A couple figure paintings

After lopping my thumb off, a storm rolled in and blew out the power for half the island. We pulled out lanterns at the library and I sat at the desk laughing.

My evening walks have turned into evening trots that are quickly becoming evening runs. Partly because there is a van that has started following me and then zooming away when I start sprinting. They’re probably just looking for a quiet corner to deal weed on, but I have been changing my route every night anyway. I don’t have any pockets for self-defense items. Maybe I should stuff my bra with rocks or something. 

Anyway, I got some time to myself this weekend and painted. The wolves have been trying to eat me for the past couple of weeks, so it was good to grab some brushes and hold them back for a few hours. After painting on paper it was a bit hard working with the duralar again. It kind of kicked my butt a bit, but I’m getting a handle on it.

 

no good

Since the broken nose, we have had barfing, emergency dentistry, antibiotics, and then today I cut off the top of my thumb.

This is the time to buy scratch lotto, folks; doing our best to keep bad luck occupied over here.

Well, you don't need thumb-tips to paint motorcycles. Mostly.

Process pictures. You can locate the moment I realized the tail light was crooked - all the way at the flippin' end.

I have taped the thumb back together. The antibiotics will take care of the gangrene. It's sorted.

zenny breaks her nose

Got a call at work from the after-school program. "So, Zenny was swinging between two cafeteria tables and she fell down -" my heart tried to shoot out my neck and I made a sound like a kazoo, so they hurried on, "And she landed on her face but the bleeding has stopped and she seems okay."

By the time I got over there to pick her up, the bridge of her nose had swollen up and turned bright blue. So it was down to the Emergency Room with us, and YEP - her nose is broken. "No PE, no blowing her nose, and no sneezing for 2-4 weeks," they told us. NO SNEEZING.

Z, who has been sneezing nonstop ever since

The next day was picture day at school. Because of course it was.

But there were no seizures or blackouts this time, so I am counting this one as a victory. 

rude

It has been a hard week. Sad news for old friends, dentists shaking us upside down for all the money in our pockets, anniversary of my grandmother's death, and a stupid argument in which I started ranting in metaphors again ("A person can sit upright in a three-legged chair just fine, but sometimes, if you just trust enough, and lean back on the missing leg... THE LEG IS STILL GOING TO BE MISSING AND THE CHAIR WILL FALL OVER"). Also, one of the mail carriers got mad at my "GO AWAY" welcome mat and wouldn't deliver my package of paint, even after I signed the "we missed you" slip with permission to just chuck it anywhere, so I had to hoof it down to the physical post office to claim my loot. Like some kind of frontiersman. I'm going to need an addendum door mat that reads *applies only to proselytizers and that guy who sells sides of beef from his truck.

So I knitted some petulant "your mom" mitts.

Still having a hard time with my painting flow. Reminding myself that I'm only a year into painting, everything I do is still practice. It doesn't matter if my paintings look like student studies, because they are student studies. I can try to compose elaborate illustrations and dramatic pre-Raphaelite scenes after I learn to paint fruit and jackets and pants. 

not feeling it

boring

Wish I had more than one day a week to work on these things.

cityscapes and chickens

As workshop homework, we have to take photos of city scenes to share with the other painters in November. Except I do not live in a city, I live in an old residential neighborhood attached to a falling-down plantation town, and so far I've only had time to take pictures on my nightly walks while being chased by dogs.
It is not going so well.

We live behind the cop shop and I had to stick my arm through a fence to get a picture of the sunset. Luckily, it was not electrified.

Here I liked the power lines and the glowing street light - 

neither of which came out well in the picture.

I like symmetry, but someone designed this gate to be off-center to the light. WHY.

I liked the fading sky against the tower. Imagine painting all those lines straight, yikes.

I'll have to take a field trip to the main drag with the good camera during daylight. Over where the broken plywood and sleeping junkies are. Will be disabusing everyone at the workshop of any whimsical notions they might have had about Hawaii. Sorry, folks.

Raining chickens

The boys sleep over at grandma's most weekends, and we go over for family dinner on Sundays to pick them up. I was halfway out of the car last weekend when Leif came skidding outside and then ran right back into the house, yelling, "THEY'RE HATCHING COME ON." Oh no.

