We’re back from spending the queen’s birthday weekend with my parents. It was a lovely visit; we are all tired but happy. The weekend roundup will happen tomorrow.
The boys are currently building a space shuttle in the living room.
We go to see our first slate of houses on Wednesday!
I’ve been having trouble recently trying to keep up with things and not sink under a general miasma of depression. There’s great stuff happening — the pre-approved mortgage which now allows us to act on the listings we’ve been researching for the past year, I’m writing again (baby steps, baby steps), great weather — but I’m struggling with the good old self-worth issue again. I’m dealing with a lot of general pain and achyness, my back is screwed up again, sleep is back to the waking-up-a-lot-and-not-hitting-deep-enough-cycles, and I seem to be saying, “Is [insert goal or activity here] worth it?” a lot more than usual.
Cello is currently freaking me out. Not only is there a lot of pressure at orchestra with new music that’s pushing us past our comfort zone again, but my teacher’s studio year-end recital is coming up and I’m uncomfortable with the lack of prep on the ensemble pieces. This isn’t necessarily me; a lot of people have missed the group classes for various reasons, and so our group pieces are all over the place. There’s that whole obstacle of the opening two notes of my solo piece which isn’t helping. Overall, it’s the pile of work that’s making me freeze like a deer in the headlights. It doesn’t help that when I do work on stuff, especially for orchestra, it doesn’t seem to matter or make a difference.
Most of my freelance assignments are coming back with requests for tweaks or rewrites, which isn’t helping my self-confidence at all. Monday I was ready to chuck it all and just spin yarn to sell on Etsy or something, because I obviously couldn’t handle my job, as light as it is. Rather surprisingly for me, I was proactive and wrote an e-mail to the coordinator I’ve been working with the longest and pointed out that I was getting a lot of revisions, and what could I be doing better? Her response was reassuring: I had been really strong for a couple of years, but had lately been developing a weirdness concerning one particular part of the manuscript evaluations I do, and she pinpointed it for me. I’d successfully addressed the not-positive-enough problem that had popped up in my work earlier, which was good to hear, but part of what had made me ready to give it all up on Monday was a criticism that I was being too positive now. (This has happened before; I’ve been corrected on a couple of things and applied them to the next few assignments, only to have my corrections pointed out as incorrect for a different reason. Frustrating, but all valid.) We talked about the new problematic issue and it was somewhat of a relief to hear that she didn’t know how to fix it either. A solution would have been nice, but both of us brainstormed a bit, and we’re trying a couple of different techniques to see if we can adjust things. I came away from it feeling a lot better, or at least I wasn’t writing up a resignation letter in my head any more, convinced that they were about to fire me.
I got two inches cut off my hair last week, which helped somewhat. Now when I look in the mirror I’m not cranky. I went to the salon around the corner that I’d tried just after the boy had been born; I’d felt neutral about it then, and still do, but it’s thirty dollars less than the salon that the stylist I’d been seeing for the past three or four years moved to. What she was charging at her last salon was pushing my budget; the new place made it impossible for me.
I spun two ounces of BFL in a pretty purply colourway; it’s one of the Fleece Artist braids that I picked up in Mahone Bay last summer, and reminds me very much of the colours inside a mussel shell, a couple of cooler purple shades with touches of pinky-browns and a bit of old rose-silver. It’s not quite long enough for what I’m aiming for, so I weighed out two ounces of tussah silk and started spinning that to ply with it. A handful in, I realised that the natural honey color of the tussah was lovely but was going to ruin the colour effect, so I messed about in the kitchen with my dyes and ended up with a truly gorgeous one of a kind colourway that will complement the BFL nicely:
It looks a bit muddy in the photo (silk doesn’t seem to photograph very well) but it’s got the same colours the BFL has, only sort of in reverse weight: mostly warm pinky-browns and blueish silver with the cool purple tone. I’m not sure exactly what it’s going to look like spun up and plied with the BFL, but I know it’s going to look beautiful:
I wrote 1200 words the other night, and five hundred yesterday before the boys came home and there was no hope of focusing. I think I’m going to have to draw up a schedule so I can check things like a half-hour of cello off, an hour of writing, some spinning or dyeing work, and block off time for whatever assignments come my way. Crossing things off a list make me feel much more secure regarding my time management. Last week I was attacked by naps pretty much every day, which didn’t help my productivity (but obviously rather important). So far this week I’ve avoided that, but I don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue avoiding them if I’m not sleeping at night.
