not long now

On one of my break-time walks last week, I saw that the public pool by the library has finally opened up for lap swimming during lunch hours on Fridays. Today I grabbed my backpack, walked across the street to the park, and swam like a fish in the warm water for half an hour. Showered off in the sunshine in the open-ceiling changing room, stuffed my wet suit and towel into the backpack, and walked back to work. It felt really good - the quiet loudness of the water, the sound of your own breath, the snatches of music playing from the guard station, the feeling of hitting a flip turn and smacking your feet onto the wall. I felt more like myself than I have in a long time. I'm even getting a faint tan. Maybe.

So, there has been a thing going on over here. A week ago my mother (a teacher) found a foreclosed fixer-upper next to her beach-side school, and we've been visiting with contractors and realtors, talking to banks and trying to get a bid in before traveling. Everything is up in the air, and my mother would have to sell her current place and live with us for months while the roof comes off and a new one goes on, but something might be happening. It's kind of exciting.

 

Yeah, the foundation is cracked, but that VIEW

 

Meanwhile, I'm in a big damn hurry to clean the house and get things repaired before sister-in-law arrives to babysit our cats - one of which has decided to develop diarrhea because I had to switch them all to a new brand of food after another of them developed an allergy and went bald. She won't notice, though, because the bathroom is painted, right?

Disclaimer: it was all coffee-colored before sanding, then it did the weird naked wood thing

 

Family leaves Thursday, I follow on Saturday. Still not excited, but maybe that's just adulthood for you. I'm feeling glad to be getting off work for two weeks, though, and that is close enough for me.

24 hour fitless

Nothing boosts your satisfaction with not going to a gym like getting a free pass to try out a gym.

A couple weeks ago I maxed out my dumbbells, and then I got chased by a toothless man while out for my evening jog around the neighborhood. Time to check out the local gym, maybe.

This will be great, I thought. I was a swimmer for years, and they have a pool. I will be so swimmy and fit, and then boil my butt in the hot tub.

I said this to the lady at the front desk while I was signing in for my free trial, and she cringed apologetically. "Aaactually, the pool is shutting down next week. And the hot tub. Permanently."

"Well, shit."

"Yeah."

I went for a swim anyway. My watch clocked me at half my high school speed, and I was feeling very sorry for myself until a nice little old man in flippers took the lane next to me. I totally kicked his ass in the 100m freestyle. 

 

When I got into the hot tub I turned off the swim setting on my watch. Nobody warned me that apple watches eject water by spitting it out onto your wrist, and I was not prepared for that. That is more intimacy than I am interested in.

There were no towel hooks in the showers. You have to walk naked from the lockers to the showers, and then track water all the way back to your locker to get your towel, and then change in front of strangers. I went for the towel-tent option and tried crawling into my clothes without exposing any of my bits, which is when I learned a very valuable lesson about poly-spandex yoga pants and wet legs. Embarrassing.

8am isn't the best time to judge a gym, so I decided to come back at 7pm to see how the after-work crowd behaved. It was wall-to-wall chaos. The weight area was a live-action gym meme. People were making up their own exercises. Men were getting trapped under free weights. Sweat was not being wiped off of seats. People were drinking cappuccinos while resting on the machines between sets.

After an hour trying to get on more than two machines, I gave up. I can spend the $350 annual fee upgrading my dumbbells and running shoes, instead. It is quicker to just run around the block or do a 30 minute video, and with fewer naked strangers and plantar warts. Toothless guys who chase you up the street are called motivation. 

And I am great at kicking motivation in the balls.

Spartantagonism

This week I learned that people who compete in Spartan races have a reputation for being assholes. I... don't know? My overall experience with the race was really positive. All kinds of people of all ages from all over the world were there, and they were really happy and supportive. There were thousands of competitors in dozens of heats, cheering each other on and helping people with injuries get to safety. If it really is an asshole convention and our race was an anomaly, I guess we will find out, because the Hawaii Spartan has been canceled this year, and it has already been paid for it, so we're looking at flying out to Seattle in September to give that one a try. (Well, the two competitive people will give it a try. I will be guarding the backpacks and eating baked potatoes again, because I like my kneecaps attached to my body.) 

I will take field notes and report if any assholery takes place. Unless it is me.

 

Countdown: 3 weeks to Scotland!

Waimea Falls

Waimea Falls. You think a hike to a waterfall is going to be a long, muddy, arduous excursion with a risk-your-life water adventure at the end? People falling off rocks and throwing garbage on the ground and peeing on trees? WRONG. Waimea has had enough of your shit. The path is paved. There's a shuttle if grandma is too slow. Garbage cans every 50 feet. Guard rails. Changing rooms. Cafe. Mandatory life vests. Lifeguards with bullhorns, because you assholes can't listen to the one thing they told you - don't swim under the overhanging rocks that might collapse and kill you. YOU WANT ANOTHER SACRED FALLS INCIDENT? 

It was amazing. Every stupid thing an endless crowd of tourists could get up to has been accounted for and neatly managed in a way that preserves the historic and cultural significance of Waimea Valley, as well as the habitat of the endangered moorhens. 10/10 family destination if you are, like me, a massive wet blanket trying to get everyone through a day trip without anyone having a meltdown or ending up on a stretcher. I tossed my soft white librarian body into the water and made it produce some endorphins for an hour. It was great. Did not even care when Leif lost his cell phone to the murky green depths of the pool, where it will remain forever with all the other cell phones and wedding rings and bones that live down there.

