Category Archives: Cello

Weekend Roundup

On Friday I went to see the MMFA Waterhouse exhibit with a friend who must remain nameless in this public post due to the Preservation of Family Harmony Act (as in, if someone found out this friend had seen the exhibit first with someone other than the someone in question, family life would no longer be harmonious). Gorgeous, gorgeous colours. Reproductions don’t even come close to capturing the glow of these works. And the design and layout of the exhibition was fabulous, too. You wouldn’t think matte black wallk and black text with black velvet would work, but it makes the paintings glow even more. We saw details we’d never seen before. I was highly amused to see that Waterhouse doodled in the books he was reading. Then we browsed through the museum gift shop (we should not be allowed into museum gift shops unsupervised) where I picked up a Christmas ornament and some of the Bleu Lavande lip balm, remembering that Meallanmouse had recommended it (and justly, too, wow). And then we went off to have expensive coffees with lots of whipped cream. The weather was glorious, too, making it an all-round perfect day. It felt so good to dress up a bit (brown patterned stockings! a skirt! my Italian leather ankle boots that I don’t wear nearly enough to justify the money my mother spent on them so many years ago!) and go outside.

Saturday morning was a very productive cello lesson. Late Saturday afternoon was Tarasmas. I wish I had the energy to describe it, but suffice it to say that there were two very clever plays that parodied four popular themes or plots, tonnes of talented people reading from scripts they’d never seen before, the triumphant return of Action Woman, and a fully-realized and orchestrated Action Woman theme that later served as the musical line for an audience singalong. I got to play a Russian spy in the vampire/spy play, which absolutely delighted me. We retired to Mackay’s nearby abode for post-play social interaction but the boy had been up a few times the night before and I was wiped. We went home earlier than we wanted to.

Sunday HRH and the boy replaced the officially dead doorbells, and HRH put the plastic up on the windows, thereby cutting the condensation problem in half immediately. I’m still taking about six cups of water out of the air daily with the dehumidifier, but it’s made a huge difference already. I also finished Gran’s scarf, which you can see here, and there was a long overdyeing process that took up a lot of the day. For dinner I did a stupendously delicious pork roast.

Doing weekend roundups late means I get the bare bones down, but not the nuances. Sigh.

CONCERT CORRECTION

I should not be allowed to copy and paste the text of previous concert announcements unsupervised.

The concert is in fact on the 21st OF NOVEMBER, not the 28th as previously announced. That’s one whole week sooner. As in, this upcoming Saturday.

Many thanks go out to Ceri and MLG for verifying the date with me. Apart from my unsupervised copying and pasting, I try to get the concert announcements out two weeks before the date to give people plenty of time, and it got away from me this time; but I probably defaulted to the usual two-weeks-from-now thing anyway. (When I find out who authorized it to be mid-November I will have sharp words with them, I tell you what.)

The correct details:

The time has come again to make plans to attend the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra fall concert! Every fall we present an introspective and soul-uplifting concert to celebrate the season, and for your entertainment we have prepared a challenging programme that our new conductor and musical director, Stewart Grant, has titled Wien un München (Vienna and Munich).

Circle Saturday the 21st of November on your calendars. At 19h30 in the Valois United Church in Pointe-Claire (70 Belmont Ave., between King and Queen), the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will present the following works:

    Mozart: Ouverture Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), K. 486
    Schubert: Rosamunde – incidental & ballet music
    Weber: Concerto pour clarinette no. 2 op. 7 – Allegro (soloist: Eric Braley)
    Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) K. 620- In diesen heil’gen Hallen (soloist: John Manning)
    Beethoven: Symphony no. 8 op. 23

Admission is $10 per person; admission is free for those under 18 years of age. The concerts usually last approximately two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website, linked above. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all.

This is the first concert with our official new conductor Stewart Grant. We’re really enjoying the work he’s doing with us, and judging from the reception of the Canada Day concert, audiences are enjoying it, too. Come experience our first proud formal performance with this talented and experienced conductor!

Concert Announcement: Wien und München

Yes, gentle readers, the time has come again to make plans to attend the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra fall concert! Every fall we present an introspective and soul-uplifting concert to celebrate the season, and for your entertainment we have prepared a challenging programme that our new conductor and musical director, Stewart Grant, has titled Wien un München (Vienna and Munich).

