Category Archives: Words Words Words

Brief Weekend Roundup

I am effectively dead. I am calling in Not Living today, because that’s about as useful as I can manage to be. Work will happen tomorrow.

Friday: Excellent day running around with the boy. Dinner with Tal and Kris, which consisted of much laughter, wine, delicious food, and OMG Battenberg cake, which I have not in forever, or at least since Marks and Sparks abandoned the colonials closed their Canadian shops. Awful night of not-exactly-sleep where I am very, very ill for some reason.

Saturday: Resting in bed with tea until I decide I am able to get up and drive safely. Excellent cello lesson. Visit to the mall to pet the Easter farm animals. Scored a secondhand copy of Lego Star Wars for the Xbox, and a secondhand controller which is red so I will play better. Lunch out consisting of hot dogs and fries, as I had promised the boy. After nap, we all head out to the south shore so I can drop by the luthier and renew the rental of the 7/8 cello for two more months. Then all three of us play our new video game, and the boy is quite good at figuring out what’s what. We end the day by watching the Deserts episode of Planet Earth.

Sunday: Summer tires put on the car. I make my first homemade tourtière. After nap we head out to have a home-hosted sugaring off meal with excellent friends and many children. Everyone eats too much breakfast-style food drenched in maple syrup. I think the tourtière is too dry and kind of wishy-washy on the seasoning, but everyone else claims it’s awesome. (Next time I’m doubling the sage and cloves, not boiling off as much of the broth, and using a different pastry recipe.) After the boy’s in bed HRH and I head out for our once-monthly steampunkian-horror game, which was most excellent. I got nine more rows of the lap blanket done. (It’s the only knitting I’m getting done at all, and only during this game.)

Which brings us to today, where I feel lethargic and achy. The damp weather doesn’t help.

My mother has informed me that the FedEx shipment I missed is not in fact my cello goody bag, but a box of photo/scrapbook albums she and my dad shipped to me from my grandmother’s apartment in Vancouver when they went out to visit her last week. I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Figures

The boy’s hair has been cut, I have paid a slew of bills (my poor bank account, at least it was flush for twenty-four hours), we have new books, there is a new Hot Wheels fire truck, and of course I missed a FedEx delivery while we were out. When do I get FedEx deliveries? Never. Well, not entirely true; two of my sets of author’s copies arrived by FedEx in the past. As I’m not expecting anything like that, however, I’m guessing that it’s the cello goody bag I won, but I won’t know till Monday. At least, FedEx says they’ll come back on the next business day, which I am assuming is Monday in their world as in mine. Woe. I would have liked to have opened a parcel today. Especially a parcel with surprises in it.

In half an hour or so I’ll start the dough for the rolls I’m making for tonight. I may make a double batch and freeze one set.

Yes, that’s about as exciting as it gets today. It’s damp. I’m going to go find a cat and an afghan.

Win!

Hello, spring!

Good Things of the Day So Far:

1. The exchange rate. Hello, an extra twenty-three cents to every American dollar I just deposited into my bank account!

2. SUN! I had to take off my scarf and then my velvet jacket while running my errands. The sunroof was opened, the car window was rolled down. All the house windows are now open as well. I’m wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt for the first time in, oh, months. Also for the first time in months, I am not cold.

3. I have daffodils that I bought from the Cancer Society! So many that they all don’t fit in my little Caithness vase!

4. A stack of new library books. Om-nom-nom.

5. Not one but two pairs of leather shoes purchased at Winners: a pair of plain black Rockport Mary Jane flats, and a pair of taupe Clarks casual Mary Jane heels. (Curiously, the heels are more comfortable than the flats.) I paid less for the two together than I’d have paid for either of them separately. SCORE! (Of course, taupe isn’t my thing; I’m kind of, heh, neutral about it. I intend to have them dyed, I just can’t decide on black or brown. Because, well, CLARKS, and holy cats they’re comfy.)

And finally:

6. The anthology ms. has already been approved. The request for my delivery cheque was just put in. HOW COOL IS THAT?

Yeah. A good day so far.

Enough Tax Stuff For The Day

I declare the tax stuff half-done. Everything got sorted, and all but three of the ten stacks of receipts have been calculated. My calculator doesn’t have an ‘erase current input without erasing the ongoing total’ function and the decimal button is finicky, so if I make a mistake I have to begin all over again. As a result it feels as if I’ve actually calculated about twenty-seven stacks of receipts so far. I really, really wish there was wine in the house.

I only made half of what I made in 2007, which isn’t surprising as I didn’t work in-house for three months with a major local game design company. All I did was write one book, and do the freelance evaluation gig. Which means I’m anticipating some kind of return, the only question being how much (or little!) of one. Money coming back is always good.

Tomorrow I’ll calculate the utilities and such, and go through my credit card statements for the correct conversion from USD to CDN amounts on research book orders from the first half of the year when I was writing the hedge witch book. As I sorted I was actually impressed to see that on half of them I’d noted down the Canadian conversion as the credit card statements came in, so go me; it’s not going to be as much of a nightmare doing it as last year’s was. (Yes, I can learn from my past mistakes.) I think we need one more receipt, and then HRH can call our awesome tax guy.

And In Completely Unrelated News…

This morning, while I was composing the very-difficult-to-write post about my newfound chocolate sensitivity, I received word that I won a year’s subscription to Strings magazine plus a $100 gift basket from an LA luthier for a 250-word contest entry I wrote on Emily Wright’s online teaching technique via her cello blog.

