Day 1: Aberdeen Art Gallery

Our clothes were still wet in the morning. I went to get the ironing board and discovered an electric clothes drying rack, so we sat around in towels drinking tea while our jeans dried like beef jerky. I watched a pair of nesting seagulls outside the window. 

“Bring back good sticks!”

Finally dressed, we walked down to the shops when they opened and ate steak pies at Greggs, bought new underwear and warmer outfits, picked up groceries, and then dropped off our bags and walked up to the museum. By day, the city was filled with shoppers and cafes and street musicians. A young man with a guitar was singing “Chasing Cars”, made better with his soft sweet accent, and I fished out a pound coin to drop in his case.

The museum was beautiful. I got my nose right up to a huge Waterhouse painting and looked at all the brush strokes, studied the Scottish landscapes and portraiture, and Mike left me alone to work while he sat in on a performance by the college choir that broke his heart with the high notes.

With sore feet, we sat down in a bookstore cafe and drank cups of chai that were served in china cups piled with foam and dusted in cocoa and cinnamon. I bought a Scottish art history book and some funny children’s books for my mother, Mike got three paperback mysteries set locally. We walked through an alleyway and found ourselves at Provost Skene’s house, so we took the free tour through the historic building and I almost broke a lamp when I tripped over it staring at the ceiling.

Before dinner, we bundled up against the evening wind and walked out to Mercat Cross to find one of the painting sites. We ran around the courtyard for half an hour, trying to figure out the positions of the original buildings with all the new architecture added on, and realized the well house statue was in completely the wrong place. Over cider and shepherds pie at a pub in an old cathedral, we found a small historic article explaining that the well statue had been relocated twice in the centuries after the painting had been made, along with a story about a massacre of rude teenagers who had made fun of some drunk soldiers posted at the barracks near the well. Mike was excited to find the next painting sites and see what had changed. I wrote notes in my sketchbook until I was about to fall asleep mid-sentence.

Our bags arrived (the airport driver laughed about how often he has to deliver bags to this apartment building in particular, confirming my suspicions that it is a little bit cursed), and we crashed with exhaustion onto the bed wearing clean pajamas. The cities here go quiet after the shops close at 6pm, with no traffic noise at night and just the most dedicated drunks left to hoot when the pubs close at midnight. Everyone is home and sleeping. It seems like such a better arrangement than our cities that bustle and honk all night. 

Tomorrow: a bus ride to the countryside to visit Fyvie Castle.

Still day 0?

*updated*

When I said I would edit for updates in that last post, I forgot that I don’t have cell service on airplanes or in the UK. It is WiFi only for me. Every trip outside will be a step back in time, nobody can find me. 

I can’t sleep on planes, but I can halfway doze with an audiobook in my ears and my hoodie pulled tight over my face like a cozy sphincter. When light cracked under the window after only 4 hours of night, I pulled up the shade far enough to press my face to the plexiglass and watch the sunrise. Far down below, the flat carpet of clouds broke open over snowy mountains and crackled glaciers in the pink light. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen. Until the person behind me hissed to shut the damn shade.

Being trapped by the window on a 9-hour night flight means you pee when the person in the aisle seat wakes up to pee. I went to the rear toilets and saw a crew member open a door disguised as a cabinet, revealing a spiral staircase that led up into the top of the aircraft. A small sticker on the door said there were sleeping bunks for 8 up there. Went back to my seat feeling like I’d caught someone coming out of a secret revolving bookcase. 

By breakfast I was too hungry to eat, which is bad planning on the part of the human body. Took one bite of eggy bagel and felt sick. Handed it to Mike, who needs about 3000 calories a day and had been going through our stash of protein bars like an opossum. Someone in the back of the plane was having a worse time than I was with the blood sugars and passed out on descent, so we all had to clear the aisle for paramedics to get through before disembarking at Heathrow. I sat by our next gate and drank a bottle of orange juice while watching people plug in their phones at a free charging kiosk and then just walk away from them. And then I watched as nobody stole the phones. That was nice.

