It being thirty-two days since I submitted my invoice for the last freelance job I did, I gently prodded my contact there this morning about the overdueness of the matter. I just got a response telling me that accounting had been advised, it was being handled immediately, and I ought to have the cheque next Wednesday. This is nice, but I will be more pleased when I have the cheque in hand. There is shopping that needs to be done and payments that need to be made, and it’s frustrating to be on hold at this point in the season. Particularly when I’m feeling rather flat and apathetic; a shot of holiday activity would help a lot.
Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations
Birthday Hurrahs!
Happy birthday, Ceri! Have 31.6 centimetres of snow!
(Yes, I am smacking myself for saying we hadn’t had a massive dump of snow only two days before your birthday.)
They’re putting up reindeer, And singing songs of joy and peace…
Not dead, just run-off-my-feet busy. I haven’t sat down at the computer in days.
Over the last twenty-four hours there has been lots of snow. Official reports vary, but according to our backyard we’re looking at around eighteen inches. It’s stopped, but we’re due to get about fourteen more centimetres tomorrow. (How very Canadian: Imperial and Metric describing accumulation in the same paragraph.)
The boy stayed home today and HRH took the car in to work after spending an hour and a half shovelling the driveway. For those who have inquired, no, HRH did not get the snow day that most elementary and high schools got. CEGEPs don’t close unless something traumatic has occurred on campus. He’s out there shovelling again now.
This morning I wrestled the boy into his snowpants (“No, no , no Mama, no snowpants”) and coat and hat and mitts and boots and scarf, and myself in tights under jeans and legwarmers over that (a lucky and unexpected find in the winter accessories box) and my old snow coat, and opened the back door for him. Liam was decidedly unimpressed with this deep snow thing. He kept falling over and flailing in a swim-like fashion, then rolling over on his back to look up at me and say, “Help, Mama, I am stuck” in that funny precise way he has of speaking. We fell over in the backyard for half an hour before coming in and shedding piles of snow-covered clothing on the kitchen floor and drinking hot chocolate. Like me, he thinks the hot chocolate is the best part. I am all about the apres-ski.
Friday night I went to a cello quartet concert with someone from orchestra, and it was absolutely phenomenal. It was one of those evenings where I was reminded of why I chose the instrument I did, and also mildly despair-inducing in that it made me feel that it was completely useless to even try because I can never play like they can. (Granted, they all had at least two music degrees each and played in pro symphonies. But still.) I really appreciated the evening, because not only was it the first time I’d attended a live music performance since May, but it was at my orchestral colleague’s invitation to share her double pass. It was great to have a night out with someone I don’t know very well but with whom I have things in common. I thoroughly enjoyed her company.
Late Saturday afternoon we went out to have dinner with Ceri and Scott, and this marked the first official Taking Liam Out To Dinner at a Friends’ House With No Other Kids. We all had a fabulous time. Liam was very well-behaved apart from the not-at-all-subtle exploring of rooms and the joyous chasing of cats, who mostly (meaning any cat who was not Tybalt) didn’t seem to mind and even let him pick them up and carry them around (I don’t know who was the most surprised when he walked in holding Miho). He ate surprisingly well, too, which I hadn’t expected, although it was hard not to enjoy the food as the meal was one of the best I’ve had in a while. (Liam seems to have decided peas in a pod are the current vegetable to be defined as Dalishious, replacing the chopped and frozen parsley he had dubbed Dalishious a few days previous.) I made a chocolate espresso pecan pie for dessert, which immediately made my Make This Again and Often list when we tasted it. We all had so much fun that we didn’t check the time until eight o’clock, at which point HRH and I scooped the child up and fled, expecting disastrous things to ensue with his schedule. Going to bed two hours later than usual didn’t seem to completely mess him up: there were no mid-night wakings, I got him back to sleep when he woke up at 5:15 the next morning with minimal fuss, we all got another two hours of sleep, and the only other effect seems to have been the boy being slightly whiny over the past two days. Not something we want to do on a regular basis, of course, but we’re very impressed at how he handled it. We wish we could have stayed longer, of course.
I spent a lot of the weekend baking, because Sunday was a cookie-exchange day. Bearing ten dozen oatmeal cookies, I spent a lovely afternoon with friends and acquaintances and snuggled with Tallis while chatting with some other mums. Liam cried a lot over the weekend when he’d try to scoop a cookie off the cooling rack and was told he wasn’t allowed because they weren’t ours, but the delight on his face when I unloaded all the new cookies once I’d come home from the party was proof that the cookie-denial was all forgiven. (Besides, he’d already stolen four of mine from the first batch out of the oven. It wasn’t like I didn’t let him have any at all.)
I like to wait as long as possible before breaking out the Christmas albums, but after watching the however many feet of snow fall today I put on Holly Cole’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside, Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs, and Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong while making supper.
I have piles of e-mail to handle, but that will get done tomorrow morning.
It was a very long day. I’m going to turn out the light now.
Cautious Improvement
Today things are much better, thank you. I left the boy at the caregiver’s giving giggly hugs to all the other children and the flock of them jumping around like kangaroos. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to pass out or not, now that I’ve handled my correspondence and filing. There will likely be a nap later, and my hair needs a wash. I’ll see if I can pull off a thousand words first. It may take a while, as I can’t think straight; my head feels like it’s stuffed with treacle-soaked cotton. I give myself permission to give up at some point.
