Kate McKinnon, globe-trotting writer and metalsmith, has devoted herself to the study of how things are done, and how they could be done better. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and loves warm weather, nice people, rides in the car, and good books.
I had a lovely morning of hard work in the warm warm air (my favorite) and some swims, and a couple of hours on the computer. A perfect day.
The pirate arbor is so fun to play with. The ten foot high end is really up there! The solar shades (the part that will hang down between the trellis on the west wall to block 85% of the sun’s heat out and drastically reduce my electric bills in the depths of summer) will be here in a few days, the vines are all happy and reaching for holds.
I’m very happy and very tired and very much enjoying all of my work right now, whether on our book or digging holes in the yard.
Summer is my favorite time of year, and this is the best summer ever. My life just gets better and better the longer it goes on. I assume I’ll reach a tipping point somewhere along the line, but it’s nowhere in sight. I look at my birthday, coming on Weds, with delight.
Just because Kyle’s new book is out today and Ken Thomas is in it and Dustin and I were enjoying the Barbie Coach, I thought I’d post this photo I took of Ken (wearing my apron) with Kyle’s camera and fisheye lens.
And I think I need a nap. And then some gorgeous Mexican food.
I planted a Lady Banks Rose (also known as rosa banksiae, or Tombstone Rose, if you’re from Southern Arizona), a blisteringly red mandevilla, and an elegant and strange Corkscrew Vine today, because it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved before.
I say this because (you may recall) the harvester ants ate the last Banks rose two years ago, and the mandevilla and the corkscrew vines are only hardy down to 20F.
This morning I optimistically built an enclosure of pretty green trellis, and planted the new arrivals in sequence, so the climbing rose can shelter the beautiful mandevilla, but we all know that it’s going to be ass-cold at some point, and there are still ants, and so either it will work out or not. Until then… LOOK!
I blame Doriot, because hers are so alluring that I was helpless under the thrall of this one when I went to Home Despot for a new pipe for my pool backwash. Maybe I’ll get lucky and we’ll have another mild winter, and the vines will have a chance to really settle in.
In addition to the planting, or should I say before it, I also painted four trellis, mounted them, and did a whole stack of other things that I won’t bother you with. I’ll just say that I had another six-Kate day, when I what I thought I was going to do was lounge around the pool. I did that too, but Lord. So much else.
The new arbor is mindbendingly good with slats on, towering slightly above but neatly matching the one next to the pool.
The Cape Honeysuckle is gorgeously filling in, and has already made its way to the new trellis, as you can see in the photo below. Dustin fits perfectly in the Hiding Space (I expect to be able to secrete myself in the space between vines if necessary, or to stick some persecuted minority in there temporarily if they have to hide from pursuers.)
It looks very Japanese, with Dustin’s bandana and the neat reed blinds. The Pirate arbor is so fabulous in every way, in fact, that I think I need to move the Robert Plant Thinking Spot to it immediately. Or in the morning. There isn’t any moon tonight, and it’s too dark to work.
Anyway, I guess I’ve done enough. To say the least.
You’ve simply got to watch this, if for no other reason, to admire the bandana headbands, mustaches, and long flowing hair on the boys. (It’s also a good song, albeit without Michael McDonald.)
“What the people need is a way to make them smile, whoa oh oh we got bandanas and hair..”
It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’ve spent the last few hours communing with the cats, the birds, and the plants, and the new slats on top of the beautiful arbor. I’ve gone through my mail, and unclogged a sink, and stained a trellis, and watered and brushed a ball of hair off of Miss Fish the size of a baby’s head (not kidding).
I’ve caught up on yesterday’s episode of Wait Wait (unfortunately PJ O’Rourke was on- he’s rude, interrupts all of the time, and he’s got a dismal worldview but happily the fabulous Paula Poundstone was on to balance him out) and I’ve had a whole pot of coffee and have already eaten the slice (the last slice) of the Miss Hullings Lemon Loaf that Bill got me for my birthday. I ended up with FOUR pieces over three days, which is excellent. I have to behave better when it’s someone else’s birthday cake, but when it’s my own birthday, everyone mostly stands back and lets me have both ends, the pieces with the most FROSTING.
