Category Archives: Words Words Words

Friday!

I have had a couple of people now e-mail me to say that they like the idea of recording the day’s accomplishments. I firmly believe that we don’t give ourselves enough credit, and I know how easily I downplay what I do in a day because it doesn’t have a concrete or immediate result, so if I can prove to myself that my day was not a waste because I got maintenance/work/research whatever done (you know, stuff that gets me closer to a concrete goal) then I’m happier and less stressed. And if I’m inspiring people to re-examine their own days and their accomplishments to see that they do more than they think they do too, then so much the better. (Conversely, I’m sure there are people out there grumbling because they think I’m showing them up by boasting about what I get done, like the folk who hate seeing writers post word count because they see it as some sort of competition or judgment, but really? That’s so not why I’m doing this.)

I have to get into my head that Fridays are half-days in the summer, because of HRH’s summer hours. The boys come home after lunch.

Things I Did Today:

– 3 loads of laundry (was raring to go at 7:45 but waited till 9:00, because there’s a tenant in the downstairs apartment again and I thought it graceful to not start the machines till the standard accepted-noisemaking-hour)
– baked bread
– baked shortbread squares
– finished and handed in the freelance assignment
– finished and sent the rough draft of new baby naming ritual (the babies, they just keep coming!)
– printed out new music
– registered the group and paid for the upcoming camping weekend
– printed out medical and waiver forms
– set the breadmaker up on the timer to make pizza dough for supper

Somewhere along the way today I realised that I have a birthday party to plan for next Saturday. I did ask the boy earlier this week what wanted for his birthday dinner, and he said hot dogs, to which I said, er, no, because I am not serving my parents and in-laws hot dogs. I was thinking salmon. I wonder if that qualifies as a “five-year-old food” in the boy’s hierarchy of age-appropriate consumables?

Okay it’s 1:00, and the boys are home. Time to pack up and head out.

Thursday Log

Witness my ongoing quest to record my daily activity so I don’t feel like the day was a complete waste!

– constructing spreadsheet to keep track of all the house listings we’ve thrown around; we keep coming up with the same listings and wondering why we haven’t pursued them, so I have to dig back through my e-mail to find that they sold two weeks ago. It would also be useful if real estate listing sites actually marked listings as sold instead of leaving them up. (This took a stupid amount of time, as I had to track back through e-mails and bookmarks, but now I am on top of it going forward.)
– bill-paying
– filing and office maintenance stuff
– freelance project (done except for a final polish and proof tomorrow)
– lots of phone calls in and out (bank, real estate agent, dinner reservations)
– lots of house research (this is a stupid game that isn’t as much fun as it should be)
– dinner prepared in the slow cooker

Wednesday Log

Hey, I found an extra day this week. Not that there’s actually an extra day (I could sell something like that on eBay and make a mint) but for some reason as of yesterday I thought there were only three days in the week left, when there were actually four. It’s like I’ve got a bonus Thursday or something. And a good thing, too, because I’m going to need it for the freelance thing.

– more scheduling and planning
– did a mock-up/rough draft of a concert program for my cello teacher (this breaks down into looking at samples, researching and downloading new clip art, trying to figure out the new printer settings for duplex printing, and so forth)
– blogged the weekend roundup
– blogged the May book list
– washed my hair
– tried to nap when I started falling over, was thwarted by the phone
– caught up on more of the way-behind-inbox
– did a splash of the freelance assignment (every time I sat down something else happened that I had to handle)
– more house research
– half an hour of seriously overdue practice for orchestra tonight

ETA: Orchestra, of course.

Tuesday

I’m going to try to list everything I accomplish in a day, because I have been feeling very not-accomplishy, and if I see it all down on a list maybe I will feel better about my days.

On Tuesday, I:

– handled a third of a freelance assignment throughout the day (323 pages of manuscript and a 24-page report; you do the math)
– made muffins
– researched productivity programs and started testing ToodleDo (very useful so far, especially since I can access it via the Touch)
– scheduled out the rest of the week (that takes longer than you think)
– made a marinade in which to soak the chicken breasts for the dinner fajitas
– researched more houses
– whittled away at the unanswered e-mails in my inbox

Today I’m keeping better track, so the list should be more complete.

