4th of July and art repairs

I've never known what to do with the 4th of July, it wasn't a day we celebrated in Canada, on the reservation, or on Molokai. Oahu has a bigger military population, and people generally like beer, bbq & beach holidays, so the neighborhood clears out. I decided to make an apple pie, and if the oven is on I might as well make bread. I decided on Kings Hawaiian Rolls, because they are expensive - so why not make my own? 

The recipe calls for pineapple juice. I had a container of fresh pineapple in the fridge. Some part of my brain dinged up a warning - didn't I read something about the enzymes in fresh pineapple killing the gluten or yeast or something? Shouldn't I go get a can of pineapple that's been pasteurized? Shut up, brain, fresh is best, the stores are going to be packed with people getting beer and meat, and I'm not going out in that mess. 

Well, I killed my bread, and made an enormous bowl of gluey slime. I was not prepared to add another 8 cups of flour to a single batch to try to force it together into a ball, so I let it rise, mucked it all into pans, and made very strange biscuit-bread (pineapple enzymes kill the gluten, turns out). Now I have something to prove, and can't stop until I make perfect Kings Hawaiian Rolls. Even though buying a package of them would be much cheaper at this point.

My mother came over, made guesses about what 2 loaves of pineapple biscuit could be turned into (bread pudding? French toast?) and we sat outside chatting until dinner. We watched the chickens dig around for fallen lychees, and Plucky hopped up onto our laps so we could peel off the layer of dirt that had adhered to the sticky juice on her face and dried into a face mask. She's gorgeous now.

My mom took Zenny home with her for a sleepover, and I spent the evening moving a big concrete head around my studio, trying to find the right spot for my next painting. 

I bought the concrete head knowing it would arrive broken. All the reviews said so. But I had an idea for a painting using my new neighborhood florist, who specializes in locally-farmed flowers. Flowers around here are big and heavy, more tree than flower, so I needed a big heavy planter to hold them up. If it arrived broken, I figured I could just glue it back together, and the cracks would add visual interest. Well, it came in 3 pieces, but her face was thankfully intact, so I put it back together with industrial epoxy.

I can bullshit some symbolism about the cracks if anyone asks about it. 

While I was in mending mode, I took custody of two of my mother's paintings. I've been trying to encourage her to paint again, after she showed interest, but she's waffling. I think she's afraid she won't be any good at it after all this time. When I went to college, she took a painting class at the university and really enjoyed it, but they didn't teach varnishing or framing, so her unfinished paintings have been hanging on nails in the bathroom collecting dust and gecko poop since 1998. She needed to be reminded how much she enjoyed painting, and shown that her work is valued.

So I kidnapped the paintings, cleaned them, re-stretched one of them because termites had eaten the wood support, varnished, and ordered good frames. First one:

Such a difference! I didn't take a "before" shot, so imagine it dull and streaked with dirt, with raw unfinished edges. I'm still working on the other one, which was near a window and had more damage.

She took it home, happy, and then pulled out her paints, and set up an easel with a little canvas in her living room. She hasn't started putting paint to canvas yet, but it's promising.

At work, my co-worker has returned, and I lost the nice office and processing work. I'm back at the front desk, pointing to the toilets all day. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

Not cut out for this

(animal injury/death)

When I was 9 or 10, one of the rez dogs that hung around the teacher trailers attacked a porcupine and got a faceful of quills. We sat for hours cutting the ends and pulling them out with pliers, wiping away the blood while the dog shook and tried to stay still. We did what we could to clean him up and prevent infection, but rez dogs lead their own lives, and he had gotten what he needed from us. A few weeks later, he attacked another porcupine and showed up again with long brown needles all over his face. Edward, the school maintenance man, shook his head at us while my mom sat on the steps of our trailer and pulled the quills out. He said, "A dog who bites a porcupine will never stop, he'll go after them again and again, trying to get even." My mother stubbornly finished the job, smeared bacitracin on his face, and the dog ran off with the rest of the pack. 

A few weeks later, he was back again with hundreds of thin white quills in his muzzle like a dandelion. Wounds on top of wounds, infected and too sore to let us touch him, too sore to eat or drink. My mother stood outside and talked with the other teachers and Edward. She came back into the trailer looking grim. When she had to explain tough parenting subjects like sex or racism or homophobia or death, my mother just laid things out plainly and let me draw my own conclusions. “The dog won’t stop, so Edward is going to put him down.” 

“Put him down?”

“Kill him.”

“How?”

“With a gun.”

