Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Standing Still

Lowest voter turnout ever. Well, since 1898. I’m disgusted.

We spent election night drinking Quebec ice cider, Nova Scotia beer, local venison-cranberry pate, and baked local Brie. How much more Canadian can you get?

Far more interesting than the Official Federal Election In Which Nothing Happened was the Student Vote program, a project designed to educate children and teenagers about the election process and the structure of government. Students assessed platforms, debated, listened to candidates who were willing to meet them, and finally ‘voted’ and ‘elected’ 100 Conservative seats, 66 NDP seats, 54 Liberal seats, 44 Green seats, and 24 Bloc seats. Take a good look, people; these are tomorrow’s voters.

In other news, we had an absolutely lovely weekend with my parents. The weather was lovely; the food was incredible (as always). The only drawback was Liam coming down with a cold and his first case of conjunctivitis, which we caught right at the beginning before it got bad and thus was cleared up before we left for home. (Well, okay, there was that other drawback of having to wade through two hours of traffic to get out of Montreal, and experience so awful that we came very close to turning around and going home. Except to go home would have taken us the same amount of time that continuing to get out of the city would take. You know, that whole ‘I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’ thing. And had it taken any longer there very well might have been blood.)

Naturally I have the cold now too, and mine are always worse than the boy’s. It’s like he amps them as he passes them along. He stayed home yesterday and we ran errands together. “We’re going to vote for the government!” he told everyone with great excitement when we went to the bank, the grocery store, the place where I bought pants, and where he got his hair cut. The actual voting was anti-climatic for him though once he’d helped me find the polling booth by number (although he kept trying to steer me toward 126 instead of 136). We were in a school gymnasium, and he was very distracted by the climbing bars and the benches against the wall. I voted very quickly in order to lunge and catch him before he got more than a foot off the ground and up those bars.

After a very overcast day, the sun broke through for the most glorious autumnal end of afternoon glow. There was a warm wind all day. It was a beautiful full moon last night, and when we lit our Happy Full Moon candle at the altar before the boy’s bedtime he chirped, “Thank you, Goddess, for all the things in the world!”

Also, I found three pairs of jeans that fit me that were all on sale. And I only have to hem one of them.

Forty Months Old!

Or three and a third years old, for those counting in years.

“What are you going to dress up as for Hallowe’en?” Liam asked us excitedly at dinner the other night. HRH and I looked at one another, and we both grinned. It’s been ages since we did costumes (would they have been for the last superhero party, or the final Hallowe’en party t! threw?). Suddenly here was our son encouraging us to do the Hallowe’en thing, because as far as he knows everyone dresses up at Hallowe’en. We have no time to do new costumes for ourselves; any costume-creation effort will be focused on him. So I gave my costume wardrobe a quick once-over in my mind and said, “I think I’ll go as Belle.” “Oh, Mama,” he said, “that’s a great idea!” HRH has decided to make himself an Incredibles t-shirt to wear to school, so I think that will be the extent of his costume. As for what the boy will be wearing, we are not yet sure. There is the pirate coat we planned for last year that never got made, and apart from that he has alternately decided to be Dash from the Incredibles, Mr. Incredible, and a diesel locomotive. I suspect we will have to set a deadline for a final decision. This year will be the first year he goes out trick or treating, and I believe he expects us both to go out with him (because again, as far as he knows, everyone does it!). Must check with the upstairs neighbours to see if they would be good with handling kids at the door while we go out for half an hour.

Over the past couple of months he has developed an odd use of the third person to describe himself and his actions, as if he is narrating the activity of a character in a story. “Mama, said the [kitten/robot/fish/whatever he is pretending to be today], what are we having for lunch?” he’ll say. It’s interesting.

He’s sleeping really well, anywhere between an hour and a half and two hours of nap in the early afternoon, and ten hours at night. And he’s so close to making it through all those ten hours at night completely dry. Sometimes he manages it, sometimes he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t it’s usually the wetting that wakes him up just before our scheduled wake-up time, and he’s so upset and frustrated. (Jury’s out regarding the classification of the amount of frustration connected with the wetting, and the amount associated with being jolted awake before he would wake up on his own.)