Weekend Roundup

Busy end to a busy week. Gah.

The kindergarten orientation went brilliantly on Friday; when the boy’s name was called he hopped up and trotted out of the library to get his nametag and wait in line without even looking back. There is another boy in his class with his full name, and one with his nickname, so things should be very interesting. (There are also two Scotts, a fact the boy finds very interesting. He thinks it’s fun that someone else shares his name(s), too). If the stars align he shall have one of his old preschool educators as his teacher, although the second kindergarten teacher is very nice as well.

We enjoyed our own school tour, and our orientation sessions about school life and rules and such. Looks like HRH may join the parent committee that handles things like planning events and upkeep and such things, and I will likely volunteer at the library one day a week. Every single teacher and administrator we met was cheerful and open, and the school had a wonderful vibe to it. We’ve made the right choice. We eventually met the boy in a kindergarten room where he showed us all sorts of things with great excitement, like building toys in bins and caterpillars in little containers that the current kindergarten kids were studying.

After that we walked the boy back to preschool and I went to run errands and set up in a coffee shop to handle the interview questions that I’d been poking at for a couple of weeks, and HRH went back to work. He picked me up a couple of hours later and we went back to preschool for the boy’s play, which was hilarious. The educators and kids did a fabulous job on the sets, the costumes (that parents helped with those), and their lines. The kids were all animals on a farm, and the boy was the billy goat. Then we all had a feast of classic summer backyard picnic foods, and I wish we could have stayed longer.

My cello lesson went really well, something that surprised me. Apparently the key is to be exhausted, because then you don’t overthink or tense up.

Saturday morning we went out and got the boy new sandals (these are size 11, his old ones from last year were size 7, what are we feeding him?) and shorts, picked up groceries, and hit the library for some books on trains — no, robots — no, spaceships! — and I collected the pile of reserves i had waiting for me. That afternoon I had a group cello rehearsal where everyone was finally in the same place and we played through pieces we’d never really rehearsed before. I wasn’t as on as I’d been the night before.

Going to see the weavers at the cultural rendez-vous in Pointe-Claire over the weekend did indeed get dropped, as did the boy’s monthly pagan playgroup meeting on Sunday morning because we were scheduled to go to another series of house viewings. The last one we saw was hard to pull ourselves away from: it was all polished glowing wood inside, just like an old cottage or farmhouse, with an exquisite new kitchen and bathroom, with two bedrooms upstairs under a peaked roof that had painted wooden floors, one of which could easily be split into two for two smaller bedrooms. But it just wasn’t big enough; we really need a basement and somewhere for my office, and this house had neither. Well, it had a basement, but I felt like I had to duck, and HRH could barely fit through the door to the very awkward stairs down. It would have been storage and nothing else. In fact, the last time HRH went down he cracked his head really badly. Later he joked that it was the house slapping him and saying, “I’m all wrong for you!” It’s sad when you really love a house but can’t do anything about it because you’d need to severely alter it just to live there.

When we got home I had to scurry off yet again for a cello rehearsal, this one a private accompaniment rehearsal. And while my first go was rocky in the intonation area, I adjusted my endpin, played through it twice more, and declared myself rather happy with things, somewhat to my and my teacher’s surprise. I think playing this piece with the piano accompaniment is easier, somehow; it gives me something on which to to hang the cello line.

HRH and I started watching the first season of Chuck this weekend, which we are enjoying immensely. I had no idea HRH had borrowed it, but I am hoping we can borrow more.

Monday I finished polishing the interview as I planned, even though I discovered to my chagrin that it had been due on the Friday, not the Monday as I’d plugged into my calendar and schedule. The interviewer sent a polite note asking if I wanted to reschedule as I was finishing up, and I felt like an idiot for my error. But It got done, and handed in, and I received another request for an interview that day for a different source, due in three weeks.

And finally, Monday late afternoon and evening I finished warping the loom that has been languishing in various in-between stages for the past few weeks. Hurrah!

