Category Archives: Diary

Kitten Nurse

Well, drat.

I was all psyched for this literacy tutor thing, and I couldn’t go to the info session with Ceri because I was unable to be out of bed for more than half an hour at a time. She thoughtfully brought back the information package for me. However, it turns out the training sessions are on the two nights per week when I’m teaching and when I’m at orchestra.

Double drat.

They repeat the training sessions in later months, but again, they’re on nights when I’m teaching. It seems that I am not meant to be a tutor at this time.

I am, however, to serve as a feline Florence Nightingale. A Florence Nightingale to felines, I mean. Now that the feral cat’s kittens that Scarlet discovered when we came home from Pennsylvania are starting to be weaned, someone needs to feed them three or four times a day, and Scarlet’s back at school full-time and working part-time. So to me will fall the early afternoon feedings, and an extra dinner-time feeding for the tiny black female who’s skin and bones. I’m rather partial to that one, so I’ll do my best to make sure she gets that extra meal and grows nice and plump with a shiny coat.

Still popping vitamin C, and drinking lots. I’ve given up on herbal teas; just can’t take them anymore. I’m on water today. And I’m craving chocolate sooo badly…

Amused

Found more old e-mail as I was cleaning up my hard drive. For a while about two or three years ago, I signed off with “The Jovial Warrior Sorceress”, and my sig was “Leather will do just fine”. It’s a bit out of character, yes, but that was half the fun. It came from the wonderful, time-wasting Lee’s (Useless) Superhero Generator, which served as a source of amusement for my circle of friends for a week or two.

The next time I have to create a D&D character, none of this patiently developing a character and a background for me. Nope, it’s going to be The Jovial Warrior Sorceress, levelling enemies with a quip, a rapier, a fireball and a heroic laugh. “Hold, miscreant! Have at thee! What, my hearty allies? Wearied already? A round of song, then! Ninety-nine dumb orcs charging the Wall, ninety-nine orcs at the Wall; strike one down, spread him around, ninety-eight dumb orcs charging the Wall!”

I really think I should go back to bed.

Taking Form

It’s official! The cold has developed a fever, making this the Cold Package with Extra Bonus Material.

When I have a cold, I know what makes me worse: soda, dairy, and so forth. Sugar and milk just feed my sore throat with bad stuff and it gets worse. So of course I’m craving cola and such. Instead, I’m drinking herbal tea and bouillon. It’s odd how you can fall into a routine without realising it; when I open my laptop to write, I gather my loose change and I walk to the depanneur to pick up a can of Vanilla Coke, then come back and sit down and whip off however many pages my mind decides to create and/or my fingers can keep up with (whichever comes first). I want to write today, but Vanilla Coke is right out. I suppose I could buy a ginseng drink or something, but it’s just not the same.

On the much more exciting news front, my husband came home from working on someone’s balcony yesterday, and after chatting with his a-bit-out-of-it wife, he wandered into the office and didn’t come out. Now, he’s been discovering the Internet (has his own e-mail address and everything! Well, it’s big news in our world, anyway), so I figured he was on-line. When I emerged from under the afghan and left my nest in the living room to refill my teacup, I stopped in the office doorway, amazed. He wasn’t at my desk, where the computer is; he was at his own desk, where the new oil paints I bought for him on Saturday were. In fact, he had a palette out, and two brushes going, and a landscape taking form rather rapidly.

Oil paint fascinates me. I’m a watercolour person myself, so to see how oil blends so well is truly astounding. Even more astounding, however, was watching him blend two or three different paints on the palette, take the new colour, and blend it into a tree trunk, for example, on the painting. He doesn’t seem to use long strokes very often; he dabs a lot. His foliage in particular uses this technique, and catches my attention.

The whole apartment smells different too, and it took me a while to get a fix on where I recognised it from. I shared an apartment with Annika while she was doing her BFA; her room and the bedroom hallway always smelled like this. It’s the smell of creativity, and of colour, and of boldness and a moment in time.

The only problem with this fever is I’m at one remove; I feel as if I’m working under a pane of glass that separates me from the rest of the world, or a puddle that slightly distorts the sensory info that reaches me. No doubt when I re-read all this in a couple of days I’ll wonder how anyone made any sense out of it.

