Category Archives: Diary

Garden!

I have just returned from eating dinner on the back deck, cooked on the new barbecue. (Thank you, whoever left the brochettes in the fridge; they were delightful.)

HRH spent the early part of the afternoon overhauling the gardens, because it was such a beautiful day. The mass of hostas that were growing along the side fence have been transplanted to various spots around the house. We took a trip out to price lumber and lattice to build the new side fence, and then to the nursery to buy our first set of plants. I now have rosebushes, lavender, and other herbs in the back corner. The huge creeping vine is gone from the back porch as well, as the trunk was beginning to split the floorboards. I think we’ll plant a clematis or two down below to replace it, to wind up the deck and along the side fence.

It’s beginning to feel somewhat like summer. It will feel more like summer once we’ve put in flats and flats of flowers, but we’re not going to do that until we’re certain the overnight temperature won’t dip close to the zero mark. I’m not tempting Nature like that, not when it’s done it twice in the past five years before Victoria Day.

Sunday

We spent a fabulous afternoon with the ADZO family yesterday. They fed us, which was unexpected but not unwelcome because they always create wonderful food, and Liam got to play with TAZ and her toys, and in general we all got to relax and share good company. It was remarkable to see Liam interacting with someone who is seven months older than he is; we can see how advanced he is in some respects, and the areas in which he’s definitely an eleven-month-old. He had an excellent nap in the morning and one in the early afternoon, and those allowed him to be sociable all afternoon and let us stay till past six o’clock. When we got home, he had some milk and passed out for twelve hours, with no wakings.

(Yes, we’re rather happy about it as well. Plus he went down for all naps and bedtime without a fuss. Two days of stress seem to have smoothed things over. Cross your fingers.)

We got to share in a first at the park: TAZ climbed the stairs to the slide, sat down at the top, then pushed off and slid down all by herself for the very first time. Liam’s first was much less impressive, but something to celebrate nonetheless: he climbed up the single stair from the sunken playroom into the dining room all by himself. And it looked at one point like he was playing peek-a-boo with TAZ across the wooden chest, because he was trying to mirror her actions of bending down behind it to hide and standing up to reveal herself.

Liam also consumed the most Cheerios I’ve ever seen him stuff into his mouth over dinner. Of course, a lot of them ended up in the seat of the high chair, but he ate tons of them despite that.

Once Liam’s morning and afternoon naps are solid (and they seem to be settling in well) I’ll be able to count on two blocks of an hour to an hour and a half of work per day. Oh: and Mousme is writing a swan story based on the Bonny Swans folk ballad too! I am very amused, and also very excited. I opened my Swan Sister file the other day, but not a single word was added because of the Invisible mp3s on the playlist. It was all good, though, because I played the cello instead, and Liam woke up fifteen minutes later, so I would have just been settling into the writing flow when I’d have had to stop.

I’ve been invited to a local BNI meeting in a couple of weeks, so I have to overhaul my business cards and recreate my handout literature. It’s interesting that this invitation came from someone whom I’ve never met (HRH has spoken to her on the phone once), who thought of me off the top of her head, and at a time when I’m ready to start taking a couple of freelance jobs on again. I’m looking forward to it.

‘Not What We Give, But What We Share’

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who came out to the potluck BBQ t!-and-ai731-are-getting-married party last night. Tal, HRH and I truly appreciate your time and energy. The food was wonderful, and the company most excellent. I’m only sorry that I missed a lot of the party due to sitting in the baby’s room trying to get him to/back to sleep, or sitting in my bedroom next to the monitor so that I could hear him if he woke up yet again. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the guests who wandered in over the course of the evening to hang out with me and bring me drinks and lemon buns. (At one point the entire membership of Invisible was in my bedroom with me, save for the bassist. Of course, the bassist has been in other bedrooms of mine plenty of times, and besides, it was his own getting-married-party going on in the other rooms.)

Ironically enough, Liam woke up at eleven once everyone was gone. Go figure. Maybe it was the cessation of white noise. But apart from the initial rocky two hours of very-hard-to-get-him-to-sleep, he only woke up at eleven and again at five-thirty, each time for about fifteen minutes for soothing, then another five or ten minutes of grumpy complaining alone before falling asleep. That’s an improvement already.

We now have a plethora of hot dog buns in the fridge. No hot dogs, but plenty of buns.

HRH picked up a new barbecue yesterday morning in honour of the event, as we realised that there were between twenty and thirty RSVPs and there was no way that our mini camp BBQ was going to handle that kind of dinner traffic. We’ve been wanting a full-size one for some time, of course, and we found a really great one on sale for just under one hundred dollars, down from its usual price of one-forty-ish. Hurrah!

We also had a wedding rehearsal yesterday, and it’s going to be wonderful. t! poked gentle fun at me for getting choked up when I read one of my lines, but I think I have every right to get teary because it’s one of the lines he read at my own wedding six and a half years ago. The circle is now complete. Or something like that.

Band practice Saturday morning confirmed that the wedding gig will be more of the non-stress event we want it to be. We’ve temporarily removed two of our songs from the set in order to rework and polish them some more before reintroducing them in the fall.

Today: a lovely social afternoon with the ADZO family (once we ascertain the time)!

Just A Hedge

Wow. What a completely miserable night.

And this morning hasn’t been much better.

On the more humourous side of things Liam ate live grass, dead grass, a dead leaf, an ant, and a handful of sand at the park yesterday, on top of his rice rusks, apples, and water.

