still waiting for that ride home

Someone come drive me home

Took some cold medicine, put on makeup for work.

Arrived at work, caught glimpse of self in office mirror, realized what I had done.

Licked my finger to fix eyeliner with artful smudging. Rubbed off half of eye. Tried to reapply with different color from tube on my desk. Made it worse. Waterproof, will not come off. Decided to distract from eyes with alluring lipstick. Used the 12-hour stick that looks like a red sharpie.

Going to hide in the media closet for the rest of the day, folks.

Christmas, the unwrappening

Tippity-typing on my phone, so the basics were this:

4:50am. Gavin couldn't take it anymore and burst into the room exclaiming, "IT'S BEAUTIFUL." We wished him a merry Christmas with groans and weeping noises.

The best kid-present of the day turned out to be a free app. Santa left a little robot thing that came with a link to a stopmotion animation program for iPhone, and everyone spent the rest of the day filming their toys having misadventures. Unexpected. Best present for myselfs was an Anthropologie rolling pin with little squirrels and bunnies painted on. I bashed out some crust for the meat pie and felt so damn fancy.

Neighbors had an alarming crowded screaming block party in our driveway, and we decided to have future magical twinkly little family dinners at my mom's house. She had spent the night with the new kitten, and was happy to pack up everything, steal Gavin for a sleepover, and flee back home after we set the pudding on fire.

So we fell asleep at 8:30pm while chucking the little kids in bed, because this all happened with a gross chest cold, and we were wiped out.

Today! Boxing Day! Robitussin! Candy! More Star Wars!

Doing this thing. 

Edited to add captions:

Cat log

Aunt and mother, making fun of bad cookbook indexing. The title was "Electric Pressure Cooker Recipes", and all the recipes started with "Electric Pressure Cooker", and were listed in alphabetical order, under "E". There were no other letters.  

My mother caught her fleeting moment of genuine holiday feeling on Christmas Eve by the tree. I have determined that holiday cheer is contingent on sitting around while other people work, because I didn't catch mine until Boxing Day, when she made enchiladas and I knitted on the couch with a cup of rummy eggnog.

4:50am is NOT 5:00am, CHILDREN.

Cat roll

The mess. I have stopped being charmed by the mess.

Someone gave me an entire corpse to hang around my neck.

Brothering

Stop motion animating 

Plum pudding ignition. It was a bit less dramatic this year, because we ran out of Braddah Kimo's rum-what-lights-the-roof-on-fire. We used Bacardi 151 instead, and mehhh.

We did it! Christmas achieved.

The annual questions RETURN

I'm doing this a bit early, because I am punctual like that. If the year goes tits-up in the next week, I will note it.

1. What did you do in 2015 that you’d never done before? I planted a proper garden, with roses and bushes and food things. And did not kill it. In fact, it has swallowed part of the house. My concerned neighbors think it is because I am an ignorant haole who doesn't know what the plants are or that the fruit is edible ("Hawaiians eat these, do you know what they are?" OH GEE THEY'RE THE FUCKING LILIKOIS I PLANTED MYSELF THANKS), but they are wrong. I am just a lazy haole who can't be arsed to pull them off my windows. Even if I hadn't grown up in Hawaii, I can guarantee I would have figured out there was food on those bushes, neighbors. I am a survivalist like that. (Don't worry, I was friendly and gave them lilikois. When people hesitantly appear at your fence to make awkward small talk about your fruit bushes, it is because they want to eat them.)

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? Failed. I was going to publish a book and learn to oil paint, and all I did was draw portraits of produce and illustrate drunk dwarves and weregoats. I DID, however, succeed in not going to Maui, which was on my list of things not to do.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Two of my oldest and best had their second babies this year; one a bit on the underbaked side and one just squeaking in before the end of the year. It was a good year for blonde baby boys.

