Category Archives: Diary

Home Again

I’m back from my week with my parents, being company and an extra pair of hands for my mum, who had a hip replacement. She’s doing impressively well, and thank you, everyone who asked!

Two things:

First, while I was there I read pretty much a book a day. Here’s what I inhaled:

Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
Safe-Keeper’s Secret, Sharon Shinn
The Red Door, Charles Todd
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley
The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, Alan Bradley
Chill, Elizabeth Bear
Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman
Blackout, Connie Willis

And I’m two-thirds of the way through Sarah Monette’s Corambis, too.

Second, and perhaps what most of you are waiting impatiently for, is the loom.

This is what it looks like, all folded up (with a Useful Cat for scale):

And when unfolded (Helpful Cat is Helpful):

There are no pictures of what it looks like when warped, but I’m sure if we wait long enough, that will occur, yes?

This is what the 16×16″ sample square I wove when I got it, though:

That’s Lion Brand Homespun; the cream colour is Deco, and the variegated colourway is Tudor. It’s incredibly soft. It is also not appropriate for a 10 dpi reed, because it’s about 6.5 wpi and bumpy like a boucle, so it kept catching on the slightly rough edges of the plastic reed. My fault; I hadn’t seen the reed before I chose the yarn for my experiment, and the grist of the yarn really calls for a reed with more space between the dents (a lower dpi). The yarn is also very fluffy, which I think contributed to the catching issue. Still, it made a spectacular fabric that’s warm and drapes beautifully, and I’m going to use it again when I get a new reed with a lower dpi. (Which will be very soon; my local Ashford dealer is checking stock for me right now. Yes, Ashford; their much-less-expensive-than-Kromski-reeds fit the Harps, hurrah.)

There you are. What am I using the sample square for? Well, the boy has already used it to cover two very feverish stuffed bunnies to help them get better, every cat as curled up on it at least once, and Nixie was tucked in with it last night. It is nothing if not versatile.

Tidying Up

I’ve been gathering my things from where they are all over the house in a slow-motion preparation for decamping tomorrow morning. Tonight Dad and I will kitbash a box for the loom out of wine boxes and pack it up so I can check it on the train home.

I finished the sample weave yesterday around lunch and cut it off. It’s exactly what I expected from the yarn, soft and drapey and gorgeous colours. Except I don’t think it will work for the project I had in mind, so I shall file it away for when I want to weave a soft, fluffy throw for myself or my mother instead. The only problem is the reed is too small, so I’ll order one with larger dents and it will be lovely. And so of course I bought a completely different yarn for another project, sweetly-coloured yarn of a weight that will slip easily through the reed I’ve got while I wait for the new reed to arrive. (Of course, neither of the craft stores I went to had either of the yarns I was actually looking for in the colourways I had chosen from online colour cards. Which is how I ended up with the soft, fluffy yarn that didn’t fit my reed in the first place. And the new yarn, too.) I also whipped up a carry case for the loom, but it’s a bit floppy because the folded loom is narrower at the top than it is at the bottom; it will need stabilising. For now it will be good padding inside the shipping box.

I picked up a couple of books for the boy today, and treated myself to Connie Willis’ Blackout for the trip home. I bought Elizabeth Bear’s Chill and Sarah Monette’s Corambis earlier this week, but I finished Chill this morning (yes, another riveting read; I love how Bear uses language) and I don’t seem to be in the right headspace for Corambis yet.

And I just had lunch out with Cats and Jenn, whom I met via LJ, and they are thoroughly delightful people with the right kind of sense-of-humour, and we have already planned to meet up again next time I’m down. It occurs to me that we should have gotten photographic proof of so much awesome in one place for Bodhifox. I had the most wonderful jasmine-lemongrass tea, served in a little silver teapot and a tiny yellow tea glass.

One more sleep till I’m back with my boys. It has been a lovely trip.

ETA: We have just kitbashed the shipping box. It looks godawful, but damn, it’s strong. And Dad did a final wrap with light spinnaker cord for a handle. It’s extremely solid, and very impressive. If the train people reject it on looks alone, I shall take off a shoe and beat them.

