Category Archives: Diary

Christmas Eve

The boy’s fever is bouncing between 99.5 and 101 but he’s his usual cheerful and energetic self, so we’re calling that a win. He was thrilled to open his last door in the Kinder Advent calendar today; he’s been looking forward to that egg for some time.

HRH went out this morning to pick up an early Christmas gift of an FM transmitter for the car, so we can listen to the iPod Touch on the go. The boy’s daycare coordinator stopped by with a gift for him this morning, too. The boy has been struggling with the knowledge that there are gifts from MLG and Ceri, Scott, and Ada for him under the tree, and has been asking at intervals if he can open them. I told him point blank this time that if he asked again the presents were going away and he wouldn’t get them at all. “I’m never going to get to open them,” he mumbled. “Not till Christmas Day,” I said. “Which, after all, is the whole point of Christmas presents.” Everything else will come out of where it’s been hidden tonight once he’s asleep; this has been done in self-defense and the preservation of sanity.

I remember the interminable creep of time as the twenty-fifth approached, but he’s doing pretty well. He’s had lots of fun today: he watched cartoons till noon, then had lunch, then played out back in the piles of snow with HRH, played inside with Lego, and is now watching a movie. We’ve been tracking Santa on Twitter and through NORAD at intervals as well, which has been lots of fun. (I am never reminded of how colossally lame my world geography is as strongly as when I track Santa through Google at Christmas.) When I was a kid we used to listen to the radar tracking Santa on the radio on the way home from the Christmas Eve church service, and it was the most exciting thing ever. I kind of miss the more mysterious radio version. After dinner we’re Skyping with my parents so everyone can wish one another a happy Christmas, and there’s also the magic reindeer food to scatter all over the snow in the backyard before bedtime. The boy was discussing the idea of staying up to see Rudolph (not Santa, but Rudolph; we know who the real rock star is in this house), but eventually concluded that not only was it too risky in that if Santa figured out he was awake he might not stop by the house, and apparently Rudolph is a very shy reindeer (I was unaware of this; one learns something new every Christmas from very serious children).

And in the realm of last-minute realizations, I have no sage with which to flavour my stuffing tomorrow (I shall call my mother in law and ask if she has some I could borrow; I honestly thought I had a whole container of garden-grown sage in the freezer), and my breezy assurance that they could bring the defrosted turkey over with them when they come tomorrow means I won’t have the time dry-brine it the way I usually do. I guess that means I have to try the herbed butter under the skin thing sans brining that I’ve been idly considering for a while. Time to dig out that recent issue of Fine Cooking (or just look it up online, voila).

Have a wonderful evening, everyone. I usually get a few minutes to post on Christmas Day itself, but if I don’t this year I wish you an excellent day, whether you are with family, friends, colleagues, or your cats.

Weekend Roundup: Yule Edition

On Friday, we went and chose our tree. Hearing that local trees were $60, we chose to investigate the Boucherville IKEA for the first time, where we got an excellent 6-foot pine for a very satisfactory $20. It was pretty frozen in its wrapped shape even when we cut off the twine, but by the next morning it had thawed and the branches had opened beautifully.

On Saturday, while HRH helped a friend move in the morning, the boy and I made gingerbread:

When HRH got back home that afternoon, we decorated the tree:

On Sunday, we went to visit Santa. We ended up going back to LaSalle to Angrignon Mall for this, because despite there being three major malls around our new house on the South Shore, none of them listed enough information to actually schedule a visit. Either they didn’t post hours ( “call this number during business hours for info” is not entirely helpful when one is attempting to make a schedule for the next day) or they posted hours but didn’t post where Santa was set up (Dix30 being an outdoor shopping complex with no obvious central indoor location on its maps). So back to Angrignon we went, expecting our usual Santa, but we got a different one who was very jolly regardless. We had the brilliant idea of lining up before Santa opened for business, but a billion other families had the same idea and so we waited for an hour. Thank goodness the boy is at an age where that kind of wait isn’t hellish. We did have a bit of technical issue with the photo, though; he was very determined to be serious, but Santa had other ideas and tickled him. Every time the photographer took a picture the boy either stopped smiling or his eyes flickered past the camera to look at the sea of people behind her, and she got very cross at one point. But we have a good photo, which is proof that the boy actually sat on Santa’s lap, something he hasn’t done since he was two years old:

