Landscapes and red flags

Well, I am absolute trash at landscape painting. 

 

Trees, why are you?

But I learned some things and troweled on a lot more paint than I usually do, so that’s an improvement. Each one just needs to be better than the last. 

 Now that can sit in time-out while I paint a nice safe still life, instead.

- -

Unrelated 

I have been having a bad feeling for the past week, and I can't seem to shake it. It's creeping into my dreams, but there's nothing I can really point to and say, "aha, that's what the problem is". To distract myself, I have been cleaning up the basement studio and fixing the lighting, spraying and baiting the corners to fight the roaches that lick the oil off my paintings at night. It gets dusty down there from dirt sifting loose when people walk overhead, so a ceiling needs to go up. Then if I get a mini fridge and a fold-out couch down there, it'll be kind of like having a vacation house. A vacation house where you can hear people stomping around upstairs looking for you.

Jogging also helps, if only to move snails off the road, smell flowers, and see some good clouds.

When that doesn’t work, bake some bread.

I hope everyone is okay out there.

At it again

Hail! In Wahiawa! 

At midnight the sky was streaming with sideways lighting, and suddenly the world began crackling. Two car alarms went off, and I went outside to see ice bouncing around the yard and rolling down the street in the rain. I watched to see if my chickens would get brained and fall dead out of the lychee tree, but it has dense branches and did its job to protect them. When the ice began to let up, I got back into bed, and Zenny climbed in with me, crying. I rubbed her back and told her my best childhood hail story:

When I was 9, we went on a summer road trip in our little blue pickup truck. While visiting family in Fargo, my mother decided she wanted a camper for the back of the truck. "I just need a basic little camper shell," she told the guy at the auto place. "No, you want fiberglass," he said. "Do I?" she asked. "Fiberglass." "Okay, fiberglass." She bought the not-cheapest fiberglass camper, and we headed on toward South Dakota. At nightfall, somewhere around the badlands, it began to rain so hard she could barely see the lines on the road, and suddenly olive-sized balls of hail began cracking off the windshield. "To hell with this," she said, and slowly pulled over into a McDonalds parking lot. We climbed through the sliders into the back of the truck, and slept the night on the crib mattress she had thrown back there. The next morning we woke up, got breakfast at McDonalds, and carried on down the road. Not even 200 yards away, we passed a car with its windshield smashed. And then another. And then we saw that all the cars along the road had smashed windshields, and their hoods were pock-marked with dents. The hail had come down the size of baseballs, and hunks were still melting in the gutters. If we had kept driving, we would have been right in the middle of it, but instead we were cuddled up, sleeping safe and cozy in our new camper. "Fiberglass," my mother said gratefully.

"Just like we're safe and cozy right now," I said. Zenny calmed down and fell back asleep. Wild night.

(Edited to correct some details about where we were driving; I was 9 and couldn’t remember that stuff reliably.)

It's only life after all

Between upcoming travel and the backgrounds of my horse paintings looking like shit, I decided it was time to have another stab at learning landscape painting.

Landscapes are my discomfort zone. About 5 years ago I decided to confront my bad attitude about landscapes, but I just ended up making it worse. The workshop I chose was in Portland, because my favorite studio on Whitbey Island wasn't offering a landscape class that fall, and also because I had discovered through lurking on Linkedin that someone I used to care about had moved there. I was depressed at the time because of medical/relationship bullshit, and my way of dealing with depression is usually to t-bone it with something it doesn't see coming. A unicorn latte. Jogging down a different road and getting chased by dogs. Sneaking into an unlocked construction site at night. Buying plane tickets to a place I have no business being.

I waffled about it, but I really did want to take a landscape workshop, and the only other one I could find was in Sedona for $3,000 more and 14 hours of driving.

First thoughts: Oh, just do it, you are not banned from an entire city just because someone who dumped you lives there.

Second thoughts: And maybe he'll see me posting that I'm in the area and want to catch up over coffee, and we can be friends again!

Third thoughts: He's going to think you're stalking him and shoot you on sight.

I told my brain to shut up and went anyway, hoping I would get so good at landscape painting that everything else would be put out of mind.