Circle Saturday the 28th 21st of November on your calendars. At 19h30 in the Valois United Church in Pointe-Claire (70 Belmont Ave., between King and Queen), the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will present the following works:

    Mozart: Ouverture Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), K. 486
    Schubert: Rosamunde – incidental & ballet music
    Weber: Concerto pour clarinette no. 2 op. 7 – Allegro (soloist: Eric Braley)
    Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) K. 620- In diesen heil’gen Hallen (soloist: John Manning)
    Beethoven: Symphony no. 8 op. 23

Admission is $10 per person; admission is free for those under 18 years of age. The concerts usually last approximately two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website, linked above. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all.

This is the first concert with our official new conductor Stewart Grant. We’re really enjoying the work he’s doing with us, and judging from the reception of the Canada Day concert, audiences are enjoying it, too. Come experience our first proud formal performance with this talented and experienced conductor!

Weekend Roundup

This was a truly lovely weekend. We didn’t rush around, the weather was nice, we crossed things off the to-do list, I got work done, got reading done, had a cello lesson, and ate food. Really, that’s all I ask for.

Friday afternoon I had the deeply satisfying experience of refusing that benighted UPS package, and the driver said, “Good for you.” I’m going to be saving around twenty dollars by having the parcel shipped out via USPS, even paying the USPS shipping fee, and I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks to finally get it. I refuse to cave in and support UPS’s extortionate practices.

Saturday morning I took the boy to get his hair cut, and then we went next door so I could pick up The Intentional Spinner that I’d ordered to replace the copy of Spin Control that I’d bought and later that day won in an on-line draw. The boy had saved up twenty dollars and though he tried to get me to say he could buy a train instead of a book, he eventually went up the escalator with great enthusiasm and chose the copy of Warman’s Lionel Train Field Guide 1945-1969 that he’d been sighing over every time I checked out the needlework books on the adjacent shelf. (We have proceeded to read this book before each nap and bedtime. No, really. We started with some of the text on how to use the book, then the evolution of the Lionel packaging, and then the captions under the pictures of the trains. Not exactly a brilliant narrative, but he’s enthralled.) When we left the bookstore we stopped by Jess’s house to finally collect the carton of Vanilla Coke she’d bought for me on a trip to Vermont at Thanksgiving.

Saturday afternoon I got some Yule knitting done and read another chunk of An Echo in the Bone. I also learned that my proper 7/8 soft case arrived at the luthier! This is going to be a straight trade for the 4/4 case that my 7/8 cello came with. I originally told the luthier I’d stop by next Saturday but that doesn’t make sense time- or gas-wise; I’ll send the 4/4 case over with HRH on Friday, and he’ll make the ten-minute trip to the luthier’s shop after work on Friday on his way to collect the boy. We also moved the DVD cabinet out of the living room and into the hallway, where it doesn’t look bad at all, to free up one whole baseboard heater. As the house has been very damp and chilly lately despite the heat being on, we also trotted out the dehumidifier that had been part of the downstairs apartment’s appliance suite, scrubbed it within an inch of its life, and plugged it in to see what would happen. As we’d suspected (and yet still to our somewhat grim horror) it pulled a good couple of cups of water out of the air in just ninety minutes. This flat has always had a problem with window condensation and mold in dark corners, but we’ve never actually used a hygrometer to measure the relative humidity. The recommended level is around 50%; from the lists of warning signs we’ve just read we suspect ours is about 100%. Anyway, we don’t particularly want to be running a dehumidifier all the time, as it takes a shocking amount of electricity, but the difference in the air was palpable. I think we’ll run it in a different room for an hour or so every day.

Saturday night we attended a dinner party chez Luanna, and ye gods, it was everything anyone who’s ever attended one has said they are. We’ve had to miss every single one of these we’ve been invited to for the past gods know how many years, so to finally be there was a huge thing. The food and the company were spectacular. We had a fabulous time and came home with souvenir programmes menus complete with recipes and photos of what was served. Shall I boast about what we ate? Oh, of course. When we arrived the wine was flowing freely and there were platters of hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen, delicious little crab things on baked wonton wrappers, homemade bruschetta, and prosciutto/melon/fig bites in crisp little bite-sized cups. Our first course was a potage of zucchini, mushrooms, and leeks, followed by duck a l’orange, roast baby potatoes with herbs, and green beans with pine nuts. Dessert was the impressive poached pears dipped in chocolate… which turned out to be stuffed with chocolate-nut truffle filling. I am not a huge pear fan, but these were cooked to perfection, and the chocolate and nuts didn’t hurt in the least. I have not been this enthusiastic about food in possibly years.

