At least it isn’t a leash. Yet.

September 26, 2014tempestpilot

One of the immutable laws of parenthood is If You Make a Threat, You Must Follow Through. That is why most of my threats are ones that I can not reasonably be expected to accomplish. “Pick up your socks, or I will stuff them up your nose and use you as a swiffer.” “Get buckled up, or I am strapping you to the surf rack with duct tape and bungie cords.” My cousin, at the age of 3, had a moment of terror and collapsed around my knees in tears when I threatened to tie the kids to the ceiling fan and hit them with a stick. Gavin, also 3, cackled and said, “You hold the stick, and ’round and ’round and WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP.” He understands how this works.

But if you make threats like, “Put that down or we are leaving!” you then have to leave, and the smug child has successfully ruined your trip to the lumber yard. And if you make threats like, “If you keep whacking your head and having seizures, we are getting you a helmet!” well, you pretty much have to buy the damned helmet the next time your kid whacks their head. Which mine did. Again. Last night.

I got home from work and said, “Hmm, I mysteriously feel like having a glass of wine, which is weird because I do not like wine.” I was halfway through my glass when the man burst into the house, Zenny ran laughing into my arms, and he said, with the slightly dazed and smoking air of a man who has just been shocked by the toaster, “Yeah, you TELL HER what you just did at the store.” She did not, because she is 18 months old, but I deduced what had happened, using my keen librarian sleuthing skills*. She had lunged from her umbrella stroller while the man was choosing bananas, landed on the side of her head, cried, froze for a just second, her eyes dilated, the man scrabbled for his phone to call 911, and then she gasped and cried and went back to normal. Mike went a bit greyer around the temples. I gave him my glass of wine.

And then I got online to shop for helmets. Her doctor said it takes months and months for a noggin to heal from a concussion; she is risking seizures every time she falls from now until next spring – and we don’t have enough wine for that.

Baby safety helmets are ridiculous.

WHAT

NO

WELL… ok, this one is kind of – ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS?

Fine.

We bought the blue one. It says “SONGZHLONG” across the front, so there you go. I am going to find Gavin’s sneaker-wings and hot glue them to the sides like a Valkyrie helmet.

If it weren’t 92 degrees here, I would just knit her a hat. Something seasonal, with lots of padding.

YES.

And I still haven’t dropped off the box of stuffed animals I’m donating to the ER. At this rate, I won’t need to; I can just dole them out to her every time we visit the hospital. Sheesh.

* I asked what happened.

Mini-vacation and more trauma

September 22, 2014tempestpilot

“Well!” I said, standing at the door with our backpacks, “Whatever happens, it will be an adventure.” Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled.

I braced for the worst, wrangling three children through airport security, but they were fine. The rental car was so lux it made us all giddy, turning on butt warmers and scrabbling around in all the seats. We picked up a fourth child, one of the large boy’s best friends, and drove for two hours into the night, along the switchback cliffs – and the baby slept. It was a vacation miracle. I opened the moon roof and watched the stars and felt love for the universe.

Our cabin was perfect.

And the knitting spot was divine.

We met friends at the bay, I lunched with the new librarian over Thai food, and there were lobster sightings with the snorkel. The newest fad in these parts are handmade whips. Bull whips, made of duct tape and rope and whatever the hell. A modern take on the kind that were in fashion 80 years ago, when my great-grandfather had his eye taken out by one. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. This can not last. Trends are no good unless they get you laid, and there will be no hanky or panky amidst the threat of eyeball loss. In the meantime, it’s a perfect time to shoot someone, because nobody will even notice with all the noise.

We were overrun by pre-teens, and it was beautiful.

And then Zenny slipped and fell and smacked her head.

