Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Satisfied, And Yet Not

I’ve just finished plugging all my 2006 expenses and income into a spreadsheet, so I’m all set to have my taxes done. I may even get money back. Of course, since Revenue Quebec sent me yet another revision last week (this one for 2003) there’s no guarantee that if I end up with an amount due to me, they won’t tell me to give it back to them at a future date.

I would feel a lot better about it all if I hadn’t just opened the latest Hydro bill and seen that they’re asking me to pay over seven hundred dollars for our November/December consumption. And January/February will be worse, of course. (We are no longer on the equalised payment plan thanks to me missing a payment last fall, and being late on the next one. Thank you so very much for being understanding, Hydro.)

That’s all right: I have been told there will be ice cream on the way to pick Liam up this afternoon. The first soft-serve of the season makes everything better.

Spring!

Today is the first full day of spring. We saw it in last night with one of the best spring equinox rituals in which I’ve ever had the pleasure to participate. (Yes, it even beat the Slinky rit four springs ago.) We had a great cross-section of people present, and the insightful focal exercise was fabulously designed and executed.

It is also JS Bach’s birthday. Happy birthday, JS!

And what better way to celebrate both the birth of JS and the first day of spring than by buying a replica sword based on the weapons of A Song of Ice and Fire?

Monday Morning

So very, very tired. Yes, it’s my default setting these days. That doesn’t make it any easier.

This morning I found some artificial flowers left over from a craft project a few years ago, twisted them into a bunch and tied odds and ends of ribbons around them, then hung them on the front door. Spring will be here tomorrow night, and I’ll be damned if I let the piles of snow continue to depress me.

We bought a new 18-gallon recycling bin yesterday, to complement our regular size bin. The new one is already full. (My life is exciting, is it not?)

Saturday night we had people over to celebrate Tal‘s birthday, and it was interesting to see that while we’d stated a late-afternoon start time to accomodate those with families and later engagements (of which we knew there were many), a surprising number of people not in those categories came earlier than we’d expected too. It was terrific to see so many friends again, most of whom I hadn’t seen in ages. Apart from the unexpected lack of birthday candles (later I remembered that I’d brought them to my mother in law for a party last year) the cake recipe I tried for the first time flew impressively well, although I somehow managed to unintentionally get all the way from one to ten o’clock without having a meal. I think all I consumed were two cups of tea and a bite of a bar cookie, until most of the guests had left and I made myself a sandwich. (That may have had something to do with the amount of desserts people brought to the potluck — holy cats!) I was very impressed by Liam, who went to bed only a bit later than usual and slept through the last four or five hours of the party. While HRH was reading to Liam in his room we sang Happy Birthday to Tal; the boy looked up and listened to the song, then applauded when everyone else did and said “Yay!” before going back to his book.

Today: more work, more outlining, more brainstorming, some research. The kind of thing that I know theoretically qualifies as work, but doesn’t feel as satisfying or as if it really counts as accomplishment because there aren’t words on a page. It’s been a while since I brainstormed random ideas for stories. It’s both more and less work than I remember it being. Sure, now I have a list of ideas, but no details spring to mind for any of them. Details used to pour into my brain faster than I could note them down. And the end of the Pandora book is going very slowly indeed.

Checklist

Number of family members the gastro has hit since I succumbed to it Wednesday night: Three.

Number of family members fully recovered: Zero. We’re all still a little off. HRH seems to be the worst off, but it hit him last.

Interest in food in general amongst family members: Zero.

Number of meals we should still eat: All of them. Plus grazing. Except see above.

Annoying conversations with downstairs neighbour in which I was told “you make a lot of noise, you know”: One. This from the woman who lets her alarm clock go off in the morning, loud enough to wake us up, and then leaves it going so we can’t fall back asleep. The woman who vacuums at midnight. The woman who leaves her television on all night. (Her living area is right under our bedroom.) This really, really infuriates me because (a) we are not loud people to begin with, and (b) we go out of our way to live in the front half of the house so that we minimise disturbance in the back half, under which she lives. I am thoughtful; she is not. And we get crap from her? Although HRH told me that apparently she complained about the noise to the landlord when this apartment was vacant before we moved in. And she told me that she heard the baby crying before we had brought him home from the hospital. So it shouldn’t bother me, because she evidently isn’t living in the same reality everyone else is. But it does. The injustice of it has ruined my weekend; I can’t shake my resentment.

