Too cheap to buy round panels

Bad dreams, woke up composing “if you’re reading this, I am dead” letters in my sleep. Something about getting trampled playing frisbee - very deep and meaningful stuff.

Alexa, slap me out of it. 

Thank you.

Baked a few loaves of raisin bread and started another painting of Zenny. The portrait seemed like it should be round, but I don’t have any round panels, and I’m not allowed to buy any more painting stuff until the last 3 aluminum panels are used up, so I put a trivet down and traced its circle onto a square of ACM. 

First layer - still need to do the headband and figure out what is going on with the background 

Put my mask on and varnished the recent flower paintings. Eyeballed the commission I am neglecting because I'm mad at the hands in the picture. Avoided working on it by coating some tiny cheap Walmart wood panels with linseed oil to build up a paintable surface that won't bleed or warp, and now they are drying in the metal sink outside just in case they burst into flames. My can of linseed oil is rusted and old, and I have been assured it will spontaneously combust, so I handle it like someone defusing a bomb. This is where it's nice that we have the air humidity of a swimming pool.

Am getting overloaded with these paintings. The goal for these next few months is to get an etsy shop together and move some things out. Then I'm going to buy all the round panels I can eat.

Philip

One of my friends died. I am so fucking sad.

We sat next to each other in most of our high school classes, sharing paperback books and talking shit about conceptual art. As a joke, he jammed a plastic fork into an orange, put it in an empty fish tank, called it a "time piece", and won a national student art award as it molded and rotted. Take that, banana duct-taped to a wall. 

A couple months ago we were talking about the Piers Anthony books we read as teenagers, trying (and failing) to find online images of the old Xanth art calendar I loved with all my baby-fangirl heart when I was 11. Last night I went to look for a picture of Philip in our yearbook, and opened it up to find one of the calendar pages tucked inside. He would have laughed.

Those nipple feathers and tail sparkles were instrumental in the switch from wanting to be a zoologist to wanting to be an artist. 
Still have not fulfilled my boobie-centaur art aspirations - I'm wasting my LIFE, Philip.

He made beautiful cakes with wild flavor combinations like purple sweet potato & baby coconut, and soy sauce caramel & passion fruit, decorated with perfect, brightly-colored sugar flowers and buttercream succulents. When I learned that he had died, I cried very hard and then started baking a cake. It looked like the cat made it, but it tasted good.

Vanilla elderflower cake with homemade lemon curd and whipped cream frosting. 
I murdered the swiss buttercream flowers and they went in the trash, sorry.

Was still depressed, so I painted a cat skull. A bit on the nose, angst-wise.

Next time I'll jam a plastic fork in an orange and paint that, instead.

If you're an old friend lurking around here, please just go ahead and send a message on Instagram or something. I am a terrible correspondent, so this is low-commitment; we can just trash-talk each other's posts from time to time. 

And don't die, ffs.

flower and wasp

Painting

Been alone with the kids for a bit now, throwing out clutter, installing under-the-cupboard lights, tripping over kittens, rescuing injured chicks, dealing with flat tires - the usual things that happen when there's nobody to complain to. But finally, for the first time since mid-December, school schedules reasserted themselves and I had all of Monday to paint again. I laid down another wilted hibiscus from my garden, and then got on my tiptoes to take down my box of horrors - an old Altoids tin filled with dead bees and wasps I’ve been collecting while cleaning windowsills. It’s hidden on the top of a cabinet where the kids can't accidentally discover it and traumatize themselves, thinking it's candy.

Wasps fall under the category of That Shit is Haunted, like broken dolls and old televisions. I have an early, dreamlike memory of walking through very green woods and entering an old overgrown house filled with tall windows that pulled open from the tops, like hinged oven doors. The windows were dusty, the light was heavy, and on every surface - across the floor, along all the windowsills, filling the partially-opened window frames - were dead wasps. An impossible number of wasps, like they had filled the inside of the house and then fallen dead at the same moment. I have asked my mother about this memory, and she gets a faraway look on her face and says, "That sounds about right." Very helpful.


Knitting 

Waiting rooms are knitting rooms. Gavin is flying into snow with his robotics team this winter, and he needs a hat.

