Category Archives: Diary

Scattershot

More useful inbox spam: Lose 32 pounds by Easter! If I lose 32 pounds I will be dead.

The main problem with moving (because of course there are several) is that there are never enough boxes. I fervently believe that it’s one of those dark SF equations at work. Neil Gaiman should write something about this. No, really – it sounds like one of those mildly annoying things that the protagonist of a dark fantasy novel encounters as s/he prepares to move out of an equally dark house with A Presence. Protagonist gets boxes, packs, needs more boxes; calculates, gets more boxes, and falls short yet again. The pattern is repeated as an (apparently) minor amusing recurrance, and not until the end of the novel does the reader realise that The Lack Of Boxes Is Significant!

Sleep update: I didn’t Wednesday night. Did last night, thanks to the joys of drugs enabling me to (a) sleep, and (b) breathe while doing it. All bow to the pharmacists, architects of my preserved sanity. Somewhere around four AM on Wednesday night (Thursday morning?) I began to understand why sleep deprivation works as a method of torture. You literally don’t have a chance to download. No blessed darkness descends to make it all go away for a while. It’s reality, 24/7. And even if your reality is nice and humdrum, it loses all appeal at 4 AM after a total of six hours sleep over four days.

It occurs to me that for the first time in quite a while, I’m hungry. Really hungry. Hmm.

Today, more packing, and I have to take the delicate stuff over to the new place – cello, viola, bodhran, harp, stuff like that. While I’m there I think I’ll unpack what I can and bring boxes back. It’s nice to feel well enough to plan things like this, although you can be darned sure I’ll stop the moment I start feeling wobbly.

In Which She Drags Herself Out Of Bed

Update:

1. I’m out of bed at last. Yes, I spent the last three or four days sick under the covers, using up Kleenex and copious amounts of cough drops, and still not being able to sleep or even breathe with any degree of success. Off and on fever, eternal blinding headache. This is the frst time in years that I’ve been able to listen to my body and stay in bed during one of these episodes. Much easier to deal with than dragging oneself around a job environment, infecting others, and generally suffering longer as a result.

2. Packing proceeds apace. There have even been a couple of carloads of boxes taken over to the new place already. Today, I have trusty friends Tal and Tass coming over to help. I still haven’t decided if this was a good idea (i.e. we’ll get lots done), or a bad idea (i.e. we’ll have way too much fun and by the end of the day it will be, Boxes? What boxes?).

3. Just so we’re straight on this, I do not in the least resent the fact that my mother is taking a well-deserved vacation with her sister in the Dominican Republic. It’s just that I’m here, packing, with tons of snow outside, and she’s reading on a beach. I wish I was with her. Impractical, of course; I mean, I was actually delighted that Montreal got a Real Snowfall in 2003, and with my lack of appetite the scrumptious vacation food would be wasted on me, and flying would have been excruciating. It’s the irony of it.

4. While I was stuck in bed yesterday and lucid enough to connect thoughts, I wrote 1,888 words of the Great Canadian Novel. I didn’t hit my 2K daily goal, but it was the first time I’d written in about four days, and I was pleased. Any words are better than no words, I always say.

Prepare for irregular postings and updates, as I shift into SuperPacking mode and place the remaining 75% of my home into boxes over the next three days. Then there’s that move thing, and the set-up of it all at the other end…

In Which She Grumbles About Poor Health

The final game of the Scott Tournament of Hearts went into an extra end yesterday afternoon. Team Canada won for the third year in a row. You didn’t get exciting updates end-by-end this year because it was a Sunday, and I’ve ruled that I will not sit down at the computer over the weekend, not even to check my e-mail, because I work on it all week. I think it’s a good rule. It helps me feel more relaxed, which is rapidly becoming perhaps the most important goal in my life at the moment.

I’ve also been drop-dead sick, which doesn’t help at all. It started Thursday afternoon – the fever, the golf-ball feeling in the throat, the blinding headache that just won’t go away no matter how many headache candies you throw at it. I had to cancel a dinner with Ceri, which we’d both been looking forward to. Friday and Saturday weren’t much better. Fortunately, my students were remarkably understanding regarding my lack of energy and focus.

