Category Archives: Diary

Adventure

Today, the boy and I went to the library.

This may not sound like an adventure to you, but ours is a family that thrives on books and money is tight. Add to this the fact that over the past decade HRH and I have lived near only one excellent library for three years (during which my reading time was otherwise occupied), and that in the past I’ve repeatedly had the irritating experience of being interested in reading the type of books that libraries rarely carry, so while having a library card is a Good Idea joining this one was never a must-do thing. I’ve wondered about our local library a few times over the past three years but for whatever reason never got around to checking it out (no pun intended). Today, however, I planned the outing for us as a diversion for the boy and a book run for new reading material for me.

The first thing we did was get library cards, which involved having our pictures taken and printed on hard plastic passes. The boy has one of his very own, which he insisted on carrying around in his hand until I persuaded him to put it in his back pocket, just like Mama. That lasted all of ten minutes before he pulled it out and dropped it into the basket he was carrying around for my books. He was very helpful once he had darted around the adult section as his whim took him, exploring everywhere. I had a list of books to pull (hurrah for on-line catalogues!) that I filled before taking him by the hand and leading him into the children’s section. He was thrilled with the ladybug stools and the low tables with paintings on them, the kid-made dollhouses displayed on top of the stacks, and the bins of picture books that he rifled through enthusiastically. Then I took him to the stacks and we talked about how libraries shelved their books by subject, stopping at the transportation section. He pulled several books on cars and trains out and sat on the floor going through them, eventually choosing one to bring home. He placed it very proudly in the basket on top of the Leo Lionni omnibus, an orchestra book, and a Tonka trucks book. I sat him on the check-out counter so he could see the woman scan his card and then each book, and print out the slip identifying the books and their due date. It was all very, very exciting. I wish I could find the kid-sized I Can Read bookbag I used to have so he can carry his own books next time. I’ll sew him one for his birthday, one with a pocket for his card.

Personally, I was impressed at the selection of English books in both the adult and children’s sections. I didn’t get a chance to see the adult non-fiction sections but I’ve already searched a handful of non-fic titles I want and found about three of the five. I took out six books, two of them Laurie R. King mysteries that I haven’t yet found in stock in a bookstore (why does no one carry backlist?), two of them novels that I know I’ll read once and never again, one a YA fantasy, and I can’t remember the other one. Maybe there were only five. I intend to put holds on the others I want too. So all in all I think I saved myself about eighty dollars today, and I have reading material for the next week.

I am smug, and very satisfied. And I am now going to return to reading Austenland by Shannon Hale.

Friday Photos and The State Of The Me

I have had a really horrendously bad past couple of days. There have been good parts, but my patience has been fraying. Much of it has to do with people being oblivious to others around them, or downright stupid. Much of it happens in the car: people don’t understand how to turn into the proper lane at an intersection, what yield means, how to take turns merging, that parking a vehicle in the middle of a street blocks traffic, or what a full stop means. (I had to deal with three separate incidents today alone of people coasting through stop signs and yelling at me when I pulled away from my stop sign. I’m sorry, I was expecting you to, you know, stop.) Phone calls to wrong numbers, and people ringing my doorbell (for me or the wrong address) when I’m trying to get myself into a better headspace or to get things done. All the idiocy on top of the miserableness I’ve been feeling is wearing me down, so things like going to the store today to pick up a DVD to send out as a gift and finding it out of stock garners a much more emotional response than it ought to. The plans to burn mix CDs for people today has also obviously been shot. So what I’m fighting moves closer and closer to rage, which is really not what I want to be feeling, thanks.

As if things aren’t bad enough, it looks like my desktop computer is now officially dead. And of course today was the day I had scheduled backing up the new files I’d added in the past three weeks. Can I afford the new computer right now? No. I’m using the laptop out of necessity and I feel cramped. At least having ninety percent of my music on the external hard drive means I can plug it into the laptop and listen. If I get tired of the tinny sound I can plug the speakers into it as well.

I did have a fabulous rehearsal on Wednesday night. I tried a new bow hold (thank you Christopher Bunting) and it automatically forced me to hold the right arm in that more balletic curve I’d been trying for to affect how I draw the bow. We got the new music for the My Fair Lady and Sound of Music medleys, and after really working the overture and playing through the delightful (and not really Mozart’s) Symphony no. 3, we did most of the SoM and had a blast. I’ve been reading through Position Pieces for Cello by Rick Mooney as well, and the geography quizzes are brilliant. If your second finger is on D on the A string, what note would your fourth finger play? The first? What would the fourth finger play on the D string if you crossed to it? It may be obvious, but it’s just what I need to help positions sink in. I should have bought both volumes.

