Category Archives: Diary

Idle Schedule Dreams

Maybe it’s because I’ve felt shackled to my desk for the past couple of months and a horrible winter, but I’ve been dreaming of what I’ll be able to do when this book is handed in on May 2.

– Actually go to the yarn store, where I have not been since early December, to pick up the copy of Spin-Off Spring 2011 that they’ve had aside for me for over a month. Pat yarn. Buy spinning fibre.

– Head over to Debra’s house with an empty box to sort through her little girl clothes and abscond with some. Also, have tea like real human beings.

– Actually shop for baby things. Not that we need a heck of a lot; we’ll be borrowing used stuff from others to replace our equipment that wore out/came back damaged/expired. It’s more the principle of the thing: I’d like to actually have one or two new things for this baby. I do need to start collecting samples of cloth diapers for newborns, though, to have on hand for when the baby comes home so we can test them out and see which brands/style suit her best. Some of this has been dependent on cash flow, as well, so I haven’t been able to jump on excellent used deals on Craigslist and the like for things like infant car seat stroller frames and sets of used cloth diapers when they’ve come up.

– Nap.

– Stare out a window for a while and not feel guilty.

– Possibly do a photo session with Tamu. Do recon on photo studios for an actual family portrait, something we’ve never had done, ever.

– Start spinning the warp yarn for the baby blanket (May), and then weave the baby blanket (see, I am already planning into June!).

– Order the fabric online for the baby’s blanket that the boy wants made for her. Start assembling the bits for the mobile he has designed. (Both of these feature the boy as designer/director and me as executor. Sigh.)

– Schedule a playdate or two.

– Finish knitting the garter squares for the baby booties and origami them together.

– Go to my doctor’s appointments and ultrasounds (the regular and the extra oh-dear-you’re-high-risk ones) without feeling stressed because there’s work piling up at home.

– Play the cello. (I have one. Not that you’d know it if you lived here.) Prep for the June recital.

– Start planning the boy’s sixth birthday parties, Family Edition and School Friend Edition.

– Read.

– Sort through what baby equipment we do have on hand that is usable and needs cleaning/repacking/set up. Not that we can set anything up in our bedroom till mid-July. No, there will be no nursery till around Thanksgiving when the attic office is done.

– Do the tax stuff. That was scheduled for last month; it didn’t happen, nor did it happen this month, because there was too much work. And since we’re first-time homeowners there’s a pile of unknowns that needs to be ascertained, like what we can write off, what receipts or proof of whatevers are required, and so forth.

– And… work. Sigh. Eventually the edits on the bird book will come back, and I’ll have to address those, and I know they will not be the “oh you have six things to handle and that’s it” that the hearthcraft book had; these will need more attention. But I am looking forward to the more regular paycheque that copyediting yields. Pay vs energy/time input, copyediting gives better value than writing, I have found. That’s sad but true.

Weekend Roundup Etc

I was disappointed in the debate last night. I was hoping for actual adult discussion of policy and platform. What we got was people pointing fingers at one another. Snarking about it on Twitter with Canadian friends helped me get through it. All I really got out of it was an odd dream that I was an environmentalist active in avian preservation, and Stephen Harper personally promised me that he’d build a new habitat for penguins at the Biodome if I’d vote for him. I think the bird book is getting to me.

We had a whirlwind trip out to Rowan Tree Farm on Saturday for our annual spring equinox ritual (affectionately referred to as OsTaras) with t! and Jan, which was very enjoyable, and the next day we did a late equinox/early Easter brunch and egg-decorating session with the Preston-LeBlancs:

The bulbs HRH and the boy planted all over the place last fall are coming up, and we have discovered naturalized crocuses (crocii?) in the back garden, to our delight:

(Hello, lovely macro setting on my camera. You make crocuses look very, very nice indeed.)

I did a preliminary dye test to tint the Falkland warp fibre green to better match the Manos weft yarn. The green dye really turned the fibre an emerald, Astroturf-y green despite me using a half-saturated solution, gack. So I hauled out the hackle and blended the emerald fibre with undyed fibre in two different proportions, spindle-spun both samples and plied them, et voila; a pretty decent match, I’d say. The left photo shows the Manos at the back, a sample skein of a 2 white:1 green yarn in the middle, a sample of 1 white:1 green yarn on the right, and on the far left is the emerald dyed fibre, just for kicks. The photo on the right shows the two sample skeins laid over the skein of Manos, showing just how close my two hand-blended yarns got.

