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My new wordpress blog has been eaten by malware. We are battling the infection.

Maybe I will end up back here, 8 10 years of broken pictures and all (damn, I've been talking a long time). Will inform.

Christmas 2014

Early morning. Coffee. Couch blanket. Boys tearing through stockings. Typically, all adults are on hand at this ungodly hour to witness the children’s excitement, but this year I was the only one who got out of bed. Santa ran out of candy and oranges on the last stocking, so mine was mostly empty and topped with a squishy bit of fruit from the back of the fridge. A cockroach ran out of my stocking when I looked into it. My days of holiday magic and delight appear to be at an intermission.

There were Skylanders and Legos and a wry stare-down over a package of underwear, but the runaway hit of the day was the electronic sound effects maker. Screams and farts and deep-voiced baby cries punctuated the early morning.

OH, THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING IN THE STOCKING THAT MAKES A NOISE, said Death. OTHERWISE, WHAT IS 4:30 A.M. FOR?

But it was a lovely day, with lovely booze, and a lovely meat pie to stuff into the cousins and a lovely plum pudding that caught the table on fire. I missed dessert, because of a dinner-time diaper blow-out and subsequent bath/trouser scrubbing, I did manage to watch the end of a Christmas Story and knit a couple of rows with a kitten down my shirt.

And then it was done, and it’s back to work again. I feel a bit sad and confused about it. I think the theme of 2015 will have to be “Redoubling my Efforts”. More running, more making, more cleaning, more cookie-baking, more feeling. I will make it happen.

“If you trust in yourself. . . and believe in your dreams. . . and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

Merry Grinchmas

Guess who is working all day on Christmas Eve? It is me!

Less-than-gruntled librarian on morning break

But then I will drive home through the snowy rain, burst in to cheers and giddy children and roast beef with yorkshire pudding, seize a glass of porter, and celebrate until my antlers drop off.

terrible monster hunter

December 23, 2014tempestpilot

and fail to read Signs of Great Import.

In the darkest part of solstice, the power went out. Rain that had been lashing the house and toppling trees suddenly fell silent. The darkness and quiet woke me, and I stretched my arms up over my head, dangling my hand between the bed and the wall. Something touched my finger. Something which felt very much like someone else’s finger – firmly, right on the tip of mine, boop. I rolled over, tucked my hands under a pillow, and my foot disentangled from the blankets. There was a pause, and then something – something like a finger – carefully traced the top of my bare foot.

“Gawd, stop,” I said.

And I fell asleep again as the rain roared back into life.

So there we are. Worlds converge, darkness falls, a creature stirs, and I couldn’t be arsed to defend humanity. Sorry, everyone.

new kitten

KITTEH

December 20, 2014tempestpilot

Milo

oh no

December 18, 2014tempestpilot

So the boy turned 12. After a day crammed with breakfast cinnamon buns, mini cupcakes for his class, and irresponsible candy consumption, we geared up for a feast at our favorite Chinese restaurant. I scraped the struggling infink’s hair into pigtails, made the boys change clothes because they had decided to roll down a hill in the rain, and warmed up bird formula. As the baby dove chugged its bottle, I said, “Birds. All these birds. At least nobody has tried to give us kittens.” And I ducked as imaginary thunder clapped, and said, “I RETRACT THAT STATEMENT.” But it was said.

At the restaurant, the cousins were late. We ordered gau gee and spring rolls and drank pots of green tea before giving up and ordering dinner, and were halfway through the Mongolian beef when the boys crowded in. “WE SAVED A KITTEN.” Oh no. Gavin lit up like a shiny beamy thing. This is a boy who is cool just by sheer lack of self-consciousness. He wears Doctor Who shirts, has glittery kittens on his folders, and he ain’t give a damn. Kittens are his thing. “The kitten will be mine,” he said. “No.” I said. “Yes, it will,” he said. “Well, ok,” I said. Damn. Outwitted.

The cousins wanted to give it a go at kittymommyhood, since they had saved it from the slavering dogs. But the cousins swell up like puffer fish when they touch cats. “We will bathe it every day!” they said. “We will wash our hands so much!” they said. But then they woke up with boiled eggs for eyes, and my aunt was on the phone, arranging for transfer of custody.

So now we have another cat on the already-unwieldy pile of cats.

