Disaster and Dr. Pepper

First off, a special thanks to Mo Willems, who livened up this week's storytime when I read "Pigs Make me Sneeze" and made all the parents in the room cover their faces in embarrassment while yelling "AAAAH - AAAAAAAH!" for four pages in a row.

Anyway. The missing hamcat:

Two nights ago: "Um, when was the last time you saw Po?" Quick mental inventory, realized with icy horror that I had not seen the hamcat for at least 2 days. 2 days! I'm a terrible cat owner! Quickly checked to make sure I had not misplaced the children.

A third day went by, raining. At work, I imagined that my fat kitty was croaking weakly in the woods, soaked and injured and dying of exposure. In the evening I searched everywhere, calling and listening for answering meows or ominous droning flies. Gave up at dusk and watched the man fix the car. Suddenly, I heard it! RrrrOOOwwwllll, from the dense jungle beside the house! I started yelling, and Mike shot out from beneath the Volkswagen, covered in car oil, and ran heroically into the foliage; dropping into a gorge and disappearing with a yelp. We all watched as the banana trees thrashed violently while he tried to climb out; Gavin and the bad cat and the mean cat watched from the lanai, and me and Leif and the hamcat watched from the - HAMCAT! Oh, hamcat hamcat hamcat!  She was following us around all along, helping to look for herself. We picked her up and cried and kissed her and gave her cat food. Very emotional night. We left Mike in the bushes.

And now the car is fixed. I drove to work, singing along with Brandi Carlile and then suddenly swerving the car all over the road as I beat a nest of red ants off my legs. 4 days off the road, and the tropics have tried to reclaim the vehicle. Heading out to pick up the library's mail this morning, I borrowed a pair of fancy white sunglasses from the lost and found bin. "Ok, let's see them on you," said my janitor. I tilted my head and he made a sad sound. Got the mail, chugged a soda, and sang along loudly to trashy songs as I pulled up at the library. Slammed the door shut, belched in response to the beep of the car alarm, and looked up to see a patron laughing at me from the car next to mine. Librarian disguise breached! Damn it, and I had on dress pants, too.

In other news, furloughs have been arranged for Wednesdays starting in December. It'll be a Bob Cratchit Christmas.

Finished objects

Project update post.

I made a mushroom house. I'm not really sure why, now that it's done. It doesn't do anything. On the other hand, I was always rooting for Gargamel, so maybe it will attract a little blue source of furlough income.



Also, the Robin Hoodie has been be-tassled and be-toggled. Natural cotton, wooden clasps. I grafted the hood instead of seaming, planning to add a zipper and maybe lining.



One of my patrons took up knitting, and as I stamped her stack of requested pattern books, I offered, "We have a copy of Stitch n' Bitch, it has some lovely beginner's cable projects." "Oh," said she, "I don't like cables and all that fancy stuff, it looks like the stuff you see in stores, you could just go out and buy that. If it doesn't look homemade, what's the point?"

So now you know: snarled acrylic yarn = heirloom quality. :)



Oh, and did I mention that my baby is WALKING?

Tasty gnomes

 

We caught one!  

Didn't know their hats were so disproportionately huge, did you? Acrylic felt with interfacing is a motherfucker to sew. I've bound (using the amazing lazy-ass pillow technique) and started adding gold quilting to the kiddo's star wars/batman quilt. 

 

 

And knocked out another box bag.

  

And then we put on loud music and danced.

   

Real subtle use of the auto timer. 

 Have not done any illustration yet, but have ambitious plans for after bedtime.

waning summer weekend

We hit the scene at the bay for Statehood Day celebrations.

It was bright. There were flower arrangement contests and food and music stuffs. We left when the Sons of Hawaii blew out the generator and it started to rain. Weird Al was roving around with his lovely family and some scary frowning woman.

Back at the pointy house, I made waaaay too much fudge, and fixed my jelly by boiling it down with a handful of guavas I picked near our house. This involved dragging the stroller down the stairs, strapping in Leif, and running up the road before the cats could follow us and climb into the basket. I found a big stick to swing up at the branches, and, this failing, made flying leaps at the tree limbs and shook them until one or two semi-ripe guavas fell out.

Three hours later...

Yes! It jelled! Take that, Mother Nature, how you like being in a jar? (please don't smite me)

And for all that leaping and scambling? Someone at work today handed me a giant bag full of beautiful strawberry guavas. So I did it all over again this evening. Now we just need to make some bread, because we are breadless since the kiddo went on a toast bender.

