Category Archives: Food

Grand Finale to The Week Of Birthday

The kids’ party was a success. (Or if it wasn’t, eleven kids and their companion adults did a very good job of conspiring to present a unified false front.) So successful, in fact, that we completely dropped the planned craft from the schedule and sent the kids home with their choice of wooden object to paint, along with their superhero balloon from the balloon bouquet HRH went out and picked up this morning. (He also picked up a Superman t-shirt for the boy, who had reluctantly agreed to wear his Spiderman shirt but argued earnestly that Spiderman wasn’t really a superhero. “Are you kidding?” said HRH. “Superman is super-strong, but Spiderman’s much faster than he is.” He came home with the shirt as a surprise, though, and the boy was thrilled to bits with it.)

So many compliments on the Superman logo cake. I tell you, it’s great to be married to an artist. I bake it, whip up the icing, then let HRH go to town with bowls of tinted icing, a pastry bag, and a paintbrush.

No one went overboard on gifts (lots of craft supples, books, and puzzles — thank you deeply, everyone, from the bottoms of our hearts), and Nightdemons sent their gift home with us yesterday as they were fairly sure they wouldn’t be here. Liam opened the bubble machine just as his first guests arrived, and it was an excellent ice-breaker once more kids who didn’t know one another gathered in the backyard.

Platters of fresh fruit, juice, mini hot dogs, pizza, cookies in the shape of fours, foccaccia and coffee/tea for the adults. Really, I will miss these easy parties once he gets older and more sophisticated. Today it was sheer joy for him and his friends to run around the backyard, play on the swings and slide and trikes and such, and eat kid-perfect finger food. Excellent weather for it, too. And as an added bonus, all the adults got to see one another for the first time in however long.

We all crashed for naps around 1:30. As it’s now five, there’s no way I’m making it to Ariadne for Spin In Public Day.

HRH and the boy are currently out back dancing like crazed things on the tiny patio area between the sandbox and the back gate. It’s soaking wet for some reason (the hose was out) and the boy is flinging himself around with a huge smile on his face, pulling off some pretty fancy footwork. I’d say he’s very happy indeed.

Today So Far

– Proofed and handed in my freelance assignment

– Obtained craft supplies, groceries, party food, tinting gel

– Returned books to library, picked up reserves (oh noes I was a day late with the Igntaieff book, paid my $0.25 fine)

– Baked bread

– Baked cookies

– Cake in the oven as we speak

Now, we just need to hit the party store on the way to collect the boy, and we need more icing sugar if I’m to make enough icing for everything.

I realised earlier that I won’t be warblogging the evening-before-the-party prep as I’ve done in previous years, which saddens me somewhat. Being up till midnight getting punchy from frosting various things has become a tradition.

I contacted the luthier and told them I’d be in next week to buy the 7/8. Except I miscalculated what I had left in my ING account, and I can’t count on my provincial return will be here in time, and my 4/4 hasn’t officially sold yet. I may have to send an apologetic e-mail to say er, sorry, will be renting one more month, thank you.

And then, to add insult to injury, someone’s just listed a double bass student model for $800 on Craigslist. I’m gritting my teeth at the moment. (First a house; then a double bass. There is no room for it here.)

Ack, must not forget to start the pizza dough.

… And Birthday Prep

Today is kind of a mess. There needs to be a cake and two batches of cookies baked, as well as our regular bread. HRH is doing most of the grocery shopping after dropping the boy off with the caregiver, while I finish up the latest assignment and hand it in. We need to head out to the craft store in the east end to pick up supplies for the crafty part of tomorrow’s party; party decorations need to be picked up as well, at a different store. We need to hit a particular grocery store for a couple of items not available at our regular grocery store, and another speciality store to pick up gel colouring for dyeing roving tinting the cake icing. I have a cello lesson tonight and it would sure be nice to get a lick of practise in today before I go. Dinner needs to be made and eaten in there somewhere, too. At least HRH has offered to ice the cake while I’m at my lesson. (ETA: Ack, need to pick up reserved books at the library, too.)

I think the tension is coming from the fact that I’m thinking of today as a work day with a bunch of other stuff that needs doing.

I suspect I will pass out once everyone’s left tomorrow after the party. I intend to hit Ariadne for the subversive Spin (Not Knit) In Public day when the boy naps, but evaluating how achy I am today after yesterday’s outing, and knowing what today and tomorrow morning entail, I suspect it’s not going to happen, no matter how much I want to try the wheel.