Stuff

I am officially sick. Right on time, too; I have an audition in four days. Nasty headache, sore throat, coughs and sneezes, the whole cold package. I’ve been feeling increasingly off all weekend, last night I slept horribly, and I’m cranky. So I’m in bed with my laptop, and when I’m done here I’ll curl up with A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the rest of my pot of peppermint tea, and furry hot water bottles that purr.

Well, well, well – Chretien is going to take Kyoto to Parliament. About bloody time. HRH will be pleased – that was going to be his next rant. Along with building a big air-proof dome over the Kyoto-scorning US, he was saying something about short-term sacrifice on the part of companies to ensure a long-term benefit of saving the planet.

I printed out the sixty-five pages of the story that I’ve been working on, and I read it all at one go last night. It’s rather gratifying to see that things flow. I even found some lovely unintentional foreshadowing and dramatic irony that was unplanned but which works quite nicely. For things like that to happen I have to be in the right headspace, and evidently I’m occupying it on a regular basis. There are snags, and I need to smooth things out here and there, substitute other words, but all in all, I like it.

I mentioned that I’m reading Possession again. In only three chapters an innumerable amount of references to thesis-related concepts that I didn’t find while I was doing it have leapt out at me. I must have been so focused on the particular angle I was after that I filtered out these other ideas, which is good for what I was doing at the time, of course. Now, though, it makes me want to write another paper. Hmm. Maybe the use of research and the character of History in Byatt’s work. Angels & Insects would be perfect for that, both the title novella and its focus on natural history, and its sibling novella about mediums and reaching into the spirit world for news of past family and lovers. So would Virgin in the Garden, which is all about staging a Renaissance-related drama.

Uh-oh. Do I sense another project coming on?

I have been taken with the whim of attempting to publish something; perhaps I’ll focus on an academic periodical and see what happens.

Fun and Games

Yesterday we cleaned out the fridge. We do this out of self-defence periodically; not because we’ve run out of room, but because we don’t know what might be back there. We liberated a few Tupperware containers from bondage and discovered not one, but four bottles of wine that were open. This comes about as a result of people bringing wine over for parties and such, not finishing the bottles, and saying, “Hey, that wine in the fridge, it’s all yours,” as they leave. I forget it’s there until a time such as this.

“How many bottles of wine are in here?” my husband asked, peering into the depths.

“We should pour them all together in a pitcher,” I said. I was joking. But then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t. “We could mix them and blend them with 7-Up and have kind of a sangria,” I said. My husband looked at me oddly, but gave me the bottles of wine. I tasted each first to make sure it hadn’t soured; nope, the three whites were fine. The single red, however, was definitely past its prime. I wouldn’t even be able to cook with it. Down the sink it went while the husband went to buy 7-Up. I found a bottle of lime cordial in the fridge that had only an inch or so of cordial left; I poured that in as well, being minus the lemons and limes I like to put in mixes like this. And the whole thing tasted divine.

We made dinner, poured glasses of the mystery mix, and decided to play Junior Trivial Pursuit. Ordinarily this means it’s a quicker game than the adult edition. However, the edition of Junior Trivial Pursuit I own is the original version, dating back from 1984. (Go ahead. Count on your fingers. Yes, it’s perilously close to twenty.) This means it asks many questions based on contemporary pop culture like information about hockey leagues and now-defunct sports teams, and the question that stumped us both: what is the Sugar Crisp bear holding on the Sugar Crisp box? The box has since been redesigned, so it was more of a challenge that we’d anticipated. This is definitely a game we’ll have to pull out at a party, just to watch people rummage around their two-decade old store of history. It was terrific; a mix of a walk down memory lane, a high school reunion, and a realisation of how much the world has changed.

Contradiction

Yesterday was another odd day.

I met with Ceri to exchange our creative efforts for the two previous weeks, and I was late; I had been involved in my writing, finally looked at the clock, and proceeded to dash about trying to print things out, change, and catch a bus. I hate being rushed. I also dislike waking up and being slightly out of sorts, which I was yesterday; not in a bad mood, just slightly out of step with everything else. Ceri offered me tea and made me a grilled cheese sandwich, like any good Maritimer would if you collapsed in their kitchen and said, “I feel wrong.” It helped. So did the Advil.

