Category Archives: Diary

Ten!

On this day ten years ago (TEN!), in the company of family and dear chosen family on a spectacular autumn day, I married my best friend.

We have now officially spent a quarter of our lives together!

Today also marks the twelfth anniversary of HRH and I doing our first road trip together, one of the joys I have continued to experience with him throughout our marriage. I’ve been told that the true test of a couple is if they can paint a room together without killing one another, but I suspect the ability to survive a road trip better attests to their ability to co-exist harmoniously.

I received an exquisite handmade wooden rose as an anniversary gift, and my parents sent us a cheque for a dinner out (thanks, Mum and Dad!). I’m exhausted and fighting this cold, and have the boy home for a third day in a row, so I don’t have much energy (there’s also a family dinner and a cello lesson ahead of me; I hope my teacher understands my inability to process much tonight), but I do have enough to say:

I love you, HRH. We’ve put up with a lot of ups and downs, challenges, and obstacles, but I think things are paying off in some sort of stability. We still have a way to go, but I can’t imagine traveling the road ahead with anyone but you… accompanied by the boy, of course, and any number of stuffed rabbits.

Speed Bump

The boy woke up with a horrific asthma attack around eleven on Tuesday night. He hasn’t had one in two years. This was eerily reminiscent on that previous attack, too: suddenly waking up in a panic almost incapable of breathing. The good thing is that he’s two years older and understands that the mask and inhaler help him to some degree almost immediately. So that plus a glass of water and some cuddling got him calmed to a point where he eventually fell asleep again, although he woke up again four hours later for a repeat of all treatment. I had trouble getting back to sleep every time, so I think I clocked a total of three or four hours. When we got up at six it was obvious that he wasn’t going anywhere, so I called preschool and let them know he was staying home. Both his teacher and I were mystified as to the origins of the attack, as there had been no signs of a cold or anything triggery the day before. Mid-morning he developed a very low-grade fever (just two- or three-tenths of a degree above average), which led me to suspect that he was indeed fighting some kind of cold or flu.

We went out to pick up refills on his inhalers and an expectorant syrup, and ran other errands as well. As the day went on it became increasingly hard for me to breathe as well. The weather had done a drastic switcheroo and went super-humid, which may have been a major factor in the asthma. As the day went on, however, it became increasingly evident that there was a major impressively icky full-blown chest cold developing. This asthma attack, like the one two years ago, had been an early warning response to the imminent pulmonary-focused illness.

With the lack of sleep, I tried to nap when the boy went down for his rest, but I was wide awake, which did not bode well for the rest of the day. I did get some spinning done, though, and when the boy woke up he climbed into the chair next to me (along with five cars and Blackie), followed closely by Gryffindor. Let me tell you, the chair was pretty crowded, and drafting was a challenge. But the boy took pictures!

I finished spinning the Blue Faced Leicester fibre I had left over from the spindle workshop I took in May, and I knew there wasn’t going to be enough yardage for the project Ceri needs it for. So I called Ariadne Knits, and they had both half-pound bags of both Corriedale and Merino top in stock. The boy and I popped down to pick up a pound of the Corriedale (much less expensive than I was expecting!) so I’ll have enough for all the yardage required (have to start over again, as I discovered that BFL is “hard to felt”, which is ungood for the particular project Ceri has in mind) plus extra for people to try it out (crafting weekend in Alexandria coming up, hurrah) and dyeing experiments. Using the commercially prepared BFL top is a blissful experience. It’s like night and day when I compare it to spinning the unknown bits of wool I carded and dizzed into sliver myself. This is more even, smoother, and easier to draft. It shouldn’t be a surprise, of course; you get what you pay for. And as Ceri pointed out to me, this is why people stress that you should work with the best stuff you can afford, whatever your craft. The less expensive stuff is less expensive, but you never know when the fibre is working against you, and when it’s your technique that’s causing the problem. One should also really enjoy what one’s doing, and using the best material you can afford contributes greatly to that.

