Category Archives: Diary

On Pens and Writing

It’s never been a secret that I am a stationery geek. I love pens and blank notebooks of all kinds.

Recently, my love of fountain pens has been rekindled. My four fountain pens have been in their glass cup on my desk for a few years, ever since I ran out of ink cartridges for them. I own a Sheaffer Javelin with a F nib (which is my favourite), a Parker Vector with a F nib, and a Waterman Kultur with a M nib, as well as a standard Sheaffer calligraphy pen that came with three italic nibs of different widths. I use the smallest italic nib for regular writing. Nothing high end, mostly student-level models that I like. (I mourn my lost Pelikan fountain pen, which had a perfect nib for my handwriting style; not too wet, not too scratchy. I also have a collection of dips pens that is stored in a writing box.) I do so much work on the computer that buying new cartridges seemed wasteful. Besides, the only cartridges I could find for them were filled with black or blue ink, neither of which are colours I enjoy working with very much. I love brown ink the best, and while I used to be able to buy brown cartridges at local office supply stores and even pharmacies, those days are gone.

But a couple of spinners I follow online mentioned they got orders from Goulet Pens, and one day I clicked through to the website and fell into a deep rabbit hole. There is a very healthy market for fountain pens of all price points, and better still, there are inks. Oh, the inks! All sorts of colours and effects! But they’re mostly sold in ink bottles, and my fountain pens take cartridges.

A bit of sleuthing turned up a couple of options. I could wash my empty cartridges and refill them with syringes (this is perfectly acceptable and operable, but apparently the cartridges can begin to leak over time), or I could buy converters for my pens. Converters are essentially refillable ink reservoirs.

And rather than dropping thirteen to thirty dollars on a bottle of ink, I could order 2-ml samples to experiment with and help pinpoint the right colours I wanted to invest in to use! An average pen cartridge takes 0.5 to 1.5 ml of ink at a time, so it’s a decent amount for a trial. Shipping from the US and our feeble Canadian dollar led me to find Wonder Pens in Toronto as a Canadian alternative to Goulet Pens, and I used the last of a prepaid Visa card to order some samples of brown ink and a couple of syringes. I’ll save up for converters. (Of course all my pens are from different companies, so I need different converters. Figures. I suspect I may not get a converter for my Waterman Kultur; I tend to prefer using finer nibs.)

Tied to this is my investigation of pencil grips. When I handwrite for a long period of time, my hand cramps up. I looked into this and discovered that there’s a whole subset of pediatric occupational therapy devoted to pencil grips, examining efficiency and physical issues arising from the odd grips children develop to offset various obstacles. I use what I have discovered is called a thumb (over) wrap grip, where the web space in my grip is closed and my thumb wraps over the pencil and my index finger. This leads me to use my whole hand as a writing unit, making larger movements from the wrist instead of just moving my fingers. In addition to this, I grip my pencils tightly, which leads to fatigue and stress in the hand and forearm. My handwriting is neat (although less so when I write quickly) but I have to rest my hand frequently.

With the desire to begin using fountain pens again, I’ve started thinking about how I hold them and how I can make handwriting a less tense experience. Since most of my work is done on the computer and I only take brief notes with pen and paper as I work, it isn’t generally an issue, but I’ve begun working on a new story and it wants to be handwritten, so I’m running into these issues again after a long time. It’s interesting to look at this from an adult perspective, as opposed to a child learning cursive. I’m aware of the smaller elements, requirements, and stresses in a very different way. Having new inks to play with will encourage me to practice a new adapted grip, too.

Catching Up

December was, predictably, somewhat frenzied.

Work:

I edited a math book (or rather, a parent guide to math from pre-K through grade 5), and found a case of plagiarism in the second chapter, plagiarism so glaring that the author had even copied the mistakes and misspellings from the website. This is not the way to my heart. I documented it thoroughly, finished copyediting it, and sent it along to the editor, whose problem it is. It took me a while to calm down, though.

When I handed that in, I got another project immediately, which I edited over Christmas. It wasn’t as intense a schedule as last Christmas when I worked on a manuscript three times as long (with issues, oh, there were issues with that one), but it was enough to keep me busy. (And stressed out during yesterday’s ice storm that had our power flickering as I raced my deadline. Fun times.)

