Category Archives: Books

Weekend Roundup, Birthday Edition

What a lovely weekend!

Saturday HRH went over to his parents’ house and helped his dad build the new back deck until they got rained out. The boy and I lazed around the house all morning: he watched the fifth and final disc of the first season of the Animaniacs, while I read and surfed online. HRH came home halfway through the boy’s nap once it had started to rain, and wow, did it ever rain for the rest of the day! We sat on the back doorstep and watched the wicked storms roll in, and when it began to be too wet back there we opened the front living room wall living room patio doors and sat there watching the rain pound the road and the huge maple tree whip around in the high winds. HRH had to go downstairs and rescue the garage from flooding, as the drain at the base of the driveway had blocked with dirt and maple keys. It was fabulous storm, and watching it was a lot of fun, too. At one point the thunder rolled and Liam clapped, then said, “That’s the big man in the sky with his hammer!” HRH turned to me and said with deep satisfaction, “My place in Valhalla is now assured.” The storm’s damage was impressive, including flooded highways that created miserable traffic problems that we saw but fortunately didn’t have to deal with, as we drove in the opposite direction that night.

HRH’s parents arrived at five, and I opened my birthday gifts from both sets of parents because the boy was nearly beside himself with excitement wondering what was in them. My parents had given me a copy of The Cello Suites (the recent book by a Montreal journalist, not a recording, because I have at least three four five of the latter) and a fabulous tiny micro-grater, while HRH’s parents gave me a lovely candle and money to put toward whatever I liked. Then HRH and I headed out to meet Ceri and Scott for a sushi dinner that had been planned for about four months. We ate fabulously delicious sushi, and then discussed the merits of moving on to a place like Rockaberry’s for dessert versus returning to their place to play Rock Band. The discussion didn’t last long: Rock Band it was! We played for a good couple of hours and then drove home in yet another storm in order to release HRH’s parents from babysitting the boy, so they could go home before the storm got any worse.

Sunday morning they tried to let me sleep in but the boy was too excited about the day. “Do you know what your presents are? Will they be surprises?” he kept sneaking in to my room to whisper. We went back to HRH’s parents’ house so HRH could help his dad finish the deck that had been rained out the day before, and the boy, his Grandma and I went out to pick up groceries. Once back home, the boy napped while HRH went out to pick up ice and my not-so-secret-by-that-point birthday present, and I made a Thai noodle salad for the small birthday picnic I’d planned.

One of the intangible birthday gifts I received came during my weekly phone call with my mother. My parents had flown out to Vancouver to visit with my grandmother last week, while they were there they took Gran out to the library. They set her up at a computer, put a set of headphones on her, and my dad cued up the URLs to some of the videos taken at the Canada Day concert. It didn’t quite sink in for her until my dad moved the cursor to point at me in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, at which point she exclaimed quite loudly (she is rather deaf and had headphones on, after all). Fortunately, the people around her in the library were amused rather than upset. Mum says Gran was quite overcome and couldn’t stop talking about it. “I knew she was in an orchestra, but I had no idea it was like that,” she apparently said. I’m just thrilled that she finally got a chance to see and hear a concert, and I’m especially pleased that it was this particular performance. One of the ideas behind the MiniDisc player was to send her some sort of recording, but she doesn’t have a CD player or a computer, and I have no way to record it into cassettes (if she even has a cassette deck any more), and as we saw on Canada Day, the MiniDisc may not be capable of handling the level of music produced by the orchestra. The video was a much more personal way of sharing it with her. So once again, I’m thankful that the HD video was made.

We packed for the picnic, and on the way to the park we stopped to pick up balloons, as the boy says all birthdays require balloons. Unfortunately, the wind was so strong that half an hour after we arrived they were tugged loose from the picnic backpack to which we’d attached them, and they rose to tangle in the branches of the huge poplar tree under which we sat. It was pretty, but not as pretty as having them right there with us, and rather put paid to my plan of sending them home with the kids in attendance. Everyone had made some kind of salad to share, which was terribly amusing, but they were all very different: pasta salad, strawberry/walnut/spinach salad, two-potato and corn salad, my Thai noodle salad, and I think I’m missing one. It was a light and refreshing meal. I didn’t bake a cake this year; instead, we’d bought one that morning that was nice and light and not too sweet. There were nine adults and three kids, which made for a small and relaxed group. Pasley, Jeff and the girls gave me a lovely amber-coloured beaded necklace with a photo pendant of an owl on it (and a moon on the other side!) and a set of earrings to match, and Devon drew me a really excellent card of me playing my cello.