It was a lovely weekend. It felt like it went on forever, such a nice change from wondering where the weekend went. The weather was spectacular, which helped a lot. Our windows were open all the time, and the scent of the lilacs from over the back fence is just heavenly. I’m enjoying it, even though I know it’s all two weeks early. Normally we’d be gardening in weather like this, but as we now have our official pre-approved mortgage and are looking for a house on the south shore this summer (yay!), we’re not planting annuals or doing the vegetable garden this year. The extent of our planting was scattering wildflower seed in the front and side gardens, and trimming the deadheads off the tulips.
First thing Saturday morning HRH and I went to get our passport photos taken. And wow, in this day and age of digital cameras, it’s five minutes and done. They even showed us the digital pictures and asked if they were okay. Then we went to the library for our new library cards, and the boy got his photo taken because it’s been two years since the last one, which is almost half a lifetime ago for him. (I got to keep mine, because I don’t change as rapidly as he does.) It’s been about six weeks since I’ve managed to get to the library, so I paid my lingering fine and grabbed a couple of new releases.
Saturday morning I had one of those cello lessons where I almost reached the point of tears because I couldn’t play an open D followed by an open A. Yes, you read that right. I hate the opening bar to pretty much any solo piece, and the Lully gavotte is no different. I’m too forceful, I’m lifting the bow, I’m not articulating properly, where’s the contact between bow and string at the tip of the bow… I could go on. Two stupidly easy notes, open strings. And yet I can’t do it properly.
While I was celloing HRH took the boy to the toy store so he could buy a Playmobil airplane with the sixty (!) dollars he’d saved up in his piggy bank. They picked me up from my lesson and we stopped over at Ceri and Scott’s place so they could sign our passport applications as guarantors and references. Back home we had a light lunch and then everyone kind of rested, the boy on purpose and HRH and I somewhat unintentionally. I started measuring the warp for a new project on my warping board and managed to completely overestimate the finished length, so I measured two feet more of warp than I needed, which meant I ran out of yarn very quickly. In self-defence I must point out that this is the first time I’ve used a warping board for a full-length piece, and zig-zagging back and forth in a small area makes a length look much shorter than it is when you stretch it out. I redid my calculations and saw that I’d been overly generous with my calculation of loom waste, but even if I’d been measuring the two-feet-shorter version I’d have been short of yarn. I would have to buy another skein of it, which was mildly annoying because I was doing this to use up this particular yarn. Other really frustrating things happened too, like the skein tangling terribly while I wound it into two centre-pull balls, and then the centre-pull balls tangling terribly. (This last is particularly infuriating because centre-pull balls are supposed to eliminate tangling.) Coven was cancelled that night, so I had a hot bath and went to bed.
Sunday morning we were all up stupidly early, so the boy and I headed out to buy that other skein of yarn. When we got home the boy and HRH mowed the back lawn, and then we all went out to do our weekly grocery order. After lunch we were ambushed by naps, and when we got up we went out for a bike ride! The boy biked to the local schoolyard and HRH and I walked our bikes behind him, and he practised cycling on a flat surface. Next trip the training wheels come off, because he hasn’t quite figured out that he needs to go fast enough so that he won’t fall over without them. But as this is the second time he’s used his two-wheeler (rain and the busy have prevented us in the past month) he’s doing pretty well, and is understanding steering and braking and putting a foot down on the ground when he stops. There was a bit of not wanting to try because it was hard/scary/required attention, but we worked through that. And he loved that we had our bikes out with him, too.
