Egg rescue and SADNESS

I used to have a friend who found playing cards on the sidewalk so frequently that he started looking them up to tell his fortune, just in case the fates were trying to leave him messages. I think he probably just had a lot of gamblers in the neighborhood, but it's a nice idea. This week I woke up from a nightmare for the fourth night in a row. Peeled a dead mouse off the library walkway. Fell asleep in a zoom meeting. Sat at the door waiting for patrons, staring at the sky and having an existential crisis. Discovered I’m one of the suspects in an Ann Cleeves book.

So when a playing card dropped out of a book I was handling, I went straight to the internets and looked that shit up.

Ten of Spades means SADNESS mixed with tears and disappointment. 

It isn’t just a bad card. It’s poisonous like jealousy. It will in a great measure counteract the good effects of the cards near you. You might be overcome by the feeling that nothing is right and the only thing you wish is to be to left alone. Ten of Spades is also a warning: take care not to get addicted to your sorrows.

 

Rude.

One of the wild hens behind my mother’s house pecks her babies to death. When we catch her on a clutch, the mental egg-hatching countdown starts, and our ears perk up for the sounds of infanticide. My mother still can’t drive with her recovering arm, so I came over for my weekend shift as caretaker and first thing this morning that stupid psychotic chicken started pecking her chicks as they hatched. We ran outside and grabbed up the survivors and the cracking eggs. One had already been murdered overnight, one had a horrific brain injury and is in a special hospice box with a warmer, and two got away alive. We dabbed ointment on the one that was bleeding, and we are on eggy watch now.

It is really hard not to mess with them. You imaging cracking them open and having fluff balls fall out, but what you’d get is a wet shrink-wrapped thing that bleeds to death. Let them work themselves out.

Will update this post as they hatch. Live video on my Instagram stories. 

Update:

Four viable chicks so far. Two eggs were having difficulty, so over the course of 8 hours we gently and slowly helped them along (don’t tear the membrane, give them a chance to struggle free so the blood vessels close), and they did finally break free, but one had a fatal birth defect, and it’s going to die. Which is fucking awful. The other, however, managed to get its shrink wrapping off just fine once it had some help.

Chopper, who made it out all by herself in record time 

Pecky, the baby who survived multiple head injuries 

Eggy, who had a little help and popped out successfully 

The lucky baby who escaped murder hen while she killed the others and hid crying in a flower pot until we rescued her

Update again:

Holy shit, what we thought was a scary birth defect was some kind of yolky prenatal weirdness, because she absorbed it all, kicked off her shell, and screamed “I’M ALIVE, MOTHERFUCKERS.” We apologized and cuddled her and took her out of the hospice box to put her in with the others. 5 survivors!

Update next morning:

Two more eggs hatched, one at bedtime and one in the morning. 

The chicks are in a bird cage with a soft pocketed warming pad suspended over them so that the pocket hangs down like a tunnel, and they’ve all crammed inside it to make a cuddle puddle. Guess what we didn’t need? 7 MORE CHICKENS. We will find good homes for these sweet nuggets.

Hibiscuits

Painting hibiscus over here. I’ll probably sit down for a few more hours and try to ruin these things before calling it quits.

In my latest act of transfiguration, I turned $300 into a pottery wheel. Currency is the oldest and laziest form of wizardry — but just because you know how it’s done doesn’t mean it isn’t magic. As soon as I figure out what kind of clay and glazes we need, this ceramics operation will be in motion. I’m going to make a flower vase the cats can’t knock over, and a coffee cup you could use in hand to hand combat. The kids can fill the house with bowls and little mangled figurines. Making things is important.

Also there are MORE CHICKS. 

Two feral hens got into one of the flower pots behind my mom’s house and shared a clutch of 21 eggs. 14 of those hatched successfully, and the two moms realized they didn’t know how to get the nuggets out of the big pot. We had to scoop out handfuls of fluff balls and deal with the dead ones while the mother hens tried to sort out whose chicks were whose. In the end they settled on walking around together while the chicks run back and forth between them.

Adorable.

Especially because they’re not my problem.

Oh no, she’s still talking about flowers

I left the wilting hibiscus on an unused chair all weekend and came back to find them twisted up and dried. Nothing dries here, things just mold and decompose, so this is some kind of miracle.

