Done, did it

Nonstop bots again! Gonna shut the blog down to shake them off, but popping in first to say WE GOT THE HOUSE.

Going to throw some mattresses on the floor and be hobos for a while, sand the studio floor, watch YouTube tutorials on how to fix loose glass and cracked fire bricks in a wood stove, paint, eat off a card table with old chairs from the shed, shovel two tons of snow, learn to wire ceiling lights, and figure out how to get rid of fallen trees. Really happy. Get ready, tight pants, this is what you were prepping for.

I’ll figure out how to post pictures again, meanwhile catch me on Instagram.

Robert

Our cousin Robert, a rescue helicopter pilot, was killed yesterday in the line of duty. If anyone tells Tish he died doing what he loved, I am going to punch them right in the face when I get over there. Nobody becomes a first responder because they want to die violently. He saved a lot of people over his career, and he was a funny, kind man. He never said anything cruel or stupid when I spent time with him, he was sharp witted and gentle mannered. He and Tish bought the house grandpa lived in for the last years of his life (and they’re letting Drunk Wife remain there now). Robert regularly rescued injured hikers from the Grand Canyon, and he went down trying to save people during an active shooting in Flagstaff. 

I’m so sorry for Tish, and their son. 

Also, I see you, bots, creeping back in. Kindly fuck off.

Hail the conquering hero

I got the Dutch oven, bitcheeees. Everyone in Burin has one of these now. You won’t trust someone unless you visit their house and see the blue pot of victory on their stove. And they offered double stickers because it’s the end of the promotion, so I got the brownie pan, too. Feeling like I have brought down a large animal for my village.

I’d post a picture, but Google has decided not to allow me to upload until I fulfill some magical combination of specific browser + data harvesting permissions, but it won’t quite tell me what they are, and I don’t want to anyway.

Call the authorities

You guys, THEY RAN OUT OF ENAMELED POTS. I have all the stickers, and the very hassled cashier said a new shipment is supposed to come in today or tomorrow, so now I have to go stalk No Frills and vault over all the storm-prep shoppers cleaning out the potato chip aisle and trying to get their frozen little hands on MY DUTCH OVEN.

Forward, through shot and shell, here we go into the mouth of Hell.

Pray for me.

Gouache

(Turned my blog off again because the bots were back.)

To distract myself from yet another real estate delay, I have been getting busy making friends at work. It’s going well. Except that, in one case, I’ve done that terrible thing where you forget someone’s name and then wait too long to ask, and now it’s weird. I’ll find the right moment eventually.

Them: and that is how my entire family died tragically.

Me: *nodding sympathetically* so what’s your name again?

Other than that, I’m doing great with the friend-making.

And I have been painting, slowly working on a couple of still life setups and illustrations for a picture book. I’ve started messing with gouache again on my lunch breaks because the almost-not-hypothetical house has a view of the bay, and I thought it would be nice to wake up with little 20-minute color sketches of the view, the way Nathan Fowkes painted the view from his office from day to day. Painting the same scene over and over will force me to work out my problems with landscape painting, probably.

(Not this scene, this is just the view from the parking lot at work.)

I got my first full paycheck, and… well, I knew it was going to be tight, so no surprises. But it’s like my grandfather always said, Happy is the man who earns one dollar more than he spends. I’ll make it work. It’s just as well; I finally tried to put on a pair of jeans I knew would be honest with me, and couldn’t quite get them buttoned up. It was inevitable, the way I’ve been enjoying things. I can’t afford new pants right now, so my “more” philosophy is going to have to include more frugality with the chocolate biscuits. And more snow shoveling. I guess I’ll be getting the soup when I go out for Chinese food with my coworker today. Joke’s on you, poverty, I like soup.

In unrelated news, the high school classmate who’s been in my DMs lives in Minnesota, and he got shaken down by four ICE agents right after the shooting, they scared the shit out of him while he was just trying to get gas. I might not be interested in dating ever again, but this kid and I used to sneakily hold hands while playing Oregon Trail when we were 14, and I am all the way pissed off. I hope every one of those racist cosplay assholes gets frostbite on their balls. They could be whittling spoons and baking bread and living a whimsical little fucking life, not harming anyone, and THIS is what they chose. Drive off an icy overpass, assholes.

Look at these cute little dysentery victims

Now I am going to go eat some soup and empty the rest of my bank account onto the lawyer’s desk so I can get a damn house to live in. Still happier than ever, but in an angry way, too. 

(4 more stickers for the enameled pot.)

