Category Archives: Diary

School Again

Today was Sparky’s first half-day of school. He didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t eat very much this morning, and had worried himself into a low-grade temperature and chills. We dropped Owlet off at daycare half an hour early (more on that in a moment) and drove to school, parked, and joined the throngs of parents and children walking to the schoolyard together. There were about five hundred people milling about, meeting up with friends and awaiting the morning bell that announced the arrival of the teachers with their class list posters decorated to reflect their chosen themes for the year, which they taped up on the walls of the school building so the kids could crowd around and figure out who was in which class. The boys were thrilled to find three of the four who generally hang out together were in the same class. (I feel a bit sorry for the fourth, who was missing his first day and who will be without his mates in a different class tomorrow.)

It was interesting to watch how Sparky’s body language changed over the half-hour I was with him. He started off a bit huddled into himself, holding my hand now and again. When he saw people he knew he relaxed a bit, waving and saying hi oh, so casually, though he still held himself guardedly. And when he saw his very best school friend, he called out, and I could see his body open up and relax completely. He hung around with them, laughing and talking about Minecraft, and it was as if the summer hadn’t happened at all.

His teacher seems very nice. He told me with great excitement that there’s a book on Star Wars vehicles from Episode One in the class library. (Dear Mlle Sophie: You scored a win with that one.) They did a self-evaluation exercise where they were asked to write something they’d had trouble with last year on a small card, then fold it up and hand it in. Sparky wrote ‘math: subtraction,’ which I find interesting, because I’ve never seen him have a problem with that; his difficulty in math lies in mainly in thinking through word problems. He thinks his teacher will keep the cards and bring them out near the end of the year so they can see how far they’ve come. This is the first year of Cycle Two, and they do the first half of the year in French and the second half in English. (After this, I believe it’s just about 50/50 all year long through the rest of Cycle Two and Three.)

Owlet is in her fourth week of daycare, or “cool,” as she calls it. Day one was such a success that the only way I could lure her home was by promising her a bagel. (She has recently become obsessed with fresh bagels. This is both good and bad, as we liv around the corner from a bagel bakery.) The second day I dropped her off, I hung around talking to the educator. After a minute she pointed to the stairs and said, “Shoes. Stairs, Mummy.” The message was very clear: Shoo, lady, you’re cramping my style. When I picked her up that afternoon, we got in the door at home and she started to cry, “No, play more, play….” I comforted her and told her she’d go back to “cool” again tomorrow. “Oh kay,” she said, somewhat suspiciously and grudgingly, like I might be trying to fool her. Napping has been successful, they started potty training the second week they were there because everyone had settled so well, and in general everything is going so well that it’s like she’s been doing daycare all her life. There has been a teacher switch, however, because the educator who was initially slotted to handle this small private daycare (a satellite one to the main daycare the director runs) pulled out in the second week. Fortunately, the director was already talking to someone who had worked with her before, negotiating to bring her in as a swing teacher, and she just stepped in to be full time instead. Owlet loves her, and loves all her little friends there, and it’s only a bit odd to think that she has a social life outside our sphere of responsibility now. She brings home art, and talks randomly about her friends, and in general is thoroughly in love with “cool.”

It’s terrific that school and daycare are only four minutes apart by car in the same neighbourhood. My round trip takes about fifteen minutes, including drop-offs. And it’s a relief to be able to focus on work during the day, all the more so because I’ve been working on back-to-back projects, the last couple of them rush jobs.

Sparky’s Summer So Far


[ED NOTE on 19 AUG 2013: This was originally written two weeks ago. No, three, since it was when Sparky had just begun his second two-week session of camp, and he has been done with camp for a week. Sigh. In my own defence, I was working on a project that ate up all the time ever, because it needed tonnes of fact checking. (Not because things were wrong, I hasten to point out. Just because there were lots of real-world facts, and part of my job is to make sure the author hasn’t mixed things up or misremembered something, especially if those facts affect key plot points.) Anyway, that project is now done, and I will get a nice big cheque for it late next month.

So I’m backdating this instead of updating it. The update is basically that “Yay, Sparky adored camp, and I got to go to the last parents’ day with HRH while HRH’s parents stayed with Owlet, and then we took him out for ice cream. The end.”)]

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Sparky is in his second two-week session of day camp, and is loving it. We have impromptu little songs about, “Oooh, I love camp, I love camp, I’m going to camp” in the car on the ten-minute drive there in the morning.