Annoying conversations with downstairs neighbour in which I was told “you call my name a lot”: One. Same conversation, actually. This bit rendered me pretty speechless beyond, “Ah, no. No, we don’t call your name. Ever.” More proof she’s not living in the same reality. I don’t know whose voice she’s hearing, but I wish they’d encourage her to relocate.

Number of new movies seen in the past two days: Two. Impromptu, and Howl’s Moving Castle. I appreciated the Miyazaki for its designs and how it interpreted Sophie’s shifting age, but the book by Diana Wynne Jones upon which it’s based is so much better.

Hours spent planning out the end of The Moments of Being Pandora: Four, this past Friday. It was an excellent work day. I’m excited about the story, and I’m looking forward to filling it out now. Swan Sister gets set on a side burner while I make a drive to get a finished draft of Pandora. I’ve already done a basic edit on the existing three-quarters of the book, so another fourish chapters should end it. Then I can look at the entire thing properly as a unit.

Snow in our backyard: Around three feet? It was up to the crossbeams on the swingset when we went to bed after the storm on Friday night; it’s compacted a bit now. Still, that’s a lot of snow. There’s only about a foot of fence showing above it.

Number of time I’ve seen a plough on our street in the past two and a half days: One. Our lovely wide street is now a single lane. The piles of snow at the end of people’s driveways are around eight feet high. Very exciting if you are under fifteen. The removal crews can visit our neighbourhood any time now. They haven’t even touched 90th Avenue.

We’re off for a visit with the ADZO crew this afternoon, or Liam and I are, anyhow, despite the fact that I think it would do HRH good to get out of the house.

Clean

What a beautiful, beautiful early spring day. This is the second day in a row that I have been able to wear my cherry-red polar fleece spring jacket, ignoring my black wool winter coat with great satisfaction.

Appropriately, today we have been spring cleaning. HRH even scrubbed out the closets. I cleaned out the jumble that had collected under the kitchen sink, did some mending, and some general tidying and reorganization in my office.

Which led me, thrillingly, to uncover the location of the 8 x 10″ envelope containing all the postcards and pins and pictures and story cards that decorated my inspirational bulletin board in the last apartment. This is the envelope of precious things that I thought I’d lost in the move, believed gone forever.

In it was — are you ready? — the postcard from Neil Gaiman, the story assignment that I finally wrote last fall. I knew what the line was because I’d journaled it, but I’d thought the card itself never to be seen again. No longer!

Now, off to pick up the boy. And again, I must remember that it is Wednesday, and that I have orchestra. (We’re all off in this house because we came home on a Monday instead of a Sunday, you see, and we are firmly convinced that it is in fact Tuesday.)

In Which She Does A Brief Recap Of The Weekend And Dodges Writing About Herself By Posting About The Boy

Thank you everyone who stopped by to see HRH on his birthday, or sent greetings and good wishes. He had a wonderful time with his friends, and is very excited about all his gift certificates and tickets and game cards and art supplies. Well done, troops.

By Friday night whatever had been eating through my spine during the day had ceased, and it was nice to be able to sit back by the fire at the pub and just listen to the conversations going on around me. I did actually have a book in my bag, but I didn’t need to use it.

Speaking of things in my bag, I have lost my sunglasses. This is very upsetting, because I hate sunglasses in general and I have owned this perfect pair for about four years. I had them when I walked from the car to the house after band on Saturday. Now, they are nowhere to be found. I mourn their absence. They may have fallen into the snow, in which case farewell till spring, assuming I’m lucky enough to find them when the piles and piles of snow finally melt, and they’re salvageable. (Look, a Canadian winter. I’d forgotten what those were like.) Lots of snow fell this weekend. HRH shovelled three times, and each time he moved the snow it was as if he hadn’t done so earlier. Today it is very clear outside (and thus the discovery of the loss of my sunglasses). The sun is rising significantly earlier and setting later, and the angle of it has visibly changed in the past week.