Sunday morning we went grocery shopping, which was oddly enjoyable. Usually we are very tense when we shop in grocery stores, generally due to the oblivious and rude nature of fellow shoppers or the non-availability of an item of which we are in dire need, but people were moderately sane and the only thing on the list that we didn’t get was the name brand butter that was on sale, which wasn’t a huge issue because the basic no-name brand of sweet butter I usually buy was only twenty-five cents more expensive at its regular price.

The weather this weekend was a treat. Yesterday in particular was a gorgeous warm fall day, with sun and only a slight breeze and a high of something like fifteen degrees. When we got home from doing the groceries the boys played in the pile of leaves outside. They claimed to be raking, but I knew what was actually going on.

The huge maple tree out front drops an equally huge number of leaves around this time of year, and after scraping them up into a huge pile (and spreading it all out and raking it up again and again) they hauled the leaves into the backyard to pile on the vegetable garden on top of the compost we’d already spread there. It was so warm that we opened the windows. (Also good for removing extra humidity in the fall, we learned.)

While the boy napped I worked on the assignment I’d received on Friday afternoon, because if I could finish it and hand it in, chances were very good that both it and the one I’d already handed in on Friday would be approved by five PM on Monday and I’d be able to invoice for both of them, doubling this invoice total. I managed to do it, too, so I’m just waiting for the approval codes for each so I can plug them into my invoice and send it off. I’m getting better at the efficient handling of evaluating these manuscripts. It helps when they’re non-fiction; I can scan them with less investment. The co-ordinators have just figured out that I’m experienced in religion, so that’s what three of the last five have been. I greatly prefer them to the epic fantasies.

And I had my cello lesson last night, where we worked on the group pieces for the recital. The great Focus on Shifting continued, with the key thing I brought away from this particular lesson being the concept of shifting over the wall instead of through it, using the slight elastic bounce off the fingerboard to travel on the string to the target position and then rejoining the fingerboard with another elastic motion. I worked on this about a year ago, using the mental image of a jellyfish or a squid swimming for an analogy to the motion required (whatever works, okay?) and it’s so rewarding to see that absolutely none of it stuck with me once we stopped talking about it. I also had a note on my Brahms waltz/lullaby piece that said WRONG FINGERINGS, noted as such after the last group class when I got tangled up and saw everyone else was shifting differently, and hoo boy, were they ever wrong. We went forty-five minutes over time as a result of trying to get them corrected. My teacher is an absolute saint.

Today’s to-do list includes a short proofreading job, doing up that invoice, and typing out the draft of a formal ritual which also involves transcribing Norse poetry. Also, it would be really nice if my late freelance cheque finally arrived.

Weekend Roundup, Halloween Edition

Saturday morning we headed out to Karine and Adam’s place for a birthday party. We were the first ones there, so we blew up balloons and put up streamers while Adam got the birthday boy into his costume and Karine whipped up a fabulous brunch (first round for the kids, second round for the adults!). I was fighting a headache and realised halfway there that I’d forgotten to put on my glasses, which didn’t help at all. (I swear, I have to think of something to get around the dark-glasses-on-a-dark-dresser problem.) Almost half the invitees had to cancel due to illness, which was sad, but those in attendance had a wonderful time. There were a moments where my heart nearly broke, though; the boy came to get me at one point and said, “Mama, they’ve locked the door and won’t let me in.” The birthday boy and his school friends had closed the bedroom door against him, and he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him play. So I sat with him in the playroom with an arm around his shoulders and tried to think of a way to explain it but couldn’t put it into words for him, so I just hugged him and offered to help him build with the toys at our feet. But then there was a stack of birthday cupcakes and presents, so everything was all right.

We headed home and it took the boy a while to settle for nap, of course. When he woke up HRH had hollowed out the pumpkins in preparation for carving them, and we got the boy to draw the faces for them. The results were great!