At the end of each two-week session there’s a presentation for the parents on Friday afternoon. Each class has a fifteen-minute block in which to demonstrate their new skills or talk about what they did and learned in the class, and then the bell rings (they use a huge old-fashioned school handbell, and it has a glorious sound) and everyone moves to their next class. At the end, there’s a half-hour concert where the whole camp population sings whatever songs they’ve chosen to work on over the session in choir. As the parents’ afternoon takes place the very same time Owlet’s nap does, I stayed home this time and HRH went. He recorded a couple of Sparky’s demonstrations for me, though.

Sparky chose to do piano this summer as his music class at camp. He learned a two-hand scale and some finger exercises in the first two weeks. We were expecting him to play the scale for his presentation, which is what he told us he was doing, and that’s what he did. There was applause… but then he went right into something else, a simple piece that he played with both hands and read from the music on the piano in front of him. We were so excited. After only two weeks! He really, really enjoys piano, he says. I am slightly anxious, because I want to ask him if he likes it more than cello and would prefer to study it instead, but I don’t know if I want to hear the answer. On one hand, a local teacher for an instrument we didn’t need to lug around would be great. On the other hand, we’d have to prepay a season’s worth of lessons, and we don’t have that kind of available money. Our cello teacher asks for a month’s worth of lessons at a time. And cello is something that we do together, and he benefits from a parent who has a different understanding of the instrument than one who doesn’t play can offer. If he ends up doing Suzuki piano I will end up learning it with him, which is not a bad thing, but also perhaps one more thing I do not need on my plate right now. It is to be seriously ruminated upon, however.

The next thing HRH recorded for me was Sparky’s martial arts demonstration. They did different kicks and punches to break practice boards, which was fun, but the best part was the last bit. Sparky was first in the lineup for this one. The teacher braced, held out his hand with what looked like a pencil upright in it, and Sparky clapped his hands around the instructor’s hand and the pencil thing flipped away. When he was showing me, HRH was excited and said, “Did you see that? That was amazing!” It was filmed far away, so I couldn’t see any detail and had no idea why this was so fantastic. I had to ask a couple of times for it to be explained properly. Turns out the teacher was holding a practice knife, and Sparky hit the tendons in his wrist with one hand and the back of the instructor’s hand with the other, which forces the gripping hand to snap open in reflex. And he did it so well that the practice knife spun up and halfway across the room. So my kid knows the rudiments of disarming someone with a knife. Holy wow.

I finally finished his Gryffindor socks. He loves them, in case you can’t tell.

And since we’re talking about feet… he has worn through his fourth pair of shoes this year. School hasn’t even started yet.

He is very excited about water and pools these days. But he’s resisting actually trusting himself, the water, and the parent teaching him to swim, which is so argh-inducing from the parental POV that we’re pretty much at our wits’ end. It may be time to register him in lessons this fall, at an indoor civic pool. His French is good enough now, which was the main stumbling point before.

He’s currently in love with my Calvin and Hobbes books, and the Mutts collections as well. At least one goes with him everywhere. They’re getting a bit tattered, but since it’s from love, my rule about with keeping books pristine is somewhat relaxed.

Spinning and the Tour de Fleece 2013

So there’s this spinning thing that runs concurrently with that big bike race in France. (They race on bicycles for about three weeks. There are mountains. I like my version better.) Basically, you spin every day the contenders cycle, and rest the days they rest. It is traditional to have some sort of personal challenge to echo the challenge days in the Tour de France.

This year, I chose two challenges: spinning silk hankies (basically an empty silk moth cocoon that’s been soaked and stretched out; the actual name is mawata), and spinning some big chunky yarn. Like so many other spinners, I lost the ability to do the latter once I’d gained the ability to spin very finely. Those plus trying to spin as often as I could would be more than enough, I figured. But to start with I rummaged through my fibre stash and pulled out what my fingers decided felt nicest that day, a 50-gram twist of green Fleece Artist Merino sliver. (Maybe I should have called that a challenge, too. I am terrible at deciding what to spin next, and this was akin to closing my eyes and choosing randomly.)

Well, I spun every single day during the three-week race. And I blew through my two challenges early on (and plied them together to boot), with the added bonuses of plying 1200 yards of luxury singles I’d spun earlier in the year for Mum’s yarn, spinning 50 g of Fleece Artist Merino, and getting halfway through 6 oz of batts I’d had in my stash for about three years. I spun and plied an awful lot of yarn.