Ooh, news flash as of a phone call two minutes ago: Sparky has a new baby cousin! Well, of a sort; my cousin has a new daughter as of this morning, and we call our children cousins. (His daughters are my cousins once removed, but I don’t know what the term is for the relationship between our children themselves.) Hurrah! Can’t wait for pictures. We’ll get to meet her when we go down to Toronto in ten days.

Belated Weekend Roundup

Okay, here we go.

Thursday night: Marc’s vocal concert, at which I unashamedly cried because I’m so darn proud of him. He gets better every year, and his range is really expanding. (I mean vocal range, but the style of songs he’s exploring is also broadening.) There were about ten of us there, and it’s always fun to sit with friends at this kind of thing. We are all about the support.

Friday: Lunch meeting with Marisol, at which I was much more with it than the meeting we had in late winter. We nattered about a bunch of different things connected with her thesis, which she’s trying to recast as a personal memoir and anthropological exploration of language, cultural origin, and spirituality, specifically in Quebec with all its wackiness. It’s fascinating. I know nothing about anthropology, but I made a few suggestions to help make it more attractive for marketing and she’s all excited and fired up to begin. It’s fun helping someone uncover and refine their focus. Then I wandered around downtown in the sun for a bit, hitting the Body Shop and Lush and a used bookstore, where I scored copies of Deborah Lipp’s The Study of Witchcraft, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, and Robert Jourdain’s Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, all of which I’ve been wanting to read. (Eclectic, that’s me.) The boy begins showing evidence of a cold.

Saturday: Errands, mainly going out to pick up a gift certificate for Jeff and Pasley’s eleventh wedding anniversary, and prep for the family dinner. The big event of the day is the boy’s family birthday party. This is kind of blurry for me, as I was low on energy and doing stuff, but it went well. Everyone arrived around four, was served a drink, and the boy opened his presents. We were somewhat shocked to watch him tear one open then another and another without pausing to appreciate what was inside, which is most unlike him. We suspect an unintentionally misleading gift bag with a large WALL*E on it, which led him to think there was a large WALL*E toy he’s been coveting inside, so when he found clothes he kind of rifled through them and then turned to the next large thing, expecting to find it. Once everything was open he did go back to each gift one by one to explore it, though. There was a simple Millennium Falcon kit, a bug terrarium, new Lego, and Transformers, which wowed him thoroughly. He got me to open them right away, and grabbed Bumblebee from my hands. I said, “Just a second, I’ll show you how to…” and didn’t bother to finish because the four year old who’s never seen a Transformer before went flip-flip-flip and transformed it from car to robot in no time flat, then back again. (HRH and I = very proud. Also, go us for choosing a cool toy.)

Dinner was excellent: wet-brined home-cut pork chops glazed with a Dijon/maple syrup/beef bouillon glaze, and grilled vegetables, preceded by various seafood hors d’oeuvres courtesy of our mothers, and followed by a chocolate cake with vanilla icing, upon which the boy had scattered sugar dinosaurs. There was a lot of wine consumed. The boy went to bed around nine, two hours later than usual. Yikes.

Sunday: I slept horribly and woke up thoroughly ill. The boy and HRH made the Millennium Falcon while I tried to get some more sleep. We met Mum and Dad at their motel and headed over to Ceri and Scott’s house, because Mum was giving Ceri her old spinning wheel for the sunroom. (An antique great or walking wheel, for those who are interested and wondering why I didn’t jump on it; it’s technically functional, but it’s a Saxony style and I have no room for it, and I’m looking for a modern compact castle-style wheel.) The medication I took for the cold started kicking in and I don’t remember much about the visit other than it was sunny and we were outside for most of it. We stopped at La Belle Province and had hot dogs and french fries for lunch, then went back home and the boy conked out for two hours straight. Mum and Dad joined us later and we had a very pleasant visit. Once the boy was up things moved outside, and I was so out of it I couldn’t drag myself out after them all; I lay down and read. My parents left early, and HRH fed the boy while I went to bed. We ended up having to cancel our late dinner out with friends, because I was non-functional. (I remember hearing HRH call to cancel, and him using the phrase “she has a bit of a cold” and being annoyed, because “she can’t get out of bed” would have been more honest and made the cancellation sound less wishy-washy.