I am remarkably reticent about the things that are on my mind these days. I habitually use this journal as well as my other handwritten journals to work out and record how I feel about things, but these days it feels very much like more of the same thing I was feeling yesterday, and the day before that, and haven’t we had these general life problems before a few times too? And on top of that, I am experiencing computer aversion. The two main books on the go right now are frustrating in very different ways. I’ve reached a part of Swan Sister that isn’t very clearly defined in my brain, and while I usually see this as an opportunity to allow my brain to simply create without boundaries (and it is usually a success), this time it’s a major stumbling block. (Imagine, a stumbling block at 30K. You’d think I’d see them coming by this point.) The Poppy book, while now having a pulse again in my work-brain, is a problem because of the Revelation, because to implement it would require an even more drastic overhaul that I had originally expected. I would have to scrap eighty percent of the novel, and throw out most of what makes the plot currently advance. I read the first couple of chapters during Liam’s nap yesterday and it’s good as it is, just not what it needs to be in order to be a complete success. It’s an enjoyable read, but not a Story. I have to think about it a lot more, and this is ungood because what I want to be doing now is actually writing, not planning or rewriting. I may ignore both of them, pull the Pandora book out and start writing the final chapters of that instead. (Because today, ignoring the problems is much easier than trying to work through them and feeling as if I’ve made matters worse by the end of the precious work day. One must choose one’s battles.)

I’ve spent the morning handling correspondence, and doing banking. I’ve crossed half the things of today’s To-Do list. Since I don’t feel particularly interested in elaborating what’s on my mind, I will share Liam-news.

Liam has been singing Twinkle Twinkle an awful lot these days. He has also been requesting it on the cello. We are a little tired of fending him off from giving the cello full-body hugs at high velocity while it is being played, or using the body as a percussive instrument to accompany the bowed music. He informed me that the f-holes were moons the other day.

Yesterday he drew a picture, and by ‘drew’ I mean he scribbled with his markers on a sheet of construction paper on the floor with his Thomas the Tank Engine next to him. When he was done he looked at me and said, “Ati!”, which means Thomas in Liam-Speak. It took me a moment before I realised that he was referring to the set of scribbles. And when I turned it around, it did look remarkably like the engine once he’d pointed it out. I am mildly freaked out by this. I put it up on his door.

Toilet training also proceeds eerily well.

I made delicious homemade pizza Saturday night, and Liam ate an entire slice as well as stealing the pizza bones off my plate. Sunday we went over to HRH’s parents’ home for dinner, where we had excellent prime rib and lovely potatoes, with cauliflower and broccoli in a light cheese sauce. Liam gorged himself on it all like everyone else did, having seconds and thirds of everything. Then he sat on my lap, appropriated my coffee spoon and helped himself to my serving of impressive home-made black forest cake, and ate more of it than I did (I’m not a big fan of cherries in cake; I’ll eat them fresh but that’s pretty much it). He also helped himself to a few spoonfuls of decaf cappuccino.

And now, I will go reheat the final slice of pizza.

Swan Sister Update

Wow, what a miserable day I’m having. It can be over any time, thanks. I don’t much enjoy being mad at the world in general for no particular reason. I should bring a book to the pub tonight so that I don’t have to talk to anyone, or I may ruin their night.

Total word count, Swan Sister: 31,482
New words today: 1,865

Looking back over my records, I see that I get the opportunity to work on this damn story once every thirty days or so. If I could work on it more frequently I might like it more, take less time getting back into it when I do sit down to work, and not feel like I’m facing a brick wall every single session.

Really, spring can show up any time now. Any. Time.

In other writing news I recently had a Revelation concerning the Poppy book, which requires a massive overhaul and rewrite and rethinking of some of the central action. It’s not a bad thing, because it’s been sitting there patiently waiting for an expanded second draft for a couple of years now. This Revelation may make the unintentional ending I wrote work, too, and the expansion/second draft would fill in what needs to happen before that end. Not that I can do anything about it for a while. Fitting everything I need to do into two days a week is beginning to take its toll.