Wiktory!

I have my loom! I’ll do a photo post when I get home from my trip.

I’m going out to the fabric store today to get a bit more polar fleece to extend the homemade duffel bag I found that almost-but-not-quite fit it, and some cord with which to reattach the apron rods to the loom, because it’s currently got a series of loops attached via lark’s head knots and they’re not all even with one another, so the rods don’t sit snugly when under tension. I’m going to do the zig-zag lacing thing with one long piece of cord instead of separate loops. The loom is very light indeed and folds quite cunningly, and we’re now trying to figure out a way to kitbash a box for it so I can check it as baggage on the train home. I can’t carry it on, as the length exceeds the max carry-ons can be. Yesterday we got some yarn with which to sample a pattern for a Seekrit Progikt, and I’m going to do a test warp for the sample this afternoon.

The girl who sold it to me is my age or a bit younger, and got herself a small used Dryad floor loom so she didn’t need this one any more. She also had a Lendrum wheel and baskets of yarn everywhere. Heh. I wish we lived in the same city; we probably would have gotten along just fine.

Mum is doing very well indeed. She’s using the cane while in the house now, and the walker only when we go out, which we’ve been doing once a day to shops and things. The food has, as usual, been brilliant. Last night, for example, we had scallops au gratin, with steamed asparagus and brown rice. Mmm.

The nightly video chat with HRH and the boy back home is a great idea, and it’s been fun, but they’ve been having problems with the microphone on the webcam back home (translation: it wasn’t picking up sound at all, so we used the telephone as a speaker) but last night it worked for some reason, and it made the chat much easier. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that tonight and the rest of the nights go as smoothly. Living in the future is pretty darn cool. I miss them a lot, and seeing and talking with them every night helps. ( “Having a Dada and no Mama makes me very sad,” the boy told me solemnly last night before leaning into HRH for a hug. Only three more sleeps!)

I’ve burned through three books since I got here, and I can’t recommend Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag highly enough. The other book was Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which was good, but the Bradleys were really spectacular. I also hand-wrote four pages of novel material in bed this morning.

Okay, off we go for today’s outing. Have a wonderful day, gentle readers.

Fifty-Eight Months Old!

One of the boy’s favourite things to do this past month was check on Molly the barn owl who had laid her first clutch of eggs in California. Her nesting box has a webcam in it, and it’s been really interesting to watch the process. Every morning before he went to school and every day as soon as he got home, and sometimes before bed, too, he’d ask to watch her. He saw the first couple of owlets once they’d hatched, and watched a recorded video of the third hatching. He really enjoyed flipping through the other recordings available, particularly of the male owl dropping, and of Molly eating various rodents and rabbits with great gusto. “Let’s watch the one where she eats the rat!” he’d say, and enjoy the somewhat grisly performance with great relish. “What’s that crunch sound?” he said the first time he saw it. “That’s the rat tearing apart,” I said. “Oh, good,” he said, and enjoyed it all the more. He learned how to write ‘owlet’, too:

(I am just as tickled that one of the words he knows how to write on his own is ‘owlet’ as I was when the word ‘book’ was among the first five words he learned to say.)

His writing is really firming up, and so is his reading. He can get two or three pages into a picture book before he decides it’s too much effort and tells me to finish it on my own. I find it interesting that when he writes his name, the first and third letters are capitalsed, but the second and fourth are lowercase. I’m amused by his vocabulary, too. In his stories, for example, ships don’t come back to be fixed, they “return for repairs.” The stories he tells and his imaginative play are becoming ever richer; they start in the morning, especially when he’s got his shoes and coat on and is saying goodbye to me, and carry on in the car with HRH all the way to school. Sometimes he gets distracted by the stories and loses sight of what he’s supposed to be concentrating on. He’s getting really scary-good at Lego. I am told that preschool has to invest in more to keep up with him. Heck, at the rate we’re going, we’ll have to invest in more to keep up with him. (And with HRH building all sorts of spaceships at the boy’s command.)

