Last Day

Emptied the travel budget in the school bookstore. Fucking textbooks. Thank goodness for his Military History professor, who did not assign a book. Why are computer engineer majors required to take military history? They are the ones who make systems for guided missiles. I’ve been breaking out into song ever since learning this. “GUIDED MIIIIISSIIILES.” I’m four days short of sleep and running on decaf, this is my time to shine as an embarrassing parent. (Gavin is interested in autonomous cars, not missiles, and has strict instructions to thwart the rise of the murder robots if given the chance.)

I did not want my child to face his first winter without waterproof, insulated boots. We finally found out-of-season footwear in the dead animal emporium; the hunting and fishing store. Now he has sub-zero footwear that is also resistant to blood-born pathogens, perfect for wading in snow and the blood of your enemies.

I was going to claim this massive store as my post-apocalyptic bunker, until I realized I’d have to share it with these guys, along with about two dozen stuffed wolves. That is a lot of bodies to hold funeral services for while also surviving an apocalypse.

Survival boots! With teenage stink protection!

$500 worth of textbooks that don’t even come with covers, just pages with binder holes

After sending him off to orientation, we drove into downtown Rochester to find a proper brewery with Salvo, and the Rohrbach nailed it. They even have a view of the armory from the parking lot, which is an actual castle. An actual castle which is now screening Gojira. Armories are not as well armed as they used to be, I guess.

Love

Old people who spent an hour drinking and trash talking college loans and 90s cartoons

That vanilla porter

Castle of LIES

The boy is settled in, parents have been chased off campus, and it’s time to go home. He’s been texting me memes to soften the transition. Salvo headed back to Toronto, and we feel good that Gavin has an adult within driving distance in case of an emergency.

Heading back over the continent and the ocean. 

Day 3: move in

The campus is a mile long, surrounded by forest paths and filled with little circular courtyards and spiky sculptures to disorient you. My legs have fallen off. It’s a good thing my kid is going to be engineering microcircuitry so he can design my new antilock autonomous self-guided legs.

Move-in was basically us setting up his room while he set up his computer. I hope his roommate doesn’t need to sleep in darkness.

With a few hours to kill in the afternoon, we drove into downtown Rochester to visit the famous Genesee Brew House next to the falls. The view was beautiful. The beer was of a quality one rarely experiences in a brewery — a gas station, maybe. A late night run to a grocery store with $6 in your pocket. Hardly ever a brewery. It was almost enough to make us buy a Genesee beer glass just to serve sad batches of homebrew in. 

Instagram 

My panorama skills are not amazing 

Downtown Rochester. I want to go into those holes in the cliffs and meet some goblins 

It looks good, anyway. Hire a new zymurgist, Genesee

Salvo (one of our oldest friends and Gavin’s unofficial godfather) drove all the way down from Toronto only to get dragged on a terrible sweaty hike around campus while we looked for the orientation groups. We ditched Gavin for his icebreakers and hung out at the hotel to catch up on ten years of stories.

Salvo and Gavin in 2003. 

Long, exhausting, good day.

Day 2

Woke up unreasonably early and it was already 10:30am. What the hell, eastern standard time.

Driving around Rochester, the radio created a time warp by playing all the same songs it was playing back when we were in college and driving around New York as youths. The music cut to talking and after a minute Gavin said, “This is a weird podcast.” Child, I was feeling young until that moment.

Target was full of other parents charging around with carts full of dorm supplies, and other moms pressing warm clothes on teenage boys who looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. All the men in New York are wearing black jogger pants, so that is what I bought them. They complained about their ankles, but looked spiffy anyway. 

So much walking and shopping 

The boy’s first diner 

RESULTS

Two story Barnes and Noble! I thought they were extinct!

Sticky Lips Barbecue 

We ate very good food, hit Trader Joe’s for a bag full of snacks, and got locked out of the hotel room in our swimsuits. 

Amazing day. Rochester is beautiful and forested and full of houses that look like gingerbread. Screw dirt farming.