“When?”

“He’s taking him now, out over the hill.”

My chest clenched up, but I couldn’t think of anything else we could do. It was a 3-4 hour drive over dirt roads to the nearest veterinarian. We couldn’t afford to take him. And even if we could, he would just do it again when he got better. So far the other dogs he hung out with - including my dog, Buckwheat - hadn’t attacked a porcupine, but maybe they would if he did it in front of them. If we didn't do something, he’d suffer and die of infection, thirst, or starvation.  

Our couch was against the window, and my mom sat down next to me to look out. I don’t know if I looked, too, and saw Edward walking away with a long gun over one arm and the dog on a rope lead, or if I just visualized it into a memory, but I can still see it. I slid off the couch onto the floor and pushed my fingers into my ears. My mom put her hand on my shoulder. “I know. But this is the way they do things,” she said, and I could hear her, so I knew I’d hear the shot no matter how hard I covered my ears.

There was a long quiet minute, a small distant muffled bang and a sharp pain in my chest, and then a horrible relief that it was all over. I felt guilty about being relieved.

This is how it was. My mother rescued bugs as a kid, and later on she learned to save birds and kittens and dogs. Once she carried a rattlesnake out of the school on a shovel and the Navajo admin had to have a ceremony to cleanse the building because they saw her talking to it ("Don't you try to bite me, go home"). Before switching to teaching, she took two years of nursing school, so she can give injections, tape broken legs, and staunch blood. Smaller animals only survive half the time, though, and when they die they tend to do it at night. We woke up to a lot of dead animals. I have a harder time with rehabbing than she does. I feel panicky pain for bad injuries, and have nightmares about finding hurt, drowning, or dead animals in boxes or tied to things. Every day they survive is another night of nightmares, and every morning is a Hitchcockian walk across the room to look into the cage or shoebox or coop to see if they’re still alive. 

So I wasn’t too happy about finding another baby bird on Father’s Day. The best thing is to try to reunite it with its parents, so I spent the day climbing the roof, trying to get it back in its nest, letting the parents feed it while they tried to lead it up the lychee tree branches, but it tumbled down again each time, and wouldn’t stay in the makeshift nesting box tied to the tree. My mother came to help, but it wouldn’t accept bird formula or sugar water, so we set it on the patio table for its parents to feed for as long as they could, then cuddled it up at night in a little cage, nestled on warmers and away from the cats. 

It woke up dead. Mike took it outside to bury because I was having a hard time looking at it, feeling like I’d killed it. (Too warm? Not warm enough? Could I have gotten more food into it?) You have to remind yourself that all you can do is your best, and it's better to die warm, safe, and dry than cold, scared, and wet.

Then yesterday, over at my mother's house, the injured cardinal died. It had a traumatic brain injury and was partially paralyzed on one side, but she was giving it a chance to recover because birds can regenerate nerve damage better than humans. It was improving and seemed happy, but it must have had a stroke or aneurism in the night. 

For some reason it had me thinking about that rez dog and the porcupine.

It all makes songs hit differently on your morning commute.

I'm glad Zenny was away at camp this week, and the boys slept through it. I'll take all the nightmares.

20 minutes of dog ownership

I have been painting flowers. In the interest of keeping it local (and cheap), I have only been painting flowers I can find growing wild around the neighborhood, walking around with scissors down my waistband (for snipping plants) and wondering if I'd get in trouble if I stabbed someone with them in self-defense. Knives are not okay, but scissors shouldn't count as a deadly weapon, right? Doesn't matter, if some weirdo tackles me while I'm out walking, they're getting the scissors. Thinking wouldn't enter into it.

Zenny followed me out to find flowers the other day, and we were walking around the neighborhood, casing the gardens and talking about the legality of scissors, when a weirdo tackled me. The weirdo was a dog, though, so I caught him in my arms and just stood there while he panted in my ear and hung over my shoulder like a big yellow baby. Zenny started laughing.

"What do I do?!" 

"I don't know!"

So we walked home with the dog. "Hey Leif, what kind of flower is this?" we yelled when we got to our back yard. The boy came out and immediately ran back inside to get a tennis ball. Where did he get a tennis ball? All young people have a tennis ball kicking around somewhere in their room, I guess. The dog had no tags, but seemed well cared for, so after chasing the ball for a bit and having some water and a snack, we clipped a cat harness loosely around his neck and walked him up the road, heading for the vet to check for an identification chip. 