Love them even more now.

My new plant blossomed the minute I wasn’t home, but Gavin got a picture of it. I’m stalking the next bud, which is only days away from opening.

Slowly working on a portrait of these beauties. Before they mummified. For now.

Fish hooks and flowers

If pandemic job duties were a steel trap, I’d have chewed my own leg off by now. We’re all daydreaming about radical career changes.

“There is a new forensic anthropology program at the university,” I told my coworker. “I am going to take night classes and go work with dead people.” 

“See, that would be interesting. I always wanted to be a private investigator. Sneak around, catch people doing things.”

“You’d be good at that, you can run fast. I’d get beat up a lot. But I could probably win a fight against a dead person.”

“Some of those crime scenes can be pretty gross, though.”

A year in masks has taught everyone’s eyebrows to speak full sentences. My eyebrows said, pfft, I’m not even bothered because I’m a legendary badass.

Her eyebrows said, girl, I’ve seen you clean a toilet.

Ten minutes later she was handling some old picture frames for the film guys and got a rusty fish hook stuck through her finger. I did what any cool-headed forensics expert would do and freaked the fuck out. Ran around getting bandaids and pliers and wire cutters, handing them up to her on the ladder with my eyes squinched shut. We had to get the film crew’s medic (a retired PE teacher) to cut her off the wall and pry the hook out of her finger. “Well. If you were dead I could have gotten it out for you,” I said. 

I’m overqualified for a certificate in being an absolute weenie, at least. Put it on my resume.

And don’t use fish hooks to hang certificate frames, ffs.

Getting weird about hibiscus 

Doing the damn thing, because if I’m going to be painting flowers I should be painting local ones, not grocery store ones, and by the time the plants are big enough to produce blossoms I might have painting time again (RIGHT?). Plucky is into it, because rolling in fresh dirt and digging up baby plants are two of her favorite things. 

PLUCKY NOOO 

Drove up to Mokuleia to pick up the plant I bought from the hibiscus nursery. The flowers look a bit like a parrot tulip, which I think would be a neat twist on a classic Dutch painting tradition. 

An example of a thing that is not a tulip

 

An example of 17th century Dutch tulip painting by Anna Ruysch (1666-1754)

While I was up there, Jill the Hibiscus Lady gave me a box of loose blossoms, and I was SO EXCITED. Took a hundred reference pictures, because they wilt in a few hours. 

All the flowers I can eat. I’m about to evict the ceiling molding that has been squirreled into the studio while I was at work and paint hibiscus until my eyes fall out. And then buy every single one of these plants and let them take over the yard. Prepare your drumsticks, Plucky.

Easter 2021

Edited to add: father in law w/covid got out of the hospital on Easter! He’s still on oxygen, but improving.

Bought a pie that looked like a ring of cats performing a seance. 

Accidentally molested a brooding chicken that I thought was too white around the gills and maybe egg-bound. Got a pecking that I very much deserved.

Find the chicken in my garden shed

Tie dyed in the yard under the banana trees. The gardenias are blooming, the dwarf lime tree has fruits on its branches, and I’ve decided to dig up part of the garden and get weird about hibiscus. One of my library patrons cultivates her own varieties of hibiscus, and I want every variety of double blossom.

Billy and Droopy pulled all the decorative chenille chicks and feather butterflies off the Easter baskets and left their wet, chewed up little bodies all over the floor. It was an Easter morning massacre.

There was a glazed ham, and lemon pie with sky-high meringue, and bocce ball where nobody got clocked in the face. Tick this one off as a success.*

The last time all my offspring will be in the same Easter picture during their childhoods. This swift and fleeting mortal life, I tell you.

Billy, chenille chick murderer

Droopy, chewer of flowers and fake butterflies 

My mother, both arms attached  

It happened again. 

Chickens are better at hide and seek than I am.

Lady, are you okay? Do you need help?

NO. FUCK OFF.

Occult pie cats

I found a filter that adds rainbows and cat hair for enhanced authenticity 

Free form experimentation

So that’s the last big holiday. The next big event is the boy’s high school graduation. I am not ready for that one. Time to knit more hats.

* As I was writing this, something was crunching under the dining table, and I found Billy and Droopy eating all the beef jerky out of my basket. Keeping it on-brand around here.