I finished measuring the warp for the new project, and I’ll wind and sley it today so the loom will be ready for weaving when I feel like it later this week. Today is also slated for writing and transcribing for my own work, making bread, and practising those two damn notes on the cello.
One month till the boy turns five. Thirty-one days.
We have to remember to round his age up when people ask how old his is, now. And he’s measuring actions according to his age. He will sometimes politely refuse to try a new food. “No, Mama,†he’ll say, “that’s food for a five-year-old. I’m only four. But when I’m five I’ll like it.†He’ll do the same thing with toys or activities; he’s saving some of them for when he turns five. Mind you, the reverse is also operative: some things he tells me are okay for four-year-olds, but when he’s five he’ll stop.
One of the funniest things about this past month was his discovery of baked potatoes. That sounds odd, but it’s so much fun to see him get excited when I tell him that we’re having baked potatoes with dinner. He saw an illustration of one in a picture book and asked what it was. HRH explained it to him, and he said they sounded delicious. So I baked potatoes the next night to go with dinner, sliced it open, put a curl of butter on top, and he was thrilled. He asks for them all the time, now. It’s like he’s discovered the most exciting food ever. Baked potatoes. Really. I mean, there are other cool things associated with dinner, such as how he clears the table and puts the dishes in the dishwasher and such, and usually asks to be excused (every time he got up from the picnic at Tristan’s naming ceremony, for example, he asked to be excused, which amused me; he must be the only little boy in existence who asks to be excused from a picnic blanket, not once, but three times), but the baked potato thing is just so wacky.
He is fearless and so very confident in his inability to get hurt. He throws himself from a standing position off the top of the slide, and swings from the top bar of the swingset. He doesn’t watch where he’s going when he runs, hurls himself enthusiastically around corners, slips, bounces off walls. We are mostly sanguine about this now. We are less sanguine about his ability to selectively hear warnings and instructions, and listening actively is something we’re working on. So is following instruction immediately instead of saying “I’m just going to do this one thing first.â€
His preschool is working on a play. He came home with a little script, very excited. They’re basing it on Leslie McGuire’s picture book This Farm is a Mess. The kids are all the different animals, and the educators are the narrator, the farmer, and the mama chicken (the baby chicks are being played by the three babies of the daycare). The boy has been cast as the goat, and said he needed a costume. So I, with my years of experience creating costumes out of nothing, pulled out a pair of black socks with holes in them, and cut off the toes. “What are you doing?†he asked. I slid them over his forearms and said, “These are your hooves and legs,†and I thought he was going to pop from excitement. I then pulled out an old grey t-shirt and cut out a tail and two floppy ears, tipping each with black marker. I sewed the ears to a black headband, put a big safety pin through the tail, gave him one of his grey shirts to wear, and voila, we had one little black and grey kid goat. He has been practising his “meh-eh-eh-eh†sound, and we sit down every day or so and go over his lines. The day he brought home the script he arranged HRH and I, and said, “We will do my play. Dada, you can be the farmer, and Mama, you can be the narrator; that means the person who tells the story,†he explained, patting my hand. I just about exploded with that indescribable feeling of pride mixed with joy and triumph. My son knows what a narrator is. I, of course, desperately want to be there to see this play be performed, but parents are almost certainly going to distract them (the average age here is two or three years, after all), so I think they’re planning on doing it in front of a video camera to make a movie instead, which we will all get on DVD. If they do this, I am praying that they do credits, because that will absolutely blow the boy’s mind.
