Category Archives: Food

Work-Avoiding

It is really so very hard to do these evaluations when the manuscripts are awful. I have to couch things in diplomatic terms and come up with suggestions of how to improve it. It takes at least twice as long on a bad one as a good one takes. Fortunately I get two or three good ones for every awful one. I told Ceri I was work-avoiding yesterday, and she said, “So I take it This manuscript doesn’t need an editor, it needs a paper shredder is right out as a commentary?” That’s kind of where things are at right now.

I have finished the basic review; now I have to go through it and make sure my formatting is correct and I’ve said nice things before I say mean things. Diplomatically. Ugh.

To give myself breaks from it throughout the day, I have baked maple walnut muffins (note to self: when you make them half the size, reduce baking time accordingly, you idiot) (but it’s all right, Liam won’t care if they’re a bit crunchy; he’s a sweetheart that way), I have done laundry, I have eaten lunch. Now to the final step of polishing the review and sending it off. It has to be out of my hands by the end of the work day or I will go mad.

Ye gods, orchestra tonight. I should kill this headache that is spawning in my lower skull in plenty of time.

Cautiously Optimistic

Ah, sweet, sweet crackers. I have eaten half a box of Carr’s already and am feeling very chuffed. Next: The fresh bread that will be done in, oh, forty-five minutes. And the rest of yesterday’s soup.

The new cell phone is operational. The last customer service rep I spoke with was very supportive and sympathetic about the lost-then-stolen-phone plight, and we tsked together over ‘people today.’ Now I get to spend half an hour entering numbers from the address book. Oh, joy.

And there will be writing today, too, especially since I notified the central whatsit of the company for whom I’m currently doing freelance evaluations to tell them that it’s day five and I still don’t have the required material to complete the assignment given last Friday, so I’m telling them to take the assignment off my to-do list because even if they get it to me today I can’t hand it in by the deadline this Friday. As for what I will write today, I don’t know if it will be Orchestrated or some developmental work on the collection of essays I thought up the other day. (Upon a quick scan of the posts I’ve made over the past two weeks I see that I have not mentioned this project here at all. Consider this your notification, gentle readers: I thought up a themed collection of personal opinion essays the other day. There.) Or I could work on both, too. Nothing stopping me from working on one till I run out of steam, then turning to the other.

Delays, Delays

Despite being told I had a new assignment on Friday afternoon the required manuscript still hasn’t appeared in my work folder. I’ve sent a second query to the controller; we’ll see what happens. They’d better adjust the due date accordingly.

The good thing is that my copy of Strings just landed in the mailbox, so I have something shiny to distract me while I wait. I think I will attempt some soup, too, and maybe a cracker or two. I wish we had a Lipton’s chicken noodle packet; there’s something comforting about fake soup, although the recipe seems to have changed. As it is I believe that there’s a can of minestrone in the pantry.

I should activate the new phone, too. Unfortunately, transferring my account to a new phone can’t be done online; I have to actually speak with a customer service agent. I’ll wait until it’s past lunchtime to do that, though, or I’ll be on hold forever.

Hello Monday!

Not dead — just busy having a fabulous weekend.

Friday was entirely consumed by the freelance evaluation I wanted done by noon. It wasn’t. It was a tricky one to handle because of the subject matter. We had homemade pizza for dinner (which has now officially become the Friday night meal in our household, because our homemade pizza is yum), which went over very well.

Saturday morning we dawdled for while over coffee/tea/trains, then headed out to try to pick up various necessities. This was foiled by the store advertising an item we’d intended to pick up as a Christmas gift for someone being out of stock of said item, so we moved on to get the rest of the list. We wrapped the morning up by taking the boy out for a hot dog lunch at a local La Belle Province (because we have become highly disillusioned with the quality of food produced by our local Lafleur‘s), where we ate in a booth with sparkly vinyl benches and chrome fixtures. The boy approved. We were very happy with the flavour of everything, and so our allegiance has shifted (at least between these two local franchises). While the boy napped I managed to get half an hour of work on the runs in the final movement of the Haydn symphony done. (Official state of stun: I practiced on the weekend.)