I had dinner with MLG which was as enjoyable as always, and yet uncomfortable on other levels. We’d made the date previous to my implosion on Sunday, so rather than having an evening getting away from it all, we ended up troubleshooting and problem-solving, which isn’t a bad thing, just not what I had originally intended. Although I am an excellent listener, I am admittedly reluctant to ask people for help, and these days I’m incredibly blessed to have people who see that I need it and give it to me whether I’ve asked or not. I think that reluctance partially stems from the belief that my feelings and problems are private, and partially from the desire to not burden others (who have their own problems) with mine as well. To a certain extent, it’s also learned behaviour: throughout high school and CEGEP, my friends would pour their problems out to me, but when I tried to share my own, they were uninterested. The idea that people are determined to get me to talk and open up is rather new. I am, however, looking forward to a day when I can have a conversation with other adults that doesn’t revolve around my problems. I get twitchy when a conversation rests on me for too long and start looking for a place to hide, and when you’re in a corner at a pub with a single rather sharp individual, hiding is rather difficult. I suppose this is good for me – doesn’t it build character or something?

Apart from dinner being terribly delicious (nothing like colcannon when you need comfort food!) and being introduced to Boddingtons, I acquired a battery for my laptop, hurrah! I got home and spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for the slot to install it before realising that the only logical place for it to go was the CD-ROM drive slot, so I took out the disc drive and lo and behold, the battery slid right in. The unit didn’t self-destruct when I turned it on this morning, so I must have done something right – it has even produced a battery indicator on the display. I feel more freedom already. The Loyola campus library is three minutes away from me, and I have many fond memories of hours spent there before and after class during my BA years; there’s also a perfectly lovely park across the way which I will have to test out soon as a writing location as well.

I have an odd contradiction of feeling about my home these days. I want to cocoon, to stay home, read, and write; on the other hand, I’m feeling a little house-bound by the recent weather and want to be Out Doing Things. The latter is a very new experience for me, so I’m indulging it at the right times. In fact, Ceri and I are headed for more fabric stores today, questing for the perfect trim for sewing projects. Little expeditions like this are just perfect; they get me out, I can read on the metro, I share a couple of hours with another intelligent life form other than a cat, and then I’m home again. I have discovered by not working for an employer during the week, I no longer feel like I Have To Have Fun on my days off; as a result, when the sun goes down I no longer feel as if I’ve wasted a day somehow. This is a definite improvement.

They say it will rain this weekend. They said that last weekend too. I’ll believe it when I see it.

The Little Things Count

So I spent yesterday with Ceri, and all day something was lurking in the back of my mind, and it had something to do with Ceri herself (indirectly), and Saturday night when I went to a ritual.

It nibbled, and nibbled, and every time I tried to look at it it would vanish into the shadowy depths of my subconscious again. All Sunday it lurked and gnawed. Something like this is like having a mosquito in the room with you: you can hear it, and you know it’s there, but you’ll never see it, and it just gets more and more irritating.

When I go to ritual I usually wear a hand-made anklet of amber and onyx. I rarely wear it for any other reason, and if I do, I have to be feeling really special. As I did up the clasp on Saturday night I thought about wearing it more often, but I’m always afraid it will break. This casual observation must have been what started that lurky thought that hung around for a day or so. Ceri and I looked at a lot of fabric and trims yesterday, and Ceri mentioned making her wedding dress. The niggling feeling that I was forgetting something floated closer to the surface, but still didn’t make it all the way to conscious thought. It wasn’t until I was in a bath last night that I finally, triumphantly, dragged that thought out into the light, kicking and screaming.

I bought another anklet in Halifax last September the day of Ceri’s wedding, so I could wear an anklet all the time.

There.

When I emerged from the bath I hunted through my jewelry box until I found it, underneath some stone necklaces. Out of sight, out of mind. Figures.

I shouldn’t feel this smug and content about remembering a delicate silver anklet. Really.