Category Archives: Diary

New Day

Today: bright sun, then snow, sun, snow. Just above the freezing mark, too. Beautiful.

Yesterday was A Very Bad Day, all of it happening after 3 PM. The burn on my left hand from a splash of hot oil caused by a can opener being thrown into a pan of frying ground beef seems to have been relatively neutralized by the lavender oil I put on it, but the right foot damaged by an overturned kitchen chair is causing me problems today. It was a two-year-old day. Enough said.

Today I had intended to print out a two hundred page document, but I have just realized that I have to go through it and accept all the damned edits I did in Track Changes first. So it has to be put off yet again, and it’s already been rescheduled over and over for the last two weeks for a variety of reasons. Grr. At least today I’ll get to switch back and forth between the hearthcraft book and this other document as I get stuck on one and need a break. And it will be nice to take a final look at the other document as well, as I’ve been second-guessing my edits on it. Rereading it will help refresh my memory and help me get in the right headspace for the associated cover letter, too.

Weekend Roundup

A respectable weekend, marred only by the bad decision to go out grocery shopping Sunday morning. I really hate people who don’t think beyond themselves while in a public place. I hate people who hover behind me in shop aisles glaring at my back when I pause to take something off a shelf even more. And I hate that I get tense and get snappy with HRH because of it, as he’s the one who pushes the cart when we all go out together. We couldn’t get out fast enough.

Aside from this, we had a great Saturday afternoon out at the ADZO household, where we reconnected with lots of people we don’t see often enough, ate so much delicious food that our hosts just kept putting out on the counter in front of us, enjoyed a very nice red wine and a surprisingly good honey brown beer, and gawked at the number of kids running around. (They almost equal our numbers. If two or three more come along, that’s it; our generation is history.) Liam discovered the joys of the ball pit, an inflatable wading pool filled with balls in which he played with great enthusiasm, working himself up to the point where he’d take a running start from the kitchen and launch himself into it head-first, chortling all the way.

The Christmas lights went up on the front of the house Saturday morning, thank goodness, so there’s a least a touch of Yule around the house. Liam helped me wrap the banister of the indoor staircase with garland too, although it seems more sparse than it was last year for some reason. On the list of things to pick up this week once there have been paycheques are a couple of wreaths (one for my office door and one for the front porch railing) and a good indoor garland to loop above the front window, as well as some candles and good ribbon. We can’t get our tree till the weekend, but when we do I’ll be looking for one that’s a bit bigger than we need (not hard, as HRH always enthusiastically reaches for one that’s taller than the room can really handle) so we can cut lots of boughs off the bottom to use as further decorations. We often use the stump that we trim off the tree as a symbolic Yule log, too.

Sunday afternoon, the postal truck delivered the first box of the season, from my parents (which surprised me completely — Sunday delivery already?). It contained a tin of sugar cookies theoretically addressed to Liam, two books for me to read, a box of Lady Grey tea, and the most adorable apron for Liam to wear while we bake.

For once, the weekend didn’t feel rushed. And this is HRH’s last full week at the college; next week is private reno work, and the first couple of weeks of January are free. A real vacation! Hurrah!

And last but quite certainly not least, last Thursday Liam and I went out to get him a pair of new boots, as the ones he had fit him but didn’t come high enough to keep snow out of them. (His test to see if they fit and worked? Jumping in them like a kangaroo, then stomping around like an elephant.) While we were out I did my usual quick look around for the DS game I’d worked on in the spring that was released last month, and I finally found one on a shelf. I brought it home, popped it into the DS, and had fun actually playing through the first couple of games the team had been working the bugs out of while I’d been doing contract work for them. And then I called up the credits for the thrill of seeing certain names I knew were there. (HRH and I are the sort of people who sit through credits at films, too; it’s important for us to show appreciation and respect for all the people who have put time and effort into something. Even now I get a thrill of seeing friends’ names scroll by at the end of Saturday morning cartoons, knowing so many who have done and still do storyboards, layouts, character and location designs.) And then, to my utter astonishment, my own name scrolled by. They’ve credited me as part of the linguistics team, right after the main linguist who helped develop the project. I felt like someone had just taken all the oxygen out of the room. This was unexpected, as I was a contractor who wasn’t on permanent staff; as a freelancer brought in to tweak [ED: Oh, all right, HRH, how’s ‘manage’?] the word database I hadn’t any expectation of actually being credited as an official team member in any respect. This was a completely different kind of thrill from opening a box full of author’s copies of a new book I’ve written, or seeing my books on a bookstore shelf. I don’t know if I can put my finger on why, other than the shock of the unexpected. It was fun, too.