The local grandparents came over Saturday after the boy’s nap to stay with him for the evening. HRH and I went out to our favourite sushi restaurant for our anniversary dinner, a treat afforded by my mother’s generosity. We hadn’t been there in three years, but nothing has changed: same jazz CDs, same decor, same delicious everything. We ordered a very ambitious and enthusiastic amount of sushi, and ate most of it, too, earning the amused approval of the chef who’d assembled it for us. We boxed up the remaining sushi and maki and brought them as our buffet offering to the fifth annual Tarasmas event!

I have written about Tarasmas before (notably here and here) so I won’t rehash the explanation of the event other than to say that in a glorious turnaround of the birthday gifting tradition, t! throws a party that revolves around a series of one-act plays he writes for the event, to be performed by the partygoers who get their scripts around fifteen minutes before they go on. Tarasmas 2008 featured a medieval comedy replete with puns, a Western ( “I was just trying to kill you to get your attention”), and an old-fashioned melodrama that required traditional audience participation (in which zombie chickens made a special musical appearance). This year I got to play the heroine of the melodrama, which was, like the previous two plays, hilarious. Tarasmas is a great opportunity to appreciate clever writing, t!’s genius in assigning roles to people (to either draw them out, play against type, or play to their strengths) and to enthusiastically abandon oneself to laughter and cheering. It’s not about performing well; it’s about fiftyish people participating together and sharing the experience, either as performer or audience member. It’s truly a group effort, with t! as ringmaster. Every year just gets better and better.

I’d been looking forward to Tarasmas for days because I knew I’d see lots of people I hadn’t seen in a while, and have tons of fun. And I met new people, too, and had lovely conversations with them. I got to try Ceri’s new Aspire One, which was very adorable but just too small for me. Now that I’ve tried it properly I have laid to rest the excited-writer-coveting-new-toy part of me that had been dying for one of these mini-notebooks since they were released a couple of months ago. It’s good to know the secondhand iBook route I’ve been exploring is the better option for me.

I didn’t take my medication until I got home (and a good thing, really, because if I took it at the regular time I wouldn’t have been able to make it all the way to the end of Tarasmas and the final play, which would have been somewhat problematic as I was in it) and so I didn’t fall asleep until somewhere around two-thirty. Consequently I didn’t wake up until sometime after nine the following morning. But once I was awake, Sunday was lovely. We headed out for groceries and wine because my mother and her sister were stopping by for dinner on their way to start their lovely driving tour through the Eastern Townships. I haven’t seen my aunt in about six years, and seeing my mother any time is great. I decided to make some sort of approximation of the delicious chicken-Brie puff pastry thing I’d had when we went out to dinner with Brendan in Old Montreal this past summer, and wow, did I ever succeed! It’s always slightly unnerving to make a dish you’ve never prepared before for guests, but this was a terrific success. I served it with a simple salad of baby lettuces and parsley in a sesame oil-rice vinegar dressing. (Yes, yes, I will post it on the Recipe Trade forthwith.) We’d given the boy the responsibility of deciding on a dessert, which meant it was ice cream (although I had a local ice cider to offer as well as an after-dinner sweet). It was a lovely, lovely evening and I wish I could do things like that with my family more often. My aunt told us we had to come down to stay at the cottage in Mahone Bay next summer, as HRH has an entire month off, and we accepted her offer. It’s been six years since I’ve been back to the Maritimes, and I miss it. It will be a lot of fun to introduce the boy to wading in the ocean, picking periwinkles and seaweed, and chasing crabs. And mussels. Oh gods, yes, the mussels. By the potful.

Took my medication on time but couldn’t fall asleep till one AM anyhow. Nevertheless, I woke up at 6:30 when the boy pattered into the bedroom saying that he needed to go to the bathroom, and spent a pleasant hour with the boys before they headed out to school. I expected to have a new freelance assignment this morning but it seems that the one I handed in on Friday afternoon hasn’t been processed yet. So I have some time to catch up on news and such and maybe whack out a few words in a file somewhere.

The weekend was so wonderful that not even the very grey day outside my window can bring me down.

Weekend Review

I cannot find my CD of William Boyce symphonies anywhere, and it is making me very cranky because that’s what I want to listen to this morning, damn it. I have to settle for Percy Grainger piano stuff instead. Which is nice to rediscover and all, but he’s not William Boyce.

The weekend ranged from really quite nice to argh and back again.

