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Weekend Roundup, Father’s Day Edition

Happy summer solstice!

I’m exhausted. I feel like a black hole; I keep absorbing energy, but it vanishes. It was a good weekend, with nothing specific or enormous that drained me. There were small annoyances and obstacles, though, and when I deal with those the energy tends to slip away like something appropriately metaphoric through a sieve.

Saturday morning we headed out to do groceries and our Father’s Day shopping, and the boy got his hair cut. Then we headed to Angrignon Park for a naming ceremony I was leading, but the people were an hour later than they said they’d be there to prepare, and then the guests showed up half an hour after the specified time, too. They were all wonderful people and the ceremony was lovely, but it reminded me of why I usually charge for these things: the money covers hiccoughs like these that end up forcing me to adjust the rest of my day’s schedule. While we were waiting for everyone to arrive our real estate agent called with yet more bad news (actually, this was a repeat of earlier bad news that had been potentially rescinded, but no, we got disappointed for the second time on the same property). We ended up having to leave pretty much right after things finished because of the late start; the boy was very upset because we’d promised him he could play in the playground for half an hour after the ceremony, but the adjusted schedule meant the time wasn’t there for it any more.

We went home and changed, and fed the boy a very late lunch, then we headed to to the library just as it began to rain. The boy and I kicked around there for the better part of an hour and then came home to watch the storms batter the backyard till our agent arrived and we did some more paperwork.

Sunday morning I made pie crust and then quiche, and the Preston-LeBlancs came over for a lovely sunny Father’s Day/ Solstice brunch. We had piles of delicious food and the kids played inside and outside, and we had a wonderfully relaxing time talking to old friends. When they left I called my mother for our weekly chat, and while we did that the sun vanished, the wind kicked up, and we had another bad storm roll through. When it cleared up we headed over to HRH’s parents’ house (where they hadn’t had a speck of rain!) for a Father’s Day dinner of ribs, chicken, and multiple salads. I’d reached my limit, though, so all I managed to do was sit and watch the boy play in the pool with his grandmother and knit a couple of rounds on the short-sleeve sweater that I started last year.

After we put the boy to bed, HRH and I finally got to watch the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes, which was fun and an interesting take on the characters, but somewhat annoying in that the foley and dialogue editors seemed to have fallen down on the job of making sure the lead character’s dialogue was clearly audible in the first third of the film.

I have so much to do in the next three days. I’ve already booked off my regular freelance thing because I have an interview to finish up, and we need to pack for our upcoming camping trip and do all the other stuff associated with it. I have tonnes of planning to do regarding shopping for food at the other end, plotting out the route, trying to pin down the budget… and mix CDs need to be made!

But first, I get to invoice. Hurrah!

Friday Activity Log

This is a bad fibro day. I didn’t sleep well for a variety of reasons (most of them being in the last two hours of the night, which ruins a whole night’s sleep for me), and I suspect cuddling a three-month-old yesterday, contorting my body to support him and be a comfy bed while in a waiting room chair, did nothing for my posture. I woke up super achy, and have become increasingly dizzy. So today’s work got rescheduled till Monday (the deadline’s next week, thank goodness), and I did fibro-friendlier stuff instead.

– answered e-mail
– finished polishing the baby naming ceremony I’m doing on Saturday
– final communication and details with the mum involved in the baby naming
– showered, washed hair (and, no surprise, wiped myself out)
– laundry
– yogaed
– wove on the baby blanket some more

The boys are due home in about forty-five minutes. We are going out to get ice cream, then off to a Surprise, AKA Toy Story 3 at the theatre. Let’s see if I can set the timer on the pizza dough properly today.

Thursday Activity Log

Well, this experiment is working. I’m seeing that I actually use my days to do stuff, instead of feeling as if I didn’t get anywhere by the end of the day. It’s showing me that a completed activity isn’t the only way to measure a day’s success.

