Category Archives: Cello

Today’s To-Dos

Things I should do today:

    * Practice the cello (lesson tomorrow; I need to look at the final pieces in Mooney Position Pieces vol 1, review the first movement of the Bazelaire and play through the second movement in prep for beginning it, and probably drag out Elfintanz again, too)
    * Run errands: mini grocery order, buy printer ink cartridges
    * Bake a cake for tonight’s coven meeting
    * Finish the first pass on the edits of the repurposing project (This is frustrating because I’m considered the ‘author’ for this part of the process, but none of the manuscript is my words or arguments; I moved someone else’s around. So when the editor asks me to clarify or explain or support my claims, I’m at a loss because I didn’t write it.)

What I could do, or want to do, instead:

    * Reskein my lovely finished singles Merino yarn on my brand-new swift and photograph it lovingly; also, cuddle it
    * Curl up on the chesterfield under an afghan with reference material for book #6 (Have I mentioned that here officially yet? Well, I’ve got a new book due to be handed in in May. More news as I have it and can release it.)
    * Working on my swap parcel for my first swap project ever (My initial plan has to be discarded due to time constraints, alas, but I have a back-up plan that involves weaving.)

What I am hoping for:

    * One of the four freelance cheques I’m waiting for to land in my mailbox (I know there was a holiday in there, but my sense of time passing does not acknowledge that)
    * Any of the books I’ve ordered for research to arrive in the mail

What I have to do:

    * Pick the boy up at school to (a) go to the library to return due-today books, and (b) go to buy his first cello music book.
    * Think about dinner (augh please no I am so tired of meal planning and food in general… oh, hmm, maybe pot roast. There, that was easy. I have to go take it out of the freezer now.)
    * BUY CAT FOOD

Things I have already done:

    * Took the boy to the bus stop
    * Caught up on correspondence and news
    * Paid bills!

It was -20 C this morning, and I woke up incredibly achy. Fibro, I do not love you.

LATER: Go me; I did everything on this list except the finishing the first pass of the editing, and the three things under the could do/want to do list. Well, I did dye yarn for the swap, but that happened while I did other stuff.

No research books arrived, but the biggest of the four freelance cheques landed in my mailbox (YAY!). Ironically, so did our city taxes for 2011. That can be paid in four much easier to swallow instalments, though, so hurrah. This freelance cheque means paying a big chunk of Visa, socking some away, finally buying Amanda’s extra iPhone, and ordering my long-awaited treat for myself, my Saxony wheel.

New Beginnings

The boy is currently very excited.

We’ve been talking about music lessons for about two years now. We agreed that he would choose an instrument by new year’s, and start lessons this spring.

After initially wanting to play the cello when he was much younger, he decided against that and for the past year has been considering violin, or flute, or piano. (He really does want to play the trombone and the drums, but those will have to wait till high school age.) Those were his suggestions, too, not mine. He’s seen people play all of them and enjoys the sounds.

This morning I reminded him that it was the new year, and he had to settle on one. And he said, “Oh, yes, Mama, I want to practice the cello, like you!”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. But HRH told me that he had watched the littlest girls at my recital very intently, had clapped very hard for them, and had said, “Dada, they’re very good, aren’t they?” It must have had more of an impact than I expected. So I said I’d set it up with my cello teacher, and he said, “It’s a good thing I already have a cello.” Now, his “cello” is actually a cigar box viola I picked up secondhand on a whim about eight years ago to mess around with. So I said, “No, lovey, we’ll take you to the cello store (which is what he calls my luthier) and we’ll get you your own really real cello.” I didn’t think his eyes could get that big.

I am not a dreamer; I know this is going to be frustrating for him at times, and frustrating for me, too. But music is very rewarding, and lessons are good for teaching things like self-discipline, focus, and improving concentration, all of which he needs to work on. I’ve also seen my teacher work with her littlest students and he’s going to have a blast. It seems like they play lots of games and get to have a lot more fun than the grown-ups do!

I would have been thrilled with any of his choices. (Well, okay, the piano would have been challenging, but I would have found one for him if he truly and deeply wanted to learn it.) But he’s chosen my instrument, after telling me very definitely that he did not want to play it, and I admit to being heart-warmed by that. It’s something we can do together. We could have played duets with any of his other choices, but now I’ll be able to show him things and have a better understanding of what he’ll be learning technique-wise. And I know my teacher, so we won’t be starting from scratch with someone we’ve just met, and I know that she’ll do a wonderful job with him.

