Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Weekend Roundup

Yet another insane weekend. Househunting is incredibly draining.

Friday afternoon the boy and I dropped HRH off to install gyproc while we ran errands, had ice cream, and visited our local LYS so I could spend my Mother’s Day gift certificate. I came home with a selection of some lovely fibre and a couple of little knitting tools (because you know I knit so much). Upon return I discovered that I’d mis-programmed the timer on the bread machine so the pizza dough was only just starting to mix, which meant that the dinner I’d planned was shot. I was about to defrost some hamburger meat and make spaghetti sauce when HRH suggested ordering pizza instead because we were pressed for time, and I gave in. As we were putting our shoes on to go to that night’s game HRH listened to the two message on the phone and we discovered that the game had been cancelled, which made both of us rather cranky. We ended up watching another three episodes of Chuck with Blade, who had come down stairs to be the Designated Responsible Adult On Site while we were out.

Saturday was a solid list of house viewings. Anyone who’s done this knows how exhausting it is. We got back around three-thirty and HRH did a whirlwind housecleaning while we waited for his parents to arrive, as they were babysitting the boy while we had an actual date night out. They arrived later than planned, so we pretty much ran out of the house. Dinner itself was lovely, delicious Italian eaten in the company of Ceri and Scott. The plan was to go see the new Prince of Persia film afterwards, but when we got to the theatre they were on the verge of selling out, so we all looked at one another and decided to go have dessert instead. We toyed with the idea of playing Rock Band, too, but we were pretty much all exhausted and went home.

Sunday morning the boy woke us up at five-fifteen for some reason. I left the house at 8:30 for a cello lesson at 9:00, followed by a two-hour group rehearsal at 10:00. I then raced home, picked up the boys, and we went househunting again. I ended up spending an awful lot of time outside in the cold rain, what with getting the boy to run around to keep him busy and working off steam and inspecting exteriors. It was longer than we expected, and on the way back into town we debated whether or not to attend the Preston-LeBlanc singalong that was about to begin. None of us were really in the mood: we were cold and wet, we weren’t dressed for it, I hadn’t had the time to buy the ingredients for the dish I had promised to bring let alone cook it, and we were all exhausted. But it was important that we at least make an appearance, empty-handed though it was, and I’m glad we did because a whole slew of other people cancelled. When we arrived I was wrapped in a warm pashmina and given hot tea to counter the cold chill I couldn’t shake, and after some nibblies we all felt much better, and we ended up staying two and a half hours instead of only half of one.

Both the boy and I had hot baths when we got home, and he fell asleep about five minutes after we tucked him in.

Stuff

How’s that for an inspired post title? That’s pretty much where I’m at.

It’s been a remarkably awful week. Not in terms of bad things happening, but in terms of not having enough time to do everything that needs to get done, and the literal (oh, how I wish it were figurative) nigh-incapacitating headache I’ve been fighting since Monday morning. My schedule is insane, and the insanity continues through to next Monday. I owe people stuff like replies to e-mail and uploaded writing and it’s just not happening. I’m writing this post to cover a lot of what otherwise would be a series of “I can’t respond due to workload,” the number of which would take up more time than the post itself. Essentially, I’ve been miserable and stressed, and it’s been building for a while (this week has just been the final-straw kind of thing) to the point that I am almost 90% sure I’m going to contact my doctor and talk about going back on medication, a decision that upsets a couple of other life choices, which in turn stresses me. (No, there is no winning in this situation, and it sucks. And no, I’m not convinced it should be the fibro meds, either.)

I may go back and do a proper weekend roundup (I’d like to, as there were a couple of things I’d like to write out for posterity) but in brief, it was lovely Victoria Day weekend with my parents in which the boy learned how to climb a tree (with help; he got out on his own quite handily, though, and no, that does not mean he fell). I picked up a refurbished Airport wireless card for the iBook I have on semi-permanent loan, so now I have a laptop that can access wifi, for which I am truly thankful. I was testing t!’s Asus eee, and while it’s okay, it’s a tad too small for me (scrolling back and forth to see a full display of a browser or word processing window is Not On) and runs so hot that it hurts my lap. If I were to get a netbook I’d go for one that has a 10″ screen instead of the smaller 7.5″. If this iBook ever gets recalled to its rightful owner, then I’ll just pull the $20 card and there’s no great loss.

