oh no a birthday party

The man and I have very different ideas about what having a home means. He sees it as a nice place to invite people over for drinks and card games. I see it as a fortress for escaping exactly that.

Aware of this, he waited until 2 days before his birthday to text me while I was busy at work and say, "Oh hey, I invited all my co-workers and their families over for a bbq."

For a hot moment, I earnestly tried to get down to the passport office in the hopes of a speedy deportation, but the desk was closed for the weekend.

Fine.

I was going to host the best damn bbq I didn't even want to be at.

On Saturday I hauled home a pile of meat and sausages. Mopped, scrubbed, bought new couch pillows, hid the rips on the leather armchair with a quilt. I drew the line at snaking the laundry sink and blasting the wasp nest in the eves of the house, on the grounds that I was handling food and just didn't want to, so the man spent all afternoon pulling vomitous gunk out of the drain and fighting with angry wasps in his motorcycle gear*. This seemed fair.

On the day of the event, I laid out big trays of pulled pork and carne asada, made a killer coleslaw**, chilled a variety of craft ales, prepped plates of appetizers - and DUN DUN DUN, all the co-workers cancelled when they realized it was more than a 20 minute drive. I sat on the new fold-out bench with my aunt and laughed into a glass of mango beer. If nothing else, big parties are good for spurring frantic attention to all the terrible tasks you've been successfully avoiding for months.

It was fine anyway. My mother dragged herself in from the foundry late in the day, ringing the little bronze bell she had sculpted, and we hung out discussing maritime serial killers over cake. The man played with his new homebrew toys, shooting everything in the living room with a temperature-seeking laser. The kids played bocce ball with the cousins until Leif pulled out his homemade root beer and made ice cream floats for them all. THIS is the kind of gathering I can handle. The same people doing the same things as always. Perfect.

Now we get to do it all over again in a week for Leif's birthday. *sob*

 

a 39 year old and his temperature zapper

 

beer aerator was a success

 

exhausted sculptor - how sweet is this celtic bird bell?

* On the subject of wasps, the internet says, "do not under any circumstances set fire to the nest". I ask you, what is even the point of the internet if it does not encourage you to shoot your own house with a flamethrower? Lapsing standards.

** Turns out the secret to a restaurant-worthy coleslaw is sweetened condensed milk. Kind of a lot of it. Just close your eyes and do it.


ACHIEVEMENT  but maybe actually failure

The best way to make sure nothing bad happens is to pretend you are fully expecting it to happen. So of course when I finally made it down to the passport office, they accepted my paperwork without even batting an eye. Well, with just a bit of eye-batting. And concerned squinting. And checking with their supervisor. And then shrugging. "Weeeell, it might be fine? But if not, you'll know in 2-6 weeks, and then the feds will probably contact you and -" she cringed elaborately. Success! Maybe!

After deciding I'd have to skip the painting workshop this year, disappointment kicked my knees out. I spent weeks slogging around with a mechanical smile and a weight in my chest. Gavin was excited by the prospect of traveling to Japan for his 16th birthday, and as it stood, I'd have to stay home and watch the chickens while the family went to Harry Potter World without me. The disappointment solidified into self pity and pulled my face down onto my desk. That was no good. To heck with it! Everyone should have a chance to travel this year, I will make it happen! So I threw it up to the fates; if I get the passport, I will join the family and visit Japan this winter. If I am denied, I will go to a plein air workshop in Portland and learn how to paint in the rain. If I have to get a green card, I'll start shopping for jobs in Canadaland. Lobbing a bunch of things in the sky and waiting for one of them to fall back down and hit you between the eyes is better than being sad that nothing ever happens to you. Like aiming a flamethrower at a wasp's nest, you know you will get results, in one form or another.

deal

Fresh from a close encounter with what could have been a dead animal or a hunkering monster, I walked into the livingroom and made an announcement.