There’s so much variation in the kettle-dyed Manos that either of these blends would work, I think. Or rather, I could be a bit less precise about how much of each colour I’m blending in as I go, and it will still look lovely. Now I know that I can blend it, I could dye up about 4 ounces of green at this solution and trundle down to Ariadne Knits with it and another 4-6 ounces of undyed fibre to crank out 8 to 10 ounces of batts on the drum carder there… or I could further experiment with a much, much weaker solution of emerald green on a larger amount of fibre. Which I may still have to card with undyed fibre; who knows? It’s academic at this point, though, because I need my order of undyed Falkland to arrive at the shop first.

The bird book proceeds apace; deadline is in two and a half weeks, five days of which I am away for Easter. We had a bit of a setback last week when we discovered some of the art wasn’t available, which led to a three-level list of birds to be cut, and unfortunately I’d already written over half of them. It was somewhat demoralizing so close to the finish line, especially because I immediately assumed I’d have to find about twenty replacement birds from among the available art, but it turns out I won’t, so I’m still on track. I do mourn the loss of the research and time spent writing those entries I’ve already completed, though, especially since a couple of them were extensive. I am very tired, and I am aware that this manuscript will not be the shiny, polished thing I prefer to hand in. It’s somewhat uneven in that some birds just have a pile of folklore and superstition attached to them, and others don’t. Generally, birds that are found both in the Old World and the New World have more; New World-only birds have a lot less. It’s simply a question of the amount of time that the lore has had to accumulate. The proposed cover for the book is just wonderful, and I’ve been signed to write the intro to the accompanying birdwatching journal as well.

The book has been wringing me out, so I’ve been restless without a lot of mental focus to apply anywhere. I’ve been spinning a bit, and because I can’t seem to gather enough energy to select music I actually want to listen to I decided to try downloading free audiobook recordings. I’m working through the Librivox Sense & Sensibility right now, and I’m of two minds about it. Librivox switches narrators every two or three chapters, which is fair, but also jarring. I’m lucky in that there’s only one narrator I’ve really disliked so far whose reading isn’t very good at all (her recording level is low, in mono, and her enunciation isn’t great so a lot of the time it’s mostly a murmur). On the other hand, it’s kind of neat to have different interpretations; the change in narrator really wakes you up and makes you listen a bit more closely. I do about five chapters in a session and get through almost a half-ounce of fibre in that time. I wish my library had a decent audiobook selection.

In Which She Thinks About Pregnancy Stuff

There are some thoughts I need to write out about this, because I’m trying to work out how I feel.

A couple of people have asked if we announced the pregnancy when we did because we couldn’t hide it any longer. This amuses me. People, I have been wearing maternity clothes since Christmas. That’s three months earlier than last time. I am built like a stick; my body shape starting changing pretty early this time round. Granted, my winter sweaters are loose and bulky, but I didn’t go out of my way to swath myself in disguises or anything, and I went out threeish times a week to mingle with the masses, so I wasn’t holing up at home to avoid being noticed. No, we announced it when we did because we finally had good news from the doctors about the health of the baby. (It occurs to me that people aren’t noticing as much as they might because of my initial body shape: I have a very short waist, so I’m basically ribcage/baby right now, and that’s not as noticeable as it might be if there were another four inches of space between the two.)

Long-time readers will remember that we didn’t publicly announce our first pregnancy at all via the Internet; we told people in person as we met them. This resulted in some people being told that we had a baby before they knew I was pregnant, thanks to the boy arriving two months early. But one of the reasons I didn’t share the news last time was because I didn’t want to be treated any differently. I was curious to see if our approach to sharing the news this time would support my previous suspicion. Sure enough, now that they know, there are people automatically assuming that I am differently-abled in some way because I’m pregnant. I am the same person the world has been dealing with for the past five months. Nothing has changed. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a bit slower getting in and out of chairs, cars, and bed, but that’s about it.

I find this fascinating, as well as exasperating. I can explain fibro till the cows come home, and although people say they think they get it, it’s a hazy, vague understanding. But tell someone I’m pregnant, and they jump to the assumption that I must be exhausted, my back must ache, I must feel sick all the time, and so forth. That’s how I feel the majority of the time thanks to fibro. Pregnancy was and is a breeze for me, possibly because I’m used to this sort of thing. (In fact, I feel better fibro-wise now that I’m pregnant. Go figure. This is not a serious option for long-term fibro treatment, though, people; we’re stopping here at two kids!)

