Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Hello Monday!

Not dead — just busy having a fabulous weekend.

Friday was entirely consumed by the freelance evaluation I wanted done by noon. It wasn’t. It was a tricky one to handle because of the subject matter. We had homemade pizza for dinner (which has now officially become the Friday night meal in our household, because our homemade pizza is yum), which went over very well.

Saturday morning we dawdled for while over coffee/tea/trains, then headed out to try to pick up various necessities. This was foiled by the store advertising an item we’d intended to pick up as a Christmas gift for someone being out of stock of said item, so we moved on to get the rest of the list. We wrapped the morning up by taking the boy out for a hot dog lunch at a local La Belle Province (because we have become highly disillusioned with the quality of food produced by our local Lafleur‘s), where we ate in a booth with sparkly vinyl benches and chrome fixtures. The boy approved. We were very happy with the flavour of everything, and so our allegiance has shifted (at least between these two local franchises). While the boy napped I managed to get half an hour of work on the runs in the final movement of the Haydn symphony done. (Official state of stun: I practiced on the weekend.)

The local grandparents came over Saturday after the boy’s nap to stay with him for the evening. HRH and I went out to our favourite sushi restaurant for our anniversary dinner, a treat afforded by my mother’s generosity. We hadn’t been there in three years, but nothing has changed: same jazz CDs, same decor, same delicious everything. We ordered a very ambitious and enthusiastic amount of sushi, and ate most of it, too, earning the amused approval of the chef who’d assembled it for us. We boxed up the remaining sushi and maki and brought them as our buffet offering to the fifth annual Tarasmas event!

I have written about Tarasmas before (notably here and here) so I won’t rehash the explanation of the event other than to say that in a glorious turnaround of the birthday gifting tradition, t! throws a party that revolves around a series of one-act plays he writes for the event, to be performed by the partygoers who get their scripts around fifteen minutes before they go on. Tarasmas 2008 featured a medieval comedy replete with puns, a Western ( “I was just trying to kill you to get your attention”), and an old-fashioned melodrama that required traditional audience participation (in which zombie chickens made a special musical appearance). This year I got to play the heroine of the melodrama, which was, like the previous two plays, hilarious. Tarasmas is a great opportunity to appreciate clever writing, t!’s genius in assigning roles to people (to either draw them out, play against type, or play to their strengths) and to enthusiastically abandon oneself to laughter and cheering. It’s not about performing well; it’s about fiftyish people participating together and sharing the experience, either as performer or audience member. It’s truly a group effort, with t! as ringmaster. Every year just gets better and better.

I’d been looking forward to Tarasmas for days because I knew I’d see lots of people I hadn’t seen in a while, and have tons of fun. And I met new people, too, and had lovely conversations with them. I got to try Ceri’s new Aspire One, which was very adorable but just too small for me. Now that I’ve tried it properly I have laid to rest the excited-writer-coveting-new-toy part of me that had been dying for one of these mini-notebooks since they were released a couple of months ago. It’s good to know the secondhand iBook route I’ve been exploring is the better option for me.

I didn’t take my medication until I got home (and a good thing, really, because if I took it at the regular time I wouldn’t have been able to make it all the way to the end of Tarasmas and the final play, which would have been somewhat problematic as I was in it) and so I didn’t fall asleep until somewhere around two-thirty. Consequently I didn’t wake up until sometime after nine the following morning. But once I was awake, Sunday was lovely. We headed out for groceries and wine because my mother and her sister were stopping by for dinner on their way to start their lovely driving tour through the Eastern Townships. I haven’t seen my aunt in about six years, and seeing my mother any time is great. I decided to make some sort of approximation of the delicious chicken-Brie puff pastry thing I’d had when we went out to dinner with Brendan in Old Montreal this past summer, and wow, did I ever succeed! It’s always slightly unnerving to make a dish you’ve never prepared before for guests, but this was a terrific success. I served it with a simple salad of baby lettuces and parsley in a sesame oil-rice vinegar dressing. (Yes, yes, I will post it on the Recipe Trade forthwith.) We’d given the boy the responsibility of deciding on a dessert, which meant it was ice cream (although I had a local ice cider to offer as well as an after-dinner sweet). It was a lovely, lovely evening and I wish I could do things like that with my family more often. My aunt told us we had to come down to stay at the cottage in Mahone Bay next summer, as HRH has an entire month off, and we accepted her offer. It’s been six years since I’ve been back to the Maritimes, and I miss it. It will be a lot of fun to introduce the boy to wading in the ocean, picking periwinkles and seaweed, and chasing crabs. And mussels. Oh gods, yes, the mussels. By the potful.