Dead on our feet, we made it to Aberdeen, but our luggage did not. The bags took a different flight and were a day behind us, so there was less to haul on the bus. A very drunk man got on and started alternately hugging people and screaming about fighting in Ukraine until he got thrown off. Two more drunks were sitting on the stoop of our flat and gave us a bit of shit when they heard our accents, but let us step around them to unlock the door. The elevator was tiny and dark, and rumbled up 3 flights so slowly we laughed and said the rats in charge of hauling the elevator pulleys were doing their best.

The rental smells like cigarettes, there is a bouquet of dead flowers, old mismatched pillow cases on the bed, and rotting food in the fridge. We were dying laughing at every fresh horror.

After taking turns showering (the shower caddy fell on my head and the shower stall flooded because the drain was broken, but there were half-used bottles of shampoo in the cupboard), we smelled how rank our only clothes were and realized our toiletries were in our checked bags. Put the stinky clothes back on, wore them to a crowded pub for burgers, and then stopped at Tesco Express to pick up laundry soap, toothpaste, deodorant, and a phone charger. While checking out, one of the front doors of the store fell off its frame and crashed onto the floor. The employees propped it back up. We walked back to the flat, weaving around drunks and getting a hard eye from some of the youngest and brokest-looking ones, and I was glad I was wearing my crappy old Led Zeppelin hoodie and worn out purse, swinging a Tesco bag. 

Back at the flat, we stuffed all our clothes in the washer before realizing there was no dryer. We did not hang the wet clothes over the heater vents to dry, but hung them over chairs, because the last thing this day needed was for us to start a fire while dressed in towels in 40 degree weather.

So Aberdeen is in shambles, but it is home to a good art museum and a lot of historic sites painted by the best Scottish artists. We just have to fight the seagulls and drunks for our breakfast sausage rolls and we’ll be on our way.

Painting trip Day 0

Well, if I have forgotten anything, they have stores in Aberdeen. I fished out all our pound notes and UK coins, packed both my long-sleeved shirts, secured my passport, threw the kids out at school an hour early, got dropped off at the airport by sister-in-law, and now it is nonstop to the Pacific Northwest for a dinner layover. (Dinner is a protein bar, because I am not paying $20 for a hamburger. I have already been extorted for a Diet Pepsi.)

Boring carpets at HNL

Incidentally, there is a non-zero chance that I may get detained or deported on the way back, because my passport shows my place of birth (Newfoundland) and I have no actual proof I’m American. ADVENTURE.

(I am posting this now and will  edit it with updates until I’m over Greenland and confused about what day it is.)

Easter 2025

We were down to one kid for Easter morning, with the boy flying home from the robotics world championships in Texas. We dyed a couple of eggs each, making a huge mess of them with the foamy slop dye kit we decided to try. Surprise: swirling every color into something like shaving cream and then moshing your eggs around in it creates purple-brown mud. 

Leif came home just before dinner and dumped a suitcase full of beef jerky and Trader Joe’s candy onto the floor, then played Beethoven vigorously for 2 hours while everyone sat around playing card games and eating grasshopper pie. Gavin FaceTimed before he went to work, and we dashed him a steak and a pile of Insomniac cookies so he’d have something nice for the holiday. My mother and I lurked in the studio to talk about art, books, and cottages in Nova Scotia, and she made off with a mini painting and a pile of plastic dinosaur skeletons for her library. 

Good holiday, even though my stomach has been in knots about the trip. Which is TOMORROW. 

Photo dump (blurry me in pajamas at the end because I realized there were no pictures of me):

She’s outgrown the bunny lore, but still got us up at 5am

After posing like a gremlin for every other picture

Leif, barely conscious but holding out to play piano after being on a trip for a week 

Chris playing ‘taco cat goat cheese pizza’

“Don’t look at the camera, act natural”

Mom in her cute ribbon shirt

The painting she took home; a tiny master copy of a painting she saw in the Sydney museum that reminder her of me. (Been learning Blender to make these little frames)

Showing off my polar bear flannels

countdown

One week before international travel! Relationship:

1. The man lost the cat

2. The man decided the best thing to do would be to hide it from me and hope the cat turned up before I noticed

3. I immediately noticed

4. Busted the man with camera footage

5. Decided to call the whole thing off and move to Newfoundland

6. The cat turned up just fine the next morning

7. Wondered if I overreacted 

8. Stubbornly tried to wind a 400-yard skein of yarn by myself because I don't need a man, I am an independent woman who can fight off yarn-crazed cats with my feet

9. Ignored each other on our phones

10. Started sending each other funny tiktoks 

Now we are planning DIY for the kitchen.

