Category Archives: Diary

Wednesday Morning

Slept acceptably well. Woke up in a slightly better mood. We shall see what the day brings.

HRH and the car are off at the garage, theoretically making everything better.

The humidity is already stifling, and the humidex is supposed to hit 42 Celsius today. There had better not be any obstacles to the car being fixed, because there’s a trip out to get ice cream in my future this afternoon, yes indeed, or else.

Luanna called last night and made me envy her all the more for studying groovy book stuff. I’ve never been so grateful to hear anyone say “Scholastic” and “Anansi Press” in such an excited voice. I miss that part of being in the book trade. My position is completely different now.

The only thing that comes close to receiving cool mail is sending cool mail out and hearing back that people are receiving it.

Oh: Liam has finally learned to wave. Now he waves at everything.

A Big Adventure

Yesterday we had A Big Adventure. We took the bus and metro downtown to the bookstore.

Since the car is down for the count we couldn’t implement our original plan for the day, which was to pick up earth and plants and finally get the garden in, or go get groceries, or do anything that required carrying things. But it was a beautiful day, and I had a coupon for a one-day discount at Indigo. Liam had never been on public transport before, and I’ve been leery of trying it without backup, so to speak, in case things went horribly awry. I happened to have a handful of bus tickets, so away we went.

He loved it. So many people to see! So many people to talk to him! When we got downtown we stopped in at a Second Cup so that HRH and I could have frozen hot chocolates (every bit as good as I remembered) and we could give Liam his lunch. He was so excited that he only ate half his usual lunch, but gladly accepted a bottle afterwards. Then we walked to the bookstore, and even though I read books to him and let him turn pages, he got cranky when I wouldn’t let him chew on them. It was around his afternoon nap time, and his two morning naps had been very short, so I’d sort of expected something of the sort to occur eventually. When I’d chosen books for his birthday presents HRH took him on a walk around the store while I pulled out my list and did a rapid check for the books I wanted to pick up for myself. The Jim Butcher wasn’t in stock (wah!) BUT the new Charles de Lint, Widdershins, was out, a lovely surprise as it hadn’t been listed as available when I’d last checked the website. So I snatched that up, plus The Greenstone Grail by Amanda Hemingway, a book that had a good review in a recent issue of Locus, plus Conrad’s Fate, the newest Chrestomanci book in paperback (yay Diana Wynne Jones! but the new cartoony covers for Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air are dreadful, whose idea were those?). All those books that he wasn’t allowed to touch really pushed Liam past his limits, though, so that was that.

We headed for home, and gave Liam another bottle on the metro as he was hitting that glassy-eyed tired stage. He fell asleep just before we reached the terminus, and slept the rest of the way home. All in all it was a remarkable success. Sure enough, my concerns about the metro were realised: to reach the platform you have to go up or down stairs, and our smaller stroller is still bulky enough to make this sort of thing difficult. The bus, however, is a breeze, particularly as we’re near the beginning of the route, so now I’ll feel perfectly comfortable taking him to the grocery stores or the shopping centres around here.

The phone battery gave out yet again when I was talking to my mother last night. I’m going to look into buying a new battery, as it’s happening with increasing frequency.

Observations

When I have had two glasses of my father’s Pinot Grigio on a relatively empty stomach, I can play Bach’s first solo cello suite with remarkable skill. Go me. (Yes, it’s all about getting the inner critic tipsy. And mostly off-topic, I have recently discovered that my inner critic is a sad pathetic self-defeating Muppet monster like one sees on Sesame Street.) And damn, those new strings really, really sound smooth. Honestly, everything I’ve read about steel strings and everything I’ve ever learned about how my cello sounds in the past eleven (eleven!?) years completely and totally contradicts how remarkably smooth and even they sound, particularly in transition from one string to another. It takes less effort to pull good sound out, and the strings respond almost immediately. It makes me wonder how I worked with my last synthetic set for so long. Of course, they were also two years old, so they’d stretched and lost some of what makes them work they way they’re supposed to, and since I hear the instrument all the time I don’t notice the gradual loss of quality. My intonation is more accurate with these new strings, too, a precious little bonus for which I’m deeply grateful.