CO 146 stitches; chart from Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible

The stitch pattern looks like angry cats. He wants me to put pointy ears on the top instead of a pom-pom. Kid, I will knit you a full onesie if you ask me to.


and a very minor accomplishment

When the electricians re-wired the house, they didn't put a switch on the dining room side of the kitchen, so I've been slapping the wall where it ought to be for 4 years now. Instead of walking across the dark kitchen to get to the light switch, I've been performing a blindfold act with the coffee pot every morning. This week I finally installed a motion-activated light, and it has saved my early-rising life.

(boomerang gif, no actual strobing happening)

I have dreams of living in a cozy cottage with oil lamps and candles, but I also have dreams of not burning my house down, so this is where we are. The coziness factor improves if you say Lumos when you enter the kitchen.

2020 so far

In the last 3 days:

Spent half a paycheck on robotics travel for the teenager.

Went to Honolulu to renew Gavin's passport, growled at three men who creeped up on my daughter and tried to talk to her about how pretty her hair was.

Trying to find a public toilet downtown, I walked four blocks to a Walmart and ran into the homeless guy who was thrown out of the library for rubbing my hands in grad school 15 years ago (he was rubbing a cashier's hands, with security headed for him). Almost interrupted to give him a high-five for still being alive, but he might have kept my hand for good this time.

Got home and said how relieved I was to have all the big expensive stuff taken care of - immediately broke a tooth on my salad.

Got back to work from emergency tooth repair and had to call the police because the "stranger danger" guy was dropping his shorts and flapping his dick around in front of the library.

The cockroaches licked the face off one of my paintings.



If the rest of the year continues this way, I'm going to file a grievance.

edited to add: flat tire!

Happy mew year

Yep, that’s the title I’m going with. First post of the year/decade. Decisions were made.

2020: Year of the Wet Blanket

New Year's Eve is not my holiday. You spend all that money on Christmas, wade through meats and cheeses and chocolates for a week, and then in the same pay period you have to host another feast, stay up half the night, and politely drink a beaker of poison because "we have to finish this bottle, it's expensive". This seemed like a problem of attitude, one I could solve by taking the reigns and making it into a holiday I enjoy. I wasn't sure what that would actually look like, though, since what I enjoy is staying at home and going to bed early with a book, and I felt too crappy to make a good plan. So I opted out instead, rattling my bottle of antibiotics and the new kitten as an excuse to stay home and comfort the animals.

What breed is he? 'Scapegoat'

Hawaii explodes at midnight, with so many illegal aerials that the police would need bulldozer buckets on the fronts of their cars to scoop everyone up and take them to jail. The best they can do is drive around the neighborhoods with their blue lights on and cause a 15-second pause as everyone holds the bombs behind their backs until they pass by. It's an impossible thing to enforce, and it's clear the majority of people are in favor of blowing shit up. There are bad spirits to be driven out, even if it means driving them straight into the lungs and brains of everybody else.

For our part, we are too lazy/cheap/flammable to set off so much as a pop-it. The family went to my aunt's scary high-rise apartment to watch the island light up below, and I spent the night alone, painting and reading as the explosions gained momentum.

portrait of the artist skipping a NYE party

At midnight, I ran out on the lawn just as the neighbors sent up the biggest, most professional fireworks show you could ever ask for, almost setting the lychee tree on fire. It was amazing. At 12:10am, while the neighborhood still roared and smoked, they brought out leaf blowers, blew all the debris into a pile, and the kids lit a bonfire to burn the red paper and cardboard casings. The dads said, "Jump over the fire!" and the moms said, "Nooooo," but let them jump over anyway.

None of the kids went up in flames.

By 1am, the neighborhood was quiet and clean again, the driveway was no longer on fire, and everyone was home safe in bed. It was a good night.

On New Year's Day, we packed up Christmas without trampling or boxing up the kitten, then drove over the mountain to my mother's house.

The kitten's name is Yulik, after Baba Yaga's cat. 

He spent the holiday falling off of things and getting his face munched. 

Get the ball rolling is the theme this year. In that spirit, while my mother laid out a medieval feast of cheeses, fruits, breads, ham, and smoked turkey legs, I aggressively tossed her kitchen, cleaned everything, and threw garbage bags out the back door before she could catch me.

Delicious! btw I threw out all your empty sour cream tubs for storing leftovers. HAPPY NEW YEAR.