Our therapist has some work to do this weekend. Sorry, lady.

Run away

Feeling both excited about the upcoming art travel, and very depressed about everything else. It's a confusing bundle of emotions to carry around, and I am refusing to look at it too closely because that just makes things worse. Waiting it out, instead.

One of the things I do to avoid things is to walk out of work at lunch, get in the car, and drive away. Yesterday I ended up at the beach nearby, walking around Haleiwa bay and trying to figure out which of the three flat rocks just off-shore was the murder rock. 

Story time: in 1785, before Kamehameha, Oahu was overthrown by Kahekili of Maui. He placed his own friends as chiefs (ali’i) in each region of the island, which pissed off the ali’i who were already here. The former ali’i up here in Waialua, a guy named Kahakana, decided to organize a coup, and secretly made plans for a coordinated nighttime attack to kill all the new Maui ali’i. Unfortunately, someone snitched and the uprising was stopped - except up here in Waialua, because everyone was running around on foot back then (no horses or wheels), and couldn't get up to the North Shore in time. Our guys went ahead that night and killed Kahekili’s buddy, Hu’eu. The rebels were murdered, and Kahekili even let one of his guys build the frame of his house with some of their bones.

This is where the stories diverge: in one account, to make an example of the ringleader, Kahakana’s body was unceremoniously thrown out onto a shelf of rock just off of Haleiwa beach. The people were forced to leave him to rot, and the new ali'i jokingly renamed the beach “Maeaea” ("the big stink") as the decomposing body fluids soaked into the sand. 

In another story, he was placed there respectfully by his people on a woven mat, and his body attracted fish and sharks, which the people harvested. The custom became popular and eventually victims were sought out to sacrifice and chuck onto the rock so that their fluids would attract sharks, as well. 

The only thing we can be sure of is that a dead body was on the rock after the failed uprising, and the rock was named “Hakakau Kanaka” (“the ledge where the man was placed”).

The rock is still there, but the one I think it might be has shifted position over a couple centuries and is a couple inches underwater now, even at low tide. The other rocks are a man-made barrier of piled stone, and a jagged chunk of reef that doesn’t look much like a ledge.

Two big outcroppings

The flat rock just off the beach, which seems easier to get to, 

but maybe a bit more sunken than it used to be

standing in the tide pools with the crabs, admiring the view

human dumplings bobbing in the bay

Thinking about taking a day off to practice painting on site. Future art/history dorks like me can use it as a visual record and see how the rocks change in another hundred years.

It's on

Tickets are booked, visa is approved, hotel is reserved, house-sitters are secured, and this thing is happening. After Easter it'll be a short layover in the Pacific Northwest, overnight to London, then a quick flight up to Aberdeen.

22 hours of flying makes time changes easy because your body doesn't know what the hell just happened, you just fall like a log when the sun goes down and your brain cuts circuits. 

I am going to eat every meat pie and try every soup that I see (my last trip basically became a soup tour, fresh soups are so good). And then I will remember that I'm there to work my tail off painting landscapes, my natural enemy*. The whole point of this grant is to get over my bad attitude about landscapes; I figured ancestral land and elderflower cider would push me through the learning curve. Also, I'm going to visit the university and make a cheerful nuisance of myself in the registration offices so they remember my kid when he applies to the engineering college (a few of the painting sites are on campus, so I'll be there anyway). 

My mother and aunt had a spring break visit to Australia to visit the Sydney opera house, and I took a couple days off during the week to take the kids on adventure. We couldn't afford adventure, though, so we ended up on a food quest, instead. There is a local restaurant (E.A.R.L.) that claims to have the best burgers on the island, so we drove all the way over there to confirm. Verdict: yeah, they were good burgers, but a burger is still a burger. We walked off the meal in the H&M next door, and by the time we left with all the clothes they needed, we could have maybe afforded adventure after all. (I got a cool jacket for my trip, though.)