When asked what he wanted for Christmas the boy told Santa about one specific item. “You don’t want anything else?” Santa said, surprised. “No,” the boy said. “Just that, please.” He’d listed four things in his letter to Santa and specifically requested one of them in person, figuring that if he asked for one he’d run a better chance of getting it. And Mama patted herself on the back for buying it last month.

We did a bit of last-minute shopping, then went home and packed up for our annual Yule musical afternoon with the Preston-LeBlanc household. We made a stop at HRH’s parents’ house, because they hadn’t been able to come by on the Saturday as we’d hoped, then ran into awful, awful traffic on the Mercier bridge while trying to get back onto the island. The boy fell asleep, thank goodness, because it took us an hour to cover what should have been a fifteen-minute drive. We were very thankful to get to Jeff and Pasley’s warm and cosy home to share finger food, drink, songs, joy, and the company of chosen family.

It was a very long day indeed, mostly very enjoyable, but I was really wiped by the end of it.

Weekend Roundup: Cello Recital Edition

I’m swamped. I’m racing a huge deadline, both HRH and I were ill this weekend and yesterday, there are no Christmas decorations up (although we did turn the outside lights on about ten days ago), Christmas shopping is only half-done (it will be pretty much finished in one trip if I can just ever leave the house again in good health, no deadlines, and decent weather). I’ve torn the house apart looking for my binder of non-lesson, non-orchestra music that holds all my Christmas stuff and I can’t find it anywhere, which means I have to reconstruct all my Christmas stuff from scratch before our annual Yule music celebration on Sunday. There is no food in the house. Being sick and handling the fibro thing is really, really throwing a spoke in my Christmas wheel.

I’m simultaneously exhausted and climbing the walls. It doesn’t help that I mis-evaluated my current freelance project, which turned out to need about three times more editing than the sample I examined suggested it would, so my schedule has been blown to bits. I pulled off 125 pages yesterday despite feeling dreadfully ill, which is about half again as fast as my usual top speed, and burnt myself out so that I had to cancel a planned visit yesterday evening. I have another 125 to go today if I want to keep Wednesday morning for a final proofread and scan to make sure I haven’t done anything horrendously stupid. Then, I think, I will fall over. Or perhaps stay in bed for an entire twenty-four hours, because I’m having trouble making it through a basic day.

There’s a lot of snow, and it just keeps coming. It’s a good thing it’s pretty.

Saturday morning we had our dress rehearsal for the Christmas recital. I expected our usual dress rehearsal system, which was playing the solos as well as doing our group pieces, but we just worked on the group pieces. I understand why we did it — there are thirteen students now! — but I was a bit worried about my gavotte. I got home around quarter past one and HRH headed out to run errands. We had Ceri, Scott, and Ada over that afternoon for a movie and dinner, which was wonderful. The boy read both his Lego readers and a board book to Ada afterwards, who quieted down and listened, bless her. There was a moment at the beginning where she was fussing and the boy closed his book on his lap and calmly said, “I’m not going to read until you stop crying,” which is obviously something that he used to hear at preschool, but somewhat inappropriate for a tiny baby! It was explained to him that she would calm down if he read, so he opened the book again and everything went beautifully.