4. Did anyone close to you die? Both of our 20 year-old cats died this year. Xebo was cremated because he had to be put down suddenly while suffering and my mom couldn't handle it, but Hercules went peacefully in her arms and we buried him in a corner of our backyard.

5. What places did you visit? I made every effort not to travel this year, as I am still freaked the fuck out by Zenny's head injury and have been trying to thickly insulate our nest so none of my babies fall out of it again. I can't watch husbandface drive away with her to daycare, because I have the urge to chase the car like a leopard. I did take the kids to the ice rink, though, and we found two amazing D&D stores. Also I tried a new beach on the North Shore.

6. What would you like to have in 2016 that you lacked in 2015? A shower. We have a very pretty claw-foot tub, which is great unless you want to bathe in less than 30 min and not swill around in a hydro dip of body scum after washing your hair.

7. What dates from 2015 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? I have no memory for dates. I liked our first lychee harvest. I did not like getting a biopsy. My dentist is really unpleasant, too, in the way that is acceptable in doctors who actually do a good job. And I had to pick up my mother from a hospital recovery room overlooking a graveyard, which was awful in a funny way.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Kept Zenny out of the hospital! She graduated from her helmet and everything. Oh, and I guess we moved into the new house and did a lot of renovation.

9. What was your biggest failure? I set out to peacefully relocate the library mouse population, and only succeeded in instigating a mutinous rodent uprising. We had mice springing out of cupboards and tea boxes for a while there, and now that I've given up, everything has settled back to normal.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? I flunked my physical. Also I had a root canal and got hit in the face by a cat.

11. What was the best thing you bought? A truuuuuck.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Mike's. He finished floors and did carpentry and installed plumbing and continued to better himself. Or at least keep the bad stuff out of my life, which is fine, too.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Hateful religious/political assholes in the news and on my facebook feed.

14. Where did most of your money go?  childcare. UNF.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? 

16. What song will always remind you of 2015? I was driving along listening to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and Zenny said, "I don't yike this song. I don't yiiiiiike it." So I skipped ahead and an ad came on. MISTER CLEAN MISTER CLEAN. Zenny clapped and said, "Yaaay! I YOVE this song. MISTER CLEAAAN." Gah.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? happier
b) thinner or fatter?  nope
c) richer or poorer? I... don't know. I have less money, but my income is a bit greater. If we could stop having root canals and childcare provider cost hikes and busted tires, that would be great.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Driving my truuuuuuuck.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? The war against dinner. Oh my god, this middle child of mine.

every. damn. day.

20. How did you spend Christmas last year? In a panic over how quickly it had arrived.

21. Did you fall in love in 2015? I fell in like, for sure. Well. It wasn't so much falling as slowly devolving into dick jokes.

22. What was your favorite TV program? OUTLANDER. Jessica Jones was pretty good, too. And Broadchurch. Sense 8 was great. Poldark was the favorite to make fun of. Downton Abbey and Doctor Who are just givens... I watch a lot of phone tv on my lunch breaks.

23. What did you do for your birthday in 2015? Actual birthday was on Thanksgiving, and I ate a lot, drank wine, hit my cousin with a pillow, and got an Instant Pot. It was a good one.

24. What was the best book you read? Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (who is J.K. Rowling, I always feel compelled to note defensively).

25. What did you want and get? INSTANT POT. Also that truck I might have mentioned.

26. What did you want and not get? A ceiling in the bathroom. I mean, it has most of one, but it is not pretty, and the ghoul in the attic can see right down into the bathtub.

26 b. I have added this one myself: What did you NOT want and get? My husband borrowed my precious truck and got hit by a drunk on the highway and busted its tail light. Nobody replaced it. THE BASTARDS.

27. What was your favorite film of this year? Yep, it was Star Wars.Otherwise, the best film I saw on our computer was Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. It was a scifi film.

Oh, and I somehow saw Jurassic Thingy. Was Mad Max this year? That was fun, too.