Here’s my output:

Clockwise from top:

– Fleece Artist Merino sliver in Rainforest, spun worsted and chain-plied (239 yards)
– Spiral yarn made with my two challenges, a thread spun from silk hankies dyed by myself (also on the storage bobbin at the centre, about 7 g) and a Coopworth single (64 yards)
– Bobbin of 3 oz woollen-spun worsted weight single, from Spin Knit & Life batts (Falkland, mohair, domestic wool in blended blues and browns)
– In the bottom of the basket: the 1200 yards of plied luxury yarn, one ply of 50/50 silk/cashmere, one ply of 50/50 silk/Merino (8.5 oz, 1200 yards)

And in addition to this, I saw some fabulous yarns being made, interacted with awesome people, and made lots of notes on new indie dyers to check out and techniques to try. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

I spun the second half of the batts the day after the Tour finished. Here’s all 455 yards of worsted weight singles, ready to be knit into a shawl:

I need to crow a bit here. I was invited to enter my Fleece Artist skein into a draw for people who’d spun fibre from that dyer, and I won! So this pretty little green skein netted me a copy of Clara Parke’s The Knitter’s Book of Yarn:

(I really wish I had more of the fibre so I could spin enough for a pair of socks. Now that I know the colourway, I can order more sometime and do just that.)

In the past week I spun an ounce of honey-coloured silk to ply with the bobbin of green Merino singles that has been waiting patiently since January (Ashland Bay ‘Sage’, to be precise). That yarn is looking very pretty indeed so far:

And last on my list of spinning stuff to journal about, it turns out that my sample skeins lied as badly as gauge swatches do in knitting. I am about 500 yards short on Mum’s yarn. Fortunately I have found an online retailer who has both the silk/Merino and the silk/cashmere in stock and will sell me two ounces of each so I can spin up the rest. As cranky as I am about being wrong, it will be lovely to spin more of these fibre blends; it was dreamy to do, and plying was a real treat as well.

Owlet: Twenty-Three Months Old!

This is it. We are in less-than-a-month countdown mode to the second birthday, now.

Lots more talking (what, in this family?), lots more running. Climbing has been the big skill expansion this past month. Owlet nows goes up and down stairs by stepping on them instead of crawling. And she decided to climb up the inclined climbing wall on the play structure to get to the little fort and go down the slide all on her own last week.

Potty training is happening, and sometimes it’s going really well, and then sometimes there are days where she kicks and screams if you even mention the potty. And then kicks and screams if you change her diaper. So, you know. She’s just about two and perfectly normal.

Owlet is fighting a nasty cold, and today I finally took her temperature because she felt really hot to the touch when she woke up. Sure enough, she had a mid-grade fever, so I gave her some Tylenol, which mitigated a bit of the whingey whininess that’s been our near-constant companion these past few days. She’s off her feed, too, which tells us that’s she really feeling poorly more than anything else. (That and waking up crying, which she never does; she usually wakes up and talks to herself for about half an hour, playing with her blankets and stuffed animals, before cheerfully calling for company.)

This past month Owlet finally clicked into make-believe. She was on all fours one morning, reaching for some bulky yarn I’d cut lengths of so the kids could play with the cats. “Are you a kitten?” I said as I walked by. “Are you pretending you’re a cat?” “Maow, maow,” she said, delighted, and swiped at the yarn like she sees the cats do. Then later she was crouching down with her hands on the floor, being obdurate about something, and I said, “Are you a frog?” She looked at me for a moment, then beamed and said, “Fog! Reh… BEET!” And we hopped down the hall together, taking turns to jump and say “Reh… BEET!” (or, in my case, “ribbit”) when we landed. It was the only way I could get her into her room for her nap. (That’s how miserable this cold is making her. When I say it’s nap time, she usually shouts “NIGH-NIGH!” and runs for her room.) This is so much fun. I don’t remember having to teach Sparky how to play pretend. He just kind of did it on his own first.

In getting Owlet’s room ready for her nap another day, I discovered my niddy-noddy in her crib. This is:

(a) evidence that I don’t watch her closely enough while she plays;
(b) an example of how I leave potentially dangerous equipment lying around;
(c) proof that I’m indoctrinating my child into the love of fibre arts successfully.