We hit the ground running at home on Tuesday. I had a freelance thing I needed to have done by Thursday at noon, which looks great on paper, but Wednesday was a complete write-off due to errands, travel time, and house hunting. And even with Wednesday struck off the workday list, I would have been able to finish it by noon on Thursday if I hadn’t found a tumour-like object on Nixie’s stomach that was large enough and sudden enough to merit an emergency trip to the vet Thursday morning. (Thanks for cranking that stress up some more, there, universe.) That vet visit turned out to be a great relief, as the vet has pronounced it a non-infected mammary cyst that needs removal, but is fairly certain it isn’t cancerous. We’ll schedule surgery for her next week.

I got a few hours of extension for the assignment thanks to the emergency vet visit, and I had just as much trouble with this one as I’ve had with others recently. I think part of that has to do with how I’m second-guessing everything I write in the evaluation thanks to criticism, and while I know I’ve got great support for my recommendations I’m worried it will come back to me for major rewrites as the others have done, for tone if nothing else, even though I did what I could. I have other pro bono freelance things on my plate; there’s two pages of questions I need to answer for an interview with an e-zine, due May 31, and they’re insane. Each question is actually four jammed together. I’m going to have to pick and choose what to reply to, because otherwise it’s going to take about three solid days of work that I didn’t have time for before, and I certainly don’t now. Last week it was decided to do programme notes for the Canada Day concert, too, a decision I fully support because we’re playing an original piece composed by our conductor and artistic director that deserves notes (thank goodness they already exist), but that means I need to fit writing those in somewhere, too. The original due date was June 1, but the manager told me that I could have an extension, bless her.

This weekend is cello-intensive. I have a lesson tonight, a group rehearsal tomorrow afternoon, and a piano rehearsal with my accompanist tomorrow afternoon. This weekend we also really need to fit in a grocery order, buying new sandals for the boy (whose toes are peeking out last season’s, and half his shorts are too small with the other half being too big so I should buy a couple of pairs of those, too), and Pointe-Claire is having their twice-yearly Cultural Rendezvous where the weaving guild is hosting an open house type of thing, and I promised I’d stop by at some point to meet them and tour the guild room. That may be what falls off the schedule, alas, because we have house visits scheduled on Sunday late morning/early afternoon, which also means the boy will be missing his monthly pagan playgroup meeting.

We had our first round of house viewing on Wednesday, and it was… interesting. We love our agent. What I do not love is the fact that you have to go into every house looking for the bad stuff. The third and final house we saw Wednesday afternoon was very close to a Yes, except for the fact that it was close to the Louis-Hippolyte bridge, and I am so very tired of living near bridges and highways; I want something more quiet. That and the fact that the company next door built too close to their property line and as a result has annexed a chunk of the middle of the house’s back yard in order to have their code-required-15-foot-clearance around their emergency exit meant we crossed it off our list, which saddened us, because otherwise it was brilliant: solid construction, fabulous new kitchen, excellent-sized rooms with new windows, new roof, good layout, huge yard (except for that annex) and a full-height unfinished basement. Properties are cycling fast, so good ones will continue to pop up, though.

I tried to install the secondhand Airport Express last night, which failed miserably because neither it nor my computer sense one another as wireless devices, even though my computer is firmly under the impression that it has a wireless network set up. I picked it up with the intention of streaming my computer music to the living room stereo, but I gave up on it after an hour of trying to get it to work before I broke something, and installed the printer instead. That, thank goodness, worked. Yes, I ditched my failing-and-not-fully-functional HP Photosmart that lost the ability to scan when I switched to Mac a year ago, and whose ability to do straight printing degraded so badly that I banished it. (No great loss; I found the bill for it and I paid $50 for it on sale three years ago, so it had a decent run for the money.) We bought a new Canon MP560, which works like a dreamy charm with no hissy fits. HP and Apple had a weird sort of ‘nyah-nyah-can’t-hear-you’ thing with the all-in-one printers, where each claimed the other was responsible for creating new drivers so the all-in-ones would work properly with Macs. Every single HP product I have had has failed in some way, so I am more than happy to ditch them and start dating Canon. HP, we are breaking up for good and I will never, ever buy another one of your products. Go cry into your beer with Sony over there. In researching a new printer I discovered that Canons have a really good reputation for being Mac-compatible; in fact, Apple sells them in their online Apple store, which says a lot to me. So we picked one up last week on mega-special, and after testing it this morning I am very, very pleased indeed. I even love the bundled software, which is wildly unusual for me.

We had a ridiculous mini-heatwave this week that killed my appetite and energy levels. My sleep has been broken, which hasn’t helped the general state of things. I am, however, astonished at what I’ve been able to pull off so far this week. I will probably pay for it in spades next week.

I haven’t had time or energy to write, or warp the loom. I got half an hour of cello done Wednesday morning, but that’s it.