Monday: The boy stayed home from preschool as his cough wasn’t completely gone, thereby annihilating one of my precious work days this week. We got out to wander around and tried to do errands, but were thwarted by lack of stock. I was still dragging myself around with low energy, and cancelled my bi-weekly anime night with Marc. HRH and I ended up watching TV together after the boy went to bed, a very pleasant thing indeed as (a) I don’t get to spend a lot of time alone with HRH these days, (b) I don’t watch TV much but I was curiously in the mood for it last night, and (c) both House and Bones were on back to back, the only two shows I’m even remotely interested in these days, and I had seen neither of the episodes.

Today: Cold mostly gone. Dark and cold and rainy outside. An hour of cello. Baking bread.

And now, to work.

Meandering

I understand now why I’ve been avoiding doing a second draft of Orchestrated. I have to rework the beginning, and I don’t know how to step into it properly. I’m doing a lot of staring at the renamed document on the monitor, the printout in front of me, and feeling like I’m going nowhere.

In other news, there are four more rehearsal till the Canada Day concert, one of which I will be missing as we’re out of town. I need to work on the speed of the Grieg dances, and to smooth out the shifts of the Ralph Vaughn Williams and the Faure Pavane. But really, that’s it. We’re coming together. So long as everyone keeps up their end of the practise-at-home bargain, we’ll be golden. Gods, I love the Vaughn Williams. But that’s just me; I like RVW to begin with. The cellos get to do a lovely stompy theme in the first movement, and a nice lyrical theme in the second. And because I know the piece well, I can play it better.

HRH cleaned out the garage and sorted things into give away/sell/donate piles, and reorganized the storage area. We can all get to the bikes now. I went through the piles of clothing to donate to the local charities. It’s good to have all that out of the way. It was getting very frustrating not being able to find things down there, or easily access the things we needed. I finally saw the water/mold damage to my lovely thick white office carpet Blade gave me as a birthday gift a few years ago, and it’s awful; it was rolled up with one end resting on the floor and got soaked one day. Just one of the irritating reminders of the past downstairs tenant whose washer leaked regularly, flooding the garage floor (and yet she insisted nothing was wrong, argh). I’m pretty sure a thorough steam cleaning will rescue it, and as the upstairs furniture needs that kind of cleaning too we shall rent one of those special vacuums from the grocery store and go to town one day.

Things are ramping up in the family for the boy’s series of birthday celebrations. This Saturday it’s the family thing, with my parents coming in from out of town to join the local grandparents here. Next Wednesday we’ll send cake and possibly balloons to preschool. Thursday is the day itself, and if the weather’s good we may abscond with the boy and take him to the train museum and lunch out. Then next Saturday is the kid party. That’s two cakes and a batch of cupcakes to make, which also means a lot of icing. I hope butter’s on sale somewhere. We asked him what kind of theme he wanted this year, and it wavered between Star Wars and superheroes for a while, before settling on superheroes. Not that we go deep into the theme thing, we just like to have a loose thing to tie colours and cake and invitations together. This is the first year I haven’t done homemade invitations, which makes me slightly sad, but there’s that whole not having colour ink for the printer and money being tight. (Till, well, today, but today would have been too late for the invitations.) It was less expensive to buy them.

I have just discovered Amanda Palmer. I am, as usual, late to the party. I knew about her, but hadn’t actually heard her music till today. I’m currently listening to Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and it’s excellent. Not something one can just throw in the CD player; it’s a very specific sort of music. But very good. Lovely sting arrangements.

HRH got his provincial tax refund today, which means mine is close behind. Hurrah!

Done!

The anthology galleys are done and out of my hands. I had to send them away or I’d have kept poking at them.

Onward!

ETA ten minutes later: And now I am in that curious post-novel ennui phase where I can’t settle down and do anything. This is ridiculous. I should go make tea and take a notebook into the living room and scribble ideas out.

ETA @ 5:00: 460 handwritten words of setup. Am pleased. Now off to make polenta.

Hmm

I was poky this morning, dragging my metaphorical heels and saying, “I don’t wanna work.” And I spent what I thought was a lot of time kicking around online, hopping through my usual stops of news and journals and Facebook and Twitter and various forums, looking for distraction. I made bread. I don’t think I really settled in to the documents I had open on my desktop till around eleven.

And now? Wow. Freelance assignment finished, half the galleys done, and two hours of cello interspersed throughout. And I thought I was wasting the day. I shall have a glass of wine as a reward!