Dudley is still alive. She’s a terrible specimen of a chicken, but she’s on antibiotics now and eating better. Can’t walk a straight line, but doesn’t seem interested in dying.
The baby bulbul is finishing fledging and doing great, now that he’s got an endless supply of nutritional bird formula and all the attention a baby could want.
*cat is alive in the painting
A week from losing Gavin to college, Leif stepped into the role of resident teenager. We went through photos from the day he was born, and he fell over sideways, laughing at his unflattering newborn faces.
"Wow, mom, did you ask dad if he was part gremlin before you had me?"
"You had a hard day! You almost strangled to death!" I said defensively. “I thought you were perfect.”
gremlin baby
And I still think he's perfect.
The boy is a comedian, a perpetual sound-effects machine. He gets solemn about how quickly our lives pass by, he’s kind and wry and thinks about people. He tells stories with wild gestures, hops on the piano to bang out a soundtrack, draws action-packed comics, and he's obsessed with Lego - so much so that he plans to get a degree in industrial engineering and work as a Lego designer in Denmark. "That's not going to happen, and I’m not buying him any more Lego, he has enough," Gavin said, because he is tired of stepping on them and listening to endless rummaging for individual pieces. Well, those jobs exist, don't they? Someone has to design those things. So I bought a bunch of Lego sets for his birthday and made everyone's feet and ears wince. Do the damn thing, kid. Or just enjoy them while you're young enough to be excited by them, that's fine, too.
Happy 13th birthday, baby boy.
Rescued another baby bulbul that fell out of the lychee tree and tried to get eaten by chickens.
Two days later, I stepped out of the car and almost put my foot on a lost chick. Picked it up, walked all around the library looking for a hen with small chicks, couldn’t find her, and now I’ve got a ward of the state in a quarantine box, napping on a hand warmer rolled up in a sock. Trying to determine whether he’s a late hatcher or a plague carrier before dumping him off with the other two orphaned chicks (ahem, and a baby bulbul) that my mother is already raising.
Baby birds warming under boobs:
So besides decaffeinating and getting weird about the stock market, I also ordered a nonfiring theater replica of the gun my mother was so in love with at the Kingman swap meet (which is out of character for her, but as a 4th generation Kingmanite, odds are it was probably her actual gun from a former life, which she used to shoot people when they asked her for a ride to Oatman). FedEx labeled it with the wrong address, stuck it on a boat, and three weeks later a box turned up at the neighbor’s house. The neighbor helpfully brought it over, Gavin accepted it, “Thanks!” and then he turned around and yelled into the house, “HEY, MOM’S GUN IS HERE.” Sorry, neighbor.
The kiln did not set the house on fire.
The dried pieces went in to fire a week ago, and this weekend we had a glazing party in the studio, covering the table with brushes and cups and smears of probably-nontoxic chemicals.
Glazed pottery looks terrible before it’s fired - the clear is opaque, the yellow is black, the blue is red, the red looks the same as the blue and you can’t remember which cup you dipped in - and then the all-day baking activates chemistry. The kiln cooled through the night, and in the morning I went sneaking out in my pajamas to crack the still-warm oven and peek in, feeling that early-hours magical-transformation anticipation for the first time since I was a kid tiptoeing down the stairs to look at the stockings. It was the most satisfying personal moment since I walked through the rain at night on Whitbey Island with an Elizabeth Zanzinger painting in my arms.
The pottery is ugly as all hell, but we learned a lot about how glaze behaves, and some of them surprised us with flecks of gold and deep shiny color. The kids cheered and made sad trombone noises as we went through them.
After work, I scooped the clay slop out of the fuckup bucket and spread it on a plaster slab to reconstitute, then wedged up a big pile of reclaimed clay and threw three decent mugs in a row. I don’t even know how that happened. Running your fingers slowly up and down a spinning cylinder and feeling it move into the shape you’re thinking of is like telekinesis. At night, in a basement studio with quiet music, it’s a good zone to be in.
Feeling really happy over here.
Zenny is feeling good, and confident her dish is the best one
And I've been reading finance magazines. For fun. In my reading glasses.
The girl is bouncing back and eating again, now that she's full of medicine. And she has some negative reviews to leave about Gatorade. "'Arctic' is not a flavor," she says."And electrolytes are not my natural prey." Kid, I have seen you lick the spout on the salt canister. More artificially flavored sports beverage for the rest of us.
The only unvaccinated member of our family was exposed to a confirmed case, and now we’re at the ER with a 103.4 fever because no doctor will see her and no urgent care will answer their phones.
Not happy.
- - - -
Updates:
The isolation room does not have a tv.
- - - -
RESULTS
Acute kidney infection.
As the ER doctor peeled off his layers of PPE, he said, “So, when do you think you’ll be having storytime again?”
Dude.
Maybe when you don’t have to WEAR A HAZMAT SUIT TO DIAGNOSE A KIDNEY INFECTION.
- - - -
She snooze.
