SOMEONE ATE ERIC THE CATERPILLAR. Or he crawled off to metamorphose and didn't leave a note. I would have expected to find a pile of yellow-and-black-striped barf or a sick chicken if he had been eaten, but there's no sign of him. He left plenty of nice milkweed uneaten, so he didn't just crawl off in search of milkier pastures. I hope he's sentient goo in a chrysalis somewhere, and not inside Plucky.
Also, Steve the Rooster has been rehomed. And the tree limb has been removed.
To balance things out, the sink has filled with dirty dishes, and the pile of unfolded laundry on my bed has reappeared. Nature is magical.
I woke up to Steve the rooster cockadoodling. He startled the flock of doves that gathers on the porch waiting for me to feed the chickens, and they exploded into flight with a huge FWOOOMP, which scared the hell out of Steve mid-doodle and sent him screaming around the house. Very brave. Plucky loves him, and has been taking him everywhere, teaching him how to rooster. I like the guy, but chickens don’t have predators here, and we’re only allowed 2 chickens per household. We’ll have about 2 dozen every month if the girls start hiding their eggs from me again. He’s got to go.
In the meantime, I needed more invasive species for my painting. Our stupid conscientious neighborhood is really on top of it and nobody has let invasive species take over. I walked over to the botanical gardens and immediately found every plant I wanted, but there were “don’t pick the plants” signs everywhere and we all know that birds are drones and will report if you try to steal one, so I just took some pictures, instead.
Surprise! Kahili ginger isn’t Hawaiian, despite its name - it’s one of the top 5 invasive plants in the islands
Spot the park employee making sure I don’t pick anything
So then I had a terrible idea. If I was very careful… and kept them all in containers or raised beds… I could make my own invasive species garden and then have all the flowers I want, year-round!
The botanists at the Department of Land and Natural Resources
Look, if they sell the things, people will buy them. Take it up with the Department of Agriculture, DLNR.
Walmart did not have any invasive plants, specializing mainly in ornamental plants that will die immediately in our climate, and I walked away with a $1.00 pansy just because it was cute. Driving out of the parking lot, I spotted a new garden center at the hardware store. Not only did they have an bunch of invasive plants (lantana, allamanda, and ground orchid), they had an entire section of native plants, including one of the early varieties of hibiscus I’ve been looking for! I walked out with a cartful of plants. One of them is a tree. Oh no.
That night I was down in the studio, painting one of my new flowers, when after about two hours, out of nowhere a skinny teen kitten with patchy black and white fur just stood up in front of me, stretched, gave me side eye, and trotted past me and out the door. Excuse me? Does a cat live in my studio? How long had it been in the room with me? I found an egg under the table, too. Presumably not from the cat. I’ve named him Spaghetti, after the cat in an episode of Phroggers I had been listening to (a guy was pulled out from the underside of a couple’s house and told them to take care of Spaghetti, who was still under there somewhere).
Couldn’t sleep. Picked up the family from the airport with purple loops under my eyes. They had flown all night and were exhausted, too, but were so excited to tell me everything, share pictures, and pull out all the Japanese candy they had brought home. After a couple hours they all crashed into naps. I put on a hunk of beef to braise and made a loaf of bread. I'm a bit sad about having to leave my studio and go back to work, back to painting one day a week or in one-hour scraps in the evenings. Still, it's a good life, and I just need to be glad for the time I've had.
And to keep making plans for the future.
(disclaimer because some people don't know if I'm joking: no, I don't think birds are robots, but it is my favorite online conspiracy theory.)
Yesterday evening I was down in the studio, painting a trumpet flower and feeling pretty good about having 3 hours to finish it before bed, when suddenly there was a terrible loud groaning, creaking, splitting noise from the back yard, then a crack like a gunshot. It sounded exactly like a large tree falling over. I was in a concrete room, half underground, the only exit was toward the noise, and the kids weren’t home to be smooshed if a tree went through their bedroom, so I just stayed very still right where I was. The lychee tree crashed into the house and shook the entire basement.