"I would like recognition for an act of bravery," I said. "I picked up a towel off the shower floor without knowing what it was. Although, to be fair, I did poke it with my foot first."
"A towel," said husbandface.
"Yes, a towel, but it could have been anything."
"Why didn't you have the lights on in the shower?"
"I don't use the lights in the shower. That is why I went a whole week shaving my armpits with a razor that had a lid on it. When I finally took a shower during the day, I thought the new vitamins I had been taking had caused rapid overnight hair growth. It was terrifying."
"A shower sounds good. I should go take one."
"Well, it's safe now."
"Because you picked up the towel."
"Yes. I won't be here to do these things for you after I am deported."
"Just so you know, I'm not moving to Canada until I learn how to surf. I finally have the boards now, after 15 years."
"The boards you pulled out of someone's trash."
"Yes."
"That is fair. See you in another 15 years."

This constitutes permission for me to pretend I've been deported and run off to a lakeside cabin in Ontario, I think.

to the blood

The summer is winding down. Already. There is kindergarten paperwork to chase, school supplies to purchase, orientations to attend, rotting lychees to rake up, new rakes to buy after snapping the old one on rotting lychees, and also I busted myself in the face with a box of cheerios. Kind of hard. Split my lip. I think I am only alive because I have a desk job. If I had been a lumberjack, I'd have died trying to catch a chainsaw with my foot by now.

Meanwhile, Plucky the Terrible Terror (our chicken) has emerged from her weeks of brooding and she has unleashed a plague of bird mites upon us. I've been wrestling her down to spray her butt with bird butt spray, and then stripping off my infected clothes next to the outdoor washing machine and running for the outdoor shower to decontaminate. So far, the new neighbors have not seen me do this - which is maybe too bad because it might deter them from letting their kid scream across the street, "HEY ARE YOU GOING TO INVITE ME OVER OR WHAT" while we are unloading groceries. Or from sending texts while I'm cooking dinner that say, "Hey he's really upset and crying, why can't he come play in your yard?" Folks, I don't have to supervise your kid because he screams. That is actually a reason I do NOT have to supervise him. I am cooking. And painting. And wrestling chickens. And stripping off mite-infested clothes in the backyard. Shush now.

At a push from my mother and our bronze sculpture instructor/longtime friend, I'm working on a textile-themed painting for an upcoming show. It's just Gavin wrapped in a knitted blanket on the couch, but that ticks off two 2018 goals: proper portrait of the kid; entry into art competition. I've got to get through the whole family in the next few months, and stop getting sidetracked by cats and horcruxes and flowers.

Another goal: get passport. This one is tricky, because in the 1980s you could come and go between the US and Canada pretty freely, and dual citizens were just kind of shrugged over and waved along, but at some point that all changed and citizenship certificates for foreign births became required, which HAHA I DON'T HAVE. "So just go for it and declare you're Canadian," my mother said. "You are trying to get me deported," I replied. "Meeeh," she said, reassuringly. So I'm going to show up at the passport office with my Canadian birth certificate and my American social security card and see where the cards fall. If I wind up at a holding facility in Vancouver, whoops. Will report. Maybe.

the poor little foot

In 1988, my great-grandmother typed out her memoirs and gave copies to each of her children. My grandfather lost almost everything he owned after grandma died, but he held onto this little book, and while visiting last week, my mother talked him into lending it to us for scanning. She sat in the Portland airport for about 5 hours on the way home, reading these grim and funny old stories. Great-granddad Casey died in his 30s, and getting to know him through Gran's writings has been really moving. And kind of horrifying. This bit is from World War II:

We’ll scan it and fix minor typos. If we can hunt down the artifacts she mentions, we can put in photos and illustrations. It's a nice preservation project.

IN THE MEANTIME. I realized that peeling tape was the best reward for finishing a painting, and got a little carried away.

oh no

It takes too many hands to peel that much tape while also taking an instagram video, and I got a long blurry shot of my arm before knocking the painting onto the floor. It's a learning curve.