We packed up the pumpkins and headed out to the local grandparents’ house, where the boy does his trick or treating. Except it wasn’t that easy. The transport ministry had closed down half the Mercier bridge, so there was a single lane going each way. We figured it would just take a bit longer to get across, but when we encountered a staggering lineup at our alternate entrance (our regular one was closed) we tried a second, then a third, and discovered that most of the entrances to the bridge were closed, and all the traffic was being funneled through LaSalle onto one on-ramp and taking this way would eat up an insane amount of time. So after forty-five minutes of being five minutes away from our house in various directions, HRH decided to take the Champlain bridge and drive all the way around the south shore of the river to get to Chateauguay. We got to my inlaws’ house an hour and a half after we left. Normally, it’s a fifteen minute trip.

Anyway, tempers were tight and gas was getting dangerously low when we go to the Champlain, but right then the sun came out. It had been an extremely windy, rainy day up till then, but the sun suddenly broke through at just the right angle for magic to happen. As we crossed the Champlain we saw the fattest rainbow I’ve ever seen grow from the opposite shore and reach up to the clouds. I rolled down the window and took a photo:

Then we looked in the rearview mirror, and the sky behind us was on fire. Copper and gold and blazing apricot-bronze; absolutely incredible. When we got across the river I rolled down the window again (rather dangerous in the high winds, whoa) and took photos looking back at Montreal:

We had to stop for gas in La Prairie, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing, and we got to the boy’s grandparents’ door just before six-thirty. After a quick gulp of alcohol to soothe the stress we’d incurred on the way and much admiring of the decor there we got the boy out the door. He loves dressing up, he loves the decorations, he loves the candy… he is not such a big fan of older kids in scary costumes. In fact, after the first house he started digging his heels in because there were two teenagers right behind us wearing horrific rubber masks whom he saw every time he left a door, and on the corner he stopped and started crying, asking to go back home to Grandma and Papa because he was scared of costumes. The woman in the next house heard him and came out to talk to him, and she jollied him up nicely, getting him to come to her front door to see her decorations, and talking to him about the scary costumes. It turned out she worked at the local elementary school and knew exactly how to handle it. (Another example of how what one’s parents tell you doesn’t count, but hearing the same stuff from a different adult is OK.) The boy left in a much more cheerful mood, and I suspect the woman talked to the teenagers behind us because at the next house they stopped to talk to the boy and lifted their masks so he could see they were just people underneath. He was better then, and got to a whole two more houses before saying he was tired and wanted to go home. So this year he hit a total of five houses, three or four fewer than last year.

At home was more fun for everyone, actually, because my mother-in-law had finger food for us as well as more alcohol, and the boy had a delightful time answering the door in his costume and handing out candy. My father-in-law kept slipping more candy into our bags as well! It was a perfect Halloween night: windy, not too cold, piles of wet leaves all over the ground, with wisps of clouds racing across an almost perfectly full moon.

I slept horribly that night, despite being in a wonderful mood going to bed. I got two hours of sleep before midnight, then woke up so very completely at midnight that I had to get up. I knitted Gran’s scarf till two, spun some of the dye sample I’d done a while ago, spun some Aran-weight singles and plied them, then took some herbal sleeping pills and went back to bed around four. I got one hour of sleep before the boy woke us up at five, because of of course the clocks had gone back the night before and his body knew it was six. He tried to snuggle with us but wouldn’t stop squirming or talking so HRH put him back to his own bed, and I slept on and off till nine.

We went out to vote in the municipal election at ten, and wow, worst voting experience ever. The gym in which they were supposed to set up this polling station had been damaged by the wind and rain the previous day so it was squeezed into a cafeteria area instead, and the insensitivity of those waiting was just boggling. It took about forty-five minutes before our station was clear, and a good half of us waiting were polite, but the other half were just asses and made things miserable for everyone else… and this was within the first half-hour of the polls being open. The abuse the volunteers were receiving was dreadful. Now, okay, smaller area, perhaps not as many booth open per polling station number, but at the same time every single person had to unfold five ballots, mark them, and fill them in again. With only one person per booth allowed in the room at a time, yeah, that’s going to slow things down. Anyway, no one I voted for was elected, a result that I fully expected.

As the voting process took twice as long as we’d expected it to take, HRH pretty much had to leave as soon as we walked home because it was open house day at school. He took the bus in while the boy and I stayed home for lunch and a rest. We drove in after the boy’s nap to pick HRH up, and discovered that the open house had been insanely busy and successful.

