painting Pan

Guess who is flying to the mainland next week and still hasn't done her workshop homework? That's right, I spent my day off painting the cat, instead. Will end up taking cityscape pictures on the walk from my hotel to the studio with a corner-shop waffle sandwich stuffed in my face. Last year I had all the logistics and transportation mapped out, paid for in advance, and printed out in a detailed itinerary, and this time I am kind of winging it. Does the TriMet have an app? Is my apple pay set up so I can pay for bus fare? How does Lyft even work? WHO KNOWS. I will worry about it when I'm trapped in the baggage claim, mainlining coffee and wishing I had worn a warmer coat.

This is Pan, the cat with the built-in fig leaf of modest white fur. Pan is short for Pantalaimon, but he also gets called "Pan Pan", "Pan Panny Pan Pan Pan", "Panty Liner", and "GAVIN COME GET YOUR STUPID CAT". He is the love of my teenage son's life.

I posted the little painting on instagram before heading to work, and a few hours later my painter friend plunked down next to me at the library. "Look, I've been sick for 3 weeks so maybe it's the pneumonia, but I could NOT figure out that cat. Where is it? What are these swirls? Is its head on backwards? WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?"

So I went home and painted out the carpet. Kind of badly, because it was dark in the dining room, but at least now even a person on Dayquil can tell it's a cat.

I'll give it one more sitting. And then it is right back to neglecting my packing and preparation.

home improvement action - handmade counter tops

All of our home repair efforts have been devoted to undoing all the terrible shit Larry the Mason's offspring did to his house. The cheapest carpeting nailed to hardwood floors. Surplus, mismatched linoleum tiles glued to the bedroom floor. Bottom-of-the-line office ceiling tiles nailed to the bathroom walls as soundproofing. Hammer-shaped hole bashed in the roof, with an aluminum baking pan underneath to catch the rain. And now, in the kitchen: chipped, swollen particle board glued over a layer of old linoleum counter top. 

Before (ok, this is the right-hand counter because I forgot to take a picture of the left, but same idea):

Oh look, they even nailed together two small pieces of whatever the hell that thin stuff is 

to make it fit across

After (shiny! solid! wood!): 

 Nobody better cut any bagels on this thing OR ELSE

It took about a month of gluing, sanding, and patient layers of tung oil, but now we have lovely oak counters. On one side of the kitchen. And by comparison, the cupboards now look like absolute hell. Larry's offspring put about 8 layers of peeling paint on those drawers, slopping over and preserving generations of cockroaches and geckos and small rodents for future archaeologists to discover, so they're going to need to be stripped down and sanded; if they're even worth saving, instead of rebuilding entirely. IT NEVER ENDS. Which is fine. Renovation projects to last a lifetime.

I forgot to take any pictures of the trimming or sanding or oiling, but here are the boards being glued with fancy new clamps:

such wow

Terrible action shot, with embarrassed elderly refrigerator:

That is a fake magnetic ice dispenser stuck on the fridge, with labels like "cheese" and "hot wings"

The other side is getting oiled and ready to mount (leave it). Was I supposed to plan on the backsplashes before installing counters? Oh no.

the angel doggo

Look, I am not even the kind of person who thinks pictures of other peoples' dogs are cute, but I was having a weeping-in-the-library-toilet kind of day and this very good girl came trotting in like a meatloaf on legs and did yoga next to me. Her owner told me to say "chicken", and she made a face like she was pretty damn sure I didn't actually have any chicken for her stuffed down my blouse, because she is a GOOD SMART GIRL.

That is all.

moleskine painting and frantic knitting

Time is getting away from me; I am back to scraping together weekend and evening minutes in my sketchbook. Painting is a difficult thing to do in nips and fragments; there is mess and solvents and pacing that needs to happen, but that is life. You get what you get. 

It is the two-week countdown. Revelation to nobody but myself: two weeks is not enough time to knit a sweater on lunch breaks. The thing is not going to happen. But I could knit a shawl, right? Cold people wear shawls. When I was a kid in Newfoundland we had stocking caps that were so long you could wrap them around your neck like a scarf (or tie yourself to lamp posts/friends/the dog, etc) and probably I should have just knitted one of those, but TOO LATE. I picked a nice, easy triangular shawl pattern and set to it while watching cold case detective shows over lunch, imagining how 18th-century chic I'd be in my sexy granny shawl.