(I should point out that I don’t actually consider the niddy to be dangerous equipment. I imagine that people unfamiliar with how my house runs might, though. It might be like seeing a toddler running around with a baseball bat, or some other kind of long piece of wood. But we don’t keep anything breakable down at Owlet-level, and even if she swings it she might knock a picture off the hall table, but that would be about the extent of the damage. I also imagine that she could theoretically ding herself in the face with one of the crosspieces, but she’d have to be moving really fast and swinging the niddy at the same time. I suppose it could be considered mildly dangerous when she pretends it’s a pony and tries to ride it around the house, and trips over the crosspiece between her feet. But that doesn’t fuss her, so it doesn’t fuss me, either.)

Owlet is now enthusiastically into reading along. Her favourite books at the moment are Mo Willem’s Pigeon books, Sandy Boynton’s Little Pookie books, and Ellen Walsh’s Mouse Paint. She provides Little Pookie’s lines of dialogue when we read those books, and it’s hilarious to hear her tiny voice say, “Um… a what?” in Let’s Dance, Little Pookie, or “No, no, nope, no THANK YOU!” in What’s Wrong, Little Pookie? While she gets the “silly!” part about the hippo borrowing the shoes, she just snores at the five lazy frogs instead of saying “silly, too!” And then she pretends to grab one of the cookies on the next page and runs off to feed it to HRH, Sparky, the cats, and whoever else she can think of. So the rest of that book doesn’t really happen for us yet.

This month she also learned how to blow bubbles with a bubble wand (or kind of; she does a short, sharp puff of air, which, if it’s directed correctly, produces one or two tiny bubbles). HRH built the kids a sandbox to stop her from digging in the vegetable garden, and Owlet supervised.

It’s a big hit. Owlet approved on the first day that there was sand in it and it was nice enough to play outdoors.

It’s summer hols now, and I am loving how the kids play together. They cook up games about playing with the cats by dragging yarn for them to chase, each of them going in opposite directions as they trot around the middle of the house. They make blanket forts downstairs on weekend or rainy mornings while they watch TV. They build block towers together, and roll balls to knock them down. There’s still frustration on Sparky’s part as Owlet jumps the gun and cuts short his planned outcome of whatever he’s doing, but that’s part of working things out between themselves.

She loved the daycare get-to-know-you picnic and played with all the things. (Chewing on the play kitchen food is probably what gave her this awful cold, but it has to happen at some point.) She enjoyed playing with the other kids, too (parallel play at this point, of course, but she was very cheerful about it), and singing songs, and doing the casual group activities. We’re in a countdown for that, too; she starts part-time daycare the week she turns two, though it will be a progressive entry and she probably won’t do full days till the following week. She’s such a big girl now, learning so much, and I know she’ll love the stimulation of daycare and socializing with other girls her age.

Summer Vacation Begins

Portfolios have been brought home, report cards received (all very good, thank you), the backpack has been emptied, and we are on summer hols here in the dollhouse. We’re bumping against one another a bit while we find our summer rhythm.

In a nutshell:

It is hot. And humid. And stormy.

HRH demolished the old, rotting fence on the north-west side of the property and built a new one — in three days. This is it, only halfway done:

Owlet has a cold, a nose-streaming, whiny, sneezy cold. She must have caught it at the daycare get-to-know-you picnic party. Ah, the joys of challenging the immune system.

I have a concert in four days. That would be July 1, if you missed it. We’re playing Dvorak Slavic Dances, and Strauss, and Warlock’s Capriol suite, among others. Nice stompy and swingy stuff.

I finished spinning the undyed BFL/silk single and plied it with the waiting single I spun from the lavender/green/chestnut braid of My Own Fibre Club BFL/silk I dyed in April. And I completely misjudged the weight. (Not the mass, the diameter of the yarn.) So now I have 1100 yards of light silk laceweight, which does not work for what I was spinning it for at all. (Which was a lace shawlette calling for 475 yards of sock weight yarn. Yeah, I really blew it. I should have chain-plied the dyed single and skipped the other ply entirely.)

For my June edition of My Own Fibre Club, I dyed some silk hankies to spin in the upcoming Tour de Fleece. I did a two-part process, dyeing them with yellow, purple, blue, and green in the first step, then overdyeing them with blue in the second, and ended up with some truly lovely Peacock hankies.