28. Did you make some new friends this year? I've got a couple favorite library patrons, but they don't know it.

29. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? cryosurgery. I was going to try to be funny with this one, but seriously - being told "oh, it's just pre-cancer, come back in a year when it's turned into proper cancer" was not my treatment of choice. In Canada they would have just zapped things to be on the preventative side. I know this because that is what they did to my mother when this exact same thing happened to her.

30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2015? I've started wearing only black shirts with big scary necklaces to work. And oxford shoes. (Ok, and pants.) These are things that are abundant in good quality at the thrift store - which is my only shopping outlet until the daycare budget gets back under control - because in Hawaii we have a lot of rich old people and not a lot of hipsters to snatch up their discards. Just meeeeeee, making grabby hands over ugly Italian loafers.

31. What kept you sane? I have this nifty little coping mechanism now - I tap my collarbone to summon my brain back into the present. And it works, which is weird. For a second you are trying to figure out if you're actually hearing the echo of the taps inside your body or just feeling them through your bone, and that's long enough to let the thoughts pass.

32. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Well, there was this bloody redhead.

Although I did do a google search for "Chris O'Dowd sexy" and it did not disappoint.

33. What political issue stirred you the most?  I unfriended a couple of people for being assholes about refugees, confederate flags, and supporting Trump. And accidentally re-friended one of them, because we are distant relations and both forgot. Tricksy internetses.

34. Who did you miss? Actually, this year I'm good. I mean, though, you know... if anyone misses me, I wouldn't discourage them from dropping a note in my inbox or something.

35. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2015. Don't leave a man alone in an empty house with an industrial floor sander.

RIP Hercules

Our aged cat Hercules (HUR-kles) departed this mortal coil on Saturday at the age of 20.

 He called for my mother, she held him in her arms, and he died. He had a long, comfortable life, and while that is always a good thing to achieve, here is why it is particularly nice for this cat:

The boy with the pellet gun

Twenty years ago, on the island of Molokai, there was a stray black cat in a small community of housing up in the mountains near the Kalaupapa overlook. Imagine tall ironwood trees, misty pastures of horses, and dirty trucks with beer coolers parked in front of every cozy plantation home. One of these houses was decorated with rows of deer skulls and antlers, and a teenager with a pellet gun hung out on the steps. The smaller kids used to walk up the hill to the bus stop by my house every morning to avoid waiting near the boy and his friends. I rode the school bus with headphones on so I wouldn't have to listen to them bragging about shooting things.

One of the things they shot was the stray cat. She showed up at our house with dozens of bb pellets embedded under her skin, and both eyes shot blind. We named her Helen. She could still hear well, and she could smell well, and she would reward us for feeding her with a nice dead rat on the porch every now and then. Then one day, instead of dead rats she showed up with live kittens, because Helen had been pregnant when the boys shot her. She raised them under our porch, and when they were old enough to find homes for, we kept the sweetest one of the litter to keep her company, and that was Hercules.

Then one day, the hunting dogs got loose, and they killed Helen in front of our house. We buried her in the rose bushes.

One of my best friends was infatuated with the pellet gun boy. Her father taught hunting and fishing, and he came by on weekends for lessons. I hated the way she giggled and tossed her hair when he walked by in the high school cafeteria, and the way he would stare through her with a blank expression and then ignore her. "Oh my God, he looked at me!" We didn't discourage her, because we thought she might only cling tighter to the romantic rebellious image she had of him, so we just hoped it would pass before the boy became interested in screwing with her.