Would you like to spend a few moments brushing up on your Spanish? This is a good exercise, follow along.
I haven’t seen The Snake yet, but of course I’ll be looking out for it (or any old snake, frankly) for the rest of my life. I like snakes a great deal and have never seen one of any substance in any yard I’ve ever had, at least not in the city. Of course as a kid growing up in the real desert, south of Tucson, it was completely ordinary to see a five or six foot rattler curled up in a shady spot; we just learned not to scare them. I’ve never been bitten by a desert snake, and I can’t think of why I would be, unless I surprise one.
Time to clean and fill the hummer feeders, have a swim, talk to my co-authors, see what our schedule is for June and July, pick a press date… Kyle Cassidy‘s shots should arrive this coming week, and in short order we’re going to have something on the table that looks like the most fabulous book on beadwork we could have dreamed up. Kyle’s been a busy rock star. Do you follow him on Twitter? It’s the way to keep up with him and he’s really a role model for communicating at pretty much the exact right level. Someone should study why it is that some people are so annoying online and others just… nail it.
I really think that just about anyone can look into their own personal Internet experience as a mirror; the quality of one’s experience is driven not only by the equipment and the user, but also the quality and breadth of one’s acquaintances and interest. Like any aspect of life, if you hook up with quality people doing fabulous things, your own life and mind will expand in kind. When I look at the variety of stunningly kickass people I’m connected to, I’m humbled and prodded by their sheer magnificence, and that’s exactly how I like it.
You know I like to be just a little bit behind the 8-ball, to have a bit of work to do to come up to snuff.. I like to drop myself into a foreign country alone, to pick up a book that’s just beyond me, to find words I’ve never learned, to meet people who blow my mind, to take chances… to work hard and work well.
And so, on to the next hill, the next windmill, the next kiss in the flowers.
A week from now my house will be bristling with boys; the cats are beside themselves with excitement.
I’ve got a few hours in Dallas, stopping off on a night flight home to Tucson.
I usually stop here whenever I fly American Airlines, unless Allah wills that I should go to Chicago. There is often a haze over the city; today it was brown and looked damp and vaguely poisonous. I felt badly for people stuck under it.
The DFW airport isn’t on anyone’s Favorite Airport List; it’s unbeautiful, they have bad knockoff Eames chairs, and the airport sprawls forever over the swamp. Sometimes you drive for miles in your airplane after you land to get to your gate. I’ve taxied so long in Dallas I felt like I was on a Greyhound bus. There are tile floors with deep grout lines, so that every single suitcase that rolls over them goes clackclackclack. And, mark of a truly backward airport, there is no free WiFi.
I have to tell you that if you are an airport or a hotel and you try to charge for wireless Internet, you are a goat-sucking dinosaur and you need to get with 2009. Everything is better when you empower people. Customer service lines are shorter, people are better behaved, people can stay connected and up to date despite being on the road.
However, Dallas has one truly great thing, a good Skylink train with a pointy nose that drops me off here, at Gate A-19:
I know Dickies’ is a chain. But no Dickie’s is this Dickie’s. There’s one in the C concourse too, but it can’t hold a candle to this one, the glorious A-19. It’s beyond fabulous. It may be a chain but each one is run by someone, and this one is run by a freaking genius, and they will put peach cobbler in as a side. And I can sing myself Steely Dan’s Hey-19 while I ride the SkyLink there. (And by that may you remember it.)
I once broke the airport train here James Bonding it through the closing doors with some last-minute Dickie’s. I made it just fine with my body and my cobbler, but I was wearing an opera cloak, and the hem of my garment caught in the closing door, and it stopped the train. I was mortified, but it didn’t stop me from evading the angry mob advancing on me by James Bonding it into the other train (they run in opposite directions in an oval) as its doors were closing. That time I was careful to pull my cloak behind me before the doors flicked shut.