What frustrates the hell out of me is that we’re moving this Saturday, so the original plan was for me to be in a packing frenzy all this week. The problem? I can’t stand up for too long without falling over, let alone do the reaching-up-and-placing-in-box motion of packing. I tried last night while my husband was chipping away the net of snow and ice trapping our car out in the winter wonderland called Montreal. It was a mistake.

I hate feeling so damned helpless. I hate it at the best of times, but at a time like this, it’s even worse. So I’m cranky as well, which doesn’t improve matter at all.

The final twist of the screw: My mother is is the Dominican Republic, soaking up sand and sun. Grrr.

Semi-Random Neural Firings:

1. We’re moving March 1. Yay us! Big, bright, mock fireplace, built-in china cabinet in the dining room with leaded glass doors, and a claw-foot bathtub. I’m in heaven. And after only a couple of hiccoughs, it’s ours. We sign the lease tonight. Woo!

2. It sucks to be stuck in the middle of a family power struggle. Especially when it’s somebody else’s family, no relation to you whatsoever, and when you’re (a) a pawn, and (b) a casualty. So long, landlord.

3. I appear to be officially hibernating. I’m so tired of winter. All I can manage to do these days is curl up under the afghan with a pile of cats, and space out.

4. Sleep? What is sleep? We do not understand the concept of sleep.

5. Food is hard to think about, let alone swallow. Tums are my new best friend. Yay, minty Tums! Rich in calcium, too. I seem to remember reading something recently about Tums being bad for you in large quantities, but one a day is not going to kill me. Anything that settles my eternally nauseous stomach must have possess some intrinsic good.

6. Thirty-one days till spring!

First Rehearsal, New Conductor

8,900 visitors! Goodness. We’re about a week away from a year of the Owlyblog. That’s a lot of people. (Can’t fool me, I know that it’s a couple of you at work, checking several times throughout the day in desperation, seeking something, anything to fill the void…)

Last night was our first rehearsal with our new conductor, Douglas Knight. Our principal cellist was away on a business trip, so last night of all nights Walter made me fulfill my promise to him and join him at the first stand. For those of you who don’t know, the principal chair of a section sits (a) closest to the conductor, and (b) closest to the audience. Theoretically it’s because they’re so talented and experienced, and they lead the rest of the section.

So there I was last night, sitting right next to the new conductor. “This will be much better,” Walter told him. “She’s good.”

Now, as much as that boosted the ego and probably had a positive effect on how I played, it didn’t change the fact that I hadn’t been at rehearsal in two weeks, and had played only once at home (shame, shame!). And what I played in my living room had nothing to do with what we’re preparing at orchestra, and everything to do with Bach solo cello suites.

I didn’t embarrass myself, which is good. I proved to myself that I can play musically even with wrong notes. I also proved to myself that two weeks of not looking at Mendelssohn is suicide, especially in that dratted second movement with those wretched sixteenth notes and the celli solo in tenor clef. Grr.

All in all, it was a good night. We’re all feeling each other out, finding new footing, new ways to communicate, learning each other’s style. He really put us through our paces, working most of the Mendelssohn: the minuet and trio movement (which was quite beautiful once we found our rhythm as a unit), the final Allegro Con Fuoco movement (also known as the Movement That Never Ends), then back to the evil second movement. And then, joy of joys, the nice, dramatic, Don Giovanni overture. My fingers were swollen and throbbing when I got home, but that’s what you get when you don’t practice for two weeks, right?

Can’t practice today, though; I’m off to the store, then home this afernoon to work on the newsletter, then back to teach at the store tonight. (Yes, astonishing, I know; the first workshop this year that has enough students to merit not cancelling it!) So, tomorrow I will attack the looming threat of the Stretto section of the final Mendelssohn movement (actually, the entire last page), and rework the second movement yet again.

It’s a good thing that I want to practice, I think. It’s nice to feel positive about my cellistic abilities once again.