Category Archives: Diary

Sparky: Ten Years Old!

We did it! We made it to double digits!

These birthday photo posts are getting very long. I think that makes them all the more special, don’t you?

Ten entire years ago, during a humid heatwave, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another nine weeks. In those nine weeks, I had to correct the galleys of one book, deliver the first draft of another, unpack from the move, create a nursery, and perform in a rock concert. All that was rearranged, rescheduled, or cancelled (for me, anyway): the galleys were corrected in the hospital (yeah, I’m hardcore that way; HRH FedExed them to the publisher for me as soon as they were done), t! took my place onstage with Random Colour (I dictated basslines to him over the phone from my hospital bed), the delivery deadline for the first draft of the other book was moved (bless my editor at the time!), the nursery was hastily finished while Sparky was in the neonatal unit, and unpacking happened when it happened.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

Six…

Seven…

Eight…

Nine…

TEN!

For what it’s worth, he showed that striped shirt to me yesterday and said, “This is too tight on me now.” We’ve been weeding clothes out of his drawers on what feels like a weekly basis, and he’s eating an awful lot. Not a lot at a time, just frequently.

Oh, let’s add another one where’s he’s actually smiling.

One decade ago he was born nine weeks early, and we’ve been trying to keep up with him ever since.

Books books books books Lego books Minecraft books Pokemon books.

He’s wearing size 10-14 or large youth shirts, and size 9-10 pants for length, although we have to cinch the waists. He’s wearing youth size 2 shoes, and more of my socks and some of my more fitted t-shirts are mistakenly ending up in his drawers when the laundry gets put away.

This year at school he ran into math problems because he didn’t have a basic handle on multiplication/division/fact families. But then he discovered fractions and blazed through those, and plotted coordinates were fun, too. Grade four is the first year of provincial exams here, and we’re waiting on those results.

He’s sensitive, funny, loves sharing stuff he’s interested in, actively tries to engage his sister in play (until she tries to direct said play, that is), and adores puns. We have a special family game or movie night with just the three of us every Saturday night, and it’s a blast.

(We just watched Jurassic Park in two goes, because while he was happy and awed for the first hour, when the T-Rex ate the lawyer it was all “WHY ARE YOU LETTING ME WATCH THIS THIS IS A TERRIBLE MOVIE” and we had to stop it. After a week of getting used to it, he proposed watching the second half, and he was fine. Now he’s changed his idea for his birthday party from a spy theme to a Jurassic Park theme. Uh-oh.)

He’s a terrific kid, and we’re looking forward to the next decade with him.

The New Glasses

I’ve had my new glasses for over a week now, and I’m pretty excited about them.

I have three older pairs scattered around the house for various reasons. My most recent pair are at my computer, for working. I carry my second-oldest pair in my purse, for reading music. And my third-oldest pair are on my bedside table, for reading at night. Now, this arrangement isn’t ideal, not by a long shot. Particularly if you consider that the most recent pair are two or three years old, the second-oldest are eightish years old, and the third oldest are so old I can’t remember when I got them, to be honest. Possibly pre-blog vintage. But they all seemed to work adequately for the reasons I needed them. They were fine, in a pinch.

Last year I got a reminder card from my optometrist. That’s new; they usually don’t do that for me. But maybe there was a flag put in my file to recall me every two years, because my optometrist told me that once one hits forty, ones eyes really start changing as the lens loses its flexibility at a faster rate. I knew I was due, but it wasn’t immediately critical, and I didn’t have the money for new glasses anyway.

This spring I started getting irritated at my eyewear situation. I was wearing my glasses pretty much all the time at home, but if I tried to wear them in the car, my eyes hurt and it was actually harder to see. So I’d take them off, but then I’d forget to put them back on unless I was at a musical activity where I needed them to see my sheet music clearly. This last pair of glasses were for general wear with an emphasis on reading, but I hadn’t been told I had to wear them for driving (or to not wear them for that reason, either, just to be clear). It got to a point where when I had the money, I made the appointment.