She likes that kind of thing, though. Don't try it with your in-laws or boss.

We ate enough Cambozola to keep us fed until spring, then watched the season finale of The Mandalorian, which was a thing of beauty and perfection, even though we were all yelling about the lava. We don't like lava over here.

This is the year! Get the ball rolling, there is still time!

xoxo
h

Annual questionnaire 2019

I'll update this post if anything goes critically wrong in the next 3 days.


1. What did you do in 2019 that you’d never done before? I ate a yule log. 

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions? My theme was "put down the feel-bad machine", and it went pretty well. Read lots of books instead of looking at my phone. Some of those books were terrible, but it was a good decision anyway.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Someone finally got someone else pregnant (not me, on either count), and I am knitting lots of tiny hats with ears for "Meaty" the baby.

4. Did anyone close to you die? A family friend (Mr. Tomassi) and a great-aunt-in-law (I am a terrible person because I can't remember which one). My mother did not die, but she was smashed like an accordion between two trucks and concussed pretty badly. 

5. What places did you visit? I went to a new location of the same restaurant I like. And to a roller rink. Also a scary warehouse filled with trampolines where you have to sign a death waiver for your kids. 

6. What would you like to have in 2020 that you lacked in 2019? Beefy muscles. My heart did some bad stuff this year, so I laid off jogging. I didn't gain weight exactly, but I softened like warm butter. Now I have giant rubber bands that will get me back in fighting shape for sure. 

 The asparagus workout

7. What moments from 2019 will remain etched upon your memory? The cat turned into a blood fountain for Thanksgiving. 

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Hey, another book publication, and paid freelance work! I did art for money, and that's the dream, as it has been explained to me. I kind of think the bigger achievement is that I painted a whole lot of paintings for no reason at all except that I liked doing it. Being a maker of things is important, whether you're building furniture, whittling soap, braiding bread, or telling stories.

9. What was your biggest failure? Guess who still does not have a passport or a gold star on their license? 

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? I suffered from stupidly inhaling varnish for 5 hours without realizing what the weird smell was (I was focusing and thought I was using oil medium), and then my heart developed a murmur and I fell over while jogging. It seems quieter now. Also I broke my toe trying to catch a plate of toast with my foot. I totally saved the plate, though. 

11. What was the best thing you bought? A new-ish Volkswagen with a moon roof and lots of warranty protection so I could let my teenager drive.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Gavin made a heroic kitten rescue, Zenny started reading her way through all the Calvin and Hobbes books, and Leif became the voice of his school's morning announcement system because he makes the best fart jokes. 

13. Whose behavior made you appalled? The lady who throws coffee and rotting garbage into the library book drop came back. And a sweaty shirtless guy yelled at me for closing the library at closing time.

14. What did you get excited about?  If "excitement" means "blind terror", I was pretty excited when a shark chased me while I was swimming with my kid. Also three old friends came to visit, and Sarah summoned a fireball across the sky.

15. What song will always remind you of 2019? Some time around May I found out about a shitty thing, and I couldn't react to it for days because I was busy at work or with the kids. When I finally had a long nighttime drive by myself, the feeling just sat in my chest like a weight, I couldn't do anything with it. Just then, Bridge Over Troubled Water came on the radio, and it fucking broke me. I cried about the thing, cried because I didn't have someone to comfort me, cried because I was crying to this particular song (back in the '80s, a friend was laid up in the same hospital as Art Garfunkel and said he was constantly walking up and down the halls, singing the harmony to Bridge Over Troubled Water so people would know who he was. We have been joking about it ever since, shuffling up the hall and singing whenever one of us feels like we're not getting the recognition we deserve). I cried so hard I turned on the windshield wipers, like that would do anything. Felt a bit better afterwards.

And When the Night is Over became my car-singing song. If I ever find myself shoved onstage for karaoke, I'll have something to sing besides panicking and belting out Bohemian Rhapsody. 

 

16. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder?  I had accurate expectations.
b) thinner or fatter? The same size, but smooshier. Corporeal forms are hard.
c) richer or poorer? A little bit richer, even with the exploding cat. I have a cabin-in-the-woods savings account now, for when I'm an old lady with a rusty truck and a dog with nice ears. And I got a signed certificate from the governor congratulating me on 10 years of service, so I'm halfway to earning that sweet pension.

