This morning we pulled up outside the caregiver’s house, and another familiar car pulled in right behind us before I’d even taken the key out of the ignition.
A: Hey, look who just arrived — Grace and Fergus.
BOY: OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR!
It’s good to look forward to playing with friends.
The boy is finally asleep. It’s been a good morning. For the first time ever, I even got some research reading and longhand writing done while he played.
My years of absorbing and singing revival-era Disney heroine songs from the 90s were all validated today. While I made bread late this morning and Liam was lying on the floor of the kitchen playing with his trains, he began singing “under sea… under sea… under sea” over and over. Then he stopped and said, “Mama sing Ariel?”
This was a significant request, because I don’t get to sing any more. If I start singing something, I am told ‘no, Mama, no singing’. I would be a lot more upset if my goddaughter hadn’t gone through a similar brief phase when she was around the age Liam is now, because I love to sing, and I tend to do it a lot around the house whether there’s music on or not.
“You want me to sing Ariel’s song? The one where she’s in her room of treasures?” (I had to make sure. If I was wrong or had misunderstood somehow, I could damage my chances of singing ever again.)
“Yes.” (Firmly.)
And he lay there for the full three minutes it takes to sing the entire song, sneaking me quick looks from under his lashes every so often while I sang. I remembered the whole thing word for word, where to take breaths and phrasing and everything I used to have down perfectly. He was absolutely silent until I was done. Then he calmly went back to playing with his trains.
There was something very satisfying about being able to not only fulfil a child’s request for a song, but keep him spellbound through it (even if he was trying to act cool). Today, I win.
Total word count, hearthcraft book: 8,800
New words today: 1,250
Five hundred words before a two-hour nap (the nap bit was intentional, the two hour part was not), the rest in the hour post-nap before I went to get the boy. The five hundred took longer. I’m remembering that my most productive work hours are between four and six. The problem now is that I have to leave at 4:45ish to collect Sparky.
What I’m currently struggling with on this hearthcraft project is the balance between spiritual and practical information. Ideally, one would explore the spiritual associations of each practical bit of information, but that’s just not possible. I’m at the throwing information down on the page stage of the process, and I keep thinking in the back of my active brain that it all should be much more meaningful. There is plenty of time to go into the spiritual aspect of all these practical things once that practical things are down. Baby steps, brain. One thing at a time.
Today’s amusing tyop: ‘crate the ambiance’. Because you can’t let it be catching, goodness no.
Today things are much better, thank you. I left the boy at the caregiver’s giving giggly hugs to all the other children and the flock of them jumping around like kangaroos. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to pass out or not, now that I’ve handled my correspondence and filing. There will likely be a nap later, and my hair needs a wash. I’ll see if I can pull off a thousand words first. It may take a while, as I can’t think straight; my head feels like it’s stuffed with treacle-soaked cotton. I give myself permission to give up at some point.
Sunny out, but very cold. The car doors on the passenger side were frozen shut this morning.
I received my first Christmas present in the mail yesterday: a renewal to last year’s gift subscription of Fine Cooking! Thanks, Mum and Dad!
The day began at 5:15, when Liam woke up. Exactly three days after HRH came home with a cold, the boy has it. I discovered when I woke up at this ungodly hour in response to the boy’s pitiful wail that so do I. That makes three colds for both of us in the space of four weeks.
I do not operate well on five to six hours of sleep. I’m an eight to nine hour kind of person. There have been very few full nights of sleep for me over the past month, be it due to insomnia, illness, or something unidentifiable that kept waking me up.
Blend all of the above, and you have two cranky people in the house today. Joy.
If you want me, I’ll be in the corner muttering darkly about the injustice of it all.
ETA: Also? The Sympatico web mail log-in thing never works for me. Ever. I hate it. I should be able to access my main e-mail no matter what.
ETA #2: Oh, after an hour of searching in frustration, I discovered that it’s because web access is *not* actually bundled with my regular internet service, like it says all over the place on the web site. I have to subscribe to and pay for an extra service in order to access my mail. I hate corps and badly designed/explained services. ARGH!
This morning, I opened the front curtains to see the minivan next door parked on an odd angle in the driveway. So odd, in fact, that upon closer examination we saw that the back end of the van had slipped sideways on the ice, coming to rest against the back bumper of our car.
HRH inched our car forward and cranked the wheel, easing it back and out past the crooked van bit by bit, manoeuvring past the upstairs neighbour’s car on the other side. He parked it across the street for me and left to catch the bus to work.