Sunny out, but very cold. The car doors on the passenger side were frozen shut this morning.
I received my first Christmas present in the mail yesterday: a renewal to last year’s gift subscription of Fine Cooking! Thanks, Mum and Dad!
Kissmas
Late last week, Liam came up to me and put his arms around me, saying, “I love you, Mama.”
This is a big thing, because while he has done this with prompting he’s never initiated it all on his own before. Over the past week he’s done it frequently, and it does wonders for the morale, especially coupled with the recent increase in spontaneous kissing.
And in other kissing-related news, a neighbour across the street became rather overzealous and put their Christmas lights up along their outside banisters last weekend. Liam got out of the car last Monday evening and stopped dead.
“Mama, what that?” he said. “Kissmas! That Kissmas!” he answered himself. Then he stepped out of the way of someone coming along the sidewalk ( “Uh-oh, people on the sidewalk”), and as she passed he turned and called after her, “HAPPY KISSMAS, PEOPLE!”
Two-thirds of the way through November and my son is already wishing people the joy of the upcoming season. Gah.
But… Kissmas. I love that the way Liam puts it, it’s a festival revolving around kissing. Not a bad idea at all, when it comes down to it.
Even cuter, he sang me his very own Kissmas song yesterday, which sounds suspiciously like Happy Birthday but goes: “Happy Kissmas…. to you…. Happy Kissmas, Happy Kissmas to you!”
This holiday season is going to be a lot of fun, methinks. This year he has figured out what presents are, after all. Come the beginning of December we’ll do a holiday collage, with a new picture or object to stick to it every day at breakfast, a twist on the Advent calendar thing. I’ll see if I can interest him in making paper chains, too.
Friday Morning
It feels odd to be sitting down to work at eight-thirty. HRH took the car to work today, dropping the boy off at his grandma’s on the way. Usually I’m not at my desk before ten o’clock. I like it. I may ask that this become a regular thing on Liam’s grandma days.
There’s nice light in here this morning. Although it’s overcast, there are lazy snowflakes drifting in the air, and what light there is is bouncing off the snow on the ground. Yesterday’s freezing rain completely coated the maple tree out front, and every single twig was coated in a glistening sheath. When we went out this morning to put Liam in the car, the breeze brushed the branches and I heard clicks and cracks, a sound that I haven’t heard in months. The poor blue cedar in the corner of the back yard is equally frozen, and already bending towards the snow-covered ground. Every year it happens earlier, and every year we think we’ve lost it to the weight of an ice storm. We’ve tried tying it to the telephone pole behind it, propping it up with wood… we’ll see if the roots actually stay in the ground this year, and if so, for how long.
Liam and I made our first loaf of bread in the new bread machine (or, if one reads the French on the box, the ‘robot baker’), and it’s delicious. The texture is nice and even throughout, not too light, and not too crumbly. The crust is even, too. It’s good to know that I can bake one or two of these a week, that it will be fresh right up until it’s eaten (yesterday’s is half-gone already) and not preservative-ridden. I like knowing exactly what goes into the things I cook. My one regret is that the smell of baking bread doesn’t permeate the house, but if I’m craving that then I can always take the dough out of the machine after the second rise and bake it in the oven instead. I’ll try a whole-wheat version next, and buy some seeds to make a flax-sesame-poppyseed version too.
There was a Liam-related accident with my cello bow yesterday, resulting in a snapped frog. I have another bow but it’s heavier, and as I haven’t practised this set of music with it I’m concerned that it will adversely affect my performance or cramp my hand. Some of the Grieg requires a light touch, for example. HRH is bringing home some Krazy Glue tonight, so we’ll try to fix it that way and I’ll see how it works tonight at the dress rehearsal. If it doesn’t work the frog can always be professionally replaced, but that’s not going to happen by tomorrow night. The temporary solution doesn’t have to hold beyond the end of tomorrow’s concert. I’ll bring both bows, just in case.
Research books for the hearthcraft book are starting to arrive, and there are more second-hand ones to order today. Except I’m currently watching my outgoing cash flow very, very closely at the moment. One of the problems with doing freelance work is that you do the work and get paid at an unspecified time later, on someone else’s schedule. It makes for a nice surprise when the cheque finally lands in the mailbox, but the watching of the mail until that point isn’t as much fun.
The Car
The good news: The car’s engine is running cool, and in no danger of overheating.
The bad news: It’s not warming up enough to open the thermostat, making driving a rather chilly experience. And if it’s like this now when temperatures are hovering around the zero mark, it’s only going to get worse. HRH has poked around at it and we thought it had been fixed, but apparently not. I seem to remember this issue last fall, but not what we did about it. Possibly a flush and refill; it may have fixed itself, if there was a bubble in the system.
There was thick frost on the back windshield this morning, and no scraper in the car. I have no idea where HRH packs them away in the summertime, and as the boy was already strapped into his seat I couldn’t go inside and dig around the garage looking for it. I used a (clean!) wooden paint stirrer that I found in the trunk instead. It was remarkably successful at it, too.
Hearthwitch book stuff today. And administration-type things.