Finally, painting content

So my mother tore off all the tendons and the muscle on her right shoulder, and had to have them strung back up like guitar strings. If you’re going to do something, do it thoroughly, etc. I’ve been staying over for most of the week to help with her post-op care, finally enjoying a bit of time to paint. 

And I get my pick of post-op sympathy flowers, because I’m the one buying them for her. She’s lucky I’m not into painting potted cactuses.

Detail:

Glare and brush strokes

Proof of life:

A woman and her ice pack 

DIY nursing care

Got my second shot.

The vaccine distribution isn’t going as well in New York; mother- and father-in law (both school bus drivers who are not yet eligible) tested positive this weekend and Jon is in the hospital with his organs failing. It is not looking good.

- - -

Meanwhile, it turns out I am as good a nurse as I am a detective. Last week my mother got stuck in the floods and drove for 3 hours up and down the coast, trying to get her tiny car through the washed out roads, and the strain on her already-torn shoulder ligament caused it to snap free and slither down into her arm muscle. A surgeon has to fish it out, pull it up like a garter, and stitch it back in place. Since she is in terrible pain and has no internal cabling to lift her arm until then, I stayed over for a few days to keep her fed. Immediately gutted her kitchen, reorganized the cupboards, and installed a new oven. She accepts this as quality nursing care. Probably because she’s on dope.

Walked up to the store every morning and stopped to look down at my favorite drainage ditch. I always want to climb down the vines and look for secret entrances to the underground.

The rain has been activating the waterfalls on the mountain. They’re probably covering the entranceways to other worlds, too. I am much better at falling into ditches than climbing mountains, though.

- - -

Zenny turned 8. The age of awakening, when children start wondering if they’re the chosen one and seek adventure through reckless bike riding and spooky woods exploration. The age where they start reading good books and stop dropping the milk carton.

There was an enormous shepherd’s pie, a platter of corned beef, and a number 8-shaped cake covered in fresh raspberries to annoy the fruit-hating cousins. Rainbow Dash was hung from a tree and clubbed with a stick. Nobody got clocked in the head this year, but my cousin hit the thing so hard the piñata stick cracked in half and landed point-down in the dirt like a javelin in front of our feet. On the whole, I am not a fan of piñatas.

Exhausted. The teenager is babysitting his grandmother for a few days, and I’m back in my own bed again. Going to lock myself in the studio for a few hours next chance I get.

Detective librarian on the case

We have been a police station for hours and nobody has reported any crimes yet.

GUN DROP

We’re going to open up the book drop tomorrow and find it just completely full of guns. Look out, criminals (and also law-abiding citizens). I am the last person you want in charge of those.

I’d actually like to keep the frosted glass and the island decals, thanks.

They just took a photo of our rusty old sign and changed “library” to “police station” and kept all the dirt.

“A famous actor is coming today,” we were informed by the set manager. I tried to imagine who I’d be excited to meet. Hoped it was one of the officers from Wellington Paranormal.

Folks, this is the cast for the show:  https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10937180/

Oh well.

Owls and chickens

Okay, I'm doing a free trial of Noom because the relentless mysterious advertising finally worked, and the first thing I did was try a soup recipe and explode a filling. These people are serious. They'll break your teeth if you don't log your meals.

We're still fixing up the ceiling and studio. There is a bit of a theme developing over here.

Upstairs/downstairs 

Electricians came through and wired up new outlets and a light in the studio. The electricians are the neighbor’s grown sons, and I accidentally left my flayed dick painting out where they could see it. Have fun speculating about what goes on in our basement, neighbors.

The spare rib I painted while I was coveting a painting of a pork chop.

Instead of a ceiling fixture for the new studio light, the teenager talked me into buying a smart bulb. And it’s great. It has dimmer settings and changes to any color you could ever want to light your still life. Just lovely. Until your kids get hold of the app and change it to strobing red. 

Plucky modeled under the warm light and listened to murder podcasts with me. 

Who killed those hitchhikers, Plucky?

(She says it was "Buck". It was only funny the first time, Plucky.)

The girl’s mittens are finished. She’s ready to visit her brother in New York next winter. And she plans to wear them until then, evidently.

