Like National Treasure, but it’s just me trashing my studio

Vague posting pisses me off, but OH WELL.

I have been trying to catch another glimpse of Basement Cat using old-fashioned flour-on-the-flour kind of detective work, and things have gotten weird. I found more than I was looking for, and I need an explanation. But guess who rots her brain on podcasts and thinks she can solve the case? Fetch my deer stalker cap.

I’ll get into it later. Right now I am racing the clock to paint one last painting before the gallery deadline. Took the day off today to finish all the blank pieces.

It’s coming along in small bites. 

Last photo is today’s progress. Still have time to block in the butterflies before bedtime. Then the whole thing gets a second pass, and I think I might be on track for the show. 

hurricane season

The first hurricanes of the year are heading our way, with a big storm thinking about turning into a hurricane right on top of us, and another hurricane right behind it. Blogger changed its formatting so we can no longer post gifs from the internet, so here is the link to the NOAA satellite view. They should get here by Saturday afternoon.

And of course it's just me and the two younger kids at home this week. Did I remember to get plywood this year? No, I did not. At least the louvres have been repaired, so we can pretend to close the windows by cranking the slats from flat to downward. We have a camp stove and a bucket of apocalypse food from the ballistic missile incident, so I just have to remember to stock up on water and we'll be set. Except for, you know, the windows being as stormproof as a paper bag. The basement is safe if things get bad - so long as the yard doesn't flood and the lychee tree doesn't decide to launch itself onto the house.

Storms hardly ever make landfall on Oahu. Not worried. 

ghosting myself

A couple weeks ago I was in a zoom meeting with the life insurance lady for the annual "are you sure you don't want to pay more?" policy review.

"So," she explained, "These benefits will increase every year, maxing out at age 86. That's just the average lifespan. For you, you're in your 40s now, non smoking, female, so you should have about... let's see... 42 years left to live. Make sense?"

"Yes," I said, "And then you dispatch the assassins."

Reviewing life insurance makes you feel like you're on the brink of death and running out of time to make your final arrangements. I started scribbling designs for a headstone and pinning cemetery statues on Pinterest. Not sure if our local graveyards even allow statues, I started looking at real estate sites for churchyards so I could run my own cemetery and make statues mandatory. Imagine all the craftsmen and artisans that would find work in the area, importing marble and stone, operating the foundry, milling and engraving and installing beautiful tombstones and mausoleums. Let's bring back spooky gothic graveyards that become future tourist destinations, folks.

I chatted about all this while I was cooking the other day, and didn't get any response or grunt of acknowledgment. Well, it wasn't important, I guess people are used to me going on about dumb shit while I'm doing busywork.  

Throughout the week, though, it became pretty noticeable. At one point I stopped talking mid-story, waited, and ended up waiting so long I gave up and went to bed.

First thoughts: wtf, do I really talk so much that I need to be tuned out? 

Second thoughts: Oh no, am I being grey-rocked? Do I have a toxic personality disorder and don't know it? 

Third thoughts: relax, someone would have told you by now. 

Second thoughts: phew

Third thoughts: you might be dead, though.

As I have mentioned, third thoughts are assholes. 

That asshole might be on to something, though. This morning I went to refill my cup of decaf. Poured some milk in the cup. Put the milk back in the fridge. Picked up the coffee pot - empty. Weird. Picked up my cup to put it in the sink - it was full of hot coffee. WHEN DID I POUR IT? 

I don't know, folks. Could be a ghost. 

Meanwhile, this week the open call for the annual Artists of Hawaii show was announced, and I panicked. I don't think my yearlong sketchbook project is good enough to submit (I gave up posting videos, but I've still been working on it). I have been painting a lot of flowers, but I don't think any of those are up to the job, either. So I decided to try to paint one last thing in the time left before the deadline, and just hope it turns out good enough to submit. 

Over the weekend I sketched out the plan, bought the flowers, set up the still life, drew it onto velum, transferred the drawing to the toned panel, and now I'm trying to figure out which part to start first.

 HURRY, JUST PAINT IT.

This will be all I’ll be thinking about for the next 5 weeks.

16

Leif turned 16.

This kid used to escape out the cat door as a baby. He shredded entire loaves of bread into pots and pans while we weren't looking, painted the walls with my semi-permanent 24-hour lipstick, flushed toys and pads down the toilet, ate peanut butter out of the jars by the toddler fistful, and got an empty sugar packet stuck so far up his nose that we had to go to the otolaryngologist to get it pulled out. He's a rascal, quick to laugh and quick with funny comebacks. 

These days he's been really interested in military history - the complicated moral issues, the stories of survivors, how PTSD was viewed, how young the soldiers have been, and the fact that so many regular people are so willing to commit atrocities. He asks questions like, Do you think the ends really justify the means? How many German citizens knew what was actually happening? How does a good person stay good? What would you do if you were ordered to do something you knew was wrong? Things I'm glad he's thinking about. We've been watching war shows in the evenings after Zenny is in bed, and he chimes in with information about diseases/politics/technology like a nature documentary narrated by Hawkeye Pierce. Right now we're watching a really good German miniseries called Generation War (on Prime), and he's just finished reading Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard. I'm along for the ride and reading The Tattooist of Auschwitz so we can watch the new series adaptation. It gives us interesting stuff to talk about on the daily commute.

He has also been learning advanced CNC machining on the robotics team, and this year he's being paid for it. He's still planning to go to university for engineering, but it's great that he has skills to fall back on if he wants to apprentice somewhere, instead. 

