Category Archives: Words Words Words

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.

Memeage

This sounds like all I can handle right around now. I’ve been violently ill for the past 24 hours. (Thank the gods I got home from orchestra before it got really bad. It’s been terribly lovely, really; I haven’t been this ill in almost two years. Liam, poor boy, has just begun his own gastro. I’m grateful that mine’s now over, otherwise trying to deal with a toddler being ill while trying to not be ill oneself — no fun.)

Memeage courtesy of Talyesin:

Fun writers’ meme: Post the first line from five works in progress.

I am shocked to discover that I only have four works in progress at the moment, Others have been finished, handed in, submitted, closed, etcetera.

1. The swan reached the end of the pond, turned, and began sailing back. – Swan Sister, of course. Although this is a prologue written to help situate me-the-author, which I’m not sure is going to actually be included in the book or not. If not, then the first line of the first chapter is, When Annah turned sixteen, her father gave her a beautiful palfrey mare.

2. What makes a great novel? – The Poppy book, sometimes known as The Great Canadian Novel.

3. “They found another girl in the scaffetta last night after curfew,” said Guilia, skipping into the dormitory room. – Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro.

4. There. – The Moments of Being Pandora.

Wow. Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing so much non-fic in the past three years, articles, books, reviews and the like. But only four?

What I Read This February

Duty and Desire by Pamela Aidan
Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomlin
An Assembly Such As This by Pamela Aidan
These Three Remain by Pamela Aidan
Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
Still Life, by Louise Penny
Blade of Fortriu, Juliet Marillier
Vivaldi, Michael Talbot
The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, Patricia MacLachlan (reread)

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.)

Weekend Recap

We just bought a dozen fish at the pet store. Well, we paid for a dozen, but the saleswoman liked Liam so much that she slipped an extra one into the bag, to make a baker’s dozen. (What a baker would do with goldfish is something about which I do not want to think for too long.) We are having a Bad Day, which is hardly surprising as the boy needs a day to recover from a long car ride, and he only had one day in between recovering from the drive down and starting the next one. In fact, it feel somewhat like a sick day in our house, as we are all being very good to ourselves (long car rides are no fun for Mama and Dada, either). So new fish are a treat. Also? A dozen are cheaper than four. Feeder goldfish are our friends, yes indeedy. And the death rate won’t be as noticeable with a whole school like this.

Liam travelled both ways very well in the car, but wow, when he’s had enough, that’s it, he wants out RIGHT NOW. He became very distressed on the way down when we were on a long stretch of highway and he needed to use the bathroom, which triggered a meltdown even though he was wearing a diaper instead of training pants against this very kind of eventuality. When not in the car Liam was very charming to everyone with lots of “hello” and “bye-bye”, and pointing out “people!”. While we were there he discovered the Canada geese who fly back and forth all the time, and thus spent a lot of his walks with his head craned back, waving at them and saying “Bye-bye birds, bye-bye. Go go go!” He also finally saw the moon in the daytime sky, and gave us that “You SEE, I KNEW you were holding out on me with the whole ‘moon at night, sun in the day’ crock you had going!” look when he pointed it out.

Finally following through on an idea I had a while ago, I went out to a craft store in Oakville and found two small needlepoint kits. I’ve almost finished one already. It’s really remarkable how much technique one retains from doing a single small needlepoint project twenty years ago. I got small kits because I didn’t want to overextend myself and ruin my fledgling desire to start needleworking again. It was hard to find a needlepoint kit at all; counted cross stitch appears to be all the rage right now, and while I love the look of finished cross-stitch there is nothing less fun than keeping track of numbers by referring to a chart and counting squares on blank cloth, thank you very much. I wanted these needleworking projects to be fun and relatively mindless, so I made sure the kits I got had pre-printed canvasses instead. I started the first one, a 5 x 5 ” crescent moon for Liam’s room, on Sunday at noon when I brought it home; I now have all of the main design completed (modified, naturally, because the moon had a face and I hate moons with faces) and a third of the background filled in. Go me! It helped that I have discovered that I can do needlepoint in the car without triggering motion sickness, which made the trip home much more enjoyable. (And there is only one person out there who will understand this: ADZO, needlepoint is my bowling.)

My mother can still wield a mean set of shears, as she demonstrated by cutting my hair as she used to do when I was six. She cut three and a half inches off my hair, and I feel so very much better. I’ve been trying to find time/freedom from the small one for about a month now in order to go get it trimmed, because I have been hating how very dead the ends were and how much they tangled. Amazing how much better the loss of four inches of hair makes one feel.

So there you have it: we are home, and relatively sound of mind and body.

Home

Home from our trip to Toronto; all is well.

Every day I’ve been checking LJ to see if Samuel has been born, and every day I’ve been reporting to family that Karine is still pregnant. No longer! He arrived in town yesterday an hour before we did. Welcome, Samuel! It was wonderful to hear that everyone involved is happy and doing well.

New word from Liam yesterday: French fries.

And now we are off to run errands. More thorough updates later.

Hanging Out The Shingle

Ugh.

I just wrote and submitted a writing sample on an assigned topic to an anonymous corp whose name is being screened by the hiring company. The sample consisted of three to five hundred words on a specific topic, to provide essential info and context to potential buyers. It was a topic I knew nothing about, and was given no guidelines other than “include general information about where X takes place, the popularity of X, and people involved”. I hate being clueless and not knowing who my audience is, or what an employer is looking for in style or tone.

I did it in an hour. Fear my mad research skillz! Whether it’s any good is up in the air, since I have zero background on the topic personally and the intraweebs were pretty useless, so I can’t judge if it’s what they’re looking for or not. The proposed pay is by the piece, and if I can complete each piece in an hour to seventy-five minutes then it’s worth the pay; any longer and it isn’t profitable. Assuming they hire me, that is, which they very well may not do.