Category Archives: Diary

Today’s Plan

Know what I’m doing today, after I finish baking oatmeal cookies? (And in between batches, chasing the stubborn little grey mackerel tabby off the top of the warm stove, drat her paws and whiskers?)

Research in the living room! I have books and pens and notebooks and sticky tabs and my new recording of the Planet Earth soundtrack (George Fenton, how I love thee) to keep me company. I have the Orchestrated ms. to work on, and coven/writing research to do, and a new book to read to help me with Harpsichord Dreams. There ought to be some celloing in there as well. In other words, today is a work day that emphatically does not feel like one, seeming instead like a day of personal indulgence. We should all have more of these.

Today’s Grand Announcement

The taxes are finished! Woo-hoo! Or more correctly, the pile of prep for my taxes to be done by our very excellent accountant is finished. All the required exchange rates for various dates were located and calculated accordingly, then the final pile of receipts added up, and everything sorted into different labelled envelopes and clean new file folders. (Elapsed time: three hours.) I very strongly suspect there will be decent coin returned to me by the government.

Yay me!

Now to move into the living room with the Orchestrated ms. again, pen in hand.

Weekend Roundup

Good morning, Internets. It was a busy weekend.

Friday afternoon: Finish printing the ms. and start reading through it with a pen in hand. It does not suck as much as I’d feared. I suspect I’ll throw out about fifteen pages, or at least fit the info in elsewhere (probably in dialogue with someone). It’s the kind of thing that was necessary for me to write to understand where things were coming from, but not necessary for the reader.

Friday night: Awesome cello lesson. I’m getting it.

Saturday morning: HRH dismantles the upper bunk of the boy’s bed (AKA the tree fort, where a lot of the boy’s playthings are stored) in preparation for a new shelving/storage system to be put at the foot of his bed. Then, IKEA! As soon as the store opens, when there is still parking by the door and almost no one inside. The boy requests the ball room, and we sign him in for the first time and head off to reconnoitre on our own, feeling vaguely like we’re skipping school or something like that. The shelving unit and bins we are here to pick up are actually in stock. We collect the boy, who has a bump on his head from running into someone round the corner of the play structure. He has a mild breakdown when he is informed that it’s time to go. (Sign of Things Having Gone Well: floods of tears when it’s over.) Off to Best Buy so HRH can pick up yet another cell phone and a copy of 101 Dalmatians on DVD. We stop by the bookstore and buy two books for the boy, then bring home hot dogs and fries to eat while we watch the film.

Saturday afternoon: I stumble to the bedroom with a suspiciously threatening pain in my head, and nap after taking some headache candy. The boy does not nap, although HRH convinces him to have quiet time in his room for an hour or so. I take more headache candy. When the edge of what has revealed itself to be a migraine has been taken off, we head out to our goddaughter’s seventh birthday party, which she has planned as a singalong for family. With the help of a glass of wine, I enjoy myself more than I’d cautiously expected to. The boy makes new friends with the children of an old friend of mine (we are all touched when the two youngest hug gently before leaving). This old friend, another scion of an ex-pat UK family, gives me a roll of Polos and a Cadbury Flake, making me squeal.

Saturday night: Major discovery! I can eat the Cadbury Flake without having an allergic reaction to the chocolate! This further confirms my suspicion that the sensitivity responds to the proportion of cocoa solids to butter/cream/other stuff. Alas, dark chocolate; I loved you well, but circumstances force me to turn to milk chocolate for comfort and indulgence.

Sunday morning: HRH and the boy assemble the shelving system and slide the bins into it. It’s terrific. We watch 101 Dalmatians for the second time in less than 24 hours. Good thing it’s still among my top three favourite Disney films today, and was my very favourite while growing up. HRH heads out to do a landscaping consultation for Ceri and Scott, and the boy and I go along to make use of the play structure. There is soccer and much swinging and sliding and finding of bugs and playing a new game called “the running around the trees game.” (I told you, my almost-four year old is terribly original when it comes to naming things.) The boy learns the valuable lesson of the necessity of holding on to the chains of a swing while you’re at the apex of your arc.

Sunday afternoon: The boy naps for just under two hours. Wiktory! He heads out to help HRH in the garden, expanding the vegetable plot, turning compost into the soil, watering the plants, and so forth. I head out for my monthly group cello lesson where we work on ensemble pieces for the upcoming recital. For some reason I can’t get comfortable with the length of my endpin or the angle of my cello. I blow stupidly easy shifts when I’m playing solo (naturally). Moral of the story: Revisit your ensemble pieces regularly, even if the last time you played them they were easy and note-perfect.