Whee!

This was especially nice, because I didn’t do it for the prize; I did it because Emily was looking for an idea of how readers interpret her lessons and approach. Of course, the prize is really quite nice too, because who wouldn’t want a goodie bag of cello-related stuff? (Er. Anyone who is a cellist, that is. I have no idea what most of you would do with such a thing. No, wait, yes I do: You’d give it to me!) The subscription is timely because I was going to have to let my subscription to Strings lapse this fall; it’s too expensive for me right now.

So. Yes. What a lovely surprise.

And I really need to get back to the taxes. I hadn’t made much of a start when I came back for a break, and then the chocolate post took longer than I expected.

In Which She Makes A Regretful Revelation

I’m working on the taxes today. I hate it. I hate sorting receipts and adding things up and inputting them into appropriate columns. Bah.

So I’m taking a break to share something very sad with you. I figure this is timely, what with Easter coming up.

Over the past two months, I have developed a sensitivity to chocolate. The darker the chocolate is, the worse my reaction.

Yes, you read that right. I can no longer eat dark chocolate.

No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

You have no idea how much this has upset me. Chocolate is my reward to myself for finishing a task, my encouragement for making it through part of the day or a project. Instead of being able to enjoy it, my tongue and hard palate burn. It’s no fun at all, I assure you. This has really depressed me, and it’s been one of the things I’ve been struggling with behind the scenes.

It’s not just one brand, either. I’ve experimented with various kinds from my stash. Same result every time. The higher the cocoa content, the worse it is. Chocolate chips in cookies, chocolatines, chocolate-covered butter cookies; they’re all culprits. Those double-the-cocoa cupcakes I made last week? Bad. But the regular chocolate cake I made earlier in the month was fine. Go figure.

The reaction I get from milk chocolate is almost non-existent, so I’ve nibbled what little I had of that with caution. So far, so good.

Then this morning I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and fifteen minutes after I finished it my tongue and throat were prickling. It’s not an additives thing, either; we use natural peanut butter (as in, the ingredient list reads: “Peanuts, The End”). I suspect my body, slyly encouraged by spring and the general sap/growth thing that used to turn me into a mess as a child and teen, is now manifesting allergies to things it hasn’t previously needed to in a new and exciting way thanks to a ramped-up sensitivity level. Ten years ago the new symptom was random skin itch and contact dermatitis with pretty much everything, so I wouldn’t put it past my body to have developed a new symptom. I haven’t yet experimented with diphenhydramine hydrochloride (like Bendryl, one of the common food-sensitivity-friendly antihistamines) to see if it’s my body releasing histamine in an attempt to fight off what it perceives as an invading chemical of some kind. (Dear body, you know I love you, but really, dark chocolate? Is this some kind of amped-up immune system thing connected to the fibro? Do we need to talk about ongoing medication again?)

Sigh.

You know what this means, of course. It means I have to go shopping to replace all my dark chocolate with creamy good-quality milk chocolate. In small amounts, of course, in case I develop a more intense sensitivity to that as well. And yes, it also means I’ll be careful, and will speak to my doctor about it at my upcoming appointment.

What I Read This March

Lord John and the Private Matter by Diana Gabaldon
Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
The Game by Diana Wynne Jones
Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery (reread)
New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Foundation by Mercedes Lackey
Pride and Prescience by Carrie Bebris
Good Enough by Paula Yoo
The Tower Room by Adele Geras
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery (reread)
Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson
Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Greener Shore by Morgan Llywelyn
Princess in Training by Meg Cabot
Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella
Bread Alone by Judith Hendricks
Princess on the Brink by Meg Cabot
Sweet Sixteen Princess by Meg Cabot
Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
Silhouette In Scarlet by Elizabeth Peters
The World According to Bertie by Alexander McCall Smith
Street of Five Moons by Elizabeth Peters
Party Princess by Meg Cabot
Princess in Training by Meg Cabot
Pride & Prejudice & Jasmin Fields by Melissa Nathan
Chicks With Sticks (It’s a Purl Thing) by Elizabeth Lenhard
Scott Pilgrim 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O’Malley

My gods. Thirty-one. That’s one a day.

Um, yeah. Pretty much all I did this month was turn my brain off and read if I wasn’t working. I read most if not all of a book at bedtime each night because I didn’t have the energy to do anything else, and my brain was too awake to fall asleep easily. The library loves me; I love the library. They’re literally saving me, because I don’t have the money to buy books.

I finally read my first Georgette Heyer! I will read more.

I read the last three novels in the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi, despite telling myself that I should really space them out to enjoy them one at a time. I’m sure I would have enjoyed them that way, too.

Why do I still read Mercedes Lackey? Is it because I keep hoping I’ll enjoy it as much as I did when I was seventeen?

I also finally decided to read the sequel to Twilight. It was better, although I still rolled my eyes a lot when the tragic hero re-entered the scene. I find the references to classic love stories and comparisons between the contemporary storyline and classic heroines and heroes really clunky. Meyer seems to undercut her own writing somehow. It will be working, actually flowing, and then she’ll do something that sinks it by using cliche or something, and it stumbles along that way for a while before it begins to creep back, only to run headlong into cliche again. It’s frustrating.

I wanted to like The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency much more than I did. Oh, well.