Just before Christmas, I also got a very interesting query from a major game studio concerning my availability at certain points in 2015 and wondering if I’d be interested in talking about handling some copyediting work for them. Of course I was. Am. Whatever. Let’s see what happens. Today I had my small panicky meltdown when I was asked what my rates were, and now I’m fine. It just needs to go through the contracts people in HR or whoever it is, now.

Music:

My teacher’s studio recital was a couple of weeks later than usual this year, taking place on December 21 instead of the first weekend of the month.

I am very happy with how my piece went. HRH filmed it with his iPhone for me, and I finally watched it a couple of days ago. While it sounded like the intonation was a bit odd overall, I suspect that is more due to the church and the poor wee iPhone striving mightily to record me seventy-five feet away, because it sounded fine under my fingers. Did I mention how happy I was with how it went? As in, no qualms or destructive self-criticism whatsoever? I don’t think that’s ever happened. I think doing this Wagner piece was very good for me. I’m sure my teacher will have comments when we view her (much better) video of it this weekend at my first lesson of the year, of course, but I am sure she will also be very excited about how well it went.

Christmas break:

We hosted Christmas at our house this year again, and both sets of grandparents joined us. Dinner was lovely, and we even managed to get the good china out this year. (We didn’t go so far as to dig out the good cutlery. Let’s focus on the small victories, though.)

I think the gift we were the most excited about receiving (apart from watching our kids be thrilled about everything they unwrapped) was our set of Paderno pots and pans. We gleefully stripped all the mismatched and bent stuff off the pot rack and hung all the new shiny ones. Cooking with them is a dream: they’re heavy but well-balanced, they sit level on the elements, and they clean up in a breeze. We adore them. The other big thing was that HRH designed and built Owlet a dollhouse for Christmas:

More details about that will come in her 41-months/January post, whenever that happens, since the 40-month/December post isn’t even up yet. Maybe I should declare amnesty on that one and just jump to the January post.

HRH and I took Sparky out to see Big Hero 6 after Christmas, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. Two days later, HRH’s parents came to spend the afternoon with Sparky and Owlet while we went out for lunch and to see the last Hobbit film. It was so unusual for the two of us to be out together, let alone without kids, and the experience was very enjoyable. Sparky told us how lucky we were to see two films in one week, and I had to point out that since HRH and I only see two or three films in a theatre each year, it was more like we were just fitting them in before the calendar restarted.

Sparky:

Sparky completed his first session of art classes in mid-December. Before it ended I asked if he’d be interested in registering for the next session, and he said ehn, not really. I gently pointed out that we’d have to figure out another extracurricular activity, then, and he buried himself in a book and ignored the situation. But when he brought all his art home the following week and we went through it, we saw some really good stuff, and told him so. We hung the canvas he’d painted, and framed a beautiful multi-media piece he called “Birch Trees in Winter” that he’d done at school, and suddenly he was very excited about going back to art. He got a pile of art supplies for Christmas from us, too (thank you, Michaels, for your crazy sales and decent-quality student stuff) and was thrilled. This year he also told us (repeatedly, in whispered asides) that he knew we were Santa. We’ve never really perpetuated the Santa thing; we’ve always told the kids that Santa is an idea, a representation of love and generosity and sharing, one of the spirits of Christmas. So this wasn’t a disappointment or a betrayal; it was more like he was confirming that he knew he was part of it, consciously helping to spread the joy and love associated with the season. He’s growing up.

Solstice also celebrated his one-year anniversary with us. We call it his birthday to keep it simple, even though we know he’s actually eight weeks older. Happy birthday, fuzzybunny Solstice!

Santa 2014!

When we got to the mall on Sunday morning, it was later than we’d planned, and the lineup for Santa was already really long (and he hadn’t even arrived to start his shift yet!). I was very proud of how both kids behaved while waiting, and I promised them a trip to DavidsTea afterward as an incentive to keep positive. “I don’t want to see Santa,” said Owlet; “I just want to have tea.” Oops? (Anyone else remember that last year, when asked what she was going to tell Santa she wanted for Christmas, she said tea? I’m so proud.)

It only took about an hour in the end, and we got a very nice photo.