I’ve just sent my luthier an e-mail requesting an appointment for sizing a rental cello, and a note to my teacher about scheduling lessons. The boy is very much looking forward to all this. And to be honest, so am I.

Weekend Roundup: Cello Recital Edition

I’m swamped. I’m racing a huge deadline, both HRH and I were ill this weekend and yesterday, there are no Christmas decorations up (although we did turn the outside lights on about ten days ago), Christmas shopping is only half-done (it will be pretty much finished in one trip if I can just ever leave the house again in good health, no deadlines, and decent weather). I’ve torn the house apart looking for my binder of non-lesson, non-orchestra music that holds all my Christmas stuff and I can’t find it anywhere, which means I have to reconstruct all my Christmas stuff from scratch before our annual Yule music celebration on Sunday. There is no food in the house. Being sick and handling the fibro thing is really, really throwing a spoke in my Christmas wheel.

I’m simultaneously exhausted and climbing the walls. It doesn’t help that I mis-evaluated my current freelance project, which turned out to need about three times more editing than the sample I examined suggested it would, so my schedule has been blown to bits. I pulled off 125 pages yesterday despite feeling dreadfully ill, which is about half again as fast as my usual top speed, and burnt myself out so that I had to cancel a planned visit yesterday evening. I have another 125 to go today if I want to keep Wednesday morning for a final proofread and scan to make sure I haven’t done anything horrendously stupid. Then, I think, I will fall over. Or perhaps stay in bed for an entire twenty-four hours, because I’m having trouble making it through a basic day.

There’s a lot of snow, and it just keeps coming. It’s a good thing it’s pretty.

Saturday morning we had our dress rehearsal for the Christmas recital. I expected our usual dress rehearsal system, which was playing the solos as well as doing our group pieces, but we just worked on the group pieces. I understand why we did it — there are thirteen students now! — but I was a bit worried about my gavotte. I got home around quarter past one and HRH headed out to run errands. We had Ceri, Scott, and Ada over that afternoon for a movie and dinner, which was wonderful. The boy read both his Lego readers and a board book to Ada afterwards, who quieted down and listened, bless her. There was a moment at the beginning where she was fussing and the boy closed his book on his lap and calmly said, “I’m not going to read until you stop crying,” which is obviously something that he used to hear at preschool, but somewhat inappropriate for a tiny baby! It was explained to him that she would calm down if he read, so he opened the book again and everything went beautifully.

The recital was on Sunday. For the first time we rented a small church, because we no longer fit into the seniors’ residence we used to play at. The acoustics were phenomenal; even the tiny cellos, which usually have problems with amplification, were resonant and clear. I was worried about the order of the pieces. In the past we’ve opened with group pieces and then interspersed solos throughout the programme. This time, the first half of the programme was soli, and the second half was all group pieces. I was concerned about not being warmed up by the time my solo came up, but it turned out fine. I started oddly slowly, perhaps because I was subconsciously taking into account the fact that one usually plays too fast live, but I picked up the pace when the initial theme was repeated before the development and second theme. I was pretty happy with how it went. Midway I was starting to be unhappy with slightly imprecise intonation but I remembered something my teacher had told me at the last lesson, mainly that even if intonation is off by a fraction, it isn’t necessarily audible to the audience by the time the sound has travelled within the space, and even with that slight imprecision the piece had been pleasant to listen to at the lesson.

The response I got was really heartening. I had strangers asking me how long I’d been playing and how many certificates/grades I held, which was just odd to hear. The boy told me, unprompted, that I had been awesome. I had my dear friend Marc there in the audience for more support, who enjoyed himself immensely, too. It was a very nice afternoon. The group pieces went well, too, although the arrangement of the Haydn Op. 76 no. 3 movt. 2 felt a bit muddy. All the Christmas stuff was jolly and resonant. The arrangement of Silent Night was lovely, and I think the Greensleeves seven-part arrangement was all right, but I can’t be sure.

I finally finished spinning the last of the first 2 oz of the yellow/orange Polworth in stupidly thin threadlike laceweight singles. I am going to do some nice chunky, squooshy singles from some Merino in Blue Bells before I have to spin the last 2oz of Polworth. Someone remind me of this the next time I decide to spin laceweight to get as much yardage as possible out of something, okay?