Vision:

Probable outcome:

At least it matches my chicken hat. Which I still haven't found. Because I haven't actually looked for it. Occam's Razor: a child wore it ice skating, so it is going to be dropped on the floor of the truck. Hire me now, Cold Justice detectives.

Pattern: Reyna

world's worst detective is on the case

Recap: the last mystery I failed to solve was the one where a school kid reported a severed head in a valley nearby and our library-coffee-usurping cop wouldn't get a shovel and go digging for it with me just because I didn't actually know where it was.

This mystery is maybe less thrilling than a misplaced body part, but SOMEONE has been disappearing all my winter travel clothes. A few months ago, the man brought a bag full of old shoes to the Goodwill, and now I have one winter boot. He denies donating just one boot, on the grounds that that would be super stupid, but now we have a clean closet with just one boot in it. Suspicious.

And now my chicken hat has gone missing. When everyone went walleyed and shrugged vacantly, claiming not to have seen the most perfect of hats since I wore it last year, I pulled up an instagram photo of Leif wearing it ice skating a few weeks ago. "Oh yeaaaaah, that chicken hat." As if we have an excess of chicken hats around here.

Still no hat. Still one boot. I should probably stuff my winter coat into a locked box before someone uses it to line a pet carrier or something.

human contact

A mom at the library asked me my name, and then turned to yell at her husband, "THIS IS THE POTTY BOOK LADY." He came vaulting over the toddler chairs and gave me a high-five, then grabbed my hand in both of his and said the little board book I had written was the thing that worked for their kid, so thank you. It was really weird being touched by another adult, but I was really glad that they liked the book.

quality literature

With my painting trip to Portland in just about 3 weeks, I started digging through the library donation pile for a throw-away paperback to read on the plane. We have hundreds of these things. People paid actual money for them at one time; one of them must be good, right? Wrong. And in the pile of red-covered cowboy romances and super lawyer novellas, I realized that I did not need a good book; the thing I needed was a really bad one.

My top 3 picks, in descending order:

3rd place

Little Heroes, by Norman Spinrad, 1987

In the near-future dystopia of the 1990s, the world is a nightmare of kibble-eating teenagers with machine guns, and music is being made by synthesizers. A drug-snorting muzik executive enlists a leather-pants-wearing retired rocker queen to create a virtual pop star using computers, with the help of some "fat, sloppy" nerds. Some guy named Paco joins the Reality Liberation Front and they do something to fight against whatever it is this book is about . Many asses are wriggled - wriggles of seduction, wriggles of anticipation, wriggles of discomfort by the reader. The hard-ons are all raging and the nipples are all rosebuds in this misanthropic novel written by a man who now blogs in all-caps about stupid people at his bank, Vladimir Putin, and how he's been unfairly blacklisted just because he self-published a book about a sexy Bin Laden that everyone is too political to appreciate. How dare you. DON'T YOU KNOW WHO HE IS? HE IS THE WRITER OF BUG JACK BARRON.

The fun of this book comes in seeing where the author was accidentally correct about anything. 


2nd place:

Books of Blood, Volume 2, by Clive Barker, 1984

Before there were gratuitous torture-gore films, there were the Books of Blood. Grossly sensuous descriptions of impractically elaborate murders and dismemberments are held together with scraps of plot. Sometimes. Teeth will melt, tongues will spurt, skin will fly off hands like gloves. You think these things are physically impossible? Not when you are a shapeshifting monster who can grow breasts on his own chest until they burst apart like wet tissue. HA. Shows what you know.



1st place: THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN*

Venus on the Half Shell, by Philip Jose Farmer, 1974

Simon Wagstaff is a one-eyed Space Wanderer with a pet owl, a dog, and an electric banjo. He drinks the elixir of immortality while bonking a cat woman, and then hooks up with a sexy, cynical robot who is programmed to hate birds. They battle "zeppelin things", get into an ax fight with a hunchback, and get drunk while telling a story about a spaceman who's space suit is operated by his penis.

If we can't give future generations any great works of literature by which to gauge our society, this is the book that should rise to the top of the ashes for archaeologists to puzzle over. Folks, this book has everything.

Science!

This was called the Unavoidable Transdimensional Shift in scholarly journals but was privately referred to as the You-Grab-My-Nuts-I'll-Grab-Yours Hypothesis.

Romance!

