Category Archives: Diary

Let’s Try Again

Lost an entire post just now. That hasn’t happened in quite some time.

Five loads of laundry yesterday. Five. That’s significant, right?

Apart from that, I managed to edit a whole eight pages of Orchestrated despite having the file open for hours. I’ve hit Part Two, wherein I’ve left myself notes in the text like [write dinner scene here] because I was intent on getting the damn skeleton of the story down and done with. This means my light edits/rewrites are turning into more substantial rewrites, meaning my already slow pace is about to turn into the speed boasted of by turtles. The fibro-fog isn’t helping; I have little focus.

Yesterday I also began re-ripping the missing albums that iTunes can’t/won’t find. Turns out a few of my CDs were originally ripped into .wma format, and iTunes on the Mac doesn’t have an import/convert .wma function. Not a big deal, really. It’s just that I’m trying to find where iTunes is ripping them to, and I can’t. All the logical places I look haven’t turned anything up. (The Mac: “Just trust me. Everything’s going to be fine.” Me: “I know, I know, it’s magic, but even when doing magic I like to know what the ultimate destination for my energy is, thank you very much.”) I want all my music in one place so that I can back it all up at once.

Speaking of the Mac, it doesn’t have a formal name yet. My PCs all had names drawn from Norse mythology — Freyja, Valhalla, Bifrost, the Dell laptop is Nehelennia — but I suspect the Mac has energy that’s more Egyptian in nature. The Wii is named Isis; I think perhaps this is Nephthys, although Ma’at is tempting. I’ll think about it some more. (The Touch may be Nephthys, actually, making this one Ma’at. Hrm.)

Pursuant to the spinning obsession, I found a used Louet S15 on eBay that was listed at a $50 opening bid and comes with a bulky flyer included, so I calculated shipping, looked at my budget, and bid on it. I’m currently winning, but if someone tops my highest bid within the next five days I can still add another twenty dollars before I hit my self-imposed max total of $200. Seeing as how a new wheel would cost me $400 at the least for the very basic entry-level models, $200 including shipping is decent indeed. If I win the damn thing my brain could give over the RAM it’s currently devoting to wheel research and reviews to things that need it, like planning dinner and actual work, instead of constantly returning to the wheel thing when it ought to be thinking of other issues. Actual spinning would be more relaxing and have tangible yield for the time invested than obsessive wheel research online (actual yield = time missing, nothing concrete accomplished, lots of info buzzing in the brain, irritation at the to-do list not diminishing). I know that realistically if I win the wheel, the Obsessive Research slot will be assigned to fibre. But I’m doing that already as part of the overall wheel research thing, so I am being optimistic about the possibility of some leftover RAM.

Huh. There is a ladybug on my office wall. I saw something crawling and did that hiccup of panic, thinking it was a spider, before I looked and saw that it was in fact a Coccinellid. She’s now crawling up the copper deer painting HRH did for me five years ago, and settling down in the knotwork:

Right. I need some Excedrin for this headache, and then it’s back to Orchestrated.

Today Started Out So Well; Or, A Vague Weekend Roundup

No, really. The weather is nice, I had an okay weekend, I slept decently, I was looking forward to working.

Then a couple of stupid things happened that got under my skin, things that would have rolled off my back on most other days. The latest was condescending communication from someone whose classified ad I queried about this morning. (You may never speak to me again, but didn’t your mother teach you that you should be polite to people anyway as a rule? Also, reading non-present intent into my very clear query and shutting me down by answering something I didn’t ask was rather insulting, as was telling me you’d already made the sale to someone less fussy because your item was priced so inexpensively.)

We have a clothesline again, thank gods. On the other hand, the boy is now big enough that the clothesline can only hold half a regular load of his laundry. Also on that other hand, I can’t find the little brace that holds the upper and lower parts of the line together, and half our clothespegs have disappeared. I’ll add them to the ongoing list of household things to pick up. (Hey, we only just succeeded in picking up rechargeable batteries that were put on the list a month ago, and the clothesline that broke late last fall.)

We enjoyed a lovely belated birthday dinner of ribs at my inlaws’ house on Saturday, before which HRH and the boy played in the pool. The boy got to the point where he was jumping off the side of the pool into HRH’s arms and going for rides around the shallow to mid-deep areas. Much progress made from the nervous boy he was in pools at the beginning of the summer; very good.