School continues to go very well. They call him their sparkplug (familiar, what?), the one whose enthusiasm and energy gets everyone else active and involved. He plays with the older kids, then goes to the younger kids, and then to the kids his own age, and integrates seamlessly into each group; apparently he’s the only one who ranges between groups like that. The CD player was being fixed when he started school, but when it came back and they did a unit on music he was right there, attentive and interested. It’s his favourite thing there, or at least the one that keeps his attention the longest, we’re told. He brings home new songs all the time (not that we recognize them, because although he is enthusiastic he is not necessarily reproducing them correctly), and loves songs with actions accompanying them. The other day he was making odd vowel sounds to the tune of Frère Jacques, one of the tunes they adapt a lot at preschool, then saying someone’s name: “[vowel sound] [vowel sound] Heidi, [vowel sound] [vowel sound] Heidi…” It took me a half hour of hearing him sing this to himself while playing before it clicked and suddenly it made sense. He was singing the morning welcome song ( “Where is Ashley, where is Ashley? Here she is, here she is!”) in French. Ou est Heidi? Aha.

His food preferences have no consistency that I can see. He refused applesauce for months, and has enthusiastically eaten bowls of it for the past two weeks. Every time I made homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner he’d cry and ask for plain noodles, but last night he dug in to the bowl I put in front of him with gusto and even had seconds. At breakfast he asks for a mélange of Rice Krispies, Cheerios, Shreddies, and organic kamut flakes in various combinations. Cold pancakes are still a great snack. Oatmeal is back. Apparently he wasn’t eating well at school lunches, pushing things around his plate and saying, “I don’t like it,” but that’s been worked out (part of it was low appetite leading into the cold then the tummy bug thing, part of it was a sudden discomfort with the schedule, yet another part was that he was having huge breakfasts and enthusiastic mid-morning snacks and thus not hungry at lunch). The deal at home is you eat three big bites of what’s on your plate and if you decide you don’t like or want it, you can politely refuse the rest, but we’re not going to make you something else. Generally it’s not an issue, and if it is for some reason, he learns that being hungry later isn’t so much fun. We’re not in the least concerned that he won’t eat enough; that will never be a problem!

In general he’s still a cheerful, inventive, imaginative boy with great enthusiasm for just about everything. He loved bringing his carrots into school to share with all his friends there, and told them that he helped plant them, water them, and harvest them. He and Gryff have been celebrating the turn of the season by galumphing up and down the hall, chasing one another. Falling leaves mean playing in piles of them, messing about with sticks, and finding very cold bumblebees to tuck into the garden in hopes that they will find a warm place in which to hibernate. Decreasing hours of daylight means getting ready for the day in the morning when it’s still dark, and going to bed when the sun has gone down. “Maybe it will snow from those clouds!” he says eagerly. Everything is interesting and fun. And it’s good to have someone discovering fun things around.

Dragging Oneself Into Monday

Oh gods. So. very. sick.

I find it moderately unfair that this seems to be getting worse as it’s passed along to each family member. The boy had the collywobbles first on Thursday night and threw up once, then just had an upset tummy on Friday. HRH had the collywobbly tummy on Saturday and part of Sunday. I had the usual getting-sick powering-down of energy on Sunday, but didn’t actually manifest anything until 1:42 AM last night, at which time I woke up and thought I was going to die. And then I proceeded to stay awake for three hours, thinking I was going to die. I moved to my office and tried to distract myself by transposing a song Sandman7 and I want to play together at some point, which was surprisingly successful, checked on the sleeping boy a few times (including sitting down on the floor next to his bed, putting an arm around him and lying my cheek on his side to cuddle him as he slept), and finally got back to my own bed to sleep around 4:30. And then an hour later a damned cat knocked over the screen that gives them privacy in the litterbox, which sounded like a gunshot and woke both HRH and I up… and the boy too. I got up to check what it was, stomped back to bed and fell asleep. I woke up around 7:00 with the boy burrowing into bed next to me with his stuffed Maggie-cat in one hand and BunBun in the other, so we could both cuddle something. It was nice to snuggle him till it was almost time for him and HRH to hit the road to their respective schools. I waved as usual and then stumbled back to bed.

I woke up again at 9:30, still feeling moderately oh-gods-I-want-to-die, and then realised (A) with great argh that it was in fact October 6, which was Mousme’s date to have her head shaved live on radio for the Shave to Save campaign for breast cancer… at 8:00 AM, which had been ninety minutes earlier; and (B) with a bit of panic that the landlord was coming by this morning to power-wash the garage door in preparation for painting it this week. So I leapt out of bed and scrambled myself into some sort of reputable state, and here we are.