Dinner was remarkably delicious homemade spaghetti sauce made from the garden tomatoes I’d canned two months ago, and then I headed off for a cello lesson. These are getting better, although I’m still having moments where I freeze up or can’t work through a small problem. My teacher had to remind me about things we’d worked on months ago — caterpillars, the little bounce in the shift that provides shock absorption so the shift doesn’t sound harsh — but for once my right hand was behaving. So now my focus is on smooth shifts, elegant ones, done at the same speed my bow hand is moving at instead of rushing the shift.

In Which She Rubs Her Eyes And Wonders Where The Time Went

Halloween tomorrow. I’m fine with that. It’s the fact that the next day is November that’s currently skewing my worldview.

I tend to journal about what excites or interests me, and I know I blog to primarily record things for myself rather than to entertain readers, but lately I feel that all I do is type out what we did on the weekend and post yarn stuff. I’d rather spin than write it all out. Although I should write it out; I should write it out differently than I’m doing, too, with more info about how/what I did so it’s there for me later. I’m taking notes in a notebook, but the online journal is where I go when I need to look back and see how I felt about it all. Ceri helped me figure out that if I journal about what interests and excites me that translates to my writing and entertains my readership regardless of what the subject is, which helped a lot. So now I don’t feel bad about rambling on and on about yarns and swatches and ratios.

(Also, if I journal more often instead of wibbling about boring people by nattering about fibre and posting pictures of yarn, then my posts won’t be unending screeds that sum up three or more days. There’s incentive. The longer the post, the longer it takes to write it up.)

On Tuesday Jan came by mid-afternoon, and we hit the yarn store then came home and knitted together for a little bit. Jan said something quite perceptive that I hadn’t considered before: decision-making takes up energy and effort, and if you work at home you’re self-directed, which means your entire day is composed of making decisions that you can’t hand off to a colleague or boss or underling. Add housework and meal prep and such to that, and no wonder I’m fried at the end of the day. She’s really good at laying things out in a sensible fashion so that I gain insight into my situation. She also brought us a chicken from her flock, butchered and skinned and frozen by her and t!, as a thank you for helping raise the coop this past spring. I’m looking forward to making a stew or something with it.

On Wednesday M. came over for our first rehearsal together of the Mozart duet we’re playing for the recital in December. Nothing like a practice session with your duet partner to emphasize that you’re really not as bad as you think you are. I sounded much better and steadier than I thought I did, with pretty good string crossings. This piece is all about waves and flow and steadiness, so I’m further along than I thought. There are still places that go ‘crunch’ so there is lots of room for improvement, but I felt a lot better about it than I did going in to the rehearsal. Orchestra that night wasn’t a compete disaster either: I got some of the harder bits but flaked out on the easier patches at the end of the Beethoven. I hate doing that. Just under one month till the fall concert, too.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a secondhand lazy kate extender and two bobbins for my spinning wheel listed for sale on an e-list. The price was unbeatable (everything plus shipping for the price of two new bobbins!) so I jumped on it, as I’ve been wanting more bobbins and a way to start making yarn with more than two plies. I sent the seller a money order and as of yesterday my new-to-me toys are officially on their way, and the seller wrapped them in a highly recyclable packing material… roving! Wow! I was looking forward to it before, but now I’m even more excited to see what kind of fibre is inside, and how it will spin up. The seller raises goats, so there may be some of that to be packing material, but no matter what I get I’ll be thrilled. Sometimes people are just wonderful, and I need to remember things like this to offset the overwhelming and ongoing evidence that humanity sucks. The parcel should arrive via UPS around the 11th of November.

I got the swatch pics of the two handspun knit samples up on Ravelry yesterday. It amuses me that the colours are inverted. (Also, go self-striping dye job!) This is why we swatch: The handspun n-ply for Gran looks smashing in the lace pattern on the left, and just kind of pained in the handspun scarf swatch on the right. Pics:

I tried swatching the handspun scarf pattern again on size 10s, but no, the yarn is just all wrong for the pattern. The swatch is stiff and a bit scratchy. I love the pattern, but it needs a fluffier, thicker yarn, possibly in earth tones. (What, me planning more spinning? Why would I do that?) So the lace pattern it is. I ran the yarn back through the ballwinder and it loosened up a bit as well as growing a bit softer; this is a trick I will remember for the future. (Surveying my Ravelry project list, I wonder when I became a lace knitter? Stupidly easy lace, but it’s lace all the same.)