Last weekend Sparky had his birthday party #3, the Friends From School edition, and it went very well indeed. HRH scratch-built a Minecraft cake landscape from cubes of fondant that he painted. It was a big hit.

Books… I read Elizabeth Bear’s The Shattered Pillars and it was very good, managing to not fall victim to middle-book-of-a-trilogy syndrome. I read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was so very, very perfect and bright and sharp. I am rereading Possession, because I have to do that every five years or so.

No work coming in, which is both worrisome and welcome. My fibro meds aren’t settling the way I was hoping they would; maybe it will take another couple of weeks to adjust.

The kitten is settling in very, very well. She loves playing with the children, purrs loudly when she snuggles into your lap, and has quite the personality. Gryff approves.

That’s what’s happening. Back into the fray.

Recent Excitement

1. We have a new kitten. She’s three months old, and it only took our big orange cat Gryffindor two days of suspicion before he started romping with her. His hisses were half-hearted, though. I think they were mostly for show.

Gryff has been clingy and needy since Cricket left us. He’s always been one of a multiple-cat household, and very social; he was miserable without another cat around. The original plan was to get another cat at the end of the summer, when Owlet turned two. Well, that plan was moved up for Gryff’s sake. Last Sunday afternoon we visited the city shelter, and came home with a wee brown and grey tabby. Meet Minerva (McGonagall, of course):

She’s zippy and so energetic that she may tire out both the kids and Gryff, now that he acknowledges that she exists in his own reality. The first evening, she raced laps in our bedroom, under the bed, up one side, running across under my knees, throwing herself off the other side, then repeating the whole thing. She’s three months old, is slim and tiny, and has wee kitten claws and wee kitten teeth. We put her carrier in a quiet part of the living room when we got her home, and I found Owlet pushing the straw of her water bottle and goldfish crackers in through the wire door to share with the kitten on two different occasions while we made supper.

We all had a really good feeling about this. We wouldn’t have brought her home otherwise, as disappointed as everyone would have been to come home kitten-less. We’re good at judging personalities and energy and estimating how they’ll fit into the energy of the family and house. Minerva was grounded, forthright and self-assured without being aggressive, and wasn’t afraid of the children. She fit in right away.

2. Sparky turned eight last Tuesday, and we celebrated his birthday this weekend en famille. My parents came in from out of town and HRH’s parents came over, too. The birthday boy requested cheeseburgers and ice cream cake for his birthday feast, which also doubled as our Father’s Day celebration, so that’s what we had for lunch on Sunday. He specified ice cream cake with an Oreo crust, a bottom layer of chocolate ice cream, and a top layer of peanut butter ice cream, so I made that Sunday morning. We had it with whipped cream and homemade hot fudge sauce, and it was really good. My mother, who does not eat desserts, had a slice and enjoyed it immensely, which was all I needed to know it was really good. (I knew everyone else would like it, and I’m glad they did. It’s just that Mum doesn’t eat desserts, so wow.)

3. Sunday afternoon Sparky and I had our end-of-year cello recital. Sparky played “Song of the Wind” extremely well, clearly, in tune, and in tempo. I had the pleasure of accompanying him again. I did a “Chanson Triste” that people thought was excellent, but I knew had been better in rehearsal. And then we played lots of good movie music as an ensemble, and we totally killed our teacher’s original four-cello-part arrangement of “Skyfall,” which we segued into after playing the James Bond theme. (I don’t know about the audience, but most of the students up on stage had goosebumps!) My teacher now has twenty students, so it made for a long afternoon, but it was good. It was great to have Marc M and Marc L in the audience, and both HRH’s parents and my parents this time; my parents haven’t heard me play for years.

My teacher is raising her lesson fees for the first time in ages next year, so it looks like I’ll have to stick to my biweekly schedule instead of returning to a weekly lesson. (Assuming I ever work again. It’s been six weeks since the publisher sent me a project. Feast or famine, that’s what this is, and I know it. Still, work would be nice, what with Owlet’s private daycare costs about to begin in August. Especially since the whole point in putting her into daycare was so that I could get work done without making myself sicker.)