When the winter boots were put away we discovered that last fall’s shoes barely fit him, so he has new ones now. They’re size 11 shoes, which means that he grew two shoes sizes over the winter. He’s in size 4 clothes, edging into size 5 tops. The naps are pretty much a thing of the past, but that doesn’t stop us from gently insisting on a lie-down after lunch on weekends. On the days when he doesn’t have even a brief a nap at preschool, he sometimes falls asleep in the car on the way home.

It’s great to see his abilities improve by comparing last year’s seasonal arts and crafts projects with this year’s. He brings home spring or Easter crafts and I think about last year’s, and it’s so easy to see how much more sophisticated the current ones are. His current favourite movie is The Princess and the Frog, which is growing on me after a somewhat neutral response to it when I saw it in the theatre at Christmas. The current favourite books are his collection of Henry and Mudge stories, possibly because he’s learning to read them and so is rediscovering them in a way. He mouths the words while I read them.

Just before Easter we were in a pharmacy and he saw the racks of stuffed animals alongside the chocolate. “Blackie needs a little friend,” he confided in me. “He has lots,” I pointed out. And it is true, there is a minor collection of rabbits in various sizes that he has amassed from various places. “No, he needs a new friend for Easter,” I was told. I almost picked one up when buying the chocolate eggs for our hunt, but decided against it. A good thing, too, because he ended up coaxing his grandma into buying another black and white one while they were out shopping on Easter weekend instead. So he has a new bunny about whom we had a serious discussion concerning names. He wanted to name it Blackie-Whitey, which would have been confusing since we already have one. I got him to agree to Whitey-Blackie. And then we had a couple of talks over the next couple of days about how we don’t stop playing with our old friends when we have new ones; Blackie isn’t allowed to be left behind just because there’s a fluffy, soft, new bunny with a shiny ribbon in the house. He’s handed it very well, actually: they take turns cuddling with him, or he has me take both out of his room at night ( “Mama,” he said, “please take my bunnies, because they are being disturbing and keeping me awake.”) And he left both at home on his first day back at school after Easter. We were concerned that he was going to glom onto it, and we’ve already done some work on getting him to stop bringing Blackie everywhere, but he’s been very good about it all.

And of course, the biggest news this past month: NEW BIKE! FIRST TWO-WHEELER!

He’s really growing fast. I say that every other month, I know, but that’s because I marvel continually at how steep the learning curve is for children, and how rapidly they assimilate new information.

Two months till he’s five years old. Just under five months till kindergarten. I’m going to stop the monthly posts on his fifth birthday, and just stay with random boy-themed posts when they come up.

Safe

My train trip was excellent in every sense of the word. Huge seats on the new Renaissance trains! Baggage under the seat, not out of sight at the front or back where anyone could abscond with it! Free WiFi and an electricity outlet for one’s computer-object! Fair trade and organic tea, served in a compostable cup! (The tea bag was even given to me on the side without having to be requested. So civilised.) Things went so well that I was safely ensconced in my parents’ dining room eating roast beef sandwiches around 12:30 PM. I made my connection in Union between VIA and the GO with time to spare, even though the VIA train was about five minutes late. It helped immensely that not only was my VIA train the first out of Montreal and thus not as popular as later trains so there were fewer passengers, but it wasn’t anywhere near rush hour in Union so I didn’t have to navigate seas of commuters. There were only two people ahead of me in the ticket line, and my westbound GO hadn’t even arrived when I bought my ticket. The departure screens showed it ready to board just as I got to the waiting area.

It was four degrees and there was suspicious white stuff floating around in the air in Toronto when I arrived. Just saying.

Today, however, it is sunny, and I hear it’s supposed to be something between ten and fourteen degrees. Mum, who really is doing O most excellent well and is quite mobile, has expressed a wish to visit the library today.

Notable things so far: All three of my parents’ standoffish cats have come to see me, even Cordelia. She even let me pat her, and kiss her on the head, and Seamus and Rufus hang around me quite happily. I have changed two beds today, something that I enjoyed doing because hospital corners please me, and I can’t change our bed at home because the mattress is too heavy to shift. (Granted, that may be my lot; the rest of the day may be very light work out of necessity… but it was fun.)