Today, I:

– babysat Tristan Bean for an hour while his mum had a dentist appointment (best-behaved baby ever, and I got him to sleep not once but twice!)
– went to the bank
– picked up some groceries
– went to the pharmacy for stuff
– had a meeting with our real estate agent
– stressed about house stuff (yes, this deserves a separate bullet point, because, well, stuff happened)
– didtwo three four loads of laundry
– chain-plied a full bobbin of 4oz of singles (and only ended up with 66 yards; this is insane, I’ll have to spin up even more)

Wednesday Activity Log

Today, I:
– handled correspondence
– showered
– took public transport out to the south shore to meet HRH
– visited seven houses
– came back home
– edited yesterday’s freelance assignment at the coordinator’s request
– brief cello practice

And now I am going to go pass out on the couch till the boys get home and dinner is made. Orchestra tonight; I’m so exhausted that I know it will be a minor disaster.

Tuesday Activity Log

Today, I:
– finished the freelance thing, proofed, did the final summary report, sent it all in just before noon (and am now second-guessing myself, as usual)
– had a 47-min phone conversation
– baked bread
– plied Jan’s yarn (which went well, but not so well; I’ve got less than half the yardage I’d planned to get because the fibre was partially felted, making drafting a thin single almost impossable)
– wet-finished said yarn
– spun another 4oz of mohair/merino to make up for the shortfall
– listened to two episode of the SpinDoctor podcast (while spinning and plying)

Nice, sunny day, too.

Monday Activity Log

Today, I:
– washed brushes
– wrote weekend roundup blog post
– paid a couple of bills
– finished the freelance thing (worked on it pretty intensely; a final proof tomorrow morning and away she goes)
– more freaking househunting (which stealthily eats up minutes in a very insidious way)
– practised for half an hour
– handled a weekend of e-mail and today’s correspondence

I am going to miss a lot about this lower duplex. We have fantastic neighbours across the street and to either side (our upstairs neighbours are a given, and the new kid downstairs seems really nice too); a relatively quiet neighbourhood except for the idiots who gun their car engines now and then and the little kids behind us who scream in their pool till eleven at night; and I love the layout and feel of this apartment. However, I am very much looking forward to (a) not sharing my laundry machines with anyone, (b) not paying for three households’ worth of water and electricity for laundry, and (c) always having hot water and water pressure at my disposal when anyone in my household is scheduled to or desires to have a bath or shower. (We allow the upstairs neighbours to use our washer and dryer, and the bachelor apartment in the basement runs off our electricity and hot water. While our lower-than-usual-for-this-lower-duplex rent reflects the latter, the hot water/water pressure issue is a problem. We also pay for our water usage, and three households use up a lot of that in laundry-associated activity; we pay double the regular fee as a result.) Any new place will have its own idiosyncrasies, but it will be nice to not have to worry about this particular set of problems.

Weekend Roundup, Birthday and Recital Edition

What a wonderful weekend.

Friday I did over half of the freelance thing in four hours, had a catnap, wrote the boy’s five-year-old celebratory post, did more househunting research, and started the laundry. We let the boy stay up an hour past his usual bedtime to finish building his Lego Atlantis sub, and HRH went out to the party store just before it closed to get helium balloons with which to surprise him the next morning.

Saturday morning the boy woke us up at 5:15, and while HRH got back to sleep I did not, so I gave up around 6:00 and got up with the boy. He was not impressed that the World Cup coverage was on instead of his cartoons. The morning felt rushed for some reason, and I headed out for our recital dress rehearsal just before nine-thirty, which was fifteen minutes later than I wanted to be out the door; as a result, instead of taking the detour and time to treat myself to a breakfast sandwich as I’d originally planned, I hit the local depanneur to pick up an orange juice and a huge granola bar. I’d expected the rehearsal to be as stressful as home had been, but it wasn’t; it was relaxed and went very well, and was very enjoyable.

After lunch I made the boy’s birthday cake while HRH did the final tidying up (who knew the front window could be that clean?). My parents had arrived in town the night before, and they came over around one-thirty. The overcast skies and drizzle cleared up enough for us to sit outside, which was lovely. Mum brought fresh peas (both the kind to be shelled as well as sugar snaps) and Niagara cherries, both of which the boy was into as soon as he saw them (he won’t eat tomato sauce, but will eat sugar snap peas by the handful, and asks for them as a treat; go figure). And he got cherry juice on a brand new button-down shirt, of course, but at least the juice kind of matches the shirt’s colour scheme.