What I Read In May 2010

A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire
Changes by Jim Butcher
The Accidental Sorceror by K. Mills
Overnight Socialite by Bridie Clark
Soulless by Gail Carriger
The Story of Cirrus Flux by Matthew Skelton
Simple Weaving by Hilary Chetwynd
By the Mountain Bound by Elizabeth Bear
Jacqueline du Pre by Elizabeth Wilson (reread)
The Reckoning by Kelley Armstrong
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (reread)

Changes: Whoa yeah. Well handled.

Soulless: I really, really wanted to like this more than I did. I wanted the world to be deeper, and the characters to be less light. It’s not the fault of the book; my expectations were different.

By the Mountain Bound: Elizabeth Bear is one of my favourite contemporary writers. She uses language so beautifully.

Stuff

How’s that for an inspired post title? That’s pretty much where I’m at.

It’s been a remarkably awful week. Not in terms of bad things happening, but in terms of not having enough time to do everything that needs to get done, and the literal (oh, how I wish it were figurative) nigh-incapacitating headache I’ve been fighting since Monday morning. My schedule is insane, and the insanity continues through to next Monday. I owe people stuff like replies to e-mail and uploaded writing and it’s just not happening. I’m writing this post to cover a lot of what otherwise would be a series of “I can’t respond due to workload,” the number of which would take up more time than the post itself. Essentially, I’ve been miserable and stressed, and it’s been building for a while (this week has just been the final-straw kind of thing) to the point that I am almost 90% sure I’m going to contact my doctor and talk about going back on medication, a decision that upsets a couple of other life choices, which in turn stresses me. (No, there is no winning in this situation, and it sucks. And no, I’m not convinced it should be the fibro meds, either.)

I may go back and do a proper weekend roundup (I’d like to, as there were a couple of things I’d like to write out for posterity) but in brief, it was lovely Victoria Day weekend with my parents in which the boy learned how to climb a tree (with help; he got out on his own quite handily, though, and no, that does not mean he fell). I picked up a refurbished Airport wireless card for the iBook I have on semi-permanent loan, so now I have a laptop that can access wifi, for which I am truly thankful. I was testing t!’s Asus eee, and while it’s okay, it’s a tad too small for me (scrolling back and forth to see a full display of a browser or word processing window is Not On) and runs so hot that it hurts my lap. If I were to get a netbook I’d go for one that has a 10″ screen instead of the smaller 7.5″. If this iBook ever gets recalled to its rightful owner, then I’ll just pull the $20 card and there’s no great loss.

We hit the ground running at home on Tuesday. I had a freelance thing I needed to have done by Thursday at noon, which looks great on paper, but Wednesday was a complete write-off due to errands, travel time, and house hunting. And even with Wednesday struck off the workday list, I would have been able to finish it by noon on Thursday if I hadn’t found a tumour-like object on Nixie’s stomach that was large enough and sudden enough to merit an emergency trip to the vet Thursday morning. (Thanks for cranking that stress up some more, there, universe.) That vet visit turned out to be a great relief, as the vet has pronounced it a non-infected mammary cyst that needs removal, but is fairly certain it isn’t cancerous. We’ll schedule surgery for her next week.

I got a few hours of extension for the assignment thanks to the emergency vet visit, and I had just as much trouble with this one as I’ve had with others recently. I think part of that has to do with how I’m second-guessing everything I write in the evaluation thanks to criticism, and while I know I’ve got great support for my recommendations I’m worried it will come back to me for major rewrites as the others have done, for tone if nothing else, even though I did what I could. I have other pro bono freelance things on my plate; there’s two pages of questions I need to answer for an interview with an e-zine, due May 31, and they’re insane. Each question is actually four jammed together. I’m going to have to pick and choose what to reply to, because otherwise it’s going to take about three solid days of work that I didn’t have time for before, and I certainly don’t now. Last week it was decided to do programme notes for the Canada Day concert, too, a decision I fully support because we’re playing an original piece composed by our conductor and artistic director that deserves notes (thank goodness they already exist), but that means I need to fit writing those in somewhere, too. The original due date was June 1, but the manager told me that I could have an extension, bless her.

