Category Archives: Diary

Adventures With Jiji

Jiji is no longer a kitten, and I am sad. This photo was taken almost two months ago; look at the size of him compared to Gryffindor. Gryffindor is not a small cat. And now Jiji is even bigger.

Now Jiji is a teenage cat, and he is a jerk. He torments the other cats (especially Minerva), eats anything he can get his mouth around, drinks anything he can stick his head into, climbs into any bag he can (including schoolbags and grocery bags full of groceries), and pulls the ziplocked bag of bread off the counter to drag it around the house and gnaw at it through the plastic. You’d think we were starving him. (“Mummy,” Owlet said this morning, holding up the bag in question as she came into the kitchen, “I found a bread in my room.”)

Example: This past week I started making nice coffee for myself after dropping the kids off at school, to help me slog through my last project.

Me: NO, CAT. YOU MAY NOT STICK YOUR PAW INTO MY SALTED CARAMEL LATTE.
Jiji: Too late!
*cue caramel pawprints on the work papers all over my desk*
Me: …
Me: Guess I’m making myself another salted caramel latte.
Jiji: Those pawprints I licked up were delicious. Make it two.

And apparently neither of us learned, because two days later…

Me: CAT, NO
Jiji: Well, I didn’t stick my paw in it this time.
Me: No, you stuck your HEAD in.
JIji: Good job on the caramel latte, Mum. Two whiskers up.
Me: I wouldn’t know. I haven’t even tasted it yet.

I’m really looking forward to Jiji getting past this stage and mellowing into a proper adult cat. It’s probably not going to happen anytime soon, however.

Halloween 2015

I’m emerging from under a pile of work to polish and publish posts that have been sitting in draft form.

Halloween was fun!


Sparky designed his own costume his year (he’s a supernatural creature tracker and protector, complete with a homemade handbook and an “ivory flute so I can play music to soothe savage beasts”), and Owlet is Belle. I still can’t believe that I found the perfect dress to modify for her; it was a size 10 fancy sleeveless dress that I cut down and took in. It has a crinoline and a spangled chiffon overlay. She adores it, and to be honest, so do I.

The best part of the night? When a fire engine rolled up and firemen jumped out in full gear, carrying buckets of candy to pass out to trick or treaters! Although Owlet certainly enjoyed charging up stairs and banging on the doors with her mittened hand. “Mummy!” she exclaimed, running back each time, “I said bonjour! And merci!”

Speaking of basic common courtesy, I was really cross at a bunch of kids while we were doing the rounds. I teach my kids to wait at the bottom of the stairs or at the end of the path to the door so as not to crowd the kids currently receiving candy, and to go up the stairs on the right and descend on the left to make a clear path for others. There were droves of kids just shoving up and crowding the adults distributing candy with no thought for anyone else around them or order of arrival. It meant my kids had to stop being as respectful as I (and they) wanted them to be, because they were being run over. We eventually chose a different, quieter area to cover. I don’t think I’m expecting too much if I want kids to learn to be polite, consider others around them, and respect taking turns, even in an exciting situation like trick or treating.

Whatever; they enjoyed themselves immensely, loved their costumes, loved going to school in them, and that’s what counts.

Fall Extracurricular Classes

Yes, it’s that time once again!

I had to switch my time slot for cello, as we were looking at registering Owlet in an intro to music class at Preville, the arts centre with which Sparky does his summer camp and art lessons. With two kids doing extracurricular activities on Saturday, I either needed a second car or to switch my lesson time. And since a second car isn’t in the budget, I worked out a new slot on Friday at midday with my cello teacher. (This means working on the weekend if necessary, but ehn. If I have to, I will.)

I had my first lesson yesterday, and the work I did on the Vivaldi sonata over the summer wasn’t a complete waste of time (go me!). I didn’t get a debrief of the concert and assignment of summer homework in a final lesson back in June, as schedules didn’t align, so I just guessed and went with it. My teacher congratulated me again on a terrific recital performance, and asked if I’d seen HRH’s recording of my solo Bach yet; I had to admit that no, I hadn’t, because as happy as I was with my performance, I haven’t had the courage to sit down and watch it. I got two stickers in my book for it, though! (I am in my forties and still like getting reward stickers in my music book, thank you very much. It’s the little things.)