Also, they have peacocks.

Add it to the lifetime to-do list, folks.

but what if

After years on the adulting to-do list, we finally sat down with a union rep and got proper life/funeral insurance.

First thoughts: what a relief!

Second thoughts: congrats, you are one step closer to death.

Third thoughts: realistically, how likely are you to be murdered for the money? 

 

Better get busy being alive.

heed your own warnings

Okay, I admit it - I did not talk to my doctor, I just threw the rest of the pills away. He will be fine with this, probably. I'll tell him eventually. Like when he's staring at me over my next checkup results in October.

In the meantime, I have been feeling a bit more alive, and managed to do a sewing project with Zenny, glazed some pottery, scrubbed the floors, baked bread, and painted another side of the house over the holiday weekend. The painting counted as a functional workout, because I'm tired of fitness cult videos. I put my watch on "yoga" (because it does not have a setting for "house painting"), and got to work going up and down the ladder with a roller. Every time the kids came out to pretend to help, I warned them, "Paint tray! Watch out, don't step in it," and they did a good job of not kicking the thing over. I was feeling pretty good about how smoothly everything was going. And then, about an hour into it, I climbed down the ladder, hopped off the last rung, landed on the edge of the paint tray, and splashed it up onto the back of my legs. Spent the next 10 minutes rescuing every worm that came panicking up through the paint-soaked dirt, rinsing them off and putting them in the flower beds.

 

Don't tell the EPA. 

Happy start-of-summer, folks.

(I will leave a message for my doctor.)

it's not a rebrand if you don't have a brand

I paint slowly and post very little of it. I'm okay with this. After crying over wiring paintings in the parking lot of the Ho'omaluhia show, I decided to take a break. No gallery shows or sales this year, I said to myself. Just paint for pleasure and focus on travel and health.

And then I got an email about the big annual statewide art exhibition in the fall, with a $10,000 prize for Best in Show. It’s eating my brain. Okay, I think, so you walk into a gallery, there are paintings of flowers and fish and palm trees, and then you turn a corner and there it is - the Best in Show… WHAT IS IT? I don’t know. It’s big, whatever it is. I went to 7-11 and bought a bunch of local junk food and dumped it on my studio table, and I’ve been painting it for the last month (from photos at this point, because shrimp shumai don't make good still life models). A person with half a mind for marketing and self promotion would be taking videos along the way and making reels for Instagram, but I just don’t want to.

I also don’t want to paint landscapes. This seems to be a realization I need to come to over and over again. I can’t compete with nature. I don’t even like landscape paintings in my own fiddly “paint what you see” style, I like tonal minimalist landscapes with weird trees or giant robots in the mist. Give me eldritch landscapes or give me travel photographs.

So I'm just going to post my reference pictures instead of trying to paint them. If people only followed me on Instagram for paintings they were out of luck anyway, because I never post anything. My self esteem is still in the toilet, but I've started going for walks with my camera on my lunch breaks to see what I can see, and it's been a nice change of pace.

Maybe the Best in Show piece is a photo, who knows? I have decided to stop thinking about it, I'll submit something if I feel like it.

 

We were short-staffed, slammed with delivery, and then someone gave me a dying pigeon covered in mud and shit. I cleaned it off, warmed it up, gave it a soft dry bed, and watched it die in a box under my desk. Sometimes that is how it goes. Sometimes all you can do is give someone comfort, safety, and company while they pass on. And then bury them under a bush behind a taco truck. 

I smelled like dead bird, so I changed into a spare shirt that had been in my car for a few weeks. Realized I forgot my lunch again. My boss turned on the vacuum just as the phone rang, and I forced a smile, picked it up, and yelled, "Hello! [library name], can you help me?" 

FFS.

I realized what I said, corrected myself, "Oh, dear. I mean, can I help YOU?" And then, into the awkward pause, I explained, "Someone turned on a vacuum." 

Yes, that clears things right up.

It is going to be that kind of week.

Trying

Good news: I have not been run over by the construction mob.

That said, I’m kind of in a slump.

The past 6 months of hospitals, surgery, and medication have been rough on my body image. I feel disfigured in a really intimate way - I don't know how bad the scarring is, and I don't want to find out. I've been making a point to cuddle my kids, but otherwise I don't like being touched at all, I freeze up. The weight gain has been hard to stop, and slow to come off. I'm giving it another 2 weeks to see if I keep making progress, then I'm talking to my doctor about quitting the meds. I just want to feel like myself again.

Summer plans have been finalized, and I’m trying to get excited about it. Mike is doing certification testing at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, so we’ve rented a campus apartment for a few weeks at the end of July. Due to work obligations, I’ll be leaving a few days after the family, traveling alone, and meeting them there. I don’t mind solo traveling, I just hope I can make the trip fun and memorable for the kids, not knowing anything about where I am or how to do anything.

Going to do the damn thing, though, and give it my best.

opera

Leif spent a week in Texas with his robotics team for the World Championships (they placed 15th out of 623). His review of Texas was, "It was Texas." He did like Trader Joe's and In-n-Out Burger, though.

When he got home we went to the opera, because my mother bought tickets and wouldn't take "I almost got killed last time and I don't want to die" as an excuse for me to skip it. Leif enjoyed the orchestra, and I did not get in the middle of a high speed chase while driving home this time, so she wins.

 My college kid comes home in one week.