One morning I got a phone call from her. "He's dead. He died. I was there." Her father had taken them out at night with a group of spear fishermen in a brightly lit boat, and she had paddled after him optimistically, imagining kisses in the dark water. He dove with his spear gun and she treaded water, waiting. When he took too long to come back up, she guessed he had resurfaced behind her somewhere, but she put on her snorkel and looked around with a light, and finally she found his body drifting with the water, back and forth deep down over the rocks. It took her three dives to reach him and pull him up, touching him with her fingers a few times before kicking up for air. She told me she pulled him up, and she screamed and screamed for a long time. Imagine a small, cute, round-cheeked Japanese girl treading water in the ocean in the darkness with a dead boy's hair against her face, trying to keep her head above water with his dead weight in her arms, screaming and screaming for a quarter of an hour before help came to pull them from the water. She never got over it. He was cemented in her brain as the love of her life. I told her how awful it all was, and did not tell her how glad I was he had died before murdering someone. The yearbook committee devoted an entire page to him, and the best picture they could find of him was a dead-eyed stare at the camera holding a severed deer's head.


- - -


So the boy shot the cat, and his dogs killed the cat, and the boy died. Hercules the kitten lived a long, good life, fed on fancy feast and table snitches. He was a kind individual, and adopted stuffed animals to groom and cuddle before my mom found another kitten for him to mother. He had stinky breath and he was skinny with too-long claws that always stuck out like a dog's. I drove to my mother's house and collected her up with his little curled body and drove them back to my house, where we buried him in our yard and the kids cried their eyes out. We will put a little grave marker there for him, and plant night-blooming jasmine, so he can rest under flowers like Helen.

I'll go dig up some old pictures in the basement this week, and post them here as I find them.

hurricane billiards

Remember all those hurricanes we were having over the summer? There was a record-breaking number of them this year. Here they all are in one graphic, bouncing off our invisible shield:

This is probably because Hawaii is an implant station of the Galactic Confederacy. Thanks, Xenu!

The boy turns 13

Both of us are shrugging, having expected this transition to be more momentous, teenager and aging parent-of-teenager that we now are. I did pin him down and check his armpits for hair, which they didn't have. He posed for a birthday picture by making hork face. I caught him looking normal just afterward.

Awww, he's got my grimace.

We ate pre-birthday Thai takeout with my mother, and the kids largely ignored my traditional gruesome retelling of Gavin's birth - which started with my sudden and urgent demand for Thai food, and the restaurant owner who knowledgeably informed my mother that if I was yelling for Thai food, I would have the baby that night. I did. The kids have all heard this story, so over the years I have had to add pantomime and gross exaggeration to keep them interested. By now it goes like this:

And then the doctor FINALLY came in, still half asleep and in his pajamas, shuffling with his arms outstretched like a zombie as the nurse swooped him into a gown and snapped gloves on his hands, and just then the baby SHOT out PEEEEEW and the doctor just casually caught him like a football and held him up, yawning, "It's a boy." And granny clapped her hands in delight and cried, "Oh! He looks just like Danny Devito!"

Common phenomenon, actually

Mike always tells the bit about how my stomach turned into a perfect square during a crucial contraction, and my mother likes to mention that it was she who dragged me bodily off the toilet when I decided that it was the only comfortable place to deliver the baby. Leif does all the sound effects. Gavin likes the small things, like how he held his head up and wobbled around looking at us all, and how he had soft tufts of hair on the tips of his ears like a cat.

The first real sign of teen-hood appeared when I took him to the bakery to buy a few dozen donut holes for his robotics team (the 6 kids in his group). I dropped him off at the workshop with the big box of pastries, turned the truck around, and before pulling out of the parking lot he had texted me three messages - "5 left", "2", and "They're gone." Holy shit. Next time I'll bring a garbage bag full of chips and oreos.

There was cake and loot and a disaster with his miniature tree crashing off the table. There will be Star Wars and arcade shenanigans this weekend. I don't brag about my kid very often, so let me do it now: Gavin is kind and funny and loving. He adores cats and doesn't give a shit. If people tease him, he laughs and makes nyan noises. He reads fantasy novels and listens to D&D podcasts and hyperventilates with excitement in role playing stores. This child has been telling us that he would be a robot maker since the age of 4, and now in his first 6 months in robotics, his team has won two competitions and he's won two individual Think awards for his programming. If they continue their winning streak through state championships, he'll be flying to Kentucky for Nationals. If he nails it at Nationals, he'll be off to China for the world championships. His robotics teacher took us aside and whispered, "He is such a neat kid. He gets it - he could be a world champion." My head exploded in pride. He's going to cost us so much money. And I'm so excited for him as he heads into this new adolescent landscape.

