Avocado

The cat had his procedure, so I took a day off to make sure he didn't bust a stitch. Painted an avocado while listening to a crime-solving podcast, wondering if it's too late to quit my job and become a pathologist. Probably I'd have less time to paint produce if I had a job that didn't let me take a day off to babysit my cat's balls.

I painted a bunch of boards in different colors to use as backgrounds. A blue background looked good, but the kids went nuts for the shiny gold, so I went with it.

My ward, unbothered

I'd like to be a painter who gets the form down in thick, lovely stokes, but I am a terminal dabber. 

In other news

Got screamed at by a shirtless guy for closing the library. He came back a few days later and tried very hard to be charming, hoping I would not recognize him with a shirt on. Nice try, Ed.

Tried to have an inspirational Banned Books Week story time, but dropped a book truck on my foot at the outset and it went downhill from there. 

A few more cat procedures may be in order before I feel like going back to work.

hang on

My office-mate's 10 year-old grandson died this week. An honor guard of nurses and family lined the halls and walked him to surgery, where he was taken off life support and his organs were donated to save three people.

On the heels of this, one of my favorite author/illustrators (Ben Hatke) lost his 4 year-old daughter in a traumatic horse accident.

And a great aunt died. Then an online friend died.

Everyone - just make yourself very small and quiet for a little bit and stay alive, ok?


Drink and Draw

Kept it cheap and drank leftover Capri-suns and a homebrewed Guinness clone.

The girl went for wildcats.

The boy imprisoned some sailors.

I overworked a tarantula, because the great-aunt's funeral was in Arizona, and now there is active talk about buying a house outside Kingman to stash grandpa in so he can be closer to his remaining siblings.

My cabin-in-the-woods daydreams had more in the way of raccoons and squirrels than rattlesnakes and black widow spiders, but whatever. I'm rolling with it.

Alexa, play something catchy to cheer me up.

Alexa what the fuck, no.

Better, I'll take it.

bulbul

Some guy on a black motorcycle is on the loose in our town shooting people (ok, just one person. In the leg. But still) and the police haven't come by yet to interrogate the big black motorcycle sitting in our driveway. Or the big black motorcycle in the neighbor's driveway. Or... ok, it looks like the guy across the street has one in his driveway, too. It seems that everyone in Wahiawa has a motorcycle, actually. Sorry about that, detectives. Good luck.

Demotivational painting 

Have been feeling uninspired, painting sloppily and then wiping everything off with a rag. Got mad at a seed pod and a shriveled nut, threw them out the back door, and painted one of the rescue birds, instead.

Fidget the Red-Vented Bulbul

This is not a happy picture. This particular bulbul escaped the aviary, panicked, and drowned in the toilet. It was a bad way to go. My mother, the local Bird Witch who rehabilitates these guys, was very upset about the death, and so she opened up the flight cage and released her other young rehabbed birds - then worried that she had made a mistake and doomed them to die in the wild. She did not doom them. They have been returning every day for dinner, chasing her from her car to her front door when she gets home from work. It's good for her, and it's funny for me. We're still really sorry about Fidget, though. 

Currently in rehab: Spike the Red-Whiskered Bulbul, who has undersized wings and flies like a chicken. He smiles, which is weird for a bird. 

I need to take a break from plants and birds and paint some faces and bodies again. People with faces or bodies are encouraged to come sit for me. I have a kegerator and cookies. There's a cupcake in it for anyone with tattoos.

Wilted purple flowers

I love these aluminum panels, but the little bastards are hard to get an accurate picture of because the oil doesn't sink and there's a lot of glare. They look like candy when I varnish them, though.

One of our library patrons picked these flowers from her yard and left them like a little wilty offering on the reference desk. I don't know what they are. Spent the afternoon piling all kinds of crap up on the table, trying to make an interesting still-life that would trick people into thinking I was cool, but I just couldn't get into it. Ended up sweeping the table clean and just dropping the wilted flowers onto a blue piece of paper. DONE.

Glarey glare glare

Someone gave me shit for not signing my art, so THERE, it is signed. Am a real artist now.

Guavas

(note: lots of weather happening, bad news coming in - I'm watching with concern, Atlantic folks)

Very helpful 

So the library art show is going well, getting lots of feedback. Someone said, of my lychee branch, "Wow, I thought it was from Ross." (Ross is a discount home furnishing store.) Another person said, "OH MY GOD - what a nice frame.” (The frame actually is from Ross. We really love Ross around here, it seems.) Someone else looked very hard at me and said, "You're wasting yourself." So that's nice. Art critiques are fun.