Today’s schedule:

– I am currently baking bread and muffins for tonight’s preschool potluck picnic
– get at least one load of laundry in (I have no idea when we’ll get the rest done)
– take bus+metro to the south shore to meet HRH (11:00), and to pick up my laptop that he took into work (I can’t carry that plus all the baked goods)
– head over to preschool to pick the boy up after his lunch, drop off baked goods (12:45)
– kindergarten orientation (1:00-2:30)
– take boy back to preschool (2:45)
– drop HRH back at work; go to office supply shop, then a Second Cup with the laptop to work on those interview questions (3:00-4:30)
– pick HRH up from work :94:45)
– go to preschool for the boy’s play (5:00)
– potluck picnic with kids and parents (5:30-6:30)
– take HRH and boy home, pick up cello
– cello lesson (8:00)

I should probably schedule in “pass out,” but I suspect that will happen regardless. Either that or I’ll lie awake for hours, like I did earlier this week.

Weekend Roundup

It was a lovely weekend. It felt like it went on forever, such a nice change from wondering where the weekend went. The weather was spectacular, which helped a lot. Our windows were open all the time, and the scent of the lilacs from over the back fence is just heavenly. I’m enjoying it, even though I know it’s all two weeks early. Normally we’d be gardening in weather like this, but as we now have our official pre-approved mortgage and are looking for a house on the south shore this summer (yay!), we’re not planting annuals or doing the vegetable garden this year. The extent of our planting was scattering wildflower seed in the front and side gardens, and trimming the deadheads off the tulips.

First thing Saturday morning HRH and I went to get our passport photos taken. And wow, in this day and age of digital cameras, it’s five minutes and done. They even showed us the digital pictures and asked if they were okay. Then we went to the library for our new library cards, and the boy got his photo taken because it’s been two years since the last one, which is almost half a lifetime ago for him. (I got to keep mine, because I don’t change as rapidly as he does.) It’s been about six weeks since I’ve managed to get to the library, so I paid my lingering fine and grabbed a couple of new releases.

Saturday morning I had one of those cello lessons where I almost reached the point of tears because I couldn’t play an open D followed by an open A. Yes, you read that right. I hate the opening bar to pretty much any solo piece, and the Lully gavotte is no different. I’m too forceful, I’m lifting the bow, I’m not articulating properly, where’s the contact between bow and string at the tip of the bow… I could go on. Two stupidly easy notes, open strings. And yet I can’t do it properly.

While I was celloing HRH took the boy to the toy store so he could buy a Playmobil airplane with the sixty (!) dollars he’d saved up in his piggy bank. They picked me up from my lesson and we stopped over at Ceri and Scott’s place so they could sign our passport applications as guarantors and references. Back home we had a light lunch and then everyone kind of rested, the boy on purpose and HRH and I somewhat unintentionally. I started measuring the warp for a new project on my warping board and managed to completely overestimate the finished length, so I measured two feet more of warp than I needed, which meant I ran out of yarn very quickly. In self-defence I must point out that this is the first time I’ve used a warping board for a full-length piece, and zig-zagging back and forth in a small area makes a length look much shorter than it is when you stretch it out. I redid my calculations and saw that I’d been overly generous with my calculation of loom waste, but even if I’d been measuring the two-feet-shorter version I’d have been short of yarn. I would have to buy another skein of it, which was mildly annoying because I was doing this to use up this particular yarn. Other really frustrating things happened too, like the skein tangling terribly while I wound it into two centre-pull balls, and then the centre-pull balls tangling terribly. (This last is particularly infuriating because centre-pull balls are supposed to eliminate tangling.) Coven was cancelled that night, so I had a hot bath and went to bed.

Sunday morning we were all up stupidly early, so the boy and I headed out to buy that other skein of yarn. When we got home the boy and HRH mowed the back lawn, and then we all went out to do our weekly grocery order. After lunch we were ambushed by naps, and when we got up we went out for a bike ride! The boy biked to the local schoolyard and HRH and I walked our bikes behind him, and he practised cycling on a flat surface. Next trip the training wheels come off, because he hasn’t quite figured out that he needs to go fast enough so that he won’t fall over without them. But as this is the second time he’s used his two-wheeler (rain and the busy have prevented us in the past month) he’s doing pretty well, and is understanding steering and braking and putting a foot down on the ground when he stops. There was a bit of not wanting to try because it was hard/scary/required attention, but we worked through that. And he loved that we had our bikes out with him, too.