This weekend is cello-intensive. I have a lesson tonight, a group rehearsal tomorrow afternoon, and a piano rehearsal with my accompanist tomorrow afternoon. This weekend we also really need to fit in a grocery order, buying new sandals for the boy (whose toes are peeking out last season’s, and half his shorts are too small with the other half being too big so I should buy a couple of pairs of those, too), and Pointe-Claire is having their twice-yearly Cultural Rendezvous where the weaving guild is hosting an open house type of thing, and I promised I’d stop by at some point to meet them and tour the guild room. That may be what falls off the schedule, alas, because we have house visits scheduled on Sunday late morning/early afternoon, which also means the boy will be missing his monthly pagan playgroup meeting.

We had our first round of house viewing on Wednesday, and it was… interesting. We love our agent. What I do not love is the fact that you have to go into every house looking for the bad stuff. The third and final house we saw Wednesday afternoon was very close to a Yes, except for the fact that it was close to the Louis-Hippolyte bridge, and I am so very tired of living near bridges and highways; I want something more quiet. That and the fact that the company next door built too close to their property line and as a result has annexed a chunk of the middle of the house’s back yard in order to have their code-required-15-foot-clearance around their emergency exit meant we crossed it off our list, which saddened us, because otherwise it was brilliant: solid construction, fabulous new kitchen, excellent-sized rooms with new windows, new roof, good layout, huge yard (except for that annex) and a full-height unfinished basement. Properties are cycling fast, so good ones will continue to pop up, though.

I tried to install the secondhand Airport Express last night, which failed miserably because neither it nor my computer sense one another as wireless devices, even though my computer is firmly under the impression that it has a wireless network set up. I picked it up with the intention of streaming my computer music to the living room stereo, but I gave up on it after an hour of trying to get it to work before I broke something, and installed the printer instead. That, thank goodness, worked. Yes, I ditched my failing-and-not-fully-functional HP Photosmart that lost the ability to scan when I switched to Mac a year ago, and whose ability to do straight printing degraded so badly that I banished it. (No great loss; I found the bill for it and I paid $50 for it on sale three years ago, so it had a decent run for the money.) We bought a new Canon MP560, which works like a dreamy charm with no hissy fits. HP and Apple had a weird sort of ‘nyah-nyah-can’t-hear-you’ thing with the all-in-one printers, where each claimed the other was responsible for creating new drivers so the all-in-ones would work properly with Macs. Every single HP product I have had has failed in some way, so I am more than happy to ditch them and start dating Canon. HP, we are breaking up for good and I will never, ever buy another one of your products. Go cry into your beer with Sony over there. In researching a new printer I discovered that Canons have a really good reputation for being Mac-compatible; in fact, Apple sells them in their online Apple store, which says a lot to me. So we picked one up last week on mega-special, and after testing it this morning I am very, very pleased indeed. I even love the bundled software, which is wildly unusual for me.

We had a ridiculous mini-heatwave this week that killed my appetite and energy levels. My sleep has been broken, which hasn’t helped the general state of things. I am, however, astonished at what I’ve been able to pull off so far this week. I will probably pay for it in spades next week.

I haven’t had time or energy to write, or warp the loom. I got half an hour of cello done Wednesday morning, but that’s it.

Today’s schedule:

– I am currently baking bread and muffins for tonight’s preschool potluck picnic
– get at least one load of laundry in (I have no idea when we’ll get the rest done)
– take bus+metro to the south shore to meet HRH (11:00), and to pick up my laptop that he took into work (I can’t carry that plus all the baked goods)
– head over to preschool to pick the boy up after his lunch, drop off baked goods (12:45)
– kindergarten orientation (1:00-2:30)
– take boy back to preschool (2:45)
– drop HRH back at work; go to office supply shop, then a Second Cup with the laptop to work on those interview questions (3:00-4:30)
– pick HRH up from work :94:45)
– go to preschool for the boy’s play (5:00)
– potluck picnic with kids and parents (5:30-6:30)
– take HRH and boy home, pick up cello
– cello lesson (8:00)

I should probably schedule in “pass out,” but I suspect that will happen regardless. Either that or I’ll lie awake for hours, like I did earlier this week.