Collywobbles and upset stomachs and wanting to die aside, we all had a lovely weekend. The weather was beautiful and crisp. On Saturday HRH acquired an Xbox 360 at a hundred dollars off the customary price (!) (“I shouldn’t do this,” he fretted, so I helpfully enabled him by pointing out that if he ever wanted to play a new Xbox game again he’d have to buy one at some point), I acquired a new cell phone (which is black and very light, and we have discovered that the back has red sparkles in it when you angle it properly in the sun), and the boy acquired a new Thomas the Tank Engine DVD (because wow are we sick of the ones we have). After everyone napped we hied ourselves to Tal’s housewarming party where we saw many friends, including some I hadn’t seen in fifteen years (let me tell you, it was odd to sit on a blanket chest with girls I’d last seen ages and ages ago, all talking about our kids) and others who I’d always seen at parties but never had the chance to speak with (parties for me tend to be ‘hit the people you know and exchange essential info ASAP because eek, look, a crowd’). The boy had a wonderful time galumphing around with two older children, who seemed cheerfully willing to galumph with someone less than half their age and whose father was willing to galumph around outside with them in the first fallen leaves of the autumn, along with HRH. When we said it was time to go the boy just stood there next to his newfound friends and burst into tears. “A sign that things have gone well,” their father said, and we shared knowing looks.

On Sunday HRH started putting the gardens to bed for the winter. The biggest part of this was harvesting all the damn carrots, a job he shared with the boy who has taken a big bunch of them to school today for show and tell and snacking, greens still on and everything (because how much do you want to bet that most of these kids have never seen a carrot that’s just been pulled from the ground?).

And now I get to settle down and do another manuscript evaluation, assuming it’s actually arrived in my work folder. It hadn’t on Friday, despite the notification that it had been assigned. I need some time away from Orchestrated anyhow, after the numbing sprint over the past two weeks.

Hello Monday!

Not dead — just busy having a fabulous weekend.

Friday was entirely consumed by the freelance evaluation I wanted done by noon. It wasn’t. It was a tricky one to handle because of the subject matter. We had homemade pizza for dinner (which has now officially become the Friday night meal in our household, because our homemade pizza is yum), which went over very well.

Saturday morning we dawdled for while over coffee/tea/trains, then headed out to try to pick up various necessities. This was foiled by the store advertising an item we’d intended to pick up as a Christmas gift for someone being out of stock of said item, so we moved on to get the rest of the list. We wrapped the morning up by taking the boy out for a hot dog lunch at a local La Belle Province (because we have become highly disillusioned with the quality of food produced by our local Lafleur‘s), where we ate in a booth with sparkly vinyl benches and chrome fixtures. The boy approved. We were very happy with the flavour of everything, and so our allegiance has shifted (at least between these two local franchises). While the boy napped I managed to get half an hour of work on the runs in the final movement of the Haydn symphony done. (Official state of stun: I practiced on the weekend.)

The local grandparents came over Saturday after the boy’s nap to stay with him for the evening. HRH and I went out to our favourite sushi restaurant for our anniversary dinner, a treat afforded by my mother’s generosity. We hadn’t been there in three years, but nothing has changed: same jazz CDs, same decor, same delicious everything. We ordered a very ambitious and enthusiastic amount of sushi, and ate most of it, too, earning the amused approval of the chef who’d assembled it for us. We boxed up the remaining sushi and maki and brought them as our buffet offering to the fifth annual Tarasmas event!

I have written about Tarasmas before (notably here and here) so I won’t rehash the explanation of the event other than to say that in a glorious turnaround of the birthday gifting tradition, t! throws a party that revolves around a series of one-act plays he writes for the event, to be performed by the partygoers who get their scripts around fifteen minutes before they go on. Tarasmas 2008 featured a medieval comedy replete with puns, a Western ( “I was just trying to kill you to get your attention”), and an old-fashioned melodrama that required traditional audience participation (in which zombie chickens made a special musical appearance). This year I got to play the heroine of the melodrama, which was, like the previous two plays, hilarious. Tarasmas is a great opportunity to appreciate clever writing, t!’s genius in assigning roles to people (to either draw them out, play against type, or play to their strengths) and to enthusiastically abandon oneself to laughter and cheering. It’s not about performing well; it’s about fiftyish people participating together and sharing the experience, either as performer or audience member. It’s truly a group effort, with t! as ringmaster. Every year just gets better and better.

I’d been looking forward to Tarasmas for days because I knew I’d see lots of people I hadn’t seen in a while, and have tons of fun. And I met new people, too, and had lovely conversations with them. I got to try Ceri’s new Aspire One, which was very adorable but just too small for me. Now that I’ve tried it properly I have laid to rest the excited-writer-coveting-new-toy part of me that had been dying for one of these mini-notebooks since they were released a couple of months ago. It’s good to know the secondhand iBook route I’ve been exploring is the better option for me.

