Category Archives: Words Words Words

Cautious

I was miserable late yesterday afternoon, and last night was worse. I either had a very bad system-wide reaction to something I ate, or had something gastro-like. It’s possible that it was related to the boy’s two separate episodes of illness last week (well, we thought they were separate, anyway) but whatever the origin, I’m just thankful it’s pretty much over. This morning it’s the traditional morning-after-the-night-before breakfast of tea and crackers, which is what I had for dinner last night, too.

The kicker is that I dreamed of making peanut butter marshmallow squares, so I woke up craving them. I don’t have butterscotch chips, or even chocolate chips to substitute. It’s probably a good thing.

The boy was very solicitous of my health yesterday. When I tottered out of my bedroom to read him a story before bedtime he met me and took my hand, patting it and saying, “It’s okay, Mama. I know your tummy hurts. Mine does sometimes, too. We’ll just go get you a couple of crackers, and that will help make things better.” Then he took me into the kitchen and opened the pantry, I got down a box of crackers, and we shared some. When I’d read him his story he turned to me and said very seriously, “Now, Mama, if you have to be sick, just run to the bathroom. You don’t have to be scared; I’ll be with you, and I’ll hold your hand, okay?” He was adorable; his tone was so serious and soothing. I loved it. I think we’re doing okay with this kid. He told me very proudly how he helped with one of the new babies yesterday, Sophia (nicknamed Kiki), and how he was officially at the Big Kid Table. HRH told me later that he’d had a couple of unsure moments at preschool, where he was evidently struggling with the very exciting ‘I’m a big kid and I take care of others and help the teachers’ concept while trying to integrate it into the ‘but I’m a little kid too’ reality. Apparently there were tears at one point, and when asked what was wrong he said, “I miss my dad,” which we think was shorthand for needing a reminder that yes, he was still a kid, and he wasn’t responsible for everything. It’s hard to integrate new responsibilities; there’s a lot going on internally with the whole self-consciousness and self-esteem and establishing one’s place in the world, forging new definitions and associations for interpersonal relations.

Today I’m planning to take things easy. I may cast on my lace scarf. I may knit some more rounds in my sweater. I’m certainly not going to work at the computer; sitting here is uncomfortable and hurts both my stomach and my head. I’ll read, and doze.

Weekend Roundup, In Which There Is A Visit To The Godforsaken Howling Wilderness

Wonderful, wonderful weekend.

Friday the boy and I had our special day out together. We visited the Melange Magique for incense, and the boy played with the resident cat Tequila and chattered away to Sam and Debra when she arrived. From there we went to Ariadne Knits to visit with Mary Louise and her ten-month old son Henry, and to inquire about the status of my wheel order. She tracked down my order for me and discovered that the model of wheel had been backordered at the CDN warehouse for a month. The order was closed on Friday morning, so it’s either on a truck or will be on one as of Monday, so I figure a week to two weeks at most for my wheel. I picked up a lovely skein of Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino fingering weight in soft variegated greens with which to knit a lace scarf. I will lick my hatred of fingering weight and lace in one simple yet elegant scarf for my fall jacket! We somehow spent an hour there, the boys interacting with one another and the store spinning wheel (the boy spent a lot of time turning it via the footman, and told a client who came in that he was spinning yarn for her to buy). Then it was home for lunch and rest, and then to the local movie theatre to see the new Miyazaki film Ponyo. It was very sweet, and the feel struck me as being a cross between My Neighbour Totoro with the magic of Spirited Away, and a dash of the humans-and-Nature-in-balance thing from Princess Mononoke. Excellent voice acting, truly stunning art (a lot of it takes place underwater or involves sea creatures), and a lovely score. The boy got very excited when he saw the Studio Ghibli logo on the big screen, as it’s a sketch of Totoro. Also: Astro Boy trailer! Woo! And Toy Story and Toy Story 2 coming out as a 3D double bill this fall!