4. The Tour de Fleece is coming up! This is a for-fun spinning event that runs concurrent with the Tour de France. I was so excited that I cleared my wheels two weeks ago, which was kind of a dumb move. So I’m doing my vanilla spinning now to get it out of the way and fill my time before the TdF begins at the end of June. I’ve got an undyed BFL and BFL/silk blend going on my Symphony to ply with a bobbin of dyed BFL/silk I’ve already spun, and I’m doing some longdraw singles from heathered plum roving on my Baynes Colonial to get used to woollen spinning on it.

5. It’s the last week of school for Sparky. (We got next year’s supply and fee lists today, and I’m having trouble parsing the fact that he’ll be in grade three in September.) He has a final birthday party coming up next Sunday for five friends. Then after that it’s the Canada Day concert, two weeks off for everyone, and then day camp begins for Sparky. I’ve made it through the past two weeks; I just need to make it through the next couple.

Quiet

I’m being very quiet these days, because I’m exhausted.

I remember this. It’s what the beginning of fibro felt like. The kind of zoning out, the physical exhaustion, the inability to hold a thought in my head past a certain period of time. I’m irritable as a result of all of this. I have a constant low-grade headache, and my body is starting to hurt again. I’m not sure how to relax, because a lot of my time is just spent sitting there, trying to interact with my children or fold laundry, and not getting very far. I’ve forgotten how to enjoy myself again, because it’s kind of a weary triumph when I just get through doing the regular stuff. I wonder if I need to try to start the “yay me I accomplished these things today” posts again. It would serve to get me journaling more often, and to show me that I am accomplishing things, even when it doesn’t feel like it. I need to consciously start implementing my fibro-coping mechanisms again, starting with my expectations and limits for my daily activity.

I’ve had time off from work, thank goodness. After a crazy few months, I’ve had a couple of weeks of evenings and naps to myself, and I’m so grateful. I don’t know how I’d handle it otherwise.

I’m reading a bit every day, which is nice. I’m almost finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s new River of Stars, and as usual, I don’t know how I feel about it. Kay has vaguely frustrated me a bit over the past few books for reasons I can’t pinpoint, and every time I read one I decide it will be my last… then every time I read an excerpt of the next one and the poetic prose just sucks me in. I disliked the Sarantine Mosaic duology when it came out, but now I think it’s my favourite of all his works. Funny how one’s opinions change.

I’m sending a box of handmade projects to a swap partner from my mums’ group today, and working on that has been lovely. I can’t say any more than that until she’s received it, but I pushed some of my boundaries and skills making the items, and explored new techniques, and I’m pleased with it. Even with the last-minute wibbling about one project, redoing it, and deciding in the end to send the first version after all.

I finally got around to making an appointment to drop in at the local spinning and weaving studio that’s been open for over two years, and it was glorious. Oh my goodness, I will never have to shop online again! There were shelves and shelves of silks, cottons, flax, wools of all sorts, and luxury fibres like yak, camel, and alpaca, which I’d never touched on their own, only as blends. She has two full-size floor looms set up, six wheels, and lots of swifts and rigid heddle looms and carders all over the place. There were cones and cones of cones of weaving yarn, dyes, spindles… I wanted to move in. I could have easily spent so much more than I did. She was so patient with Owlet, too, who wanted to touch all the things. Especially the packets of ginned and dyed cotton that she kept picking up and squishing, saying “skish, skish,” and the huge skeins of handspun she picked up and cuddled, saying “soft, soft.”

We actually had to go two days in a row, because I’d forgotten to take money out of the bank to pay for my order the first day, so we went back. Owlet stopped at every dandelion plant along the sidewalk and yanked off the flower tops, then gave them all to the woman who runs the studio. And she told me she hosts a spin-in once a month on a Sunday, and invited me! Unfortunately, the next one isn on a group cello class day, so I’ll have to wait for the next one.

Owlet is great, Sparky is great (he has a school concert tomorrow afternoon, and I hope everything works out; HRH’s parents are coming to stay with Owlet so I can attend, and then I think there should be a Mama-Sparky treat afterward), I have a new-to-me spinning upright wheel that was a crazy good deal (thank you, enormous tax refund allowing me to give myself a little treat amid paying debts) and HRH has a new-to-him iPhone that we’re trying to set up (ditto the treat, but grr, technology and things not talking to other things). We are a single-cat household for the first time in… well, ever, actually, since I had to take Cricket in to the vet to be euthanised two weeks ago. She’d stopped eating and drinking, and you could almost see through her; it was just time.

That’s about it. Trudging along.