Liam and I went out to Greene Avenue in Westmount to shop for a birthday gift for a friend of his yesterday and had a lovely time, except for the bits where he wanted to be carried and I couldn’t do it which resulted in whining or crying, but we got past it all. We had custody of the baby squirrels yesterday as well, to allow Scarlet the opportunity to finish her paper (and yay to Scarlet for finishing it!), and he was a tremendous help, holding the white one on his lap after I’d fed her so that I could feed the grey one, then letting both of them curl up in his lap to doze while I refilled their hot water bottle and cleaned out the cage. Both HRH and I feel this is a wonderful experience for him, teaching him about the delicacy of baby animals as well as responsibility and cause and effect. It’s also a valuable opportunity to teach him the difference between wild animals and domestic ones.

It is Friday, so here are your photos. There are others up on the Flickr photostream.

What I Read This April

Ragtime in Simla by Barbara Cleverly
Essay on the Art of ‘Cello Playing vol. 1 by Christopher Bunting
The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison
The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James
Ophelia by Lisa Klein
Looking for Anne by Irene Gammel
Vivaldi’s Virgins by Barbara Quick
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde (reread)
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde (reread)
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde (reread)
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (reread)
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

Health: Check

Had the annual checkup with the doctor today. Fifteen minutes of poking and listening and hurrah, I am in very good health. I also got an hour and a half of work done in the waiting room, thanks to the emergency cases the doctor had to handle this morning.

I know why you’re really here, though. You want more squirrel pictures.

You can really see how much she’s grown over five days when you compare these to last week’s pictures on the Flickr photostream.

Weekend Roundup

The weather was beautiful, which went a long way towards offsetting how ill I felt over the weekend. Going downtown on Friday really messed with my energy levels and I paid for it. This is one of the big reasons why I was reluctant to commit to a full-time in-house job: the commute alone would kill me, thanks to the FMS. And if I needed proof to demonstrate how much the medication I’m taking for it has been helping, skipping a night because my throat thing was making sleeping difficult what with the dry scratchy feeling I couldn’t shake no matter how much water or honeyed tea I drank and throat lozenges I sucked, because the meds dry me out and made the whole throat thing worse at night, illustrated precisely how much they take the edge off the pain. We had to cancel a dinner on Saturday because both Liam and I were sick, and HRH was at the tail end of a stomach thing. Then because I was still too wiped out we passed on the public Beltane ritual on Sunday as well. I slept badly all weekend too, but that’s a given when I have bad FMS days now.

Instead we took things nice and easy over the two days. I spent a lot of the weekend just kind of sitting down, mainly reading Christopher Bunting’s Essays on the Art of ‘Cello Playing Vol. 1 (which is brilliant) and Kim Harrison’s The Outlaw Demon Wails (which is also excellent, moving things in the series along, further developing characters and relationships, and addressing some very interesting issues) while HRH and the boy enthusiastically overhauled the garden and prepped it for planting vegetables and whatever new flowers we decide to add. Late Saturday afternoon we meandered down to Dorval for some ice cream at Wild Willy’s. Sunday we picked up grass seed and vegetable seeds in the morning, HRH laid the grass seed and raked in new earth with it, and when Liam woke up from his nap we packed the wagon with water bottles and an apple and ambled to the park so he could play. He is a mad slide fanatic. HRH fielded him as he threw himself down various slides while I sat in the sun and watched. When the boy had reached the clumsy stage from all the activity we trundled to the corner store to buy Freezies and ate them on the way home. I picked three wild violets just around the corner and drank in the sweetness the rest of the way to the house. The side garden along the path to the backyard is a windy happiness of tulips and daffodils too, which makes me very pleased.