And it turns out I did the right thing. My optometrist is terrific. Unlike some other optometrists I’ve had, he actually asks what I do in daily life and what my job is, listens to what I say, and then makes good decisions based on that information. He asked if I’d had an increase in headaches, too (how did he know?). He explained to me that my eyes are pretty good at what they do, sharing the job between them, albeit in an unequal fashion (nearsighted in one eye, farsighted in the other), but that my job was stressing their capabilities. He pointed out that it was great that my monitor was as far away from me as possible because my eyes were good at distance stuff, but that I shifted frequently between the screen, printed material on the desk between it and I, and my hands close up. What I needed, he said, were three different prescriptions to help my eyes shift between those three distances. And he wrote a scrip for progressive lenses.

Then the fun started. And by fun I mean the soul-crushing search for frames. I have a small face. 90% of frames are too wide and look awful. Among the last 10% available to me, the frames had to be large enough to contain the lens area for a progressive prescription. That eliminated about 90% of the smaller frames out there. This meant I had to choose a frame that looked good, had a lens area large enough, and was in a material or colour I didn’t despise. I’d been casually bookmarking frames online for a year or so, preparing for this eventual pair; all of them were useless. I went to five different stores in person and eliminated pretty much everything out there. I ended up at Optique Laurier and finally found a set of frames that I didn’t hate. I’d been hoping to find a pair in green, but apparently it is not an In Colour these days. I ended up with purple, of all colours (not something I ever expected; it makes Owlet very happy, as it is her favourite colour), matte purple metal frames and purple mosaic acrylic arms. I went back a couple of days ago for a final adjustment, and I’m really happy. They fit, they’re comfortable, I can wear them all the time without having to take them off or peek over the top — including the car! it’s great! — and it took me no time to adjust to them at all. I’d read about the adjustment period for progressives and was nervous about it, but I drove right home with them on, and had no trouble with stairs or anything. (There was an interesting moment where I stepped off the curb on my way to pick Sparky up for school, but that was all.) There was also an hour where if I paid too much attention to my peripheral vision when I turned around it felt like I was in a fishbowl because things distorted, but that was super temporary (and, frankly, amusing when I noticed it, not vertigo-inducing).

They’ve been terrific, and I love just putting them on in the morning and not having to worry about taking them off for something and forgetting where I put them. And they’re shaped in such a way that if I need to, I can still peek over the top of the lenses to deliver that flat, unimpressed look if required. I know there’s sort of a stigma attached to progressives, but wow, I love mine, and I’m so happy I’ve got them.

Owlet: 44 Months!

These updates are getting challenging. I remember Sparky’s growing much harder to write around this point, as well. There aren’t as dramatic leaps forward as there were earlier; it’s like everything is just a bit more developed or precise than it was last month.

We spent Easter weekend in southern Ontario with my parents, and visited the RBG while we were there. They were hosting an exhibition on frogs, and the kids were enthralled.

We walked through the permanent collections after seeing the frogs. The greenhouse room between the main building and the collection building was full of spring flowers. Walking in, the scent quite literally hit you like a physical blow. It was warm, spring-damp, and gloriously colourful. I wanted to stay and just drink in the smells. Owlet wanted to pet all the flowers, and was sad to leave that room.

But then we took her to the wee indoor koi pond, so it was all right again.

After our stroll through the collection, we saw that there were people with kids gathering for a presentation, so we sat down with them and were treated to an interesting talk on local flora and fauna. Talking about the frogs led into the host showing two snakes and talking about respecting the participants in the local ecosystem. After he was done, he invited the kids to make a line to come up and touch the snake, with the idea that if they actually experienced one firsthand, they wouldn’t have misconceptions about them and hopefully perpetuate that respect beyond the RBG doors. Sparky and Owlet were right there in line, and Sparky was fantastic, helping Owlet hold her fingers out and stroke the snake. It was pretty special.

Owlet has given up her naps at home. We don’t even try on weekends any more; we just set her up with craft stuff and she works quietly for an hour or so. She’s down to forty-five minutes at preschool, too, and only because her educators run them ragged!