Weekend Catch-Up

Happy Beltane!

Not turning on my computer for four days running is a very good method of dealing with stress. I like it. It does, however, mean that I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on when I get back to it. The good thing is that it was over the weekend, when there’s generally less stuff to handle anyway.

Let’s see. My parents were in town for a conference, so they came over Friday night and I cooked a belated birthday dinner for my Dad. Roast breast of duck glazed in ginger marmalade and soy sauce, wild rice with oyster mushrooms and toasted almonds, organic spring greens salad with homemade vinaigrette, followed by a dessert of chocolate sponge sandwiched together with strawberry coulis folded into whipped cream, then topped with fresh strawberries and chocolate ganache. And my parents brought an excellent Australian shiraz called [yellowtail] and it was the perfect accompaniment. It was so incredibly perfect. I’m not sure what happened, but it all worked. I’m always surprised when special dinners work.

Band practice was very okay. We miss our drummer something fierce when she’s not there. We talked about what to drop for the upcoming private gig (we’re playing a wedding! okay, it’s the guitarist’s wedding, but still!) and ran through stuff. I think most of us feel better about the gig in general after a week of distance.

Liam’s naps and sleeping-through-the-night went out the window again. Saturday was very, very bad. Last night he only woke up once around midnight, and today when he woke up after a scant twenty minutes of nap he was soothed back to sleep, so I am cautiously optimistic. We thought a tooth had made its appearance Saturday morning, but it’s still covered by a thin bit of skin, damn it. Like the other three, now.

We had coven yesterday and wove a beautiful Maypole. We slipped the weave off and tied it into sections and everyone took a bit home. Our feast was really good, too.

I’ve been going to bed very early to cope with the sleep fragmentation I’ve been suffering courtesy of the waking baby. It seems to be helping a bit.

Reading an excess of Connie Willis (not that there really is such a thing) makes me want to write desperately again.

Okay, baby’s awake! That makes for a total of over an hour of nap this morning. Hurrah!

Liam Update

Twenty-one pounds, ten ounces. Yikes.

Today was the follow-up appointment to the research project Liam was involved in at Ste-Justine hospital for premature babies and the prevention of respiratory illnesses. We got there, I fed him his oatmeal, they weighed him, asked if everything was okay, and we all shook hands and wished one another well. The results of the study won’t be available for a year or so, but in the meantime he didn’t get sick and we helped advance the development of a valuable vaccination.

He slept through Tuesday night. Then he had four (four!) naps yesterday, two of decent length and two catnaps, and he slept through last night as well. (He woke up at five, but them’s the breaks.) I’ve been whisking him off to his room to nurse him to sleep when I catch him rubbing his eyes, which has the added bonus of increasing his nursing as well, something that he hadn’t really been interested in doing during the day recently.

He’s cruising around pieces of furniture really well. And now he’s trying to share his toys with his other toys. The other day HRH found him holding one of his little rolling balls out to the stuffed turtle Luanna gave him.

Nap’s over! Back into the fray.

Standing Room Only

I don’t know how many people ended up attending last night’s show. I do know that more chairs had to be brought in, and it ended up being standing room only.

I find it interesting that when I woke up this morning I was thinking, “Wow, what a great concert I attended last night” as opposed to, “Oh yeah, I played a gig.” That’s what happens when you open for a kick-ass band like Invisible. They wipe all memory of your own set away. Not that I needed much help in that area; I remember the first three songs of our set really clearly (excellent! fast! precise! fun!), and then everything goes mysteriously missing until the dismantling of the set and unplugging of the instruments. Which is probably good for me, because I know there were things that went wrong for me, and if I can’t remember them then I can’t get upset about them. Oddly enough, I clearly remember thinking that things were slipping away from me during the Boom Desjardins song, and just letting it go and not stressing because there wasn’t anything I could do. But I don’t remember the actual music in the middle or latter part of the set, other than Moon Over Bourbon Street. (I can’t even blame it on alcohol, because I had only three sips of my whiskey sour post-performance before having to stop, because my stomach and head started doing odd things as a result of the sound and the crowds. Of course, we were sitting right in front between the speakers for Invisible’s double-length set, and I did dance rather hard for a bit, so that may have contributed to the odd nausea.) I had fun during our set too, though. I’d’ve had more if that song hadn’t gotten away from me, but we enjoyed ourselves. And there’s plenty of proof that the audience doesn’t know when things go wrong. It’s just because we know the songs we’re doing so well that when we make a mistake it stands out with flashing neon lights and sirens to us. I’d like to do some simpler songs that allow us to have fun and be relaxed as well. Our covers tend to be of complicated stuff that sounds brilliant but that requires a lot of concentration. Having fun and being relaxed is a good goal to strive for, I think.

We thoroughly enjoyed Invisible’s set, from the Johnny Cash through the originals. I’m so glad this gig was recorded. (And no, it won’t be available for public consumption; it’s a learning tool for the bands.) We sang, we danced, we cheered!

Unfortunately when I got home I couldn’t fall into a deep sleep despite how tired I was; I kept skipping the surface and waking up. And then Liam woke up at five o’clock, so I had a total of something like three hours of sleep. And the baby’s out of sorts today as well; no sign of teeth yet. Argh.

We’re trying the crock pot we got for Christmas for the first time today. Pot roast: just the thing for a dark rainy spring day.