Clean edges:

yessss better

Dialed it back on the tape while painting my mom's cat, Stella. 

Stella, the only striped cat in our collective family. 

Stella, a cat we have known for 5 years. 

The man walked by and looked at it. "Nice cat! Who is it?" 

WHO IS IT. Goddamn. Pet portraiture isn't going to be my legacy. And body identification isn't going to be his. 

"But Stella has black stripes," he explained. 

"Wow. Just wow," has been a phrase that has made me irrationally angry for years, but it has officially been toppled by folks who describe brush strokes as "juicy". I am immune to the word "moist", but "juicy" is just an abomination. I will take all your wows if you take your juicies back*.

So this week I decided to loosen up and just slop a lot of paint onto a piece of Duralar instead of doing a careful under-drawing. I was happy with this. And we will all understand and agree that it is in no way juicy.

delicious, fat, unctuous, luscious, non-juicy brush strokes

Messy paint looks better when you back up a few feet.

There we go.

I never did get myself down to the print shop to make giclees. And the plan to visit Whidbey Island for another workshop isn't looking likely. I will remain here, singing barnyard songs, painting fat cats, and daydreaming about another life as a forensic reconstruction artist in Scotland - one who probably wishes she were a librarian hobbyist painter in Hawaii. That is gratitude for you.

*LIES. I will take neither. Get out of my house.

midsummer

The 4th of July was quiet up in our parts. Evidently this was because everyone on the island was down in Waikiki, getting drunk, falling off of boats, and drifting out to sea on inflatable sharks. That is nature for you.

With the neighborhood to ourselves, we sat around in the yard, playing cards and peeling lychees all day. Our two trees are covered in fat red fruit, and after a bit of prospecting, I decided that the best bunches were hanging over the back of the house. I grabbed the picker, pulled out the ladder, climbed up onto the roof, and then danced around with my feet burning on the flaming hot shingles before jumping onto a scrap of roofing paper from the as-yet-unfinished renovation. It turns out that some sorts of roofing paper are actually covered in tar, and where the plastic had peeled back, both my feet stuck to it like glue. This was kind of like wearing shoes, so I thought I would just hop to the edge of the roof with my 9-foot picker and cut some branches anyway - but then Mike popped his head up over the ladder, saw what was happening, took my picker, pulled the tar paper off my feet, chased me off the roof, and cut the lychees himself. I was very probably not going to fall off the roof and into a tree with both my feet stuck together, but whatever. I have a bucket of lychees to eat now.

A bit later, while preparing hot dogs for the kids, I decided to be calorie-minded and fancy, so I defrosted a lobster tail that had come free with a grocery store coupon. As it happens, grocery stores don't give away free lobster tails without a reason. Cooked up, the frostbitten little flipper turned into a thick rubbery hunk of smelly steamed sea cockroach. The cockroach aroma might have had something to do with the actual cockroach that somehow crawled into the foil packet and boiled itself in butter while the thing was in the toaster oven, though. Either way, the bugs went in the garbage, and I patted myself on the back for having prepared an elaborate 0 calorie meal.

 if you don't count the treeful of lychees that I ate beforehand

Now the man is back to pet-sitting at my mother's place with the kids, and I have the house to my very own self every night. It is amazing. Have been living off cereal, loose chocolate chips, tea, oil paint, and BBC dramas. I paint all evening, knit for bit, and then go to bed with a book and a bunch of cats. I was born for this life.

 a life which does not include clearing the table

(There is a very satisfying video of the tape getting pulled of this painting on my instagram account.)

 On the needles: MORE DOILIES.

Little Flowers doily

Which I haven't seen since, because they're under cat butts.

One of my friends said they were maybe thinking about possibly having a baby in the next few years, so I immediately started knitting a baby blanket.

It that doesn't summon a baby to roll up in it, it should at least get the cats off my goddamn doilies.

backup plan

This weekend I pack up my portable easel and take my turn housesitting with the kids, raiding my mother's Guinness drawer and secret stash of Canadian chocolates.