The recital was on Sunday. For the first time we rented a small church, because we no longer fit into the seniors’ residence we used to play at. The acoustics were phenomenal; even the tiny cellos, which usually have problems with amplification, were resonant and clear. I was worried about the order of the pieces. In the past we’ve opened with group pieces and then interspersed solos throughout the programme. This time, the first half of the programme was soli, and the second half was all group pieces. I was concerned about not being warmed up by the time my solo came up, but it turned out fine. I started oddly slowly, perhaps because I was subconsciously taking into account the fact that one usually plays too fast live, but I picked up the pace when the initial theme was repeated before the development and second theme. I was pretty happy with how it went. Midway I was starting to be unhappy with slightly imprecise intonation but I remembered something my teacher had told me at the last lesson, mainly that even if intonation is off by a fraction, it isn’t necessarily audible to the audience by the time the sound has travelled within the space, and even with that slight imprecision the piece had been pleasant to listen to at the lesson.

The response I got was really heartening. I had strangers asking me how long I’d been playing and how many certificates/grades I held, which was just odd to hear. The boy told me, unprompted, that I had been awesome. I had my dear friend Marc there in the audience for more support, who enjoyed himself immensely, too. It was a very nice afternoon. The group pieces went well, too, although the arrangement of the Haydn Op. 76 no. 3 movt. 2 felt a bit muddy. All the Christmas stuff was jolly and resonant. The arrangement of Silent Night was lovely, and I think the Greensleeves seven-part arrangement was all right, but I can’t be sure.

I finally finished spinning the last of the first 2 oz of the yellow/orange Polworth in stupidly thin threadlike laceweight singles. I am going to do some nice chunky, squooshy singles from some Merino in Blue Bells before I have to spin the last 2oz of Polworth. Someone remind me of this the next time I decide to spin laceweight to get as much yardage as possible out of something, okay?

That’s the single on the bobbin and across the right penny for size comparison, and on the left is a look at how it will look when plied with the as-of-yet unspun second single. This is the finest single I’ve ever spun with success for an extended period of time.

I really need to get to work now. Wish me luck.

Idle Thoughts on Podcasts

The boy was home again yesterday with a bockety digestive system. We shooed him off to school today with lots of encouragement.

I’ve been really slow to pick up on podcasts. I spend most of my time at a computer working with words, and listening to words while I do it distracts me. I can’t follow both trains of thought at the same time without failing at both, which not a model of efficiency. On top of that, if I want information, I’ll read about it; it’s a lot faster.

But I discovered the SpinDoctor podcast last summer, and I love it. Sasha, the host, started spinning at just about the same time I did, so we’re around the same level. She reviews things I’m interested in, like DVDs and books and fibre and equipment, and things I’ll probably never experience like the huge fiber festivals, and I like her personality. I generally listen to it while I spin (what better time?) but I haven’t been spinning much lately. There’s been a boy home or work to do or I’ve been knackered by fibro, and to be honest, this yellow Polworth is taking forEVer to spin up as laceweight. (We’re talking a single of about 54 WPI, on the fastest setting of my Louet S15, which is a ratio of about 10:1.) I split the four ounces into two parts to spin a two-ply yarn, and I’m so close to finishing the first half. When I am, I suspect I will stuff it in a bag and spin something else before I start the second half, because I’m so tired of it. I’ve spun all of one ounce of Merino before this, and I find the Polworth very much like it. I really prefer BFL and silks to the Merino kind of sponginess, I have discovered. Longer, silkier fibres are my thing. I don’t know how to explain my liking for Corriedale or Coopworth, then, but there you are.

Anyway. I have discovered that with the weather so cold, I can’t read books, either paper ones or ebooks, while waiting for the boy at the bus stop in the afternoon any more. Enter the podcast! I can stand there and watch for the bus, hands warmly ensconced in mitten, and listen to a bit of an interview or review or whatever.

I’m still not a huge fan of podcasts in general. I find I need to be doing something that doesn’t require a lot of attention in order to listen, and that’s a tall order when I’m fighting fibro fog a lot of the time because the fog demands that I focus all that I’ve got on what I’m doing like cooking, baking, writing, editing, what have you. The car may be a good place, but I don’t have a widget that allows me to plug my iPod into the stereo. On top of that, while I may find a segment interesting, it’s rare that I’m always interested in all the information a podcast covers so I get impatient or bored quickly. I’ve sampled a few here and there, and a lot of the time I find an episode is too long for what it should be.

