Happiest of birthdays to our beloved Rosy! May every year be better than the one that came before.
Ran errands on foot this morning with the boy, more coming this afternoon. I am up to my eyeballs in prep for the camping trip this weekend. Now back to making lists and sorting through boxes looking for equipment, fall clothes, and baby gear for Charlize while he naps!
I had a lovely surprise visit from Mousme this morning, which shouldn’t have been a surprise because I’d invited her. She arrived with her laptop and I made a pot of tea and we sat down and actually wrote stuff. You know, that thing I do for a living, and have been trying to do for the past couple of weeks and have been getting pretty much nowhere because I keep getting sidetracked by shiny research that really doesn’t need to be done this very second? Yes, that. I fed her leftovers and she asked for seconds, wonderful girl.
Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 48,906
New words today: 1,777
We’re inching towards an end of the first draft. I still don’t know which ending is going to happen. We’ll find out as things develop, I suppose. Once the first draft is complete (how confident I sound) I have a feeling I should go right back to the beginning to polish and expand and fill in the gaps, and attack it with a metaphorical offset spatula to smooth out the continuity. I’m mildly concerned that if I put it away I’ll lose momentum on it. (Momentum? What momentum? The theoretical momentum I’ll have achieved once it’s been finished.) Remember, I put this away last December and only took it out three weeks ago; I don’t want to have to go through all the rereading and reacquainting myself yet again.
Mousme and I now have a casual regular writing date. If it works, don’t mess with it. It’s been ages since we’ve just chatted so we did a lot of that too, catching up and talking about books. Imagine how productive we will be when we don’t have to do as much catching up.
I know I wrote on Friday, but for some reason I didn’t record it. The day’s total was around eight hundred words, I know that, and there was an extra three-hundred-word character file that I finally had to draw up because I could no longer remember the specifics of the dozen or so orphans and several adults I’d created a hundred pages and ten months ago.
This post launches the new Il Maestro-associated icon, from one of Chris Van Allsburg’s breathtaking illustrations for Swan Lake. (No, there are no swans in this novel. Swans elsewhere in my other novels and novellas, yes, but not this one. Are there swans in Venice at all? Other than on crests?)
Saturday we postponed an Ecomuseum trip we’d planned with the Preston-Leblancs due to inclement weather, and had brunch out instead. Then we took the kids to an indoor playcentre and the boy had a rip-roaring time in the three-and-under room of slides and lookouts and big foam blocks. We will absolutely return, and return often, I think. On our way out I spied a kitchen supply shop that had Bundt pans in the windows, and suddenly I was coveting Bundt pans I’d never seen but only heard tell of: cathedral pans! castle pans! rose pans! And not only in the regular large size, but miniature fantasy Bundt pans too!
Sunday we wandered about shops doing errands, and after the boy’s nap we had a birthday visit with HRH’s mother. All in all a lovely weekend.
Today I also applied for a posted freelance job, doing the whole tweaking of CV and creating the perfect cover letter thing — only to have an automated return reply to my email saying that the employer receives so many applications that they’d get back to me in four weeks. Ah well; all that angst, gone in an instantaneous email poof.
Three days after I bought my first new DS game, I have bought my second. Now I, too, can make music on my DS!
Jam Sessions was worth my money for the ear training exercises and the free play mode alone. I only know two of the twenty songs included in the game (non-game? bah) so the playing-along mode is pretty useless to me, unless I use it for ear training as well. If I used effects more than I do in real life I’d be more excited about the wide variety of sound alteration available to the player. The basic guitar sound is fine on its own for me. All in all, this is pretty flexible for messing about with. The recording option is convenient and I’m looking forward to using it, although at the moment I don’t know how much music it will hold. Have I already composed original chord sequences for verses and bridges? Yes. Do any of them match the three sets of lyrics I have written within the past eighteen months? No. Of course not.
I have discovered one drawback so far. The way the DS has to be held and the buttons pressed and the stylus moved all at once means my hands get tired from supporting the weight and stretching, as the original DS is a hefty little thing. Makes one wish for a DS Lite. In candy apple red, of course (or what they’re calling crimson in the new limited edition bundle).