In this case, I am so glad that it was the quality of the fibre that was the problem. My beautiful BFL singles, let me show you them:

I can’t wait to ply them. Except if do that, I use up my last free bobbin, and I can’t spin my Corrie. No, wait, that’s stupid; if I ply them, I end up with two free bobbins at the end. Never mind. Or one free, anyway, because there’s more on one bobbin than the other, so there will be leftover single. And my last attempt at Navajo plying was amusingly disastrous, so perhaps we won’t to that again. Or, well, why not; I have to learn, and this is as good as anything else to practice on. Or I can just skein the leftover single and wind it into a centre-pull ball on Sunday when Ceri comes over to play. (This example of stream of consciousness thought is brought to you by slowly shifting into work mode from early-morning mode.)

Needless to say, I got no freelance work done yesterday; then again, I didn’t expect to. Although I really wanted the project done and gone so I didn’t have to think about it any more. Ah, well; we all encounter speed bumps. The boy’s home again today, as he will be for the rest of the week. The glamour of being home sick has worn off, and now he is cranky, irritable, and whiny. And I have to work today regardless, as today’s my deadline. HRH is going to try to come home early, around the end of the boy’s nap, so I’ll have at least naptime and a couple of extra hours to polish the report.

I didn’t make it to orchestra last night, as the lack of sleep, my own developing cold (yes, another one; the boy’s ambushed me while my immune system was still down form the last light cold), and the running around all day had taken its toll. I was achy, dizzy, and couldn’t hold things securely with my hands, so in the interests of not totally running myself down and making myself and everyone around me at orchestra miserable I called and let them know I wasn’t going to make it. And wow, did I ever sleep well.

So today the boy is enjoying cartoons in his pyjamas for a good long time, and I am opening the freelance document, and work shall be done. He knows to leave me alone as much as possible, and so far so good.

Weekend Roundup With Bonus Monday Material

Sushi Friday night! This was a long-awaited treat. We went to our favourite sushi restaurant with Jeff and Paze, and as we went out after the kids were in bed there weren’t tables when we arrived. We chatted at the bar for about half an hour or forty-five minutes, and when we finally got a table the chef sent over a treat for us as a thank you for being so patient. It was one of his personal creations, not on the menu, and was delicious: a roll of salmon around tuna and what may have been red snapper, all wrapped in nori and lightly sauteed so that the first five millimeters or so of the salmon were barely cooked, all drizzled with a gingery sesame-chili-green oniony sticky glaze that we all scraped up with our chopsticks after the roll was gone. Oh ye gods, it was all heavenly. The tiny bit of cooked salmon contrasted so beautifully in taste and texture with the raw. I want to be kept waiting for half an hour every time now. We also learned that they’re expanding! Finally, after a decade of going to this tiny restaurant that seats maybe thirty people, they’re taking over half of the next space in the mall, so we’ll be able to bring a party larger than four people, which currently strains the seating. (Perhaps they will also take reservations. You never know.) We’re very excited about this, not only for our benefit, but because it means the restaurant is doing so very well. They opened two new locations over the past few years, one in Vaudreuil and one in Laval, but this one has stayed tiny and intimate. I can’t say I’m thrilled with their switch in music from jazz classics to modern pop, but everything else more than makes up or it. Dinner was, of course, delicious.

Saturday morning I headed out to my cello lesson, which was pretty intense in the focusing department. It was also very physical in that we spent a lot of time talking about back muscles and doing various exercises in order to isolate their movement. I also got to choose between two pieces for my solo in the upcoming Christmas recital, and I chose another duet with M, a lovely two-cello arrangement of Mozart’s ‘Canzonetta sull’ aria‘ from Le nozze di Figaro. I get to play Susanna! The lesson was good, but by the time I headed home I was drained, exhausted, and dizzy, and when I got in I knew that I was going to be useless for the rest of the day. This was problematic because I’d scheduled a very necessary grocery run and various errands, most birthday-related, and then had to drive to the south shore through a detour around the reserve to get to my in-laws’ house for HRH’s mom’s birthday dinner. (HRH was being picked up by his dad that morning in order to go help put a new fence in.) Well, the day got shafted because I couldn’t focus enough to drive, which made me even more irritated than the original irritation about being downed by the fibro. The boy and I stayed home all afternoon, napping together, watching movies, and making cupcakes. In the end we rescheduled the birthday dinner for next Friday night and HRH’s dad brought him back home again, going above and beyond the call of duty by crossing the bridge and traveling the associated detour four times in total.