1. Lovely weather. Everyone’s health seemed to improve somewhat, at least during daylight hours. Thumbs up.

2. Saturday morning: We found HRH a new fall jacket, I picked up some heel liners for my red shoes, and then we headed out to Longueuil to pick up my cello. And oh joy, it sounds bee-you-ti-full. My cello has always been easy to play (in the getting-sound-out-of-it sense, not the oversized-body-thick-neck-argh sense), but now it’s even easier! I always forget how strings deteriorate in sound quality over time, and the awful warp on the bridge certainly wasn’t helping. I, like an absent-minded sick person, wore a long straight denim skirt and a black sweater along with my red shoes. Lovely for a day out in fall; not so conducive to cello-playing. No matter; I sat with both knees together and to the left, and played the cello side-saddle to hear how it sounded. The ten year old girl there renting her first violin gave me a surprised look. Anyway, lovely, lovely sound: I love the feel of the strings, the new scoop on the fingerboard makes thumb position easy to play (I never thought I’d say that, ever) and the bridge is just beautiful and looks so much sturdier than my last one from my now-ex-luthier. They reshaped the pegs, too. “Really?” I said. “They were fine — never stuck, never slipped.” “You’d have noticed sooner or later,” the assistant luthier said darkly. “They were decidedly… oval.” And then he asked shyly about the mystery cello, which is still tucked away along a wall of the workroom, so I obliged him by telling him the Secret Origin story. The luthier flew in from dealing with three people in the other room long enough to make sure I was thrilled with the tune-up and then apologised for not getting to the quote on the mystery cello; he said things were very busy. I assured him that of course it was busy, it was the beginning of the school year as well as the concert season, and not to stress about it. It’s going to take a while to restore anyway; a few weeks aren’t going to make much difference in the long run. It’s also not like the mystery cello is my main instrument, and I’ve lived fifteenish years of my cello-playing life without it. Of course I’m excited about it, but there’s no rush.

I forgot to buy rosin again. Again. I give up.

I didn’t bring my bow with me to test the new setup so they lent me one, and it’s a good thing I didn’t play with it for more then five minutes because I was falling in love with it. Perfect weight, nice balance, good springiness; more responsive than the one I currently use, which has been my favourite up till now. The assistant helpfully looked it up for me: pernambuco of Chinese make, four hundred dollars. If it had been three hundred I’d have bought it on the spot. But still, it’s a decent price for a pernambuco bow with those fittings and that kind of response. I keep telling myself there’s no point in buying a new bow now if I’m going to be playing a different cello in a few months. But I want it.

3. I finished Anathem last night, a brilliant philosophical story that reminded me a lot of the discussions we used to have after classes at the Liberal Arts College. And on Saturday I read the entirety of Mr. Darcy Presents His Bride, a book I obtained for review through MiniBookExpo. Best Austen sequel I’ve ever read.

4. HRH took down the awning on the back deck and removed the air conditioner from the kitchen window, replacing the regular windows instead. Suddenly there is a lot more light in the kitchen. He also moved the heater from the wall that backs onto the neighbours’ place (a inside wall, which makes no sense) to the half-wall in the kitchen that backs onto the living room, i.e., in the middle of the house (which makes a heck of a lot more sense). This involved buying electrical cord and a junction box, turning the electricity off, installing said junction box, feeding new cord around the kitchen, wiring it all in, turning everything back on to make sure it worked, then swapping baseboards to hide the old installation spot. Those of you who know HRH’s track record with electricity will be immensely gratified to hear that he did not experience a single shock. We’re going to look at doing the two similarly stupidly-placed heaters in the living room next, moving one to under the window (you know, where it’s actually needed) and removing the other entirely, which would enable us to put furniture along the walls. (What a concept!)

5. Saturday night I zoned out and forgot my on-line writing date with Ceri. I can’t even use falling asleep as an excuse.

6. Thanks to a timely question from Ceri on Friday, I realised that I’d written the harvest picnic down on the wrong day on the calendar. It was Sunday, not Saturday, and thus we had to cancel our appearance as it was in fact taking place concurrent with my mother in law’s birthday celebration. Grr.

7. We had the neighbours down for breakfast with us on Sunday. The waffles were so good we sent HRH back to the kitchen to make a second batch. Could have sat and zoned in the sunny living room all day, except we all had things to do.