Happy birthday, baby boy.

butts and cats

The other day I was reading a few threads on my phone while drinking coffee, and could not understand why one person was flipping out about a slug in their house and another was gagging because they saw someone trimming their toenails. Wondered why I was not bothered by these things, worried that maybe I was a revolting person. Got to work and discovered that someone had shit in the urinal. Again.

At home, the toddler climbed up on my lap while we were chatting about our days at work. When she hopped down, I realized that at some point she had taken off her diaper, because there were two round toddler buns printed in white oily butt cream across my black shirt. The kind that smells like fish oil, because it was on sale.

So maybe it's just a matter of content saturation, this not giving a damn about slugs and toenails.

I was considering these things when one of our regular library users wandered up to the desk. She had been wearing a boot on her broken foot for months, and it was gone. "The boot is gone!" we said helpfully, because she might not have known. She cringe-smiled and held up her hand. It was now in a cast. This is no good, because she is a piano player. We told her that, too. It turns out that what happened is this: she was playing piano for a holiday party at an Admiral's Club. As she was playing, there was a crash and a cat came falling out of the ceiling panels onto her head. It battened onto her hand with its teeth, and she ran screaming from the room, trying to flap it loose at the end of her arm. It broke her finger and ran like the devil. I went limp across the desk, laughing.

My job keeps me centered, folks.

Buffalo Sponge Candy

It's Christmas candy time! Every year I try to make a new confection. One year it was peppermint patties. Another year it was a brandy-soaked fruitcake. Five years in a row it has been homemade marshmallows, which I still haven't been arsed to do. It's not a perfect tradition. This year I decided to make Buffalo Sponge Candy, using this recipe I found on Pinterest - my go-to source for inspiration, consternation, and disappointment. This stuff is like Violet Crumble or Crunchie bars; a light honeycomb dipped in chocolate. YUM. Can it be done in Hawaii? The land where candy sweats and dissolves and gets slogged away by ants before you can get back to the table with your hot cocoa? Let's find out, I said! I knew, people. I knew. So this candy is pretty simple: sugar, corn syrup, an infinitesimal amount of gelatin to bind the bubbles, and baking powder to make it explode. Also "very good" chocolate, for dipping in afterward. (Actually, looking back at the recipe, it doesn't say this at all, but "very good" was what I was chanting in my head while tossing aside bags of generic chocolate chips at the grocery store. It's a safe enough rule to live by, very good chocolate.)

 

1/2 tsp gelatin (bloomed in 1 tsp of water and reheated to liquid just before adding)

1 ½ cups sugar

½ cups corn syrup (light or dark or medium or whatever you have)

½ cup water

1 tbsp baking soda (sifted)

We had to make sure the chocolate was very good, first. Sometimes they poison these things, you know. My kids all know the "just to make sure it's not poisoned" sampling procedure we perform when opening anything made with chocolate.

So you boil up the sugars with a bit of water to 300 degrees. I don't have a candy thermometer, but I have made and ruined enough candy over the years to know all the stages of sugar. Boil it to hard crack, testing with a bowl of cold water every half a minute or so. You'll know because it stops balling up and becomes long threads of hard candy when it drips in the water. Don't stick your fingers in it or lick the spoon. It's 300 fucking degrees.

Then you mix in your bloom'd gelatin and whip in the baking soda and pour the thing out while it's very foamy and alarming. Yell, "10 points to Hufflepuff!" because you know this is really a Hufflepuff kind of thing.

I got a bit sidetracked at this point, because something on my counter smelled like a rotting corpse. I sniffed it down to the gelatin dish. Turns out that just because it's made of boiled horse's knees, gelatin smells like boiled horse's knees.

