Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Bonus Hearthcraft Book Update: Special Weekend Edition

I worked for another two hours last night, moving things around, cutting things out, and generally garnering more carrots.

I e-mailed my editor to ask for a three-day extension, and hated myself for it. She e-mailed me back this morning telling me that of course I could have an extension, that my books were always clean and she didn’t have to worry about them, which was appreciated on her end. I love my editor. With one sentence she wiped out all of my stress. Of course, she probably laughed like a loon at a request for a three-day extension, too. I suspect most requests are for weeks or months, not days.

We took Liam to the mall to see the Easter display of farm animals this morning and it was great fun to watch him scurry around, crouch down to peer through the fences, and laugh at the animals inside. His favourites were the fancy chickens and the goats. He had a good lunch and went down very easily for his nap, so now I have two hours to spend sorting through the MS, finishing sentences and making notes of places that need work.

While we were out I found the mp3 player I will buy after payday. It’s only fifteen dollars more than my first one cost (much less than I expected it to be), and this one is new so it will be fully guaranteed. I may even buy an extended warranty for it.

Oh, and the cinnamon toast made from the failed sweet buns? Big hit. “Mama? I like cimmamyum toast,” he informed me, cinnamon sugar and butter smeared all over his face. So do we, kid.

Guess What, It’s Snowing Again

An e-mail exchange during work this afternoon:

HRH: It’s snowing again. I’m starting to feel like a extra in the Narnia books.

Autumn: I said “Always winter and never Christmas” to Miranda just this morning!

HRH: How long was winter in the story?

Autumn: Over a hundred years.

HRH: Someone please kill the White Witch!

Autumn: Dude, you’re the one with the lion on his house crest. Do it already.

Introducing…

Now that HRH has made his own introduction, I present to you the newest member of our family: Gryffindor.

Gryffindor is a five-month-old ginger tabby. Some of you knew Gulliver, HRH’s big orange cat who used to perch on his shoulders. We lost Gully in October 2005 to kidney failure, and HRH has taken a long time to get over it. If — and it was a big if — HRH ever got another cat, it would have to be one with as much personality, and who clicked with him as well as Gully had. This kitten, whoever he would be, had big boots to fill. This past January HRH said to me that perhaps, if there was an orange kitten out there who needed rescuing, just maybe he would be ready to welcome another one into his heart and home… assuming there was that spark.

This past weekend, HRH met this little fellow in person, and watched him very critically. The kitten was friendly, well-grounded, not completely freaked out by Liam (this was important — we weren’t going to force a cat into our home if he didn’t get along with the boy, no matter how well the cat and HRH hit it off), and, most importantly… there was a connection made between HRH and the ginger kitten.

We signed the papers and brought him home. The highlight of the journey back was Liam lifting the edge of the blanket we’d snugged around the carrier, in response to a single tiny mew. He peeked in and said in the most tender voice I have ever heard him use, “It’s okay, buddy, we’ll be home soon.” Gryffindor spent a lot of his first afternoon with us under the comfy chair, watching the room. When Liam napped, he came out to play with a bit of string. And after the nap, he allowed HRH to hold him and met Liam properly. Over the next day he explored more and more of the room, and was even bold enough to try my office and the kitchen door.

What do the current feline residents think? Maggie has displayed a “whatever” attitude; if he gets too close she Looks at him and hisses half-heartedly. Nix and Cricket have cornered him once or twice by staring at him across the room, and make creaky noises when they see him in the same area, but other than that things are going very well indeed. He is open and cheerful and willing to meet them. He has shown himself to be a tremendously loud purrer, and very willing to be scratched and petted. Today he climbed up on HRH’s shoulder and rode along to the kitchen with him. I think there are wonderful things ahead for us all.

Did we need another cat? No. But it has always seemed mildly unfair that the cats we have all decided that they belong to me. And Maggie is the only one who will allow Liam to pick her up and cuddle her. She’s getting on; I don’t know how much more she’ll be able to take. It made sense to find a kitten who would grow up with Liam and not run from him the way the cats-who-can-no-longer-be-referred-to-as-‘the-kittens’ do. We felt it was time for us to give another abandoned or unwanted creature a place to be loved and kept safe. And with HRH finally coming to a point where he was ready for another cat, and the fortuitous discovery of a ginger kitten on the Animal Rescue Network (who ended up being adopted by someone else before our screening process was completed in early January, but they told us about this one they’d just rescued and who hadn’t even been catalogued yet), things simply happened in the right way at the right time. All of our cats have been rescued in one way or another, but this is the first time I’ve worked with a shelter. I cannot recommend the ARN highly enough; their principals and their commitment to placing their animals in the right kind of homes are admirable.

