A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

I was never much for celebrating Independence Day, even in an era that didn't feel like democracy in this country is actively dying as the entire world watches. The neighbors seemed to feel the same, or maybe it was just too hot to be blowing stuff up. There were a few minutes of desultory fireworks between 9:00 and 10:00, but it seemed like less than past years.

Friday I was mostly just a bum. There was nothing I really felt like doing and it was too hot to be outside for longer than the time Penny needs to pee. (Penny is too small to just be turned loose in the yard, so someone always has to take her outside.) I made us breakfast, and I baked a batch of dog treats, and did a couple loads of towels, and I made cacio e pepe mushroom ravioli for supper.

But I spent a large part of the afternoon on the living room couch, drinking wine and eating goldfish crackers and reading Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door. I hadn't read that since I was a teenager, and in spite of some dated talk about homosexuality--honestly nothing bad--and some classist attitudes that I found unpleasant, it holds up pretty well. Both Stephen King (in Danse Macabre) and Grady Hendrix (in Paperbacks From Hell) said they thought it was one of the best genre novels of the 20th century.

After supper I watched Jaws--the closest I come to a July 4th tradition--and painted.



Saturday I went out to get kolaches and apple fritters for breakfast. I went to Miniso because I'd gotten an email saying they were having a back-to-school sale that included "desktop storage" and I wanted to get a new desktop trash bin (the lid on my old one had started to stick) and a couple of those little 3-drawer chest/pen holder things. I got a few pens and a mechanical pencil topped with a capybara that had an orange on its head, because why wouldn't I buy that, but they didn't have any good stationery sets or pencil boxes, two things I would have never left a an old school Sanrio store without getting. I'm starting to think they just don't make the kinds of pencil boxes I remember, like I can't even find them online (uness maybe eBay).

I went to Rouses, and after putting away the groceries I realized i'd forgotten to get pineapple juice, so I ran over to Super One. I sorted through an Amazon delivery (new pillow slides, a case for my label maker, bergamot essential oil, watercolor sponges, erasers, razor blades, and more pens). I stripped my bed, even though that's normally a Sunday chore, because I wanted to wash all my bedding and I knew I had other laundry to do on Sunday.

I made sweet and sour meatballs for supper, just frozen meatballs but the sauce was made from scratch. Afterwards I completed my re-watch of The Pitt and finished a couple more paintings I made from photos I'd taken years before.





The first one is an old fishing camp near Grand Chenier, and the second one is the Baptist church in the ghost town of Rodney, MS during one of the periodic floods. Rodney used to be a busy river port, but in the 1880s a sandbar formed in the Mississippi, moving the bank 2 miles west and leaving behind an oxbow lake prone to inundating large areas of the town. Floodwaters of course are rarely blue, but who wants to paint ugly shit-brown floodwater?

Sunday I made Irish coffee baked doughnuts for breakfast. Coffee in the batter, whiskey in the glaze, which someone on social media said sounded like an unreleased Pogues track. I watched Dateline and started a new painting. I did a load of laundry, trimmed Penny's back nails, made more pureed pumpkin ice cubes (Penny gets one--defrosted--in her food every day for her gut health), made strawberry pretzel salad, and did some dinner prep.

"Strawberry pretzel salad" is actually a Jello dessert from the era where all kinds of horrifying shit was called "salad" if it had a single fruit or vegetable in it, but this one is pretty normal and has lasted into the modern era. You bake a bottom crust of crushed pretzels, brown sugar, and melted butter; add a layer of cream cheese whipped with heavy cream and powdered sugar; then top it with a layer of strawberry Jello and sliced strawberries. No Miracle Whip or green olives or celery or hotdogs. It's a good hot weather dessert.

I finished The House Next Door and started C. Pam Zhang's The Land of Milk and Honey. So far I'm finding it sort of pretentious and almost unbearably Millennial--like dog bless those kids but some of them really act like everything that's happened to their generation has never happened to anyone before ever in history--and it touches on a lot of interesting themes without ever totally developing any of them. But it's not like, terrible, and it's not very long, so I will most likely just finish it.

I made chicken cordon bleu casserole and green beans for supper, and afterward I started the new (and last) season of Sandman. Man, I guess they chose to adapt "Calliope" before the allegations against Neil Gaiman surfaced? Yikes. I debated whether I should even watch it, but Netflix's checks to Gainman cleared well before the shit hit the fan, and they've been pretty clear they won't be doing another season. Hilariously, they're being very coy about why that is, insisting it's because although the graphic novel went on for years, Dream wasn't always the main character and Sandman the series was always just going to be the material where he is. Sure, Jan.

I finished another painting based on an old photo, taken inside an abandoned Episcopal church near St. Francisville:



More idealization: the view outside isn't nearly the colorful springtime displayed (in fact I'm pretty sure the photo was taken in November). Did I fuck up the geometry of the bricks? Something looks off to my brain. Oh well, let's just call it an homage to Lovecraft or whatever.