If I had broken the other train too, they would have all eaten me. Or at least eaten my food. The other train’s worth of people, all standing on the platform outside the other stopped train, all looked at me aggressively as I sailed away. I was sorry for them; I felt badly. But standing around with them waiting for the next one wasn’t going to improve anything.
. . .
I had a good time on this visit, even though it was two full weeks, it got hot and sticky, there was a lot of work to do, and there was Mold Surprise and a house full of contractors. It’s fun to watch this last spurt of the boys growing into men. It’s happening so fast that you can watch it practically in real time. Soon they will be able to drive and then, truly, that will be fabulous. Then they can drive MY ass to an appointment, go to the grocery store, do their own errands.
Admittedly I suffer from nostalgia; they were such cute little boys, such trouble. Bill and I are planning to go through our boxes of old photos when they arrive next weekend in Tucson for their summer visit. Lord knows what we’ll find.
It’s been a long couple of weeks of work, and I’m ready to head on home this weekend.
Look, I finished painting/staining the new porch, and it looks right pretty, as does the garden, with roses and a nice wooden fence and lots and lots of monarda and coneflower and mint, mint, everywhere huge stands of SPEARMINT.
It’s nice to see Bill.
I don’t often revel in the luxury of having a mate, a partner, someone to share the moments of life with. It’s just not how I’m put together. I do not, as Holmes said, work well in harness with others. But this has been nice, and happily he loves everything I’ve done, which makes having done it all quite worthwhile. And he really likes the bathroom, which makes me really happy, because I spent a week in there working.
He marvelled over how I managed to get all of the old white and blue tile in the old-fashioned tub and shower so clean and sparkly (sulphuric acid, frankly, and two days of scraping, scrubbing, digging, cleaning and re-grouting…) and the blue porch ceiling and the little things I fixed. And the porch light, and the hinges and latch on the old wooden access door that used to fall out of our wall with a terrifying thud every couple of months. Just everywhere, something groovy has been done.
Personally, I am disorganized, and my things are in a cluttered heap in the corner of the bedroom. My MacBook is clogged with images, my mail is backing up, and I’m pretty much up to my nose in work. But I’m happy; things are good.
The boys finished school today, Evan with a trip to Six Flags, Liam with a victory march to pizza with friends. They’ll all be coming to Tucson for two weeks in June, to see Venus pass in front of the Sun (personally I prefer to view it glittering like a jewel in the night sky) and to kiss me in the various love nesty sorts of nooks I’ve made. It will be disruptive, like everything involving herds of people, but quite nice. Evan is set up for physics and robotics camp, Liam for a drawing and painting intensive.
We haven’t broken it to the cats yet…. two weeks without their beloved boys. Jasper sits at the door every afternoon, singing his odd little birdsongs, waiting for Evan to come home from school.
This morning when I came back of taking Evan to his last real day of middle school, I was listening to Bob Dylan’s Shooting Star on the radio, and there was a baby bunny licking his fur down in the driveway, and the male cardinal who chips from the bush next to the house but who always hides when I try to peek at him was pecking on my neighbor’s stairs, bold as you please.
Try this. Click on the white space. Maybe Bob Dylan will sing Working Man’s Blues while you read. Don’t ask me how one uploads a blank screen to YouTube, but I admire it. (Click high on the box; it has the usual (but invisible) YouTube menus at the bottom, and you might accidentally navigate over there if you click low.
It’s like a White Painting; useless, immaculate, unexpectedly moving. And after you listen to it, it’s like a Black Painting.
I’m a huge Dylan fan; this is odd, because he stands for a lot of things that I don’t agree with. He’s the kind of Christian who damns other people with different beliefs to Hell, he thinks men should decide for women, and he’s grumpy almost all of the time. Like Van Morrison. (Seriously, just like Van Morrison.)
And a lot of his songs are about that. But there is genius that can’t be denied, on both counts, and the thing is, the important thing is, they really believe. And believing in something, anything, so powerfully that it makes you want to be a better person, even a good person… well. That’s a powerful and powerfully attractive thing.
I find this in simple existence; I’m just lucky that way.