Tip: follow the directions and use baking parchment, or you'll be chipping this shit out of your pan with a knife later, and then chipping bits of Pyrex out of your candy when that goes wrong.

Let it cool for a few hours. Spend this time chasing cats out of your tree. 

I finally put the dish in the fridge, after determining that it was just going to sit and sweat if I left it out on the table, assuming the ants didn't find it first. Which they would, because they had formed squirmy black sweaters of themselves all over the drips I had gotten on the floor, and I murdered them with a sponge.

It sweated in the fridge anyway. When I broke pieces off, the inside had the right crumbly texture, but by the time you got it in your mouth it was already moist enough to glue your jaw shut when you bit down on it. I pried candy out of my fillings and then dumped rice in the bag, hoping to soak up the moisture and dry it out a bit. This is a trick that works with salt. If you visit Hawaii and discover restaurant salt shakers full of rice, this is why. That "when it rains it pours" girl on the Morton carton LIES.

So of course, the rice glued itself all over the candy.

Well, shit.

I got the chocolate out anyway.

And just ate it.

Ew. This picture is kind of lewd. I'm sorry. That is how it happened. MOM STAYS IN THE PICTURE.

So now I have a brick of candy covered in rice sitting in the fridge, because I remain naively optimistic that it'll still dry out and I can just flick the rice off and break the stuff up to dip in chocolate. I'm wondering if I could combat the humidity by boiling the candy just a bit longer and omitting the gelatin, which in my mind could be responsible for the bit of chewiness where I want a bit of crumbliness. For all the money I'm going to waste on this endeavor, I could have just bought half a dozen Violet Crumble bars, but that is beside the point. It's the doing of the thing. It's the thrill of the endeavor. It's the conquest and the victory dance and the remorse of eating it afterward. It's the staying off of Facebook and not arguing with redneck uncle about news articles.

Opt for adventure, folks. And go make this candy, because it's really easy and fun, actually - if you live ANYWHERE drier than the mid-Pacific.

Edit: YOU GUYS IT WORKED. I chipped the thing up and dipped the things in melted chocolate and at first it all softened into toffee, so I chucked it in the fridge and the chocolate did some kind of alchemy and IT SOLIDIFIED INTO CRUNCHIE NUGGETS.

I am so impressed. Naive optimism ftw!

the big Thanksgiving weekend

FAMILY PHOTOS. I forgot to take any. But I did take eight pictures of the turkey. I was hungry.

FAMILY DRAMA. My 13 year-old cousin threw himself down sobbing because we told him to stop laying across the floor like a slug and tripping everyone, then he built a pillow fort around himself because WHY NOT EVERYONE HATES ME ANYWAY YOU SHOULD ALL BE HAPPY NOW NOT TO HAVE TO LOOK AT ME. And because he is my cousin and not my precious nephew or beloved grandchild, I threw all the pillows off him and told him to stop being an asshole. "DRAINS AND RADIATORS," I yelled tenderly. "People will like you if you radiate good feels, and they will not like you if you drain all the good feels from the room." Yes, I said 'feels'. I had had a glass of wine. "BUT," I hollered on, "People will also immediately forgive people for being assholes if they just take a minute to think about it and then turn it around. TURN IT AROUND." He turned around and faced the wall and sobbed loudly. I made sucking noises like a drain. Gavin and I put on a podcast and laid around playing with Zenny until the sniffling stopped and the teenager came oozing quietly across the floor to listen with us. Someone made a dingledong joke and we all burst out laughing. The rest of the evening went pretty well, with pie and tea and dingledong joke reenactments. "I turned it around," cousinface quietly told me as we packed up to leave, and I was stunned that someone had actually listened to something I had been yelling. Leif just lets his eyes go unfocused while I try to pop my own head with my internal barometer.

