Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Not The Official Festival Report

Am exhausted. Ran out of spoons mid-Saturday, not long after it started to pour buckets of rain upon the fest. Fortunately, the energy ran out after my workshop; unfortunately, before the other workshops and rituals I’d planned to attend. Sleeping badly all weekend plus two seven-hour car rides did not help. Neither did the energy-sapping damp weather. It’s going to take me about three days to get back into some sort of normal operative mode.

Workshop = success. Yay me. Yay workshop attendees. Yay festival organizers for being an awesome team of awesome people. Love them all with much love.

Sold some books, even. Was also asked to do an article on hearthcraft for Circle Magazine.

Both HRH and I came home from the festival with new blades from Helmut’s Forge. I also acquired a stunning kyanite pendant from Shan, a highly polished cabochon the size of my thumbnail that looks nothing like that Wikipedia photo of the mineral. (Oh, this site has a gallery of cut and polished stones; much better.) Websites variously tell me that kyanite is used for stimulating energy, encouraging clarity and intuition, dispelling anger/confusion/frustration, protecting in energy-sapping situations, facilitating communication, and promoting tranquillity, among other things. We just bought it because it looked pretty.

Stopped by t! and Jan’s new home on the way back yesterday to run around the place (okay, the boy did the running, I did a lot of sitting and drinking a glass of water) and generally admire their house and land. The boy smashed the cats’ water goblet in one of his enthusiastic turns through the kitchen. Sigh.

Finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last night. Would have been life-changing had I not just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Started Neal Stephenson’s Anathem this morning and love every word of it.

The boy has a cold; his chest seems congested and he coughs now and again. (Travelling with him was not much fun yesterday.) He stayed home with me till we verified that the preschool takes kids so long as they are not feverish or diarrheaic or have streaming noses, drove him in for ten, dropped the car off for HRH, and metro/bussed home. Walked through the front door at 12:30. Lay down for a while, then hauled myself here to assure you all that no, I is not ded.

Except now, having seen that the world and the Intraweebs did not blow up in my absence (the remnants of Hurricane Ike smashing into the back of the house last night notwithstanding) and my inbox holds nothing of dramatic deadline, I will drag myself off to lie on the couch again and read more Anathem, because I have the energy for nothing else.

Hullo, World

First things first: Happy birthday to Sandman7 and Pdaughter!

I just spoke briefly with t!, who says life is very good at the new homestead in southern Ontario. Just to let those who are wondering know, the Coalition Stronghold does not have internet access and will not until early next week.

I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off today, and did not in any way need the New Construction Headache in the middle of town this morning as I tried to get gas and to the bank. Argh.

My computer will not recognize my camera at all, no matter what USB port I use. Tonight I plan to open the box under Blade‘s supervision (which at this point consists mostly of Blade drinking Scotch and tossing me a screwdriver; he’s moral support and the voice of wisdom that suggests I may not actually want to plug/unplug a particular cable inside) to insert the USB expansion card Jan gave me before she left, to up the number of installed USB ports to eight. I have pictures to share, you see, of the new haircut and the new glasses and other things, and not being able to get them off the camera is annoying.

I finished the huge freelance project yesterday, two days after I’d wanted it gone because I realized I had to do one final step. I may do a timed writing thing around noon before I have to head out to the doctor just past one, simply to get some words down. After that it’s to the south shore to drop off postdated cheques with the boy’s preschool, because they were forgotten yesterday which was in fact Wednesday not Tuesday as we all thought it was. And if I’m out there I might as well pick HRH up from work before going to get the boy from his caregiver, who is having a little party today with the kids.

Next week’s work is all mine, because I have to draft the workshop I’m doing at the Hamilton Pagan Pride Day event on September 13. Which is next weekend. We’re leaving a week from tomorrow. Eek.

Right; off I go to do more headless chickeny things. Which reminds me… I need to think of something for dinner.

Inbox Amusement and Mailbox Joy

I am always amused when Amazon recommends one of my own books to me.

Today’s mailbox joy: My new glasses! Huzzah! Now I have to stop jumping when I pass a mirror. They’re very different from what I usually wear. Also handed to me by the postman were three secondhand books that I was beginning to suspect had gone astray.

Stupid Microsoft is making me download file conversion thingys so that I can actually open the Excel file that contains my assigned freelance work. Gnarr. I wonder what else it will make me do. (Ssh — there is a Macbook test in my future. Do you think Microsoft heard about it?)

And finally, I am cold. I’ve already put socks and slippers on, and I suspect I’m going to have to put a cardigan on over my long-sleeved t-shirt.