It didn’t look as a dramatic as it sounded, but a limb as big as my torso had split from the trunk and fallen onto the patio roof, and it was hanging by a chunk that was making noises like it wanted to rip the rest of the way off. If it did, the huge limb would fall and break the patio furniture, maybe see-saw down and flip, putting the jagged end through a window. I stood and watched the break for about a minute to make sure it wasn’t going to fall immediately, then ran under it and pushed the furniture out of the way. I went to the tool shed, got a pair of branch cutters, dragged the ladder out, climbed up onto the roof, and cut about a hundred pounds of branches and lychee off the cracked limb to lighten it, racing nightfall and humming “Dumb Ways to Die”. Home alone, up on a roof, in the dark, climbing around a hunk of tree that could break off at any moment and catapult me into the sky. With a lighter load, the split stopped groaning, and the tree settled down.
What kind of tree makes so much fruit it tears its own limbs off? That is bad planning.
Today, I got back up on the roof and cut a few more hundred pounds off the tree, throwing branches and fruit down onto the patio. Ate a few of the biggest ones (fruit, not branches). The outdoor shower was buried under branches, so I had to excavate it and sweep the corrugated roof before I could wash off all the sweat and grime. That counts as a workout for today.
As a reward for all that, one of my library patrons brought me a plastic container with two dead rhinoceros beetles for my invasive species painting. These things are terrible pests, but also very hard to get hold of because they’re found high up in coconut trees, so I’m kind of excited to have some.
The family has flown away, every person in my life in one budget aircraft. I spent 9 hours keeping busy at work and cursing myself for watching that John Oliver episode on Boeing. When a text came in from Japan before bed, I was able to relax. Until they have to fly home.
After yelling songs at my last class of summer students for the week, I took a few days off. It is my time to go feral. So far that has meant cleaning, doing workouts, cooking gross health food, taking walks to find flowers, painting the flowers, and then going to bed at 10pm. I did spend a lot of time chasing a wild rooster around the yard in my pajamas, though. I finally gave up and named him Steve*.
Gratuitous fitness cult progress picture:
(7 lbs to goal. I didn’t take “before” pictures when I started working on the surgery weight, but I’ll find a picture from last year and put on the same outfit or something.)
Why I’m blogging instead of working out right now:
ADVENTURE
One of the flowers I picked was crown flower (milkweed), and it came with a tiny baby caterpillar. It has doubled in size every day, and I’m getting kind of attached to it. Yesterday I went sneaking back to the neighbor’s bush to clip a bigger snack for it, but the neighbor was outside in the garden, so I kept walking. About 20 paces on, I realized I could just ask for a cutting like a normal person, so I turned back around, then chickened out again when I thought of her noticing the pruning shears sticking out of my pants and guessing what I had been up to, so I just went home. This is why I don’t work as a secret agent. (Edited to add: to be clear, I only pick flowers growing on public easements by the road, I don’t mess with people’s gardens, I just don’t want them to worry that I will.)
Today I tried again, and walked in the other direction around the neighborhood until I found a different bush of overgrown milkweed to clip a stem from. On my way back, I stopped at a telephone pole with a faded flyer for a lost dog stapled to it - the lost dog we found last month! I texted the owners to see if they had been reunited, and they hadn’t, so I walked over to the neighbor’s house to find out if he still has the dog. His green truck wasn’t parked in front, but the folks next door peeked over their fence and confirmed that he still has the dog and it looks healthy, so I left a note with the flyer in his mailbox and texted the address to the owners. They’re so relieved he didn’t meet a terrible fate! I’m pretty sure the neighbor doesn’t know who I am, but of course now I’m home alone and imagining all the future true crime podcasts about my stupid meddling ass. Fingers crossed for happy people all around.
*Steve is an old family friend from Indiana who calls my mom at exactly the worst moments to interrupt us with increasingly weird Internet conspiracy theories and political rants. He was already on my shit list for arguing about Tolkien canon in favor of the terrible Hobbit movie and refusing to believe he was wrong even when I read the actual passage in the book out loud, mumbling something about the Silmarillion, which he hasn’t read since 1975 - and THEN he called during 4th of July to explain how the Palestinians are not actually humans, they’re all pure evil, even the toddlers, until my mom blew up at him and he realized he fucked up and she might cancel the packages of coffee and oatmeal she sends him every month. GET OFF OF YOUTUBE AND READ REAL BOOKS, STEVE. Anyway, the rooster interrupted my staycation and has been making a lot of aggravating noise, so he’s Steve now.