Summer is my favorite and best.

Nope.

That's it. It's a one-part series of paintings. Installation #1 of 1. I woke up screaming from dreams about babies having their heads broken in. FINISHED. DONE.

The book was actually a lot of fun to paint, though. The darks look weird because the paint sunk in a bit overnight. It'll darken up and look right with varnish.

BACK TO PAINTING BUTTS.

a bad idea for a painting series

I brought my portable easel to my mother's house for a weekend of house-sitting duties, and then wandered around, feeding the animals and tidying up and looking for something to paint. She has birds and statues and lots of old books, but I kept coming back to a little tarnished pewter dish that sits on one of her shelves. Every other dish in the house has collected old pennies and hair pins, but this one is always empty, because nobody touches it. I loved the dish when it was given to us as a wedding gift - back when I thought I was marrying the right person, even if I felt some uncertainty about it and had embarrassing feelings for the guy next to him. Then everything came apart, and all the years since have been after. The dish is still sitting there, painfully earnest in the before.

You should paint it! 
No.
In fact, you should paint a whole series of cursed objects!
NOOOO.

But I took the dish down and set up my easel anyway.

Everyone has these sorts of objects, hidden in drawers or under the bed or at the back of a cupboard. Evidence of dead relatives, lost loves, unsolved mysteries, narrow escapes. This particular little bowl is just one of several objects that we actively avoid disturbing. The skinwalker knife is in the kitchen junk drawer. On the top shelf of the bedroom closet is a little blue foam toddler helmet with red Valkyrie wings sewn on the sides that makes me jerk back with flashbacks of my blue and dying baby. In a photo box in the hallway closet there is a bullet-shaped magnet that left a person-shaped hole behind it. On a book shelf there is a handmade kaleidoscope my father doesn't remember giving me, even though it was the only Christmas gift he ever sent and I had been sure there was a secret, mystical mechanism to it that might connect us like magic in a storybook.

Yes, this is a good idea, let's take all these loaded artifacts and HANG THEM ON THE WALL IN OIL PAINT, SURE. That is called "relic preservation". Or "grounding a negatively charged object". Or "draining your living essence".

Me painting this thing

And so I have been fighting for three nights with a pewter whiskey quaich. I think it is only getting stronger. And maybe slightly bigger.

Maybe I should be painting other people's cursed objects. I suspect, though, that people would be quicker to pose in their old undercrackers than to lend me their horcruxes.


Some progress:

another burn-your-own birthday

My mother had the plans laid and the tickets booked; the day after her birthday, she was taking the teenager and hopping a plane to upstate Washington to visit her dad. From there, they'd ride the rails across the country to Indiana for summer parties and sneaky property purchases (she has a friend who wants to sell some land, but I am still lobbying hard for the haunted graveyard). 

So on the day of her birthday, we met at Gyu Kaku, our favorite restaurant for letting the kids play with fire while we talk trash over a pint. 

Probably not one of my kids' fingers

When it was time for cake, I dug in my bag and realized I didn't have even remotely enough candles. Roman numerals were too hard to engineer with wax sticks, so we figured out the number in binary and jammed the purples in for ones and the green in for zero.

on this, the occasion of my mother turning 111011

Then our waitress offered to take a picture of us. Result:

modern technology is no match for a stranger's cosmic mandate to take blurry pictures

This was all going pretty well, until we went back to her place for presents. As soon as we put the kettle on for a nice pot of tea, one of the wild chickens that lives in the gulch behind her house dropped a baby out of the roosting tree (a chicken baby, not a human baby), and the little guy started running in circles, screaming his head off for every feral cat in the neighborhood to come eat him. We spent an hour chasing the chickadoo around bushes and through fences until we finally mesmerized him with a flashlight and nabbed him, tucking him up for the night in the mini coop my mother uses for her foster chicks. She rehabs wild birds that her school kids find orphaned (sometimes because they themselves orphaned the things), and right now she's got a couple of half-grown chicks clucking around in there. With the chickens tucked up to bed, we finally had a cup of tea, tidied wrapping paper, and said goodnight. As we left, my mother planted a kiss on my cheek and said, closing the door, "Oh, and you're taking my chickens while I'm on the mainland, BYE."