The weekend consisted of grocery shopping, a haircut for the boy, going to the bookstore, more grocery shopping, working in the vegetable garden, and a game on Sunday night. The boy and I messed about with our cellos on Sunday, too, and he conducted me as I played Twinkle. This was amusing because he was beating very slowly in two, and would get distracted in the middle and stop, then wonder why I wasn’t playing.

HRH has promised to finish the inserts for my modified cello case today so I can cover them and get the cello back into the hard case in the corner, instead of having both the hard case there and the cello in the soft case on my office floor. I’m increasingly nervous about the boy and the insane cats going in and out of my room.

Must release the crankiness. Must work.

Fuzzy

Oh, fibro-fog, I have not missed you.

Actually, I think this is a combination of poor sleep and being up and moving too early in the morning, plus forgetting my glasses on the bedside table.

HRH and I went out for our annual blood test this morning at stupid o’clock. It occurs to me that now that we have health insurance, we could to this via private clinic and be reimbursed instead of sitting in the hospital for an hour and a half. Next time. Anyway, we took the boy with us because we figured it would be good for him to see it before he needs it done at some point, and also to kind of save time, as we could take him directly to Grandma’s house afterward. He was pretty good, too. We sat in the hallway of the blood lab along with fifty other people and read a book, played some games, and I let him play with the Touch, too. He came into the lab itself when we were called, and he sat with HRH while I had my prise de sang done, and then I took him to the bathroom while HRH had his done. I’d warned him ahead of time that when we were in the actual lab that he’d have to sit very quietly and not wiggle around, because there were lots of breakable things and people having sensitive tests done, and if anything went wrong they’d have to start all over again and there would be much crankiness. After we were done we left and he said, “That was fun!” (Okay, kid, whatever.) Then he threw his arms out to the sides and said with great excitement, “And I didn’t break anything!” A couple of the people waiting giggled a bit behind their hands, as did a few when we’d been waiting earlier and he’d asked me what a prise de sang entailed, then put an anxious hand on my arm and said, on the verge of tears, “But I don’t want them to take your blood out of your body.”

Then we all trooped over to the nearest Tim Hortons so there could be food and coffee, because we’d been fasting for the tests, and he was allowed to choose a whole doughnut for himself. He chose a chocolate glazed, and told me that I wasn’t allowed to cut it in half (which is what I usually do, half for each of us). He pretty much had three bites and then licked all the icing off, then washed it down with some chocolate milk.

I’ve had a couple of queries about how the spinning wheel recon went. Basically, I sat down and spun my fibre for two hours on a single-treadle Louet S-17, and as I suspected, I am completely and totally hooked. Never even tried the Victoria. A single treadle slow machine will be fine for me for a while, which is good to know because there are lots and lots of secondhand ones on eBay (although I’d love to buy one new, and support the LYS that’s been helping me with the research). Molly Ann wound the single I’d spun into a centre-pull ball with the ball winder (so easy!) so I could ply at home with my spindle (again, so much easier!) and I made honest to goodness real yarn last night after the boy was in bed. I have photos, but I can’t figure out how to get them out of iPhoto. Thank goodness for my library reference books, which I will make use of later. (Note to self: You need an FTP program before you start working the freelance gig again, oh hell. Although I can upload things for the blog from a web interface, thank goodness.) My biggest problem with the wheel is over-spinning the wool and putting too much twist into it, just like I do with the spindle. I need to treadle slower; I tend to speed up. But it’s so much easier, and so much smoother, and I can make a lovely fine single instead of something chunky because drafting is easier.

We’re off to see the new Harry Potter film this afternoon! And leaving, er, now.

ETA @ 8:25 PM: Peektures!

Here’s the first bit of plied yarn on the spindle, halfway through the process. I admit that I paused here to photograph it because of how perfect the yarn about to be wound onto the spindle shaft is. So even! So… worsted weight-ish!

And here is my first-ever baby skein of yarn plied from a single spun on a wheel. The length of the finished skein is about eight inches.

It is somewhat lumpy and not even (well, more even than my spindle stuff ever was), but I love it with much, much love.

Also, the Harry Potter film was very good indeed. Better than the last, which was probably my least favourite of the lot so far. Well-paced, nicely balanced, very nice camera work.

On My Way Out

The PC has officially been retired. Thank you; you did me good service when there was a gap. You stepped into the breach and soldiered on. Good PC.

And I almost forgot my appointment at Ariadne this afternoon to test spinning wheels! Thank goodness for playing with the shiny Touch, because I found a note to myself about it on my list of things to do today. I’m off!

