An excellent cello lesson always begins the weekend nicely. Things have improved over the past couple of weeks, which is great, but I’m still a month behind where I ought to be. The six-week breakdown of technique while my subconscious implemented the new lesson stuff really crippled my progress in orchestra.

I got home to find the boys still in pyjamas watching a movie. An hour or so later the boy went to his room to get dressed and closed the door, and an hour after that it was lunchtime, so HRH went to get him and found him still sitting on his bed with his clothes next to him. HRH was a bit miffed, especially as we’ve been having trouble lately with the boy focusing on getting dressed so we’ve been working on it. Then he discovered that the boy’s general body temperature was warmer than usual, so I took his temperature and discovered that yes, he had a fever. He said he didn’t want lunch, just wanted to curl up in bed, so it was Tylenol and an early nap for him, which lasted three hours. He watched another movie once he woke up, had a bit of pasta for dinner, then went right to bed and proceeded to sleep hard. He was awake when I checked on him around 3:30 AM and the fever was really high, so I gave him the last of the Tylenol and cuddled him. He asked to come to our bed instead and I said yes, so we curled up there and he actually slept. Overall he got about twelve hours, and when he awoke at 7:30 the fever had broken completely. Other than the fever there were no symptoms, although we kept a very close eye on him all weekend. I’m not overly concerned, as this is how HRH’s body handles some illnesses too: the body ratchets up the temperature and burns whatever it is right out over a day. Still, it meant that we couldn’t in good conscience send him to his monthly Pagan playgroup meeting on Sunday morning, which was sad because it was to be a costume party with games and treats. But he was very good about it, saying, “I don’t want to give my fever to my friends at Magick Stars!” It also gives me a couple more days to finish his costume. (A good thing, as on Saturday when we were trying the different bits on him to adjust and size them, he accidentally got stuck with a pin that was in his cloak and howled. He went from “Can I wear my costume all day?” to “I want to take this off right now!” I know a lot of that was his fever and under-the-weatherness. I wouldn’t have been able to finish in time anyway. ) As of this morning he was over twenty-four hours symptom-free, so off to school he went.

Over the weekend I spun up 130 yards of chain-plied sport-weight Corriedale with which to knit a scarf for my Gran. I space-dyed half of the fibre in two shades of yellow and left the other half natural, and alternated a strip of the coloured fibre with a strip of the natural. My second batch of dyed fibre was a bit more intense than the first so with most of that I spun from a strip of the dyed and undyed fibre simultaneously to tone down the yellow a bit. I was envisioning something a bit less saturated than this, but I’m sure it will knit up just fine. (I called the colourway Buttercups & Daisies on a whim last night. While photographing it this morning I saw that the colours also remind me of sweet corn on the cob when you’ve just husked it, but that’s a bit less poetic.) Also, my grandmother will be bowled over by the fact that I dyed, spun, and then knit my own yarn into a gift for her no matter what I give her, so the lack of perfect colour match to what was in my mind isn’t a deal breaker. We photographed each step so that I can make a little album with captions outlining each step to wrap up along with the scarf come Yuletide, so she can see how it started from plain fibre, went through the dyeing and spinning process, and then the knitting.

And the weekend ended with a fabulous installment of our steampunquian horror game, where Things Were Revealed and the Bad Guy Was Vanquished (for now?), and there was dramatic character fallout. This marks the end of the first story arc after twelve months of playing one session per month; we have voted to continue, and I’m glad. It’s a good world, the party is very well-balanced with excellent characters, and the story is grand. The company is pretty stellar, too.

Ahead this week: The next freelance project (the last report was accepted and approved within half an hour of submitting it on Thursday, woo!), cello work, and I should start knitting some of the things I’ve spun yarn for. I have a yarn shop date with Jan on Tuesday afternoon (not that I can buy anything at the moment, so it will be a recon and perhaps a special-ordering of new fibre for more Yule gifts mission), my bi-weekly anime evening with Marc on Tuesday night, a cello session with M on Wednesday afternoon, and whatever else comes up along the way. There’s a story or a book lurking in deep subconscious, but all I know is that it’s lurking. Now and again I get a murky idea of a phrase or a character, but it’s at the frustrating phase of brewing without tangible development or even clear recognition.

Also, tonight I roast a chicken. I think I’ll roast diced potatoes, cauliflower, parsnips, and some more of the garden carrots with it. I would have done the chicken yesterday but it wasn’t defrosted in time, so instead I made beef stew, and tiny bite-sized apple pies with half of the leftover apples from the apple-picking session a month ago. I made a half-yield of a pastry recipe but it wasn’t enough for the apples I’d prepped, so I dug in the chest freezer and found six mini tart shells left over from something and used those, too. The tarts were thoroughly approved of by the gaming group and our babysitter. (The other half of the remaining apples got made into applesauce.)

To work!