I guess what it comes down to is familiarity. Everyone knows someone who is/has been pregnant, so they have some level of direct experience with it. Millions of women do this; we have a cultural perception of pregnancy and what it does to someone. Fibro? Not so much. There’s a reason why a lot of FM/CFS sufferers default to an explanation such as “It’s like I have the flu all the time”: it’s a common experience people can draw on to get some idea of what you must be going through. That cultural perception of pregnancy isn’t universally applicable, though, and that’s what drives me crazy. The experience is not one size fits all; everyone’s pregnancy is different, affects them differently, and impacts them differently. I appreciate the fact that people are upping their solicitousness and concern, but it kind of frustrates me that I’m being placed in a box marked “Pregnant” along with the general assumptions that rattle around inside it. We all pigeonhole people and situations, myself included — it’s human nature, and it helps us deal with things efficiently — but as often as I can, I try to evaluate every new situation and individual, and not default to assumptions. It just feels weird to have people dismiss fibro because they don’t have experience with it, and overemphasize pregnancy for me.

Okay, enough of that. Here’s something wacky.

Last fall I figured it was about time to get my eyes checked again. It has been about five years since my prescription changed, twoish since I started wearing my glasses full-time, so I was due. As usual, I procrastinated, so I got pregnant before I went in for a checkup. And then it was Christmas, and there was travelling and other family health issues, and it fell off my to-do list. My eyes started acting up in about January, and I remembered that I really ought to make that appointment with the optometrist.

And then I paused. What if it wasn’t my vision alone? What if it was the pregnancy? It isn’t unheard of for women to report major vision changes during pregnancy; there are people whose eyes have significantly improved or worsened permanently due to it.

I didn’t notice any sort of change in my first pregnancy. This one, though; whoa. I can now get away with not wearing my glasses at all most of the time. In fact, I have to take them off while driving a lot, because they make my distance viewing slightly blurrier. Reading from a book is mostly fine, depending on how tired I am, and ditto for the computer screen: I can go glasses-free earlier in the day, but as the day goes on and my eyes get tired, I have to put the glasses on again. The main problem I have discovered is that I have developed the habit of taking a pair of glasses off and putting them down if they’ve started straining my eyes, and then I can’t remember where I put them when I need them again hours later.

So in the end I think I’m glad I didn’t get that optometrist appointment before the pregnancy happened, because if I’d spent all that money on a new prescription that was just going to change anyway, possibly permanently, I would be pretty cranky. (No, HRH’s health insurance doesn’t cover eyes. Or dental, despite the atrocious amount of money he pays for it.) I’ll make an appointment for this coming fall instead.

What I Read in March 2011

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King (reread)
The Game by Laurie R. King (reread)
Unnatural Creatures by Sarah Monette
The Bone Key by Sarah Monette
Helping Parents Practice by Edmund Sprunger
The Sea Thy Mistress by Elizabeth Bear
Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire
Grail by Elizabeth Bear

I am cranky. Nowhere in any of the advance store previews or ads that I read was A Discovery of Witches said to be anything other than a standalone novel. As I read it I kept thinking, “The pacing in this is odd. Decent story, but where is it going?” which became, “How on earth is this going to be wrapped up in twenty pages?” Turns out it’s to be a trilogy. I hold marketing to blame. Also, there’s not a smidge of mention anywhere in the book itself, not in front or back matter, that says it’s to be anything more than a single book. (I just dug out the book jacket and on the inside flap in pale letters it says it’s the first of a trilogy. Man, that rankles.) I will be reading the others in the trilogy, just so we’re clear; I find a lot of the central ideas very interesting (especially having just gone through a crash course in genetics).

Stopping By To Say Hi

I am swamped with work. I have a month to deadline, and hospitals and doctors have eaten up a lot of work days in the past couple of months. I have to add April to my list of Months In Which I Will Have No Time To Do Anything So Please Don’t Ask.

Here’s a scattershot report of the past week:

1. You know that whole “maybe now that I don’t have to visit so many hospitals for tests and consultations I can get work done?” Yeeeeeah. Guess where we spent Tuesday? That would be checking out the emergency ward of our local hospital, because HRH got ambushed by a wicked kidney stone. The hospital and staff seem very nice. HRH is bruised and recovering from medical trauma.

2. We went in to Le Melange Magique this morning to bid farewell to Debra, the owner, who after nineteen and a half years decided that she had other things to do in her life. From the moment she told me of her plan to sell the store in January I have been behind her one hundred percent. She’s pulled off some pretty amazing stuff in the past twenty years, and deserves her retirement from the metaphysical business and eventual refocusing on a new career. I admire her immensely, both for what she built, and for moving on when the time was right. And I am thrilled that a couple of my friends have bought the store; the administration team is going to be terrific. The store is in good hands.