She was walking in the carport, following our friends’ dog with an outstretched hand, and hit a wet spot on the concrete. She went down and threw out her hands, but her head hit the ground in just the same spot as the last time. I ran and picked her up, and she started crying – which was reassuring until the scream froze, her eyes dilated, and she went rigid, jerking. I called to Mike, he ran to the landline to call 911 (there is no cell phone service), and we waited. It’s a bit of a drive from the health center, and there is just one ambulance. She went from staring and stiff to limp and unconscious, and we called to her and gently tried to wake her until the EMTs arrived. They stuffed us in the back of the ambulance and tore along to the airfield, strapping her to a board and trying for an IV until she was alert and screaming. While waiting for the helicopter to get in, they told me I couldn’t ride with her. I bent over her and murmured soothing things while she gripped my fingers, then they had her out of the ambulance and into the helicopter and I was standing barefoot on the airfield, sobbing. I took a shitty picture as they went, feeling stupid, but whatever – bad things need documentation, too.

One of my old library patrons who works at the airfield looked hard at me.

“… Holly?”

“Yeah. You probably don’t recognize me, because I wasn’t usually sobbing at the reference desk,” I hiccupped. He gathered me up and I cried on him.

They herded me into the office, I called my mother on Oahu, who texted Mike in the Dead Zone (texts work with wifi), and he rushed to pick me up. We drove for two hours into the night with no cell reception. My legs started drumming and my hands kept moving up to gather my hair, twist it, let it go. I wanted to climb out the moon roof and run to the hospital. I did breathing exercises and tried not to think about bleeds, swelling, secondary seizures, or brain damage. I skidded into the ER and could hardly tell them why I was there. “MY BABY. HANA. HELICOPTER.” They brought me in.

And she was ok. One of the nurses shushed me when I reached for her, because she had just gotten her to sleep after her CT scan. The doctors were embarrassed that the helicopter had left me. They hadn’t even gotten her name; her ankle bracelets said “baby girl, 1 year”.

 

 They discharged us when the scans came back normal. “Well, she’s very likely fine, the seizure was probably caused by post-concussive bruising from her previous fall. Anyway, we don’t have a pediatric neurologist on this island, so you’re just as well at a hotel as you would be here, really.” That is encouraging.

The only hotel that wasn’t full was the stupid fancy one. We showed up with our eyes like boiled eggs, and I threw out bloody gauze in the receptionist’s trash and asked her to cut the hospital bracelets off. She looked like she was considering calling the hospital to see if they had an escapee. Still, it was a nice suite.

Our friends drove the boys down in the afternoon, and we flew back in the evening, crawled into the house, and collapsed. My mother poured a glass of wine down my throat.

RUN AWAY

  So we are home. HOME. HOMEY HOME HOME. I am never traveling again.

Oahu put on the welcome lights for us.

At least, not until we can get one of these for Zenny.

Lake George of my own

 September 16, 2014tempestpilot

I drove home from work, listening to Stephen King’s Joyland. It’s a ghost story about a college kid working a summer job at an amusement park, and he isn’t there for long when he gets a Dear John letter from his girl. It breaks his heart to little bits.

“There were three breathless pages, mostly saying how sorry she was, and how she had fought against the attraction but it was just hopeless, and she knew I would be hurt so I probably shouldn’t call her or see her for a while, and she hoped we could be good friends after the initial shock wore off, and he was a nice guy, he went to Dartmouth, he played lacrosse, she -“

“- knew I’d like him,” I said aloud with the narrator.

“- etc. etc. fucking etc.”

I laughed.

Travel is imminent, which means I am ruminating moodily and listening to terrible music. Returning to the sites of former golden days is like holding a negative over the landscape, watching ghostly figures through the overlap of the years. Standing beside those ghosts feels intrusive and sad, but the kids are charging in and blazing their own imprints, so I’ll try not to be a complete turd about it.

Instead, I am going to go, and eat things, and confuse people by pretending I’ve been there all along and did not actually leave.

To do (UPDATED):

* swim in the ocean, instead of just laying on a towel cursing the sand – I did not do this.

* buy ice cream and cookies for any child in my company, especially if they are not mine - I did not do this, either.

* duck and roll to avoid particular individuals, in repeat of last year’s hiding-behind-rental-car prowess – wasn’t necessary, thank goodness. Couldn’t have taken it.

* hunt the wild Krispy Kreme - SUCCESS.

* get home without anyone barfing or getting in a fist fight – success, but next time will add “no injuries, emergency air-lifting, trips to ER, and expensive hotels in the middle of the night.”