In other news, I broke my no-axe-murdering-hitchhikers rule and stopped to pick up my epileptic surfer neighbor, who I am almost certain was heading to work with a diet pepsi can full of vodka. Am a good neighborly type, what with the ride-giving and the gossiping.

soup and mashed potatoes

Recently I've been eating a lot of canned soup, which is easy to bring to work, low in fat, low in calories, and high in sodium*. It looks very sad in a bowl, though. Today I am eating brown liquid with corn. Which tastes better than the glue I accidentally took a swig from this morning.

At work, I have ordered Julia Child's cookbook because of the movie coming out. My favorite Julia Child moment was shortly before her death, when Food Network hosted an all-star tv-chef Christmas party. Someone brought a boneless turkey stuffed with a boneless chicken stuffed with a boneless duck. As the turducken was carved (was sad to learn that the turducken was not actually a real animal), the camera panned across elaborate pastries, fancy stuffings, unrecognizable entrees and desserts. Then there was Julia Child and the host. The host asked, "And what have you brought for us, Julia?" And she held up a big bowl, "Mashed potatoes!" I love her.

*While at the doctor this week, the nurse took my blood pressure and said, "Whoa! Are you feeling ok?" My blood pressure is down at "barely living" levels, so I guess I can handle some soup.

1 year old

The little badger has turned 1! A year ago yesterday, Stephenie Meyer annoyed me into labor, and 13 hours later Leif was born a limp blue thing with his cord twice around his neck. The feeling of him solidifying into a firm living baby with his first breath is one that will never leave me. He's a baby born of a reluctant reconcilliation in the wake of heartbreak, and he has done more to heal our family than we dared hope for. On the news today the pictures of 1 year-old birthday kidlets were narrated with descriptions like, "she enjoys tickle-me-elmo and eating rice" or "he likes to play with his grandma and watch cartoons". Is this the most descriptive thing that can be said about their children? I think there may be more to it than that. This is Leif. He enjoys playing with cat food, eating toilet paper, blowing fart noises, sneaking up and yanking on his brother's hair, and nursing on just one side (am now amazing one-breasted woman). At 12 months, he is cautious about standing and prefers to power-crawl until he forgets to move an arm and face-dives into the floor at high speed. He can say [inconsistently] "dad", "cat", and "piko", and understands "not the catfood!" "stay out of the toilet", "wanna nurse?" and "be nice to the kitty". On the two-hour drives to town he croons himself to sleep and sings along with the radio. At night I sing to him while he drifts off nursing, and he strokes my cheek and shoulder with his chubby hand until it falls limp. I love him so much. Happy birthday, baby boy. 

  

We made brownies instead of cupcakes last night. I had an ambition be ultra-crafty like other blog moms and make a brownie tower with little handmade flags on toothpicks, but in the end we just stood around and ate them out of the pan. That is how we roll.

Library mobs

Proof that our library gets some action!

BOE council member calls the State Librarian a knucklehead:



I really wanted to run up to the top of the building and take a shot of the parking lot, but I figured I maybe didn't want to get my heels pegged in the roof and have 300 people watch my body hurtle down past the windows.

Went home and fell asleep fully dressed at 7:45pm. It was a long day.

Today we ended summer reading with a guest performer, Bobby Norfolk. To kill some time pre-show and allow stragglers to get in, I warmed up the kids by playing a CD of The Wiggles and leading a round of "Shake your sillies out". They all shook and nodded and jumped - except for one kid in the middle, who had his face buried in his hands in embarrassment for me.

Bobby goes all Gunnywolf on their asses:



Bobby and the kids:



Bobby chats up Weird Al, who read Mad Magazine through the performance:



I think Mike wanted me to come home with Al in my trunk. He's doing his workout again (Mike, not Al). The video hunk says: "Tip of the day: don't smash your face." This is the kind of wisdom I can subscribe to.