The little DavidsTea semi-shop was jam-packed with people, though, so all we did was taste the teas of the day at the entrance. (They’re opening a full-sized store in that mall very soon, thank goodness. Next year, the bribe will be a bit easier!)

For the purposes of comparison and exclaiming at how the children have grown:

– The 2013 Santa photo
– The 2012 Santa photo
– The 2011 Santa photo

Owlet: 40 Months Old!

We have pictures, so let’s do the 40 month post anyway, yes? This will be backdated to 4 December 2014 in a few days.

There was an overnight language upgrade again. There’s subtlety, updated syntax, that sort of thing. And pronunciation has become even clearer, not that we’ve had trouble understanding her for a while now. She can count to twenty without hesitation (fifteen is sneaky and sometimes get dropped; Sparky had a similar issue with fourteen and sixteen, which is interesting).

Her expression in art has leveled up, too. Her paintings are often still chaotic, but she painted a picture of flowers that were very recognisable this month. Her use of colour has really exploded, too. Rather than just making one or two marks on a page and calling it done, now she’s filling the entire paper with rich colour and lots of motion. Painting is her number one activity; if she can’t paint, she’ll colour or do something with stickers. I bought some poster paint, cleaned out the unit that housed the ColorWonder gel paints that all dried out, and mixed the poster paint to go in each little pot. She likes it much more than watercolors, which can be slow to get started, and it’s much easier to pull out her little art desk, pop open the paint jars, and let her go.

She loves just about any craft activity, though; if there are stickers and glue, she’s excited.

When she needs a pencil sharpened she says, “Can you scrape this please?” And her pencil grip has miraculously improved. I saw her approximating a correct pencil grip the other day for the first time. Apparently she’d seen her godsister coloring at my last concert, stared at her hand for a bit, then shifted her fingers around her own marker so it was like hers. It was encouraging.


(THose were taken on different days; she just really loves that shirt.)

We gave her a couple of quarters to put in her bank one day when we gave Sparky his allowance, and suddenly she was very interested in it. “Can I have a money?” she says. “My owl is hungry.” So we dig a nickel or a dime out of our change pockets, and off she goes to ‘feed’ her owl bank.

She has decided that when she is big and has her ears pierced, she would like feather earrings. Also ladybug ones, and rainbows. She must have heard about pierced ears at school for some reason; I rarely change my earrings from my small, plain hoops, and I don’t talk about them.

At the end of November they started working on a winter unit at school, and she brought home this little diorama:

There’s a bonus view of her wonky jack o’lantern jar next to it. It had an LED tea light in it that burned out pretty quickly because she insisted on having it on all night, every night.

She’s fun. They’ve started with the Christmas songs at school, so now there’s a lot of Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells happening in the car. She still gets stuck in those funny little-kid loops when singing, where they slip into a line from an earlier verse and then sing the chorus and end up slipping on the same line again. We grin and bear it, myself with more patience than Sparky. He refuses to hear that he did it, too, because he could never be so uncool.

~ Sparky’s forty-months post, for comparison

How Is It December?

This year has flashed by. I’m not panicking about it, just feeling slightly sad. Owlet’s post for last month is still in draft form, and her next one is due tomorrow (ah ha ha, that’s not going to happen). For all the time I’m spending at the computer, not much of it has been writing in any form.

I’ve been tangled in horrible paycheque luck these past three months. The most recent snafu is that accounting has recently discovered that no, Canadians can not in fact be paid via direct deposit, which is a complete contradiction to what they said when I checked with them in early October. The direct deposit option was being promoted as a quicker way to be paid, and after the really, really, really late payment earlier this fall, it had sounded like a good idea. Everyone is horrified and apologetic, and I’m waiting to be paid. The accounting department is swamped because two of their full-time employees retired this summer, and the new employees are making mistakes and working more slowly. There’s not much I can do except wait. Which is stressful on its own, of course, because not only can I no longer schedule an expected payment date into my agenda and work out a household budget with any confidence as I used to (it used to be four and a half weeks from the Friday of the week my invoice was sent through, like clockwork), but I can’t even expect the payment process to be flawless (other than slow). I’m sure it will get better… eventually.