All the world is Marystown, and the past is a fever dream

My family has finally settled on a day in July to have my grandfather’s funeral, and now I need to save up to go to Arizona, which does not feel like a real thing a person can do anymore. I traveled through a wormhole and popped out in a snowstorm in alternate-universe 1996, and now they want me to go to Arizona?  I am pretty sure Arizona does not exist in this timeline. Oh, but first I am supposed to drop off Zenny in Hawaii to visit the cats. HAWAII? What in the science fiction bullshit are they even talking about? I am very busy over here collecting grocery store stickers to earn an enameled cast iron Dutch oven, and they want me to do quantum physics to realign the dimensions. I am not going to Hawaii, it will suck me into its gravity well and I’ll be stuck there for another 30 years. The cats are going to need to learn to be time travelers.

I’ll see what I can do about Arizona, though. 

A storm blew through yesterday, and we spent the day baking bread, drawing, doing very bad yoga, and watching terrible movies. In the evening, the storm let up enough for me to go to the store, crawling slowly over the dark roads with sheets of snow skating across the ground and blowing up into whirling ghosts. It was really beautiful. 

It was still beautiful this morning when I woke up in a panic because I had slept past 7am and there were no school closure announcements on my phone. We threw food into our faces and I ran outside to excavate the car, get it warming up, haul the trash up to the bin, and grab snow-covered packages from the porch. In my rush, I lost my feet and went hammering down the stairs into a snow bank. I hope the landlord got it on cctv. My kidneys are mad, but I’m pretty happy because one of the packages was art supplies. The other was a gift from my mother for emergencies: a solar flashlight. I think she has forgotten that the sun doesn’t live here during emergency weather. I could club someone with it in self defense, though, so I popped it in the glove box. She also sent an electric kettle, an upgrade from the little burbling plastic one that came with the loft and spits boiling water all over my hands. In all; worth a bruised kidney.

I’m getting the hang of things at work, appreciating my tidy little library and cozy office even more after spending some time in the ransacked public library. I’ve been trying to find information on the regional library board so I can befriend/overthrow them, but they seem to be some kind of secret society that doesn’t like maintaining a website. I’ll be nosy and ask some questions when I pick up my holds and buy a big bag of .25 paperbacks this weekend. I can’t spend the academic budget on thrillers and romances, but I can spare ten bucks out of pocket to set up a nice rack of honor-backs for the students to read while they’re snowed in.

My cortisol levels are back to normal after years in survival mode. I’m sleeping the whole night without help. I haven’t woken up crying or fighting the air in a week. I haven’t started gaining weight yet, but I should probably start working out again; it’s easy to restrict yourself when you need something to have control over, and I’ve been over here making cookies and bread and chowders like the happy cottage witch I’m becoming. And I don’t intend to stop, so it would probably be a good idea to get some thermal hiking pants and go find pretty places to paint. I’m not looking for less anymore - less stress, less secrets, less calories, less worry about a hand on my shoulder at night - right now I want more. I want to feel full with good things. I will bake the bread and eat it, I will go walk in the woods and feed the crows, I will watch movies with my kid and read books and still have time to paint. 

I am getting to know this life and who I am in it, and I’m really liking it so far.

(14 more stickers for the enameled pot.)

wtfbbq

Note: I turned off my blog for a while because I was getting absolutely slammed with bots/crawlers (my stats don't show location, but they show unique/regular visits, time of day, and web referrals, so when I go from 10-30 visits a day - mostly regulars and folks clicking over from friends' blogs - to 400-800 unique visits at steady intervals, I know something's up). I keep my blog unlisted, but somehow they find me a couple times a year, so if I go offline periodically, it’s to shake them off. I just want to talk about my silly little life, not feed an AI machine so everyone’s college essays can sound like they were written by a middle-aged librarian who paints Internet memes.

 

Anyway.

The new house closes in two weeks, and we're flapping in the wind while the bank slowly processes the loan. I’m not stressing about it yet, but I am on the verge of stressing about needing to stress in the near future. Right now I’m just driving around listening to dwarf-core death metal, because I refuse to listen to any of the songs I listened to before the move. Or ever, really. And no songs about love. Or breakups. Or sex. I couldn't think of what was left after that, so for now it's screaming dwarves.

The library job is pretty nice. I am paid enough to eat, I have a comfy chair, and I go most of the day without seeing another living human. Except the nursing students. They rush in before class and print off every single powerpoint slide they've ever seen, go through reams of paper every day, talk trash about boys, and then leave in a swarm. One of them called out to me that she liked my cardigan, and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to decipher her tone. Nurses tend to be either superheroes or high school mean girls, it's hard to tell which.