"Lead us to your home!" we told him. He did not. He led us to the house with yodeling huskies and peed on the fence, then he shook off the cat leash and ran down the road like an idiot. "I am not adopting a dog who can't help solve mysteries," I told Zenny, "'Where do I live?' seems like a mystery a dog should be able to solve." A green truck drove up slowly and stopped next to us. 

"Lose your dog?" the driver asked.

"No, we found him and we were taking him to the vet to see if he had a chip. Do you know who he belongs to?" 

"Nah, I just saw him earlier so I went to get my truck, figured I'd hang on to him and post signs." 

"Right on." The dog came running back to us with his tongue flapping behind him, so we picked him up and stuffed him through the guy's window. He turned around and drove away with the dog grinning in his lap. We walked home and saw the green truck parked in a driveway three houses down from ours, so if anything bad happens to that dog, we know where he lives. And I have scissors. He seems okay, though, I just didn't recognize him with a shirt on; he usually comes out to check his mail with only saggy gym shorts on, and years of dealing with the public has caused me to develop willful face blindness. It's easier to cheerfully help people who have been assholes to you if you can't be bothered to remember what they look like. It means I am absolutely useless when describing people to the police, though. No details or colors, just general vibe: "scary screaming man on a bike", "woman with no pants trying to poop on the stairs", "big, completely naked, thought it was a sasquatch", etc.* 

And that was our very brief taste of life as dog owners. We are not prepared.

*actual incidents

In other news, the kids have progressed from drawing to their first painting lesson with the online atelier program. 

Top: Zenny, Bottom: Leif 

Really pleased with how they did. Neither of them are clicking into obsessive mode and shooting off on a trajectory to become artists, but trying to learn a thing is all it takes to be a more interesting person. Being good at it doesn't matter as much.

Make your own entertainment

We feed the cats a small mouse-sized portion of Fancy Feast twice a day, and they are still built like bowling balls on popsicle sticks. "Nearly fat," is what the vet said at their last checkup. But then Finnegan sat on the scale while I was in the bathroom, and I saw that "nearly fat" had tipped into the zone of "actually fat". We love a big hunk of cat, but they need to move their drumsticks a bit more.

So I bought the cats a giant kitty hamster wheel. 

I knew better. I knew they would just pee on it and then use it to nap on, but the child part of my brain kept imagining cats running at cheetah speeds and then spinning around in the wheel like a centrifuge before flinging off like cat-shaped ninja stars.

It was the kids' job to train them to run in the thing. They tried using a laser pointer, and they demonstrated walking on it with their hands and meowing. Finally I heard the wheel spin, and the kids cheered. I ran into the room to find them holding treats out like carrots, just out of reach, and then rewarding them for half a rotation. Now the cats will walk on the wheel for 3 seconds and then stop and wait for a treat. This has been a successful training program, but not on the part of my kids.

We’ll work on it.

Update: one cat loves it and runs and runs! It’s the wiry anxious cat who pulls his own fur out. He seems happier and stopped plucking himself, so I guess it was a therapy purchase. The big cats lay around and watch him like a tv.

balance restored

Got up at 5am and kicked one of my dumbbells so hard I cut the top of my foot open, and the good news is that the blood offering seems to have ended the run of bad luck. The cat went bald again, though.

My feelings about what I want to share have been shifting, or maybe I just don't feel interested in things the way I used to be. I started blogging when I was 24, and every post was a bread crumb leaving a trail just in case the guy I secretly liked wanted to know what I was up to. 

"secretly" lol

Well, he didn't. I kept writing anyway, to pretend I didn't care. For the next 18 YEARS.

(Edited to add: it’s no use looking, I deleted the embarrassing stuff years ago.)

Young people have a lot of things going on. Grad school, babies, new jobs, moves, breakups, makeups, buying a house, renovation disasters, scary encounters.

And then one day, the friend group is gone. The kids are too old to tell cute stories about.* Experience means there are fewer funny mishaps and scary encounters. Adventure is going to Target with a gift card. The milestones are medical - and you know what happens if you talk about your brush with cancer? Strangers start searching your blog archives for “covid vaccine”, because there are fucking idiots out there.

Unless I take up a hobby like the people on tiktok who are sitting around in the backyard with trays of seeds on their heads to attract birds, not much is going to happen that's fun to talk about.

But this is MY boring life, so here's what's up:

Lost a few more pounds, went out to buy new pants (with a Target gift card!) and discovered that the summer styles are shredded acid-washed ‘90s mom jeans, denim bib overalls, crop tops, and dresses that are just sacks tied at the neck. If this is what we're doing, I can wear anything I want, I guess, so I ordered a hippie clown onesie, instead. 