ETA: I should clarify something lest someone leap to an incorrect conclusion. Yes, I have a couple of perfectly good instruments, and yes, I make up music with them, and yes, this program is but a hollow shade of what a real guitar would be like. My problem is that my instruments play only one or two notes at once, and thus I can’t get the subtle colour difference that (for example) a Cm versus a Cm7 chord can provide. If I’m writing an ensemble piece it’s easier for my brain to begin with a chord that sounds right for the rhythm guitar, which I can then break down into its key component notes and pass them to different melodic lines. And I don’t know what chord is going to sound right unless I hear it, and as I don’t own a chord instrument or have the time to learn one, this works pretty well for me. It saves a time, and a lot of calls and repetitive questions fielded by my guitarist. Also, it’s fun. I like it when learning tools are fun.
Some day my postman is going to ask me what the heck I do for a living, that I have so many padded envelopes of books coming to my door, some of them quite bulky. And I will say that I am a writer, and I research a lot, and nine times out of ten the perfect book I need is out of print or unavailable at an easily-reached library or too damned expensive to buy new, and so I order them secondhand on-line. I prefer to have my own copy of something I’m likely to use extensively for research, as it eliminates the renewal issue and the losing-the-book-to-a-reserve possibility, and I can plaster it with sticky-notes to my heart’s content.
I have scored a copy of Barbier’s Vivaldi’s Venice, for which I paid $6 CDN. Huzzah!
(This means nothing to most of you, I know. It’s not like it’s a popular book. It just happens to be exactly what I needed.)
This book still has the original shipping slip inside the front cover. It was a comp copy for a Toronto newspaper editor in 2004. The book then somehow found its way down to Georgia to the secondhand retailer from whom I purchased it. I love finding notes or shopping lists or train tickets or boarding passes in secondhand books. It makes the person who owned them so real, and yet so mysterious. Who were they? Did the book make their trip from Oslo more enjoyable? What was their relationship to the Marie about whom they made a note on this scrap of paper, and what did they buy her for her birthday in the end? What did this journalist think of the book? Was it read for a review (unlikely, as the book doesn’t feel as if it’s ever been opened) or was it requested out of personal interest?
I like knowing that human beings still read, that books play a role in their lives. And I like to imagine the journeys that books have made.
Today:
Went to Best Buy to get a new CD player for Liam’s room, and naturally it was out of stock. This was so that we could once again use the nice relaxing CDs we played when he was much younger, before the first CD player died and left us with only the radio. (Anything to try to recapture the normal sleep routine.) What I didn’t do at Best Buy: walk through the DS games aisle to see what was there, which is a pity because I just checked on line and apparently they have Jam Session in stock! I forgot it was being released today. Argh.
Picked up a couple of small baskets at the dollar store for assorted odds and ends on my new closet shelves. Finally remembered to buy foam brushes so that I could stain the door of my office.
Did the tour of the pet store and little bookstore, as we always do while we’re running errands at the mall. Did not buy the adorable Abyssinian kitten, or the fluffy and killer-cute Golden Lab puppies that scampered back and forth with Liam and licked his hands through the glass. (Obviously they didn’t actually lick him, but he knew what they were doing and giggled and said “Puppies lick Liam!” anyway.) Did not buy books, but not for want of trying: Liam went through several but handed each back to me with a calm “Thank you, no, Mama”, and the book I was looking for wasn’t in stock.
Bought Liam a track expansion set for his trains.
Unexpectedly bought myself my first DS game: Brain Age II, as it was on sale for $15. (Why the second and not the first? Because it had a music game on the back cover.) This marks the first game I have actually purchased instead of borrowing. Now addicted; I enjoy this sort of game. I am the poster girl for casual gamers and people interested in non-games (please, someone come up with a better industry label). Must go back and buy the original Brain Age and Big Brain Academy very soon. The sale’s on for another week.
The boy went down for his nap with a minimum of fuss, only screaming for about twenty-five seconds before settling down to play and fall asleep. He napped for an hour and a half.
Stained the French door we hung in the doorway to my office months ago while the boy slept.