3. The boy attended his first group cello class on Sunday, and it went very well indeed. He saw seven or eight other kids, ranging from his age to late teens, playing, and was thoroughly energized. He played open strings that fit into whatever the other kids were playing from the Suzuki repertoire, and I saw him imitating their bowing rhythms and pretending to move his left hand fingers on the fingerboard like they were doing, too, which is huge because he’s been resisting left hand work; he just hasn’t been ready yet. My teacher lent us a basic first cello performance book that uses the Twinkle Variation A rhythm for the young “soloist” along with a piano and second cello accompaniment, which sounds like “real music,” and we have played “Wintertime in Russia” and today we played “Carnival in Rio.” Sure, the young soloist in question is playing an open string over and over, but the piano and second cello move around and use different keys, and as a result different moods are created. “Wintertime in Russia” really sounded Russian; “Carnival in Rio” sounded like a gentle samba. He loves playing with me, and I think the fact that we’re playing “his” music makes a big difference to him. And he’s doing a good job maintaining the rhythm, and watching for cues to stop, too.

4. We’re in the last few days before the spring concert this Saturday. There are some things I still can’t get, mostly cues that feel sudden to me, and I can’t do any more work on them on my own because it’s about fitting in with what’s happening in the orchestra. I can play the stuff on my own. It’s understanding where to come in that’s throwing me. And as usual I feel awful, because I’m right in front of the conductor, and I feel like I’m personally letting him down when he suddenly turns and cues me and I miss it. I know it’s coming; I know, and I’m physically prepped, and then whoosh it’s gone. I am definitely proud of conquering some stuff I was struggling with up till last week, though.

5. The baby (whose code name is Owlet, dubbed thusly by the boy) is big enough to be visibly bumping my tummy around from the inside. It is amusing.

6. Yes, the baby has a name, or one so far, at least. No, no one’s getting to hear it until she’s born. Partly because, well, it’s ours right now, and partly because if it really doesn’t suit her when she’s born, we don’t want to have to explain that we’ve changed it. She has actually had a name since a couple of days before she was conceived, when the boy casually mentioned to us at the breakfast table that he was going to have a baby sister, and this is what her name was going to be. Two weeks later I showed HRH the pregnancy test, and when the boy asked what it was, we told him it was the baby he’d ordered. It’s an unusual name, too, one we’ve never heard before. We have no idea where the boy found it; we know no one with that name, there are no kids at school of that name, it hasn’t been in any books or films we’ve seen or read. We suspect he made it up, although HRH has since found it online as a variation or diminutive of another name. We really love the fact that he’s so voluntarily involved with this baby. He’s taken on the task of designing the nursery theme as well, and has proposed several crafts for us to do to create mobiles and blankets and so forth.

7. I got the mock-up of the cover for the bird book, and it is absolutely exquisite. It’s easily my favourite of all my book covers. It looks like an old botanical illustration, but with birds. The tentative release date for the book and the companion journal is January 2012. (If I ever get it finished, that is. I’m going to have to start adding another work day on weekends, probably Sundays, to hit my deadline. Stupid doctor appointments. At least I only have two scheduled this month.) (She said with great emphasis, glaring at the universe.)

8. I need a new laptop. The borrowed iBook is running Panther (2003, boys and girls!), Safari crashes on it repeatedly when I try to access half the research pages I need to access, and it is, alas, very slow. I can write a rough draft of one entry on the iBook in the time it would take me to write two polished entries on the desktop. My original plan to buy a secondhand iPad on which to write has been morphing into a less-exciting plan to buy a secondhand Macbook, which will serve me better in the long run for switching between documents and online research. Not that I can buy either until my delivery cheque is issued to me after I hand the bird book in. (The point that I will not need to switch back and forth so often once this research-heavy book has been handed in has not escaped me. I have three months to decide which to choose, in which I may be able to borrow an iPad for a day or so to test it out.) Yes, I do have an old Windows laptop, too, but it dates from about 2003 as well. I should see if I can update its browsers and such.

That’s all I’ve got right now. I have to go turn the oven on to bake today’s bread, and get at least one bird done today (this morning and early afternoon were errands and such). I got four birds done yesterday, which was heartening. I’m looking at the number of birds I have left, and at the remaining space within my allotted word count, and thinking that I need to stop going into so much detail. But I’m still stuck on the “can you flesh this part out more?” request that came back after I handed in a sample with my proposal, so I’m adding as much as I can. It can always come out later, but as time is beginning to be of the essence, I may have to dial back to basics.

In Which The Polworth Is Put To Bed

It is done.