We wrapped everything up around six, and came home. I played with the iPod Touch that HRH and Meallanmouse had given me and thanks to the free wifi network nearby downloaded a couple of free apps (Twitterrific and Stanza being the ones I am the most excited about) and then several free e-books. (A Room With a View! Howards End! Persuasion! Sense & Sensibility! Pride & Prejudice! Jane Eyre! The Prisoner of Zenda! And just to blow the curve, His Majesty’s Dragon!) Now I have lots of my favourite books with me all the time, and I will never be caught without something to read again. This makes me disgustingly gleeful, and also smug. I can’t get over how crisp and clear the screen is, how easy it is to read on it, and how accurate the on-screen keyboard is. Liam wandered into my office after his nap yesterday and said, “What’s that?” “It’s, um, like a little computer that plays music and I can read books on it, too,” I said. He climbed on my lap and watched me tap my way through some things, then asked if he could try it. I pulled up Notes for him and said, “Why don’t you try typing your name?” He hunted and pecked, and again I was amazed at how accurate the keyboard was, even for preschool fingers. He slipped off my lap and left my office with the Touch, saying, “I’ll bring this back to you when I’m finished with it.” I found him in the living room typing things. He’d figured out that if he turned it so that the screen was landscape instead of portrait, the keyboard enlarged. He’d also found something that made a terrible buzzing sound, so I rescued it before he could do something irreparable to it. The Touch is currently decked out in the cartoon skulls and bones skin that Meallanmouse had on it, which amuses me because it is so cute and so punk at the same time. “Does the Touch have a name yet?” Ceri asked me this morning. “At the moment it is called the YAY NEW TOY, all in caps,” I replied.

The boy developed a cold last Thursday evening, which means he got it at school at the beginning of last week. It’s not bad, but I have it now too, of course. Which, apart from the sad loss of the lovely balloons, was the only down side to the weekend. Well, I would have liked to have seen HRH some more, but we did get out on Saturday night, and that was absolutely wonderful. And tonight’s meeting has been cancelled, so perhaps we will be able to play some more Rock Band together. (It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one to know that I hold the bass like a cello because it’s easier on my hands and arms. This is fine in the Wii version because the upright position triggers overdrive as soon as the option is available, but the Xbox wants me to move the bass to trigger it and won’t recognise the left/down motion I make or the return to upright, so all that lovely energy was wasted. Scott told me to use the Select button, which works very well instead, except I need to time it properly so I don’t start missing notes.)

So all in all, the birthday weekend was very pleasant indeed. It was relatively low-key, and I have a new toy whose code name is YAY NEW TOY, and there is a piece of cake left in the fridge for me. I have a pile of new music by The Donnas, courtesy of Ceri, to speed me along my day of work. And my birthday celebration continues throughout the week, what with the Mac Mini appointment Tuesday night, and my local family birthday dinner this coming Saturday night!

Holiday Roundup, With Bonus Today Stuff

All right; my work for the day is done. I have read and written a two-paragraph endorsement of a book coming out this fall, and it’s just as well I didn’t bring it with me; it was mostly correspondences and such, so I needed to do it all in one go to get a feel for the overall book. (And I’ve just been informed that as a thank you, I’m getting a copy of the bound book when it comes out this fall; how nice of them!) Things got off to an early start, what with me getting up at 3:45 AM (hello, insomnia, I have not missed you, and just because I slept an average of four hours each of the past four nights does not mean it’s a pattern that ought to be perpetuated), so I didn’t have to drag myself awake for a couple of hours when the boys left. Also, I ate lunch at 10:30, so I kept being surprised that it was only noon or whatever when I checked later.

Today I got a secondhand book in the post, then a postal truck arrived and gave me my order of Vienna Teng CDs, and just now a second postal truck came by with a different driver, to give me yet another secondhand book. I suspect this is what inefficiency looks like.

Right, so, here it is, the highlight reel of our week away:

SUNDAY we drove to Toronto. The six-hour stretch between these cities is without doubt the most boring stretch of highway in the country. It is flat. It is straight. It is dull. But the drive went relatively well, except for getting off the 401 at Whitby to get to the 407 instead of Ajax. Yeah, we won’t be doing that again. See, despite the little 407 toll route! signs at the exit we took, the 407 doesn’t actually start in Whitby. Lying little signs. You have to take the tiny you-call-this-a-highway 7 to get to it, after driving north on Brock for about half an hour. Which kind of undercuts the whole idea of saving time idea. Anyway, the 407 is a beautiful highway, and traffic-free. Traffic free = stress free. Sure, we pay about $20 to drive almost its entire length, but as we do it only two or three times a year, it’s totally worth it. It saves about 45 minutes, and avoids lots of sitting in traffic, construction, and crankiness.