Notes

I think all the e-mail addresses are working now. All I need is to go back to the PC one last time to make a second backup of the mail profile, the address book, and whatever else I think I need. Of course that means unplugging the Mac, which I am, understandably reluctant to do. Then ADZO has given me permission to hand the PC over to whatever charity refurbishes hardware for places that need computers, like other charities and churches and so forth. I want it out of my office by tomorrow. I want the space under my left-hand writing desk reclaimed!

I’m fumbling through the first few days of adjustment quite well. What keyboard combinations do I use to approximate this or that desired function? How do I sync the new Touch and the computer? Why has all the info on my Touch vanished after syncing? (Oh; one can only sync the desktop to the iPod. Well, that’s odd. It would make sense to be able to do it both ways, as the iPod acts like a PDA you carry around, so in my mind one should be able to upload changes from it to the main system.) Some things need to be double-clicked, some don’t. I’ve set up Open Office for now, till I get iWork. The screen resolution seems to have finally settled thanks to determined effort on my part to try every single possible resolution plus tweaking sharpness and interweave and mumblemonitortechspeak. My main problem is that everything is easy. Too easy. There’s a tiny bit of my brain that’s chittering away, saying, “But you don’t know how it works.” To which I say, “Yes, absolutely. Which means that it’s magic!”

I’m going to sound like a broken record: I can’t get over how quiet it is. I can listen to music playing in the next room with no difficulty. I am so relaxed, it’s slightly anxiety-inducing. It boots up incredibly quickly. The boy is very impressed that it makes “the WALL*E sound” when it’s turned on.

Today I went to the license bureau to pay for my next two years’ worth of driver’s license fees (why yes, my birthday was four days ago, why do you ask?), had a very enjoyable breakfast with ADZO, and went to the library to pick up an armful of reference books on Macs and how to understand the inner workings of iTunes (because things I expect it to do or recognise don’t happen), some graphic novels (who knew there was a whole section of English graphic novels in the back corner?), and a new book on writing by Graham Swift called Making an Elephant: Writing From Within. I’m always very excited when an author whose work I analyzed in my thesis comes out with something new. Which reminds me, I think David Lodge released a new novel recently. I’ve already read A.S. Byatt’s latest.

I am trying very hard to not think about how much money I have spent on major purchases in this past month. The new cello and computer have both been a long time coming, of course. I’m just twitchy about that much money going out within that small a timeframe.

Astute readers will have noticed that the monthly post about the boy hasn’t gone up. July’s like that: there’s the concert, then recovery, then my birthday, and the first two weeks just don’t really exist properly. And then this year there was the computer stuff, too. I’ll get to it next week.

To work! Which in this case is reading. And re-ripping the albums iTunes claims don’t exist. And there ought to be some more cello work, too.

Almost Perfectly Smooth…

Everything has gone/is going very well, except the setting up of mail accounts and transferring of old mail to the new computer, which isn’t working at all for some reason. There had to be something, of course. Fortunately, my primary work and personal accounts were made Gmail accounts at the beginning of the year, so I can check them on an ongoing basis. And I can access my Owldaughter accounts via a web interface as well,though they’re not used often so it’s not crucial at the moment. But still, argh; if this doesn’t work I’ll have lost yet another chunk of archived stuff and my address book. In a way it’s therapeutic, because I am a moderate pack rat when it comes to mail: I like to keep things for reference. But in another way it’s annoying, because there was a bunch of stuff in folders that was important. And I really, really hope I haven’t lost my address book this time like I did thanks to the last two crashes. It’s a different situation, but past experience does tend to shed a negative light on everything. I’ll be reconnecting the PC today and recopying all the pertinent files again.

So if you e-mail me something I might not see it for a while, and I may be slow in responding till the email connections are all straightened out.

Mac Transition Complete; Or, Stealth Computing

Coming at you live from the new Mac Mini, complete with the tiny wireless keyboard the guy threw in for free! It’s not my ergo keyboard, and it’s a French layout, but it’s fun. Apple isn’t kidding when they say that Macs are fully functional right out of the box.

And it is SO QUIET. This was one of the major reasons for going Mac, because the constant noise of the fans and the drives in my PCs grated on me very quickly. I am Stealth Girl now.

I’m using the VGA adaptor and it’s making screen resolution a bit odd, but I’ll try to find a solution for it. I may need to upgrade the screen at some point, which isn’t the end of the world, as it’s about five years old. And the Touch is charging up as we speak. Tomorrow I’ll download Firefox and Thunderbird.

I’m very, very happy. Also, I’m happy. And did I mention happy?