That’s the single on the bobbin and across the right penny for size comparison, and on the left is a look at how it will look when plied with the as-of-yet unspun second single. This is the finest single I’ve ever spun with success for an extended period of time.

I really need to get to work now. Wish me luck.

Weekend Roundup: Mostly Cello Recital Prep Edition

Cello fell apart last week. I don’t mean literally (you’d have heard me screaming from wherever you physically are, I suspect) but figuratively. Nothing I played worked. Everything was disjointed, scratchy, jerky, lousy phrasing, no dynamic control, horrible intonation (why E flat major as C minor, why, WHY?)… every time I tried it got worse instead of better. Which is, if you think about it, the exact antithesis of what practice is supposed to do. One of the general bits of wisdom floating around is that you shouldn’t repeat mistakes, so if things are going wrong and you can’t isolate why and fix them, stop and come back later. Except every time I came back it was worse. Friday night I sat down, gritted my teeth, put the Suzuki accompaniment CD on and played the Gavotte at the ridiculous speed it called for. And I did it again. And again. And again. I didn’t stop, I didn’t pause to fix things, I didn’t listen critically, I just played it. And I played it at a speed that was far faster than I’d worked it before, faster than my target metronome marking. And then I put the cello away.

Saturday morning I went to my lesson. We warmed up with my lines in the pretty arrangements of Silent Night and Greensleeves that we’re playing, then my teacher said there was half an hour left and she didn’t think we needed half an hour for the Bach, so why not look at the Bazelaire she’d given me for the next recital? And we played through the first half of the first movement, working on the wacky thumb-index-index pizzicato movement, and it was so much fun. Then we turned to the Bach. I kind of gritted my teeth again, then took a steady breath, threw all my feelings about it away and started. And it flowed, and had phrasing, and drove right on to the end. When I was finished I started to laugh, and my teacher exclaimed and asked where that had come from, and she even made me stand up and take my Suzuki bow. Apparently running a piece at ludicrous speed seven or eight times in a row to recorded piano accompaniment is a good thing. I didn’t even play it through again, or look at trouble spots; it didn’t need it.

I drove home and had a quick lunch. Then the boy and I bundled into the car and drove to the local movie theatre to meet with his best friend from preschool and her mom to see Tangled together. It was so much fun. Granted, listening to Zachary Levi for an hour or so was part of that, but the design, the palette, the characterization, the execution, the pacing and plotting, and the songs and score were all fantastic. (I’d sneaked a listen to some of the songs released earlier that week on various music and film blogs, and had in fact purchased the soundtrack two days before the film, so I knew about that last bit ahead of time!) It has firmly settled itself among my top three favourite Disney films, and very possibly has bumped Beauty & the Beast out of my #1 spot. I can’t make a confirmed judgment as to that yet, because I’m going to need to see it a few more times first. We’ll certainly go see it at Christmas when we visit my parents, because Mum wants to see it and HRH needs to see it, too.

The boy’s friend came over to our house to play for an hour and a half after the film. I made peanut butter chocolate-chip cookies, they played with his trains, and at some point they ran through the house playing cowboys & knights, one waving the wooden sword and shield HRH made and the other with a Nerf gun. It was great.

Her mom picked her up and I headed into Montreal for my piano rehearsal scheduled for 5:20, where we each play our solo pieces with the accompanist. Despite giving myself forty-five minutes to get to NDG I hit bad traffic and was ten minutes late, but things were running behind anyway. I got to listen to everyone’s pieces and their work on the timing or the trouble spots, applauding with everyone else enthusiastically after each. And then, like the Farewell Symphony, they all left one by one as they were done; I was last, with an audience of only my teacher and the pianist. And I kicked my Gavotte again from start to finish. I was very pleased with it. We didn’t need to work on anything or test timing or cues; I loosened my bow and that was that. I’m feeling really confident now about next weekend’s recital. I got home in time to read to the boy in bed. That night HRH and I ended up clearing out the storage room because I was looking for something. We moved some stuff into the laundry room and emptied at least three big boxes. It’s much easier to locate things now. Ironically, though, we didn’t find the box I was looking for.

