Category Archives: Diary

Weekend Recap

We just bought a dozen fish at the pet store. Well, we paid for a dozen, but the saleswoman liked Liam so much that she slipped an extra one into the bag, to make a baker’s dozen. (What a baker would do with goldfish is something about which I do not want to think for too long.) We are having a Bad Day, which is hardly surprising as the boy needs a day to recover from a long car ride, and he only had one day in between recovering from the drive down and starting the next one. In fact, it feel somewhat like a sick day in our house, as we are all being very good to ourselves (long car rides are no fun for Mama and Dada, either). So new fish are a treat. Also? A dozen are cheaper than four. Feeder goldfish are our friends, yes indeedy. And the death rate won’t be as noticeable with a whole school like this.

Liam travelled both ways very well in the car, but wow, when he’s had enough, that’s it, he wants out RIGHT NOW. He became very distressed on the way down when we were on a long stretch of highway and he needed to use the bathroom, which triggered a meltdown even though he was wearing a diaper instead of training pants against this very kind of eventuality. When not in the car Liam was very charming to everyone with lots of “hello” and “bye-bye”, and pointing out “people!”. While we were there he discovered the Canada geese who fly back and forth all the time, and thus spent a lot of his walks with his head craned back, waving at them and saying “Bye-bye birds, bye-bye. Go go go!” He also finally saw the moon in the daytime sky, and gave us that “You SEE, I KNEW you were holding out on me with the whole ‘moon at night, sun in the day’ crock you had going!” look when he pointed it out.

Finally following through on an idea I had a while ago, I went out to a craft store in Oakville and found two small needlepoint kits. I’ve almost finished one already. It’s really remarkable how much technique one retains from doing a single small needlepoint project twenty years ago. I got small kits because I didn’t want to overextend myself and ruin my fledgling desire to start needleworking again. It was hard to find a needlepoint kit at all; counted cross stitch appears to be all the rage right now, and while I love the look of finished cross-stitch there is nothing less fun than keeping track of numbers by referring to a chart and counting squares on blank cloth, thank you very much. I wanted these needleworking projects to be fun and relatively mindless, so I made sure the kits I got had pre-printed canvasses instead. I started the first one, a 5 x 5 ” crescent moon for Liam’s room, on Sunday at noon when I brought it home; I now have all of the main design completed (modified, naturally, because the moon had a face and I hate moons with faces) and a third of the background filled in. Go me! It helped that I have discovered that I can do needlepoint in the car without triggering motion sickness, which made the trip home much more enjoyable. (And there is only one person out there who will understand this: ADZO, needlepoint is my bowling.)

My mother can still wield a mean set of shears, as she demonstrated by cutting my hair as she used to do when I was six. She cut three and a half inches off my hair, and I feel so very much better. I’ve been trying to find time/freedom from the small one for about a month now in order to go get it trimmed, because I have been hating how very dead the ends were and how much they tangled. Amazing how much better the loss of four inches of hair makes one feel.

So there you have it: we are home, and relatively sound of mind and body.

Home

Home from our trip to Toronto; all is well.

Every day I’ve been checking LJ to see if Samuel has been born, and every day I’ve been reporting to family that Karine is still pregnant. No longer! He arrived in town yesterday an hour before we did. Welcome, Samuel! It was wonderful to hear that everyone involved is happy and doing well.

New word from Liam yesterday: French fries.

And now we are off to run errands. More thorough updates later.

Hanging Out The Shingle

Ugh.

I just wrote and submitted a writing sample on an assigned topic to an anonymous corp whose name is being screened by the hiring company. The sample consisted of three to five hundred words on a specific topic, to provide essential info and context to potential buyers. It was a topic I knew nothing about, and was given no guidelines other than “include general information about where X takes place, the popularity of X, and people involved”. I hate being clueless and not knowing who my audience is, or what an employer is looking for in style or tone.

I did it in an hour. Fear my mad research skillz! Whether it’s any good is up in the air, since I have zero background on the topic personally and the intraweebs were pretty useless, so I can’t judge if it’s what they’re looking for or not. The proposed pay is by the piece, and if I can complete each piece in an hour to seventy-five minutes then it’s worth the pay; any longer and it isn’t profitable. Assuming they hire me, that is, which they very well may not do.

Better Than I Think I Am

I just watched an hour-long interview on Wicca and living as a Wiccan that I did with two students from Dawson college, about four years ago. I’d never seen it before; simply never got around to it. I think there was a move around that time, then the career thing really took off, and then another move, and a baby, and a few books happened in there too. HRH finally (!) connected the VCR this afternoon so that we could tape a TV show on Wicca tonight, and I found this videotape and wondered if it had room to record the show after the interview. We popped it in to cue it up, and we ended up watching most of it. Apart from wanting to create a drinking game in which the audience takes a shot every time I say “Precisely”, I am remarkably impressed. I look good, I sound good, and it’s a terrific piece in general. They did it for a film editing class, if I remember correctly.

I wish I could remember their names; one was called Carolyn, I do know that, and one was of Irish origin and the other of Greek background. There are no credits at the end of the interview, nor are there names on the thank you Post-It note they affixed to the case. If I had their names and contact info I could get in touch with them to congratulate them on planning and conducting an enjoyable interview, and doing a great editing job.