Took my medication on time but couldn’t fall asleep till one AM anyhow. Nevertheless, I woke up at 6:30 when the boy pattered into the bedroom saying that he needed to go to the bathroom, and spent a pleasant hour with the boys before they headed out to school. I expected to have a new freelance assignment this morning but it seems that the one I handed in on Friday afternoon hasn’t been processed yet. So I have some time to catch up on news and such and maybe whack out a few words in a file somewhere.

The weekend was so wonderful that not even the very grey day outside my window can bring me down.

Thirty-Nine Months Old!

The biggest news of the past month is, of course preschool. “Bye Mama! I’m going to school!” Liam says jauntily in the morning, and heads down the stairs to the car with HRH. Sometimes I even get a “See you later!” or “Have a good day!” as he waves up at the living room window and then climbs into the car. His teacher called me after
his first two weeks and gave me the update: they love him, he plays enthusiastically with everyone but has one special girl he absolutely adores ( “I’ve seen love affairs begin this quickly before, but not often,” she said!), his language skills blah blah blah, has a wonderful imagination, eats well, has adjusted well to the structure and directed play as opposed to the completely free play he was used to, is very sensitive and picks up on emotional states very quickly, helps set things up and clean them away, falls asleep at rest time within ten minutes and sleeps well, and so forth. If there’s one thing he has to work on it’s dressing and undressing himself. (Yes, we know, trust us. And we find it odd that out of all the things he could choose to rebel against, it’s pulling pants up and down and taking shoes off.) It took a week or so (and a new pair of shoes one size larger so that he can slip his feet in and out more easily) but he now puts them on and takes them off by himself, and even puts them away tidily by the door. I am always particularly amused when he carefully hangs his cap on the handle of his bedroom door.

He brought home ‘art’ his third day there: a piece of paper with bits of coloured construction paper from the scrap box glued all over it. “I made art!” he said, bursting through the front door. “Put it on my fridge!”

He sang selections from The Sound of Music in bed to me the other night, then patted my face and said “Sing with me, Mama!” So we sang ‘Do Re Mi,’ and ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ (I must learn all the proper words), and ‘Eidelweiss’. Singing in general has increased in frequency, accuracy, and volume. He’ll even sing for other people instead of clamming up when they notice. He tends to sing to himself when we’ve finished a story and our cuddle at bedtime, kissed him, tucked him in, and closed the door behind us. Putting him to bed at home has become much easier, and his midnight wakings have vanished. On average he wakes between six and six-thirty, which is right on time for school mornings.

He has lately been introduced to a 1996 BBC animation of The Wind in the Willows, and absolutely loves it. He has dubbed ‘Concerning Hobbits’ (of The Fellowship of the Ring score) “the Wind in the Willows music”. Sometimes he has an ice cream cone for dessert on the back porch after dinner, and he often brings a book out with him and asks one of us to read aloud while he sits on the deck and eats his treat. One night he asked if we’d read to him and I said that I had something new to share. I brought out my Ernest Shepard-illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows and read the first half of the first chapter to him. He was spellbound. He has to be in a very quiet mood to listen to a chapter book like this, but we’ve managed to do it once or twice for a few pages so far.