I’ll save my gift card for the fall, when fashion sobers up.

Meanwhile, the family has booked tickets for summer travel in July and  I can’t join them because of work, and this means A WEEK ALONE. I am more excited about eating popcorn for dinner in my underpants and painting until midnight and having the house stay clean than I would have been about going on the trip.

The sun is up late, the lychee tree is covered in young little fruits, and it’s the last week of school. I love summers.

* As I was laying in bed typing this on my phone at 8:30pm on a school night, Leif came in and asked if I could bake a sheet cake for his class party in the morning. Did I jump up and bake him a cake? YES I DID. I still get to talk about my kids when they’re hiding giant sticks in my trunk (which is still in there, along with my collection of found-in-the-wild machetes), and making requests for “frosting-frosting, not ganache or fudge, 'cause it’s just for the kids in my class” half an hour before bedtime.

it's fine. IT'S FINE.

The bird survived! I drove across the island and got to my mother's house in the evening. The little bird was scared and struggling, but it calmed down when she picked it up, gently turned it over, and let it grab her pinky with its toes to see if the legs were broken. Both feet gripped her finger, and it could spread both wings on its own, so it doesn't need a splint for broken bones, although it's definitely injured. It accepted a bellyful of warm bird formula (very young bird, still had some rubber baby beak showing) and she put it under a heating pad to sleep the night. She texted to report that it woke up alive instead of dead, and had a big appetite, so that's promising.

I sunk all my good luck into that bird. It was after dinner time when I got home, so I found some sad salad in the fridge and ate it with the last three shrimp in the freezer. Did my fitness cult workout like a toddler being forced to put away blocks. The neighbor's son was blaring NSFW music to drown out Leif banging out Bach on the piano, and my nerves were fried. By the time I got out of the shower the duel had ended and everyone was settled down to their own activities, so I decided to get an hour of painting in to unwind before bed. Picked up my art stuff, went out the back door, slipped on a puddle, and fell down the concrete stairs.

When I came limping back in an hour later, Mike pointed at the mail pile. "Something came for you today." The something was an envelope from the post office, containing an apology letter and a torn scrap of cardboard that was the only surviving piece of the box of painting panels I had ordered a couple weeks ago. A sorting machine in Philadelphia ate the rest of it. 

But today is going to be a good day. I am going to throttle the goodness right out the day, goddamn it. 

Edited again to add: also I found my new teapot in the garbage because the cat threw it out of the cupboard and broke it.

edited because google still won't let me comment on my own posts: I'm fine, just busted my knees and elbows a bit. Probably helped that I was limbered up; one leg went flying out like Gumby all the way to the bottom of the stairs, the rest of me followed, and I went crashing down into pigeon pose on the wet patio.

rain and birds

It has been monsoon raining, turning the curvy downhill road to work into a white water river adventure. My kid went on a field trip to Honolulu with her class today, and hopefully they didn't have to get there by outrigger canoe. The dam reached spill point and flooded out the homeless encampment, but I haven't seen rescuers standing on the bridge with poles to fish out bodies, so they must have cleared out in time. If anyone has even checked. Half the island was stranded when Ka'a'awa flooded and shut down the only road to town, and my mother had to float her car across the bit where the ocean swamped the road, once the firemen were satisfied it had receded enough for a Honda to survive crossing. But do we get a snow day for all of this? NO, WE DO NOT. Somehow the power has stayed on, which means it's time for work, everyone.

Birds don't do well in a downpour. They get washed out of nests and crash into things with wet feathers. One of our homeless guys found a young cardinal who had been hit by a car and was flopping around in road puddles, so he put it in a box and sat with it at the library computer the entire day before showing me and asking if I knew any rehabbers. I took the box with the terrorized injured bird in it, and now I have to drive across the entire island to give it to the bird witch of the East (my mother). I hope he makes it.

Sorry, buddy, hang in there

Time warp

My college kid is home for the summer, and I slept the whole night for the first time in months. It was beginning to feel like he wasn’t real, just a dream of a fat little baby, a kid running on the beach, a teenager walking around with cats slung over his shoulders. The tech industry employment scene is crashing as AI has been introduced, and a lot of his classmates haven’t been able to get the internships that are required to graduate - him included - so we don’t know what will happen as they enter their last years without the co-op credits. Their academic advisor doesn’t know either, and just says, “uh, try again for next semester? Apply to more?” He’s applied to hundreds. Maybe the university will have to change their requirements, or maybe he’ll have to transfer to another university to graduate. It’s okay, he’s young enough to switch majors and do something else if he can read the writing on the wall (I would have, if I had a time machine to go back and warn myself). For right now, I’m just glad to have all my kids back at home.