When the next-door neighbour came out he stared at his van and walked all around it, as if he suspected someone of hitting it. Then he looked across the street at our car. I wish he’d looked out his own window half an hour earlier and seen his vehicle leaning on our back bumper; things would have been a lot clearer.
Anywhats, the boy had a lovely outing this morning with his caregiver (during which, I am told, he happily sighed ‘Oh…kissmas!’ while gazing at a Budweiser advert), the car now has the winter tires on (take that, winter!… except it’s a balmy five degrees above zero now), I have (useful) stocking stuffers for Sparky, as well as the new ornament for my annual ornament exchange with HRH, and one for the boy, too. I also treated myself to a Happy Meal on the way home, one of the approximately two McDonald’s meals I have in a year. (Did you know that one cheeseburger — a plain cheesburger, not a Quarter Pounder or anything larger — constitutes one-third of your daily recommended sodium intake? Yeah. Bleargh. Why I wanted it, I do not know.)
While we’re on the topic of (quasi) food, last night I made a huge pork roast that was juicy and tender. It was so successful, in fact, that the boy actually picked pieces of pork out of his bowl and ate them, along with a lot of gravy and corn (kernel by kernel, of course). This is huge, because he doesn’t like meat very much. And I did what Nigella suggests in one of her books: I cut the fat off before I pulled the roast out, put it in a separate pan and roasted it alone while the pork was resting in order to make crackling. I have been craving crackling for about seven years now. And after eating a piece the size of a pink school eraser, I’m done for the next seven years again. Instead of warming the corn on the stovetop or in the microwave I tossed it in a Corningware dish and slipped it in the oven while I roasted the crackling. If I’d been thinking I would have done the same with the mashed potatoes to make the top crisp.
We did an elevation ritual last night that was a lot of fun and felt really good. I’m realising that shouldering a lot of ritual work over the past few years has really burned me out. I enjoy ritual with others, but being the one to come up with and/or lead a disproportionate number of them takes away from that enjoyment because I’m busy facilitating everyone else’s experience. It’s always nice to participate in someone else’s ritual for a change.
This is going to be short one. Why? Because it was a good concert, nothing went horribly wrong, and I walked out feeling fine. No deep observations or life-changing moments; it was just a good concert.
The really noteworthy thing was an audience member standing up as the final applause died, asking us to play the ‘just beautiful’ second movement of the Haydn symphony again. We played it for him. It was a lovely way to end the evening.
I was somewhat concerned about the audience’s potential reception of the Peer Gynt suite, because it’s one of those stereotypical pieces of classical music — everyone’s heard Morning and In the Hall of the Mountain King, after all, and has an opinion about it whether they consciously know it or not. In the end what seems to have happened is what I was hoping for: everyone knows these pieces from recordings or as cartoon soundtracks, and so hearing a full orchestra play them is a completely different experience. It’s much more complex and rich. And they got to hear one of my favourite pieces from the suite, Ã…se’s Death, which is beautiful and very moving. There was music committed in that particular bit. (There was music committed all over the place last night, really; Valse Triste, for example.)
The clarinet soloist blew everyone away (no pun intended). He’s fourteen. Yikes.
There was a minor kerfuffle in our cello section after the warm-up, and it’s got me thinking about the interpretation of the word ‘amateur’. In my mind, being an amateur doesn’t mean you get to show any less respect to your fellow musicians, the conductor, or the audience than a professional would or does. Even as an amateur one approaches music and one’s colleagues seriously, with consideration and commitment. Being an amateur is no excuse for laziness. I think there may be more to say on the subject, but it needs to brew in my mind for a while.
The emergency-glued bow frog survived the night, thank the gods. I did the dress rehearsal with the heavy bow, and I hated it. My principal looked at it and told me that the main problem was the weight distribution, so she suggested wrapping an elastic band around the frog and tucking a quarter inside to help redistribute the weight. It helped a bit, but I really do prefer my main bow. I kept the heavy bow with me in case the emergency fix fell apart in concert, though. I’m somewhat afraid to get the frog replaced on my main bow, as I don’t know what it will do to the weight or balance of it.
Other noteworthy things that happened which were not music-related: I got to meet Tallis (who was beautifully behaved), and we received the chocolate mint Girl Guide cookies we’d ordered.
Thank you to Jeff, Paze, Devon, Tallis, Ceri, Scott, Daphne, and HRH for coming out to support us, and to Blade for babysitting. (Poor HRH only arrived halfway through the Peer Gynt suite and two movements before the break, as the boy had had a late nap and thus his bedtime was late too.)