Category Archives: Diary

Virtuous

I have further caught up on the holiday backlog of e-mail and cleaned out most of my in-box, I have yogaed, and I have celloed. I am very pleased to see that my cello skills haven’t completely crumbled in my two-week hiatus. In fact, wow. Positive proof that my two months of lessons have made a definite impact and improvement. The Lee piece sounds excellent, especially considering that this is only the third time I’ve played it. But in the interest of full disclosure and humbling myself, the piece from the Mooney book sounds awful: I can’t get the damn rhythm of “Erik’s Minuet.” I subdivide, I count, nothing works. Argh. It figures I’d stumble on the easy piece and whip through the more challenging one.

Now for a snack (because I had an early lunch before celloing), and then work. I think I’ll do the first half of the proofs today, or however far I get so long as it’s at least five chapters. Drat; I need to download and install Foxit on this computer so I can mark them up if necessary.

And later, when I need a break (and I will, because I remember what page proofs are like) I will sew up the ends of HRH’s scarf and put the tassels on, because I went over to Ceri and Scott’s house last night and Ceri gave me a J crochet hook of my very own. The test tassel I did was too long, so I’ll need to find an intermediate-sized book to wrap the yarn around. And in other knitting news, I did indeed frog those two inches of hat last night; I cast the Softwist yarn on my size 8 Addis instead, and wow. I prefer bamboo needles to metal, and I thought the slippery yarn on the super-slick metal Addis would be a match made in hell, but it’s spookily easier, somehow.

Right; Foxit has downloaded. Time to install and get to work.

Work!

It feels good to be working again. Today, I:

– got the galley proofs for the hearthcraft book coming out in April (due back January 13th)

– got my first freelance evaluation assignment of the year (due back January 12)

– and wrote!

Orchestrated:
New words today: 3,376
Total word count, Orchestrated: 58,625

And it feels very good indeed. Today I wrote the crucial Bad Thing and started the fallout from it. Muah-hah. Doesn’t feel like much of a climax at the moment, but that’s probably because I’m too close to it and it’s been building for some time. Also, first draft, so no pressure.

So yes, good thing I got a chunk of Orchestrated written today, because I’m probably not going to be able to do much about it for the rest of the week.

Finis!… Except Not

I finished knitting HRH’s eight-foot-long banner of Harry Potter geekitude, AKA his Gryffindor scarf, yesterday morning. I turned it inside out, wove in all the ends, and blocked it in the basement. The tassels were supposed to go on last night.

Except I do not have a crochet hook with which to do them, and everything else I suggested to myself also did not work. (Christmas tree ornament hook! Candy cane! Unbent paper clip!)

Argh.

I suspect I will be pleading with Ceri to allow me to stop by tonight in order to collect a crochet hook. Or possibly Mousme, as she may also have the smaller size circular needles I need for Bodhifox’s hat. Because after two inches of ribbing and stockinette, it is clear to me that I need to start over with a smaller needle size unless Captain Fox wants a hat that looks like lace. Stupid yarn. (It’s very pretty, really, but not his type of thing.) My gauge swatch lied AGAIN. You see why I cannot trust these things? [ETA: Oh, aha, I have a size 8 circular needle. It’s an Addi Turbo, and I don’t like it as much as my bamboo needles, but I’ve got one and that’s what’s important.]

We had some Family Dramah over the weekend (two separate incidents, actually) and as a result some of our weekend plans were skebarded. The one good thing about the Dramah is that everything is better than it was pre-Dramahtic Incidents. HRH said that this holiday would go on record as being One Day Too Long, although I suspect it was actually a good five days too long and we were all gritting our teeth for those final days until none of us could take it any more. We ended the holiday period by taking down the tree and decorations last night (in about thirty minutes, bang zap pow!) and watching The Empire Strikes Back (the original theatrical version, thank you very much).

And now, the first thing I get to do before I settle down to write is submit an invoice for my December work! What a lovely way to begin the work week.

What I Read This December

The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley
Tug of War by Barbara Cleverly
Solo by Emily Barr
Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
A Secret Alchemy by Emma Darwin
First Love by Adrienne Sharp
History Lesson for Girls by Aurelie Sheehan
The Mediator by Meg Cabot
The Reincarnationist by M.J. Rose

Wow. Talk about a very, very slow month.

Going In Circles

Today’s agenda included going to two yarn shops, one in the morning and one after the boy’s nap (different opening hours on New Year’s Eve day, you see).

