Things are moderately insane here, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s being shifted lower on the list of priorities. Bear with me if I owe you a reply about something via e-mail or a phone call or blog post or something. In the meantime here’s a very brief overview of the last three days for my own records.

Friday Ceri and Phnee came over for a long-anticipated day of writing/crocheting/knitting. I haven’t laughed that hard in ages. I somehow managed to get a thousandish words written, which mystifies me because I’m fairly certain I spent most of my time talking about books and yarn and spontaneously rewriting TMBG songs to be about knitting instead of Advil. And eating. Dear gods, the food. Not that we planned to eat piles of it, just that it was pretty steady. Phnee baked muffins ( “These are delicious,” I said. “They should be,” she said, “they’re your recipe.”) and brought biscuit dough to bake on-site. Ceri brought tea sandwiches for lunch, two kinds of preserves (OMG the carrot cake preserve that I wanted to eat with a spoon), and there was baguette and baked Brie with onion confit and pots and pots of tea. The only shadow upon the day was that Phnee’s laptop decided to turn its nose up at the perfectly good electricity here at the palace.

Friday night HRH and Jeff H. shared a rental van to bring the rest of the bunk bed pieces home and move our no-longer-being-used double dresser to chez Jeff and Airea. Saturday morning HRH and Liam built the bunk beds (and I’m not kidding, the boy actually did help move the mattress and the base through the hall and into his room, and helped screw things together) and there is now a pirate ship construction site lion cage tree house in Liam’s room. I felt like death on toast, so I kind of dragged myself around and stayed out of their way. Saturday afternoon I had a strings-only rehearsal so I dragged myself to that. Managed not to embarrass myself, despite not being wholly there in mind or body. Came home, had a hot bath, rested, reheated homemade pizza for dinner, and then once the boy was in bed we headed out for Emru’s visitation. One never knows what to expect regarding visitations or funerals, but any uncertainty was immediately dispelled as soon as we stepped into the memorial complex. There was upbeat music playing, and people laughing and chatting. The family we spoke with were all equally upbeat, and the whole event really was the celebration of Emru that it couldn’t help but be. He had been dressed in a beautiful white dashiki with exquisite white embroidery around the collar and down the yoke, and a lovely black and white woven cloth of African design was draped over the lower half of the casket. (Perhaps slightly irreverent thought: I’d forgotten how darn tall Emru was.) We met all sorts of people and ended up being among the last to leave. On the way home HRH and I talked about how we really didn’t know much about what the other wanted regarding death arrangements, and discovered that we pretty much intuited the basics anyhow. It’s something we need to think about properly, though, especially now that we have a child. (HRH, of course, isn’t difficult at all: there’s a pond, and there will be a glorious fire, and several days of drinking and loud music of various kinds. Most of us know this. Mine’s similar.)

Sunday I woke up feeling a bit less like death on toast. I mostly worked on the programme notes for the upcoming concert while HRH and the boy played in the construction site tree house. With this new bed the furniture has been rearranged a bit and his toys now live in the two drawers under the lower bunk, so we’ve eliminated the shelves that used to hold his toy bins. Now the room has a very play/activity feel to it, what with the multi-purpose upper bunk (which doesn’t have a mattress on it and will soon have a set of those interlocking foam pieces to make it a bit more comfy), the easel, and the craft table. He has decided that he should be listening to his music while he’s in there, so his CDs have been moved into his room. He’s been playing there instead of in the living room, which is great because it means HRH and I can now relax in the living room when we need to rather than being dragged into the boy’s play. Mid-morning we had our usual pancake brunch, then we went out to buy the boy a play tool set because he’d had so much fun helping HRH build the bed and move the pictures and shelf on his wall. I kept working on the programme notes, which I finally finished last night; I just need to translate them today. I made candles while the boys watched Toy Story and used up the last of my vegetable/soy wax; I’ll need more before Yule. After dinner we had a concert where the boy played the drum and HRH and I alternately got the little xylophone thing and the bells to play and I laughed so much that I cried.

In bed last night I finished Thornyhold (why have I not read this novel before? Oh, right, because I went through my Mary Stewart phase in late high school, before it had been written), read the first quarter of Snake Agent, and wrote a thousand words. It didn’t feel like I did a lot yesterday but apparently I did.

Today: Translating, and doing the first half of my next evaluation assignment. And hopefully some writing, because I’m feeling behind and I really don’t want to lose the momentum of the past two weeks.