MONDAY we puttered around. Can’t remember doing anything spectacular, really. We went to the used kids’ clothing store in the morning and found new shorts for the boy, which he sorely needed, and a couple of new books, one of which was a Transformers reader. Wandered aimlessly at the bookstore; there’s nothing out that I want, really, or perhaps more correctly nothing I will spend $10 on when I know I’ll read it in ninety minutes. The boy splashed around in his wading pool for about two hours. And by ‘splashed’ I really mean ‘ran at it and took flying dives into it.’ Those are HRH’s genes, thank you very much.

TUESDAY was the family gathering. There were eleven of us: HRH and myself, my parents, the boy, my cousin and his wife, their three-year-old daughter, their ten-day old new baby girl, my aunt (aka my cousin’s mom and my mother’s sister) and my cousin’s mother-in-law over from Japan. I think that was everyone. Oh, we ate. We always eat when family get together. There was cheese and fruit before dinner, and grilled flank with potatoes and cold orzo-grilled veggie salad, and green beans. Dessert was two huge crystal bowls of torn up angel food cake, piled with fresh local strawberries, and further piled with freshly whipped cream. I had both kids on the floor of the kitchen helping me make these, spooning berries over the piles of cake, then trying to spoon the cream on top, but it kept sticking to the spoons so they got it all over their hands. Everyone had two servings, so it’s a good thing we made tonnes of it. It was so light, though; it felt like you were eating air.

WEDNESDAY morning Mum and I went out to Spun Fibre Arts in Burlington to check it out. They have a lovely selection. I went to see what spinning wheels they had in stock, but the owner wasn’t there to demonstrate them. They had the Schacht Ladybug and a Louet Victoria there, and while I’ve heard the Ladybug is more versatile, I was really impressed by the Victoria’s smoothness. After the boy’s nap we went to visit Granddad at the Canadian Warcraft Heritage Museum so the boy could run around among the priceless and irreplaceable airplanes. It was nice and quiet, so my father offered to let HRH crawl around inside one of the only two operational Lancasters in the world. Yeah. HRH was totally blown away. The boy got his kicks sitting in the Fleet and the CF-100, showing me how the sticks still moved the flaps. On the way out we hit the gift shop and the boy chose a really well-done metal toy of the Lanc, and HRH bought a CAF shirt for himself and one for the boy.

THURSDAY we went downtown to the ROM, to see the dinosaurs. I adore the ROM, and this was my first opportunity to see the new pavilion. The natural history exhibits have been installed in this new section, and it all suits very well. You can’t do the entire ROM in one day (well, maybe some can) and I really missed not being able to go through the textiles and the many cultural galleries. We promised the boy he could pick something out at the gift shop of this museum too, and he chose a dinosaur egg, one of those things you put in water and it dissolves/cracks while the dinosaur inside ‘grows.’ It was put in a jar of water pretty much as soon as we got home. We had planned to split up at lunchtime, the boys to have sausages from the cart on the corner, and Mum and I to Remenyi to check for an orchestral tuner. And we did, except the major deviation from the plan was the spectacular thunder and lightning storm we walked out into, totally unexpected after the bright, clear, hot day we’d started with. Mum and I got drenched going across the street, and the boys dashed to the cart and back to shelter to eat their lunches. In the end, Remenyi didn’t have an orchestral tuner, I wasn’t going to buy the very excellently designed and priced cello case I saw without testing it for fit, and we missed the GO train heading back to Oakville. Because yes, we took the GO train to town, and then the subway to the museum, which thrilled the boy to no end because it meant four train rides. We ended up sitting at Union Station for forty-five minutes waiting for the next train, but it wasn’t so bad; Mum and I shared a ham/cheese/tomato bagel sandwich, then we wandered over to the Second Cup where she got tea and I had a delicious caramel steamed milk, which I shared with the boy when it cooled enough. Mum and I entertained ourselves by rating the shoes and clothes we saw go by. People wear the oddest things. That night after the boy was in bed HRH took me out for a caramel latte at William’s Coffee Pub in Burlington, one of our favourite places for a date. (Yeah, we don’t get out much.) To my delight they do decaf lattes. Next time I may go wild and have a mocha, although I love the flavour of the caramel lattes and the balance between the milk, the coffee, and the syrup drizzled on top. I also nipped into The Shoe Company ten minutes before they closed and scored the perfect pair of black leather mules by Liz Claiborne for $60. I have been looking for these ideal shoes for about ten years. I win.