WHAT.

So now the teenager and his grandma are off on adventures, and my coop is full of surly adolescent chickens. Plucky the Terrible Terror is pretty cheesed, and I keep having to peel the cats off the sides of coop because the little nuggets look so delicious in there.

But it began paying off immediately. The man decided that it is more gas efficient just to camp out at grandma's place with the kids while feeding her cats, and I suddenly have the ENTIRE HOUSE to my ENTIRE SELF for ENTIRE NIGHTS. Am going to eat shrimp, listen to endless crime podcasts, and paint until my eyeballs fall out.

(Note to ax murderers: please disregard.)

synchronicities and dumb injuries

* Two mentions of the Lindbergh baby within an hour; listening to Criminal podcast and reading new Stephen King book, The Outsider.

* Also in The Outsider: entire page with just HOLLY written on it.

* Stepped on a roofing nail and was supposed to get a tetanus shot, but my doctor's office said to use the emergency room because they were busy. PFFFFTTTT, naw. Taking my chances with lockjaw, in the tradition of my disease-addled forebears.

* Got my finger stuck in a package of fresh strawberries and cut my finger getting it out. So probably also getting gangrene. Whatever, it's my left hand.

* Painted while the kids were sleeping over at grandma’s:

 in progress, with smudge marks where I rested my stupid hand against the page

I think I'm getting the hang of this thing

And I peeled the tape off the edges of the one I finished over the weekend, which is the best part of any art project, so say we all.

The thing I was trying to do with the red-brown background didn't work, and the blue is WHOA CLASHING. Oh well, throw it on the practice pile.

Also, painted out the gold on the self portrait. It was too much.

* First lychees are turning red on the trees. The sun is setting late. The evenings are warm. Someone mail me a box of fireflies and some baby rabbits, and this scene will be just about perfect.

studio renovation: building a shadow box

Now that I have another student painter in the studio with me, it seemed like a good time to build a still-life shadow box. TO THE YOUTUBES.

The whole project cost about $50, including paint and lighting. The man assembled it, and I painted. It took a couple hours, plus drying time.

In addition to the shadow box, I painted one wall atelier grey and attached a curtain rod to the ceiling for a portrait-sitting corner. It is very fancy. As fancy as a corner of a basement with a concrete wall and a chair stolen from my mother's house can be.

SYNCHRONICITY SIGHTINGS: Picking the wall and shadow box paint colors, I just walked through the paint chip aisle and plucked out the two swatches that best looked like studio greys, and the darker one, "Tempest's Teapot", seemed like some kind of cosmic sign. So I just went with them both. This was the third synchronicity of the week; two days earlier, I was listening to a Criminal podcast about the illegal trade in Venus Fly Traps, and arrived at the grocery store to find an enormous display of actual genuine goddamn Venus Fly Traps in the floral department. Since when does a grocery store in Hobo-ville Hawaii stock carnivorous plants? Since NEVER, that is when. The next morning, during a library lecture on ancient Hawaiian politics, I checked in a book and the computer popped up an alert that said "Waikiki" at the very moment the speaker said, "Waikiki". Was I supposed to buy the fly traps and bring them to Waikiki? In a teapot? At twilight? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? Nothing. But I noticed it, and that is called "mindful living" - which is different than "delusional thinking".

Anyway, I'm all set up now for properly precious and pretentious portrait painting. Please come visit me, folks, because my kids won't sit still and I can't paint my own self while sitting in the fancy chair.

Just some of the many poses you can consider holding for 5 hours solid

COMING SOON: I am looking into getting giclee prints made, which I'll be selling on an as-yet-to-be-made etsy shop or something. On my way to the print shop right now.