Keep it short and reasonable, is what I say.

Inedible oranges

September 12, 2014tempestpilot

Mandarin oranges full of seeds are no damn use to anyone. They have been sitting around as a Time Piece; a long-term study in decomposition and the futility of staff room fruit bowls.

Update on my wandering-banshee fitness plan: have lost 1 lb, but have been banned from pacing in the house because it “makes everyone uncomfortable”.

Very supportive, family. Have snuck it in anyway, fetching drinks and brownies for people. Am not sure who is prevailing here.

Fitbit for zombies

September 9, 2014tempestpilot

I have been given a fitbit as an early get buff by your birthday present, and I have been trotting everywhere for the past two days, spurred by blinking dots. It even tracks your sleep – and that is where I laugh like a sad person, looking at the long chart of red lines that mark wakefulness. “5 hours 3 min sleep” it says optimistically, but no, there was not any sleep between those lines. The instant I got a device to track my rest, two of the kids developed night fevers and asthma attacks, and I only stopped administering medicine and cold cloths and inhalers at 4am, crashing for a restful 45 minutes of sleep before leaping up for the work day.

On the plus side, I logged 300 steps before 5am, so I am winning. The darling thing doesn’t even care if the next 9,700 steps are hollow-eyed foot-dragging staggers, because it is forgiving like that, and I am 32 oz of coffee closer to my daily fluid quota. Suspecting this is a relationship I will be good at.

The 2-hour commute makes movement necessary. The driver’s seat is shaped like my backside and I get tetchy when people adjust the lumbar angle. My phone is filled with dashboard cloud formations.

There are other, wonderful sights, as well. The other day a motorcycle roared around me, and astride it rode the best-looking driver I have ever seen; he had on a big black backpack, and across it in large white letters was the word LUNCH. I chased him for half a mile, but he escaped.

Working on maneuverability.

Too hot for this - FO

September 2, 2014tempestpilot

I took three shots and ripped the sweater off.  The rain is practically steaming when it hits the ground.

Erin Cardigan , from Vintage Modern Knits

Buttons! So many!

And ONE SOCK. FINISHED. The sock so nice, I knit it thrice.

Deflect, via Knitty

And I still have to make another one.

stickers, stink fruit, and MORE BIRDS

August 28, 2014tempestpilot

Took entire day to run automotive obstacle course and acquire expensive stickers that don’t even smell like anything.

Killed time at mall while the car was inspected. Zenny got in a fight with her stroller and lost, ending up with her feet on the seat, harness tangled around her knees, and head stuck between the back of the stroller and the underside of the cup holder, arms flapping in panic. Had to pry her out, shrieking (her, not me), and clean all the black stroller-underside dirt and scream-snot off her face with a butt wipe while people went in and out of Sears, shaking their heads. Was not a winning moment for motherhood.

House smelled like jet fuel. This was emanating from the 30lb jackfruit on the table, which we had been too squeamish to cut open before it rotted. My mother rolled it over the fence into the jungle under cover of night.

Adorable kid saved a baby bird from a very lazy cat outside the library, and I somehow ended up coming home with it. Am considering a picture book about bird rescue, with little illustrations of hand warmers and syringes and powdered bird formula. I’ll call it, “LEAVE IT ALONE, IT WILL BE FINE.” (Except, of course, when it won’t, and that’s when you need the other things.)

Baby bulbul, new household overlord.

Jackfruit.  Named for a reference in naturalist and physician Garcia de Orta’s 1563 book,Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, wherein he writes, “That fruit is jacked.” (Paraphrasing)

In which motion blur gives my baby scary needle teeth, and I spend the next 10 minutes fighting off Sam and Dean Winchester.

Reading: The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.

And things are happening here. (I am burying this at the bottom here because I am iffy about sharing.)

Dangers of cars

August 24, 2014tempestpilot

Went to Costco. Left dregs of frozen yogurt in car to melt in the beverage holder. Accidentally dropped the car charger into the melted yogurt. Cleaned it off with a butt wipe. Forgot about it. Tried to plug in ipod, and charger jammed. Seemed sticky still. Put it in my mouth, realizing just as I did so that I should have unplugged it first. Failed to electrocute myself, to Darwin’s annoyance.