TWO MORE PAYCHECKS TO CHRISTMAS OH NO. We set up the tree as soon as Thanksgiving was packed away in tupperware. It was a fake tree, but it was pre-lit, which turned out to be important because we forgot to pack any lights when we moved. Also missing: almost all our ornaments. And our stockings are somewhere at my mother's house. BUT WE HAVE A TREE UP. And there are cats in it, so that's kind of like ornaments. The first door on the advent calendar is open, the man baked coconut macaroons, I made lychee liqueor out of the fruit we've been soaking in gin since July, and in general we are panicking and flailing around, trying to pull off the holidays on a shoestring. I was going to make a fruitcake again, but it is a month's worth of work for something the kids won't eat anyway, so we decided just to drink the bottle of brandy and make a plum pudding instead. That is time/booze economics.

Next: "sponge candy". With pictures. And hopefully no fire extinguisher, because we don't have one.

36 in pictures

We tried to get a proper picture of me to document the aging process going on here. I have the fine-photography modeling skills of a lemur, and the man has a knack for taking pictures of people blinking, so these are the best we got.

Look down. To the side. That's no good. Smile. TOO MUCH. Whatever, good enough. *click*

What I actually look like most of the time. 

The year my last baby was a baby for the last time. 2.5 going on 12.

What I look like the rest of the time. 

More on Thanksgiving in a bit.

hunger and games

When the stores are full of cardboard cutouts of grinning turkeys in Pilgrim hats and shoppers are flinging coupons for free birds at haggard cashiers, you will know it is time for my birthday. This year my birthday falls on Turkey Day itself (appropriate), and so the annual birthday beer-and-a-movie date with husbandface was shoved up to Monday. The rule is that we have to lunch at a place within staggering distance of the theater, so this year we found ourselves at a place called BUFFALO WILD WINGS. Which sounded like a chicken wing place, but turned out to be a sports arena with sad-eyed teenagers dressed as referees guiding us along dotted yellow lines to a table surrounded by enormous blaring televisions tuned to sports channels. The effect was that of being seated in a Colosseum and not knowing from which direction the gladiators would be set upon you with short swords. As we tried to work out the scoring system on the menu, a group of military guys leaped up, cheering.

"Someone scored a goal," Mike said, goggling around at all the different games on the walls. 

"It was that one," I said, pointing over his shoulder. 

"That is Nascar."

"Yes, but while you were turned around, I took your beer."

"Ahhh, you scored the goal."

"Ten points to Griffindor!"

He took his beer back.

Consoled self with a Kona Longboard.

We gnawed chicken and talked trash and skipped to the theater afterwards. I took a picture in the bathroom, because I always do. And because it is always empty, which is kind of weird.

The last Hunger Games movie was just fine - maybe because I read the book 5 years ago and couldn't remember the damn thing at all. There was no blood, which is fine, because book-gore and movie-gore don't sit in the psyche the same way and I am a bit of a weenie.

We ran into Walmart on the way home, and plunged into a crowd of holiday shoppers yelling, "PATTI. WHERE THE PIES, PATTI?" There were no pies. There were only desperate mothers with visiting relatives trailing after them, shoving baking ingredients into their carts and sneaking pre-made mixes in while their mothers-in-law examined bags of Kona coffee. We did likewise, got in a fight with the self-checkout machine, and made it home in time to pick up the kids. VICTORY.

And that's that for another year. After four years of watching Jennifer Lawrence shoot things with flaming arrows on my birthday, I'll be adrift in a sea of cinematic woe next year. Throwing my vote in for an adaptation of Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series. GET FILMING, HOLLYWOOD. 

balls.

I can knit celtic knots and shetland lace, but I can't knit around a fucking foam ball.

Oh, hey, that looks alri-

#@%!?

HOLIDAY SPIRIT SURGING.

This is the holiday spirit that runs people down for spots in mall parking lots and throttles old ladies over 75% off snuggies. 

