Category Archives: Food

Weekend and Book Roundup

I am drinking the most excellent jasmine green tea this morning and feeling very happy about it. It’s Mighty Leaf Mountain Spring Jasmine, one of three remaining jasmine tea bags I’ve been hoarding from the huge sampler box ADZO gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It makes the morning very, very good indeed.

The weekend was lovely. There was the trip to the luthier on Saturday morning (see below for associated cello-squeeing), house tidying and general upkeep Saturday afternoon, a two-hour dinner prep and cooking Saturday night (in which I winged a roasted garlic-mushroom-onion-chicken thing that I served over pasta), the annual M&M birthday party Saturday night (at which we saw many many people, huzzah!), a trip to the Marche de l’ouest for fruits and vegs (we ate all the berries on the way home in the car, though, oops; but hey, it’s fruit) and then the bookstore on Sunday morning, groceries Sunday afternoon, and homemade pizza Sunday evening. The only thing I forgot to do was go to the bank to deposit a tax refund.

There’s been a lot of book reading lately. (Not that there isn’t usually, but it just seems more intense than usual.) I might be the only person I know of, or at least within three degrees of separation, who geeked out in absolute excitement over receiving my secondhand copy of the out-of-print Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525-1855. Gods bless Jane Baldauf-Berdes for writing exactly the book that I needed, fifteen years before I knew that I did. I devoured Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps and Last Days in an afternoon and evening, and will cheerfully lend them out to anyone looking for a decent and believable vampire story for teens. Ceri lent me her copy of Charles de Lint’s Dingo, which I also read in an hour in a half. I also finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma this weekend, and it was excellent. I looked for The Botany of Desire in the bookstore Sunday morning but of course it wasn’t in stock; if I’d wanted In Defense of Food I could have had one of twenty-three hardcover copies, but I wanted Botany. I don’t try to be difficult, really. (I also went with the intent of picking up Neal Stephenson’s new Anathem, couldn’t find it anywhere, was absolutely mystified at how they couldn’t have a single copy in stock when Stephenson is So Damn Big, then checked a terminal and discovered that it doesn’t come out in North America till Tuesday. Argh. Should have ordered the UK version that released on September 1 [obviously why I thought the NA edition was also out]; I could have had it finished by now.) Since they didn’t have the Pollan I wanted I picked up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle instead, which has been on my to-read list since its release.

I read the boy the first half of the first chapter of The Wind in the Willows while he ate his after-dinner ice cream cone last night. I’m stunned that he sat still for twelve pages of text with only the occasional pen and ink sketch tucked among the words. I’m looking forward to sharing this with him, a few pages at a time.

Speaking of books, I have to reread the hearthcraft book today in preparation for drafting this weekend’s lecture. I suspect everything I’ll need for this hour-long intro-to will be in one particular chapter, prefaced by a quick definition of the subject and the importance of addressing home-based spirituality. The problem will be keeping it to an hour! Those of you who won’t be coming to Hamilton for this festival (and really, that’s 98% of my readers here) can assuage their trauma with the knowledge that this lecture will be a condensed version of the extended one I’ll be presenting next spring at the Avalon Centre, and most likely at Le Melange Magique as well, to celebrate the release of the hedge witch book.

Time for more jasmine tea, then it’s word-making. I think I’ll work on writing till noon, have lunch, then do a rough patch of the hearthcraft lecture from the bits in the book I want to focus on. Tomorrow I can add and remove things, make it pretty, then remove elaboration till all I have is a bulleted list of points to make and talk about. Okay, that won’t all happen tomorrow, but it will happen over the next couple of days. I’d do it from memory except I know that I wrote things down in the book that I won’t remember off the top of my head while drafting a lecture.

To work! And more jasmine tea!

Good Things

Thanks to some help from Blade, the laptop is up and running and as of some messing about on my own this morning can actually connect to the Internet via ethernet cable. We’ll make sure the wireless works properly when I get the passkey again. (Duh. And this time, we’ll save it.)