I've never known what to do with the 4th of July, it wasn't a day we celebrated in Canada, on the reservation, or on Molokai. Oahu has a bigger military population, and people generally like beer, bbq & beach holidays, so the neighborhood clears out. I decided to make an apple pie, and if the oven is on I might as well make bread. I decided on Kings Hawaiian Rolls, because they are expensive - so why not make my own?
The recipe calls for pineapple juice. I had a container of fresh pineapple in the fridge. Some part of my brain dinged up a warning - didn't I read something about the enzymes in fresh pineapple killing the gluten or yeast or something? Shouldn't I go get a can of pineapple that's been pasteurized? Shut up, brain, fresh is best, the stores are going to be packed with people getting beer and meat, and I'm not going out in that mess.
Well, I killed my bread, and made an enormous bowl of gluey slime. I was not prepared to add another 8 cups of flour to a single batch to try to force it together into a ball, so I let it rise, mucked it all into pans, and made very strange biscuit-bread (pineapple enzymes kill the gluten, turns out). Now I have something to prove, and can't stop until I make perfect Kings Hawaiian Rolls. Even though buying a package of them would be much cheaper at this point.
My mother came over, made guesses about what 2 loaves of pineapple biscuit could be turned into (bread pudding? French toast?) and we sat outside chatting until dinner. We watched the chickens dig around for fallen lychees, and Plucky hopped up onto our laps so we could peel off the layer of dirt that had adhered to the sticky juice on her face and dried into a face mask. She's gorgeous now.
My mom took Zenny home with her for a sleepover, and I spent the evening moving a big concrete head around my studio, trying to find the right spot for my next painting.
I bought the concrete head knowing it would arrive broken. All the reviews said so. But I had an idea for a painting using my new neighborhood florist, who specializes in locally-farmed flowers. Flowers around here are big and heavy, more tree than flower, so I needed a big heavy planter to hold them up. If it arrived broken, I figured I could just glue it back together, and the cracks would add visual interest. Well, it came in 3 pieces, but her face was thankfully intact, so I put it back together with industrial epoxy.
I can bullshit some symbolism about the cracks if anyone asks about it.
While I was in mending mode, I took custody of two of my mother's paintings. I've been trying to encourage her to paint again, after she showed interest, but she's waffling. I think she's afraid she won't be any good at it after all this time. When I went to college, she took a painting class at the university and really enjoyed it, but they didn't teach varnishing or framing, so her unfinished paintings have been hanging on nails in the bathroom collecting dust and gecko poop since 1998. She needed to be reminded how much she enjoyed painting, and shown that her work is valued.
So I kidnapped the paintings, cleaned them, re-stretched one of them because termites had eaten the wood support, varnished, and ordered good frames. First one:
Such a difference! I didn't take a "before" shot, so imagine it dull and streaked with dirt, with raw unfinished edges. I'm still working on the other one, which was near a window and had more damage.
She took it home, happy, and then pulled out her paints, and set up an easel with a little canvas in her living room. She hasn't started putting paint to canvas yet, but it's promising.
At work, my co-worker has returned, and I lost the nice office and processing work. I'm back at the front desk, pointing to the toilets all day. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.
When I was 9 or 10, one of the rez dogs that hung around the teacher trailers attacked a porcupine and got a faceful of quills. We sat for hours cutting the ends and pulling them out with pliers, wiping away the blood while the dog shook and tried to stay still. We did what we could to clean him up and prevent infection, but rez dogs lead their own lives, and he had gotten what he needed from us. A few weeks later, he attacked another porcupine and showed up again with long brown needles all over his face. Edward, the school maintenance man, shook his head at us while my mom sat on the steps of our trailer and pulled the quills out. He said, "A dog who bites a porcupine will never stop, he'll go after them again and again, trying to get even." My mother stubbornly finished the job, smeared bacitracin on his face, and the dog ran off with the rest of the pack.