17. What do you wish you’d done more of? PAINTING. One day a week is like one meal a day, your hours revolve around it. 

18. What do you wish you’d done less of? Teaching people how to use the new print system at the library. All day. Every day. Next to a sign (that I made) listing each step in all-caps. "Did you send your print job to the print station? Did you wait for the confirmation to pop up? Go back to your computer and click the confirmation popup. Ok now log into the print station by clicking BEGIN. Sorry, no, with the mouse, it's not a touch-screen. Right, now log in, using the same login info you used for the computer. No, your library card login, not your email. Now click PRINT. No, not RESERVATIONS, cancel that. Click PRINT. Ok, now click on your print job. The name of your document right there, click on it. Right on the words, CLICK ON IT. Good, now click CONTINUE. There's your summary, click CONTINUE again. That's it! Easy, right? " 

I am going to push it off the desk one of these days. 

19. Your aunt wants to know, after shit-talking you to your mother, "So! How's your love life?"

Oh, I'm still frigid and withholding, thanks.

(In previous years, this question was, "What is the general state of your heart?", and in years before that it was "Did you fall in love?" This question and I are not friends.)

20. What was your favorite TV program? The Dark Crystal. Also Wellington Paranormal, and What We Do in the Shadows. Stranger Things is fun. Recently we've been into the Mandalorian. 

21. What was the best book you read? The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and Carry On by Rainbow Rowell (this is an imaginary fan fiction novel of an imaginary Harry Potter-type series featured in her book, FanGirl, but it holds its own without any back story, and there's a great sequel after that, Wayward Son) 

I read a bunch of gritty science fiction, westerns, and thrillers, too, but these were the ones that kept me nailed to the couch with a book in my lap. 

22. What did you want and get? a painting of a pork chop.

23. What did you want and NOT get? a painting of a dead raccoon. 

24. What was your favorite film of this year? Jojo Rabbit. 

25. Did you make some new friends this year? Absolutely not. The better question is, did you make any enemies? Maybe a lifelong nemesis? Also no. But I have hope.

26. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? It would be nice if yanking your glove off and slapping people was still socially acceptable. 

27. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019? "What do I have that's clean?" It was supposed to be "Bohemian Cowboy", but I didn't feel like buying new clothes. This year I'm going with "I'm an ADULT" and buying proper librarian clothes from a department store whether I like it or not.

28. What kept you sane? books, painting, and a Costco bottle of melatonin.

29. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?  I liked the priest from Fleabag because he said he was a 'big reader with no friends' and got weird about foxes. 

Also I liked Sam Rockwell's battle outfit scene in Jojo Rabbit.

30. What political/news issue stirred you the most? I found out that one of my library patrons helped murder two people in the '90s, hid their bodies in his garage, buried their bodies with a backhoe, dug up their bodies a month later, and then chucked their bodies into the ocean weighted with concrete slabs. 

Also, this summer a plane crashed at the airfield near my library and killed a few sky divers we knew. The whole town was very upset.

31. Who did you miss? This week I was listening to an audio book in the car, and it said, "You can't change the sound of an echo." They meant it in a "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" kind of way, but that line stuck with me. You can't change the sound of an echo. You can shout over it, though.

32. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2019. "STUDENT DRIVER, PLEASE BE PATIENT" magnets on your car make good drivers better, and bad drivers so much worse. 

Christmas 2019

Wild winds, rain blowing in through all the windows, branches flying. The chicken coop was flooded and I looked under the house, where it was dry, to find 23 sets of chicken eyeballs staring back at me. We have 2 chickens. I put some food under there and didn't ask them any questions.

This is as close to a snow storm as we get, so it was a good atmosphere for roast beef and flaming puddings.

Christmas went off without a hitch, if you don't count chasing sneaky-footed children back into bed all night as a hitch. By 9am the floor was glittering with Legos like a scene from Die Hard. I would have stayed on the couch where it was safe, but I had a new electric milk frother and needed to make elaborate latte art. Picked my way through the mess like a goat, dumped a big pile of hot milk foam into my coffee. Felt very proud.

Back at work now, exhausted, still sick, dropping tissues out of my pockets and cuddling a bottle of hand sanitizer. Thinking about the painting I've been waiting to work on; a slightly-wilty carnation from Thanksgiving.