So here’s to many years of love and joy with Gryffindor, our newest member of the family. May we give him the home he’s always dreamed of, and may he live a long, happy life with us.

Oh, and those big boots the next cat would have to fill? Gryffindor has huge paws. And huge ears. And a very long tail. We suspect that he’s going to be a big boy, just as Gully was. He will never replace Gulliver in our hearts, but he seems to be a more than worthy successor, with a definite personality of his own.

Bright Sides

I am trying to be thankful that this storm has given us a dozen centimetres of ice pellets so far instead of the skating rinks other areas have received. Except I just got home after dropping the boy at the caregiver’s and HRH at the metro, then doing a brief stop in at the grocery store for essentials, and after trying to drive through the gales of wind and the accumulated ice pellets that behave like wet sand, it’s moderately difficult to be thankful. Particularly when winter just keeps on going. (Lying groundhogs — the Canadian ones said spring would be early. Can one sue a rodent?)

There is almost no one on the roads, and the grocery store was deserted. That’s good, I suppose.

I was going to write an open letter to winter, but Mousme beat me to it and did it better than I could have done, too. It’s more succinct, and certainly more polite. Oh look; it’s now snowing big fluffy Christmas flakes out there. Whatever; I just don’t want it to turn into freezing rain.

To work! I’ve had to reschedule the topic I was going to work on today, after discovering last night that the two books I was intending to use for reference were useless. I shall move on to one I was less mentally prepared to write.

Weekend Roundup: HRH’s Birthday Edition, In Which She Mainly Talks About The Jorane Concert

The big event this weekend was HRH’s birthday on Saturday, which unfortunately started out rather roughly with all three of us prickly and getting on one another’s nerves. Things were better by mid-afternoon, though. I made a double chocolate cake while the boy had his nap, and was making the frosting for it when he woke up. Much was the excitement and many were the offers to help, and requests to eat it, but we told him the cake had to wait until his grandparents showed up for the brief birthday party-in-passing that was to happen. So when they pulled up just before five, the boy ran to the front door yelling, “Grandma, Papa! We have cake!”

To save him from bursting with the anticipation we put the candles on the cake, lit them, and sang to HRH as soon as everyone had divested themselves of coats and bags. Liam helped him blow out the candles, of course. The boy was the only one who ate a sliver of cake, as the rest of us knew we were too close to dinner. Then HRH opened his gift, the twenty-inch flat screen computer monitor that his parents, my parents, and I had conspired to buy him. He was absolutely floored and thrilled to bits when he opened it. We win!

Then we left the boy in the hands of his grandparents and went out. I treated HRH to a lovely dinner at Le Biftheque (prime rib all round, preceded by Canadian smoked salmon, mmm), and then to the Jorane concert in our borough. I felt mildly odd about taking HRH to a concert given by a musician of whom I’m the primary fan, but he insisted that it was fine.

Jorane is a Quebecoise singer and cellist. I’ve been trying to see her live since I discovered her in mid-2004. With the launch of her latest album in the fall of 2007 she’s been doing a series of small concerts in and around Montreal, and I was determined to get to one of them. I was concerned that this show might be cancelled because when I bought tickets three days before the date, less than half the house had been sold. It wasn’t, of course, and I think the small audience was one of the keys to the success of the show, which managed to be intimate without being diminished in any way. And it makes sense that she’d expect small audiences; she’s in essence dividing her own audience base by offering so many shows in the same area over a period of three months.

Allow me to say here and now that I finally get it; I completely get the attraction of watching a female cellist playing non-traditional music on stage. My apologies to anyone to whom I ever gave an odd look when they said anything about seeing me on stage.

One cello, two double basses, two sets of percussion… and four people. One of the bassists also played electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboards, and the xylophone. And just those four people on stage created a vibrant, dynamic form of music that rolled over and through the audience. Their presence and awareness and connection to one another was phenomenal. Interestingly enough, what I felt were the most powerful and rocking songs were done by just the three string instruments, tossing lead pizzicato and bowing back and forth. Incredible. And the opening piece was done entirely with foot stomps and hand claps; it may have been based on “Elmita”, or maybe it just had a similar beat and rhythm.