Day 1.5

(Saturday) Midnight: plane ride to LA. Napped for a few hours with a parka draped over my face. Gavin used me as a body pillow.

(Sunday) 5am: LAX. Navigated the warren of stairwells, empty halls, and half-constructed tunnels that have been unfinished since the first time I got lost in them in 1989. At least they’ve removed the curtains of plastic sheeting and the brief runs across open tarmac.

8am: paid $30 for three bagel sandwiches because it was literally the cheapest fucking meal option in the terminal.

10:30am: boarded flight to Philadelphia 

Noon: deplaned without going anywhere because the fuel lines were malfunctioning and they needed to remove an entire fuel tank from the plane. Watched people yell at the desk guys because they paid FIRST CLASS SO LET’S GO while we sat and drank mocha Frappuccinos. First class people are okay with exploding in midair so long as it’s on schedule I guess.

1pm: re-boarded and flew to Philadelphia. Drew in my sketchbook and watched Outlander over my neighbor’s shoulder.

10:55pm: Why is Philadelphia airport so big?! We had 10 minutes to get to the gate before our flight left without us, and had to sprint nearly a mile. Sent the boys ahead and jogged behind them like someone with the cardiovascular strength of an 80 year-old man and the pelvic floor strength of a 41 year-old mother of 3. Passed about 14 defibrillators, which were installed exactly for ding dongs like me. Did not faceplant while running off the moving walkways. Skidded in just in time to board the plane last. WE WIN. The fashionable 15 year old passenger next to me loses, because I smell like a goat. Sorry, kid.

(Monday) 1am: ROCHESTER. I don’t know what it looks like because it is dark. And cold. We have a sweet black SUV and we are pretending to be feds at the Taco Bell drive through. Our luggage was left in Philadelphia, so everyone is going to be wearing my pants until that gets here. (I am a suspicious traveler who crams all my belongings into one giant carry-on backpack.)

Tomorrow later today: exploration and shopping before checkin at the university.

Day 0

Dudley the chick has been re-homed with a chicken breeder. The babysitters have arrived. The house has been... sort of cleaned.

This thing has started happening.

Aunt Sue and the cousins are here to kick the kids into the car for school every morning

I have not packed my backpack yet. 

It’s a bad time to travel. My mother is sick, Zenny’s kidneys are still acting up, cases are surging and the governor is thinking of taking action again. 

But Sue is a police dispatcher and knows how to handle an emergency. 

And Gavin is so excited. 

Maybe we can sell up and buy a cabin near Rochester and live as hermits while painting ducks and trophy fish for a living.

Bird update

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.

6 more days until we pack our bags and bring Gavin to New York to fledge. I’ve got my travel sketchbook and a half-dried painting of a dead cat* to give to Sal, in exchange for a bag of mint Aero bars and Big Turks.

Having big feelings about this transition.

*cat is alive in the painting

Teenager #2

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.

Dept of bad ideas

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. 

It’s really a high quality prop, heavy and seemingly fully functional. It says it can fire flash rounds, and I’m too dumb/disinterested to know how that would differ from firing actual bullets, if anyone got hold of some and stuck them in. Part of me is suspicious it’ll come to life and fire a hole through the wall while I’m messing with it, so it’s in time out until I’m ready to pose it for a painting.

Add that to the painting queue, which starts with my friend's ex-husband's dead cat and ends in a November gallery exhibition. The show is themed “Maneki Neko”, so I’m gathering lucky cat figurines for a series of little still life paintings, which I can sell and then buy one of the giant scary porcelain lucky cats with a huge mouth filled with a bunch of tiny less-lucky cats.

Or my next opera outfit:

If I can paint with all these birds stuffed down my shirt.

First finished pottery

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

Kiln reveal

Okay, so now we know the yellow is terrible 

Everyone wants to see mold spots in their coffee 

Maybe a couple keepers here, but my wax design came out like a blorb 

Process: bisque, taped and glazed, finished mug

Clay slop turning back into clay 

Last night’s mugs. Nevermind the fingerprints at the bottom where I picked them up, that gets trimmed off later