Orchestra also began this past week, although I had to miss the very first rehearsal because of work (hey, there, busy season and rush jobs and everyone needing everything tomorrow morning). The upcoming programme looks terrific: some Debussy, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky miniatures, a Mozart overture… stuff I’ve enjoyed playing before, a couple of new things. Our annual membership fee has increased by 40%, which is ouch even though the reason is valid (our conductor, who is excellent, has until now been accepting payment way lower than other orchestras of this level are paying). My individual lesson fee has also increased; I suspect I’m going to have to make a compromise somewhere, maybe by dropping one lesson a month.

Sparky is now in Cycle 3, and that means band at school! It’s wind and brass instruments, so right now he has been trying to get sound out of the headjoint of my flute to see if that would be interesting for him. If not, he thinks either trumpet or trombone would be fun. We shall see what happens there.

I went to the Preville open house this morning (with Megan! and I ran into my friend Adelina, whom I haven’t seen since we did our workshop on alternative-spirituality parenting discussion at the Yule Fair a few years ago!) to see what was on offer. We got to see and say hi to some of the teachers we’d become familiar with over the summer at day camp, which pleased Owlet. In the end, she will be doing her intro to music next semester; this session, it’s all about art, thank you very much. (That’s what I get for suggesting she move on to explore other tables rather than just standing at the intro to music table, banging the little cymbals. We then had to pry her away from the glue, feathers, and Plasticine.)

She also totally schooled the violin teacher as only a four-year-old can. He showed her how to rest the instrument on her shoulder, and she sighed and said, “That’s not right.” Then she lowered it and held it vertically in front of her. “No… that’s how you hold a cello,” he said, a bit puzzled. “Well, yes,” she said, giving him a flat stare, and you could tell she was thinking, ‘Seriously, dude? You teach this stuff? Everyone knows you hold these things like this.’ One small victory in a world where most kids call violas and cellos ‘big violins.’

So both kids are now registered in their respective art classes. Sparky is delighted (I am not entirely sure why, but he thinks both he and his sister taking art with the same teacher, albeit at different times, is terrific) and Owlet is looking forward to it as well, because (quite apart from the exciting making art thing) her friend Audrey is in the class with her. And I’m looking forward to not having to drive 45-60 minutes first thing on Saturday morning and then be focused enough to play cello and process musical instruction for an hour on Saturday mornings, then drive another 60 minutes home. Everyone wins!

Meet Jiji

We took the kids out for a surprise today. Where were we going? We wouldn’t say. It’s a mystery! Just sit back and enjoy the trip, kids. (As best you can in 31 C weather before humidex and with no AC.)

Meet Jiji.

We went to the shelter for a cat one year or older, since the population of those skyrockets around July 1 here (it’s moving day) and whereas kittens always find homes, rehoming adult cats is much more challenging. We felt we were at a place where we were ready to offer another rescue animal a home and a forever family, and the shelter was running a half-price adoption fee for adult cats, since they were overpopulated. We found three we liked as we walked through the cattery (two calicos! a grey!)… except then we saw this three-month-old guy at the end of the hall. He tried to climb through the glass to get to the children, and, well, game over. A full-price kitten it was. Black cats are always harder to get adopted, so we helped him, right?

He’s spectacular with both kids, with whom he played in the meeting room for over half an hour without fear. The adoption facilitator kept saying, “I have to tell you all this stuff about stress and warnings and how adjusting can be hard on the cat, but… somehow, I really don’t think it’s going to be a problem.” She said she hadn’t seen a cat click with a family that well or that fast in quite a while. So far Gryff and Minerva haven’t had hissy fits about the Strange New Cat Smell on the Family, which is also positive, although the true test will come tonight when they are both denied entry to our bedroom, where they like to sleep.

(PS: Bonus points if you get the name reference!)