Small time glitches have been happening. We went to my mother’s house for dinner on Sunday and found a strange car parked in her spot. Inside, we met two elves from Lothlorien - the nature commune in Indiana where we spent so many summers as I grew up, run by some of my mother’s closest friends. It’s one of those places where you can feel that natural kind of magic that exists in the world, with heavy sunlight, fireflies in the evenings, and raccoons that can unzip your tent and steal your marshmallows while you sleep. The founding members ran around mostly naked through the woods, building communal structures, tending gardens, and playing music. These girls were second-generation, with blue hair and gauzy tie-dyed clothes and witchy tattoos and little metal vape pens. They were in Hawaii for a wedding and stopped by with no warning, like visitors from ye olde 20th century, pre-cell phone. We put out a buffet of carnitas and taco fixings, sliced up the apple pie I brought, and caught up on stories over dinner. “The government finally found us, now we have to get rid of the composting toilets - which have been working just fine for 40 years, thank you - and put in flush toilets. Could be worse, at least it’s just toilets,” they said. There wasn’t enough time to hear everything in one evening, we all hugged and said goodbye when it started getting dark. It felt like we’d opened the door and walked into an Indiana summer, with old friends we’d never met, and it was a bit sad closing the door again and being back at home. The governor is making reluctant promises to give us hazard pay for working with the public during the lock down*, and now I am mentally spending my hypothetical lump sum on a chunk of forest by Lake George to start an artist’s colony in my retirement years. 

It could happen.

And if I’m going to start an art commune, I’d better be able to teach something, so I watched a 10-hour demo on Dutch floral painting with Carlo Russo, and then ordered the brushes and panels on his materials list. The birch panels he uses are from a small husband and wife company in Pennsylvania, and you order them by calling up, chatting with the wife on the phone, reading out your credit card info, and then waiting with no email confirmation or tracking number for the panels to arrive by mail, not sure if they’re even coming at all or if you just handed over your entire bank account to an outlaw. It is a 1980s mail order adventure, checking your mailbox every day like a kid who sent in cereal box tops for a prize (which I did once, and I still have the blue limited-edition boy My Little Pony, who was hotly fought over by all my friends so he could be put in horrible situations and then rescued by the other ponies). 

Also this week: the elementary school brought back their May Day program for the first time since the plague, and I walked down from the library to watch all the kids dance hula and twirl like little rotisserie chickens in the hot sun. It was really sweet, and I got a bit emotional seeing my first crop of storytime babies performing as big kids. Including my own, who is going into her last year in elementary, and looking forward to her first sleep-away camp this summer. 

It's just a jump to the left

Feeling time sneaking up on me lately.

* don't get excited, he's also talking about cutting our pay by the same amount to pay for the Lahaina wildfire recovery that he's been messing up

I have an announcement

I am back in my clown pants era. 

The stores are full of pants so big you could smuggle entire pizzas into movie theaters up your trousers legs. Pants your kids can use as play tents when you hang them in the closet. During the Revolutionary War, one of my ancestors smuggled rebel documents inside her petticoats, and I am ready to join the resistance. They’ll never know what we’ve got up there, ladies, let’s ride.

Edited to correct which dang war my ancestor was involved in. I went to primary school in Canada, okay?

Three Tables

One of my resolutions has been to accept the offer if anyone asks me to go to the beach with them, even if I really don’t want to.

And it’s a good thing to do. We drove up to Three Tables and I sat on the sand, watching my kids dig holes and throw rocks into the ocean. A plover swooped over the waves and landed on the sea rocks after the water crashed over them, catching a little fish and then flying away just before the next wave crashed down. It landed on the sand and fought with the little fish before eating it.

It was too cloudy to see the sunset, but the orange light on the ocean was pretty, and the street lights near the beach park glowed in the waves. Leif accidentally scooped a very surprised crab out of its hole while digging in the sand like a golden retriever, so he made a new hole for it and coaxed it inside. 

A couple days later I opened up the trunk of my car and discovered a very large stick crammed in diagonally, because teenage boys (and golden retrievers) can’t resist a good stick. It’s still in there, because I guess I like a good stick, too.