Orphaned squirrel update: There was a second one rescued the day after the white one was brought inside. The new baby is a more usual grey colour. The white one’s eyes opened on Saturday (lovely brown eyes, so it’s not an albino) and the grey one’s opened on Sunday. They are both girls, and the white one does seem stronger than the grey. They both suck lots of formula from the syringe, though, and curl up so sweetly in a hand or under the chin once they’re done. They are remarkably good-natured and behave much like gerbils do. At the moment they’re about the size of a large gerbil, too, fitting very securely in the palm of my cupped hand. Liam has held them and petted them very carefully, has rubbed them gently against his cheek, and has decided that the white one is his favourite. He asked to sleep with it the other night and we explained that it was very very tiny and he might roll over on it and squish it. I’ve posted three of the pictures at Flickr taken last Thursday evening when we first found the white baby on the ground. I don’t have pictures of the little grey one yet, as when I’m with them now I’m usually handling them.

It’s cool and rainy today, which is a good thing because the gardens all needed a good soaking.

Friday

In a nutshell, here’s what’s going on:

I interviewed today for a writing-associated position on a game that expands upon the game I worked on last spring, and by the end of the interview the producer said, “Well as far as I’m concerned you’re on the team already, so let’s talk money and time.” In short, I have everything I was concerned about not having: the pay I’ve asked for, flex time, working at home, and the week off when my first round of edits come along, and being on tap for the next round of stuff that’s needed for the game. Plus I have the very excellent bonus of working on a game that will help people understand the art of conversation, how to think through a problem and achieve certain goals using dialogue, and other neat stuff. I am still moderately in a state of stun, as I was expecting to have to turn it down because I thought it would be another full-time in-house deal. Part of the coolness of the project is that it’s still at the development stage; they need content to work with before design goes any further, and that’s why I’m with them.

They laughed when I told them there were now two DS units and a Wii in the house, and that it was their fault.

The car we’d crawled all over and had taken for a test drive Monday evening… was sold last night, eighteen hours before HRH was scheduled to go in and begin negotiating for it. To me this means that this was not our car and we should ask them to keep an eye out for exactly the same thing — which they have already found for us. Go team us! The new one is a year younger, has less than half the kilometres, and is only about $1500 more.

We found a baby squirrel who had fallen out of its lofty nest yesterday afternoon, and after watching for the mama squirrel and fending off neighbourhood cats for a couple of hours, Scarlet took it in. I came home today to discover her at work trying to hold a second baby and draw formula up into a syringe with the other hand. Looks like their mama is history; this second one is skin and bones. I helped feed and deflea the second one, and it’s simply adorable. They’re so young their eyes aren’t even open yet. I’ll be going up to feed it again in half an hour so Scarlet can keep working on her paper.

While I was out there was another plumbing emergency, one that entailed someone getting into our apartment to go into the panel backing onto the bathroom pipes. Seems that when the bathtub was replaced the places that were supposed to be sealed weren’t. The landlord apologised and said it was his fault. What I want to know is why it took five years for this to start leaking downstairs. Anyhow it’s been handled (thank you, Scarlet, for using your keys to get the landlord in and being the Responsible Adult on the Premises while he fixed things), and the backyard plumbing thing was fixed on Wednesday.

I think that’s all at the moment. The boy and I are both still fighting colds. I can’t decide if he has an eye infection or not; sometimes I think he does, and then the symptoms vanish and I’m left suspecting he just has allergies. I’m still having difficulty with the throat/breathing thing myself, and part of that is a cold while the rest is my sensitivity to All Things Green, which just so happen to be going wild right now. The baby leaves out there are so soft and such a perfect green!.

Have an excellent weekend, everyone.

From The Files Of Argh

I just lost an hour to a plumber who is going to have to come back another day. Why? Because I wasn’t told he was coming, and so the stuff in storage in front of the main water shut-off wasn’t moved. I can’t move it; there’s too much of it and it’s too heavy. I tried. We weren’t told someone was coming by today, or HRH would have cleared a path last night. The landlord did say he’d call the plumber when he stopped by on Saturday to look at the damage but that was the last we heard of it. The plumber was lucky he came during the three hours I was home today. It would have been even more pointed if I hadn’t been home.

It’s a stupid little twenty-minute job. The pipe to the tap outside in the back cracked over the winter. When it was turned on last weekend it leaked into the downstairs apartment. The plumber said he just needs to install a new faucet and pipe leading to it, but of course he needs to turn the water off to do it. And the water shut-off is in our part of the building, not the downstairs neighbour’s. I wonder if he told her the plumber was coming instead of us, assuming her place was probably where the plumber would have to work?

Grr.

I’m off to pick up the boy.