I’ve been prebooked to copyedit another book on math, which is great; not only do I already have a stylesheet for the other book in the series, but my December work schedule is taken care of. I’m also slowly working through a private editing project of picture books, which is fun but challenging on how to schedule it into my other work, as well as how to think about it/approach it and put my thoughts down on paper for the author.

I recently applied for a copyediting position with a quarterly magazine incredibly relevant to my interests. The editing sample they asked for consisted of working over a five-page article, which took me a day and a half because it needed a lot more work than the example they’d provided as a guideline, and I was constantly referring to the house stylesheet and making decisions in a bit of a murky situation. However, a zillion other people also applied (many non-professionals as well as professionals). Yesterday they announced the position had been filled (by a professional), and that they’d been spoiled for choice with a lot of perfect people, but they could only choose one. I am moving forward, disappointed but not devastated, assuming I am one of the perfect people who didn’t get hired. It would have been more lucrative than my ongoing freelance job with the publisher, and the work would have come at four predictable, reliable times per year, so I could have organized my schedule around them. But it wasn’t to be.

Our fall concert went well last Saturday. We brought Owlet, and it was her first non-Canada Day concert. As always, I wish I’d done better, and hoped the people sitting closest to me weren’t hearing the sludgy mess I made of quick finger-twisting bits. Our next concert is in March and we’ll be doing Beethoven’s seventh, which is very exciting for the celli and bass. Up next for me is our Christmas studio recital, which is a bit later than usual this year, on December 21. I’m working on a transcription of Wagner’s “Song to the Evening Star” from Tannhäuser which is asking a lot of me in the letting-go department.

The furnace went on the fritz a couple of weeks ago, necessitating repair. We had the money, but it meant that the optometrist appointment and new glasses I was planning on didn’t happen, and isn’t going to for a while. (See above re. unreliable payment schedule.)

I think that’s about it. Knitting is at a standstill, because the shawl I’m working on is now at the 400+ stitches per row point, and there is always something else that has to be done instead of knitting a row. I’ve spun a couple of yarns, but I’ll save those for another post.

Owlet: 39 Months old!

(Look, I managed to upload photos and paste in the coding, so you can have the November Owlet post! I’ll backdate it to 4 November 2014 in a couple of days.)

There’s more Being Three going on. Naps are becoming an Issue, for example. Owlet will not nap if I put her down. She naps at school, she naps if her dad puts her down… but she refuses to do it for me. I’ve come to the point where Wednesdays I have to assume I will get nothing done, because I will spend almost two hours going into her room to get her back into bed. And if she finally falls asleep it’s around 2:45, an hour and a half after nap is supposed to begin, and I have to wake her up at 3:30 to go get Liam from school, and she cries the whole way because guess what, she didn’t have a proper nap. And no, she’s not ready to give up her nap; she still naps a long time at preschool and on weekends. She still very definitely needs her naps. She’s just being frustratingly stubborn.

We get errands done together on Wednesday mornings. One such day we went and bought her a new car seat. Our old one was out of date. I knew that, but I didn’t realize how far out of date. (Eek.) Owlet weighs 35 pounds, and that was the limit for the old one. This one can be used till she’s something like 110 pounds and 1.45 metres tall! (As a booster, obviously, not the 5-point.) Still… at least now we’re good until she’s, what, twelve?

A conversation about pre-writing skills came up in my mums group (mostly experienced mothers assuring newer ones that three wasn’t an age to be worried about lack of correct writing grip). Owlet still holds her crayons in a fist. It doesn’t help that I actually don’t hold a pencil properly, either, so I’m a lousy model. We still can’t trust her with markers (she scribbled all over the piano keys with permanent black marker recently; that was fun), not even washable ones, because when my kids get hold of so-called washable markers, they stain and do not, in fact, wash out. I discovered her scissor skills were pretty good the other day, though; Grandma found some Crayola scissors that are plastic but very sharp, which cut straight, wavy, or zigzag lines. We love them. You need to hold the paper pretty taut, though.

HRH turned the enormous box that held her carseat into a playhouse. The kids coloured it, and she moved some pillows and blankets inside and had a blast for weeks.

HRH also brought home some interlocking foam squares a student had left behind after a project, so I could use them for blocking knitted things, but Owlet has taken possession of them and lays them out to use as a bed for either herself or her toys. Sparky and HRH showed her that she could build three-dimensional objects with them, too.