HRH’s parents joined us around three, and the boy asked when we would be able to open birthday presents, so when everyone had settled down with a drink we let him go to town. He was perfectly thrilled with all the Playmobil and Lego (“Oh, this is what I wanted! Thank you!”), and while he didn’t seem as enthusiastic about the clothes, he has chosen to wear three new shirts from the pile of birthday clothes already, so while they were not immediately gratifying they did make an impression. He finagled various adults into helping him build the new sets of things until dinner, and had HRH fill his pool so he could play in it and take the Playmobil seaplane in. He was in and out of that for the rest of the afternoon while the adults snacked on crackers alternately piled with Brie and my mother-in-law’s wonderful seafood dip.

We had flank steak and herbed sausages for supper, and while the sausages were dry (partially a result of their composition and partially to miscalculating the cooking time) the flank steak was really quite excellent. We put out a pile of fresh raw veggies and made dip to serve with it, and a potato salad. Dessert was the cake the boy had requested, vanilla with maple frosting. The recipe for the cake is a definite keeper, though I used four whole eggs instead of eight yolks. I’m not sure why I continue to use new recipes for special occasions because so much can go wrong, although it didn’t in this instance: it was lovely and moist, although the frosting I made was essentially my regular frosting with about a half-cup of maple syrup added to it for flavour, and since maple syrup is sweeter than sugar it was a bit cloying. Now I understand why people use maple extract.

Sunday morning we introduced the boy to The Rocketeer, one of our favourite films, and it was a hit, as we’d expected: it has racing planes, a dirigible, and a rocket backpack. After lunch we got tidied up and headed out for my spring recital at the seniors’ residence, meeting my parents there. The last time my parents saw me in recital was at my first and only big public one about twelve years ago, where I played the full Breval Sonata in C (my mother tells me I have definitely improved, which is a relief). We had a really big crowd in attendance this time; either the seniors were more active, or our fame has spread. (I doubt it’s the latter.) We had two more cellists, and three violinists, so there was an increase in attendant families as well. There was a bit of oddness during setup when we discovered that the piano was tuned to A443, which meant we had to crank our cellos up three notches above the 440 we’re used to, translating to about a quarter-tone on my instrument in yesterday’s weather. You get used to A440 sounding one way, and when you adjust the tuning across the instrument it sounds really wrong to your ear for a bit even though it’s in tune with itself. The opening ensemble piece felt unsettled to me and a couple of other cellists as a result, but the audience probably didn’t notice a thing. Apart from that, I think that this is the recital I have enjoyed the most so far. Everyone did a wonderful job with their solos, and the ensemble pieces were great. I was comfortable both physically and mentally, I aced my trouble spots in my Lully Gavotte, and we delivered lovely versions of The Entertainer (all of it, no shortcuts; it’s a longer piece than people expect in its proper form) and Ashokan Farewell. All the ensemble pieces were good, but those two really stand out in my mind. Our final piece was a unison performance of the traditional fiddle tune Soldier’s Joy, and we had four violinists, a pianist, and twelve cellists playing it. We did it three times, each time a little faster, and at the dress yesterday our teacher reminded us not to speed up during each repetition because then the final set would be too fast for precision. Well, of course that’s exactly what happened, but everyone hung on and made terrific noise. My parents told me that the little kids had a blast barrelling along at the end, and it was a great way to finish the programme. I’ve never left a recital feeling that good about myself and the class. I felt like I looked good, I sounded good, and I felt really secure about everything. So secure, in fact, that when HRH complimented me repeatedly on the way home about my sound and delivery he didn’t make me feel awkward or self-conscious. I got some very nice comments from my classmates about my sound at the dress rehearsal, too, which was nice, detailed comments that went beyond the basic encouraging sorts of remarks, too.

My parents came back with us and we sat in the yard talking while the boy splashed about in his pool again, and then we went out to dinner, which was fun and pretty good. I can’t believe the amount of food the boy ate over the weekend. HRH and I wonder if he’s on the verge of another growth spurt, which would be just crazy. We parted ways in the restaurant parking lot, and after putting the boy to bed HRH and I sat down and seriously went through the latest list of houses our agent sent us for review. I think we’re ready to start this again after a few days off to heal.

It was a lovely weekend. We had lovely weather, we enjoyed great food and great family time, and the boy had a blast doing what the boy does.