I like them anyway. My ordering budget is tiny, but it's enough to keep me busy making long lists of books and then whittling them down to the best stuff. It's modest, I thought, but it's nice. 

And then I went to the public library. Folks, I was not prepared. 

I have worked in rural libraries for 20 years. My libraries had 4 computers, a printer nobody could use without me holding their hand, a copier, and a shelf of new books that always had some new books on it. At storytime there were always a handful of kids, even in Hana. That's rural life - it's not a lot, but enough, right? So I was really surprised to pull up to an empty parking lot. The library was crammed into the back of a classroom, shared with the school. There were donated paperbacks piled on the floor, books on the shelves with no plastic covers, some with hand-written spine labels. No computers. No copier. No new books. No storytime. No patrons. Just one (very nice) woman at a desk in the corner, who was a bit surprised to see me. Ok. This is the smaller of the two regional libraries, so I chatted a bit with the librarian and then drove down to the library in the next town, which was twice as big, and for a moment I relaxed. This library also shares with the school, and it has good furniture, nice rugs, tables, student art - but then you walk back to the shelves, and you see.. the books. Old books - like, I read these books as a kid in the '80s, and they were already old back then. Books in boxes on the floor, books stacked sideways on other books, books piled on top of the shelves, books spilled and knocked over and completely out of order. There were no adult and children's sections, the genres were all mixed together. The nonfiction was inexplicably split across opposite sides of the room, with fiction from the 40s-80s crammed on shelves in between. No section for picture books. Nothing new. Nothing mended or with protective covers. Book jackets torn, leather spines rotted, acid-cracked paperbacks. I couldn't stop myself - I started standing books up straight, shifting overcrowded shelves, getting everything back in the right place. In an hour, I had only fixed the 900s.  

So this is why they aren't hiring. The public libraries are being given no budget, no processing supplies, no help maintaining the collection; the government is not going to put money into a service nobody uses, and nobody is going to use a service that isn't being offered.

 

I got online and put in requests for a dozen new books from the city libraries. If there's one way to boost funding, it's to boost usage. If you want to support your libraries, use them. Check out a lot of stuff, request everything you like, make those stats move even a little bit. It's like I always tell my kids, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Something is better than nothing. 

I'm going to have to start bringing chocolate biscuits for that poor woman, though, because I'm not going to be able to stop coming every weekend until every book is in its right place. 

First week

The days are already lasting longer, and it's only been a week. The sun was coming up orange over the snowy mountains as I was driving to work and listening to music. I caught up with a raven flying along the highway and slowed down as I passed under it. It rode the cushion of air over my car, flying just above my windshield and flapping along to Djo at just the right part, and it was goddamn delightful. I leaned up against the steering wheel to watch it fly, just laughing.

Damn it Steve, this is stuck in my head like a fork 

 

I’m still having night terrors, but more and more my dreams have been getting just… weird. The other night I was in the John Hamm dance meme with him, Betty White, and Christian Siriano, who was annoyed that John wouldn’t put on a bustier because he was self conscious about his middle-aged nipples. This is what happens when you fall asleep under an electric blanket while scrolling Instagram reels. It beats my usual dreams of thin snaking tornadoes and secret passages in scary houses and crashing airplanes, so I’ll take it. (Those aren’t even the nightmares.)

The college is a 2-songs-long drive down the road, and I get to park in the staff lot by the good entrance. My office (I have an office!) is freezing, and not because I’m a weenie - the heating vents are broken. The campus handymen are a couple of guys with matching names who walk around everywhere together in neon safety vests, and they came in to look at the ceiling, cluck their tongues, and then chat with me about dumb local criminals for 20 minutes before leaving without fixing anything. I kind of love them. I got a little space heater to keep my hands thawed, it’s right cozy.

This week I was dropped into the deep end, with introductions and meetings and trainings - but it’s a small pool and I’ve been swimming for years, so I’m doing just fine, paddling around on Teams and getting into all the storage cupboards and learning to use the industrial label maker to print stupid labels for my staplers and tape dispensers. And do you know what colleges have that public libraries don’t - even very small rural colleges in the middle of the ramtops? PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO USE THE PRINTER. 

Zenny has been going to school and coming home a latchkey kid, and she’s loving it. She loves the other kids, she loves the pride stickers posted around her school with nobody being an asshole about them, she loves riding the school bus and having a locker like the kids on tv shows, and she loves having art and music and drama classes because they haven’t been cut from the curriculums in Canada. She’s learning French, throwing snowballs at her friends, and telling me animated stories about the kind of trouble her classmates get up to (sneaking ice in after recess to drop down boys’ collars, getting busted putting on false eyelashes in the washroom - a bit of a change for her from kids threatening to shoot up the school over badminton or blowing up their vapes in the toilet).