Also very exciting: We have a new bed and new dressers/bedside tables! The bed is almost twice as high as our old one. The cats complained, of course, but the boy ran in, peeked over the top (yes, it’s that high) then hauled himself up without hesitation. I have to shift my clothes from the old double dresser to my single dresser today, and then the double dresser is moving downstairs to become storage. HRH has brought home the first half of the boy’s new-to-him bunk beds as well; I suspect we’ll have those complete and up by next week.

There was something else too, but I’ve forgotten it. The fact that we have new fish in the boy’s aquarium? (Six pretty guppies. All alive so far. The bonus feeder guppy died last night; I’m hoping that it will serve as a sacrifice to the Fishtank Gods and the others will be spared.) The fact that I made grape jelly for the first time yesterday? (And poured some of the boiling jelly over my left thumb while filling the very first jar; I credit the use of lavender oil with my ability to use it today, because liquid sugar? A bad thing.)

Nope; it’s gone. I’ll come back when I remember.

ETA: Aha! Walking past a mirror reminded me. I’ve now worn the new glasses almost every moment I’ve been awake for one week, and I can’t believe how light they are; I continually forget that I’ve got them on. Pretty much everyone who has seen me has complimented me (after first cautiously ascertaining that these are indeed the new glasses), and it’s a major sign of how much I like the frames that I’m taking the compliments at face value instead of questioning them or worrying that the complimenter is just being polite. Yay, new glasses! Yay, wearing glasses full-time!

Day One: Conclusion

Lunch out with Ceri was fabulous. We haven’t seen one another since my birthday, and that was for all of ten minutes. We chatted about so many different things: some writing (she asked what Orchestrated was about and I’ve never had to sum it up for anyone before…. other than the three-paragraph synopsis, that is), games and gaming, houses, her experiences at voice recording sessions for the game she scripted, her experiences at Comic-Con demoing the game, and her recent trip to Germany for more of the same. (Travel stories are much more interesting than my staying-at-home stories.) Then we went and petted all the gorgeous quilts on display in the shop next door.

Once home, I sat down and wrote a book review for an uncorrected proof I’ve read as part of the Mini Book Expo project. I’ll proof it and polish it tomorrow if necessary, then post it. I’m all set for freelance work tomorrow, and I may divide the day into half for someone else, half for my own writing. (Which is theoretical payoff in the future, as opposed to immediate income. But I’ve been over this countless times to make it All Okay in my brain already.)

The boys should be home soon. I’ll be making my homemade tomato-onion sauce for pasta tonight, with tomatoes, onions, and basil from the garden. No, they’re actually pulling in now, so in a few moments I should hear how the boy’s first full day at preschool went. I imagine I’ll hear about it while he’s still in the driveway, actually.

(Ah yes: there he is, telling the neighbours, “Hi! I was at school! I had fun!” And he evidently napped a decent while too. Excellent.)

Today:

1. I have a new printer. Completely functional! Copying, scanning, printing without stress, at last. And for the low price of two ink cartridges too. Thank you, back to school sales. And I purchased an extended warranty, thankyouverymuch. No way this one is going to conk out on me without recourse. Now if I could just isolate what’s clogging up my CPU after startup…

2. The boy has secured a two-day slot in the preschool we wanted for him! This will likely be confirmed as a three-day position tomorrow. I think I’m going to continue with the local caregiver one day a week for now anyway, because the boy hasn’t seen two of his friends in ages. And this way I can get tons of work done (read: get back on the manuscript review wagon) and sock away some funds.

3. I am making a kick-ass pot roast for dinner. You wish you were here. No, really.

4. I finally did the Facebook thing. Except not quite. The pro name is a Public Person page; my alter-ego Autumn is the regular page. This should calm my wibbles about the whole thing. Also, this way I get to be a fan of myself. This is important for building self-confidence and belief in one’s own validity.