He's also been DRIVING. My heart. His dream car is a Mazda Miata with the headlights he can pop up and wink with.

It may have been a homely cake, but it was from scratch and had layers of cheesecake mousse

He responds to mom-texts with the usual teenage one-word answers, but he sends lots of videos and memes to make me laugh. He makes sure he jumps on the bed and gets a big goodnight hug every night, and always yells, "I love you, sweet dreams, sleep tight!" as he heads to his room. I started yelling back, "I love you, sleep dreams, sweep tight!" and now if I accidentally say it the right way the kids correct me.

2 years left with this guy. I love him so much.

another school year

 The end of the summer is a mess. 

* With two weeks left before he flies back to college, Gavin knocked his face off the bottom of a swimming pool and broke a chunk of his front tooth. Emergency dentistry counts as summer adventure, if you subscribe to my motto: you know you're having an adventure when you aren't having any fun. Sitting on a curb outside a mechanic's shop in the middle of nowhere? Adventure! Flights grounded overnight in a city you've never been in? Adventure! When things go sideways, you just have to throw up your hands and go with it. Unless the adventure is a carnival ride with a bad seat belt, in which case you have to hang on to the bars for dear life. (This happened.)

* Mike changed the boy's return flight from Rochester to Newark, and is flying out with him to buy a car from his sister, then help the boy get it registered/insured and drive it up to RIT - forgetting it was the same week as the Spartan race he had been waiting 2 years to compete in. It's off for another year now, and now he's slopping around the house like a soggy wet towel of disappointment.

* One of our chickens died. She went missing right after the rooster was rehomed, and I was worried she might be sitting on fertilized eggs, but I couldn't find her anywhere. After a few days, the smell led us to her. Poor little hen. I wonder what happened. 

* The after-school program raised their cost by 20%, but that doesn't matter because my kid didn't get a spot this year. Now she'll have to join a pack of street urchins and learn how to grift. Sorry, kid.

What was with that trip to Japan?

This was my fault. Folks, set the bar low on the first kid for every family tradition. When my oldest son lost a tooth at bedtime once, the tooth fairy only had a 5 dollar bill to leave under his pillow, and that became the going rate for every tooth for the next 15 years, because he told his little brother what to expect, and then they passed the word to their little sister. Keep quarters or dollars in your dresser from ages 5-10. 

I, however, was an only child. We were poor, but what money we had didn't need to be split between other kids, so I always had food to eat and clothes that fit, and we could save up enough to travel from time to time. 

When I was 15, we lived in a little house on Molokai. My mother is a storyteller with an entire peopled world living in her head, and we'd spend days laying around drinking tea while she told stories. In October of 1995 she was telling a story about an earthquake, the partial collapse of an underground city, and the survival of two people trapped in an opera theater - the main character and an opera singer. There was also a harrowing rescue of a chinchilla in an elevator shaft, and I have wanted a chinchilla ever since. Later on, over dinner, she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which was a month away, and I joked that I wanted to go see an opera. I did want to see one, but that was ridiculous.

Well, she thought about it, made some phone calls, and decided we should do it. I was turning 16, tickets to San Francisco were less than $300, and there was a performance of Die Walküre that weekend. We could be impulsive and fancy for three days (my birthday always falls next to the long Thanksgiving weekend).

So we did it. We shopped for dresses, my mother bought a fake leopard fur coat she thought was funny, and we went to the opera in San Francisco. It was chilly, we ate some amazing dim sum, had our hair done, watched Valkyries scream in German for 3 hours, stayed in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, got chased by a homeless man in Union Square, and made it back alive. On the flight home, I decided that someday I would do the same thing for my own kids when they turned 16. A fun little wildcard trip.

When Gavin was 15 I told him about my magical trip to San Francisco, and asked where he would choose to go. He said, "Harry Potter World!" Kind of disappointing, but okay, this could be more of a "goodbye childhood" kind of trip than a "coming of age" trip. Tickets to Los Angeles in December were terrible, but tickets to Japan were only $250. I didn't have a passport, and Zenny was too little, so the two boys went with their dad and had an amazing long weekend at Universal Studios in Japan. 

It made an impact on Leif. When he turned 15 last summer, we asked him what he wanted to do for his 16th birthday trip, and he immediately said, "Universal Studios Japan!" 

FINE. We don't poop on other people's yum-yums, and I know how core memories can feel, so I just nodded and told him to maybe think on it, to have a backup plan. We asked him a few more times throughout the year, but he was dead set on returning to the same hotel, the same amusement park - so his dad started making arrangements. This time all 3 kids had to go, because Gavin was home from college for the summer, and Zenny had missed out the first time. Then my mom wanted to go, too. Soon the trip went from a fun weekend jaunt to a tightly packed week with 6 people. The price of airfare had quadrupled in the last 5 years, so Mike had to be flexible with the dates in order to get a decent price, which bumped me out of the trip and saved even more money because I had to be at work that week. So I still haven't been to Japan, but at least I got to have rooftop adventures with an angry lychee tree.

Folks, we still have one entire kid left to do this with. She's already said something about New Zealand. How did a weekend trip to San Francisco turn into unlimited world travel? We still have to send them all to university after this. We're just government employees! 

Oh well. The world is big, money is imaginary, and we should just try to do what we can in the short time we have together in this brief mortal life. 

update

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.

End of the staycation

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.)

Launch me to the moon

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. 

. 

All my eggs in one basket

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.

4th of July and art repairs

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.