The other film he is obsessed with is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. We watched it in three or four sittings to make sure he didn’t get overwhelmed by the appearance and behaviour of the various spirits, and he has been asking lots of questions about spirits in general since. “Can you tell me about river spirits?” he asked me in bed one night. “Lots of things?” He plays at being a river spirit in the bath and listens to the soundtrack at night while falling asleep.

When we got the laptop back up and running he went into my office and pulled my chair over to the writing desk. “I’m working, Mama,” he called. I came in to the office to see him confidently tapping away on the keyboard. “What are you working on?” I asked. “I’m writing a message to you!” he said. So I opened Word for him, enlarged the font to something huge he could see very easily, and let him go to town.

Overall I see him growing into a confident and enthusiastic boy, wearing size nine shoes (size nine!), who converses clearly and plays complicated little games, who is ever more capable of handling increasingly complex tasks. The odd whiny/resistant period has almost vanished. I think we timed the preschool thing perfectly; he needed more structure and social-oriented activity than I could provide for him. When we were out shopping one day I heard him say, “quatre, cinq… quatre, cinq,” and I stood there in the middle of the grocery store aisle, staring down at him. “Are you… counting?” I said. “Yes, but there are no more,” he said, waving his hand at the empty space after the sequence of air fresheners he’d been counting. It’s like a miracle: we send him to school, and he comes home counting in French and singing songs I never taught him. It’s just incredible, after being the ones to teach him everything for a while. We love it. And so does he.

Weekend Roundup

So, that increasingly bad fibro thing on Friday wasn’t my fibro getting out of hand. It was actually me getting ill. No wonder doing all my usual Soothe The Fibro! things weren’t working. It also explains the somewhat below normal two days leading up to it. I fought bad nausea all afternoon, and after consultation with HRH and Paze I cancelled my appearance at the Friday evening outing. Good thing too; I reached the falling-over dizzy stage of the Sick not long after I tendered my regrets.

However, I passed out and slept almost twelve hours straight, and woke up Saturday morning feeling a million times better. So much better, in fact, that we decided to hit Ikea as soon as it opened to see the new bed we’ve been thinking of getting in person. Not only did we agree on the bed but also on a redesign (read: actual thought-out coherent design as opposed to using the mismatched things we had — I cannot tell you how grown-up this makes me feel) for the bedroom, and a reading chair for my office. We introduced the boy to the concept of bunk beds on the showroom floor, which threw him into a level of cooled out far beyond what we’d expected. This is a good thing, because HRH is buying a set for the boy’s room from his office mate at the end of the month. We will be the Coolest Parents Ever when this happens, I’m sure.

We came home with a new duvet cover, a new carpet for the living room floor, a magnetic knife strip for the kitchen, and proceeded to clean the heck out of the house. I moved the books and bookcase that was serving as my bedside table downstairs to the communal office. We got rid of HRH’s highboy (which also served as his bedside table), I put three drawers’ worth of things into plastic storage containers and stacked them in the cupboard, and we now share the six-drawer bureau. We have two short tables on either side of the bed at the moment, rescued from other uses. Suddenly there’s lots of space and the bedroom isn’t so, well, not-relaxing. The clean-up continued: I moved a bunch of things out of my office closet, and I took down one of the shelf units in my upstairs office, condensing my herb collection down to about an eighth of what it had been. As I did I was struck by how familiar some of the smells were even though I hadn’t worked with those specific herbs in years, because they were the first ones I worked with: angelica, marshmallow, hyssop. Reorganising the storage for all my spiritual practise-related supplies made me think about how my practise has evolved over the years, and how my focus has flowed through certain areas and into others, and what sort of techniques appealed to me at different times.

Absolutely everything in the house got dusted, swept, and vacuumed. I tell you, it was like we combined spring and fall cleaning. We’re nesting, I suppose, getting things ready for winter. It certainly felt like fall late last week.