Played trains and Brain Age with the boy, who was very interested in helping me write letters on the touch screen. Not so helpful were his random decisions to draw letters completely unrelated to what was going on: “Letter… B!” “No, Liam we need a letter N!… Oh, drat.” “Your score is: negative six trillion.” Also, during a different exercise he kept talking at the game when the DS was trying to recognize our voice response, so we kept getting those answers wrong too. But we had lots of fun anyhow. (The game will undoubtedly be impressed when I improve astronomically when playing alone.)
Liam did his first watercolour painting with brushes. He told HRH that it was an airplane when they put it up on the fridge.
We prepared and ate dinner early at five o’clock. We wondered if the boy was feeling rushed at night, and that’s why he was having meltdowns. He ate a huge dinner (rice and barbecued sausages and a whole scrambled egg! er, we’re out of veggies, and he won’t eat tomatoes from the garden at the moment), had a popsicle for dessert, had a bath, brushed his teeth, put on a new set of Nemo jammies, and snuggled first with me then with HRH to read books. He asked halfway through the snuggling for cereal and milk ( “Hot milk, Mama” he specified, which he hasn’t had in, oh, months) so I got him a little bowl of dry kamut flakes and a sippy cup of warm milk. He polished both off while HRH read, then did the goodnight round in his room in perfect relaxation ( “Night-night, Peter and FlossieMossyCottontail, good little bunnies,” nod nod nod), and snuggled up in bed. Then he held the empty sippy cup out to HRH and said, “Oh, thank you” before snuggling back down again. HRH and I backed out of the room and gave each other a silent high-five. Not a peep has come from the room. We’d been trying to figure out what was wrong. Nothing had changed in the weekly routine earlier this week: we were doing everything at the usual times, but the way the boy was reacting we wondered if he needed more down time before bed, and backed everything up accordingly. Looks like we were right. This means HRH will have to leave work half an hour earlier than he already does in order to pick Liam up sooner on the two days when he’s in daycare and HRH is working; that way we’ll have a bit more leeway for his brain to encompass what it needs to encompass, time to decompress and fit some quiet playing, a calm sit-down family dinner, a bath, and plenty of snuggling and reading before bedtime. (It’s not as if we were skimping on or missing any of these things before, but any chance to do more of it without a family member feeling rushed is a good thing in our books.)
Then HRH made me watch the Iron Man trailer. Through the first half I was wondering why people said it was so awful, and then the second half kicked in. Atrocious. So bad it isn’t even funny. Iron Man isn’t remotely like RoboCop. Gah!
And now, I think I will have sangria and read. Or maybe curl up in bed and play the DS. Or maybe all of the above.
Today is the natal celebration of Invisible’s awesome lead guitarist! Everybody squee!
Happy birthday, Scott.
Everyone slept in till eight today. Evidently we needed it. The boy had one wake-up around nine last night but HRH got him back to sleep relatively swiftly (relative to the hour and a half of the night before, that is).
I was invited to a management meeting for orchestra last night and found that people feel the same way I do: we need to work harder, and people need to respect one another and the orchestra as a whole more. Also, I got a sneak preview of what our spring 2008 concert is going to be (no, no spoilers; things are always subject to change) as well as confirmation of what our November 24 concert programme will be. And alas, no, we will not be doing a repeat of last year’s staggeringly successful Messiah Christmas concert, partly because it’s an incredible amount of work that would have had to have begun months ago, but also because Cantabile is doing it this year and it’s kind of pointless to have two groups doing it in the same community. Maybe next year was the quorum’s recommendation. If not the Messiah, then another Christmas oratorio-type thing. Amusing fact: there were five cellists in attendance, a first violinist, a second violinist, a violist, and a flautist, plus the conductor.
I have been cleaning out the office closet in preparation for the new shelves, and I have packed away all my teaching and Master’s stuff in a (bright red!) plastic storage container. There is one box left to go through that seems to be a catch-all of old calendars and random papers; I’ll sort through it after this break. There are some bags of fabric to go downstairs into the sewing cupboard too, and art books to join HRH’s reference material on his bookcase downstairs.
And in doing so, I found my original thumb drive at the bottom of a box! My guess is it fell off one of the higher shelves where I keep my disks and computer manuals at some point and got itself lost. It’s a very cute 32 MB. Fine for documents, not so fine for backing up photos or music.
Back to sorting and cleaning.