Sunday was my day at the Yule Fair. I was scheduled to do a talk with Ellen Dugan on green magic and magical gardening, and she was so fabulous. We had a blast. I got to touch base with Chris Penczak and Judika Illes again, too, and pick up a couple of books. I so love working with other authors at these kinds of events. And it always comes as a surprise to me when they say they’ve read my stuff and are impressed, or refer to a concept I’ve discussed somewhere. I had some wonderful discussions with people who came to my signing afterwards, too, and was very touched by some of their stories about what my books have done for them. HRH and the boy came downtown with me and took the metro to see the Christmas window at Ogilvy’s, which was unfortunately half non-functional, before having lunch out together.

We had to leave the fair and get back home for mid-afternoon because I was possibly expecting a drop-off. It didn’t happen, however, and good thing; both HRH and I were coshed by a really, really bad cold and fell asleep while the boy watched movies. I’d felt the beginnings of it when I’d woken up in the morning, but a couple of Tylenol took care of the aches and sore throat for a few hours. I was stunned at how brutally it hit me mid-afternoon, though.

Trudging

Things are moving along. I feel somewhat as if I’m kind of walking in place, though.

More unconnected point-form stuff, also out of chronological sequence:

1. We had a wonderful concert on Saturday night. I did as well as I could have done considering the fall I’ve had, and I was fine with what I didn’t pull off. There was an odd moment in the Furiant, the final movement of Dvorak’s Czech Suite, where our conductor tried to up the tempo and I appear to have been the only one who noticed, so rather than play at his tempo for more than three bars and have it sound awful I stuck to what the rest of the orchestra was doing. It really was a terrific night overall and I want to say more except I can’t really think of what to say. Our flute soloist, a fifteen-year-old girl, was brilliant in Chaminade’s Concertino. The boy got to examine our percussionist’s tympani, which thrilled him to bits (and thank you so much for that, Terry!), and he saw his first piccolo on the way back to his seat. Jeff and Devon kept HRH and the boy company in the audience. The next concert will feature Beethoven’s 4th and Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture, two of my favourite pieces, and will take place on Saturday 2 April 2011, so don’t say I didn’t give you enough advance warning.

2. Saturday morning we moved the boy’s room around. We took out the armoire and put it downstairs in the laundry room (where I am now using it as a linen closet, and I am ridiculously pleased about having everything folded neatly behind its small doors or in its drawers), swung his bed around to be under the window, switched his dresser and his bookcase, and centered the toy storage unit along the wall between his cupboard and bed. It works extremely well, and the boy thought most of it up. (He was not entirely happy about giving up the armoire, though.) HRH also put a new-to-us television antenna on the roof, and holy cats, we now get HD channels and some big US channels like CBS and Fox and NBC, plus (this may be the best part for me) half a dozen PBS channels. Wow.

3. Sunday I had a group cello rehearsal, which I got to just in time. The boy went to a birthday party in the first half of the afternoon, and HRH went with him. Originally I was going to take him but HRH proposed giving me some time off, for which I was very thankful. I ended up chatting to my mum for an hour and a half on the phone. The birthday party was at a local gymnastics studio, complete with a trainer to guide the kids, and the boy had a blast, so they got home a bit later than we’d originally anticipated. Apparently they do a summer camp and lots of his friends from preschool will be taking classes there, so we shall keep that in mind. The rehearsal went all right: a lot of it is basic three-part carol arrangements that took a single play-through. However, there are two big main pieces we need to focus on next week, both with timing that requires a goodly amount of concentration on my part and I need to play them with other people to cement what the changes sound like. I really enjoy our group lessons.

4. On Friday Ceri and Ada came over to hang out, and we had a very nice time. Ada fell asleep on me, which was a wonderful experience. Then I went to their place on Monday to babysit Ada while Ceri went to the dentist, and I got her to fall asleep again. I am somewhat stunned. She is a lovely baby, so easy to handle, and with a sweet nature. In about two years I am going to host a Fairy Goddaughter Tea Party, because I may not be a fairy godmother, but I think I can safely classify all three of my goddaughters as fairy godschildren. We shall dress up and wear hats and have a real tea party, and we shall use the very good china tea set with violets on it, and have tiny butterfly sandwiches and miniature cakes, and we shall have a wonderful time.

5. Now that I have delivered projects and signed contracts, I have begun the long 6-8 week wait for cheques to arrive. Which puts their arrival… after Christmas, grr grr grr. My bank account is getting very thin; I can see the bottom, and that makes me very uncomfortable at any time of year, but one always feels more financially iffy in December. I should able to cover my regular bills, but even that may be tricky. This is the bad thing about freelancing: you can’t count on a regular paycheque, and sure the cheques are big when they arrive, but you have to make them last until the next undetermined paycheque.