In Which She Does A Brief Recap Of The Weekend And Dodges Writing About Herself By Posting About The Boy

Thank you everyone who stopped by to see HRH on his birthday, or sent greetings and good wishes. He had a wonderful time with his friends, and is very excited about all his gift certificates and tickets and game cards and art supplies. Well done, troops.

By Friday night whatever had been eating through my spine during the day had ceased, and it was nice to be able to sit back by the fire at the pub and just listen to the conversations going on around me. I did actually have a book in my bag, but I didn’t need to use it.

Speaking of things in my bag, I have lost my sunglasses. This is very upsetting, because I hate sunglasses in general and I have owned this perfect pair for about four years. I had them when I walked from the car to the house after band on Saturday. Now, they are nowhere to be found. I mourn their absence. They may have fallen into the snow, in which case farewell till spring, assuming I’m lucky enough to find them when the piles and piles of snow finally melt, and they’re salvageable. (Look, a Canadian winter. I’d forgotten what those were like.) Lots of snow fell this weekend. HRH shovelled three times, and each time he moved the snow it was as if he hadn’t done so earlier. Today it is very clear outside (and thus the discovery of the loss of my sunglasses). The sun is rising significantly earlier and setting later, and the angle of it has visibly changed in the past week.

I am remarkably reticent about the things that are on my mind these days. I habitually use this journal as well as my other handwritten journals to work out and record how I feel about things, but these days it feels very much like more of the same thing I was feeling yesterday, and the day before that, and haven’t we had these general life problems before a few times too? And on top of that, I am experiencing computer aversion. The two main books on the go right now are frustrating in very different ways. I’ve reached a part of Swan Sister that isn’t very clearly defined in my brain, and while I usually see this as an opportunity to allow my brain to simply create without boundaries (and it is usually a success), this time it’s a major stumbling block. (Imagine, a stumbling block at 30K. You’d think I’d see them coming by this point.) The Poppy book, while now having a pulse again in my work-brain, is a problem because of the Revelation, because to implement it would require an even more drastic overhaul that I had originally expected. I would have to scrap eighty percent of the novel, and throw out most of what makes the plot currently advance. I read the first couple of chapters during Liam’s nap yesterday and it’s good as it is, just not what it needs to be in order to be a complete success. It’s an enjoyable read, but not a Story. I have to think about it a lot more, and this is ungood because what I want to be doing now is actually writing, not planning or rewriting. I may ignore both of them, pull the Pandora book out and start writing the final chapters of that instead. (Because today, ignoring the problems is much easier than trying to work through them and feeling as if I’ve made matters worse by the end of the precious work day. One must choose one’s battles.)

I’ve spent the morning handling correspondence, and doing banking. I’ve crossed half the things of today’s To-Do list. Since I don’t feel particularly interested in elaborating what’s on my mind, I will share Liam-news.

Liam has been singing Twinkle Twinkle an awful lot these days. He has also been requesting it on the cello. We are a little tired of fending him off from giving the cello full-body hugs at high velocity while it is being played, or using the body as a percussive instrument to accompany the bowed music. He informed me that the f-holes were moons the other day.

Yesterday he drew a picture, and by ‘drew’ I mean he scribbled with his markers on a sheet of construction paper on the floor with his Thomas the Tank Engine next to him. When he was done he looked at me and said, “Ati!”, which means Thomas in Liam-Speak. It took me a moment before I realised that he was referring to the set of scribbles. And when I turned it around, it did look remarkably like the engine once he’d pointed it out. I am mildly freaked out by this. I put it up on his door.

Toilet training also proceeds eerily well.

I made delicious homemade pizza Saturday night, and Liam ate an entire slice as well as stealing the pizza bones off my plate. Sunday we went over to HRH’s parents’ home for dinner, where we had excellent prime rib and lovely potatoes, with cauliflower and broccoli in a light cheese sauce. Liam gorged himself on it all like everyone else did, having seconds and thirds of everything. Then he sat on my lap, appropriated my coffee spoon and helped himself to my serving of impressive home-made black forest cake, and ate more of it than I did (I’m not a big fan of cherries in cake; I’ll eat them fresh but that’s pretty much it). He also helped himself to a few spoonfuls of decaf cappuccino.

And now, I will go reheat the final slice of pizza.

Swan Sister Update

Wow, what a miserable day I’m having. It can be over any time, thanks. I don’t much enjoy being mad at the world in general for no particular reason. I should bring a book to the pub tonight so that I don’t have to talk to anyone, or I may ruin their night.

Total word count, Swan Sister: 31,482
New words today: 1,865

Looking back over my records, I see that I get the opportunity to work on this damn story once every thirty days or so. If I could work on it more frequently I might like it more, take less time getting back into it when I do sit down to work, and not feel like I’m facing a brick wall every single session.

Really, spring can show up any time now. Any. Time.

In other writing news I recently had a Revelation concerning the Poppy book, which requires a massive overhaul and rewrite and rethinking of some of the central action. It’s not a bad thing, because it’s been sitting there patiently waiting for an expanded second draft for a couple of years now. This Revelation may make the unintentional ending I wrote work, too, and the expansion/second draft would fill in what needs to happen before that end. Not that I can do anything about it for a while. Fitting everything I need to do into two days a week is beginning to take its toll.