Perhaps most poignant of all this month, however, was the morning that he asked for us to practise our cellos together before he went to school, and he played lovely open double stops while I played Twinkle over them. And we discovered that his own little cello, which is in truth a full-size viola, is now too small for him; he has undeniably outgrown it. If he’s going to play (and we mean seriously, not messing around with it as he’s been doing) then he’s going to need an actual 1/8 or 1/4 size cello, rented from the luthier. My teacher has a new student who is three years old, the younger sister of a seven or eight-year-old student, and so if he decides that this is something he really does want to pursue, then he has a classmate. We’ll talk about it seriously over the summer. I’ve already proposed the Suzuki week-long junior music daycamp for six-year-olds and under to him, and he’s responded enthusiastically to the idea, so we shall see. The last time he asked for music lessons I told him that if he really wanted to he could start once he was established in kindergarten, and that’s rapidly drawing nigh. The icon image is of a photo taken when he was two months shy of two years old. He is, to say the least, much larger than that now…
At my cello lesson on Saturday morning I shared my concerns about the Bach Gavotte with my teacher. A month working on it alone did me no favours. I recorded it a day or so before the lesson and hated what I heard. It just wasn’t smooth enough at this point in the game. And with so much work to do for orchestra and the ensemble recital pieces… well, I said I thought the Lully would be a better choice, and she fully supported me. So we proceeded to work on different bits of it, including a full ten minutes just playing the first two notes trying to get the articulation just right. She switched me to something else just in time before I lost it.
I know I can play the Bach at the Christmas recital. But it was my goal for this recital, and we mangled the timing. I feel better about the decision, but I’m still really disappointed.
I came home through the rain, picked up the boy, and we went to get my new reeds for the rigid heddle loom. The lady was wonderful. She reps Ashford, Majacraft, and Schacht out of her home, so if I need pretty much anything in the way of spinning or weaving equipment from any of the major companies (other than Kromski, who of course makes the next wheel I want, sigh) I’m covered by her and my LYS. I was there for about twenty minutes talking to her about things, and admiring the cherrywood Baby Wolf loom set up in the corner of her living room, warped for tea towels. She’s pretty much got me convinced to do the guild thing, even if I can’t make regular meetings. It’s amazing how meeting one kind, open person can change my mind. She told us about the upcoming cultural rendez-vous at the end of the month at Stewart Hall, one of the two cultural demonstrations/festivals they host per year, so I’ll go over with the boys and check it out. The guild is going to have things set up for demonstrations and an open house, and she said she’d show me their looms and projects.
Then we stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house, and the boy played with their new Prince of Persia Lego set while Ceri scrutinized the baby blanket and told me that it was wonderful and perfectly acceptable for gifting, which made me very happy. She also sent me away with a bottle of red wine, bless her. The boy and I shared soup and a sandwich at Tim Hortons, and then went to Pointe-Claire village to pick up chocolates for the various mums and mum-figures. After that we went to the little toy store after lunch so he could buy something with his twenty dollars, and he chose a Playmobil policeman on a motorcycle. He had enough money left over for a single figure, so he walked up and down the aisles looking for something, and then finally stopped, frustrated. “What are you looking for?” I said. “Mama, I need a girl police to go with this,” he said. The only policewoman figure they had was in a two-pack with a robber, so I paid the extra so he could have his “girl police.” Also, bonus bad guy for them to apprehend!
We got back home mid-afternoon and HRH went off in the car to run his errands, and the boy has a rest. He’s fighting a cold, and needed it despite the late naptime. I woke him up an hour later, and made dinner for him. While he napped I started weaving on the warp I’d done on the rigid heddle loom earlier in the week; I had new reeds to experiment with, after all, and so I needed to use up what I had on the loom! I’d played with combining warp threads of two different grists and an empty slot, and for weft I used the coloured Lion Homespun yarn I’d first tested the loom with in April. It wove up brilliantly, the warp threads making a lovely variation in texture, and the Homespun behaved perfectly as weft. I finished weaving it that night, but didn’t cut it off the loom till Sunday morning. (I think it’s a table runner, and I think it’s a wedding present for someone. I’m going to have to start making two of everything, because I want to keep this, too!)