6. I’m halfway through my copy-editing project. I ought to finish it tomorrow, in fact. But then, as the boy has two ped days (well, he’s home with me for the first ped day and off to visit with his local grandparents for the next, but HRH is planning stuff for Friday), I am anticipating not being able to really work again until next Monday, at which time I’ll do a final look-see to make sure I’ve covered everything and then hand it in.

That’s enough for now. Editing used up all my focus for the day.

A Brief Update…

… in point form, because putting together paragraphs that flow from one to the other takes more focus and energy than I’ve got, but some of this is news worth sharing:

1. How about the weather round here lately? This has got to be the brightest, warmest November I can remember in a long time. The forecast is either sunny, or says overcast and we get clear sun instead. Today was so beautiful I shucked off my jacket for the drive home. There was truly gorgeous fog this morning, too, which was lovely to watch while listening to Glenn Gould’s 1980 Goldberg Variations and drinking tea.

2. I got to spend a bit of time with Ceri and Ada this morning, which was thoroughly enjoyable. While I was there I finished prepping my 4oz of gorgeous firey Polworth fibre. I always forget how much I enjoy stripping and predrafting fibre; I always want to jump right into the spinning. Prepping the fibre means I get to handle it and touch it and get a real feel for the staple length is, what the crimp is like, how well it drafts, how springy it is, and generally listen to how it wants to be spun. Ceri sent me home with three pounds of Honeycrisp apples. Which, if you know how big Honeycrisps are, means there are six apples. I may eat them all myself and not share them with other family members. ( “Fruit? What fruit? We have no fruit.”)

3. I had a very good cello lesson today indeed. I had to skip last week due to work, so I was concerned about how today would go, but apart from being rocky on some of the Christmas ensemble stuff in extended sixth position, my recital piece went really very well. We’re just working on speed now. It felt very good indeed to hear my teacher say, “If you’re like this now, just think how good you’ll be in another month!”

4. I am rereading The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay. I remember being underwhelmed by this when it came out, but having read Under Heaven only a few months ago, I knew that’s the style I needed to read right now, so I pulled it out. I am enjoying it very much this time round.

5. I am annoyed at my printer. It told me it was out of the black ink, so I refilled the cartridge myself. Turns out this brand and model needs to have the cartridge chip reset if it’s refilled, or it keeps reading as empty, so I had to go out and buy a whole new one. Once I’d put that in, the printer informed me it now couldn’t work because the colour cartridges are low. Couldn’t it have told me all of this at the same time? I’ve been without a printer for two weeks now and I have to wait till the next paycheque to buy colour ink, which hasn’t gone down well with the boy at all, because he has been asking for colouring pages downloaded from the Internet to colour after school. I’ll stop by the ink refilling kiosk in the local mall next time I’m there and ask if they can reset the chips; if they can’t I’m doomed to buying new cartridges every time, which annoys me a lot.

6. Yesterday I returned the take-an-existing-manuscript-and-turn-it-into-a-different-book repurposing project with trepidation, but got a “Wonderful!” from the editor almost right away. I think it’s pretty solid, but if there’s anything that requires tweaking I told him to let me know and I’d handle it right away. I also told the copyediting department that I was good to go as of immediately, then idly wondered how long I’d be between projects. Well, not long, it seems! I was assigned my first copyediting project today, to be returned in two weeks. It’s relatively short, very formulaic so it has clear coding to be done, and has already been approved by the editor so it’s likely to only need a very light hand. It’s a great project with which to essay the copyediting waters. I am ridiculously excited about it. I get paid by the hour, too, which is so much more fair than a flat fee.

7. Half an hour after I got that e-mail today, I received an offer for the book I wrote a sample and proposal for last month. It looks like it’s a go! I’m not going to give you any more than that until I’ve signed the contract, but the terms were okay and we’ve got a verbal/e-mail go-ahead agreement. This is the first kind of book of this type the publisher has done, so we’re all taking a bit of a gamble on it. It’s due in May 2011, with 50% to be seen by February somethingth. So I’ve got very pleasant work ahead of me indeed, what with copyediting and a new book.