A few weeks later, he was back again with hundreds of thin white quills in his muzzle like a dandelion. Wounds on top of wounds, infected and too sore to let us touch him, too sore to eat or drink. My mother stood outside and talked with the other teachers and Edward. She came back into the trailer looking grim. When she had to explain tough parenting subjects like sex or racism or homophobia or death, my mother just laid things out plainly and let me draw my own conclusions. “The dog won’t stop, so Edward is going to put him down.”
“Put him down?”
“Kill him.”
“How?”
“With a gun.”
“When?”
“He’s taking him now, out over the hill.”
My chest clenched up, but I couldn’t think of anything else we could do. It was a 3-4 hour drive over dirt roads to the nearest veterinarian. We couldn’t afford to take him. And even if we could, he would just do it again when he got better. So far the other dogs he hung out with - including my dog, Buckwheat - hadn’t attacked a porcupine, but maybe they would if he did it in front of them. If we didn't do something, he’d suffer and die of infection, thirst, or starvation.
Our couch was against the window, and my mom sat down next to me to look out. I don’t know if I looked, too, and saw Edward walking away with a long gun over one arm and the dog on a rope lead, or if I just visualized it into a memory, but I can still see it. I slid off the couch onto the floor and pushed my fingers into my ears. My mom put her hand on my shoulder. “I know. But this is the way they do things,” she said, and I could hear her, so I knew I’d hear the shot no matter how hard I covered my ears.
There was a long quiet minute, a small distant muffled bang and a sharp pain in my chest, and then a horrible relief that it was all over. I felt guilty about being relieved.
This is how it was. My mother rescued bugs as a kid, and later on she learned to save birds and kittens and dogs. Once she carried a rattlesnake out of the school on a shovel and the Navajo admin had to have a ceremony to cleanse the building because they saw her talking to it ("Don't you try to bite me, go home"). Before switching to teaching, she took two years of nursing school, so she can give injections, tape broken legs, and staunch blood. Smaller animals only survive half the time, though, and when they die they tend to do it at night. We woke up to a lot of dead animals. I have a harder time with rehabbing than she does. I feel panicky pain for bad injuries, and have nightmares about finding hurt, drowning, or dead animals in boxes or tied to things. Every day they survive is another night of nightmares, and every morning is a Hitchcockian walk across the room to look into the cage or shoebox or coop to see if they’re still alive.
So I wasn’t too happy about finding another baby bird on Father’s Day. The best thing is to try to reunite it with its parents, so I spent the day climbing the roof, trying to get it back in its nest, letting the parents feed it while they tried to lead it up the lychee tree branches, but it tumbled down again each time, and wouldn’t stay in the makeshift nesting box tied to the tree. My mother came to help, but it wouldn’t accept bird formula or sugar water, so we set it on the patio table for its parents to feed for as long as they could, then cuddled it up at night in a little cage, nestled on warmers and away from the cats.
It woke up dead. Mike took it outside to bury because I was having a hard time looking at it, feeling like I’d killed it. (Too warm? Not warm enough? Could I have gotten more food into it?) You have to remind yourself that all you can do is your best, and it's better to die warm, safe, and dry than cold, scared, and wet.
Then yesterday, over at my mother's house, the injured cardinal died. It had a traumatic brain injury and was partially paralyzed on one side, but she was giving it a chance to recover because birds can regenerate nerve damage better than humans. It was improving and seemed happy, but it must have had a stroke or aneurism in the night.
For some reason it had me thinking about that rez dog and the porcupine.
It all makes songs hit differently on your morning commute.
I'm glad Zenny was away at camp this week, and the boys slept through it. I'll take all the nightmares.
I have been painting flowers. In the interest of keeping it local (and cheap), I have only been painting flowers I can find growing wild around the neighborhood, walking around with scissors down my waistband (for snipping plants) and wondering if I'd get in trouble if I stabbed someone with them in self-defense. Knives are not okay, but scissors shouldn't count as a deadly weapon, right? Doesn't matter, if some weirdo tackles me while I'm out walking, they're getting the scissors. Thinking wouldn't enter into it.