On Sunday we had brunch with the neighbours, a once-weekly event that got dropped when people ended up booked for other things on a regular basis. We’re going to try to get it going again on a semi-regular schedule. It was wonderful to sit and talk and munch. Blade introduced his Rubbermaid tub of Lego to the boy, who had lots of fun playing with the Lego people and dragons and vehicles, but wasn’t completely clear int he concept of building with the bricks. There’s nothing like a box of Lego to get all the adults in the room interested in what’s going on and mucking about with it.

Sunday afternoon HRH and Blade swapped our washer and dryer for the ones in the communal office space, and HRH moved things around in the garage yet again, making even more room. His bike is now ready for use; all we need is an extra coupler attachment for the bike trailer and we’ll be set. There was gardening done, groceries obtained, and I made my very yummy and creamy much-less-than-seven-teaspoons-of-sugar (gah! who knew!) version of iced cappuccinos in the blender. We finished the day off with a truly delicious homemade spaghetti sauce and garlic bread. I made two loaves of bread yesterday because the first one was completely gone by the end of the day. Yikes.

Despite the amount of work and the being sick at the beginning of it, this was the best weekend we’ve had in a long, long, long time. I think we’d forgotten what being relaxed around one another was like.

I leave you with a six month old Foxtrot cartoon. Yes, I am behind the times.

(Oboe! Hilarious!)

Warp And Weft

I am now the owner of a 24-inch four-harness table loom. It’s missing the shuttle and I believe a heddle hook, but apart from that it’s in usable shape. It’s very similar to this model, only older and a bit more rustic. An elderly friend of the ADZO family passed away recently and left no local family. She was a weaver, and had three (three? two?) full-size looms set up in her split-level home. She was a member of the Lakeshore Weavers Guild, who came in and took the full-size looms. The ADZO family went over yesterday and was told to take whatever of her things they liked. One of the things they mentioned seeing was a tiny loom in a back corner of the storage room.

My maternal grandfather was a weaver. I have a set of curtains he wove hanging in my office (which can be seen in these pictures). One of the atmospheric things I remember the most clearly about his house in Farnham was the entire room he had upstairs filled with his floor loom, his wools, and his equipment. Over the past couple of years I’ve planned to at some point learn how to use a drop spindle to spin my own wool, as part of a spiritual and meditative practice. Ideally, once I’d worked on that for a while, I’d move into weaving with the yarn I’d created. I like the sense of taking up a craft that’s been in my family.

It seems that the universe has decided to switch things up for me a bit.

Jen called and told the executors that she’d found someone who wanted the table loom if it was still available, and so ADZO and I went over this morning to collect it. There was a member of the weavers guild there too, and she asked me if I was interested in joining. I told her quite honestly that I had no time at the moment but a beginner’s workshop at some point would definitely interest me, so I got as much information from her as I could. Before we left she rummaged through some bags and gave me three huge spindles of synthetic yarn to dye and play with.

A 24-inch loom is tiny. You can’t do huge projects on them, unless you intend to patch your work together somehow. They’re pretty limited to table runners, place mats, scarves, that sort of thing. But it’s not the products I’m interested in so much as the process. There is so much spiritual metaphor and simile encapsulated in the process of weaving, as well as the attractive notion of doing something meditative with the hands that doesn’t feel like a waste of time. And as I said above, there’s the family connection that makes it all the more special for me.

I suspect that I’ll invest in a stand with treadles when I get around to using it seriously, because using hand levers to shift the harnesses slows you down a lot. You only have two hands, after all, and they’re already passing the shuttle back and forth and operating the beater.

So I have a whole new set of things to research and read about. (Plant dyeing! Patterns! Techniques! History!) It’s not pressing. I’m looking forward to it.

(What am I talking about? Wikipedia has entries on looms, heddles (which are set in a harness), and weaving in general to help you out.)

Nightmares And New Days

The boy appeared in our bedroom doorway rather precipitously last night around ten past one, eyes somewhat wild in the dim light. I sat bolt upright in bed. It’s astonishing how awake one can suddenly be when progeny is involved. “What is it, lovey?” I said. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“Yes,” he said in a slightly desperate, slightly muffled voice. I held my arms out. He ran around the bed and flopped onto me.