I finished measuring the warp for the new project, and I’ll wind and sley it today so the loom will be ready for weaving when I feel like it later this week. Today is also slated for writing and transcribing for my own work, making bread, and practising those two damn notes on the cello.

Weekend Roundup, Mother’s Day Edition

At my cello lesson on Saturday morning I shared my concerns about the Bach Gavotte with my teacher. A month working on it alone did me no favours. I recorded it a day or so before the lesson and hated what I heard. It just wasn’t smooth enough at this point in the game. And with so much work to do for orchestra and the ensemble recital pieces… well, I said I thought the Lully would be a better choice, and she fully supported me. So we proceeded to work on different bits of it, including a full ten minutes just playing the first two notes trying to get the articulation just right. She switched me to something else just in time before I lost it.

I know I can play the Bach at the Christmas recital. But it was my goal for this recital, and we mangled the timing. I feel better about the decision, but I’m still really disappointed.

I came home through the rain, picked up the boy, and we went to get my new reeds for the rigid heddle loom. The lady was wonderful. She reps Ashford, Majacraft, and Schacht out of her home, so if I need pretty much anything in the way of spinning or weaving equipment from any of the major companies (other than Kromski, who of course makes the next wheel I want, sigh) I’m covered by her and my LYS. I was there for about twenty minutes talking to her about things, and admiring the cherrywood Baby Wolf loom set up in the corner of her living room, warped for tea towels. She’s pretty much got me convinced to do the guild thing, even if I can’t make regular meetings. It’s amazing how meeting one kind, open person can change my mind. She told us about the upcoming cultural rendez-vous at the end of the month at Stewart Hall, one of the two cultural demonstrations/festivals they host per year, so I’ll go over with the boys and check it out. The guild is going to have things set up for demonstrations and an open house, and she said she’d show me their looms and projects.

Then we stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house, and the boy played with their new Prince of Persia Lego set while Ceri scrutinized the baby blanket and told me that it was wonderful and perfectly acceptable for gifting, which made me very happy. She also sent me away with a bottle of red wine, bless her. The boy and I shared soup and a sandwich at Tim Hortons, and then went to Pointe-Claire village to pick up chocolates for the various mums and mum-figures. After that we went to the little toy store after lunch so he could buy something with his twenty dollars, and he chose a Playmobil policeman on a motorcycle. He had enough money left over for a single figure, so he walked up and down the aisles looking for something, and then finally stopped, frustrated. “What are you looking for?” I said. “Mama, I need a girl police to go with this,” he said. The only policewoman figure they had was in a two-pack with a robber, so I paid the extra so he could have his “girl police.” Also, bonus bad guy for them to apprehend!

We got back home mid-afternoon and HRH went off in the car to run his errands, and the boy has a rest. He’s fighting a cold, and needed it despite the late naptime. I woke him up an hour later, and made dinner for him. While he napped I started weaving on the warp I’d done on the rigid heddle loom earlier in the week; I had new reeds to experiment with, after all, and so I needed to use up what I had on the loom! I’d played with combining warp threads of two different grists and an empty slot, and for weft I used the coloured Lion Homespun yarn I’d first tested the loom with in April. It wove up brilliantly, the warp threads making a lovely variation in texture, and the Homespun behaved perfectly as weft. I finished weaving it that night, but didn’t cut it off the loom till Sunday morning. (I think it’s a table runner, and I think it’s a wedding present for someone. I’m going to have to start making two of everything, because I want to keep this, too!)

We received or tax refunds in the mail on Thursday (yay!), so on Saturday night after the boy went to bed we treated ourselves to a sushi dinner while curled up in front of the TV, watching episodes of Castle that Karine had taped for us. (Yes, HRH found an operational VCR languishing in a storeroom at work, so he liberated it; now we can watch tapes again!)

Sunday morning we woke up to snow. I was pretty wiped, so HRH did the groceries. Before he left I got my Mother’s Day presents. The boy had made a card and “nests” at school, a stupidly delicious chocolate-peanut butter-Rice Krispie thing pushed into tiny foil tart shells, with peanut M&M “eggs” in the nests, and HRH gave me a card and a gift certificate to Ariadne Knits. The boy had an early lunch and a rest, and while he was napping our friend John came by and dropped off a big storage bucket of Lego, including some truly awesome specialised pieces, a robot, and a tonne of figures and horses. The boy was thrilled when he got up (which he did moments after John left, as if he has some kind of new-Lego radar). We let him dig gleefully through it for about half an hour, then we went over to HRH’s parents’ house. I stayed for half an hour and then had to leave for our monthly group cello lesson, which went relatively well for me up till the last ten minutes. I hate it when that happens, because those final minutes colour the whole thing. I went back to the south shore to rejoin the family, and we had a lovely Mother’s Day dinner, with a really nice red wine and a lovely cake for dessert, before coming home and collapsing in bed.