I didn’t take my medication until I got home (and a good thing, really, because if I took it at the regular time I wouldn’t have been able to make it all the way to the end of Tarasmas and the final play, which would have been somewhat problematic as I was in it) and so I didn’t fall asleep until somewhere around two-thirty. Consequently I didn’t wake up until sometime after nine the following morning. But once I was awake, Sunday was lovely. We headed out for groceries and wine because my mother and her sister were stopping by for dinner on their way to start their lovely driving tour through the Eastern Townships. I haven’t seen my aunt in about six years, and seeing my mother any time is great. I decided to make some sort of approximation of the delicious chicken-Brie puff pastry thing I’d had when we went out to dinner with Brendan in Old Montreal this past summer, and wow, did I ever succeed! It’s always slightly unnerving to make a dish you’ve never prepared before for guests, but this was a terrific success. I served it with a simple salad of baby lettuces and parsley in a sesame oil-rice vinegar dressing. (Yes, yes, I will post it on the Recipe Trade forthwith.) We’d given the boy the responsibility of deciding on a dessert, which meant it was ice cream (although I had a local ice cider to offer as well as an after-dinner sweet). It was a lovely, lovely evening and I wish I could do things like that with my family more often. My aunt told us we had to come down to stay at the cottage in Mahone Bay next summer, as HRH has an entire month off, and we accepted her offer. It’s been six years since I’ve been back to the Maritimes, and I miss it. It will be a lot of fun to introduce the boy to wading in the ocean, picking periwinkles and seaweed, and chasing crabs. And mussels. Oh gods, yes, the mussels. By the potful.

Took my medication on time but couldn’t fall asleep till one AM anyhow. Nevertheless, I woke up at 6:30 when the boy pattered into the bedroom saying that he needed to go to the bathroom, and spent a pleasant hour with the boys before they headed out to school. I expected to have a new freelance assignment this morning but it seems that the one I handed in on Friday afternoon hasn’t been processed yet. So I have some time to catch up on news and such and maybe whack out a few words in a file somewhere.

The weekend was so wonderful that not even the very grey day outside my window can bring me down.

Nine!

On this day nine years ago, in the company of family and dear chosen family on a spectacular autumn day, I married my best friend.

Today also marks the eleventh anniversary of HRH and I doing our first road trip together, one of the joys I have continued to experience with him throughout our marriage.

As for this year’s cool gift, I bought him a stunning hand-forged ritual knife from Helmut at the Hamilton PPD festival, the blade done in Odin’s Eye damascene steel and the handle made of antler from Manitoba. (He bought me a tiny knife with a handle in African blackwood and the guard in bone. True love in this household means gifting your spouse with a blade. Or a new gaming console.)

Ten years next year. I find it really hard to wrap my mind around that. We’ll have spent a quarter of our lives together.

This past year hasn’t been easy; in fact, I think we could safely mark it as the Worst Ever (and we’d survived some pretty depressing setbacks already). But there’s no one else I’d rather have spent it with. By hanging on and working together we’ve managed to turn things around so that now we’re looking at quite possibly one of the best years yet. And we have so many more years together ahead of us to just keep making them better. Thanks, HRH.

Weekend Review

I cannot find my CD of William Boyce symphonies anywhere, and it is making me very cranky because that’s what I want to listen to this morning, damn it. I have to settle for Percy Grainger piano stuff instead. Which is nice to rediscover and all, but he’s not William Boyce.

The weekend ranged from really quite nice to argh and back again.

1. Lovely weather. Everyone’s health seemed to improve somewhat, at least during daylight hours. Thumbs up.

2. Saturday morning: We found HRH a new fall jacket, I picked up some heel liners for my red shoes, and then we headed out to Longueuil to pick up my cello. And oh joy, it sounds bee-you-ti-full. My cello has always been easy to play (in the getting-sound-out-of-it sense, not the oversized-body-thick-neck-argh sense), but now it’s even easier! I always forget how strings deteriorate in sound quality over time, and the awful warp on the bridge certainly wasn’t helping. I, like an absent-minded sick person, wore a long straight denim skirt and a black sweater along with my red shoes. Lovely for a day out in fall; not so conducive to cello-playing. No matter; I sat with both knees together and to the left, and played the cello side-saddle to hear how it sounded. The ten year old girl there renting her first violin gave me a surprised look. Anyway, lovely, lovely sound: I love the feel of the strings, the new scoop on the fingerboard makes thumb position easy to play (I never thought I’d say that, ever) and the bridge is just beautiful and looks so much sturdier than my last one from my now-ex-luthier. They reshaped the pegs, too. “Really?” I said. “They were fine — never stuck, never slipped.” “You’d have noticed sooner or later,” the assistant luthier said darkly. “They were decidedly… oval.” And then he asked shyly about the mystery cello, which is still tucked away along a wall of the workroom, so I obliged him by telling him the Secret Origin story. The luthier flew in from dealing with three people in the other room long enough to make sure I was thrilled with the tune-up and then apologised for not getting to the quote on the mystery cello; he said things were very busy. I assured him that of course it was busy, it was the beginning of the school year as well as the concert season, and not to stress about it. It’s going to take a while to restore anyway; a few weeks aren’t going to make much difference in the long run. It’s also not like the mystery cello is my main instrument, and I’ve lived fifteenish years of my cello-playing life without it. Of course I’m excited about it, but there’s no rush.