The kerfuffle about needle size for this handspun scarf project (I don’t have size 8s; or I do, but it’s an Addi Turbo circular and I hate working with the Addis, I should sell them; I have size 8 Harmony tips but both cables are being used; what happens if I use my size 6 needles, oh, ick; what’s the next size I have close to 8s, the circular 10s? those don’t work either, argh) made me realise that while I can theoretically just go out and buy the confirmed size of needles I need for projects as they arise, it’s rather stressful for swatching to determine the correct size required when one does not yet have the needles, and now holds up the entire yarn production process until I can swatch to figure out how to finish plying the yarn. This led me to remembering that once Halloween is over there will be family members asking me what I want for Yule, which then led to exploring what equipment for knitting/spinning I don’t have and want. First up were needles, because if the project doesn’t call for 10s, 8s, or 4s I’m pretty sunk. So I checked KnitPicks and lo and behold, the sets of Harmony needles I love to work with are on sale till 4th January 2010! And as I need both a set of 10″ straights and a set of interchangeable circular tips and cables, I’m putting both on my list. If I don’t get them for Yule I’m buying them myself because that price is astonishing. (The straight set works out to less than $7 per pair, and they’re incredibly good needles.)

And this got me to thinking about what kind of yarn I want to work on. More plies theoretically mean thinner singles, and to make a thinner single one needs to use the highest speed whorl on one’s bobbin, slow take-up, and treadle faster to get as much twist into the thinly drafted fibre as possible. The highest speed ratio on my wheel is 10.5 revolutions of the bobbin to one revolution of the drive wheel. Now, that’s not bad, but it can be done faster, and Louet makes a high-speed bobbin with a highest speed of 15.1:1. So I pinged my eternally helpful local yarn store Ariadne Knits to ask about the high-speed flyer/bobbin set, and it looks like it’s almost $300. So I have quashed that plan. The high-speed flyer looks identical to the basic flyer with a 3/8″ orifice instead of the 1/2″ one my wheel has, and the set looks like it comes with the high-speed fatcore bobbins, which are twenty dollars more expensive than the regular high-speed bobbins (which sell for same price as the basic bobbins). Twenty dollars for a clear plastic tube that goes around the bobbin shaft to enlarge the core? I don’t think so. I’ll get a plain high-speed bobbin to test out, and use the trick I found online: I’ll slip some foam pipe insulation over the regular highspeed core to make it an instant fatcore. (In case you’re wondering, the fatter core reduces strain on the fine yarn being wrapped around it and reduces the chance of it snapping. We’re talking some pretty fine thread-like yarn, here.)

So yes, I am looking at making finer yarns, because I seem to have somehow become a lace knitter (or so the current lineup of works in progress on my Ravelry page would suggest), and an increasing number of my friends are getting into knitting socks. So what did I do last night instead of putting myself to bed where I could read until I fell asleep? I pulled out a half-ounce of fibre to see how thinly I could spin it. I removed the brake band entirely, set the drive band on the smallest whorl, and treadled relatively quickly while drafting out about five fibres from the narrow strip I tore off the combed top. The idea is to let the yarn sit and gather as much twist as possible before allowing it to wind onto the bobbin so the yarn doesn’t just drift apart when you pull on it, but not for so long that it overtwists and starts kinking back on itself. It took about an hour to do an sixteenth of an ounce, but I did it. (No wonder people use higher-ratio bobbins to increase production speed; at this rate it would take forever to spin enough for something like a shawl.)

I may continue it today, just for kicks, in between drafting the programme notes for the upcoming fall concert.

And remember: The clocks go back between Saturday night and Sunday morning! So when you come home from trick or treating, or your Samhain ritual, or whatever party you’ve attended (or, you know, when you just turn out your light at the end of a perfectly unusual evening) don’t forget to reset your clocks.

Weekend Roundup

An excellent cello lesson always begins the weekend nicely. Things have improved over the past couple of weeks, which is great, but I’m still a month behind where I ought to be. The six-week breakdown of technique while my subconscious implemented the new lesson stuff really crippled my progress in orchestra.