I was climbing walls by that point, so HRH insisted that we head out to make an appearance at Scott’s birthday gathering after the boy was in bed. As I didn’t have to drive I agreed, with the proviso that the moment I felt not-good we had to leave. Things went rather well, and there was excellent company. I spent a couple of hours watching people play the new Beatles Rock Band game while HRH drummed or sat out, and he even pulled off a very impressive vocal performance of ‘Yellow Submarine’. We came home to bed at a reasonable hour. Blade is to be commended for being the Responsible Adult On Site two nights in a row.

Sunday morning we went apple picking! I have never done this before. Formally, I mean; I’ve pulled an apple here and there from people’s trees to eat as a child, but I’ve never done the full-out trip to an orchard. We met the Murphy-Aubin clan at an “apple forest” near Oka and had an absolutely fabulous morning. The weather was glorious, the company was excellent, the apples were delicious, and the kids had a great time running around, up and down ladders, in and out of branches so laden with apples that they bent to touch the grass below. It was spectacular. I ate more apples in one day than I have over the past year, and every single one of them was indescribably delicious. We now have twenty pounds of apples. It was a lovely way to celebrate the first day of fall, although one day early.

Back home we napped, and then the boys took me to my group cello lesson, which was great fun. While I was there they did the groceries, then they picked me up and brought me home again. We had sausages and eggs for dinner, I called my mum to chat, and went to bed. I slept poorly again, though, and only got about four hours, which made Monday kind of hard.

The lack of sleep wasn’t the only thing making Monday hard. I opened my latest freelance assignment to find a 172,000-word manuscript presented in a font composed entirely of capital letters. (I am serious. The author screamed this novel. All five hundred pages of it.) Not only that, the classification was wrong; it wasn’t a fantasy novel, but religious fiction, which isn’t one of the areas I work in. After calming down I debated sending it back, but figured no, I would just be focused and ruthless like I’m supposed to be. I tend to give a lot more time to these evaluations than I ought to, and I need to learn how to be more precise and efficient. This is as good a place as any to begin. And I began by changing the damn font to Times New Roman and putting a big note on the front of the evaluation saying that in order to be read and evaluated the font had to be reformatted, and all page references were according to the new pagination. (I am still incandescent about it.)

Last night we had a Harvest ritual, focusing on celebrating our achievements over the past year. B brought a small bottle of ice cider, and we used our horn for the first time (although we offered the horn to the gods, ancestors, and spirits and used small glasses for ourselves, as most of us had colds). I am really enjoying how our coven is exploring a different way of celebrating, rather than using standard Wiccan format. We’ve chosen to explore the Germanic aspects of our tradition and heritage, and we’re finding that the philosophies reflect our goals and directions very well.

Today I finish up the evaluation, and if I have time, I may prep some more fibre to spin, or I may crack open the black roving I got with the wheel, or even try some of the silky BFL I have left over from spindling.

The Long-Awaited Spinning Wheel Arrives; Or, Yet Another Photo Essay

Just shy of eight weeks after I ordered it, my Louet S-15 wheel is finally here. I think I used up all my excitement waiting and fretting about it, because I have been remarkably sanguine about the whole affair since MA e-mailed me to confirm that it had arrived on Tuesday. I’ve somewhat disappointed in myself, actually; I wanted that adrenaline rush making the pickup and assembly and first go on it just a bit more exciting.

There’s a humorous saying that Louet is like the Ikea of spinning wheels. When we picked up the box at Ariadne yesterday (boxes, really, because my free skeinwinder was separate) we saw that the saying was so far accurate: it was shipped in a big flat box, complete with convenient carry-handle. Not what one envisions when one thinks “spinning wheel” at all. I’d been warned, so I knew what to expect.