FRIDAY morning HRH and Dad went over to install a fan in a friend’s house, while Mum, the boy and I went out to look at netbooks and do some grocery shopping. We hit HMV because Mum was looking for a Great Big Sea album (which wasn’t in stock, of course, because it isn’t new but not old enough to qualify for the 2 for whatever price promotion), but I picked up the first season of the original Transformers TV show for the boy, who is thoroughly delighted with it. That afternoon his grandparents took him out to visit the local trainyard, where he happily watched engines shunting things all over. An engineer came down out of a diesel locomotive and gave him a CN ballcap, which sent to boy right over the moon. Then they went out for gelato, as did HRH and I, although we went to two different places. Forget ice cream; gelato is where it’s at. (Two dates in two days!) There was perfectly grilled salmon for dinner, brushed with maple syrup and a touch of soya sauce.

SATURDAY we came home. The boy woke me up by gently waving something wet and squishy in my face and saying tenderly, “Look, Mama, I helped it be borned!” The little dinosaur egg had finally crumbled enough and the dinosaur’s foam tail and feet were far enough out that he just couldn’t wait any more. Under HRH’s supervision the jar was opened, the water decanted, and the remaining bits of ‘eggshell’ pulled off. It took him a while going through his dinosaur books in the car on the way home, but we identified it as a chubby little dimetrodon. It was a good trip home, too. I like this travelling on non-holiday weekends thing.

While away, I read In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan, A Matter of Justice by Charles Todd, Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi, and then I finished Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro and The City & The City by China Mieville the night we got home.

There. Caught up. As usual, it’s nowhere what I wanted it to be, because I’ve already forgotten the little things that made each day special.

I’m going to go read now. I can’t decide if I want to drink a beer or a latte from a packet. To heck with it: red wine it is.

What I Read In May 2009

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult
Mercy by Jodi Picoult
Alex and the Ironic Gentleman by Adrienne Kress
Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd
Mountain Solo by Jeanette Ingold (reread)
The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith
Babyproof by Emily Giffin
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente
The River King by Alice Hoffman
Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs
Drood by Dan Simmons
The Beekeeper’s Pupil by Sara George
Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin
Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

I never know whether or not to include the chapter books the boy and I read together. If I did, the four Catwings books by Ursula K. LeGuin would be on the list, too. (Rereads for me, first-times for him.)

Thoughts:

The Children’s Book was wonderful for about three-quarters, then took a turn into the political environment leading up to and during WWI that didn’t interest me as much. I admit that I skimmed those parts until I got back to the actual character storyline. So I won’t own it in hardcover, but will absolutely pick up a paperback copy next year.

I couldn’t get into Something Borrowed at all and gave up on it a third of the way through. There was something about the pacing and the characters that just didn’t sit well. But Babyproof got me from page one. Go figure.

The Servants: Very nicely written; subtle, not beaten into the reader’s head. No time wasted explaining how all this was happening. Also, eleven-year-old protagonist. Rare. Usually older or younger. Good age.

Drood was huge and really well-done. I want to say more but can’t quite formulate it.

Holiday Weekend Roundup

Victoria Day Weekend is generally planting weekend around here. We’re more concerned with getting things into the ground than being able to wear white again without offending traditional fashion rules. It’s generally planting weekend because (a) it’s a long weekend, (b) theoretically it’s warm enough that night frosts are over, and (c) because we say so. And so of course, Saturday it poured rain, and Sunday was rainshowery and overcast and downright cold; both days saw really high winds. And the temperature, flouting Victoria Day decree, went within four degrees of freezing at night and only barely made it to 10 C during the day.

So our original plans for all-out gardening were put on hold and we did small dashes when we could. Saturday morning we went out and picked up fourteen bags of black earth to add to the beds, and four double flats of cosmos for the front garden. The boys put the cosmos in while I hid in a dark bedroom, trying to deal with a migraine. On Sunday HRH went out and got four double flats of pansies to line the front garden and scatter through the back garden. On Monday afternoon we went out and picked up twenty-four tomato seedlings, lots of mixed lettuce greens, and seed packets of green onions, carrots, cucumber, peas, and poppies. The boys planted all of that (except the poppies) while I made dinner. Monday afternoon was really the nicest weather of the entire long weekend, sunny and warm enough to leave off one’s jacket and garden in just a long-sleeved jersey.