Shoved that aside and grabbed my bag of dried mango. The day before, ants had gotten into it, so I spanked the bag to get them running for safety, left them to escape for a few minutes, and then put the bag in the fridge. When I grabbed it on the way to work, there were no ants. I was glad they had all gotten away. Except they had not gotten away. They had died and fallen down into the bottom of the bag, where I was now rooting blindly. I had a searing moment of sharp, peppery metal, and started salivating like a basset hound. Ants are not delicious.

Made it mostly home when a blue light lit up my rear view window. Pulled over.

“Your stickers are all expired. All of them. Who’s car is this?”

“… Mine? My husband’s? Both of us, maybe? I don’t know. That is embarrassing.”

To my credit, I got the glove box open on the first try. The officer helped me find the registration, because I didn’t know what it looked like. She seemed to relax. It must be comforting to realize that you are dealing with someone too stupid to operate a weapon.

So, you know, it turns out being the kind of person who will eat rocks is the least of it.

Dangers of staff rooms

August 21, 2014tempestpilot

It is a fact of human nature that if you leave a bowl of rocks out on a counter, someone will try to eat them. Usually me. I am the trumpeting vanguard of buffet tables and drink coolers and boxes with only one chocolate in them, because it saves everyone from shuffling and demurring when they really just want to eat the damn mini cupcakes or open the next layer.

So when everyone was staring into the bowl and wondering why there were rocks in the staff room, I just went ahead and put one in my mouth.

It is also a fact that when someone gets a mouthful of stale apricot disguised as a rock, they will still pick through the pile and continue eating them, just to be sure there isn’t something better hiding in there. As it happens, there was some sort of peanut butter marzipan, a crumbly orange fondant, and a bit of discreet spitting into a paper towel.

Still, nothing ventured. There are few rocks that will kill you very quickly when you suck on them. Arsenic. Uranium. It’s a safe enough bet that they won’t be in a paper bowl by the microwave in the staff room.

So – the socks. I added a bar of ribbing to the bit of cabling that will run across the top of the foot, and went up to a size large. IT IS WORKING.

Buttons and frogs

August 19, 2014tempestpilot

Because we are a family of squirrels, the perfect buttons for my ridiculously green cardigan were stashed in my grandmother’s button box. They were affixed by the half-dozen to little yellowed cards with 10 cents stamped in the corner and “safe for washing!” printed reassuringly beneath. Not coated with water-soluble film that will stain all your clothes and poison your children, it tried hard to not to say. I committed a terrible crime against textile history by prying the buttons off the little rusty staples and sewing them onto my sweater; imagining them traveling from Guam to Indiana to Newfoundland before hitching a ride in my mother’s stash and following us through Arizona and Hawaii – waiting half a century for me to serendipitously knit a sweater in just exactly the right color.

When I finished it and buttoned it up, I expected to be transported a few inches off the ground in a fountain of golden light. I took a crappy phone picture to commemorate the moment.

So that was nice. And the whole thing was loaded with so much sentimental weight that I should have known better than to expect the next project to be anything other than a complete and face-raking failure.

These socks. Woe-socks. Socks so tormented, they are practically setting moors on fire and climbing roofs in their nighties.

Firstly, I knit three inches on the wrong needles, and the sock was too small to cram my hand into. Frogged it, cussing.

On my second attempt, I knit all the way down to the heel before realizing that my math was wrong – so while the cuff was now bigger than my wrist, the heel was narrow enough to fit my toddler.

At this point, I decided to plug stubbornly along anyway, thinking that it might somehow get bigger through denial and optimism. Got almost down to the toe and then struggled it onto my 6 year-old. Howled in anguish.

Frogging something this complicated usually requires a bit of crying and a glass of bourbon, but it was only 8:30am, so I just looked up at the ceiling and thought about photoshopping my MLIS degree to claim I minored in Morbid Bibliomancy while blindly unraveling the sock and winding it into a ball of crinkly ramen-yarn.

I have cast on for the third time. I will win, sock.