Once home, we ate (this was very, very hard for the boy, despite having picked up chicken and fries from his favourite restaurant, St. Hubert, on the way home from Ariadne, because he was so incredibly excited about the wheel) and then adjourned to the living room to unpack the boxes.

The box yielded five pieces: the flyer, the-mother-of-all that holds the flyer and bobbin, the upright back post with the wheel on it, and the base/treadle unit, and the bobbins and the kate (the wire bobbin-holder on the base). If this photo is so far exploding your mental image of a spinning wheel, it gets even better. (Or worse, I suppose, depending on how attached you are to the image of a stereotypical Sleeping Beauty-style wheel, more correctly termed a Saxony wheel.)

We put it together to make sure everything was there and that it worked before staining it. We screwed two nuts onto bolts, and snapped the footman connector onto the flywheel. And that was literally that. And like Ikea, Louet thoughtfully includes the necessary wrenches with their material, so we didn’t even need to dig one out. Louet goes beyond Ikea, however, in that they even include a half-pound of fibre in the box (in my case a half-pound of black Coopworth) so you can set up and go right out of the box without any fuss. It’s like the Mac of spinning wheels or something. Anyway, so after attaching a leader onto a bobbin (which took longer than assembling the wheel, I confess, argh) we could spin.

And we did.

I spun a tiny handful of test fibre for a moment or two (and got a very respectable thin though slightly uneven yarn, yay me), but the boy was bursting to try. I got a ball of acrylic from the closet and tied it on for him so he could practice treadling (he’s not really there yet, even with me helping) and maintaining the tension on the fibre in his hands. He “spun” up a bunch, then I put the skeinwinder on the wheel (not shown here), wound it off for him, then showed him how to twist it into a skein, with which he was absolutely delighted because it was “his yarn that he had spun”. As you can see, Gryffindor is fascinated with the flywheel. There’s a black knob on the back of the disc that caps the bit you snap the footman on to, and he was watching it go round and round.

The boy cried when it was time to go to bed. I promised him he could spin again tonight.

Once he was in bed I took the wheel apart and began staining it. (For reference purposes, I used Varathane Gel Stain in Early American, no. 466, and I adore the colour; it’s almost exactly what I wanted. I would have preferred something a tad lighter, but the next lighter colours were much too gold or red for my taste, and besides, this will lighten slightly over time with exposure to sunlight.) The wood didn’t even need a sanding; all I had to do was wipe it down with a bit of flannel. It did soak up stain, but not to such an extent that the colour went irreversibly dark immediately. After I finished staining each piece I wiped off the excess and evened it out. It only took about an hour, and then I left it to dry overnight.

The stain is only supposed to take six to eight hours to dry, but I happened to stain it on the only night where we got rain in September. It was still a wee bit tacky when we got up, but I gave it another two hours then rubbed it down with another piece of flannel (and near knackered myself doing it, stupid fibro). Then I put it back together.


Astute persons will see that the drive band is not on in the above pictures. What can I say; I was so excited about putting it together to take pictures for you that I forgot it. It’s on now. I haven’t decided if I’m going to stain the bobbins yet or not. It would be finicky. The wheel itself needs a touch-up in one or two tiny places.

It does not yet have a name, although it is a girl, and I am leaning toward Verity. I shall have to see what she feels like over the next week or so before she is properly named.

It’s a very modern-looking wheel, but I’m very all right with that. I wanted something with a small footprint, which meant an upright instead of a Saxony, and I wanted something I was comfortable with that was low-maintenance, didn’t require much adjustment, and could be easily serviced in case of problems. My LYS is a Louet dealer, and I worked with their Louet and was very happy with it. It’s remarkably light and not awkward at all to carry, which means that I can move it from the living room and back to my office when I want to, or even to the back deck in the summer. It will travel very well in the boot of the car on its back on a blanket. (Although I hear that many Louet spinners buckled their wheels into a seat in the car, which would also work.) I couldn’t do that with a Saxony. I’m also not afraid to knock this one about a bit; if I had a nicer traditional-looking wheel I’d be worried about it all the time. Louets are workhorses and go on forever, judging from the enthusiastic following they have in the spinning community. When I have room, and when I am better at this, and when there is extra money, perhaps I shall look into getting a Saxony as well. That’s far in the future, however. I have my wheel; I am content.