Saturday morning the boy woke up at five. I sent him back to bed where he stayed very obediently till about six-twenty, but he didn’t go back to sleep. Then an hour or so later he experienced digestive upset, which was no fun at all for the poor kid. HRH was gloomy and predicted canceling our long-planned trip out to the Fearsranch to spend the day with Fearsclave and his lovely wife Carolyn, but I was stubborn. We’d already reduced the trip from an overnight to a day trip, and I wasn’t losing the single day. I bargained for leaving an hour later, and all was fine by then. We arrived in Alexandria at eleven-thirty on the dot and the fun began. The boy romped with Jack the dog and crawled after cats, then pulled books on trains off the shelf and brought them out to the swing on the back deck to share with Carolyn while the gentlemen hacked away at the threateningly overgrown tomato patch. There was a late lunch of corn on the cob, Greek salad, and homemade whole-wheat bread. We even had dessert first, a delicious lemon-blueberry-vanilla cake with vanilla glaze and strawberries on top. After lunch we wandered next door to the abode of Fearsclave’s parental units to coo over Bonnie’s new-to-her 30″ white ash Saxony Schacht-Reeves spinning wheel, and they left me there, spinning piles of BFL fibre that Bonnie just kept cheerfully handing to me. The slowest ratio on the Schacht-Reeves is 14:1; the fastest on my forthcoming wheel is 10.5:1! She also showed off her bouquet of spindles, which were lovely, and her fibre stash.

Dinner was a wild turkey, slow-roasted at a low temperature with lots of liquid to counter the leanness, potatoes and beans form the garden, and a Caesar salad. I whipped up some sage and onion gravy for the turkey and baked a pecan pie for dessert, and everything was delicious. Unsurprisingly, the wild turkey had a different texture and taste from the supermarket kind. The only oops was that we whipped the cream for the pie into butter. Heh. Around five o’clock the boy was a bit punchy so we asked if we could put a movie on for him, and wonder of wonders they had Kiki’s Delivery Service on DVD, which we haven’t seen in ages because our VHS player finally died. We paused it so we could all gather for dinner around seven, through which he was slightly drunk on sun and exercise and a missed nap, putting his arms around people and leaning his cheek against theirs, professing his love, and saying, “I like these people. These are nice people, Mama.” He went back inside to finish watching his film while the rest of us had tea and dessert, and we left with great reluctance around eight-thirty. The boy was fast asleep before we got to the end of the road. (Apparently we just missed t! and Jan on their way home from Tal’s housewarming party, which was a shame.) I was thoroughly pleased by the boy’s behaviour: he was polite, thoughtful, exuberant, and a very good boy in general. There were a couple of hiccoughs, such as his inability to remember that we told him (over and over) not to pick George the very old cat up, but George didn’t seem to mind, thank goodness; and when we were leaving Carolyn gave him her copy of The Jungle Book on DVD, and he was so tired that he held it and said, “But I don’t need this.” We had a whispered discussion about how when someone offered a gift we accepted it gracefully with thanks, and there was eventually a mumbled thank you. (All was well the next day when he saw it on the table and bounced up to it, saying, “I need to watch this today! It’s my new movie!”) He was very taken with all the adults who wandered in and out through the day. All in all, we had a wonderful time, and we didn’t want it to end. As we brought him out to the car the boy said, “I don’t want to go home. Can’t we stay here?” As his resistance to the idea of an overnight had been one of the deciding factors in making it a day trip instead, the whole-hearted about-face was satisfying. (The other reason was Monday was the first day of school for both the boy and HRH, so a full day at home before it seemed like a good plan. And it was.)

Sunday was our at-home/errand day. HRH picked up new shoes, and we went to the hardware store to pick up stain for the forthcoming wheel, new work gloves for the boy and I, and a belt pouch for HRH’s work essentials. The boys washed the car while I chatted with my mother, and that afternoon we did garden work, liberating a good two dozen full-sized potatoes and about six dozen tomatoes. I dashed out to pick up new jars for canning (because if one is canning, one needs jars, something I’d completely forgotten about) and to have a cup of tea with Ceri, then came back to start the process. In the past I’ve had horrible luck peeling tomatoes, even with the boiling water/ice water dip, but yesterday it worked like a charm. I suspect I’ve just not boiled them long enough is the past. I was quite disappointed that so many fresh tomatoes only yielded me four 500ml and one 250 ml jars of canned, but that’s what you get when you cut up things with lots of juice and seeds, I suppose. (Note to self for the future: Don’t start boiling the water for sealing the jars till you’re almost done ladling the stuff into the jars. Also, try making crushed tomatoes instead of doing a cold pack.) We were going to have steak with garden potatoes and carrots, but the steaks I’d bought had gone bad, so we defaulted to soft tacos.

Okay, there. That was the weekend. Lovely and relaxing. And really nice weather during the days, too, with rain at night.

First Day Of School!