The wild hen who has been brooding on my mother's back porch finally hatched her eggs, and she began murdering them as they emerged. She had killed three by the time my mother went outside and noticed the peeping coming from the unhatched eggs and saw the little dead babies, so she confiscated the remaining eggs and put them on a warming pad to finish hatching. We watched them for an hour as they zippered out of their shells and plopped across each other, exhausted. It was pretty amazing.

A week later, she had found homes for the little fluffballs and we were going for our Sunday night walk when GUESS WHAT WE FOUND, fallen out of the bedtime tree and being stalked by a feral cat.

"I wonder if I killed a lot of birds in my past life and I'm making up for it," my mother said, tucking the baby onto the chick warmer for the night. She added it to the collection; earlier in the week, she passed a baby dove on the middle strip of the highway and stopped traffic to rescue it. And she still has the green weenie bird and baby bulbul I gave her from our lychee trees.

In the morning, she walked the chick back up the hill and reunited it with mom. Then she got home to find a cold, partially-hatched egg abandoned by the OTHER wild chicken who roosts on her patio. She popped it on the warmer and helped the tired little thing get out.

Honestly. She needs to wear a carpentry apron with 8 pockets so she can collect all the birds that fall in her path.


Knitting and painting

I can't knit or paint. Everything is garbage. The sweater yarn somehow became more allergy-triggering since last year, and my paintings are coming out overworked and muddy. Switching gears. I am going to win.

I booked the thing

So there. It's done. I have two months to knit a sweater. And buy a list of paint the length of my arm. Does it really take three different kinds of purple to paint a city street? We will find out.

Going to have a bit of a lie-down and get the blood back into my head.

West Coast Sweater - take 2

I have ripped the shit out of last year's robot-armed Seattle Sweater and I am knitting it into a cardigan for a as-yet-undetermined painting workshop this fall/winter. The idea is that if I do one workshop a year, it's cheaper than grad school, so I should really just pick one and stop feeling guilty about doing something for myself. The years will go by anyway.

If nothing else, I'll have a sweater to wear at work while feeling sad that everyone else is flying off to Japan.

This is the new design:

(Don't hold me to those scribbled cables, I couldn't remember what St. Brigid looked like. 
I'll take notes as I make the thing and post them on Ravelry later.)

Zenny documented the death of the old sweater. And part of her hand.

RIP, Seattle Sweater

And now I am staring at my balls and realizing that I forgot to take a swatch measurement while I had an entire sweater to measure from.

Swatches are for sissies anyway.

CASTING ON.

Hurricane prep action

Tuesday, 9:30pm

Actual prep action so far: NONE. But I’ll update this space as the hurricane figures out what it’s doing. The after school programs have been cancelled, but as of bedtime, schools and work are still open tomorrow. The night is quiet and the air is still. I filled up the Brita pitcher and counted that as a job well done. If everything gets cancelled tomorrow, we will consider covering the windows and fortifying the basement. Hopefully we will lose power and cell service before I start tweeting out last words and love proclamations. Embarrassing.


- - -

Wednesday

8am: Schools and work are still open. Everyone just trotting along as usual. If it's not raining right now, nothing bad can happen ever.

12pm: conspiracy bros are sending panicky chain emails to everyone saying the government secretly knows the hurricane has taken a sudden turn RIGHT FOR US and the devastation will be worse than Iniki and destroy all of Oahu.

2pm: turns out the hurricane made a sudden turn and is heading right for us. Closures! Statewide school and office shutdown! Time to board up the windows and batten down the chickens. The wind is kicking up.


6pm: we are under official warning now for incoming storm. Phone alerts going off. Feeling a bit somber about this now. Sarah, remember your oaths. Tell the people I love them, and knit my queue. Heather, bring Muu home for me.


- - - -
Thursday

7am: Well, it isn't even raining. That is what I get for posting last words. Will have to lock my phone in a drawer when the wind starts rocking the house.

8:30am: went outside to take pictures of the house and found an injured baby bird blown from the lychee tree.

Like an idiot, I'm about to drive into the hurricane to deliver it to my mother, the Bird Witch.

update: made it! Sheets of wind and rain on the Windward side. Still quiet on ours. Emergency vehicles lining the insides of the mountain along the tunnels.

- - - -

Friday

6am: Here we go, the winds have arrived. The chickens are pissed about being stuck in the coop.


- - - -

Saturday

6am: womp womp, the invisible shield ate the hurricane. The storm dissolved and it's just raining a lot, the winds have died down.