I don't think I'm wasting anything, though, because I'm producing stuff. I kind of like having a salary with pension benefits, and the freelance work with New Zealand pays for art travels. Which leads me to:

ART TRAVELS 

There will be no art travels this year. It had been narrowed down to Whidbey Island or McMinnville, but in the end I went out of my head and bought a pork chop, instead. I have been thinking about this pork chop painting all year. It had to come live here.

THE BEST PORK CHOP

This supports an artist I would have been studying with, and I don't have to drive a rental car into an icy ditch in January. Everyone wins. Except my mom, who laughed and said it was a stupid painting and I should put it in the fridge. She and I are both in favor of stupid art, though, because this is the latest thing in her house:

6 of 16

This week's painting: Strawberry Guavas and Jumping Spider.

panicked spider was relocated to a nice safe bush once she was done posing for the painting

(screaming in spider)

The goal is to paint 16 sort-of-cohesive paintings with a mind to sell them. Maybe I'll ask around the galleries, or maybe I'll figure out Etsy. Gotta make the things, first. 

Do not want

The neighbor's dog got loose while they were out and I babysat him in our yard for three hours so he wouldn't get flattened by a truck. He is a nice young dog, but he rubbed his doggy ding-dong on my bare arm, and that is entirely more attention than I am interested in from anyone, let alone from someone who smells like they've been eating dirty diapers.

In the end, the neighbors came home and he dashed through the gate behind them without their noticing, so they never even realized what a goddamn hero I had been. See you next time, little dog. I'll be wearing longer sleeves.

Tick one off the yearly to-do list

In January I typed up a checklist of goals entitled "Take the thing you love and make it a nightmare". This list includes: publish another children's book (check ); paint 16 pieces to submit to a gallery (I had 8, and then mother-in-law took 3 of them); and enter a local art show. I immediately missed/ignored all the major local art show deadlines, and was going to sneakily roll that goal over to next year, but then the Friends of the Library decided to do a community art show and politely offered to include a few pieces of mine - maybe a bit nervously, only knowing that I had published a toilet book for babies. CHECK. My art is officially hanging in a local art show.

Me and my cheeks were in attendance

The reception was located on the library lawn, next to the portable toilets. The refreshments were hotly contended, but cookies prevailed.

TEAM LEMON BARS 4EVA. Take your veggie platter and STUFF IT, Betty. 

Drink and Draw

This week, the kids tried a fancy craft root beer by Maui Brewing Company, and the grownups split a can of beer favored by the winos who hang out in front of the Goodwill. I think I am going to have to seize the reigns on this endeavor before my liver tries to escape out my neck.

At least I stopped trying to crosshatch my way out of every misplaced pen stroke.

Kind of. Don't look too hard at that nose.

Sneaky Saturday Painting

When Sarah came to visit, I thought it would be cute to demonstrate the crazy fishpond irrigation system in our backyard, and cranked one of the many dangling faucets suspended by long pipes that hang everywhere. And it broke, because it's 60 years old. Today the man tried to cap it, and the pipe exploded in a spray of rust holes. 

So he dismantled the pipes and ran away, with a text saying "Maybe don't turn the water back on." Faaaantastic.  I came home to a beautifully empty house and ate beef jerky for dinner and painted.

Alexa, play something to cleanse the sex scene from my audio book from my brain.

ALEXA YOU'RE FIRED

Monday painting - ex-limes

A few weeks ago, someone at the library gave me a branch of kafir lime leaves. I was all set to paint them when my model was tragically murdered.

victim and suspect

Luckily, that is why I take back-up pictures, and I had already drawn it out, so I went ahead and started painting it anyway.

First step: get it covered with paint. Second step: fix it. Will work on it in the evenings.


In other news

* Someone dropped the porta-potty key down the toilet hole. Also the lock. And the cleaning guys stole our hand sanitizer. Some helpful person has been locking the stalls in the open position for an endless line of liquor store customers to use - will figure out who's doing it and shake my finger very sternly. So the portable toilet situation is starting to get some results.