I’m not worrying about my dwindling grocery budget or my uncertain housing situation or my future publishing/art prospects, I am still just riding the relief of being gone.

First day of work

And it’s a snow day. I got up when the plow went by at 5:30am and got dressed anyway, throwing back a few cups of tea and checking the campus page every half hour for closure updates, antsy to see my new library for the first time. When they changed the status from “closed for the morning, update at 11am” to “closed for the day”, I threw my phone down, made banana bread, sketched layouts for a picture book, and went outside to shovel the stairs. I managed to coax Zenny outside just long enough for her to stomp fresh tracks down the pathway, say “wow”, and then run back inside to get under the electric blanket. It’s going to be an adjustment.

The sun came out and the snow stopped in late afternoon, and I forced the girl into the car to go check the mail and buy butter, because someone used the last stick for banana bread. I let the car warm up for about 10 minutes while brushing snow off the windows and roof, and learned that 10 minutes is not enough time to thaw power steering fluid. That is a good lesson to learn now, before I’m late for my first day of work or hulk-steering the car down the highway. Today we were only going down the road, though. There was no mail. There was butter. Poultry is scarce out here, but we found two skinny chicken breasts for soup and Zenny finally perked up when I let her detour us through the KFC drive through on the way home. Fresh chicken may be hard to come by, but fast food chicken sandwiches are in abundance. This must be their natural habitat. The power steering finally got its shit together and we zipped back home. 

I’m really happy, but I’m ready to go meet my coworkers and make some friends. WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT.

I have all the cardigans 

Marystown

The lady at the DMV traded my Hawaii drivers license for a Newfie drivers license in about 2 minutes, with a wistful sigh at the rainbow on my old card. “Well, I guess every place has its downside. Welcome home, my love.”

I wanted a truck, but decided that shoveling snow out of a truck bed didn’t look fun. Then I wanted an SUV, but driving them around the lot didn’t feel right. I ended up with a hatchback exactly the same size as my Jetta, because I’m the only adult keeping this kid safe right now and it’s better to handle something I’m familiar with. A Subaru is sturdy enough to survive getting plowed into a snow bank or pirouetting down an icy highway, and that is the main goal. If a cabbie could fit all our bags into a little sedan, we could shove them all into a Subaru.

My savings are gone now, but it’s better not to have monthly car payments as we head into poverty.

While I was in the dealership waiting room for about the 6th hour, waiting on insurance/registration/inspection things to get worked out, my phone buzzed. The sales manager looked up and asked if everything was okay when I accidentally snorted and swore. “Sorry,” I said, “It’s just that I have been gone ONE DAY, and I just got a message from a boy from high school asking, ‘SO YOU’RE SINGLE NOW?’” He laughed, “Ah, settle down, b’y, give a girl some time!”

By evening I had another message from a college classmate. For fuck’s sake, the scene must be grim at our age. Look, I meant to leave all the men in my past in another country and close the door on them forever, but then when I was packing I found myself getting into the Boyfriend Box and slapping a stack of old photos into my journal and throwing it in my suitcase. I’m dumb as shit and there’s no cure for it. Sorry fellas.

The drive from St John’s to Burin was 3 hours through craggy black rocks covered in snow, with fog rolling over ponds frozen in swirling circles of ice. It was really beautiful. I did not see a moose, except for the fiberglass one at Goobies. The radio stations crapped out around the halfway point, so this trip back in time is going to need a folder full of cds in the glove box for drives to town.

We made it to our cabin loft at nightfall. I’ve been ticking errands off the to-do list - bank account, PO Box, school registration, grocery shopping - and we slept through the New Year without the world exploding around us. I’m happier than I’ve been in years, just baking biscuits for two in a tiny oven in a studio apartment. We met our realtor and walked through the potential house (my mother is coming to the rescue to lock in financing, fingers crossed that it goes through in time), and it was perfect.

Everything is going well, and I can sleep again at night. The peace of mind set in immediately, the minute I got off that plane and didn’t have to go back. The internal quiet is such a relief.  

View from our kitchen

The floor of my maybe-studio that would need sanding and repainting 

My maybe-bedroom that I get to mentally furnish for the next month

The view from my maybe-back porch (yes, it goes straight down to the ocean, right out of a thriller novel about a single artist who moves to the seaside, but guess who always falls to their doom? The bad guy, so there.)

(Unless it’s the first chapter of a gritty detective novel, in which case it’s me, but hey, “do it for the plot”)