9pm: Drove across the island to hang out with family and eat tacos. Calling it on this storm. And good thing, because we never did find the missing window louvres. Water would have come shooting in like a fire hose.

This concludes Hurricane Freakout 2018.

Picture dump:

 

finished painting this

 varnished these 

(very secure painter's tape window barricades)

 selfie with hurricane

three days of this

FREEDOM

Not pictured: endless hours teaching the kids card games and making them watch 1980s adventure movies to get them to stop fighting over Monopoly rules and individual Lego pieces.

 

burn-your-own everything

A small painting

The kids went back to school, all our library staff returned from summer trips, and I immediately called in a vacation day to catch up on my painting queue. Ruined two small studies in a row, realized I was garbage at painting and had no business pretending to be an artist at all, and then sat down and slowly pulled off one I was happy with.

 and which the family thinks looks like an autopsy scene

I've been doing this thing for one full year now. The first part of the year, I was learning how to handle the paint, see color, and use proper techniques (ala prima, grisaille, underpaintings and wipeouts, etc). In recent months, I've been trying to figure out which of those things works best for me in particular.  Basically, it comes down to just painting the damn thing however you like. And that is HARD. 

Thriftscore

I am in perpetual denial about my coffee addiction and always looking for ways to make it harder to drink lots of it, on the grounds that I am always quitting. So I was delighted to find - in its original 1970s packaging - an adorable stainless steel single-serve drip coffee filter.

This is how you use it:

Step 1: pour a couple spoonfuls of grounds into canister

Step 2: turn screw to tighten filter so it doesn't drip

Step 3: pour in a bit of boiling water to saturate the grounds, put the lid on, and let it sit for a minute

Step 4: reach into BOILING HOT METAL CONTAINER to turn the BLISTERINGLY HOT screw to release the drip

Step 5: Use your shirt to insulate your fingers when the screw won't turn because the metal expanded with the heat just enough to stick shut

Step 6: continue filling canister and letting it drip until you've got a cup of goddamn coffee to go with your burned fingers and stained shirt

Why did these things not become more widely popular? It is a mystery.

 so cute though

Another rescue 

The very dim bulbuls behind my house dropped another baby. This is the third one we have had to rescue and rehabilitate. The babies fall out of the nest when the wind blows and then the parents can't figure out how to call them back up into the tippy-top skinny branches of the tree, so they just scream a lot.

So after diligently trying to reunite the baby with its nest, I gave up and drove it over to join its sibling in my mother's aviary. As the Bird Witch of the East, she has rehabilitated and rescued so many wild birds that the birds themselves come looking for her help. Last week, she went out for her evening walk and two frantic cardinals came caroming down the driveway and dive-bombed her head, leading her like winged Lassies up the road to retrieve their dropped baby. She wonders if she had rehabilitated one of the parents as a nestling. Birds are smarter than people think, and they teach their mates and children when they learn a useful survival trick.

Also, they make good art models.

I didn't think much about birds as a youth. They aren't cuddly and don't have friendly ears, but I am starting to understand why people go crazy and spend years touring the world with binoculars just to spy on them.


FIRE

The hobo encampment caught fire again.

the view from my roof, where I sent my child up to take a picture for me like a good parent

Also there is an arsonist on the loose on the other side of the island. The villains been having a hard time starting a good conflagration because, you know, we live in the tropics. Our air humidity is nearly 100%, we are going to be the first humans to evolve gills.

Luckily, there is another hurricane coming, and that'll sort everything out.

edited to add: Oh, and my passport was rejected, unless we can find my mother's childhood report cards from typhoon-decimated 1960s Guam.

drinky and woe

The kids went to grandma’s house, and I painted until my face fell off. Letting it dry and taking a break to grow back a new face.

Having a glass of cognac and feeling bad about going to bed. Have had nightmares four nights running. Dead children, dead birds in forgotten cages. And without the kids around, I’m gonna need to sleep in the grownup bed instead of crashing in the girl’s room, because I guess that’s what married people are supposed to do if they don’t want to keep getting dragged to therapy.

Did a tarot reading on the subject of art and relationships and whatnot. It said I would travel over water and meet someone of lawful morality and feel happy accomplishment and then DIE. So that was helpful.

Will dump this cognac down the sink and go flop like a starfish on my own bed and then get up and paint some more. Fight me, therapist.