* The man decided we needed to cut down a tree that had gotten too big and was breaking up the back wall, so he had me stand and hold the ladder while he chopped the top off and pushed it onto the roof of the garage. I put on a tiny child's bicycle helmet in case a tree trunk and a concussed man and maybe a collapsed garage might come crashing down onto my head. There was a broken saw blade, a horrible crack, a thunderous crash, and then a terrible moment when the trunk swung wildly as it went down and hit the edge of the building - but the roof and the ladder and our brainpans all survived. I went straight inside and had a Cocoweizen, which tasted a lot better spiked with adrenaline.

This is fine, I will just stand down here and see where it falls

* My favorite and best Canadian librarian came to my house. While we were standing around taking pictures of her fairy project in the banana tree, a streaking light made us turn around, and we watched a meteor burn across the sky and flare out. "That was a fucking fireball," I said intelligently. Sarah laughed, because this happens wherever she goes. She is very relaxed for someone who keeps getting space rocks lobbed at her. Next summer, Sarah. We will take out Lake George with a meteorite.

* Went rollerskating and was the only person not to bust my butt, owing to my A+ strategy of pottering around the perimeter very, very slowly and getting lapped by preschoolers with walkers. Preschoolers who ended up on their backs like flailing, screaming turtles. Ha. I win, babies.

Drink and Draw

Honolulu Beerworks Cocoweizen, the beer that answers the question nobody asked: does coconut belong in a Hefeweizen? The answer is no. No, it does not.

Did I drink it anyway? Yes. Yes, of course I did. 

Then I overworked another goddamn pen and ink drawing. Flowers have no business being cross-hatched. Who instituted this weekly event anyway? Drawing is stupid.

Alexa, play something that will make me want to jump off a bridge.

Next week I'm going to draw cats or something.

ACM

The porta-potties were all still standing after the weekend, and nobody spray-painted dicks across them. Disappointing.

Monday painting

This week I've been working on aluminum composite panels again. They're fantastic. Instead of flying to the mainland for a workshop this winter, I'll just spend all my money on squares of aluminum. They hold a brushstroke beautifully, the cockroaches won't eat them, and you can decapitate critics with them. "Why are the background colors so FLAT?"

Oh no, she's talking about chickens again

Blackbeard the Head-Ripping Rooster has been apprehended and relocated. The girls ain't give a damn, but I feel unreasonably guilty anyway. I wasn't involved in the string-and-box contraption, and hid in the kitchen when the wrestling match into the car took place, but still. He was just so handsome.

Dept of Good News: Chickadoo does not have a face-eating parasite! It turned into a case of regular old pox, and she's already getting over it. Probably thanks to all the cake I've been giving her as an apology for abducting her boyfriend. The coop sleeps easy once again.

Drink and draw

I am breaking a blog rule by posting after a drink, but OH WELL.

One of the reasons I went to Portland last fall was because there is a little gallery called Nucleus that was having an exhibition I wanted to go to. Nucleus has a space for artists on one side, and a little art shop on the other with a bar for local beers and ciders. Every Wednesday, they host a Drink and Draw event where they fill up the gallery with tables and people buy beer and draw on the tablecloths or coasters, and I missed it by one day. I have been jealous of that event ever since, and so I decided we should do it at home every week. The kids get fancy sodas, the grownups get local beers, and we listen to whatever music we shout out for Alexa until we're happy with our drawings.

This week was Waikiki Brewing Company's Skinny Jeans IPA. It was okay. I don't know why IPAs are the rage right now, but I will drink one, fine.

It went pretty well, even though Zenny knocked her root beer float over within 1 minute.

I did not eat my model this time, because it was a totally dead scorpion.

A bit heavy-handed with the pens, maybe, but I am going to get the hang of it eventually, if we keep this up every week.

 This thing is on a postcard, so if anyone wants it they should email me and I'll slap a stamp on it.

IN OTHER NEWS

* Went to dinner with a vacationing college friend and forgot to take a picture with him. Of course. But I had a beer in a giant tiki glass and we didn't get killed by traffic or the roving Waikiki arsonist, so it was a winning outing.


* The bathroom at work has been replaced with three porta-potties INDEFINITELY while a septic tank is installed. Some day. Probably. They're outside, sitting in the sun like blue poop ovens. The contractor told me to just let them know when the toilets are set on fire or knocked over. He said that usually when they're set on fire the guy who lit them doesn’t die inside them, but we should just call if that happens. And so "Portable Toilet Contractor" unexpectedly leaps to the top of my list of exciting second careers, and "dying in fire while trapped in a porta-potty" now tops the ways I definitely don't want to die but would not be surprised to see on my tombstone.