I think. It may be a mongoose. We will find out when it tries to eat our faces while we’re sleeping.

Names are being debated. The kids want to name it Zhu Li, so they can yell, “Do the thing!” at it.

I am lobbying for Our Lord Sandra, because this is the time of year that baby Jesus may come a-visiting, and nobody is to say that Jesus won’t come as a little ginger cat just to keep us on our toes, and in my favorite YA series, Georgia Nicolson’s little sister gets hold of the Jesus figurine and dresses it up and names it Sandra, so there you go. Literary and seasonal.

Gavin turns 12

This boy

December 16, 2014tempestpilot

He is twelve. TWELVE.

Celebration picture dump:

commute

December 12, 2014tempestpilot

I am between audio books again, and so I have been listening to music, which is basically just me sitting with my ipod in my hand and clicking through songs every .5 seconds.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Ok.

I tried howling along to a sappy ballad, but my voice came out like a wheezy gasping thing. The vog is billowing in lovely misty masses between the mountains, strangling us all. Am probably slowly expiring from walking pneumonia. Began mentally formulating my final emails to loved ones. It is possible, I thought, that if I want to impart my beloveds with a sweet, sad remembrance of my life, I might want to use the word “bonk” a bit less. And anyway, email might not be the way to go for final correspondence. There is always the chance that you will shoot off your last words and then fail to die properly, and then be faced with awkward reconciliation – but with a paper letter in the mail, in the event of miraculous recovery, you still have the chance to kill yourself before it gets there. That is definitely the way to go, death-bed-wise.

I started looking for the idiot in the grey Charger who passes me every morning. He has a bumper sticker that says “Honk for Impeachment”, which must have been a handy solution to his always being honked at for driving like an asshole, and a sticker that says, “Spay and Neuter Liberals”. I have been tossing my hair and winking at him every morning, so that he will begin looking for me and bobbing his eyebrows, not suspecting that I am just luring him closer so I can punch him in the junk. It will be a complicated maneuver, with the highway and vehicles involved, but a person needs a cause to commit themselves to.

cookies

December 11, 2014tempestpilot

It is a well-established fact that I make big decisions by crying next to the litter box, and I tell the future by baking cookies. Christmas, I thought. Meeeeh, I thought. I will make sugar cookies shaped like whimsical cats and children, and decorate them with colored icing and mini M&Ms, and the children will rejoice in holiday magic, I thought.

Except I don’t like sugar cookies, so I used a mix instead of a recipe.

And my cut-outs ballooned into hideous creatures.

And I couldn’t find the food coloring, except for the dregs of some old yellow and blue.

And I used a sandwich baggie to pipe it on, and it splorted out.

And someone ate the mini M&Ms.

It did not take much rumination to read these ones.

Grinch cookies

Redoubling efforts. Will summon magical spirit of the season or grind my fingers into the biscotti trying.

to face, unafraid, the plans that we made

December 4, 2014tempestpilot

Things are pottering along. Mostly things around me. The real estate process threw up a sudden hurdle, and even though I knew something would happen and I was watching for something to happen, I still failed to vault the thing and ended up on my face, where I am now laying, dejected, despite the fact that the realtor came and disentangled the hurdle and assured me that it is safe to get up now. No. Just give me the things to sign and I will wallow here until everything is done. Safe, lovely wallowing.

Home-ownership.

In the meantime, it suddenly became December. The boy’s birthday is just before Christmas, and we realized years ago that once we pull his birthday presents out from under the tree, we all become immediately depressed by how much shopping we actually still have to do, so we bought him a mini tree of his own, to keep his impersonating-a-christmas-present presents under. He asked me to knit a tree skirt for it, which I immediately set to doing – because even though I hissed at the lady at the grocery store who asked if I could knit her a sweater, I am still mostly a giant sucker when faced with direct requests.

Also happening: the hairy baby bird is becoming an actual birdy bird. A zebra dove, specifically.

A similar thing is happening to the human baby – in that she is starting to look like a child version of her eventual adult self. And talking. It is weird.

And my mother is trying to die of diverticulitis, which I have told her not to do. December is off to a dicey start, health- and real-estate-wise, so this weekend I am going to shovel tree decorating, chocolates, and rummy eggnog on top of it and see if that helps at all.