit in with the turkey my mother was failing to roast, and we ended up eating bread and broccoli for dinner. My jello splatted out of the mold (“Hey granny, I found the blood you donated,” Gavin said) but the pies, at least, were perfect.

Mostly I just sat around drinking a Guinness and playing with an AI photo-to-painting generator. Maybe I’ll paint actual paintings out of the fake paintings.

- - -

When I was a kid in rural Arizona, we went out hiking with a couple of the other young teachers my mother worked with. Just as we were realizing that it had gotten late and we should head back to the car, a smell surrounded us. Everyone went very still and silent. Thousands of years of being tasty morsels told us exactly what that smell was, without ever having smelled it before; mountain lion. My mother took me by the shoulders and put me in the middle of the group as we all turned to walk back. We found large paw prints on top of our own, just behind us. It became dark fast, and one of our friends had a pack of matches in her pocket. We followed the light of one match at a time, scared of the seconds of darkness in between, knowing there was something large stalking us.

This feels like the moment we smelled the cat.

Pear, gardenias, and rabbit ass

I painted a pear. And then I ate it, so there's no touch-ups if it looks wrong.

close enough

Made myself finish the gardenia painting that was in time-out because the petals were giving me a hard time. It turned out ok. What a jerk.

DONE WITH YOU

During my forage through the wastelands of Walmart I grabbed the last bag of fiberfill stuffing, which meant I needed to make something to stuff. So I started knitting a jackalope. There was no chart, so I just followed the instructions and trusted that it would turn into something.

“What part of the jackalope is this? It looks like an ass.”

Jackalope by Hansi Singh

It was an ass. I've knitted half the thing now, and it looks like something the cats ripped the skin off of. Just stick to the pattern and hang in there, knitters. It will looks cute in the end, probably.

Every year, the family gets new clothes for Easter. Something bright and refreshing for spring. This year I ordered myself a black cardigan. Which is really an improvement, because after buying entire outfits for three kids, I usually end up throwing a clearance rack sports bra into the cart and calling it an outfit. 

so Eastery, very festive

I kicked over some old ladies in masks for a dozen eggs, so there will be egg dying tonight. But the pie will be pumpkin, because that is what is left over in the cupboard from Thanksgiving. We will make this thing happen with what we've got, folks.

the wolves in the walls

The cases in Hawaii are only doubling every 6 days or so, which is better than a lot of places. Nobody I know has gotten sick, but the circle is tightening; friends of friends are dying. My cousin's step brother died yesterday. The wolves can be heard in the distance now. 

I bought a novelty pack of anime cat face masks for $2 as a joke back in February, when the robotics team was still planning to travel to Taiwan. Yesterday I opened one up and went to Walmart for Easter stuff. It was early, and the maze of fencing set up in front of the doors like a Disneyland ride to space customers was still empty. The fabric and craft sections were completely cleaned out (I'm looking forward to seeing all the face masks made out of damask upholstery fabric), the paper aisles were still empty, and the baking goods were all gone, but there was enough stuff in the rest of the store to make Easter happen. I threw all my clothes in the washer on the way to the outdoor shower to decontaminate, and grabbed clean clothes off the laundry line. Having half the house outside is handy in a pandemic.

Inside, there is baking and cleaning and making-of-stuff. Gavin made sword mounts for his room. Zenny has been mangling little dishes out of air-dry clay, Leif has been drawing comics, the kitten has been chewing up my sewing, and I knitted a cardigan nobody will wear because it's suddenly 80 degrees again. Been painting on wood circles that I coated with a few layers of linseed oil, and I love the feel of it. Even though it looks like I was painting a dead child. 

Felt the first stirrings of cabin fever yesterday. This might have something to do with the neighbor's rooster pacification methods; he plays the radio loudly all day next to his chicken coops so they don't crow, and this week he's switched the station from oldies to 90s R&B. I am going to have to get an air rifle just to take out his stereo from the roof like a sniper.

Antidote:

Oh good, another animal

This bronze incense holder has been sitting on one of the family shelves since before I was born. I've never seen it holding incense. It isn't one of my cursed objects - it might be one of the charmed ones. 

After ruining two paintings in a row, it was reassuring and annoying to have this one come off the brush in 2 hours without any trouble at all. Comfort zones are so nice.

Got back home from work in time to catch the across-the-street kids letting their dog chase a stray kitten. Spent two hours trying to get it out of the wheel well of the car parked in front of our house. The car owner came and popped the hood to help us find the cat, and eventually I pulled it free, holding it up like a baby lion for the neighbors to clap politely.

We can not have another cat.

Not happening, mister ginger britches.

But he’s a bit wild, and the humane society won’t keep feral kittens, so we’ve got to soften him up and find a sucker to take him.

Kitten and suckers

Animals get up to a lot of shenanigans when we’re not at home to bust them.

(Dartagnon is doing just fine, btw. He’s clucking around acting like being shot and stuck in a cardboard box was just another day at the chicken office. He deserves a promotion from #3 backyard rooster.)