The 2015 Tour de Fleece Draws Nigh!

Yes, the Tour de Fleece. Started by Star Athena in 2006, it runs concurrent with the Tour de France, except we use spinning wheels instead of bikes, and we end up with yarn instead of medals.

I’m co-captaining Team Clan Kromski this year with the steady, grounded, and organized FloofyMoose. Our team is awesome, and spins mostly on Kromski wheels. (Mostly, because some will be using spindles while they travel, and some will someday be Kromski owners but as of yet are not. We love them all.) I’ll be using my Symphony at home, and my FrankenMazurka while I visit my parents. (Sigh; there’s yet another post that hasn’t been written, detailing the conversion of my prototype Mazurka to accept the modern Kromski flyer and bobbins. Someday.)

While Spinzilla is all about achieving the most yardage, the TdF is about personal challenges. You set them, you work toward them. Some teams have requirements or team goals — spin a certain weight or yardage, spin only existing stash, spin only fibre from a specific dyer, that sort of thing — but our team is no-stress. If you want to spin an insane number of of pounds (100 ounces is someone’s goal!) or staggering yardage (five miles, yikes — also a real goal), I will wholeheartedly support you and cheer you on. If you just want to spin for fifteen minutes a day, then I am there for you, because it sounds easy but it isn’t necessarily.

Last year I spun four ounces of Merino/silk I dyed pewter and silver, inserting pretty crystal-tone beads for a two-ply beaded lace yarn; finished the last half of a Daybreak Dyeworks merino/silk blend in the ‘Maid in Bedlam’ colourway; spun deliciously soft alpaca from my friend Jenn’s alpaca farm; and sampled some undyed wool/flax blend on a spindle.

And the year before that, I spun some lovely green sock yarn; challenged myself to spin a bulky single, which I then plied with some silk hankies I’d dyed myself in peacock colours; spun half of a set of pretty blue and brown batts into singles for a shawl; and spun a bunch of Mum’s luxury silk/cashmere/merino yarn.

As usual, these days I am caught up in work and travel plans and ZOMG CONCERT, so as always I will wake up on 2 July, blinking, and suddenly remember camp, birthdays, TdF, and all the other stuff I’ve been ignoring until after the insanity of June is past. I went on a gleeful fibre-acquisition romp this past spring (having money is very nice, and treating myself to some fibre every couple of paycheques did a lot for my morale), and so my stash is much larger than it was. I think I may just casually open the wooden chest and select something pretty when I’ve finished a yarn this time.

I do know that I am beginning with this braid. It’s superwash Merino from Sweet Georgia Yarns. I’ve never spun anything from Sweet Georgia Yarns before, and I hear such marvellous things about them. (I also see marvellous things made by them while watching Felicia Lo’s Craftsy class on Spinning Dyed Fibres; an excellent set of lessons.) This is super soft, and I’m just going to spin it — nothing fancy, nothing ambitious. I’m just going to enjoy it.

After that… who knows? Maybe some lovely Southern Cross Fibre, as I now have a handful of those braids in the chest, and I have been head over heels for the two SCF Polwarth/Tencel braids I have just spun. Maybe some of the very bright braids I picked up from a destash for the sole reason that they were all (well, mostly) out of my colour comfort zone.

Whatever I choose to spin, I’ll be doing it in the virtual company of excellent spinners of Team Clan Kromski!

Workity-Work

I am in the middle of a sea of uncertainty regarding work. Yes, there is lots of work to do! When can we get it to you? Well, not now. Later. Soon. That stuff that was also due in March? Not ready. Soon. Later.

As happens with large team projects, slowdowns here and there or periods of rewriting aggregate, and that aggregation now means the initial projected schedule provided to me is completely inapplicable by this point. So I know I have an unclear amount of work to edit… sometime this summer. When? Well… July? The first bits, anyway? (On the initial schedule, this part of the project was to be wrapping up in July.)