This morning’s mission: A success! I picked up a skein of the Berroco Softwist in Ginger, and found a substitute for the discontinued Jasper in the Berroco Ultra Alpaca, which is slightly heavier and has twice as much in the skein (a good thing because I’m going to knit this hat with a double-strand of both yarns) although it lacks the pretty sheen the Softwist has. It’s still a gorgeous yarn and will look lovely with the Softwist; I’m looking forward to knitting with it. I picked up a new size 10 circular needle to start it, too, as my current one is being used for HRH’s scarf. Came home, opened the twisted skeins, wound them into balls (from both ends, so I have two balls of each), much to the interest of Nixie and Gryff, who behaved themselves impeccably (except for that one swipe made by Gryff, for which he apologised).

Put the boy to bed for his nap. Came out, rubbing my hands together with glee. Now, to cast on! I bet I can get a good third of the hat done before the boy wakes up! Bodhifox needs this hat before spring comes!

I bought the wrong length circular needle. It’s a 24″ cable, not a 16″.

*facepalm*

So… all that, and I still can’t knit till the boy wakes up and HRH returns with the car from his errand. I could try sliding the stitches off the scarf’s circular needle and onto straight needles to liberate the circular size I require, but I suspect I will only make a hash of it and create more stress that I don’t need.

If I’d picked up the ball of correct-dyelot Jo Sharp that I saw while I was at the first yarn shop I could be knitting the second half of my black scarf right now. Or a skein of grey super chunky wool to start a slipper. But I didn’t, because I wanted to get them at Ariadne.

Augh. Lesson learned: Buy it where you see it.

I will write instead. Mutter, grumble, and grr.

On the positive side of things, I can now successfully and reliably purl. Go me!

The Good And The Bad

I got out of the house! Mousme and I went over to Ceri’s house and knitted for a few hours. Everyone was pretty much in the same headspace (that kind of out of it post-holidays fuzzy brain thing) so it was an excellent idea for all of us. I got another block and a half done on HRH’s scarf, and this after doing two and a half the day before. (Officially two-thirds complete now — woo-hoo!) There were endless pots of tea and cookies and sandwiches and tea biscuits and Ceri cracked open another jar of the carrot cake preserve for us.

The down side of this is that I ran out of yarn. Finished a full burgundy block with about a foot of yarn to spare; ran out of the gold colour halfway through the next block. Noooooo!

This necessitates a trip to the yarn shops tomorrow before they close for New Year’s Eve. Because I have no (none, zero, nada) yarn AT ALL with which to work on any of my projects. Not Bodhifox’s hat (for which I must visit one shop), not HRH’s scarf (for which I must visit another), not the second half of my wool/cashmere/silk scarf (to be obtained at the same shop as HRH’s yarn). It is something of a miracle that in the space of three months I have gone from being anti-knitting to being desperate to replenish my yarn supply in order to safeguard my sanity.

Grumpy

So there’s been all sorts of lovely things happening lately, but some disappointments too. Such as today, when the boy woke up with a hacking, barking cough, which was enough to send HRH to the phone to cancel our much-anticipated trip out to t! and Jan’s place for the day.

I love my boys, I truly do. But I’m used to them being gone for most of the week, and they’ve been home for a full seven days now. This plus all the holidaying has drained me pretty badly, and I’m turning into the Irritable Me that I’m not so fond of because I haven’t had any time to myself. I have an outing planned for myself tomorrow, which will help.

The boys are currently watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (which has been renamed as “The Hogwarts Express” by Liam) on the new TV and the boy was just dancing with excitement in the middle of the room, riveted by the Sorting Hat sequence. He jumped and cheered when Harry was sorted into Gryffindor house. “Gryffindor! Just like me!” he exclaimed. He’s enchanted (no pun intended) by the characters and the settings. I suspect that he doesn’t remember the first time we watched it with him in the room a couple of years ago. We’re currently reading the Magic Tree House series before bedtime, but seeing how much he’s loving the Potter universe I may try reading him the first book soonish. I suspect I’ll be making him a Gryffindor scarf as well, which would thrill him to no end because not only will he have a Hogwarts scarf, he will match his Da.

I suppose I will go sit with them and knit, since I can’t focus on work when the boy is running in and out of my office. I managed to get about nine hundred words of Orchestrated written yesterday while he napped, which cheered me up a lot, but there’ still lots of work I want done by the end of the year. I have a pile of cello work to do as well at some point. If the office downstairs is empty I may go down there in a bit to practise.