Sunday evening: Dinner is leftover roast beef (yes, the mystery roast was beef, and oh ye gods it was tender and delicious), sliced and stir-fried with mushrooms, done in a cream mushroom gravy, served over wild rice. (“Oh-oh, this rice is bad,” says the boy, picking out the black ones. We reassure him that it’s not, that it’s special rice. He nibbles it and says, “Oh, yes! It is good!”) The beef is just as delicious the second time. And there’s enough for one more meal, too.

I woke up a lot last night. Not the best night of sleep.

Today: More editing, and finally doing the last bit of hunting for exchange rates that I need to finish up the taxes.

Today’s List

1. There are fifteen crocuses in the front garden.

2. There are ants in the laundry room. (Items one plus two = spring.)

3. Cautiously working my way through a few pieces of a Lindt Petits Desserts Chocolate Mousse bar. No adverse reaction as of yet, and it’s been half an hour. Encouraging, as the dark chocolate reaction was immediate burning on the tongue.

4. The boy waved vigorously to the metro drivers on our trip downtown and received surprised and delighted waves in return.

5. A quarter of the way through printing Orchestrated and all’s well. I had saved it to a USB key and taken it to the local print shop to get it done, but remembered while I was in line that I’d used comments. When you print a document with comments it shrinks the text and forces the page into the upper left corner to fit the comments in the right margin, which wastes a lot of paper and makes the text almost impossible to read. I bought more printer paper and came home to do it myself in twenty-page increments after stripping the comments out. Neither ink nor paper nor printer have caused issues so far. (Printing large documents usually causes problems of some kind for me.)

Aha, just as I expected; low ink. Argh. Had to happen at some point. Well, I have some in the cupboard, along with the syringe; I’ll refill it and that will be that.

Success!

Because I know you’re all on the edge of your seats, the two final takes of the entire script were great. I think it has more to do with recording them in the living room rather than my office, but the change in register and expression didn’t hurt. So he’s got at least four takes of each track to choose from, and he can edit or adjust them as he pleases.

The boy and I are going downtown in about forty-five minutes to hand in the work (and be paid, woohoo!), then we pick Grandma up at the hospital after some tests and take her and the boy to her house. The rest of the day is work for me, and as everything else is off my plate, that means I get to print out Orchestrated and start reading. I’m looking forward to it.

Argh…

I have to re-record them all. My voice level is too low, and my tone is too low too.

I only managed to find this out after trying to connect it to my computer, failing every way I tried, going online and looking up the manual, pulling the SD card out of it, putting it into my card reader and finding a USB port that would accept it. (Time wasted: one hour.) It sounded fine over the headphones plugged directly to the unit. I’m glad I double-checked.

Well, I guess I know what I’m doing tonight once the boy’s asleep. With a large glass of red wine, I might add. (It’s good to work at home.)

Potpourri

The monthly post about the boy is up and backdated.

First rehearsal with the new test conductor last night, and what fun. He had us playing the Schubert passably in pretty much no time at all. He’s younger than I thought (by quite a bit) and an oboist. We were missing an oboe so he pulled his out and wandered around playing the oboe theme while conducting. It was mildly alarming to have an oboist wander at you at various points, but it certainly encouraged each section to play out when they were supposed to. He greeted us in French and talked to us equally in both languages, which impressed us. I already like his musicality and his personality. There were grumpy people making their grumpiness known, but that’s not unusual, alas.

Best news of the night: One of the pieces he’s considering programming is Ralph Vaughn Williams’ English Folk Song suite! I bounced in my chair with excitement. (Otherwise I sat there in mild pain, because the particular chair I was in slanted nastily toward the back. Ugh. Time to look into one of those firm wedge cushions.)

I need to do two more takes of six brief sections of dialogue for this recording, then I’m going to hook it all up to the computer and listen to it. I’ve already noted which takes I need to delete because of an error on my part or noise interference (like helpful cats scratching or jumping up onto my desk and scattering papers). I fervently hope everything’s okay, because if not I have to do the whole thing over twice tonight once the boy’s in bed, and I don’t do work after the boy’s in bed very well. The boy and I are headed downtown tomorrow morning to ride on the underground train to hand this in.

This morning’s excitement included being addressed by a policeman, who pulled up next to my car while I was unlocking it after dropping the boy off. How long had I been there, he wanted to know, and was I not aware that I wasn’t allowed to park on this side of the street between nine and four? I blinked, looked at the signage, and pointed out respectfully that the signs indicated that motorists were supposed to park here between nine and four on a Thursday, and that in fact all the cars on the opposite side of the street were parked illegally. He looked at the signs, looked back at me, said, “T’as raison, j’ai mal identifié le côté de la rue,” and gave me a huge grin. I laughed and wished him a good day. There was such a difference between his neutral opening words and the tone of his reply to me. He must encounter argument and abuse pretty much regularly, so to have someone correct him politely must be quite a novelty. He gave me another huge grin once his partner had turned the car around and was headed back down the hill toward all the illegally parked cars. I think I made their day.