In Passing

I’m handling several deadlines at the moment. I’ve got a major project deadline next Monday, which really means I need to be finished on Friday and then do a final proofread pass on Monday. This has been a four-month long repurposing project, where I’ve been taking a manuscript and rearranging it to make something different. It’s pure editing, and I’m thankful to have had the four months, because there was packing and moving in there, plus the horrible, horrible fibro aftermath. A lot of this project has been turning pages and scrolling through a document, thinking about where to put what in order to have it make the most sense thematically. And since thinking has been hard, no thanks to the fibro fog, it’s been challenging. I’m almost done, though, and I feel very positive about it. Apart from the OMG-deadline-deadline-deadline! panic that’s setting in right on schedule, of course. I’m also struggling with my “But it could be better!” crisis that hits me before I hand a project in. Sure, it could be better. It could always be better. Or perhaps not better; perhaps different is a better descriptor. Most creative types could poke at things forever. You don’t actually finish things; you just let them go.

I’ve got a concert in ten days, too, and I’ve got deadline panic setting in about that as well. I’m not where I wish I could be for this performance thanks to the fibro backlash I’ve been suffering this fall, and I’m having the crisis about sitting second chair that I regularly have every two concerts or so. I love the music on the programme, though, which makes up for a lot. I’m also handling a deadline for the programme notes, which slipped my to-do list a week ago and now I’m having to shove that into moments between work on the major freelance project to get them done ASAP so that they can go along to the next people in the production process.

I’m having issues with a supposedly relaxing hobby, as well. I don’t know why I try to knit things, sometimes, I really don’t. My project notes on Ravelry for the hooded scarf I’m trying to make look like this:

18 October: Planned:
* Hood: garter stitch with Lion Thick & Quick yarn on size 11 needles (for a denser fabric to better protect ears from the wind)
* Scarf: garter stitch with Lion Thick & Quick yarn on size 15s (for better drape)

First go:
26 Oct 2010: Hood finished and immediately frogged. The fabric was too stiff. I swear to gods I swatched with the 15s and the fabric was too loose, so I went with the 11s, but sometimes swatches lie. No, they lie most of the time, actually. Sometimes a 4-inch swatch doesn’t tell you how a 12 x 20-inch piece of knitted fabric will behave.

Second go:
* 28 October: Hood knitted on size 15s; cast on 30 stitches with Lion Thick & Quick (this worked, hurrah)
* 3 November: Doing the scarf part as a One-Row Lace Scarf in the Thick & Quick on the size 15s. If it’s not long enough by the time the skein ends, I’ll pick up stitches and knit some Bernat Harmony onto each end.

Third go:
OKAY FINE. Look, here’s what’s happening.
* Early November: Knitted a One-Row Scarf with an entire skein of Lion Thick & Quick, as above. It was a better drape for the hood, so it got folded and seamed and the original garter stitch rectangle hood got frogged.
* Nov 7: Cast on for the scarf with the Bernat Harmony held double on size 15s, which drove me crazy in about three minutes. Frogged it. Cast on size 11s with a single strand of Bernat Harmony, knit a couple of inches. Felt too thin. Frogged.
* Nov 9: Gave up on the knitting and warped the Kromski Harp rigid heddle loom with the Lion (with a draft something like 10-0-2-0-2-0-10-0-2-0-2-0-10 to create the same sort of visual impression that the One-Row Scarf creates when done in bulky yarn and left unblocked), and started weaving using the Bernat Harmony as a warp.

The good news is that the woven scarf looks as if it will work out just fine. Which is also good for my sanity, because really, you know? I can’t even handle garter stitch rectangles properly, let alone an actual pattern. I should just stick to spinning and weaving to relax. Speaking of which, the 8 oz of BFL I spun on Lady Jane has all been chain-plied on my Louet S15, and I have 522 yards of fingering weight yarn:

Very pretty. It will be made into a wrap for me (except I obviously SHOULDN’T KNIT IT, which means I need to think about a weaving draft instead). I wish I could shake the feeling of being irresponsible when the fibro is at a point where I can’t do much other than sit and get some spinning done. It uses a totally different part of my brain and conscious mind than work does.

The boy is doing much better, thank you all for asking and sending your get-well wishes. He’s as good as new after the scarlet fever, although he’s still on the amoxicillin till sometime next week. Our bad colds are also pretty much things of the past, thank goodness.

Right. Back into the fray.