I’ve never been so excited about a first day of school that wasn’t my own.

I just waved HRH and the boy off on their way to their respective schools. HRH has to deal with hordes of confused new students as well as a flap of teachers who will all be asking him for things they ought to have asked him for two weeks ago. (Also, hard to prepare rooms for you if you haven’t given the tech your schedule.) The boy is now the oldest child at preschool and has graduated to the Big Kids’ Table, with associated assistant-to-the-teachers duties. Most of the time he feels very important and a Very Useful Engine, but sometimes he drags his feet. (I understand. Sometimes I want to be a kid with no responsibilities again myself.)

I wish this meant huge and exciting changes in my own life, but alas, it pretty much just means part time school has turned to full time school, and I don’t have the car to run errands on a weekday or two.

There’s a weekend roundup coming, and I know I still have to do the boy’s fifty-month update. I suspect the latter will be quite brief, as I covered a lot of the update-worthy stuff in the vacation recap.

In Which She Cuts Herself Some Slack

In self-defense (mental, emotional, physical) yesterday became a Tylenol-and-reading-on-the-couch day around one or two o’clock. I did manage to bake bread, and a pan of caramel pecan squares, which required brown sugar, but we didn’t have any, so I used a mix of white sugar and molasses, which changed the taste and now I’m all “meh” about them because they’re not what I was craving. HRH likes them, though. The day improved around five o’clock when the boys came home. I had a guerrilla cello lesson, snatched from the sea of heavily scheduled summer, which I was very excited about, because I knew I was doing things wrong, I just couldn’t figure out what. My teacher pinpointed them in no time at all, which was a relief. So was moving on from one of the things I’d started on my own after we’d tweaked a couple of things. “We don’t need to keep that one,” she said, and that was a nice little ego-boost. Part of what teachers do for you is isolate the point of an etude or exercise so you know what to concentrate on, and she pointed out that the two pieces I’d been working on were, in fact, designed to make me think of placing my third finger on the fourth-finger spot. Thinking of the ringing tones as the targets was one of the goals of those pieces. So aha, I wasn’t going about it all backwards, as I’d suddenly suspected. All in all, it was a very productive hour and a bit. I knew I was doing things wrong (couldn’t figure out what on my own, of course — yay, job security for teachers) but there were only three major issues: shifting while extending (bad bad bad — close the hand!), bowing too close to the fingerboard when playing in higher positions, and needing smoother bow changes. We’ve decided that smooth and flowing bow motion is going to be our focus for the next little while.

It was very nice indeed to be told that I’d been making progress over the summer. It may have been standard teacher encouragement, but it matters to me. I’m much too hard on myself as a matter of course, both in cello and everything else. I’m learning to let go gracefully, as a friend put it recently. I can’t do everything well. I have to allow myself to do things acceptably, so long as I enjoy them. Stressing doesn’t help the situation. Taking the afternoon off to lie down and read because I couldn’t face work with the headache I had is something I couldn’t have done a few years ago; I would have beaten myself up about losing work time. Having a child and being diagnosed with fibro taught me a very important lesson, namely that the standards I set for myself are too damn high and end up being destructive instead of supportive. Any day that you walk away from (figuratively, that is) is a good one.

Then I stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house to coo over Ceri’s current knitting projects, eat zucchini brownies that you’d never suspect were vegetable-ridden, and have tea. I was very good and only stayed forty-five minutes. When I got home I discovered that there had been unfortunate excitement, as HRH put it. The boy had gone to bed at the usual time and had thrown up an hour later. HRH had cleaned boy and bed up, but today I had to scrub the bathroom to get rid of the smell, and wash some toys that were unfortunate bystanders. It was touch and go this morning as to whether he’d actually go to the caregiver, as he hadn’t much appetite, and while twelve hours had gone by with no repeat performance or a fever, you can never be sure. He eventually decided that he felt well enough to go after waffling about it (he kept giving me woebegone looks; I think he was gunning for an extra day home with me) so off we went, an hour later than usual. We suspect it was simply something he ate yesterday, plus the heat and running around. His caregiver e-mailed me to say he’d had a great morning, ate lunch, and fell asleep almost immediately, so things appear to be all right again.

In flipping around the iTunes store I just saw that one of the top twenty classical albums is “Ultimate Chopin.” This makes Chopin sound like some sort of hard-assed extreme composer. Yo! Put on the ULTIMATE CHOPIN! We got some serious butt-kicking to do! I mean, really.