“It’s okay now,” I said, hauling him up onto the bed and rolling over with him, snuggling him in between HRH and I. “Mama and Dada are here, and you’re safe. Nothing can happen to you.”

And we slept that way for the rest of the night. I say “slept” but it was mostly heavy drowsing on our part. We’re not used to sleeping with a restless three year old. This morning HRH got up with the boy around six-thirty (the boy himself woke up around six, went and got a colouring book, and coloured quietly at the end of our bed for about twenty minutes), and I got another hour and a half of sleep. When I got up the boy told me about his dream.

“There were cracks,” he said. “But there are no cracks any more.”

“Cracks?”

“In his room,” HRH said. “When we walked into his room this morning, he looked up and said, ‘Oh, there are no cracks any more. It was just a dream.’ He told me that he’d dreamed the walls were cracking and the house was falling apart.”

I know he’s had nightmares before, but this is the first time he’s been able to articulate what he dreamed and to understand that it was just a story his mind told him while he was sleeping. It’s also the first time he’s settled down and slept when he’s come to us in bed. Usually he tosses and turns and sits up and decides it’s playtime, but then again, we’ve tried to bring him into bed in a vague attempt to encourage him to snuggle and drowse for a while, because it’s usually around five-thirty when he wakes up too early in the morning.

He’s off with the caregiver today. HRH and I have tidied the entire house (again, argh — that makes the third time in five days!) including overhauling his room. We sorted through a lot of baby toys and packed them away, and designated certain containers for certain items. There’s a box of assorted trucks and vehicles in his closet (out of sight, out of mind) and the box of baby toys and another of stuffed toys have been taken downstairs. We also thinned out his cars and Thomas stuff, putting the extras away in a storage case that’s still in the living room if he decides he needs something in particular, but at least it isn’t all out on the train table or the bookcases. And in case we haven’t mentioned it to you in person, no more Cars toys or Thomas stuff! It was nice that he had two main things people knew he loved to play with, but we’ve reached our limit of associated items. (Our limit is much lower than many other people’s, we freely admit, but still, enough is enough.) If you want to treat him to something, art supplies are big right now and get used up, so frequently need to be replaced.

HRH and I are treating ourselves to a film this afternoon: WALL*E, of course! It’s nice to know that whenever a Pixar film comes out we know it will be good, so we don’t have to worry about spending time and money and walking out of a theatre wishing the past two hours could have been more worth it. We really, really don’t see a lot of films in the theatre. I think the last movie we saw in a theatre was The Golden Compass.

Tonight is our dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s concert. I’ll be bringing the 7/8 to see how it performs in a group environment. There’s no way I’ll use it tomorrow at the concert, however, even though the luthier crossed out the ‘no public performances with the instrument on trial’ clause on the contract, of his own accord.

And finally: the crazy lady downstairs is moving out. Most of her stuff went last Thursday. Tonight is her last night here, and good thing; without all her stuff to absorb noise her TV or radio or whatever it is that she listens to awfully loudly is positively intrusive. We could hear every word of it clearly in the kitchen last night. Heck, Scarlet and Blade upstairs could probably hear it too. You have no idea how much we’re looking forward to July. Not just because the four of us get to take over that one and a half as shared office space, or because we get to unplug her ancient appliances, multiple fans and dehumidifiers and garner a greatly reduced Hydro bill, but for sheer peace of mind. We don’t need to worry any more about her falling asleep while cooking something to a burnt and fire-alarm-tripping crisp, or her letting thieves into the building, or her claiming nothing is wrong when her washing machine is leaking and ruining our stuff in storage in the garage, or allowing her jammed dryer to run all night figuring it would eventually fix itself, or her ambushing and verbally abusing us, or taking paranoid complaints to our landlord because she is convinced we’re trying to kill her. Liam will actually be able to play in his room and we’ll be able to use the kitchen in the morning without her banging on her ceiling. I have no idea what kind of place she’s moving into, but I hope she is very happy there, and I hope that her lack of comprehension concerning what life in a shared dwelling is like doesn’t negatively impact her situation.