They didn’t play anything the way she’d recorded it, which really impressed me. Every single song was stretched, folded, reinterpreted to such an extent that sometimes it took me a few bars or longer before I recognized it. As is often the case in live shows, they were mostly sharper, rougher, and more… well… alive than the recorded versions. The back of my mind was making periodic technical notes, too, about how the music was put together. One of the “aha” moments I had was realizing that almost all the time, the cello work was doubled by a double bass, which gives the line an added richness that you can’t get on the cello alone. This explains why I get frustrated when listening to my cello work in an ensemble, and think it sounds thin. Other observations included gawking at her lighting-fast triple-stops flying all over the fingerboard, trying to figure out her strumming method, and trying to identify the percussive stick with which one of the double bassists was playing his upright bass (metal? just a regular tipper?). At one point HRH asked me if I could play my cello standing up like Jorane does, and I found myself discussing the shifted centre of gravity when the end pin is extended that far, the tendency of the instrument to spin when you put pressure on it by bowing or fingering if you’re not bracing it with the legs (which of course she does, in a way, by bending a knee somewhat), and the bad stress on the bottom of the instrument when you do any of the above. I suspect the area around her end pin must be reinforced. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that she uses a particular model of cello that can be replaced, which makes a lot of sense; you’re not going to gig something priceless in that way.

I can’t remember the entire set list, but they played “Ineffable”, “Comme avant”, “Stay”, “The Cave”, and “Pour ton sourire”. The only disappointment (and it’s such a minor one in light of how intensely awesome the night was) was that she didn’t play “Dit-elle”, which is my favourite piece of hers; but of my other favourites they did play “Film III”, “Pour Gabrielle”, and “Battayum”. Naturally a lot of the show was given over to most of the latest album Vers a soi. It’s taken me a while to warm up to this album because it really has a different feel from her earlier work, but hearing it live has helped a lot. Her encore was a song I didn’t recognize (I believe it was a cover), played on acoustic guitar, followed by a fully acoustic version of another song I wasn’t familiar with (possibly from her first album, the only one I don’t own) — and when I say fully acoustic, I mean she and the double bassist took off their pick-ups, pushed away the microphones, and played, which was a daring and confident way to end the show. (And that’s where I heard the familiar thin sound of the cello line… which means the amplification was also altering the sound — in a good way for the music, of course).

It wasn’t just the music that made the night a success. Her presence was riveting. The way she communicated with the audience was terrific, too. She took the time to ground between songs, but never lost her connection to those listening, and never lost the thread of the show as a whole. Her patter was calm and well-delivered, introspective and thought-provoking. It felt like she was taking the time to communicate what moved her about life, what prompted her to write the songs, what made her sing them. Motivation, almost. (If you’re familiar with her live album, all of her spoken communication was very much like the beginning of “Intro”.)

And an aside: I nearly gave HRH a heart attack during the second song of the night by gripping his arm upon seeing a tech run out from stage right to fix a boom mic that was slipping in front of the second bassist, and hissing “That’s Perry!” — Perry being the Sound Guy of Awesome Excellence with whom we worked last May at Clyde’s.

I have forgotten how much I absolutely love live music, especially live music that somehow incorporates my instrument. Two minutes into the show I was wishing that band was actually feasible, because feeling how great everything can be when it works was inspiring.

HRH and I had a wonderful evening together. I have to honestly say that we haven’t been that relaxed together and enjoyed ourselves to that extent in a very, very long time. We spent Valentine’s Day night at home together eating fabulous sushi and watching Stardust, which was a really fantastic evening the likes of which we hadn’t enjoyed in a while too, but it was good to get out together.

ETA: Gah, I see that I didn’t babble on about her use of pedals, or her Zoe Keating-like real-time self-recording of cello lines and layering and looping them via footpedals, too. At one point she had recorded and looped six lines and was soloing over them, along with the two bassists (or one bassist and the other at keyboards? I forget) and the percussionist. Incredible. There was a moment when I wished I wasn’t as principled as I am, so that I could have thought of bringing my MiniDisc recorder and made a bootleg for my own reference.

The Unexpected

Out of the blue, I have received not one but two floral tributes today from friends. One was hand-delivered; the other I found waiting for me (ingeniously tucked into our door knocker) when I went to deliver a card. They’re currently on my desk, looking cheerful. Thank you!

I wish Liam had finished his Valentines earlier so that those who will receive them by mail could have opened them today. There’s only so fast you can make a two and a half year old work. (He also insisted on making one “for us, Mama!”, which is currently displayed on a bookshelf.)

Back to work.

ETA: If you want to give flowers, robbing a florist the night before Valentine’s Day is not the way to acquire said flowers.