Want vs. Need

Gossip: the downstairs chain-smoking donkey-sex synthesizer-playing neighbors have been evicted! After being 3 months behind on rent and mooching food, smokes, and miscellaneous supplies from our epileptic surfer neighbor, the wife showed up at the landlord's house at midnight, drunk and high on Oxycontin, and he called the cops because she was "slobbering all over and I didn't know what the fuck". He told them to be out by July 1st, and they abandoned all their possessions and disappeared. They were discovered a week later, squatting in a bed & breakfast where the wife had been hired to change the sheets. And they had broken the B&B's generator. Cops were called again to throw them off the premises. They did not return here, and three days later the cops were called again to evict them from an illegal druggie communal living nest in Kipahulu. Then they lived in their car for a bit, reportedly leaving their kitten in the Buick during the days. Then, I guess when they ran out of floors to sleep on, they came back here and settled in like nothing had happened. The landlord marched over and asked them when they were getting their stuff out, to which they replied, "Oh, like, we have until next Wednesday, so we're cool." Landlord got really mad and waved their eviction notice and said he was calling the cops if they weren't gone by Sunday. That is why I am letting the baby bang on the floor with cat food bowls at 6am. Very excited about dragging the patio chairs out to the front of the house to watch the cops haul them away tomorrow.

And god help them if I ever see their car in town and find their kitten locked in it. I know they can't afford garbage bags to cover a busted window.


Laundry and materialism

One of Mike's jobs as stay-at-home-dad is to do the laundry. So yesterday, after I determined that I would be wearing a cashmere sweater, jogging shorts, maternity panty hose, a thong, and a black lace water bra to work on Monday, we stuffed the car with 3-months' worth of dirty clothes and took over the entire front half of the laundromat to do them in one shot. I got to see a skinny old shirtless man with chest hair that grew in stripes, and a man walking around with his hand jammed down his pants to hold his penis. We walked to the fabric store and discovered that they had set up a giant long-arm quilting machine for people to play with. It was like driving a machine gun. I loved it. Even Mike had to be pried off it by the saleslady. "It has lasers," he whispered as we were leaving.

"We need that machine," I told him as we folded laundry.
"Yeah, but it costs a fourth of what I earn in a year."
"Not if we quit our jobs and become world-famous quilters."
"Yeah! Then it would cost more than what we'd earn in a year."
Well, shit.

Following all this, we went to Costco and I tried out a Canon Rebel digital camera.

Have not felt such a tantrum-provoking surge of greed since I was refused the Optimus Prime action figure when I was 7. Must make it up to my childhood self by finding $900 and buying the camera. My sons need me to properly document their childhoods. 

I'm going to get that camera.

quilted by monkeys

Progress report.

Here there be zig zags:

The Anna Maria Horner quilt is coming along. Kind of having a problem with crookedness, owing to a small screaming person wrapped around my pedal leg. Hoping that gives it character later.

Stupid baby blanket. My first attempt at that fun, spontaneous, sew-as-you-go patchwork style has resulted in a hot mess. Will try to salvage it with broad colored borders to knock down the busyness. Thinking I am not a quilting prodigy.

Leif said his first word! Dada. Very original. I am still counting his clapping as a word. Also there was banana bread today, a stop at the farmer's market, pasta salad all over the floor of the car (not my fault this time), work on the book illustrations, and minimal shmoopiness. Also gossips: stupid chain-smoking synthesizer-playing donkey-sex neighbors are behind on rent. Landlord has been buying the guy canvases in the hopes that he can sell more crap paintings and pay him. Other neighbor gave them smoking stuffs (ahem) for which they have not paid and are pretending to know nothing about. A few weeks ago they left their kitten alone all weekend with no food or water, so we had to orchestrate a break-in to save it, and now the little thing is up here all the time. We may not have to move after all.

Memorial Day Weekend

More stripes on the quilt top:

Our basil has sprouted, in spite of Gavin helpfully trying to drown it. Maybe we put a few too many seeds in there... I don't know a lot about nature stuff. I like wild growth and overgrown gardens, maybe there's a book for the willfully ignorant gardener I can find somewhere. It'll be short; "plant, water, neglect, repeat".

Sookie has become a ratter, throwing rats all over the lanai, running through the living room with corpses, and then kissing my face with her little ratty lips. Po, feeling peer pressure, has started venturing outside a few steps, then gets scared, scrambles through the house on her tiny legs, poops in the bathtub, and climbs on me to nuzzle with her poo paws. Evidently I am made of an attractive wipey-type material.

Being a holiday weekend, most of the folks around here have opted to avoid a trip to town, and the general stores are cleaned out of meat. Mike came home with giant steaks, which were delicious even though I caught them on fire while he wasn't looking.

Ahead: very exciting stuff.