Liam tripped and (a) bit the inside of his lip and (b) cut the outside on something this morning. First blood! He’s fine; now the lower lip’s a little swollen and both cuts are visible, but after the initial “my mouth is full of blood and it stings!” he forgot about it. As a treat I put his special Sunday oatmeal (with a whole grated apple stirred in and cinnamon sprinkled on top) in his Nana’s Bunnykins porringer.

Liam, of course, was more interested in the dish than in eating what it held.

When You Least Expect It

Yes! Car trouble is precisely what I need just now!

If we were scheduled to do anything with you in the next 48 hours or so, consider it off. Two of the cylinders aren’t firing and there’s a dodgy little spark doing odd stuff where it oughtn’t. To the mechanic it goes on Monday.

On the sunnier side of life, it seems that we wrote a song today. Or rather, we finally got down to setting chords to the lyrics that ai731 wrote last (eep) August. So now a vocal melody and guitar solo can follow. Yay us.

Now I have to polish the one I wrote at the beginning of the month so it scans properly, and then we can set chords for that too.

Friday

Thanks to my wonderful mother in law, HRH and I got to play hooky for about four hours today.

X3 was… disappointing. The storyline vanished halfway through the film. Characterisation and motivation were non-existant. The scriptwriters should be shot for what they passed off as dialogue. On the other hand, there was action. A bunch of it, in fact. If I’d cared about any of the characters, I’d have enjoyed the action more.

Other than that, I mailed out a pile o’ stuff and finally got to deposit a cheque. I also tried to put a CD into my safe deposit box only to discover that it didn’t fit, even without the case; the disc is about five millimeters too wide. Argh! Looks like I’ll be buying a flash drive for this instead.

All in all, though, the day was a good one. And we had a bit of sushi for dinner, because it’s been a long hard week — no, a long hard two weeks — for both of us.

Briefly

Those new strings? Awesome! Except the thinner diameter really slices into my fingers. Ouch.

We had to flee the premises yesterday morning at seven-thirty because the floors upstairs were being sanded and the first coat of varnish put on. Drove HRH out to the place he’s painting (one hour and fifteen minutes), Liam and myself to the South Shore (forty-five minutes) to stay at my in-laws’ place (for three hours) before heading back to pick up HRH (one hour) and come home for the night. Even after airing the place out and burning good resin incense, I had a dreadful headache that pills couldn’t kill. Liam’s naps and location comfort zone were all messed up and we all suffered for it. Today they’re buffing and then a second coat of varnish is going on, and we’re not leaving until his first nap is finished; I don’t care how bad it smells. But when he’s awake again we’re headed back to the South Shore for the day. Depending on how everyone feels, HRH and I may leave him with his grandma for a couple of hours and go see X3. And I’ve got a pile of mail to go out, too, so we’ll have to hit a post office.

Book Roundup

I’ve been inhaling books lately, it seems. A lot of that has to do with the insomnia thing. In the past two weeks I’ve read The Wyrd of Willowmere by Alison Baird (that was pretty much overnight), Septimus Heap: Magyk by Angie Sage (the basic story is fine, but it has the irritating idiosyncracy of capitalising spell names and setting them in boldface, argh), An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (which was far and away better than A Dream of Scipio, probably due to the separation of narratives instead of interweaving them the way Scipio did), Four Seasons of Mojo by Stephanie Bird, Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King (also pretty much overnight, and Mousme was right, poor Russell), reread Travels With My Cello by Julian Lloyd Webber, and tore through The Serpent on the Crown by Elizabeth Peters (also pretty much overnight).

The result of this binge is that my stack of books to read has been brutally decimated. I’m down to a YA book that I put down half-read a couple of months ago (yawn) and a Dave Duncan book Ceri lent to me a while back. But there’s a new Jim Butcher out in paperback that I can pick up this week (Harry Dresden, yay!), and I should have a couple of non-fic research books arriving soon as well.