 

 “Twilight hands” is the mandatory pose for modeling mittens

And I did actually paint in the cleaned up studio, finally. A little bit. And not very well. Sill counts, though.

 

DIY content

Tier 1b employee gets vaccinated

Took my turn sitting in a row of chairs to receive the first arm jab and knit for 15 minutes while they made sure I didn’t die. It was fine. The worst side effect was that I had to stop taking my daily doses of ibuprofen/aspirin a few days beforehand, and all the minor bodily pains I have been ignoring came running in to say hello. Turns out I’ve been having a searing chemical headache from the disinfectant we’ve had to spray every 45 minutes at work. Why have I been so grumpy? It is a mystery.

Knitting

My feelings about Rochester are still manifesting as hats.

Gokstad hat

Seeing the knitting, the girl asked for mittens. These checkered mitts have an “afterthought thumb”, which means I have to rip a hole open on the side and pick up all the thumb stitches, and I don’t trust the whole process so right now it’s a hand sock.

Finally finished my knit-along sweater. It is not flattering, except that it makes me look like I have boobs. Well, one, anyway. And very short arms. This is a Look.

Wandavision blew up my tv

Wanda broke the fourth wall a couple episodes early. As her powers went haywire, rainbow wiggly worms began raining down the television screen, and then it went POP and blacked out. 

Leif looked around at me. “Was that part of the show?” 

It was not. The television was dead. 

Put our masks on. Got a new tv. Threw the old remote into the drawer of old remotes*. Loaded Wandavision back up.

Just as Wanda got pissed and her eyes glowed red, Leif made a panicky noise and turned around with his hand to his mouth.

“My hair ith thtuck to my tongue!”

An individual strand of hair had knotted itself tightly around a single taste bud. This has actually happened to me before. It hurts, and you can’t see into your own mouth to see if it’s stuck to something or actually growing out of your tongue. Scary stuff for a kid. In the end, it took a flashlight, reading glasses, and a very sharp pocket knife to carefully carve the hair off his tongue without hurting his strangled taste bud.

WANDAAAA.

Studio 

Painting has not been happening. It is next to impossible to get time alone when your family is working and learning from home, which is why villains have lairs. 

My lair is downstairs. It is not great. Dust sifts down from people trampling the floorboards overhead, and the light from the ceiling bulb/cracked fish tank windows is terrible, but these are problems I can solve. It is time to get the lair in order. Then I can fuck off downstairs whenever I need time to myself and stop feeling sad about not having time to paint. I can make the time. Or I can hide a beer fridge down there.

So this weekend I went downstairs with a shop vac and mop, tossed out the junk people have been trying to sneak into storage, and installed blinds over the windows that are cemented right into the basement walls (wtf, Larry the Mason). Threw out a lot of dusty drawings and gessoed over bad paintings, so now I have a fleet of primed surfaces, ready to go. The electrician is going to install more light sources when he comes to wire an outlet for the kiln. 

ONE BLUE WINDOW, Larry.

Larry’s idiot children painted right over the door knobs and hinges to the basement door, so I took a razor and chipped the screws free, then took the hardware off and painted the door black. I have ordered shiny brass mortise knobs (the same kind as these - old fashioned with a key hole) and a door knocker shaped like an owl.

Yep, that’s a letter slot with a box affixed to the back. Send me notes when you’re hungry, kids.**

Now I’ve got to figure out how to install a drop ceiling with insulation, to catch dust and block the mind-splintering sound of never-ending lego rummaging in the bedroom overhead. But the room is at least usable for painting again. 

A few years from now, I want this studio to be a comfortable and well-lit space to host small groups for figure painting sessions. Mark it on the life goals list. It is a short list.

raise kids

get a dog

get a passport 

revisit old places/friends 

make ceramics

have a studio art group  

never go skydiving

buy a house

hang my work in a gallery show

buy an old truck

buy a slightly less old truck and maintain it properly 

 

There are things like “successfully grow roses”, “learn to braid bread”, and “make friends with a raccoon” that could be tagged on, but I don’t think I’ll haunt anyone if I don’t get around to them.

What’s on the list, folks?

* we have had one tv in 10 years, and it was a freebie. I do not know where all these remotes have come from. Remotes are like tribbles.

** I do actually have a comfy chair and a table with kids’ art supplies down there. Art is for everyone.