Preschool: Day One

HRH asked for my moral support in dropping the boy off at preschool this morning. “This is my school, Dada,” the boy said as we pulled up in front of it. This is where I work.” HRH and I exchanged amused glances at this. Because if HRH ‘works’ at a school, the boy’s school must be where he will ‘work’. We had to call him back to take off his shoes, and back again for hugs and kisses goodbye, just like on Friday. “It’s harder for the parents,” the teacher said. “Are you kidding?” we said. “We love this!” The boy flew back through the entryway and out the door to dance in front of two new arrivals, shouting, “Hi! I’m here!” and then leaping back into the entryway, throwing his hand out to indicate the newcomers and say to us, “These are my friends!” He then darted away through the corridor to the classroom. “Oh, yeah,” the teacher said, “he’s so ready for this.”

HRH took me to school with him after dropping the boy off, and I saw his office for the first time and did the first half of his morning walkabout with him. The work rooms are huge and airy, with lots of windows. The weather was just lovely today, too; it really felt like the first day of school. Not too hot, sunny with a scattering of fluffy clouds, a good breeze. I walked the ten minutes to the metro station, which is set in a terminal that looks remarkably like a modern airport, and figured out the new ticket system. I thought I was buying a permanent card that gets loaded with money and debited as you pass checkpoints but I ended up with six paper cards that get fed through the turnstiles and stamped with dates and such. I smiled all the way home through two metro rides and a bus ride. It’s such an incredible day in all respects. I love feeling like this.

When I finally got home after the hour and a half commute, there was no mail, alas. I was hoping for my new glasses. Tried to return a couple of phone calls without success.

On the way home I read some of A Thousand Days in Venice and made a connection that had been lacking about the Poppy book, which has been in mothballs for a couple of years. I realised that I have to work my protagonist through her fear of travel. It’s the obvious and logical conclusion to the conflict and the story, and I evidently needed those two years away from the book to see that. I’d been trying to work another story thread through, thinking it was the main issue and therefore the focal conclusion, and it wasn’t working properly in my head. Paired with the other Revelation, this may mean a finished novel by the end of the year. If I focused only on it, that is. Which I will very likely not do, as I don’t think it’s as marketable as some of my YA stuff. Whatever. I have lots of time to work on writing now; I don’t have to pick and choose what to cram into a day or so. A good thing, really, because I’m feeling somewhat blissfully bemused at what to do first today.

Weekend Roundup

So, that increasingly bad fibro thing on Friday wasn’t my fibro getting out of hand. It was actually me getting ill. No wonder doing all my usual Soothe The Fibro! things weren’t working. It also explains the somewhat below normal two days leading up to it. I fought bad nausea all afternoon, and after consultation with HRH and Paze I cancelled my appearance at the Friday evening outing. Good thing too; I reached the falling-over dizzy stage of the Sick not long after I tendered my regrets.

However, I passed out and slept almost twelve hours straight, and woke up Saturday morning feeling a million times better. So much better, in fact, that we decided to hit Ikea as soon as it opened to see the new bed we’ve been thinking of getting in person. Not only did we agree on the bed but also on a redesign (read: actual thought-out coherent design as opposed to using the mismatched things we had — I cannot tell you how grown-up this makes me feel) for the bedroom, and a reading chair for my office. We introduced the boy to the concept of bunk beds on the showroom floor, which threw him into a level of cooled out far beyond what we’d expected. This is a good thing, because HRH is buying a set for the boy’s room from his office mate at the end of the month. We will be the Coolest Parents Ever when this happens, I’m sure.

We came home with a new duvet cover, a new carpet for the living room floor, a magnetic knife strip for the kitchen, and proceeded to clean the heck out of the house. I moved the books and bookcase that was serving as my bedside table downstairs to the communal office. We got rid of HRH’s highboy (which also served as his bedside table), I put three drawers’ worth of things into plastic storage containers and stacked them in the cupboard, and we now share the six-drawer bureau. We have two short tables on either side of the bed at the moment, rescued from other uses. Suddenly there’s lots of space and the bedroom isn’t so, well, not-relaxing. The clean-up continued: I moved a bunch of things out of my office closet, and I took down one of the shelf units in my upstairs office, condensing my herb collection down to about an eighth of what it had been. As I did I was struck by how familiar some of the smells were even though I hadn’t worked with those specific herbs in years, because they were the first ones I worked with: angelica, marshmallow, hyssop. Reorganising the storage for all my spiritual practise-related supplies made me think about how my practise has evolved over the years, and how my focus has flowed through certain areas and into others, and what sort of techniques appealed to me at different times.

Absolutely everything in the house got dusted, swept, and vacuumed. I tell you, it was like we combined spring and fall cleaning. We’re nesting, I suppose, getting things ready for winter. It certainly felt like fall late last week.