Weekend Roundup

Everything seems to have happened on Saturday. The first half of Saturday, at that.

Saturday morning I had my first cello lesson in just under a month. Suddenly I had to decide between the Lully gavotte and the Bach gavotte for next month’s recital, which felt slightly unfair because we’d set the deadline at the last lesson and I haven’t had a chance to work on it with my teacher since then. I really do want to play the Bach, though, so my teacher said we’d do it. On the way home I second-guessed myself and was sure I’d made the wrong decision, and I’m still fairly certain I’ll blow it badly. But then, I’d feel the same way about the Lully, so I can’t win either way. In the lesson we worked on the upper body being free to move from side to side with the elbow-led bow stroke, which felt very awkward and wrong, but it did create some very nice sound. I think I’m too locked up when I play, so my teacher’s trying to get me to loosen up while still being aware enough of my body to control the sound.

Things to remember: Keep fingers aimed more toward the bridge instead of parallel to it, remember to use the back of the thumb instead of only the side in thumb position, don’t shortchange the last note before a new bow or phrase, stop leading RH movement with the wrist (my teacher was also initially trained to do this and her teacher still calls her on it, so I don’t feel as hopeless about this as I could, although I still feel pretty hopeless indeed), and the speed of the shift needs to match the speed of the song.

I raced home from the lesson to pick up HRH and the boy, stopped by the grocery store to grab cold meats and cheese and bread, then went to Angrignon Park for Tristan’s naming ceremony. (Yes, two naming ceremonies in one week.) It was lovely. Very different from the previous week’s ceremony, which was more formal in the setup and dress. This one was a circle of friends around blankets, balloons in the wind, and a baby who decided to protest the delay in feeding. We did a couple of fixes on the fly (a dandelion for the flower, the candle went out so I used the cloud-covered sun as the light) and there was laughter, which always blesses a ritual. And I finally got to use part of the baby-blessing ritual I wrote for my second book, which was intended to be used for the boy, but he ended up arriving early and in the race to keep up we never got around to holding a naming ceremony for him.

When it was over we all hauled out our picnic stuff, sat on blankets or camp chairs or around the picnic table, and ate. The boy ran around with MLG (fencing lessons with sticks; I love my friends) and a younger boy whom he decided needed looking after, so he kept feeding him, much to our amusement. HRH and I got to play with a cheerful ten(?)-month-old, who proceeded to impress his mum by trying to take steps on his own (with support, of course) and feed himself, and rather capably, too, for someone who didn’t do it regularly. And his mum asked if I’d do a naming for him, as well! It was so nice to just sit and relax with friends, and watch kids play, and nibble at stuff. A couple of hours later the threatening clouds eventually started spitting actual rain so we all packed up in about five minutes and headed for home, where we put a movie on for the boy and I was ambushed by a ninja nap.

Sunday was a very quiet day. HRH ran around, though, getting the summer tires put on (to our dismay, the sound the wheels were making was not entirely the winter tires; seems the bearings may need repacking, too) and heading over to his parents’ house in the afternoon to lay the new bathroom floor. Not having the brainpower or the energy to do much, I pulled out the spinning wheel and spun up two more samples from the January Phat Fiber box (yes, I’m only a third of the way through the samples; I’m making this last). I also wove in the last few weft ends on the baby blanket I wove for the last naming ceremony, and machine washed it to block the weave. I want to run it by Ceri first to make sure I’m not going to embarrass myself by gifting it (there are a couple of errors where a warp thread didn’t rise or lower properly so there’s a skip, but while I can see every one of them like they’re circled with blinking red lights, others probably don’t). Actually, I wanted to weave instead of spin, but since there was nothing on the loom, I didn’t. I had nowhere near the mental focus or energy required to wind a warp then get it on the loom. Maybe this week. I finally got a copy of Betty Davenport’s classic Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving, which didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering to me, but did clearly outline the process of warping from back to front, which I will try next time instead of direct warping.

Hey, my new reeds ought to be here at the end of the week.