Right. Time to tie some things up before we finish the house and head off to see the film.

Indoctrination

We had a great weekend, partly due to a financial snag smoothing itself out thanks to HRH’s willingness to do some freelance reno work over the his vacation. It’s astonishing how much better we feel with bills paid and a full pantry.

We also joined the other local coven of our tradition in a Solstice celebration. True to our experience of the gods loving irony, it started to rain as soon as the celebrant invoked the Sun God. Fortunately, we’d gone out that morning and bought a 9’x9′ awning for the back porch, something we’ve wanted to do for a while, so we all sat there and did the ritual anyway. And when it was over and the celebrant spoke a thank you for the Sun God’s presence, the rain stopped and the sun came out. It’s a good thing our trad formally recognises laughter in circle. Then we all had an excellent, excellent barbecue, and I had the great satisfaction of making a salad with ingredients mainly pulled from the garden. The boy woke up from his nap and joined us for the last half-hour, munching happily on hot dogs and showing off his new Wall*E figure.

When everyone had gone home and the boy decided to go inside to play, I asked him if he wanted to watch a new movie and he was very interested. So I put my new The Sound of Music DVD on (hurrah for gift cards), and he watched attentively through the opening scenery shots, whispering, “Do you hear that?” when the wind picked up. He was entranced by the swell of music and Maria running through the grass. “She is happy!” he said. “She is running, and singing!” And he kept watching, asking questions now and again, and I’d explain what people were doing. (Upon seeing the nuns in church, he whispered, “Do they talk?”. “Not in church,” I whispered back. “They do talk!” he said, beaming, when the scene in the courtyard started.) Once in a while his attention would wander during longer stretches of dialogue and he’d start playing with his trains or Wall*E, but whenever someone began to sing his eyes would snap back to the screen and he would be still. After the “Do-Re-Mi” sequence (also riveting for him, partially due to the children, partially due to the music, and partially due to the many different architectural and decorative details in Salzburg) I thought I heard him humming ascending three-note phrases while he played but I dismissed it.

Then we reached “The Lonely Goatherd” sequence and as the opening music played I said, “Liam, I think you may recognise this.” He’d already recognised it on the CD earlier in the week. And when Julie Andrews began singing he said with great delight, “This is the Muppets song!” (Episode 217, of course, is where he first encountered Andrews and this particular song. I love the Muppets in general, but the delicious irony of having Andrews sing “The Lonely Goatherd” with a bunch of puppets is positively exquisite.)

He sat in front of the screen and watched raptly. When the sequence was over he said, “Can we watch it again?” So we did. And a third time, too. He mumbled something under his breath at one point, but we didn’t catch it. It wasn’t until we said that we really needed to watch the next song that he let the film continue. He watched “Edelweiss,” which wasn’t as visually fascinating but nonetheless familiar to him, being one of the lullabies I used to sing to him when he was very small, and then started playing with his Wall*E again, moving it along the back of the chesterfield.

And then we heard it clearly: he was singing “oh-de-lay-lee, oh-de-lay-lee, oh-de-lay-lee-ooh,” and making Wall*E dance.

I looked at HRH, and HRH looked at me: we both had idiotic smiles on our faces, trying not to laugh. “Your heart must be ready to burst out of your chest,” said HRH, “judging by what mine’s doing.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“You’re so blogging this, aren’t you,” he said.

“With great delight,” I said.

We also heard him do a rough approximation of the beginning of “Edelweiss” too before the ballroom scene, by which point he was on HRH’s lap. “I need my cello!” he exclaimed upon seeing the chamber orchestra, so I got it for him and he played it (matching the rhythm quite well, too) before he strummed the lowest string so enthusiastically that it slipped off the bridge, so I put it away.

And, irony of ironies, I stopped the film at the wedding because it was past his bedtime.

I wonder how long it will be before he asks to watch it again.