That was the gardening component of the weekend. There was, of course, more. Saturday was dubbed the Day Of Baking. I made my first ever batch of homemade ice cream, from the recipe in the most recent issue of Fine Cooking, and froze it in a pan, beating it with a hand-held mixer once an hour. I did that three times, and it ended up beautifully creamy. (The original plan was to finally buy an ice-cream maker, but the only one I found was too expensive. Bah; who needs a machine?) I also baked the most incredibly brownie-like cookies to use in making ice cream sandwiches. The first tray didn’t spread as much as I’d hoped, so I pressed the second batch down to be thinner, and those worked better. I had five egg whites left over, so I made meringues, and if I haven’t said it enough, I love my stand mixer: I set it up to beat the egg whites and sugar and walked away for ten minutes. When I came back it was so think I could spoon some up and throw it on the pan, and it would keep its shape. Incredible! I had to bake them twice, though, because it was so damp on Saturday they kept going sticky. I left them in the cool oven overnight instead of a container, then baked them the second time for three hours at 100 F, to thoroughly dry them. It worked, too; they were light and crunchy all the way through.

Victoria Day itself was a beautiful, sunny day, most welcome after the rainy overcast days of Saturday and Sunday. We visited Ceri and Scott for lunch, and ate delicious gourmet burgers and grilled veggies done on the barbecue. Dessert was sandwiches made from my ice cream and chocolate cookies, with meringues to follow. It was absolutely wonderful. Ceri and Scott also sent us home with a small slide they’d found behind their shed, which fits perfectly within the space on the swingset that used to house the odd glider/seesaw thing we took down. Liam is over the moon.

For those who want to know the outcome of the dramatically bad manuscript evaluation I had to do, I kept slogging and handed something in with a note explaining the drastic shortcomings and the lack of examples that are usually required to demonstrate problems that need to be addressed. (Hard to prove a negative regarding plot or characterization when you can’t find any.) The department got back to me with kudos for handling a hopeless case and said they understood how hard it must have been, and thanked me for sticking to it and for being as encouraging as I had been. Result: warm fuzzy feeling. Go me.

I really had a tough time dealing with this. As an author, I know what it’s like to get an editorial letter. Even though these evaluations are anonymous, I felt like I was slaughtering this author’s hopes and dreams. A couple of writer friends, one of whom also copyedits, pointed out that part of a writer’s job is receiving criticism and applying it to improve the product, just as part of the editor’s responsibility is to critique in order to elicit a stronger product. Neither are enjoyable one hundred percent of the time, but we both have to perform our duties to the best of our abilities. We owe it to ourselves, to one another, and to the product. While I wasn’t functioning as a traditional editor in this instance, I was responsible to pointing out weaknesses and errors in order to ascertain what level of editing was required to bring it to publishable standard. And when I have to say that the writing is of such a low quality that I can’t find the story the author is trying to tell, well, I get downright miserable, because that’s not news I ever want to have to tell someone.

Let’s see, what else? I finished reading Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest; a most beautifully written book. And I finally began The Children’s Book, the new book by A.S. Byatt. I hadn’t known a new one was out until I saw it on the new release shelf at the library two weeks ago. It’s gorgeous; I will own it. Possibly even in hardcover. And HRH and I finally saw the fourth Indiana Jones movie, which was not as abysmal as the world said it was when it came out. Yes, it was flawed, and yes, there were things I would have changed about it, but it wasn’t the travesty we’d been led to believe it was.

Right; on to the day. I have a new freelance assignment, and there is cello in my future, both practise and a duet lesson tonight. Recital on Sunday! Five days!

Trees, People, Cello

Or, What My Weekend Was Like, By Me.