Her kiss was soft and hot with a tang of milk shake and ketchup. 

Complex characters!

"No," she said, "My name has always been Pussyloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday, and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow, it'll be Quimquat."

Poetry!

"To hell with Euclid's beauty bare!
Liz, get your ass out of that chair!"

(An ode to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after which the poet is clubbed to death by a wino.)



Literary perfection.


A QUEST: Go out and find yourselves some very bad books, and then leave them on park benches somewhere to pass it on. Every one of these books were proof-read, edited, and then approved for publication. The least we can do is to not let them live it down.



* As determined by 10 minutes of page-flipping

Meanwhile, at the library

First off, in very important news, I got a haircut. I don't take many pictures of myself anymore, but when I do I take lots of them and post them all. Here you go, posterity. I've got crow's feet now, and that's fine. And look, you can barely see where I was strangled in my sleep. Things are looking up again.

Recently in Working with the Public:

* Drunk patron came in while we were hosting a chamber music performance with 60 kids, threw money for DVDs at me, and yelled, "HONEY, I hate to TELL YOU THIS, but you work at the LIBRARY, your job is BOOOORING." It was 9:30am.

* A vacationer came in looking for the toilet, then stopped with her hand on the key. "I am not using this bathroom," she said. "I am clairvoyant, and someone put a secret camera in there so they can watch people pee." We have been very paranoid ever since, looking under the sink and soap dispenser for spy lenses. Thanks, psychic lady.

* The shirtless Vietnam vet with the knife-sharpening stand beside the library who would come in and ask me to help him with his marijuana applications and reward us with mystery-meat jerky he made on the dashboard of his car (where he lived) has died. He had a heart attack and didn't make it through the emergency surgery. I am sad about it.

* One of our library patrons was shot to death at the beach in front of his kids. Evidently he spotted a guy he knew who had already shot him and decided that getting into a fist fight was the best idea. Instead of, you know, gathering his kids up and leaving. His kids are my kids' classmates. So that was not good.

* While prepping for Banned Books Week, I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand the correlation between Green Eggs and Ham and early Marxism, as seen through the lens of the Communist Party of China (as far as I can tell, it comes down to the establishment/dismantling of class systems through materialistic circumstance vs. violent ideological overthrow, and Sam I Am spent too much time wheedling about eggs instead of just ordering them eaten at gunpoint). Despite this, I managed to pull off an entertaining storytime without driving away all the parents, and afterwards one of the moms came up to me with a copy of Peter Rabbit. She turned to the illustration of Mrs. McGregor and explained that she had never seen the picture before, because in Japan the bit about Peter's father getting put into a pie is removed from every book. Her husband, from Germany, couldn't get over Rupunzel being challenged for depictions of unwed pregnancy, because bodies just aren't as big a deal over there. I love these kinds of conversations, it's fascinating to learn what subjects are censored from country to country. 

Being a librarian is rewarding sometimes. And nobody has spilled body fluid on the keyboards in months.

PIE DAY - 2 recipes

Canadian Thanksgiving is a day to celebrate our frozen brethren and to console ourselves for being rejected for a passport just because we can't prove we're American. This year, I embarked on the perfect peach pie. I wanted an apple pie, but everyone yelled "PEACH", so here we are.

This is a recipe that will be more comfortable to bulk shoppers, because Costco still has good peaches for cheap (the yellow ones, NOT the white ones - I have become a person who has Opinions about peach varieties) and also because the quantity of butter will make you cry if you aren't breaking it out of a 4-box package. I'll tell you now - it takes 3 sticks. Just take a breath and do it anyway. Give yourself 3 hours for this thing, start to finish.


Perfect Perfectly Fine Peach Pie

Get your pie dough in the fridge before starting the filling, it has to chill twice.

The very best pie dough, which is actually more of a tart pastry

1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup sugar
4 cups flour
3 sticks of salted butter, chilled

Mix sour cream and sugar in a bowl, set aside. Put flour in a big bowl, chop up your chilled butter, and blend in with your hands to a mealy crumble. Pour in the sour cream and toss with a fork until it comes together into a soft dough. Divide it in half on two sheets of plastic wrap, use the plastic to smoosh the balls of dough into fat rectangles. Wrap them up and put them in the fridge for an hour. Remove from fridge, open them up and put another piece of plastic wrap on top, and roll them out into large legal-paper-sized rectangles. Use the plastic to help fold them over in thirds like a paper going into an envelope. Re-wrap and put them back in the fridge for another hour while you make the filling.