Ceri lent me her point-and-shoot camera (I am discovering that a manual setting on a point-and-shoot is a rare thing, which makes me sad because I’ll have to pay more for it), so I can show the blanket off and the stuff I’ve spun over the past couple of weeks… once I have the energy to set it all up and photograph it. And in other random fibre arts news, I thought the size 4 Harmony tips for my circular needles from KnitPicks were faulty; one kept falling right off the cable, the screw not catching at all. I thought I’d have to contact them this week so I could keep working on my sleeveless sweater without losing stitches when the cable fell off the needle, which is what happened on Friday night. But I remembered that I had a second set of size 4 tips, which came in the full set I bought after testing a separate pair of tips and cables, so I tried one of them instead. It turns out that it’s the cable that’s faulty, not the tip. I tried another 24″ cable, et voila! The previously suspicious tips are just fine. I could call them for a replacement cable, but I have three other 24″ cables (one other from the original pair I bought, plus anotherpair from the full set) and I doubt I’ll ever have them all in use at the same time.

Finally, for dinner last night I used Karine’s garlic-teriyaki pork slow cooker recipe, and it was fabulous. Slow cooker recipes are usually simple, but this one was gleefully easy. Definitely a keeper. Next time I’m going to caramelize onions and fry mushrooms to toss on top of it before the sauce is poured over top at the table.

Weekend Roundup

This was a glorious weekend. The weather was spectacular: it was brilliantly sunny and the temperature hovered between sixteen and twenty degrees.

Friday night I attended the rehearsal for the handfasting I was priestessing on Saturday. I didn’t know these women before I was referred to them, but I’ve really enjoyed working with them. They’re funny, loving, and the just right kind of people, you know? Their friends are equally fun, and we spent a lot of the two walk-throughs giggling. It relaxed everybody.

Saturday morning I had some errands to run, and I took the boy with me. “Mama,” he whispered as I buckled him into the car. “You know what we could do? We could go to Tim Horton’s.” He was so funny that I had to laugh, and decided that sure, we could have a treat. Well, the treat turned into a crisis, because as I pulled up to the drive-through speaker I said, “What doughnut do you want, the chocolate-covered one?” and he said yes. So I ordered him a chocolate-glazed doughnut and myself a maple-glazed one. I handed him his bag as we pulled around front and he pulled the doughnut out, then his face crumpled up. “Mama,” he said, “you made a mistake, you got the wrong doughnut!” And then I remembered that he and HRH had been sharing the occasional Boston Cream doughnut, and that I had, indeed, misunderstood and erred in my order. I apologised, we parked the car, and went inside to order the right kind for him. They were out of chocolate-glazed Boston Creams, but they did have maple-glazed; the boy decided that he was game to try one, and loved it. So a tragedy was turned into an exciting new discovery. (And I got an extra doughnut out of it.)

We stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house for fifteen minutes so we could trade books and I could drop off things to be taken to the monthly Random Colour craft session that I was going to miss. Then we went to Pointe-Claire Village to select chocolates for birthday and handfasting gifts, and a lovely little pair of heart-shaped Peruvian hammered silver earrings for my goddaughter’s eight birthday. Then it was back home for lunch and a rest for the boy, and I got ready for the ceremonies I was priestessing.

The handfasting was absolutely beautiful. The couple has been legally married for seven years but chose to have a spiritual service to celebrate their seventh anniversary, and to have their infant daughter named on the same day. No matter how many times you walk through something, when the actual day comes and it’s the real thing, everything is special and meaningful and so much more moving. I was complimented by guests several times for beautiful services, and every time I pointed out that the couple had written them and they should get the credit. The couple finally pointed out to me in return that anyone could have read it in a monotone: I may have had good material with which to work, but I made it special for them. There is a certain return in blessings; when you bless someone else in a ritual or rituals like this, you’re blessed in turn by their joy and love for one another. This was the first time I’ve ever performed such a deeply meaningful ritual for someone I didn’t already know, and I’m deeply thankful that it was such a joyful experience.

When I got home there was an e-mail waiting for me from Miranda, asking if we still had our baby swing. We checked, and we did, so we bundled everyone into the car and brought it over to her. We finally got to meet baby Tristan, who is just one month old. We had to cancel our earlier visit two weeks ago, so we were very happy to have an excuse to stop by and see him. A couple of days earlier Miranda had asked me if I would perform his naming ceremony, which I agreed to do immediately, and I was glad to be able to meet him before the day of the actual ritual! The excellent day continued with a brief visit with the Preston-LeBlancs, where we dropped off their birthday gifts and chatted for a quarter of an hour before finally heading home.

Sunday morning was the monthly Pagan playgroup meeting, where we talked about a potential camping trip for the families late this summer, made tissue paper flowers for Beltane, and worked on a new circle-casting song. And there were healthier snacks! The group has grown yet again.