I bought her a new pair of size 10 canvas shoes to use as indoor shoes at school this spring, but she’s taken to wearing them at home. She calls them her coronation shoes, and it took us a while to figure out that she meant carnation shoes, because they have flowers on them. She also has new rain boots, which have ladybugs on them. They clash with her spring coat, but we don’t care. She’s really lengthened out; a couple of her dresses are definitely tunics now. We’re into size 5 in most brands now.

Her current favourite books are the Henry and Mudge series and Madeline books. She doesn’t have a favourite movie at the moment; she’s happy to watch anything and everything. She does tend to suggest Miyazaki films first, but we have a house rule that if the sibling absolutely does not want to watch whatever has been suggested, they can say no and have to propose something in return that the sibling agrees on. Negotiations can drag on until they both agree.

There’s been a recent language upgrade; everything is more precise and stories are more involved and complex. Her artwork is refining, too; she’s still very into coating an entire page with colour, but now she draws things with circles and dots and says they’re actual things, not just abstract shapes. We started a pen pal exchange with the other July 2011 kids from my online mums group, and she had loads of fun chopping up bits of card stock and gluing them onto a butterfly shape.

And she dictated her penpal letter to me, then signed her name. Now, I talked her through how to make the letters, but this is the first time she’s ever shown interest in actually printing out her name. She did an amazing job!

She and Sparky are really good at playing together. She’s starting to stand up to him and codirect the play, and he’s starting to allow her instead of ploughing right over her like he was doing a few months ago. A couple of weeks ago they were working on a Secret Project downstairs, and when they brought it up to show us they were so proud of it. It’s a family portrait in Lego, and we really love it.

(Sparky and I have owls, HRH is holding a drill, and Owlet has flowers.) I’m so happy that they worked on it together, making artistic decisions and allowing one another those decisions. The Owlet minifig has black hair, for example; that Sparky didn’t insist on blonde hair is quite impressive, because he’s a perfectionist. Owlet’s capriciousness is teaching him to let go a bit.

Deep Breath

Well, we just discovered the wonderful gentleman who usually handles our taxes has passed away, so I’ve sent out a query to someone MLG recommended, and have another query (possibly two) lined up if that comes to naught. But my fingers are crossed.

I have been working overtime for the past six weeks. I booked last week off from the publisher because I was burning out… only to have work sent to me from the local contract. This was not a terrible thing; I really enjoy the work I’m doing on that local contract. I was looking forward to time off work, that’s all. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I did book that time off, because otherwise I’d have been in the exact same position, working overtime to get things done. Yesterday I finally got to prep all the tax stuff. Today Sparky has a ped day, so we’re going to go see Cinderella at the theatre.

But yes, overtime, what with two different companies sending me stuff. Journalling has fallen to the bottom of the pile of stuff to do. There are three (!!!) Owlet posts in the queue, plus one on pens and inks, I haven’t posted fibre arts stuff in months, and I really want to write down something about the baroque bow workshop class I did last weekend with Elinor Frey.

I’ll start with the most recent Owlet post; that’s almost complete. I just need to resize pictures and such….

Oh, Sparky…

While doing groceries this morning, I got a voicemail from Sparky’s school. He had called to say that he’d forgotten his lunch at home.

Except he hadn’t. There was nothing left on the floor of the entryway when we went out the door. And he had the lunchbox in his hand when I dropped him off at school.

When I got home, I double-checked the fridge, the entryway, and the back seat of the car. Nothing. So I threw together another lunch and took it to school, along with a note that said yes, he had remembered his lunch; he’d had it with him when he got to school, so it was probably in the schoolyard somewhere.

I certainly hope he finds his lunchbox, because I bought him a new drink bottle-thing yesterday, and it was not cheap. (Well, it was, actually; that particular single bottle was on clearance, but it was the last one, and the only reason I’d bought it was because it was marked down, because new the prices are stupidly high.) Also, I’m not a fan of the idea of having to buy a new lunchbox two-thirds of the way through the year, or replacing all the terrific nearly-new containers in it.