Does that look like a lot of dough? That looks like maybe a lot of dough. Ignore that for now.

Filling

4 cups of peeled and sliced peaches
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons corn starch
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice, because that is what I had, or just cinnamon and nutmeg if you've got it
pinch of salt
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon of butter

Peel and slice the peaches, put them in a big bowl. Sprinkle on the sugars and gently toss to combine. Cover it and let it sit for an hour. Your crust needs to chill, anyway. Make a cup of coffee and knit for a bit or something.

When you can't take it anymore, roll out one crust and put it in a deep-dish pie pan. Put that in the fridge for a minute, turn the oven on to 400 degrees, and prepare the filling.

Drain off the sugary liquid from the peaches and save it. In a saucepan, combine cornstarch, spices, and salt. Stir in sugar syrup from the peaches. Bring to a boil, stir for a couple minutes until thick, remove from heat, and stir in lemon juice and butter. Fold the lovely goo into the peaches. Dump all that into the pie crust. Nice and overloaded is fine. Roll out the remaining pie dough, cut it into strips, and try to make a lattice crust that doesn't look like hell. Trim, seal, and flute edges. Or smash edges with a fork, if you get mad fluting. Tear a strip of tin foil and gently cover the edges so they don't scorch. This is where I realized I was out of tin foil, of course.

Bake at 400 for 50-60 min, until bubbly and golden. Make sure it cooks completely, and don't take it out after 40 min just because you ran out of tin foil and didn't want the edges to scorch, or your bottom will be soggy and your filling will droop and there will have been no point to making a homemade crust at all goddammit.

Anyway, let it cool. DONE. Amazing.

very yummy pie despite my inability to flute edges, buy tinfoil, or bake it quite long enough

Now, to nobody's surprise but my own, that crust recipe makes way too much dough. Oh shit, the oven is on and there is a single-crust-pie's worth of dough left. What is in the cupboard? HURRY, GET SOMETHING INTO THE OVEN TO BAKE.


Oh Shit I Need A Quick Pie

leftover pie dough
3 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup of corn syrup, because that is all that is left in the bottle
1/4 cup of brown sugar to make up the difference
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon (oh look, I had cinnamon in the back of the cupboard after all)
1 tsp vanilla
squeeze of that lemon you used for the peach pie
sprinkle of powdered instant coffee
2 heaping handfuls of chopped chocolate (I use Trader Joes pound-plus bars, but chocolate chips are fine)
2 heaping handfuls of dried cranberries or raisins or whatever dried fruit you have
2 heaping handfuls of chopped walnuts or pecans or whatever nuts you can find. Or forget the nuts. Nuts are stupid. I had a lot of walnuts leftover from Easter, though. Do nuts go bad? Don't overthink this, get the damn thing in the oven.

Roll out the rest of the dough and line a shallow pie pan or tart pan. Quick, grab your saucepan from the peach pie goop and melt the butter in it. Take it off the heat and whisk in sugars, corn syrup, eggs, vanilla, coffee powder, and cinnamon. Chop the chocolate and dump everything else in and stir it together. Pour it into unbaked pie crust. Pop into the oven next to the peach pie. WHEW.

not perfect, but very delicious

oh nooooo my scorched edges

I am going to line my suitcase with Trader Joe's pound-plus bars when I go to Portland in a few weeks. If anyone ever wants to commission a painting, you should know that I only accept payment in Trader Joe's loot.

in which I need my own bed

Woke up last night with someone's hands clamped around my neck, clawing up fistfuls of my throat. This was a very confusing way to wake up, and perhaps that is why instead of launching into action or swearing, I pried the fingers off my windpipe enough to say, "Are you okay?"

 "I DON'T KNOW," my kid yelled back, still asleep and trying to throttle me.

"I'm your mom, you don't have to kill me, you're having a nightmare."

"OH, OKAY."

She let go of my throat and flung herself over onto her back, breathing quietly again. I stared at her for a minute, like maybe I had just discovered a badger in the bed, then covered her up with the blanket and made a pillow barricade between us. Now I've got bloody rakes down my neck, which is not a good look for toddler storytime.

Are you okay? Honestly. If an actual nighttime strangler shows up, maybe they will be touched by my concern long enough for me to thump them with my kindle.