—

Flyers, mother-of-all, footman? I have no idea what you’re talking about! Here’s a diagram of a generic Louet upright wheel with all the parts named for you, although the model pictured is a few steps above my basic model.

What are the specs of your wheel? Here’s a basic outline of the Louet wheels, as they’re mostly the same with only minor differences. There’s a page for the S-15 but it doesn’t tell you anything more.

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ETA: I managed twenty yards of two-ply today, which is now hanging to dry. It is lumpy and uneven, will probably knit terribly, and I love it.

My Dyeing Experiment No. 2: Another Photo Essay

By Me.

(Or, I Have No Self-Restraint, Even Though I Am Being Virtuous By Doing Laundry, Baking Rolls, and Proofing The Freelance Thing At The Same Time.)

Today’s experiments: two concurrent dye jobs! Again, we have our setup:

From left to right: Brown, teal blue for the 1/4 oz first sample of fibre; burgundy and violet for the second. I had my doubts about that burgundy; it looked awfully brown. But this is why we swatch. Er, experiment. (Because we all know that swatches are actually lying little liars.)

The tea in the background was not used in the dyeing process.

I forgot to take Before pictures of the fibre in the freshly poured dye, but just imagine the colours you see in the glasses poured onto a faintly off-white fibre. Here’s the brown/teal, after its first trip to the microwave.

Here’s the burgundy/violet, after the first heating. Wow! Check out how drastically different the colour is after only two minutes in the microwave!

Here they are after their requisite heating times, with the dye fully developed.

And here they are, rinsed and dried.

Now, even I can see that the burgundy is deep pink, and the violet is, well, kind of a bright violet. I’m sure a little girl somewhere would love it. The way to tone things down is to mix, or overdye. But I’m pleased with the brown/teal, because it comes closest to what my brain was expecting. I’m going to need to work on deepening that brown, though.

And on that note, I am going to switch laundry then finish proofing the freelance thing.

My First Dyeing Experiment: A Photo Essay

By Me.

From left to right in the photo above we have a microwave-safe dish, with a coil of sliver (precise content unknown, beyond “it’s wool from Canadian sheep”) in it, and my four test dyes: brown, royal blue, yellow, and copper. The fibre weighed barely 1/4 oz. I used maybe a tablespoon to two tablespoons of the dye solution for each colour, perhaps more of the blue and less of the copper.

The fibre, with the dyes poured over it, just before it’s put in the microwave for its series of two-minute heatings. You can see how the blue and yellow are blending and being pulled around the dish by capillary action. Clockwise from upper left: blue, yellow, copper, brown.

The fibre, now dyed, after the dye has set and the water has been poured off. (Yeah, I apologize for not using a consistent background colour.)

The teeny-tiny braid of dried fibre, posing with the big ball o’fibre that had its origins in a 3 oz bag stuffed full of mill ends and scrap that I picked through, combed/carded, then dizzed off with a button and rolled the resulting sliver into a ball.

In my opinion, the dyed fibre looks rather like a mangled parakeet. But this particular little dead budgie is my dead budgie, dyed all by myself. Now I know how things react with one another, and how the process works. Blue is very aggressive, as is yellow. (That’s why so much of this is blue, yellow, and green.) The brown needs a lot more dye to water ratio for a stronger colour. The copper is almost unnoticeable.

I call this experiment a success in the gaining experience department. Next experiment: to see what happens when it’s spun.

(I have done other stuff today, namely finish a never-ending editorial evaluation. I decided to treat myself to this test while making dinner. No dinners were dyed in the course of this experiment.)

ETA: OOOH! I could conduct Another Experiment and try overdyeing the fibre with more brown to tone it down/enrich the brown tones! Must plot.