Saturday we trekked out to the wilds of North Stormont/Maxville to help t! and Jan dig and plant their orchard. A dozen heritage apples and other fruit trees were planted, each assigned to a different pagan friend. Everyone was invited to bless the tree they planted in whatever way they felt drawn to do so. Some blessings were elaborate; some were quiet; all were blessed with sweat and laughter. Despite assurances otherwise (and here absolutely NO ONE looks at HRH, no) it, well, it poured rain. (Except when HRH planted his tree. Ahem.) I’m a fan of rain, and it wasn’t even cold, but having trekked around after a wiggly four year old for a couple of hours and trying to keep him focused during the cumulatively long first half of the orchard, eventually agreeing to hold him on my hip while he snuggled his very wet head into my neck, took its toll on me. My blessing ended up being rushed because the boy decided he needed to use the bathroom again and we got back right when it was my turn. In the end I did nothing like what I’d prepared and pretty much just shoved the tree in the ground and told those with spades to fill the hole in. I had prepared a charged pebble that I tossed into the hole, though, and I’d brought a bottle of water blended from some Chalice Well water a friend had brought back from Glastonbury for me and a small vial of water blessed and charged at the last BFC Clan Camping I’d attended in 2004, which I poured on the ground once it was planted.

The boy’s tree was next, and he tossed his pebble into the hole. We reminded him that there was something he wanted to sing, so he announced that he had a special song to sing for his tree. “It’s a song we sing at school, and it is my favourite, and it’s about something that is under the water, and yellow,” he informed those gathered. HRH and I tried hard not to laugh as people realized what he meant, and I reminded him that no, he hadn’t planned to sing ‘Yellow Submarine,’ there was another song he’d been singing at home. So we chanted “Up and down, and sky and ground” together while those with spades filled the hole and covered the roots. It was pretty special. Then he stood looking at the base of the tree for a while as everyone collected themselves to move on to the next hole. I’m not sure if he was a bit sad that he hadn’t been able to sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ to his tree, or if he was thinking about how he’d just planted a real tree. He didn’t seem upset, just thoughtful.

As Janice planted her rowan, the first in the orchard, she named the tree Rowan Tree Farm, which feels entirely appropriate.

That night, while the boy ate a late dinner of a grilled cheese sandwich, he said, “Mama, what was your favourite part of the day?” I thought about it and said, “After we had planted all the trees and went back inside, and we’d all changed into our dry clothes, and we all had drinks and pie, and looked around and enjoyed being with our dear friends after sharing something special.” He then asked his father the same question. When I asked him what his favourite part of the day was, he said thoughtfully, “I loved meeting the dog named Carter and petting him and not hurting his leg.” (Carter, the resident year-old collie/husky/shepherd mix, has had a bad run of luck with his right foreleg, and it is splinted.) Carter’s a big dog, loves people, and is currently sporting the latest in Elizabethan collars so he doesn’t gnaw at the leg, but none of this bothered Liam; he was completely in love with the dog and very careful not to knock the splint. As I was useless with the digging part of the day (thanks, fibro) I spent some time with Carter on a leash along the edge of the field so t! could get some work done, and the dog is definitely personable. I quite enjoyed his company.

Also at dinner, Liam said, “I like Amanda.” (Amanda, whom I have known since I was about eleven, had been a passenger in our car there and back.) And then, completely out of the blue, he said something I’d never heard him say before: “When I’m bigger, I’m going to marry her.” We suspect that her admiration of Blackie and her willingness to get down on the floor and play trucks with him led him to this momentous decision.

Sunday morning I was in a lot of pain, as I’d expected; one doesn’t walk around in an uneven field holding a drenched preschooler and expect to escape unscathed. By the time my in-laws arrived for the Mother’s Day brunch we hosted I was at least functional, though. Savoury quiche, waffles, sausages, piles of fruit, salad, and mimosas. Mmm. The boy began crashing just before noon, so both he and I had a lie-down. He slept for two and a half hours (not surprising given the expected lack of nap the day before) but a rude interruption by an arrogant Hydro rep at our door ruined my chance for rest. I then went off to our monthly group cello lesson after picking a dozen of the tulips from along the side of the house for my cello teacher. Great lesson prepping for the recital in two weeks, but alas, it seems as if we will be cutting my beloved “Ave Verum Corpus,” a hesitant announcement that made all three of us doing the top melody very sad. It’s being bumped to the Christmas recital, and I fully understand why; it needs more work so that all four voices move confidently at the same time, and as the lower voices don’t feel the melody the way we do they’re not as sure about where to move, or even how they’re supposed to sound like against the other parts. But I am sad indeed.

And then last night I finished reading Dan Simmons’ very excellent Drood.

That was my weekend. The end.

Mysteries

Why is my copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood not shelved with my other Dickens novels?

And why are there still no potato chips in this house?

LATER: The day has gone from “Why are no potato chips?” to “Why is there no red wine in the house?” Yes, it’s that kind of working day.