I can hear gentle rain on the leaves of the tree outside my office window. It smells wonderful. This is nice. I hope it stays like this for a while.

Now to switch the laundry, and maybe write that final [missing bit here] of Orchestrated. I wish I hadn’t lost my writing playlists in transferring to the Mac. I miss them.

Wednesdays

While for other people it’s the middle of the week, it’s just another day for me. There’s bread rising, I need to go out and collect the tomatoes that are falling off the vines, and I should eat something. There’s a cello lesson tonight, too.

I discovered this morning that the Rock Band USB mic is actually recognized by the Mac, and records the cello. Unfortunately, it’s a mono mic and the sound is awful. But what I did discover by listening to the playback is that my sound is too timid most of the time. If I want it to sound better, I have to go all out; no holding back, giving notes their full value, especially before a rest, and so forth. Vibrato! Positions to avoid open strings! The whole nine yards.

In unrelated Apple news, I would like my Touch to actually connect to the internet when it says it’s connected.

It was cool enough this morning that I turned off the A/C and opened all the windows to let air move through the house. So much cooler, right away. The A/C and strategically-placed fans can only do so much for so long.

Twenty pages got edited yesterday. I found one last [write this bit] that I’d forgotten about, and that’s the last one in the book. Then I go back to trying to find a good hook to open with. I wrote a new prologue and a new opening page for the first chapter last week; let’s see if they’re still any good when we get to that point again.

Yawn

Yeah, I know. The Court’s a bit boring these days. If I’m here, I’m tired and uninspired. If I’m away, well, I’m away.

I made homemade bruschetta with pearl onions and tomatoes right out of the back garden last week. Piled it on freshly baked focaccia and couldn’t stop eating it. That ended up being dinner for me. I used Lu’s recipe, roughly, but used lime juice in place of the red wine vinegar. I don’t think I put any herbs in at all. Just tomatoes and onions that tasted like sun, plus sea salt, the olive oil, and freshly ground pepper.

The editing/second draft work on Orchestrated continues apace. I’m at the Oh Noes Accident And Hospital part of the story, which means I think I’ve bridged all the [write this bit here] gaps that I needed to bridge. I’ll find out as I continue on, but I seem to remember everything being pretty straightforward from this point to the end. This could, of course, be an entirely falsified memory cleverly crafted by my subconscious in order to maintain sanity.

With the air conditioner installed as of last Saturday morning, we are blessedly free of the high heat and humidity warnings that are piling up. And as an added bonus, I no longer hear the landscaping crews and power tools working outside. We were trying to make it through the summer without installing it, and really, we did very well. The summer has been cooler than usual, but apparently the weather’s making up for that with a vengeance. Yesterday around six o’clock the thermometer in full sun on the back porch read 42 C/106 F, and that was before factoring in the humidity. (Putting in the A/C unit two weeks before September. What is this world coming to?)

Camping last weekend was lovely. There was plenty of tree cover to shade us from the sun and a very good fire pit on our site, which ended up being the central gathering area for everyone. Lovely new people; and so the (co!)coven grows. The only bad part of the experience was arriving to find the fire pit still smoldering, which means the people who used it before us weren’t responsible. The not sleeping well and waking up in lots of pain wasn’t great either. But everything else was enjoyable. There were many marshmallows roasted.

My spinning wheel still has not arrived. I am antsy and cranky about it, as we are rapidly coming up on a month since I ordered it. I was hoping to have it by Saturday, as that’s when we’re heading out to the Fearsranch in Alexandria for an overnight, and both Fearsclave and his Wicked Old Step-Mother want to see it. Of course, the WOSM has just gone out and bought her own gorgeous double-drive double-treadle Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel, so we may end up geeking out together over hers instead of mine, as was the first plan, or comparing the wheels, which was the second plan.

I have a cello lesson tomorrow night. I need to play for a while today.

This is the boy’s final week of part-time preschool. As of next Monday he is full-time, which means this Thursday is his last day with the caregiver, and Friday is his last weekday at home. We’re going to go see Ponyo together to mark the occasion.

So yeah. Not very exciting, here. Mostly tired, with a side of exhausted.

It’s A Cello Thing

If I start thinking of second position as being 1 on 2 instead of 3 on 4, my targeting and intonation might improve.

(Yeah. Stupidly obvious. I know. Trust me, I’m cradling my head in my hands wondering how I got so off-course.)