That did not happen, of course. I absolutely sucked at landscapes, and I was tweeting my location like a middle schooler. I figured if he didn't read my tweets, nobody was bothered. If he did read them and wanted to catch up, that would be okay. And if he wanted to actively avoid me, it was a helpful heads-up. I wasn’t trying to surprise anyone. On my third night, I was sitting in the Kells Brewery, drinking a beer and doodling customers in my sketchbook, glancing up at the door every time someone walked in and feeling stupid about it. It was open mic night, and at about 9pm a beardy man with a guitar got up and began playing Indigo Girls covers. He sang 'Closer to Fine', and then started in on 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright'. I put my pencil down, suspicious.

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If'n you don't know by now
And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It'll never do somehow
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm traveling on
But don't think twice, it's all right...

The guy made eye contact and sang the last line right at me, You just kinda wasted my precious time, but don't think twice, it's alright.

Okay. A message from the universe delivered by a stranger in a hipster beanie. I laughed into my beer, paid up, walked back to my hotel, and went to bed. When I got home a few days later I deleted my Linkedin account.

The world shut down before I could take another workshop and put some space between me and my shame, and then there was college airfare and family funerals that ate up the travel budget. Luckily, the pandemic created a leap in online course availability, and all I had to do this time was fork over $26 for a month at East Oaks Studio.

After watching a few hours of demo painting, my homework was to go outside and paint small studies - just taking color notes, not trying to make a finished piece. I decided to go to Kaena Point, thinking the dry mountains over there would be less green and maybe have some atmospheric distance. I was wrong. I had no focal point, no eyeline, no distance, and the color notes were GREEN. With GREEN. A spot of brown in there, but not enough to save me.

sad trombone

It was fun anyway. Spent the last three days keeping my eyes peeled for the right location, and almost got in a car wreck on the way home from work because I was looking at a nice tree. After dropping the kids off at school this morning, I drove over to Kaiaka Park and went wading through thigh-high wet grass in my work clothes to get a look at the early morning light on the mountain. 

Maybe I want to paint dramatic lighting. Or a sentimental location. Maybe the ocean? Actually, I am still mad at the ocean for throwing a shark at me, so not that.

"You're overthinking it," my friend at the library said. "Just paint. You're a better painter now than you were 5 years ago."

 

Get ready for a lot of bad landscape paintings, here I go.

10

Zenny made it a decade. She has been the hardest one to keep alive, between head injuries, seizures, kidney surgery, and covid — but hopefully her upcoming preteen growth spurt will make her body sturdy enough to cruise through her second decade with no health-related excitement. The world is dangerous enough for teenage girls without them having to worry about kidney function.

Year nine was a big one for this kid. She was in the hospital for a week, recovery for a month, then started training to compete in the kids Spartan race, went to Lake George, learned to drive a boat, and got into horseback riding. At this time she still wants to be a doctor, but she’s starting to get interested in the science end of it instead of the medical end. She asked for a microscope for her birthday, and she’s had her eyeball stuck to it ever since.

She’s a happier, more sociable child than I was. Still squeamish about blood, and she cringes with her whole body and covers her face if someone on tv does something embarrassing. She’s a reader, an empathetic listener, and she reads my mind in an unnerving way if she notices I’m thinking about something.

Love this kid so much.

May your next decade be full of all the good stuff, kiddo.

Droopy v. house

Droopy is the sweetest cat of the bunch, but he is not allowed outside. We found him as a kitten in a neighbor's wheel well, and every time he shoots out the front door he makes a wild run to return to his native homeland: the underside of a car.

On Sunday the rain had stopped, and we brought out the ladder and rollers to work on painting the house. Droopy squirted out the door as we were going in and out, and Leif threw up his hands, following him from car to car in the driveway. The cat finally ran into the neighbor's garage and hid where we weren't comfortable pursuing. I kept painting. Leif was annoyed to be the only person chasing the cat.

"Why is it not more urgent to you that Droopy got out?" he asked.

"Because we're all outside, so he's safer, and he'll come out eventually," I said. 