We received or tax refunds in the mail on Thursday (yay!), so on Saturday night after the boy went to bed we treated ourselves to a sushi dinner while curled up in front of the TV, watching episodes of Castle that Karine had taped for us. (Yes, HRH found an operational VCR languishing in a storeroom at work, so he liberated it; now we can watch tapes again!)
Sunday morning we woke up to snow. I was pretty wiped, so HRH did the groceries. Before he left I got my Mother’s Day presents. The boy had made a card and “nests†at school, a stupidly delicious chocolate-peanut butter-Rice Krispie thing pushed into tiny foil tart shells, with peanut M&M “eggs†in the nests, and HRH gave me a card and a gift certificate to Ariadne Knits. The boy had an early lunch and a rest, and while he was napping our friend John came by and dropped off a big storage bucket of Lego, including some truly awesome specialised pieces, a robot, and a tonne of figures and horses. The boy was thrilled when he got up (which he did moments after John left, as if he has some kind of new-Lego radar). We let him dig gleefully through it for about half an hour, then we went over to HRH’s parents’ house. I stayed for half an hour and then had to leave for our monthly group cello lesson, which went relatively well for me up till the last ten minutes. I hate it when that happens, because those final minutes colour the whole thing. I went back to the south shore to rejoin the family, and we had a lovely Mother’s Day dinner, with a really nice red wine and a lovely cake for dessert, before coming home and collapsing in bed.
When I dragged myself out of bed today, I found HRH and the boy in the living room working with Lego, as usual. There was a robot on the table.
“Hey, nice robot,” I said.
“Yeah!” the boy said, excited, and proceeded to show me all the features, including a tiny helmeted Lego man sitting inside the robot’s head in front of a viewscreen. I looked at HRH, who looked back at me.
“I had nothing to do with this,” he said. “It was, ‘Hey, Dada, I want to make a robot. With guns. And a driver.’ So I said okay, and we designed it together. Dear Diary: Today my son built his first battlemech.”
The boy started telling me a story about it, and I said, “Wait wait wait: You’re telling me that this robot hangs from the bottom of a plane, from a rack? And the driver climbs down to sit in it? And then it’s released from the rack and falls to the earth to do what it needs to do?”
“Yes!” the boy said.
HRH and I exchanged a glance again, one of those wide-eyed ‘no I don’t know where he came up with all of this’ looks that we can’t help but trade now and again. Because, really, he’s had no exposure to battlemechs yet, unless one of you has been secretly showing him mech-based anime or something. The hanging from a plane thing is more steampunk, another genre he hasn’t had exposure to (beyond thematic elements in Miyazaki films) though knowing him, I’m surprised the robot doesn’t hang from a dirigible.
We’re kind of proud.
Everything seems to have happened on Saturday. The first half of Saturday, at that.
Saturday morning I had my first cello lesson in just under a month. Suddenly I had to decide between the Lully gavotte and the Bach gavotte for next month’s recital, which felt slightly unfair because we’d set the deadline at the last lesson and I haven’t had a chance to work on it with my teacher since then. I really do want to play the Bach, though, so my teacher said we’d do it. On the way home I second-guessed myself and was sure I’d made the wrong decision, and I’m still fairly certain I’ll blow it badly. But then, I’d feel the same way about the Lully, so I can’t win either way. In the lesson we worked on the upper body being free to move from side to side with the elbow-led bow stroke, which felt very awkward and wrong, but it did create some very nice sound. I think I’m too locked up when I play, so my teacher’s trying to get me to loosen up while still being aware enough of my body to control the sound.
Things to remember: Keep fingers aimed more toward the bridge instead of parallel to it, remember to use the back of the thumb instead of only the side in thumb position, don’t shortchange the last note before a new bow or phrase, stop leading RH movement with the wrist (my teacher was also initially trained to do this and her teacher still calls her on it, so I don’t feel as hopeless about this as I could, although I still feel pretty hopeless indeed), and the speed of the shift needs to match the speed of the song.