I just spent a quarter-hour doing a phone survey on federal issues such as security, the Afghanistan mission, and the RCMP. If there had been an option to answer “I run after a two and a half year old all week so any news goes in one ear and out the other”, I would have selected it three-quarters of the time.

Today is okay so far. I worked out some numbers: if I write 1,666 words each of the three days a week I work, I will have 60K done in three months. That brings me to mid-March. And I’ve already got 10K down, so we can readjust that to about 1,300 every work day. Not that it’s going to change my regular goal of 1,600 anyway; that number is so deeply ingrained into my work mind that it’s the default quota no matter what. So it looks like two and a half months of 1,600-word work days, giving me a half-month to tweak things. (And cut words out, which is always the problem by that point; I go over the total target because there’s so much to fit into such a small space.)

And now, back to work.

Gnarr

An hour and a half round trip to drop the boy off this morning, thanks to piles of snow in the road and idiots driving on them who can’t wait their turn or remember how to drive in snow. The round trip usually takes thirty-five to forty minutes, including drop-off time. I came straight home rather than run the errands I need to run because otherwise I’d only have walked through the door around noon. I am having to reinitialize all my parking-in-snowbanks and pulling-out-of-snowbanks skills that have lain dormant for ten months.

After handling correspondence and news, lunch (important because I have missed breakfast and lunch the past two days), laundry, a call from the bank to discuss things, and so forth, it is now QUARTER TO THREE and I haven’t even gotten to Real Writing Work yet.

It’s that kind of day. I’ve lost so much momentum since last Wednesday, which is the last day I got to work at all. I wish I was motivated. This is one of those days where being a writer is more work than any other job I’ve held.

I’m going to have to leave forty-five minutes early to get through the idiocy and pick the boy up too, so if I hit a groove I’ll to have to jump out of it before I want to. It is so very tempting to say ‘to hell with it all’ and go play the DS instead. But I’ll still have to think of something to make for dinner.

That freelance cheque can arrive any time now, thanks. Money would make things marginally better.

They’re putting up reindeer, And singing songs of joy and peace…

Not dead, just run-off-my-feet busy. I haven’t sat down at the computer in days.

Over the last twenty-four hours there has been lots of snow. Official reports vary, but according to our backyard we’re looking at around eighteen inches. It’s stopped, but we’re due to get about fourteen more centimetres tomorrow. (How very Canadian: Imperial and Metric describing accumulation in the same paragraph.)

The boy stayed home today and HRH took the car in to work after spending an hour and a half shovelling the driveway. For those who have inquired, no, HRH did not get the snow day that most elementary and high schools got. CEGEPs don’t close unless something traumatic has occurred on campus. He’s out there shovelling again now.

This morning I wrestled the boy into his snowpants (“No, no , no Mama, no snowpants”) and coat and hat and mitts and boots and scarf, and myself in tights under jeans and legwarmers over that (a lucky and unexpected find in the winter accessories box) and my old snow coat, and opened the back door for him. Liam was decidedly unimpressed with this deep snow thing. He kept falling over and flailing in a swim-like fashion, then rolling over on his back to look up at me and say, “Help, Mama, I am stuck” in that funny precise way he has of speaking. We fell over in the backyard for half an hour before coming in and shedding piles of snow-covered clothing on the kitchen floor and drinking hot chocolate. Like me, he thinks the hot chocolate is the best part. I am all about the apres-ski.

Friday night I went to a cello quartet concert with someone from orchestra, and it was absolutely phenomenal. It was one of those evenings where I was reminded of why I chose the instrument I did, and also mildly despair-inducing in that it made me feel that it was completely useless to even try because I can never play like they can. (Granted, they all had at least two music degrees each and played in pro symphonies. But still.) I really appreciated the evening, because not only was it the first time I’d attended a live music performance since May, but it was at my orchestral colleague’s invitation to share her double pass. It was great to have a night out with someone I don’t know very well but with whom I have things in common. I thoroughly enjoyed her company.