So I’m trying not to panic, both helped and hindered by Ceri saying, “You’re doing MENUS? Oh my gods, those are HUGE!” because now I at least have an idea of how much work there will be (i.e. a lot), but also now I am anxious about how soon they want this stuff turned around when it eventually gets here. The projected schedule estimated 10 days would be required to handle the material, which is somewhat comforting; that’s two weeks of work. There’s always more of a crush as the end of the project approaches, and the same amount of work has to get crammed into a smaller time period, though. I am good, and I am outrageously fast (did I not just turn around a 400+ page batch in a crazy-brief four or five days? yes, I did, holy cats, and let me tell you, there was wine when I was done), but not knowing is freaking me out. Especially since I have a week out of town coming up when I can’t work, which is likely to coincide with the first batch of this material finally reaching me.

Apart from the ZOMG I DON’T KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN WITH MY SCHEDULE, which is something that always triggers anxiety (and I haven’t yet mentioned that daycare is closed for the last two weeks of July, ha ha ha, this will be fun), I am still very much enjoying this project. It’s been fun to see the fan reaction to the trailers and launch material, and to know secret stuff, and to think about how much fun people will have discovering it all when the game is released. Turns out the Xbox version will only be available on XBox One, though, not the 360, which means it’s time for HRH and I to update our Xbox console. The recent announcement that the One will now extend backward compatibility to lots of 360 games is a relief, though.

On the other work hand (does that make sense? sure, why not, yay freelancing), I currently have a deliciously perfect and staggeringly good novel I’m working on for the publisher. It’s so good that I’m doing the equivalent of racing through pages just to see what happens next. It’s beautifully clean, so I have next to nothing to do other than add the occasional comma, remove the occasional italicized closing quotation mark, and make my list of proper nouns to check. It’s a luxury to work on it, and I feel extremely fortunate to have been the one assigned to it. It’s half contemporary, half historical, and has magical realism; it’s a book I will recommend wholeheartedly and without reservation to pretty much everyone when it’s released.

Owlet: 45 Months!

(Thanks to juggling lots of crazy deadlines, I am two months behind on these. Here’s the one that should have appeared on 4 May.)

We bought a new batch of chalk, and she has been spending many happy hours on the side porch, colouring and getting chalk dust everywhere. We were quite impressed with this monster:

Her current favourite book is The Day the Crayons Quit, and she is currently very into ‘writing’ in any form. She was doing a lot of ‘writing a message’ in the bare gardens with a stick. (A message to whom? Worms? Birds? Ants? We will never know.)

She went through a brief punching phase, which was very odd; I think she picked it up in self-defense from the three little boys at school who went through a very intense superhero/monster-fighting phase. We’re trying to finesse her need to defend herself and express frustration; it’s okay to stand up for yourself by removing yourself from the situation and/or using words, not so okay to suddenly throw your fist out in front of you.

Spring cleaning yielded the lightsabers and the wooden swords and shields on the side porch shelving, much to the delight of the kids. Owlet is a bit more aggressive, faster than she used to be, and slashes harder than she used to, so after a few yelps and complaints from Sparky, I surprised them with a pair of sturdy foam swords from the dollar store. They were thrilled, tore around the yard together, and created a very simple but enthusiastic game they call “Three, Two, One, Fight!”


This month marked a measurable interest in Lego, and once we had explained to Sparky that he couldn’t complain about her sorting through a stack of bricks he’d dumped on the floor while they were watching a movie, he was grudgingly okay with her building. His sensibilities are frequently offended by the directions her creativity goes in, however. There’s a lot of “That’s not right!” and “That is NOT a car.”

Her first real Lego creation was made of the back half a racing car, the front half of a jet nosecone, some bricks building up the back, and a weird guy inside. She was very proud of it. She sat on the stairs and worked to get it to stick together for ages, because the front and the back kept coming apart. I finally had to help. She was very proud of it.

Sparky’s working on not putting down her design choices:

OWLET: I made this! (Shows minifig to Sparky.)
SPARKY: This… has a red ninja’s legs, a female torso wearing a sleeveless top, and a head with no hair.
OWLET: Yes! And I made it for you!

It’s a challenge… and a work in progress.