Zenny followed me out to find flowers the other day, and we were walking around the neighborhood, casing the gardens and talking about the legality of scissors, when a weirdo tackled me. The weirdo was a dog, though, so I caught him in my arms and just stood there while he panted in my ear and hung over my shoulder like a big yellow baby. Zenny started laughing.
"What do I do?!"
"I don't know!"
So we walked home with the dog. "Hey Leif, what kind of flower is this?" we yelled when we got to our back yard. The boy came out and immediately ran back inside to get a tennis ball. Where did he get a tennis ball? All young people have a tennis ball kicking around somewhere in their room, I guess. The dog had no tags, but seemed well cared for, so after chasing the ball for a bit and having some water and a snack, we clipped a cat harness loosely around his neck and walked him up the road, heading for the vet to check for an identification chip.
"Lead us to your home!" we told him. He did not. He led us to the house with yodeling huskies and peed on the fence, then he shook off the cat leash and ran down the road like an idiot. "I am not adopting a dog who can't help solve mysteries," I told Zenny, "'Where do I live?' seems like a mystery a dog should be able to solve." A green truck drove up slowly and stopped next to us.
"Lose your dog?" the driver asked.
"No, we found him and we were taking him to the vet to see if he had a chip. Do you know who he belongs to?"
"Nah, I just saw him earlier so I went to get my truck, figured I'd hang on to him and post signs."
"Right on." The dog came running back to us with his tongue flapping behind him, so we picked him up and stuffed him through the guy's window. He turned around and drove away with the dog grinning in his lap. We walked home and saw the green truck parked in a driveway three houses down from ours, so if anything bad happens to that dog, we know where he lives. And I have scissors. He seems okay, though, I just didn't recognize him with a shirt on; he usually comes out to check his mail with only saggy gym shorts on, and years of dealing with the public has caused me to develop willful face blindness. It's easier to cheerfully help people who have been assholes to you if you can't be bothered to remember what they look like. It means I am absolutely useless when describing people to the police, though. No details or colors, just general vibe: "scary screaming man on a bike", "woman with no pants trying to poop on the stairs", "big, completely naked, thought it was a sasquatch", etc.*
And that was our very brief taste of life as dog owners. We are not prepared.
*actual incidents
In other news, the kids have progressed from drawing to their first painting lesson with the online atelier program.
Top: Zenny, Bottom: Leif
Really pleased with how they did. Neither of them are clicking into obsessive mode and shooting off on a trajectory to become artists, but trying to learn a thing is all it takes to be a more interesting person. Being good at it doesn't matter as much.
We feed the cats a small mouse-sized portion of Fancy Feast twice a day, and they are still built like bowling balls on popsicle sticks. "Nearly fat," is what the vet said at their last checkup. But then Finnegan sat on the scale while I was in the bathroom, and I saw that "nearly fat" had tipped into the zone of "actually fat". We love a big hunk of cat, but they need to move their drumsticks a bit more.
So I bought the cats a giant kitty hamster wheel.
I knew better. I knew they would just pee on it and then use it to nap on, but the child part of my brain kept imagining cats running at cheetah speeds and then spinning around in the wheel like a centrifuge before flinging off like cat-shaped ninja stars.
It was the kids' job to train them to run in the thing. They tried using a laser pointer, and they demonstrated walking on it with their hands and meowing. Finally I heard the wheel spin, and the kids cheered. I ran into the room to find them holding treats out like carrots, just out of reach, and then rewarding them for half a rotation. Now the cats will walk on the wheel for 3 seconds and then stop and wait for a treat. This has been a successful training program, but not on the part of my kids.
We’ll work on it.
Update: one cat loves it and runs and runs! It’s the wiry anxious cat who pulls his own fur out. He seems happier and stopped plucking himself, so I guess it was a therapy purchase. The big cats lay around and watch him like a tv.
Got up at 5am and kicked one of my dumbbells so hard I cut the top of my foot open, and the good news is that the blood offering seems to have ended the run of bad luck. The cat went bald again, though.