It is fully dead now, but I took a picture for touch-ups before throwing it away. I'm eyeballing the Christmas floral arrangement my aunt picked up, and planning to steal some of their bodies once they've died a bit. Not-so-fresh flowers are more interesting.

You know what I did NOT get for Christmas? A neck ruff. Now, I did not actually tell anyone in my family I wanted a neck ruff, and I was too embarrassed to put one on my wish list, so this should be a surprise to no one. But still.

Maybe next year.

Christmas Eve

Helped an old man print a Nazi porno screenplay.

Helped an author find funny middle-grade books for inspiration because the book she's writing is "a bit grim", and she's decided to make it a comedy. She's writing a children's book about the Donner Party.

And then I was FREE for the weekend.

Went home and discovered there was another cat. My mother is as big a sucker for kittens as Gavin is. Someone shoved a box of kittens at her and she picked out the skinniest, smelliest one, because he needed her. He has a big shiny muffler burn across one ear which curls the tip up. He looks like a wall-eyed, bow-legged bat, and he smells like skunky weed. He's perfect. We kitty-sat him for a couple days while she finished shopping.

you can't see because he's a dark ball of darkness, but he's washing his face and it is very adorable

I finally lost the fight with seasonal illness and switched from booze to Robitussin. This was good timing, because Mike decided to make an old bottle of Drambuie into something drinkable, and he mixed up something called a "Rusty Nail", then stepped on an actual rusty nail as he was serving it. I yelled, "NAILED IT!" as he went down, and he did not think this was helpful.

The Drambuie was still not drinkable.

I am a fan of bandwagons, so we made baby yoda cookies out of an angel cookie cutter. And there is a gorgeous goddamn homemade yule log in the fridge, complete with meringue mushrooms, which is a sign that I must look like I'm on death's door, because my family knows that "yule log" is on the top of my bucket list. It is a safe item that I never planned to actually check off, so that I could never actually die. That is how bucket lists work, I believe. Thanks for the attempted murder, family.

The roast is roasting, the yorkshire pudding will be a foot high, and I am waiting for my cold medicine to wear off so I can drink a bottle of moscato. Merry Christmas, folks!

This guy

My tiny baby turned 17. When asked what he would like to do with his life, he says, “Something that would allow me to foster rescue kittens.” When asked if he sees himself having a relationship or children, he says, “... just cats, probably.”  He is into metalwork, armor, comedy, and rpgs. Next year he thinks he’ll apply for college in the Pacific Northwest, maybe Seattle, because he loved the squirrels and cherry trees in Point Roberts when he visited his great-grandpa. He’s a solidly good person, I love him with my whole entire heart (the same whole heart I love the other two with, but that is how hearts work).

Happy birthday, Gavin!

tidings of great joy

For a year, I have been explaining the new library print system to patrons. All day. Every day. It's a multi-step system, in three different parts of the library, and not at all simple or intuitive or convenient, so people find it very aggravating. Over the days and weeks and months I worked out the perfect combination of encouragement, sympathetic noises, comedy pantomime, and surprised dismay to keep people from getting angry at me instead of the stupid goddamn print system. Every reference phone call is, "Does the library have a printer I can use?" and every answer is a chipper, "Yes, we sure do!" Weariness set in. This is my life now. I am the print doula, guiding boarding passes from email to paper with the least amount of crying. Maybe I needed a vacation. Maybe I needed to change careers. Something more interesting and meaningful, like a coroner’s assistant, or a pet groomer.

And then this week the printer died. It just dropped stone dead, right in the middle of a print job, and I couldn't get it working again. It took all day for I.T. to install a new printer, and it worked just long enough for them to drive back to Honolulu before it also died. I.T. can't get back out here until next week. After an initial pileup of panicking, angry people, everything went quiet. I haven't had to help anyone print in three days. I can relax and have better conversations with book-seeking patrons, instead of being interrupted every two minutes by someone flapping their phone or flash drive at me. I remember why I like my job.

It's a HOLIDAY MIRACLE.

Everyone please buy your relatives printers for Christmas, save a librarian.


In other news, Plucky is molting and Tiny has become a teen mom.

In the cup: hot cocoa with tequila. On the screen: Watchmen. Festive.