My mother shoved a box of lights in my hand and told me to get festive, so I hung them over the window just in time for the winter rain to arrive. Suddenly we are huddling under couch blankets with tea and breaking into choruses of Silent Night and watching crap holiday specials on youtube. 

And furtively reading Dean Koontz novels

It's working, folks. I had feelings.

In other news:

Went to storytime workshop and am now MASTER OF COLORED SCARVES. And I learned these action rhymes, which my kid will not let me stop doing. Will need both knees replaced by the end of the week:

I'm popcorn in a pan (crouch down)
Don't forget the top (pretend to put a lid on your head)
Soon I'll start to sizzle... (sizzle sizzle sizzle with your wiggly bum)
And then... I'll... POP! (JUMP UP OH MY GOD MY KNEES) 

Then when you can't take it anymore, you sit down and distract them with this one:

Pour the popcorn in the pan (rock your kid back and forth on your lap)
Shake it up, shake it up! (jostle poor helpless child)
BAM BAM BAM (bop up and down mercilessly)

Bonus: counts as exercise. Go get a mini snickers bar out of the secret pilfered Halloween stash.

annual holiday pep talk. DO THE THING.

It is very nearly inevitable that, eventually, life will crap on your sense of holiday magic. I'm lucky to have made it all the way to adulthood before a spectacularly awful Christmas with the in-laws dropped that particular heap of shit on my warm-fuzzies back in 2003. Maybe some people manage to nurture the fragile blossom of wonder deep into their lives and then conveniently die before any grim life event can slap it from their hearts, but then they've gone and snuffed the joy for everyone else who loved them dearly, so GOOD JOB.

Adulthood renders toy companions into lumps of plastic and fairy lights into electric bills, and you learn pretty quickly that if the holidays are to have any chance of surviving to the next generation, you have to fight back. It won't mean you'll feel the thing again, but it's better than being a miserable old asshole.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, I tell myself every year. And it's worked, because my kids dance with excitement and tell stories about magical Christmases Past that I can barely recognize from where I'm standing with my oven mitts tugged on like boxing gloves. There were divorces and deaths and layoffs and illnesses that I've had to run ahead and kick out of the way and bury under tinsel and drown in eggnog, flicking cookies like ninja stars  - and IT WORKED. The kids are whole and shiny. These are the good old days, this is the payoff, and I will take it and eat it and wash it down with hot buttered rum, because this is the point of the whole thing. Existence is too big and important and incredible to get run flat by grubby human bullshit. You get to be here, to be part of it. Make that shit happen. Grab it and throttle some joy out of it even if that joy is real instead of magical. So nobody stuffs my stocking or remembers to buy me Santa presents? I will cram a whole bottle of St. Germain's into that sock and buy myself all the yarn I want and knit while swigging booze at 6am on Christmas, and SO THERE. That is how you do this thing.

This year we vaulted a cancer diagnosis ('pre-cancer'? I win for another year!). We skidded around animal heartbreak (Xebo died, but he was 20 years old and OH LOOK WE FOUND A KITTEN). We avoided hospital visits (caught the toddler's head with my goddamn FOOT on two occasions). You can't dodge everything - my mother lost an internal organ, the childcare budget flared up and consumed the grocery budget, and last night I broke the cartilage in my nose when I accidentally headbutted a flying cat - but WE FIGHT.

6 weeks left. Get to it.

Figgy

Figs are kind of moist and pink and a bit uncomfortable to paint the insides of.

Ooer. And gross.

Up on the produce portraiture wall it goes. I'm going to fill it stove-to-ceiling. And across the doorway. And all around the kitchen, until I run out of produce and start drawing cans of corn and jars of olives and granola bars with little hats on. My grandchildren will shake their heads and point and say, "That's about where grannie went mad, there amongst the individual noodles." And I'll hit them with my cane and yell about the relevance of cultural preservation through art. "WE WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT WATERMELON LOOKED LIKE IF IT WEREN'T FOR GIOVANNI STANCHI."

It's all worked out.