The ER doctor/storytime dad did some research on kidney treatment for tiny little girls and prescribed an antibiotic that only lasts 10 days, but which she needs for 14 days. The pharmacist gave me a bottle of liquid antibiotics and then held up a bottle of powder and a little bottle of water. “The doctor called to say you are competent. After 7 days, you’ll need to add the water to the powder and shake it to activate the second half of the antibiotics.”
You guys, the doctor said I am competent.
At least enough to add water to powder and shake it.
We gave big hugs and kisses to the aunt and uncles and grandpa, and then ran for it without saying goodbye to Drunk Wife, who was smoking in the laundry room where she hides her booze. "Smell ya later!" I called as we drove away. Vicious.
Drove to Las Vegas at traffic flow speeds that made my hands go white and numb on the steering wheel. The Hoover Dam has been walled off on both sides of the highway since the last time I drove over it, I guess to prevent unpaid sightseeing/panicky drivers crashing at 90 mph into the dam.*
The plane was two hours late taking off while they did math and waited for the temperature to drop a couple degrees so we could actually get into the air. I suddenly remembered again that I don’t actually like flying.
But I'm home. Zenny lost and gained teeth, the chickens murdered my pumpkin plants, the lychees are ready to pick, and the cats immediately stole the expensive yarn out of my travel bag and slobbered all over it. I upended a cooler of Trader Joe's snacks onto the floor for the kids and then napped for most of the day while they sat on me and watched Loki. Everything is right where it should be.
And then I had to go back to WORK. What kind of world is this.
* I was not going 90mph. Speed limit was 65, I was going 69 to keep from being flattened by semi trucks, and that was quite enough thanks
You know you’re having adventure when you’re not having any fun, we always say. So we knew better than to set out for adventure in the morning, but we did it anyway.
“You have to go to Oatman and see the burros!” our cousin said. The town of Oatman was an old mine, and when the miners left they abandoned their donkeys. The donkeys survived and took over the ghost town, until years later people figured out they were still up there, going in and out of the saloon like they were tending bar, and shopkeepers set up as people came to visit and feed the wild donkeys. Now it’s a shabby little donkey town with tourist shops and a live gun show at high noon.
There are two ways to get to Oatman; a little stretch of uphill highway from Laughlin, or a tightly winding up-and-down cliffside road with no guardrails on the Kingman side. Guess which side we came from?
When we lived on the reservation, the trip to the grocery store in Chinle was along an unpaved cliffside road, and when the road crumbled in bad weather around blind curves, the wheels of our truck gripped the edge of the precipice in a way that gave us nightmares for the rest of our lives. And there it was. The nightmare is in Oatman, with full vistas of distant purple mountains just beyond your wheels, surprise donkeys around the blind corners and the bones of a hundred dead motorists below. There are signs all along the way warning motorcyclists that the road is not banked and they should try not to fly off the cliff.
“Fuck this,” my mom said, hiding her face.
Back at the house for dinner, Drunk Wife made a flippant comment about how she wouldn’t need to pay for an urn for grandpa because he’d come in a cardboard box, and my mother very nearly picked her up and launched her like a shot put.
We had to dunk ourselves in my aunt’s hotel pool to extinguish the flames shooting out of my mother’s ears. The stars came out, I swam on the bottom of the pool in the silent yellow underwater light, and it is time to go home.
Did absolutely nothing useful. Banged the table, declared that I needed a real breakfast, and loaded everyone up for a trip to the old Barrel of Crackers. I have never been to a Cracker Barrel, and was prepared to make fun of it, but then they sat me down in front of a pair of antique wooden sock blockers and I was filled with want. Started looking around at all the other old junk affixed to the walls and had the terrible realization that I was their demographic and they had hit the target. I hate that. And I bought a bag full of nostalgic candy to bring home for my kids. Goddamn it.
Drove over to Laughlin and rode the free water shuttle to the casinos. It was 114 degrees and the Colorado river was full of sun-stroked screaming people on jet skis. We cautiously fed dollar bills into the machines, slammed the flashing buttons arbitrarily, and cashed out the minute we made any extra money. I came out $5 ahead, and the sisters made about $20 apiece. My uncle smiled patiently, shook his head, and lost $7 on a milkshake. We win.
Went out to the Dambar Steakhouse with the cousins, and Drunk Wife was on her best wobbly behavior after getting called out at the last family dinner. Chalk one up for public embarrassment.
Vacation toilet selfie proof of life:
Cleaned the junk pile in the dining room, hauled the poop rug outside and scrubbed it until I smelled like a wet dog, and scanned a few hundred old photos to upload for printing. Almost fell asleep watching the fireworks go off over the downtown.
A snake slithered past my foot while I was hosing the rug off in the afternoon, and I couldn’t remember if the rhyme was red touches black, kill a Jack or red touches black, safe for a Jack, so I looked it up before running away. Either way, I think you’re pretty safe so long as you don’t grab it like a squeak toy.
(It’s red touches black, safe for Jack, red touches yellow, kill a fellow. This one was just a red and black groundsnake.)
Two more days.