I got home to find the boys still in pyjamas watching a movie. An hour or so later the boy went to his room to get dressed and closed the door, and an hour after that it was lunchtime, so HRH went to get him and found him still sitting on his bed with his clothes next to him. HRH was a bit miffed, especially as we’ve been having trouble lately with the boy focusing on getting dressed so we’ve been working on it. Then he discovered that the boy’s general body temperature was warmer than usual, so I took his temperature and discovered that yes, he had a fever. He said he didn’t want lunch, just wanted to curl up in bed, so it was Tylenol and an early nap for him, which lasted three hours. He watched another movie once he woke up, had a bit of pasta for dinner, then went right to bed and proceeded to sleep hard. He was awake when I checked on him around 3:30 AM and the fever was really high, so I gave him the last of the Tylenol and cuddled him. He asked to come to our bed instead and I said yes, so we curled up there and he actually slept. Overall he got about twelve hours, and when he awoke at 7:30 the fever had broken completely. Other than the fever there were no symptoms, although we kept a very close eye on him all weekend. I’m not overly concerned, as this is how HRH’s body handles some illnesses too: the body ratchets up the temperature and burns whatever it is right out over a day. Still, it meant that we couldn’t in good conscience send him to his monthly Pagan playgroup meeting on Sunday morning, which was sad because it was to be a costume party with games and treats. But he was very good about it, saying, “I don’t want to give my fever to my friends at Magick Stars!” It also gives me a couple more days to finish his costume. (A good thing, as on Saturday when we were trying the different bits on him to adjust and size them, he accidentally got stuck with a pin that was in his cloak and howled. He went from “Can I wear my costume all day?” to “I want to take this off right now!” I know a lot of that was his fever and under-the-weatherness. I wouldn’t have been able to finish in time anyway. ) As of this morning he was over twenty-four hours symptom-free, so off to school he went.

Over the weekend I spun up 130 yards of chain-plied sport-weight Corriedale with which to knit a scarf for my Gran. I space-dyed half of the fibre in two shades of yellow and left the other half natural, and alternated a strip of the coloured fibre with a strip of the natural. My second batch of dyed fibre was a bit more intense than the first so with most of that I spun from a strip of the dyed and undyed fibre simultaneously to tone down the yellow a bit. I was envisioning something a bit less saturated than this, but I’m sure it will knit up just fine. (I called the colourway Buttercups & Daisies on a whim last night. While photographing it this morning I saw that the colours also remind me of sweet corn on the cob when you’ve just husked it, but that’s a bit less poetic.) Also, my grandmother will be bowled over by the fact that I dyed, spun, and then knit my own yarn into a gift for her no matter what I give her, so the lack of perfect colour match to what was in my mind isn’t a deal breaker. We photographed each step so that I can make a little album with captions outlining each step to wrap up along with the scarf come Yuletide, so she can see how it started from plain fibre, went through the dyeing and spinning process, and then the knitting.

And the weekend ended with a fabulous installment of our steampunquian horror game, where Things Were Revealed and the Bad Guy Was Vanquished (for now?), and there was dramatic character fallout. This marks the end of the first story arc after twelve months of playing one session per month; we have voted to continue, and I’m glad. It’s a good world, the party is very well-balanced with excellent characters, and the story is grand. The company is pretty stellar, too.

Ahead this week: The next freelance project (the last report was accepted and approved within half an hour of submitting it on Thursday, woo!), cello work, and I should start knitting some of the things I’ve spun yarn for. I have a yarn shop date with Jan on Tuesday afternoon (not that I can buy anything at the moment, so it will be a recon and perhaps a special-ordering of new fibre for more Yule gifts mission), my bi-weekly anime evening with Marc on Tuesday night, a cello session with M on Wednesday afternoon, and whatever else comes up along the way. There’s a story or a book lurking in deep subconscious, but all I know is that it’s lurking. Now and again I get a murky idea of a phrase or a character, but it’s at the frustrating phase of brewing without tangible development or even clear recognition.

Also, tonight I roast a chicken. I think I’ll roast diced potatoes, cauliflower, parsnips, and some more of the garden carrots with it. I would have done the chicken yesterday but it wasn’t defrosted in time, so instead I made beef stew, and tiny bite-sized apple pies with half of the leftover apples from the apple-picking session a month ago. I made a half-yield of a pastry recipe but it wasn’t enough for the apples I’d prepped, so I dug in the chest freezer and found six mini tart shells left over from something and used those, too. The tarts were thoroughly approved of by the gaming group and our babysitter. (The other half of the remaining apples got made into applesauce.)

To work!