I have some podcasts I’ve been meaning to listen to or try out, especially ones by friends or acquaintances, but for the above reasons I just don’t get around to it. Part of me wants to, and part of me just sighs at the amount of investment it takes in time and energy. I’ll get around to it someday.

Weekend Roundup: Mostly Cello Recital Prep Edition

Cello fell apart last week. I don’t mean literally (you’d have heard me screaming from wherever you physically are, I suspect) but figuratively. Nothing I played worked. Everything was disjointed, scratchy, jerky, lousy phrasing, no dynamic control, horrible intonation (why E flat major as C minor, why, WHY?)… every time I tried it got worse instead of better. Which is, if you think about it, the exact antithesis of what practice is supposed to do. One of the general bits of wisdom floating around is that you shouldn’t repeat mistakes, so if things are going wrong and you can’t isolate why and fix them, stop and come back later. Except every time I came back it was worse. Friday night I sat down, gritted my teeth, put the Suzuki accompaniment CD on and played the Gavotte at the ridiculous speed it called for. And I did it again. And again. And again. I didn’t stop, I didn’t pause to fix things, I didn’t listen critically, I just played it. And I played it at a speed that was far faster than I’d worked it before, faster than my target metronome marking. And then I put the cello away.

Saturday morning I went to my lesson. We warmed up with my lines in the pretty arrangements of Silent Night and Greensleeves that we’re playing, then my teacher said there was half an hour left and she didn’t think we needed half an hour for the Bach, so why not look at the Bazelaire she’d given me for the next recital? And we played through the first half of the first movement, working on the wacky thumb-index-index pizzicato movement, and it was so much fun. Then we turned to the Bach. I kind of gritted my teeth again, then took a steady breath, threw all my feelings about it away and started. And it flowed, and had phrasing, and drove right on to the end. When I was finished I started to laugh, and my teacher exclaimed and asked where that had come from, and she even made me stand up and take my Suzuki bow. Apparently running a piece at ludicrous speed seven or eight times in a row to recorded piano accompaniment is a good thing. I didn’t even play it through again, or look at trouble spots; it didn’t need it.

I drove home and had a quick lunch. Then the boy and I bundled into the car and drove to the local movie theatre to meet with his best friend from preschool and her mom to see Tangled together. It was so much fun. Granted, listening to Zachary Levi for an hour or so was part of that, but the design, the palette, the characterization, the execution, the pacing and plotting, and the songs and score were all fantastic. (I’d sneaked a listen to some of the songs released earlier that week on various music and film blogs, and had in fact purchased the soundtrack two days before the film, so I knew about that last bit ahead of time!) It has firmly settled itself among my top three favourite Disney films, and very possibly has bumped Beauty & the Beast out of my #1 spot. I can’t make a confirmed judgment as to that yet, because I’m going to need to see it a few more times first. We’ll certainly go see it at Christmas when we visit my parents, because Mum wants to see it and HRH needs to see it, too.

The boy’s friend came over to our house to play for an hour and a half after the film. I made peanut butter chocolate-chip cookies, they played with his trains, and at some point they ran through the house playing cowboys & knights, one waving the wooden sword and shield HRH made and the other with a Nerf gun. It was great.

Her mom picked her up and I headed into Montreal for my piano rehearsal scheduled for 5:20, where we each play our solo pieces with the accompanist. Despite giving myself forty-five minutes to get to NDG I hit bad traffic and was ten minutes late, but things were running behind anyway. I got to listen to everyone’s pieces and their work on the timing or the trouble spots, applauding with everyone else enthusiastically after each. And then, like the Farewell Symphony, they all left one by one as they were done; I was last, with an audience of only my teacher and the pianist. And I kicked my Gavotte again from start to finish. I was very pleased with it. We didn’t need to work on anything or test timing or cues; I loosened my bow and that was that. I’m feeling really confident now about next weekend’s recital. I got home in time to read to the boy in bed. That night HRH and I ended up clearing out the storage room because I was looking for something. We moved some stuff into the laundry room and emptied at least three big boxes. It’s much easier to locate things now. Ironically, though, we didn’t find the box I was looking for.