Bill is in an airplane forty thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean, Tokyo to Chicago.
Can’t wait to see him tonight, at Evan’s graduation from eighth grade.
Wild times.
Also: good news on the wet spot in our house; the excision was a complete success and they amazed themselves by finding it to be a simple job after all. They’ll be done by the end of the week! And as a side benefit, we get to add the space of a mostly useless closet to the previously tiny half bath downstairs. It’s like both of our bathrooms just doubled in size, because of the assorted demolitions.
Did I remember to mention that I tore out the stupid closet in the upstairs bathroom? No? Well, I did. It was an awesomely amazingly disgustingly difficult job, but so worth it. SO worth it. It’s like a whole new room now. I stuffed it with MIRRORS.
It is demoralizing in the extreme to have been so close to having everything clean and organized at once, and having a fresh new bathroom, and then to find myself with Liam and all of this things living in the living room and, him inserted into the upstairs bathroom. Who knew this would move so fast? Thankfully I can flee as early as Thursday. I’d hoped for a few days of peace before the storm. Ah well.
Bill is communing with the Snow Monkeys today. Which I guess is yesterday for him already… he’s starting his journey home when he wakes. I wonder if he got into the waters of the onsen, and if he did, were there monkeys in with him?
It’s hard to believe all that I’ve managed to get done in the past week. The mind boggles.
However… the contractors who have been replacing the roof and skylights and putting on the small porch were finishing up, and I was planning on wrapping everything inside up in these last bit of time before Bill gets home, but over the course of the last two days it came to light that there had been water damage from the hidden roof leak. Wetness had been finding its way, unbeknownst to us, down into the back wall of Liam’s (unused) closet. It infiltrated a variety of areas surrounding that wall, and. well. You can guess the rest.
The insurance company is now removing about half of Liam’s room, as if it were infected with flesh-eating bacteria. We have to move everything out of his room, and lose the use of his half bath… and it happens this morning. I was stunned (in a good way) by the response; the minute we discovered water (and consequently green mold) in the walls, they were on top of it. We haven’t really had exposure since the wetness is in a central, non-ventilated section of wall and floor, so it isn’t like OMG OUR HOUSE it’s more like OMG our tiny shoebox just got a bit tinier.
This will end up being a really nice thing for us, as Liam’s room is in a rather badly done addition, and we’ve been suspicious about the attachments and underlayments for a while. This new situation means that actual smart people who know what they are doing are going to take the room down to framing, basically, and fix stuff and then put it back together correctly. I’m sure it will end up being another opportunity to spend a few thousand dollars but of course there will be an all new room at the end of it, and not a minute too soon. None of us would have been surprised to just see it rot off of the end of the house. This IS the swamp, no matter what they tell you downtown.
I’ve gotta tell you, I’m not sorry to be headed home to some peace and quiet in a few days. Just peace, quiet, and final book layout. And, of COURSE, the arrival of Jean Power. Kyle is shooting the last big wave of beadwork this week… can’t wait to see the results. Doing this week of muck-labor reminds me of what a delightful life I have as a writer. I would rapidly tire of fixing jank swamp shit and cleaning up the sticky if it was what I did all day, every day.
Also, I don’t even want to know what is in the black ooze that exploded into the pantry from one of Bill’s ancient, beloved cans of God knows what patent swill. (Burgoo sauce? Mole? Black bean juice?) I just want to find the damned can and throw it away. There are cans in there that must be 40 years old. Sometimes bad things happen. It’s just how it is. And no, I can’t throw them away. He isn’t ever going to eat them. He just likes to look at them. I have to wait until they actually split a seam and spew out their toxic brews. Oddly, I don’t even care.
There are so many other things to worry about. I don’t eat canned food. Once in a while I might open a can of tuna fish or green chiles, but you can sure as hell bet it won’t be from his vintage collection.
RT @amichaelberman: @kylecassidy 's War Paint is the #4 selling photo book on Amazon, and it appears they have sold out their stock! ht ... 6 hours ago
RT @Kurt_Vonnegut: Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. 7 hours ago
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