Despite testing my webcam at home on the Mac, when I set the one up here and we tried to Skype with HRH at home last night the sound on his end wasn’t happening. I couldn’t troubleshoot it because the Mac and PC interfaces are different, of course, and I couldn’t remember the Mac setup properly. We ran through what I remembered, but nothing worked. Still, with a phone at one ear we could hear what they were saying, and so it wasn’t so bad. The boy, as I expected, cheerfully showed off a parade of stuffed animals and cats, and was quite recovered from his distraught tears of the morning when my train left (everything was A Big Adventure till I actually got on the train and Mama Being Gone for a Week became very real). Tonight we’ll set the laptop up next to the speakerphone; that should help. The call will be shorter, too, as we won’t be trying to fix things.

My online presence is going to be limited this week. I may poke around once in a while, but I’m looking at this as a vacation of sorts, so I’m not ignoring you personally if you e-mail or leave notes for me, I’m sort of ignoring everyone in general.

Eve Of Departure

I’m mostly packed for my trip. Just waiting for my cell phone to finish charging so I can pack that charger, and tomorrow morning I’ll throw the last of the hair stuff and cleanser and so forth into the suitcase. I’ve mended the skirt I’ll wear, found socks that match it, and will cheerfully wear my non-matching burgundy shoes. (They’ll match my satchel, though.) I have a sweater for the train in case it’s cold. (Who am I kidding, I’m always cold.)

I am missing snacks (my original plan was to pop out to the grocery store when the boys get home, but I am tired enough that I may ask HRH to get them on the way to his game tonight, after he takes our tax stuff to our tax guy), but I have games, reading material, a very full iPod, and I even have my DS (had to blow the dust off it). It’s only a four and a half hour trip, after all, even though my brain keeps telling me that it’s five and a half; I think it’s taking the five-hour trip home and mashing it up with the four and a half hour trip there, just to scare me. I am not, as some have asked, taking my cello with me, because the last time I put a cello on the train I got it back at the other end with a big dent punched in the bottom of the case. No, thank you.

We are getting up very early tomorrow morning, as my train leaves just before seven AM. The train has WiFi (free, apparently, because their service isn’t guaranteed at the moment, so I get what I get), so I may natter via Twitter or show up online in various places. The goal is to catch the 11:43 GO train, but with only twenty minutes between the VIA arrival and the GO departure, assuming everything is on time… well, let’s just say I am expecting to miss it and catch the next one. That’s fine; I will get an expensive latte or steamed milk and sit down to watch the funny people walk past in the train station.

It has been years since I travelled anywhere on my own. Almost exactly five years, actually. Five years minus six weeks.

Today with Emily’s help I tested the new webcam and it works! There was a moment where there was no sound, but that is because my webcam and its built-in mic show up as two different things, and both need to be formally recognised. I’ve fixed it in my Preferences, and all shall be well. If it works in iChat it shall work in Skype. I’ll install the second one at the other end tomorrow afternoon and we shall see what happens.

One more sleep.

Mission Accomplished

The bike scored on Kijiji has been received by the intended recipient. I learned this from hearing the boy yelling, “Mama, thank you for my bicycle!” through the back door.

He helped HRH put the training wheels on (they won’t be there long; both HRH and I are agreed that they can cause more problems than they solve), practised getting on and off, and then HRH took it round the front while the boy and I went into the garage to find his helmet. (Erm. We’ll need to replace that this summer.)

And off we went:

Only two wipeouts, mostly because he stopped watching where he was going on a slope. But there will be plenty more. There are so many driveways on our street that the sidewalk is sloped half the time, which made for wobbly steering and a hard time staying off the lower training wheel. HRH plans to take him to the old school round the corner to let him go on the flat playground surface; that will make balancing (and steering!) easier for him.

Zoom:

I love the blur on that picture. He wasn’t going fast, but I love the focus and the joy on his face.

There will really be no keeping up with him now.