On Sunday we had brunch with the neighbours, a once-weekly event that got dropped when people ended up booked for other things on a regular basis. We’re going to try to get it going again on a semi-regular schedule. It was wonderful to sit and talk and munch. Blade introduced his Rubbermaid tub of Lego to the boy, who had lots of fun playing with the Lego people and dragons and vehicles, but wasn’t completely clear int he concept of building with the bricks. There’s nothing like a box of Lego to get all the adults in the room interested in what’s going on and mucking about with it.

Sunday afternoon HRH and Blade swapped our washer and dryer for the ones in the communal office space, and HRH moved things around in the garage yet again, making even more room. His bike is now ready for use; all we need is an extra coupler attachment for the bike trailer and we’ll be set. There was gardening done, groceries obtained, and I made my very yummy and creamy much-less-than-seven-teaspoons-of-sugar (gah! who knew!) version of iced cappuccinos in the blender. We finished the day off with a truly delicious homemade spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. I made two loaves of bread yesterday because the first one was completely gone by the end of the day. Yikes.

Despite the amount of work and the being sick at the beginning of it, this was the best weekend we’ve had in a long, long, long time. I think we’d forgotten what being relaxed around one another was like.

I leave you with a six month old Foxtrot cartoon. Yes, I am behind the times.

(Oboe! Hilarious!)

Harvest 2008.1

We betook ourselves to the Atwater market this morning, and came home with thirty-five dollars’ worth of fresh fruits and vegetables. HRH and the boy munched through a good half of the berries at lunch; I had a delicious peach for dessert this evening.

I made ratatouille for dinner. The place still smells of roasted veggies and Parmesan. It also smells of fresh homemade bread. I am currently eating my way through a slice an inch thick. It’s my second third.

The first harvest rocks. Happy Lughnassadh weekend, everyone.

Birthday!

This morning I have received an aggressive kiss on the nose to wake me up, followed immediately by the boy chirping, “Hi Mama, it’s your birthday! Here, take this.” I mumbled a thank you and peered at the folded piece of paper he’d given me, with crayon all over it. “It’s a card for you!” he explained enthusiastically. “See, these are butterflies!” Then there were toys brought in and played with on the bed, as well as many snuggles. Then he hauled HRH’s guitar out and played and sang me a birthday song extempore, on the spot.

We returned the 7/8 cello Number 3 to the luthier this morning. “And?” he said. “Almost,” I said. “Almost, but not quite.” I explained that the two-week home trial had confirmed that the 7/8 size is indeed perfect for me, but that this particular instrument just didn’t have that certain something that clicked and made it mine. He asked if there was anything particular, in order to avoid it when selecting another for me to test, and I shook my head; there wasn’t anything specifically wrong. It just didn’t grab me and say, ‘You cannot part with me.’ I like the tone, the overtones, the balance, the construction, the feel under my fingers, everything; it’s just not this one that I need. He has another 7/8 in his Laval workshop and will bring it in for me, but I’m on holiday the last two weeks of July and he’s closed the first two weeks of August, so we’ll pick up again then. In the meantime there’s the two shops in Toronto, and the Scarlatti 7/8 Number 2 to take home for a test, and I’ll think about the one in Alaska too.

On the way to the luthier we treated ourselves to breakfast sandwiches and iced cappuccinos, and the we went through the car wash for the first time with the boy, who found it very exciting. Unfortunately we ran into not one but two road detours in St Lambert and Longueuil due to festivals or triathalons which rerouted us way out of the areas we needed to travel in or through, so the trip was about twice as long as it needed to be.

My birthday present from HRH was a new bike! It has been many, many years since I have owned one. As he carted it to the back yard yesterday the next-door neighbour said, “You got a n new bike?” HRH said, “It’s not mine, it’s hers.” “But it’s a man’s bike,” the neighbour replied, confused. Yes, it is a man’s bike, but I preferred the shiny red and white paint with a back rack to the blue and white with a plastic basket in the front, complete with fake flower, and with flowers painted on the seat. The blue was nice, but give me a rack over a flimsy plastic basket any day. Also, a red bike is just cooler. The next purchase is a bike trailer for kids so the boy and I can bike to the library and the grocery store, or just go for a ride together. My parents gave me a lovely blank book and a copy of Martha Stewart’s cookie recipe book. I got birthday money last weekend from my in-laws, which went to new summer shirts and a skirt (and a new bike helmet and lock!). There was a cheque in yesterday’s mail from my grandmother, which will buy a new printer. I have received numerous birthday wishes from all over via e-mail, phone, and journal posts, the weather is spectacular, and I am having a wonderful birthday so far. There’s a late afternoon picnic in my future today, and I have been promised sushi tonight after the boy goes to bed. Tomorrow there’s a birthday dinner with the in-laws, too. Life is good.