I forgot to buy rosin again. Again. I give up.

I didn’t bring my bow with me to test the new setup so they lent me one, and it’s a good thing I didn’t play with it for more then five minutes because I was falling in love with it. Perfect weight, nice balance, good springiness; more responsive than the one I currently use, which has been my favourite up till now. The assistant helpfully looked it up for me: pernambuco of Chinese make, four hundred dollars. If it had been three hundred I’d have bought it on the spot. But still, it’s a decent price for a pernambuco bow with those fittings and that kind of response. I keep telling myself there’s no point in buying a new bow now if I’m going to be playing a different cello in a few months. But I want it.

3. I finished Anathem last night, a brilliant philosophical story that reminded me a lot of the discussions we used to have after classes at the Liberal Arts College. And on Saturday I read the entirety of Mr. Darcy Presents His Bride, a book I obtained for review through MiniBookExpo. Best Austen sequel I’ve ever read.

4. HRH took down the awning on the back deck and removed the air conditioner from the kitchen window, replacing the regular windows instead. Suddenly there is a lot more light in the kitchen. He also moved the heater from the wall that backs onto the neighbours’ place (a inside wall, which makes no sense) to the half-wall in the kitchen that backs onto the living room, i.e., in the middle of the house (which makes a heck of a lot more sense). This involved buying electrical cord and a junction box, turning the electricity off, installing said junction box, feeding new cord around the kitchen, wiring it all in, turning everything back on to make sure it worked, then swapping baseboards to hide the old installation spot. Those of you who know HRH’s track record with electricity will be immensely gratified to hear that he did not experience a single shock. We’re going to look at doing the two similarly stupidly-placed heaters in the living room next, moving one to under the window (you know, where it’s actually needed) and removing the other entirely, which would enable us to put furniture along the walls. (What a concept!)

5. Saturday night I zoned out and forgot my on-line writing date with Ceri. I can’t even use falling asleep as an excuse.

6. Thanks to a timely question from Ceri on Friday, I realised that I’d written the harvest picnic down on the wrong day on the calendar. It was Sunday, not Saturday, and thus we had to cancel our appearance as it was in fact taking place concurrent with my mother in law’s birthday celebration. Grr.

7. We had the neighbours down for breakfast with us on Sunday. The waffles were so good we sent HRH back to the kitchen to make a second batch. Could have sat and zoned in the sunny living room all day, except we all had things to do.

8. I dug my first ever potatoes from the back garden on Saturday. They are so very adorable, ranging from the size of my thumb to the size of a Real Potato. We have enough for one meal. Note to self: next year, plant lots more potatoes. Although to be fair, this was a single potato that had sprouted in the darkness of the back cold closet that I chopped up and buried to see what would happen. Next year I’ll plant them seriously, at an earlier date and at a proper depth.

9. Lovely, lovely late afternoon visit with my in-laws on Sunday. I had a cappuccino as soon as I got there (thus averting the grumpy ‘no I can’t have after-dinner coffee with everyone else’ thing I always go through) and enjoyed it very much, along with the creamy Brie and crackers with rather fortified port wine jelly my mother in law set out for us all to nibble (last year’s jelly; it has aged, apparently). We had my father in law’s spectacular ribs for dinner and a light hazelnut cake for dessert. It was just so nice to sit down in the sun and watch the boy playing with Grandma. No energy, remember?

10. Laundry. Lots of laundry. Our clothesline snapped a few weeks ago and we keep forgetting to replace it, alas.

11. The cello still sounds lovely. It sounded much nicer at the lutherie, of course, because of the surroundings and because I wasn’t afraid to actually make noise. Pizzicato sounds terrific; nice sustain. I’m looking forward to playing it at orchestra on Wednesday.

12. Everyone else is getting somewhat better health-wise except me. Well, nights and mornings aren’t good for anyone, but I’m bad all the time. Everyone else is sleeping. Gnarr.

Right; my freelance assignment finally came through, so off I got to work.

PS: I have an iBook to play with for a week or so. Muah-hah-hah.