Apart from his lunchbox mysteriously vanishing between the schoolyard gate and his classroom, things are mostly okay. He got his second-term report card a couple of weeks ago and it was quite decent in most areas except math, and his French had dropped a bit. He got a plaque at a recent assembly, an award for being a risk-taker — which, if you know him, is both puzzling and great. He doesn’t trust himself to try new things or go out on a limb very often, so if a teacher recognized that particular value in him, then that means they’re doing a great job making him feel safe and able to be more daring in various areas of his life. (Risk-taking isn’t something out of the blue; it’s one of the values stressed in the International Baccalaureate programme’s philosophy. The IB programme embodies ten values: it aims to develop learners who are inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective. These ten values are underlined and revisited again and again in various modules and units, as well as activities, educational approaches, and teaching styles. It’s awesome; basically, they’re educating upright citizens of the world, the educational environment suits Sparky very well, and I am all for it.)

He has run into a roadblock with long division, with which I completely and utterly sympathize, since I did in grade four, too. (Mine stemmed from a sudden switch into doing math in French, and the French way of doing long division is different, which created a lot of stress and confusion at home when my dad tried to coach me through my math homework.) He is not a fan of having to do extra work to understand how something is done, so a few bonus long division problems every couple of days on top of drilling a multiplication table or two nightly is moaned and whined about regularly. There is much dragging of feet when I remind him to study his French vocabulary, too. Basically, anything that was not directly assigned by a teacher that needs to be handed in or checked in class is seen as the Worst Thing Ever, because we’re obviously manufacturing extra work as some kind of punishment or just to make his life miserable. Sorry, kid; what’s actually happening is we’re teaching you how to study and how to break tasks down into smaller components so you learn them thoroughly instead of just zipping through them and barely passing a test. He tends to rush through things and not question the answer he arrives at, something I’ve been trying to teach him to do when he finishes a problem. If you’re dividing 348 by 4, for example, the answer cannot be bigger than 348, and if you use simple logic, it can’t be bigger than half or a third of it, either; if it is, it means you went off track during your process and either multiplied two things together incorrectly or multiplied the wrong two things (something that happens with great frequency in his division). He loves to learn; he does not love to work. (As an aside… we were so right to switch schools. He probably wouldn’t have hit this until high school if he’d stayed in the other one.)

He’s on March Break next week. There’s at least a hot chocolate date, a bookstore trip, and hopefully a movie planned. But he’s not going to be happy when I remind him to keep up with his math practice.

Oh Look, It’s the End of February

And really, March 1 cannot come too soon.

I don’t have the energy for full paragraphs. Let’s do a point-form post.

My first two weeks on the video game project are done. So far I am enjoying it.

In my off time I handled my first project of the new year for the publisher. It was a Star Wars book. Yet again my geeky hoard of trivia proves useful! (Here’s a tip for you: The term ‘Jedi’ is a singular plural. One Jedi, two Jedi, many Jedi. Never Jedis. Never. LOOK, I CAN BE GEEKY ON MULTIPLE LEVELS HERE! AND PEOPLE PAY ME FOR IT!)

I started my free month-long trial of subscribing to Scribd for e-books and audiobooks. All things Agatha Christie have been converging in my life, and I decided to subscribe to an audiobook service so I could listen to her books while I spin or knit, but I find Audible very expensive for what it is. Scribd is $8.99 a month and offers unlimited access to a tonne of audiobooks, and e-books, too, so I went that route. (Bonus, I discovered: comics and graphic novels. Awesome.)

I am knitting a hat for a swap, and I am arguing with it. I have already ripped it back twice, and I suspect I will do it again. I just don’t know if I will try the pattern a third time, or give up on the decorative stitch part and simply knit it straight, then add a little something to it afterward. That kind of feels like cheating or giving up, but it may save my sanity. Ceri pointed out that the pattern isn’t hard but it’s tricky, which can be just as frustrating in a different way, and she has a point. Add that to the fact that I can’t knit anything more complicated than basic stockinette or garter in a room where there are other people, and there is a problem. It doesn’t help that the deadline for mailing is in one week. I could have been done by now if I hadn’t decided I really wanted to spin the yarn for this project. (But I did, and it’s terribly nice to knit with, I must say.)

I’ve started spinning more yarn for Mum’s beautiful silk/cashmere/Merino wrap. She’s getting close to the end of the stuff I made for her in 2013, and it’s not long enough, even taking into account the length blocking will add. I am so glad I took good notes about how I made the initial yarn.