Way back in September 2010 I acquired 4 ounces of yellow-orange Polworth in a Ravelry destash. I couldn’t remember ever spinning Polworth (checking my notes might have reminded me that I’d had a Polworth sample in the January 2010 Phat Fiber box, which I did indeed spin up; my notes tell me that I had the same issues with the drafting being uneven and the fibre being too spongy for my taste, but discovering those notes came after I finished this 4oz braid, alas), and the colours were outside my usual green/blue/natural comfort zone, both good reasons to buy it, I thought. Besides, I said to myself, if I do not fall madly in love with it and need to stash it for midnight cuddling sessions, like I do with so much of my handspun yarn, I am sure there will be someone out there who can use it.

In No-Light No-Love No-Hope November I reached for it, desperate for something sunny and new. And I decided to give myself a challenge. When I spin four ounces of something I usually don’t end up with anywhere near enough yarn to do anything with, because I spin thicker singles and then chain-ply them, cutting my yardage by three. This time, I decided, I would spin as thin as I humanly could on the equipment I had, and make a two-ply laceweight yarn!

Ah hah hah hah. Hindsight, you are so informative.

It took me a month to spin the first half of the fibre. Four weeks to do two ounces. I have been a strong proponent of Louets Can Do Anything Even Laceweight since I started spinning with one, but I have very firmly learned the lesson of Just Because They Can Does Not Necessarily Mean They Should. The single I spun on it was about the thickness of sewing thread, and it took so long, long, long.

It was frustrating, partially because I was at the limit of what my equipment could do at my skill level, and partially because the fibre and I do not fully get along that that blissful, harmonious happily-ever-after way every spinner envisions their relationship being with whatever fibre they’re handling on any given day. This Polworth was cranky. It did not draft smoothly. I felt like I was fighting the crimp every step of the way.

But halfway through December I had this to show:

I decided to spin some beautifully dyed fluffy Merino afterward into singles in a Manos Clasica style, and blissed out on that as an antidote. And I decided that as I was planning to buy a Saxony wheel with twice the ratios my Louet had, I’d wait till I’d acquired that before continuing with the Polworth, so as to make the experience the least painful it could possibly be.

The Kromski Symphony wheel was purchased in late January, stained and waxed in early February, and ready to go by mid-February. I broke it in by spinning that lovey wool-bamboo blend, and then picked up the Polworth again with renewed vigour and optimism.

Well, at least it went faster. I still had the drafting issues. Polworth and I may not get along, or maybe it was this particular example of it that I didn’t get along with. (Again, those notes tucked away in my sample skein box would have told me that no, it’s just Polworth in general.) What didn’t help was that while it was very cheerful colourway and bright in the drear of winter, it wasn’t a colour I was in love with. I had no attachment to the yarn I was spinning. I wasn’t going to keep it, or use it, because I wasn’t a fan of the colours.

I finished spinning the second half into singles at the beginning of March, then went right into plying it because even though the first bobbin had sat there for two months, I wasn’t waiting any longer for the second single to rest. I plied and plied and plied for about six straight hours this past weekend. My first bobbin had two hundred more yards of singles on it (I swear that I weighed the fibre into equal halves), which meant I had to wind the remaining single off onto a ballwinder and then ply from a centre-pull ball (that newly acquired skill, huzzah and go me). And then I had to skein the damn stuff, which took two sessions because my arm was hurting from turning the skeinwinder.

Almost exactly eight hundred yards, give or take a yard or so. It’s a two-ply laceweight yarn, which means sixteen hundred yards of thread-thin singles spun. I wish I liked it more, because that’s the most impressive yardage I have ever achieved from a four-ounce braid of fibre.

I can aesthetically and objectively admire this yarn (it looks like sunlight! and marigolds! and lots of other lovely similes that my Twitter list came up with!), enthusiastically appreciate all the hours of work that went into it, and the skill required to produce it. I am very proud of my yardage, and the overall consistency of my singles and finished yarn. But I do not like it very much. I really, really wish I liked it more after investing so much in it.

My Twitter fibre-friends (spinners, knitter, and crocheters, bless them all) saw me through this whole process, sympathising with me and cheering me on as I posted pictures of the yarn in progress over the past four and a half months. Much support was had in the SpinDoctor What’s On Your Wheel? forum on Ravelry, too. Did I learn a lot? Sure. Academically, did I enjoy and appreciate the experience? Mostly. Do I like the product? Well… not very much. It’s just not my thing. I am sure someone somewhere will love knitting it up into a delicate lace shawl.

Next up: Wensleydale! It should be arriving this week. I shall spin it, then cable it, and then dye it for a particular, special project which is to be a gift. Have I ever spun Wensleydale? No! Have I ever cabled yarn? No! Is this going to stop me? Heck, no!

LATER: Just out of curiosity, I converted 1600 yards to kilometres, and got 1.46. I spun a kilometre and a half of Polworth singles. Wow.