5. EMILY THE-PIRATE-QUEEN HORNER HAS JUST SOLD HER FIRST BOOK AND A SECOND AS-YET-UNWRITTEN BOOK!!! Yes, this deserves all-caps. I capered madly about the office when I read the news. If you were a YUL NaNo back in 2002 you might remember Emily as my personal quota bar and word count nemesis. I ended up passing 50K before she did, but she’s absolutely beaten me to the publishing of fiction. And I couldn’t be more thrilled by the news.

Weekend Roundup

So, that increasingly bad fibro thing on Friday wasn’t my fibro getting out of hand. It was actually me getting ill. No wonder doing all my usual Soothe The Fibro! things weren’t working. It also explains the somewhat below normal two days leading up to it. I fought bad nausea all afternoon, and after consultation with HRH and Paze I cancelled my appearance at the Friday evening outing. Good thing too; I reached the falling-over dizzy stage of the Sick not long after I tendered my regrets.

However, I passed out and slept almost twelve hours straight, and woke up Saturday morning feeling a million times better. So much better, in fact, that we decided to hit Ikea as soon as it opened to see the new bed we’ve been thinking of getting in person. Not only did we agree on the bed but also on a redesign (read: actual thought-out coherent design as opposed to using the mismatched things we had — I cannot tell you how grown-up this makes me feel) for the bedroom, and a reading chair for my office. We introduced the boy to the concept of bunk beds on the showroom floor, which threw him into a level of cooled out far beyond what we’d expected. This is a good thing, because HRH is buying a set for the boy’s room from his office mate at the end of the month. We will be the Coolest Parents Ever when this happens, I’m sure.

We came home with a new duvet cover, a new carpet for the living room floor, a magnetic knife strip for the kitchen, and proceeded to clean the heck out of the house. I moved the books and bookcase that was serving as my bedside table downstairs to the communal office. We got rid of HRH’s highboy (which also served as his bedside table), I put three drawers’ worth of things into plastic storage containers and stacked them in the cupboard, and we now share the six-drawer bureau. We have two short tables on either side of the bed at the moment, rescued from other uses. Suddenly there’s lots of space and the bedroom isn’t so, well, not-relaxing. The clean-up continued: I moved a bunch of things out of my office closet, and I took down one of the shelf units in my upstairs office, condensing my herb collection down to about an eighth of what it had been. As I did I was struck by how familiar some of the smells were even though I hadn’t worked with those specific herbs in years, because they were the first ones I worked with: angelica, marshmallow, hyssop. Reorganising the storage for all my spiritual practise-related supplies made me think about how my practise has evolved over the years, and how my focus has flowed through certain areas and into others, and what sort of techniques appealed to me at different times.

Absolutely everything in the house got dusted, swept, and vacuumed. I tell you, it was like we combined spring and fall cleaning. We’re nesting, I suppose, getting things ready for winter. It certainly felt like fall late last week.

On Sunday we had brunch with the neighbours, a once-weekly event that got dropped when people ended up booked for other things on a regular basis. We’re going to try to get it going again on a semi-regular schedule. It was wonderful to sit and talk and munch. Blade introduced his Rubbermaid tub of Lego to the boy, who had lots of fun playing with the Lego people and dragons and vehicles, but wasn’t completely clear int he concept of building with the bricks. There’s nothing like a box of Lego to get all the adults in the room interested in what’s going on and mucking about with it.

Sunday afternoon HRH and Blade swapped our washer and dryer for the ones in the communal office space, and HRH moved things around in the garage yet again, making even more room. His bike is now ready for use; all we need is an extra coupler attachment for the bike trailer and we’ll be set. There was gardening done, groceries obtained, and I made my very yummy and creamy much-less-than-seven-teaspoons-of-sugar (gah! who knew!) version of iced cappuccinos in the blender. We finished the day off with a truly delicious homemade spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. I made two loaves of bread yesterday because the first one was completely gone by the end of the day. Yikes.

Despite the amount of work and the being sick at the beginning of it, this was the best weekend we’ve had in a long, long, long time. I think we’d forgotten what being relaxed around one another was like.

I leave you with a six month old Foxtrot cartoon. Yes, I am behind the times.

(Oboe! Hilarious!)