My feelings about what I want to share have been shifting, or maybe I just don't feel interested in things the way I used to be. I started blogging when I was 24, and every post was a bread crumb leaving a trail just in case the guy I secretly liked wanted to know what I was up to.
"secretly" lol
Well, he didn't. I kept writing anyway, to pretend I didn't care. For the next 18 YEARS.
(Edited to add: it’s no use looking, I deleted the embarrassing stuff years ago.)
Young people have a lot of things going on. Grad school, babies, new jobs, moves, breakups, makeups, buying a house, renovation disasters, scary encounters.
And then one day, the friend group is gone. The kids are too old to tell cute stories about.* Experience means there are fewer funny mishaps and scary encounters. Adventure is going to Target with a gift card. The milestones are medical - and you know what happens if you talk about your brush with cancer? Strangers start searching your blog archives for “covid vaccine”, because there are fucking idiots out there.
Unless I take up a hobby like the people on tiktok who are sitting around in the backyard with trays of seeds on their heads to attract birds, not much is going to happen that's fun to talk about.
But this is MY boring life, so here's what's up:
Lost a few more pounds, went out to buy new pants (with a Target gift card!) and discovered that the summer styles are shredded acid-washed ‘90s mom jeans, denim bib overalls, crop tops, and dresses that are just sacks tied at the neck. If this is what we're doing, I can wear anything I want, I guess, so I ordered a hippie clown onesie, instead.
I’ll save my gift card for the fall, when fashion sobers up.
Meanwhile, the family has booked tickets for summer travel in July and I can’t join them because of work, and this means A WEEK ALONE. I am more excited about eating popcorn for dinner in my underpants and painting until midnight and having the house stay clean than I would have been about going on the trip.
The sun is up late, the lychee tree is covered in young little fruits, and it’s the last week of school. I love summers.
* As I was laying in bed typing this on my phone at 8:30pm on a school night, Leif came in and asked if I could bake a sheet cake for his class party in the morning. Did I jump up and bake him a cake? YES I DID. I still get to talk about my kids when they’re hiding giant sticks in my trunk (which is still in there, along with my collection of found-in-the-wild machetes), and making requests for “frosting-frosting, not ganache or fudge, 'cause it’s just for the kids in my class” half an hour before bedtime.
The bird survived! I drove across the island and got to my mother's house in the evening. The little bird was scared and struggling, but it calmed down when she picked it up, gently turned it over, and let it grab her pinky with its toes to see if the legs were broken. Both feet gripped her finger, and it could spread both wings on its own, so it doesn't need a splint for broken bones, although it's definitely injured. It accepted a bellyful of warm bird formula (very young bird, still had some rubber baby beak showing) and she put it under a heating pad to sleep the night. She texted to report that it woke up alive instead of dead, and had a big appetite, so that's promising.
I sunk all my good luck into that bird. It was after dinner time when I got home, so I found some sad salad in the fridge and ate it with the last three shrimp in the freezer. Did my fitness cult workout like a toddler being forced to put away blocks. The neighbor's son was blaring NSFW music to drown out Leif banging out Bach on the piano, and my nerves were fried. By the time I got out of the shower the duel had ended and everyone was settled down to their own activities, so I decided to get an hour of painting in to unwind before bed. Picked up my art stuff, went out the back door, slipped on a puddle, and fell down the concrete stairs.
When I came limping back in an hour later, Mike pointed at the mail pile. "Something came for you today." The something was an envelope from the post office, containing an apology letter and a torn scrap of cardboard that was the only surviving piece of the box of painting panels I had ordered a couple weeks ago. A sorting machine in Philadelphia ate the rest of it.
But today is going to be a good day. I am going to throttle the goodness right out the day, goddamn it.
Edited again to add: also I found my new teapot in the garbage because the cat threw it out of the cupboard and broke it.
edited because google still won't let me comment on my own posts: I'm fine, just busted my knees and elbows a bit. Probably helped that I was limbered up; one leg went flying out like Gumby all the way to the bottom of the stairs, the rest of me followed, and I went crashing down into pigeon pose on the wet patio.