She was very excited when I started knitting her mittens. I used her pink handspun for the cuffs, and some bulky black for the hands. Her educator thinks they’re terrific and that I am brilliant, because Owlet likes to mess around in the ground with leaves and sticks, and black doesn’t show dirt. (No pictures, of course. Or rather, there is a picture, but it’s ridiculously blurred.)

Halloween was fun for her. I documented her Halloween costume here. She has been having one piece of candy from her stash after supper each day. She gets so excited about how good it is that she wants to share it. She holds it out to me, saying, “Taste it, it’s good! Open your mouth and take a bite, like this.” I try to take tiny nibbles to leave her most of it, but she keeps telling me to take bigger bites. (And to chew. That’s because we have to remind her to chew bites of supper, and to swallow, as well, if it’s something she doesn’t really want to eat, like meat.)

Fall was, overall, lots of fun. But it’s all fun when you’re three. (Except when it’s not. And when it’s not… it’s really not.)

My Spinzilla 2014 Experience

(This blog post has been reconstructed, thanks to a server failure that lost a week of uploads and updates.)

I mentioned that I signed up for Spinzilla a couple of months ago. This year it ran from 12:01 of 6 October through 11:59 of 12 October. Things went well for the first few days; I spun and plied almost twice as much beaded yarn that I needed to make up the shortfall I’d discovered at the end of the Tour de Fleece this past July. It garnered me 1125 yards for Team Kromski (score yardage is the length of each single in the ply, plus the plied length, because yarn has passed through your wheel/spindle that many times. It maxes out at 3 plies, though.) Then I had a crazy couple of days of packing and finishing a work project six days ahead of schedule, because it was due the night we got back. I took my new-to-me Mazurka prototype and a 4-oz box of rolags along on our trip to southern Ontario, so I could get some spinning done there. (The Mazurka fits beautifully on its back in the trunk, along with all our family trip paraphernalia.)

I spun two ounces the Friday evening and Saturday. The Mazurka prototype only has one bobbin, so I wound the singles off into a centre-pull ball with my ball winder, and plied from that centre-pull ball on Sunday evening. (There was a mental disconnect for a while regarding that plying step; I was stuck in the ‘spin all the singles’ mentality, so was planning to spin the second single next, but I finally realised that plying that one single back on itself would net me more score yardage, because I could spin the second single afterward anyway and add that yardage as well, as a kind of bonus.) I had to wait till I was home to measure it, though, because I had neither my niddy-noddy nor my skeinwinder with me. I wound the plied yarn off into another centre-pull ball for storage, and started spinning a second single that I could add to the total spun yardage. In my timezone, Spinzilla ended Sunday night at 23:59; nothing done after that counted. I spun till ten o’clock Sunday evening, then went to bed, figuring that what was done was done, and there wasn’t much else I could do, especially since we had to be up bright and early and mostly coherent for the drive home the next day.

For posterity:

Spinzilla final yarns, 14 October 2014
Spinzilla yarn #1: 2 oz pewter beaded merino/bamboo, 2-ply, 28 wpi, 375 yards = 1125 Spinzilla yards
Spinzilla yarn #2: 2 oz blue and green woolen-spun Corriedale/silk, 2-ply, approx. 10 wpi, 214 yards = 642 Spinzilla yards
extra: 25 yards of singles, spun from the second half of the rolags
TOTAL = 1792 yards (!!!)

Am I happy with my Spinzilla performance? Not completely. I’m impressed by how much I did manage to get done, fitting it in around work that had to be delivered ahead of deadline, doctor appointments and medical tests, and travelling. I wanted to do a whole lot more, but my final yardage managed to break the mile mark (!!!), totalling 1792 yards. (A mile is 1760 yards, in case you were curious.) So while I’m proud and astonished by that feat, which I was fairly sure wasn’t going to happen, I’d have been happier with more. I am happy on two particular counts, though: I have enough of my beaded yarn to knit the Swinging Triangles shawl, and I’ve proven that the Mazurka can travel with me. We’re still in a rocky relationship regarding double drive, improvised scotch tension, and draw-in — I’m satisfied by my singles, but the plying seems very loose no matter what adjustments I make — but practice will make perfect.