My back was to the driveway while I painted the wall of the front porch, so I didn't see what happened next, but Leif yelped and suddenly Droopy leaped up and slammed into the wall next to me, panicking, legs pinwheeling like a cartoon cat as he tried to run vertically up the outside of the house. I grabbed him and he thrashed around like a fish, slamming us into every freshly painted surface, shredding my arms and legs and coating himself with white paint, until I finally wrestled the front door open and he launched himself inside. He sprinted through the entire house before we managed to catch him and fight him into the bathtub. He stood on his hind legs, face pressed hard into me as I bent over and washed the paint off of him with warm water. He finally calmed down enough for us to wrap him in a towel like a baby and carry him out to the living room. 

The floor was criss-crossed with white paw prints. The concrete porch and stairs were splattered with white paint. The wall was covered in claw gouges and orange fur. Droopy hopped up onto the couch and started drying himself off, purring.

He is fired from house painting. 

Do we know what scared him so badly? We do not.

Did it stop him from trying to jet outside every time we open the door? NO, IT DID NOT.

Unrepentant animal.

Not again

It is the springtime windy season, and this means birds. Birds smacking into the side of the house, birds tumbling out of trees, and birds stampeding through the yard like tiny dinosaurs. In one week, my mother the bird witch (rehabber) has been given a dove with an injured wing, a baby finch that fell out of its nest, and five orphaned chicks. Most of these birds were given to her by my own kids, but still. Out of control. 

I had to take two hours of vacation to retrieve the baby finch from my son at the high school and then drive all the way around the north shore of the island to bring it to my mother in Kaaawa, passing hundreds of happy people along the beaches who were using their vacation time for actual vacation. Felt very jealous, even though I could have yanked the car over at any moment and leaped into the water alongside them in my work clothes. I owe myself one spontaneous action item.

Meanwhile, the domestic bird situation isn’t any better. After re-homing the handsome rooster that tried to move in with our girls, we spent weeks hunting out all their secret nesting spots and stealing eggs so we wouldn't end up with another tribble situation. 3 hens, 2-3 eggs per day - we were on top of it. Until today, when one of the girls came popping out from under the house with eleven little butterballs rolling behind her. She went straight into the coop and settled down with them to wait for food and water service. She‘s too smart for us.

Using up all my sick days

We’ve been passing around a seasonal kid virus (non-covid, we tested), and it’s had me laid up for a week. You’d think this would result in a week’s worth of painting, but it turns out it’s hard to paint while you’re sleeping off a blinding sinus headache. 

I got a little bit in anyway, because I am stubborn and bored and my family was getting exasperated about how much bread I was baking.

Went for it and painted up the first page of my new sketchbook.

Painted another horse, because I’ve already drawn out a few of them and they’re ready to go.

And then back to my disgusting nest of tissues and half-empty tea cups.

My vegetarian/pescatarian Lent resolution does not extend to Sunday dinners, so I am holding out hope that I will be cured by pot roast this evening. Worth a try.

House progress

After a month of rain, the sun came out long enough for us to run outside and slap some paint on the house. Didn’t even finish one side, let alone touch the trim or put in new screens, but at least the new wood won’t rot.

Took a break from horses to paint my kid.

And then back to horses.

I’ve just about filled up both my sketchbooks with paintings of these things, so I bought a new moleskine sketchbook for 2023, and now I’m afraid to touch it. Every new sketchbook has the potential to be perfect. The one you fill up with lovely little studies that you’d be proud for your great-grandchildren to discover in an attic someday. And then you fill it with mangled sketches and torn-out pages and sloppy paint and want to bury it in the yard. The first painting in my new sketchbook has to not suck. This is going to be a challenge, since I’ve been painting Tik Toks lately when nobody is looking, and right now my photo album is full of screen shots of the Cock Whisperer. 

Sorry, great grandkids.

Wow more horses

This guy looks like a person who was turned into a horse 5 min before posing for his portrait. Blue-eyed horses are scary.

Tape on, tape off

Last week I painted a very long horse, because I thought it was funny, but it really just looks like I don’t know how to draw a horse. I don’t care, it made my kids laugh, anyway.