We went home for lunch and the boy only had a brief lie-down before he got up again; it looks like we’re down to one nap per weekend. At two-thirty the boy and I packed up and headed out for the West Island Youth Symphony Orchestra‘s free concert called “1910 – A Celebration in Music,” programmed to celebrate the city of Beaconsfield’s centenary. The last time I heard the WIYSO was, erm, sixteen years ago, when I was looking for a cello teacher. Not only was this a chance for me to actually attend a concert (imagine! live orchestral music that I wasn’t playing!), it was an opportunity to share a concert-going experience with my son. And finally, I’d also have the chance to see my new conductor in action with a different group. I explained to the boy that this orchestra was made up of kids, and he immediately asked if he could join. I told him that these were older kids, but in four three years (holy cats) he would be eligible to join the junior orchestra, if he liked.

I let him choose where we sat in the auditorium (on the cello side, halfway between the wall and the aisle; we had the whole row to ourselves), and he explored the fold-down seats and asked all sorts of questions about the theatre (he thought we were going to a movie theatre, for some reason). When the lights went down for the orchestra to tune, he caught sight of the conductor just offstage, and he turned to me. “It’s Stewart!” he said with great excitement, and I had to laugh; he made it sound like he and the conductor were old buddies.

Overall, he was very good. They played the music “all in a row,” as he told HRH back home; in other words, there was no intermission, and the concert lasted just over an hour. He was a bit squirmy, climbing from his seat to my seat to the seat on my other side, or lying down across my lap with his sweater over him as a blanket, but he wasn’t disruptive or distracting, and we never needed to resort to pulling out his books or colouring books. His first favourite bit was the Maple Leaf Rag (who can resist ragtime?), and he pretended to play a trombone through it, humming into his straw bottle of apple juice and moving his free hand forward and back in front of him. The guy sitting behind us thought it was hilarious. The Joplin was blown out of the water by Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, however. It may have been partially due to the fact that in the music he could hear the story that Stewart had briefly outlined for the audience before the piece began. “Mama,” he whispered during the first movement, “do firebirds have fur?” “No,” I said, “they have beautiful, long feathers made of flames.” “Not the babies,” he said authoritatively. “They have fuzz.” “Oh,” I said, “so they get their fire-feathers when they grow up?” “Yes,” he said, quite firmly.

He crawled onto my lap at one point to snuggle, and had his head on my shoulder when the first crashing chord of the Danse Infernale began. He must have jumped six inches into the air before sitting straight up and staring at the orchestra. I had to try very hard not to giggle, and I could hear the guy behind us muffling a snicker, too. The boy sat up very straight and applauded loudly when it was over, the first piece for which he’d done so with such enthusiasm. He talked about it had been the best part of the concert and about firebirds and baby firebirds all the way out and through the parking lot, to the amusement of other patrons. It seems that my son is a budding Stravinsky fan.

He’d been so good that we picked up a bonus doughnut on the way home (chocolate-glazed Boston Cream, this time).

Throughout the weekend, HRH finished moving us out of the basement room we’d been using as an office with the upstairs neighbours. We can’t afford the extra money each month, not when our half of the rent for that room is equivalent to the cost of the gas we use monthly. So HRH has moved us and our laundry equipment back into the garage, which is even cosier than it was in its first incarnation of his office, and has the added bonus of now having room for the table we sit around to game once a month or so. We purged a lot of stuff, as well. It’s currently a bit tight, but people will be coming to remove some of the equipment we’ve been holding for them over the next couple of weeks, so we’ll be able to actually get the bikes in and out again.

Weekend Roundup, Easter Edition

Four-day weekends are extremely unusual. All the more so because HRH’s employers usually give them Easter Monday or Good Friday off, not both. In Quebec the government has decreed that an employer of a certain size must give its employees one of those two days off. Naturally, in the spirit of compliance, every place we intended to shop at on Sunday (assuming that everywhere that was open Good Friday would be closed Easter Monday) was closed that day instead, even though they were usually open on Sundays.

Anyway. It was a lovely Easter weekend.

I sent the freelance assignment out Friday morning, and got it back Friday afternoon confirming that yes, I’d have to do revisions on it because I wasn’t quite supportive and encouraging enough. Honestly, I’d expected this, and I told the editor so. I also pointed out that I’d already redone it twice on my end before my initial submission, so you can imagine what my original looked like. I turned it around and started checking my e-mail every half-hour to see if they’d approved it yet so I could invoice by the Monday deadline.

While I finished it HRH cleaned the BBQ and checked the gas levels, then took the boy out to do some grocery shopping. MLG came over for a late lunch of grilled three-cheese burgers and warm potato salad, with chocolate-peanut butter pudding for dessert. We had a most enjoyable afternoon indeed where we sat and/or worked or played outside in the backyard. I don’t know what was more draining: watching the boy play with great enthusiasm, watching HRH clean up the yard, watching MLG keep up with the boy, or just being in the unseasonably warm sun.