8. I dug my first ever potatoes from the back garden on Saturday. They are so very adorable, ranging from the size of my thumb to the size of a Real Potato. We have enough for one meal. Note to self: next year, plant lots more potatoes. Although to be fair, this was a single potato that had sprouted in the darkness of the back cold closet that I chopped up and buried to see what would happen. Next year I’ll plant them seriously, at an earlier date and at a proper depth.

9. Lovely, lovely late afternoon visit with my in-laws on Sunday. I had a cappuccino as soon as I got there (thus averting the grumpy ‘no I can’t have after-dinner coffee with everyone else’ thing I always go through) and enjoyed it very much, along with the creamy Brie and crackers with rather fortified port wine jelly my mother in law set out for us all to nibble (last year’s jelly; it has aged, apparently). We had my father in law’s spectacular ribs for dinner and a light hazelnut cake for dessert. It was just so nice to sit down in the sun and watch the boy playing with Grandma. No energy, remember?

10. Laundry. Lots of laundry. Our clothesline snapped a few weeks ago and we keep forgetting to replace it, alas.

11. The cello still sounds lovely. It sounded much nicer at the lutherie, of course, because of the surroundings and because I wasn’t afraid to actually make noise. Pizzicato sounds terrific; nice sustain. I’m looking forward to playing it at orchestra on Wednesday.

12. Everyone else is getting somewhat better health-wise except me. Well, nights and mornings aren’t good for anyone, but I’m bad all the time. Everyone else is sleeping. Gnarr.

Right; my freelance assignment finally came through, so off I got to work.

PS: I have an iBook to play with for a week or so. Muah-hah-hah.

Oh, Bother

I should have just curled up in my reading chair and played Guitar Hero on the DS this afternoon for the amount of work-stuff I’ve actually accomplished.

I don’t have much memory of the day, really. I know I chatted with Ceri about books via e-mail. I know I answered the phone a few times, and both people who know me and complete strangers answered my “Hello?” with “Wow, do you have a cold?” The stranger from the bank cheerfully signed off our brief conversation with “And I hope you get better soon!”

I have made more typing errors today than any other day I have been alive, I am absolutely certain. I have spent as much time fixing errors as typing stuff in the first place.

At least I started dinner. I’m doing a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker, in a homemade barbecue-ish sauce consisting of tomato paste, vinegar, brown sugar, and Worcestershire sauce, plus an onion and a teaspoon-size blob of Montreal steak rub. (And on this topic, I cannot believe how many recipes for slow cooker barbecue pork consisted of “put pork in slow cooker, cover with a bottle of your favourite BBQ sauce.” Come on, people — that should be illegal.) I’d love to have it with brown rice but I think we’re out. It’ll have to be white rice. Grr.

Also? Despite my ears being blocked, the whine of the computer tower is driving me crazy. If only I could have it hidden in the closet or something, or in another room entirely.

Bah. And the boys will be home any minute, too. I think today just needs to be written off.

On the bright side, I tidied up my writing desk, and I’m loving this cool, clear weather. Hello, fall!

Orchestrated Update

New words today: 2,003
Total word count, Orchestrated: 9,393

Hello, pages and words. I love you.

Two new scenes, and my two protagonists have met and shared info and are now friends. Good. I may even have given a decent sense of who the new character is.

And speaking of orchestra, it’s the first rehearsal of the 2008-2009 chamber orchestra season tonight! I, of course, do not yet have my cello back from the shop, but someone is lending me one for the night. I’m very excited about going back because I miss playing (and not having a cello within reach for the past two weeks has driven me crazy), and also because we’ll meet our first guest conductor and get our music for the concert in late November.

Now I’m going to go get myself a drink, read some more Anathem and enjoy the language, and think about what to make for dinner. (I made sun oven-dried tomatoes with sea salt, herbs, and olive oil yesterday; maybe I’ll do something with them and some chicken. If I don’t eat the tomatoes right out of the container, that is.) Basically I intend to enjoy the fact that I have the next two hours to myself before the boys come home. Maybe I’ll have a nice, warm bath. Hmm; that thought has much merit. I also have a couple of sweaters to mend, as they seem to have developed holes during their summer sojourn in a drawer. I suspect that the bath will win out, though.