For our quest the next day, I suggested visiting Paalaa Kai bakery to get donuts, but Zenny wanted to stay home and read her book, and Leif had a driver's ed behind-the-wheel session, so I went by myself. And then the cat sat on the box of pastries and smashed it flat. To console myself, I decided to dye my hair dark brown. I've never had dark hair, and I thought it might make me look more sophisticated, so I picked up a box of brown hair color and dumped it all over my head. Except it turns out you really have to look at the back of the box, because some brown dyes are for people with black hair. Guess how you turn black hair into brown hair? Yeah. Bleach.

So spring break was a bit of a bust. 

Wednesday, though, was a state holiday, and we spent the day in the sunshine doing yardwork and washing the cars. Leif had to detail my car for driver's ed, so I bought all the car wash things - sponges, brushes, drying cloths, wash, wax, leather conditioner, wheel shine, headlight de-hazer - and he spent 4 hours vacuuming, buffing, and even picking grains of sand out of the seats with tweezers. I heard him singing over the noise of the vacuum, he was in the zone. Glad the kid has pride in a job well done. The car looks a lot better than my half-assed habit of just spraying it with a hose and sponging off the bird poop.

While he was undoing all my vehicular neglect, I was repotting a few hibiscus plants and found another invasive Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle grub in the soil. I love a big shiny beetle, but these guys have been decimating all the palm trees on the island, including three on our street that are now just dead gnawed-up toothpicks. I couldn't squish it, but I tipped it into a flower pot full of water, apologized, and reported it to the CRB taskforce. Felt like both a good citizen and a narc. 

My chickens are not doing their grub-eating duties because they're brooding on imaginary eggs. One of them sat on a dud until it exploded (which is why we call them 'grenades') and she's still sitting on the broken shells - you can smell her coming when she sneaks out for a snack, covered in rotten egg. Plucky is stubbornly pretending I didn't take her eggs as soon as she laid them, and she's just sitting on dirt. It's fine, keeps them from annoying the neighbors for a little while.

There is a lot to get done in 3 weeks, but I'm getting excited. I've got the panels, panel carrier, historically accurate paints, a half box easel, new sketchbook, pens, and fresh brushes. I am ready to not be helping people print their taxes and find the toilets all day long.

* other natural enemies: board games, kid parties, the color green, salt water, and blue drinks

12

This year the girl hit her growth spurt, and her legs shot out the bottoms of all her pants. We had to start shopping in the smallest size of the teen section just to get jeans that go all the way down to her feet. She joined cheerleading, discovered manga, and groans when she’s asked to help around the house, so that’s all right on schedule. She’s a happy person, funny and bright, and the thought of anything coming along and dimming her shine makes me want to fight the world.

To celebrate, we went ice skating with her two best friends, ate out at her favorite restaurant, and did cake and presents at home. Leif was a solid big brother and held her hand on the ice when her friends took a break to eat pizza. They’re getting along better and better as they get older, and I really hope they stay close as adults.

Love these kids. Happy birthday, baby girl. Question authority, trust your instincts, check your sources, speak up when you see cruelty, stare down bullies, and let your weirdness shine. 

Also Leif said I need to write down this dumb thing I said over cake: “Right about now is when he would have gotten pregnant with himself.” 

I was going to type out context, but nah. 

Back to normal

Leif brought home a virus and got sick, too.

By the time the man got home, I hadn’t been to work in nearly two weeks and was running on fumes. At the airport, I tossed a piece of banana bread and a drink at him as he got in the car, and he said, “Wow, thanks! How did you know I’d be hungry?” I held my hand up like it was squeezing a melon, "I'm a WOman!"*

Usually, not much changes in the daily routine while one of us is away, but that is not what happened this time. This trip was supposed to test our relationship progress by giving him a chance to collect some wins, while giving me a chance to see if I was happier without him, and nature was like, well that’s obviously a bad idea, and flipped on SINGLE PARENT DISASTER MODE. 

I passed off parenting duties like a football to the face and slept for 10 hours. Went back to work, got weird about planning a weekly series of miniature art activities and a tiny gallery show with mini refreshments for summer reading program. My boss tried to nudge me into volunteering to organize a big art show for the adults, too. Nope. When he drops hints, I watch those hints fall right to the floor, where I step over them. Ask directly and I'll do projects outside my position description, but I am not volunteering; there are no promotions or raises for people who take on extra work in our field, only complaints and trouble. Glad he's on board with my plan for a children's mini art show, though.