Sunday was my day at the Yule Fair. I was scheduled to do a talk with Ellen Dugan on green magic and magical gardening, and she was so fabulous. We had a blast. I got to touch base with Chris Penczak and Judika Illes again, too, and pick up a couple of books. I so love working with other authors at these kinds of events. And it always comes as a surprise to me when they say they’ve read my stuff and are impressed, or refer to a concept I’ve discussed somewhere. I had some wonderful discussions with people who came to my signing afterwards, too, and was very touched by some of their stories about what my books have done for them. HRH and the boy came downtown with me and took the metro to see the Christmas window at Ogilvy’s, which was unfortunately half non-functional, before having lunch out together.

We had to leave the fair and get back home for mid-afternoon because I was possibly expecting a drop-off. It didn’t happen, however, and good thing; both HRH and I were coshed by a really, really bad cold and fell asleep while the boy watched movies. I’d felt the beginnings of it when I’d woken up in the morning, but a couple of Tylenol took care of the aches and sore throat for a few hours. I was stunned at how brutally it hit me mid-afternoon, though.

Not Dead

Just really tired and working when I can. I handwrote a weekend roundup blog post on Monday (it was a really, really busy weekend) and haven’t had the time to transcribe it. Maybe I’ll do it this afternoon on the laptop while the boy watches some Peep & the Big Wide World on the computer, his favourite after-school activity while he has a snack.

What I Read In November 2010

Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier
A Scholar of Magics by Caroline Stevermer (reread)
Widdershins by Charles de Lint (reread)
Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (reread)
Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay (reread)
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (reread)
All Clear by Connie Willis
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (reread)

I don’t have a lot of brain to recap, but in brief:

All Clear was simply excellent. It was so good I reread the last quarter again, then picked various scenes from Blackout to read in conjunction with scenes from All Clear in order to get a better idea of how things happened in a particular timeline, and then went headlong into rereading The Doomsday Book in order to get more of the Oxford time-travel project.

Catching Fire was good, Mockingjay was problematic. At first I thought the writing/pacing had fallen apart, but then I realised that it hadn’t failed, it was a reflection of a problematic narrator’s state of mind/sanity. Very interesting, though not comfortable, and has generated a lot of criticism around the Internet as a good/bad ending.

Heart’s Blood was a surprise; I had totally missed the fact that there was a new book from Juliet Marillier last year, so I found this one in paperback when it was released. It’s sort of got a Beauty & the Beast theme running through it, only it’s so much more, as you’d expect from Marillier with her Celtic settings and serious political stuff. I was worried it would be a bit too heavy on the romance, but it got very interesting about a quarter of the way in and absorbed me more and more, until I tore through the last third. Oddly, the marketing copy makes it sound like it’s primarily the male protagonist’s story, when in fact it’s told in the first-person from the female protagonist’s POV, and is more about her personal evolution/development that intersects with his.

Little Women has been my iPod book-on-the-go since the beginning of September, what I read if I’m waiting in a line or at the boy’s bus stop in the afternoon. I’d have finished it in October, except someone new moved into the neighbourhood and their kids were assigned our stop, so I had to be social instead of burying my nose in electrons. I’ve moved on to Little Men, also a reread.

Lots of rereads this month. I guess I was looking for comfort or a very particular feel in a novel, and so went to books where I knew I’d find that feeling or style.

Fine. I had more brain to recap than I thought.

ETA: I read both Mouse Guard Fall 1152 and Winter 1152 this month as well. Absolutely gorgeous art!