I raced home from the lesson to pick up HRH and the boy, stopped by the grocery store to grab cold meats and cheese and bread, then went to Angrignon Park for Tristan’s naming ceremony. (Yes, two naming ceremonies in one week.) It was lovely. Very different from the previous week’s ceremony, which was more formal in the setup and dress. This one was a circle of friends around blankets, balloons in the wind, and a baby who decided to protest the delay in feeding. We did a couple of fixes on the fly (a dandelion for the flower, the candle went out so I used the cloud-covered sun as the light) and there was laughter, which always blesses a ritual. And I finally got to use part of the baby-blessing ritual I wrote for my second book, which was intended to be used for the boy, but he ended up arriving early and in the race to keep up we never got around to holding a naming ceremony for him.
When it was over we all hauled out our picnic stuff, sat on blankets or camp chairs or around the picnic table, and ate. The boy ran around with MLG (fencing lessons with sticks; I love my friends) and a younger boy whom he decided needed looking after, so he kept feeding him, much to our amusement. HRH and I got to play with a cheerful ten(?)-month-old, who proceeded to impress his mum by trying to take steps on his own (with support, of course) and feed himself, and rather capably, too, for someone who didn’t do it regularly. And his mum asked if I’d do a naming for him, as well! It was so nice to just sit and relax with friends, and watch kids play, and nibble at stuff. A couple of hours later the threatening clouds eventually started spitting actual rain so we all packed up in about five minutes and headed for home, where we put a movie on for the boy and I was ambushed by a ninja nap.
Sunday was a very quiet day. HRH ran around, though, getting the summer tires put on (to our dismay, the sound the wheels were making was not entirely the winter tires; seems the bearings may need repacking, too) and heading over to his parents’ house in the afternoon to lay the new bathroom floor. Not having the brainpower or the energy to do much, I pulled out the spinning wheel and spun up two more samples from the January Phat Fiber box (yes, I’m only a third of the way through the samples; I’m making this last). I also wove in the last few weft ends on the baby blanket I wove for the last naming ceremony, and machine washed it to block the weave. I want to run it by Ceri first to make sure I’m not going to embarrass myself by gifting it (there are a couple of errors where a warp thread didn’t rise or lower properly so there’s a skip, but while I can see every one of them like they’re circled with blinking red lights, others probably don’t). Actually, I wanted to weave instead of spin, but since there was nothing on the loom, I didn’t. I had nowhere near the mental focus or energy required to wind a warp then get it on the loom. Maybe this week. I finally got a copy of Betty Davenport’s classic Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving, which didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering to me, but did clearly outline the process of warping from back to front, which I will try next time instead of direct warping.
Hey, my new reeds ought to be here at the end of the week.
Ceri lent me her point-and-shoot camera (I am discovering that a manual setting on a point-and-shoot is a rare thing, which makes me sad because I’ll have to pay more for it), so I can show the blanket off and the stuff I’ve spun over the past couple of weeks… once I have the energy to set it all up and photograph it. And in other random fibre arts news, I thought the size 4 Harmony tips for my circular needles from KnitPicks were faulty; one kept falling right off the cable, the screw not catching at all. I thought I’d have to contact them this week so I could keep working on my sleeveless sweater without losing stitches when the cable fell off the needle, which is what happened on Friday night. But I remembered that I had a second set of size 4 tips, which came in the full set I bought after testing a separate pair of tips and cables, so I tried one of them instead. It turns out that it’s the cable that’s faulty, not the tip. I tried another 24″ cable, et voila! The previously suspicious tips are just fine. I could call them for a replacement cable, but I have three other 24″ cables (one other from the original pair I bought, plus anotherpair from the full set) and I doubt I’ll ever have them all in use at the same time.
Finally, for dinner last night I used Karine’s garlic-teriyaki pork slow cooker recipe, and it was fabulous. Slow cooker recipes are usually simple, but this one was gleefully easy. Definitely a keeper. Next time I’m going to caramelize onions and fry mushrooms to toss on top of it before the sauce is poured over top at the table.