Late Saturday afternoon we went out to have dinner with Ceri and Scott, and this marked the first official Taking Liam Out To Dinner at a Friends’ House With No Other Kids. We all had a fabulous time. Liam was very well-behaved apart from the not-at-all-subtle exploring of rooms and the joyous chasing of cats, who mostly (meaning any cat who was not Tybalt) didn’t seem to mind and even let him pick them up and carry them around (I don’t know who was the most surprised when he walked in holding Miho). He ate surprisingly well, too, which I hadn’t expected, although it was hard not to enjoy the food as the meal was one of the best I’ve had in a while. (Liam seems to have decided peas in a pod are the current vegetable to be defined as Dalishious, replacing the chopped and frozen parsley he had dubbed Dalishious a few days previous.) I made a chocolate espresso pecan pie for dessert, which immediately made my Make This Again and Often list when we tasted it. We all had so much fun that we didn’t check the time until eight o’clock, at which point HRH and I scooped the child up and fled, expecting disastrous things to ensue with his schedule. Going to bed two hours later than usual didn’t seem to completely mess him up: there were no mid-night wakings, I got him back to sleep when he woke up at 5:15 the next morning with minimal fuss, we all got another two hours of sleep, and the only other effect seems to have been the boy being slightly whiny over the past two days. Not something we want to do on a regular basis, of course, but we’re very impressed at how he handled it. We wish we could have stayed longer, of course.

I spent a lot of the weekend baking, because Sunday was a cookie-exchange day. Bearing ten dozen oatmeal cookies, I spent a lovely afternoon with friends and acquaintances and snuggled with Tallis while chatting with some other mums. Liam cried a lot over the weekend when he’d try to scoop a cookie off the cooling rack and was told he wasn’t allowed because they weren’t ours, but the delight on his face when I unloaded all the new cookies once I’d come home from the party was proof that the cookie-denial was all forgiven. (Besides, he’d already stolen four of mine from the first batch out of the oven. It wasn’t like I didn’t let him have any at all.)

I like to wait as long as possible before breaking out the Christmas albums, but after watching the however many feet of snow fall today I put on Holly Cole’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside, Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs, and Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong while making supper.

I have piles of e-mail to handle, but that will get done tomorrow morning.

It was a very long day. I’m going to turn out the light now.

What I Read This November

This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
Magic & Malice by Patricia C Wrede (reread)
Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey
Mistral’s Kiss by Laurell K Hamilton
Broken Music by Sting
Children of England by Alison Weir
Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers
Mistress Anne by Carrolly Erickson
The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff (reread)

Brief notes:

Reserved for the Cat: Better than The Wizard of London, that’s for sure. I almost swore off buying these in hardcover because I was so disappointed in that last one, but the subject matter of this one was more interesting to me. Glad I bought it; it provided me an afternoon and evening of comfortable reading. Actually, I don’t know why I buy Lackey in hardcover at all any more, other than for the instant gratification of this fairy tale-based historical fantasy series. It’s the only thing of her’s I’m following.

Mistral’s Kiss: Why do I buy these? They’re too short now, and they only cover a very brief period of time. I think they’d read better if I read a lot of them at once to get a better idea of how Merry was changing Faerie. Except I’d have to wade through a million sex scenes to do it, as the whole union of life force thing is what’s doing the changing.

Broken Music: A look at Sting’s childhood and very early music years, outlining a lot of the compromises he made musically. Pretty much ends with the launch of the Police’s first full album, unfortunately.

Undertow: A very enjoyable planetary romance (in the traditional sense of the word) that calls into question the native-colonist ethic. Really interesting native species, technology, and one of the best observations about humanity I’ve come across lately: human are climbers, not schoolers.

This Is Your Brain On Music: A well-written and accessible layman’s book that examines how our brains encompass, interpret, and respond to music, written by a musician/producer who reinvented his career and became a cognitive psychologist instead. One of those books I wish I could buy for lots of people because lending it out will take too long.

Cautious Improvement

Today things are much better, thank you. I left the boy at the caregiver’s giving giggly hugs to all the other children and the flock of them jumping around like kangaroos. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to pass out or not, now that I’ve handled my correspondence and filing. There will likely be a nap later, and my hair needs a wash. I’ll see if I can pull off a thousand words first. It may take a while, as I can’t think straight; my head feels like it’s stuffed with treacle-soaked cotton. I give myself permission to give up at some point.

Sunny out, but very cold. The car doors on the passenger side were frozen shut this morning.

I received my first Christmas present in the mail yesterday: a renewal to last year’s gift subscription of Fine Cooking! Thanks, Mum and Dad!