And then they started singing, “Let me do it for youuuu”

Lent is coming up again. This year I’m going pescatarian, in an effort to boost my fish intake and cut back on animal fats while I work through this weight program (increased dumbbells this week, so I’m making some kind of progress!). Zenny is going with “breaking a bad habit I don’t want to tell you about”, which I assume is something like licking Nutella out of the jar when we’re not looking, and not something like embezzlement or catfishing. Leif is going with “showering more”, because he’s 14. Attainable goals.

But before Lent is Fat Tuesday (and Fat Monday, because why not), so I made a king cake. I didn’t have a plastic baby to jam into it, so I rolled a nice fat dried cherry into the dough before it baked. (The recommended alternative to the baby was a pinto bean, but I’m giving up emergency dentist appointments for Lent, too.)

And then I burned it. I do not know how this happened, it was only in for 25 minutes. It was the opposite of a holiday miracle.

Oh well.

edit: it was perfect in the middle, actually, the crust was just too dark. Bread is very forgiving.

Sunset cruise

The boat ride was everything you could ask for from an aging cruise ship next to an abandoned Hooters. 

 

Aloha Tower used to be a trendy shopping destination full of VR rides, shops, restaurants, tropical bars, and the maritime museum. Now it's rented by a private university and a Scientology church.When we arrived 20 minutes early, we were surprised to see one bar was still open, with a large chalkboard sign pointed at the cruise ship waiting area: 4 FOR 20 ANY BEER. Challenge accepted. We sat next to a giant fiberglass shark and drank Guinness and Maui Brewing Co, watching the pre-boarding hula from outdoor bar stools.

 

The buffet was mostly macaroni salad and dry teri chicken. The drinks were mostly pineapple juice, with just the barest whiff of alcohol. Probably they did not need 200 tourists getting drunk and concussing themselves or falling overboard every time the ship rocked. Someone face-planted on the way to the dessert table, anyway.

I saw a whale's nose-holes as it surfaced nearby, and two dolphin dorsal fins. Everyone applauded. 

At sunset we went to the top deck to watch the city lights come on. It was really pretty. I was surprised more people weren't up there; most of the tourists opted to stay close to the bar, insinuating teaspoonfuls of alcohol out of $10 frozen drinks.

When it was dark, the floor show started. The servers changed outfits and performed rapid-fire one-minute hula routines, sprinted into the hallway, tore into a new costume, and sprinted back for their next set. Coconut bras in one set became clapping instruments in the next set, zippers were half undone, it was choreographed chaos. There were only two men, so they had to run between 3 decks to do their bits.

RUN, YOU CAN DO IT

When all of them were close to collapsing, the ukulele player turned on YMCA so they could stop and catch their breath for a bit. You guys. People still jump up and do this thing with all the gusto they can muster. Why have we not developed another uncoordinated drunk-person sing-along anthem in the past 45 years? There have been attempts, but none have stuck like this one. It is a mystery of nature.

YMCfml

 

It was flawlessly tacky. The dancers did a good job with a tough gig. It's hard getting a job performing hula in any meaningful context, but it's so important to keep it alive and well represented, even if all you get is a 2-hour budget cruise.

 

Overall, would recommend, but not repeat. Except the part at the bar with the fiberglass shark, that was aces.

adventuring for wet blankets

Well, Mike was polite about my plans to make landscape paintings of a homeless encampment and then drink beer out of plastic cups at the pizzeria next to Walgreens, and then he booked a sunset cruise with a "Pacific rim cuisine" buffet and mai tais, instead. Fine.

Luckily, I just got a new dress, which I copied directly from my friend after she posted a bathroom selfie wearing the same thing and I DM'd her for the link.

Link here 

Which brings me to FITNESS CULT.

To recap: partly to support/annoy my husband by encroaching on his hobbies, I started working out with Centr last summer. Spent 4 months getting fit, had a medical emergency, found out I was developing cancer, had to start medication to stop my uterus from exploding, started gaining weight because of the medication, had surgery for the cancer, and haven't been allowed to lift anything for 2 months while in recovery.

This week I finished a gentle 6-week program for weenies, which at least halted the weight gain, and now it is BACK ON. Last night I started Day 1 of a higher-intensity 6-week weight program. We will see if my organs try to eject themselves again.