The kids are better now, routine is back on track. I got my shit together for Lent (workout every day, knock it off with all the baking), the girl is turning 12 next week (birthday cake doesn't count), and my mother is traveling to Australia with her sister for Spring Break (which gets me off the hook for not bringing her to Scotland). Appreciating the good things as they come.

* In 1997 - 17 years old and unaware of the dangers of Florida Man - I decided to walk down the busy main road in Sarasota from my dorm room to the Dollar Store. I was wearing jeans, a hippie halter top, and my oversized letterman jacket, trudging along with my hands in my pockets, when I stopped to cross a side street. A man in a pickup truck stopped and leered at me, leaned out the driver's window, made a hand gesture like someone weighing a cantaloupe, and said in a voice like Cheech Marin, "You're a WOman!" No shit, I thought, and crossed the street. He followed me in his truck, pulled into a parking lot in front of me, waited with his head and arm out the window, and finally realized I wasn't a prostitute when I stomped past without looking at him. He waited an awkward beat and then drove away (my peripheral vision was dialed all the way up). I never walked to the Dollar Store again.

"I'm a WOman!" has been a running joke for so long, it's just part of our lexicon now.

edit: sorry, I had to turn my blog on and off a few times to shake a bot. Also, yes, I went to Ringling; I have a degree in Computer Animation that I never used because every single interviewer without exception asked about my plans to have babies, and one even went as far as to say, "We don't want to hire mothers - erm, parents."

A week off

The boy flew to Canada with his robotics team, the man flew to North Carolina, and Zenny immediately came down with a high fever. She has a history of seizures with fever, so I've had to keep a close eye on her and keep the meds on schedule, which has meant NO SLEEP. My brain can't shut off if it knows I have to get up in a few hours to check temps/medicine, and I've been keeping the bedroom door open at night to listen for sounds of distress, so the cats have been trampolining off my face every time I get close to sleep. My mother came up to watch the girl on Saturday so I could go to work and perform story time. Some weeks the story time group is small and sweet, with toddlers singing and clapping. Some weeks it is a huge mosh pit of screaming and biting, with staff scrambling to find extra crafts because we planned for 24 (the average number of kids is 22) and 60 showed up. It was the Mad Max kind of story time, and I ran for it as soon as the last craft was snatched up.

The boy's team won the Canadian regional, qualifying them for Worlds, and he flew home with a suitcase full of Aero bars and Smarties in the middle of the night. The highway was pretty empty at that hour, and I was screaming along to Black Sabbath to keep myself awake. He was waiting by the curb, sweating in the puffy jacket he was too cool to take off, and on the way home he kept me laughing with stories about how the robot jammed in a critical match and everyone panicked, the autonomous mode went awry and shot projectiles everywhere except the goal, and how good a hot shower felt after freezing to the bone. (It was 40 degrees. The Canadian teams were enjoying the warm weather in shorts and t-shirts, and our kids were in puffer coats, excited to run through every melting puddle of slush.) I love having him home. With the extra set of ears in the house, I was able to close the bedroom door and sleep 5 hours uninterrupted. I am as fresh as the day-old bread bin at the grocery store.

No red flags from the man so far. His brother flaked and didn't join them, but Mike and his sister have been making their dad laugh hard enough for his wife to get upset that they might rupture his aneurism. The man has MS, cancer, and ballooning arteries; he hasn't walked in 15 years, and he's spending the end of his life far from family in a VA hospital. Let him die laughing if he wants. A few weeks ago, their dad had talked to his sister on the phone about his favorite memories of them growing up, and how much he missed the apple pie and cheddar cheese their mom used to make on holidays. His current wife won't let their mom see him or call him to say a last goodbye, so MIL baked an apple pie and sent it along with his sister. When they sliced it up and gave him a piece, he leaned his head back and said it was just as delicious as their mother's pie. He cried a bit when they told him it was from her. That piece of pie said everything. I remember the good times, too. I love you. I forgive you. Goodbye. I think that is pretty beautiful. 

He gets back in a few days. I think it'll be a green light to book those tickets soon.