One month till the chamber orchestra’s spring concert. That’s… soon. (Saturday 21 March, 7:30 PM at Valois United church. Mark your calendars. It’s a lovely programme.)

Yeah, Owlet’s post is late. That’s par for the course these days.

We had a lovely little Valentine’s Day tea party for our goddaughters, and it was so much fun. We finally got to use the half-size china teacups I bought Owlet for her first birthday for the kids. There were several courses of delicious tea-type foodstuffs, excellent company, and it was just a lovely day all around.

I got a new fountain pen; a Noodler’s Ahab in the colour Ahab’s Pearl. It’s a flex nib, and I’ve been really wanting to try a flex nib. It’s got a thick barrel, like my Waterman Kultur. I would have preferred a Konrad or a Nib Creaper, both of which are slimmer, but WonderPens.ca didn’t have them in stock at the time and I had really promised myself a new pen when the big cheque for the math book came in. I inked it with J Herbin’s Vert Empire, and I am smitten. I am also wholly smitten by the converter it came with, and the converters I ordered for my Waterman and Parker pens. I put some Diamine Damson in my extra-fine Sheaffer pen, and it writes so much more smoothly than it did when inked with the Noodler’s #41 Brown. I think the Diamines may be lubricated; I’m not entirely certain.

Okay, that’s enough. Back to work.

Back to Work

It’s been an awful week and a half here. Everyone except Sparky was very ill with the flu. Today is the first day everyone is where they’re supposed to be. We’re all tired and drained, most of us haven’t eaten properly all week, and I’m still mystified as to how Sparky managed to escape all of this. (HRH thinks it was sheer force of will, because we had a Lego party for five of his friends slated to happen here yesterday, and we warned him that if he got sick we’d have to reschedule it. He stayed well, and the party went off brilliantly. Six ten-year-olds, a tonne of Lego, pizza, and a movie; it was a good day.)

This is good, everyone being where they’re supposed to be, because I am starting a new project today, according to the contracts that were countersigned last week. I signed an NDA in early January, heard nothing for a while, and then was in negotiations with Paris office at the end of January. (Full confession: I enjoyed saying “I’m in negotiations with Paris” way too much.) This week is devoted to getting to know the project, the team, and talking about guidelines and standards. It’s an exciting project and one I’m very interested in working on. It’s an experiment of sorts for the employer who signed me, because they’ve never had a devoted copyeditor oversee all the written content for a project like this before. The team’s writers are said to be happy, too, because a pair of outside eyes is going to be going through it all for consistency and stylistic tweaks before release. It’s difficult to do that for your own writing, especially when there’s no clear stylesheet and several writers contributing. I like to think that if it goes well and there’s a measurable positive impact, then this may become a repeat gig. (And I’m not just saying that because I get to work with a very good friend. Observing inconsistencies or errors as a consumer drives me nuts; I like to think it’s good business sense to have a copyeditor manage the vast amount of text produced in a project like this.) It’s full time for a month and a half, then a possible week after that, followed by two (possibly three) more weeks at different times between April and June as various parts of the project come due.

On Friday I also accepted my first new project of the year from the publisher, which I can work on in evenings and on weekends if necessary. It’s short and a lot of the work I’d normally do is already done, as tends to be the case when I handle a manuscript for this particular editor. While the exciting new contract is theoretically full time for these six weeks, turning something down from the publisher felt like a dangerous move, especially if I’ll have to do it in a couple of weeks once I’m actually buried in actual deadline work for the new project. Every time a freelancer has to pass on an offered project, it’s a bit less likely that they’ll be assigned something the next time a manuscript comes up for editing. It’s good to stay on top of things and keep one’s availability fresh in the coordinator’s mind.

It’s been a quiet year work-wise so far. It’s nice to sit down and be able to work again. I certainly needed the break, and I am endlessly grateful that I didn’t have work that had to be done last week when I was out with the flu, or the week that Owlet’s daycare was closed in mid-January… but it’s good to get back to my desk. Just cleaning out the mess my work and personal e-mail inboxes had become over the last three weeks felt great today. Now… to work!