Saturday we dropped the boy off with the local grandparents, picked up the rest of our coven, and headed out to Maxville to spend the day with t! and Jan, who hosted the best Ostara ritual EVER. We had a real egg hunt: we each had a list of six clues, and corresponding eggs hidden in specific places on the property that we had to find! The eggs all had a letter on them, and when everyone assembled their eggs there was a message spelled out. The theme of the rit was being happy with imperfection and/or your best even if it wasn’t perfect, which was a very good message for most if not all of us, too. And the crowning touch was that the eggs were from their small flock of chickens (who are now gloriously full-grown and sporting glossy chestnut feathers). The digital thermometer indicated that the peak temperature was 31 point something degrees while we were there, and it was simply spectacular weather to be running around a couple of acres of land. Then we got to have quiche and two kinds of salads (one green and one a fruit/nut/rice salad) and I’d made a deep-dish butterscotch lemon pie for dessert. The only thing that marred the day was my back doing something odd while I was finishing up the pie that morning, and two hours in the car didn’t make it any better. As usual, we didn’t want to leave.

Sunday we were thwarted in our scheduled errand-running, so we kicked about at home. HRH and I had hidden M&M eggs around the living room before we went to bed Saturday night, and I slept pretty badly, partially due to the wrenched back, but not helped in the least by Gryff ‘finding’ some of the eggs, knocking them down from wherever he’d found them, and chasing them around the floor. I got up four times to ruin his fun, finally shutting him in the bedroom with us until HRH woke up and thought that the cat had somehow shut himself in and let him out to wreak havoc upon the eggs again. The boy woke us up at six, saying that there were eggs everywhere in the living room; HRH and I had some fun being sleepy and not understanding what he was saying before we got up and watched him run around the with a tiny basket, collecting what he could find. He patted himself on the back quite a bit, saying, “I’m a very good hunter,” interspersed with wiping perspiration from his young brow at various points in the endeavour. We refrained from pointing out the ones he didn’t find, but after getting up the second time (because we went back to bed, of course) we discovered that he’d dragged his chair out of his room and had used it to pluck the higher level of eggs he’d missed on his initial go-round.

He had a nap, a good thing because it was beginning to look like he had a spring cold, although we were crossing our fingers and hoping it was allergies. When he got up we went over to HRH’s parents’ house, where there was another egg hunt (this one included chocolate for HRH and I, too, which was a lot of fun because my mother-in-law is great at hiding things in almost-in-plain sight). For dinner we had an absolutely fabulous prime rib roast, with a nice pinot noir from Oregon, of all places.

Monday morning we were scheduled to go visit Miranda and baby Tristan, but we cancelled it because the boy’s cold was very definitely a cold and not allergies. The last thing a week-old baby needs is a cold. Instead, we ran the errands that we couldn’t run on Sunday, which included buying the webcams. At home I tested mine out by plugging it in, and oh, how I love Apple’s recognition-awareness; I opened iChat and clicked the green video button, and voila, the computer knew what it was and where it was and there was video. HRH started trying to install the other on his computer so we could test them, but as he’s got a PC it would have entailed loading all the software and so forth, so I’ve packed it up again and will just take it with me to my parents’ house and install it on Mum’s laptop there.

I made a delicious quiche (I think the pie dough was even better after being frozen, as I’d made a double batch to have enough for the lemon pie and Monday’s quiche) and Ceri and Scott came over for a late lunch and a visit. The boy was going down for his nap just as they arrived and didn’t wake up till about half an hour before they left, and was in an odd mood when he did wake up so he hid in his room doing his own thing. My rewrites on the freelance project were accepted so I got to fire off a quick invoice by deadline, which made me very happy indeed.

After dinner HRH headed off on a Secret Mission, so I got to play with the boy through his bath and put him to bed on my own. HRH showed off his score when I emerged: a practically new bicycle for the boy, one of the ones I’d been stalking on Kijiji last week. (Ours has the colours flipped, red where the blue is and vice versa.) It’s a real pity we couldn’t pick it up before the weekend so the boy could have enjoyed it during the brilliant weather, but the seller was gone for Easter. We have it now, and are feeling very smug about paying half-price for a virtually new bike; the seller said his daughter had been on it maybe five times before she outgrew it.

It’s three days till I leave on the train to stay with my parents. I’m already stressing about what to bring with me and what I might forget.