Category Archives: Books

Nowell!

A lovely, lovely carol singalong tonight with the Preston-LeBlancs, marred only by the boy’s meltdown when it got to be an hour past his bed time (first because he wanted to go home, then because he wanted to stay). We did get there later than I wanted to, because the boys got home later than I expected, but we had a wonderful time when we settled down at last. We had a lovely buffet of hot hors d’oeuvres and cheese and nummy little things, and drinks, and opened presents before turning to the music. Both sets of children were enchanted with their respective gifts, and other than the same CD we exchange every year (no, it’s not like regifting fruitcake; every year we buy one another a specific CD so we both have a copy), they gave me a print of one of my favourite Waterhouse paintings, St. Cecelia, which positively glowed in its heavy gilt frame when we saw it in person last month at the MMFA exhibition. The reproduction is surprisingly good, much better than most of those done of Waterhouse’s other works.

We were a guitar, a recorder, and a cello, each sightreading; always interesting! The adults gamely improvised Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman for the kids, and we had lovely versions of Away in a Manger and Silent Night, and courageous attempts at other carols. The boy squeezed in between my oldest goddaughter and myself and we sang Silent Night together (this version was all open strings on the cello, so I didn’t need to actually read the music), the boy looking up at me with a smile and copying the shapes of my mouth to sing the sounds. With his quickness at absorbing music and words, it ought to be easy to familiarise him with the traditional carols like the Gloucestershire Carol, Coventry Carol, and the Holly and the Ivy. I foresee a proper Solstice mix CD next winter.

I love this tradition our godfamilies share. Most of us could have kept on playing for a good long time, but small persons have their limits. Next year, we’ll definitely do this on a weekend afternoon in order to have more time to actually play and sing, although there’s something special about doing it at night, with the midwinter darkness outside the snow-framed windows that reflect the twinkling lights on the tree.

We’ve been back for a couple of hours, but I’m still wide awake. I should make warm vanilla milk and curl up in bed with my current book, Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country. It’s a reread, as I am completely out of new books and have not had the opportunity to get to the library for a month. We are hitting the local Indigo a day or so after Christmas for their annual thirty percent off all hardcovers sale, and the new Charles de Lint will be mine. I’d buy the new Elizabeth Bear hardcover too, but none of the shops in that area have it in stock, for some reason. (Our local Chapters claims to have two in stock, but I looked for it when we were there last Saturday, and it wasn’t on the shelf in either the fantasy or SF sections. You fail yet again at matching stock and inventory, Chapters store 00794. I give up on you.)

Self-Defence

I just had to post something else, because looking at the last post was driving me crazy every time I opened my browser. I’m almost done the weekend roundup and the boy’s 54 mos post; I’m pecking at them and I’m kind of tired, and as the days go by I’m less interested in them, you know? This is why I try to journal ASAP.

Work news: Now that we’ve confirmed it, I am all backflippy to announce that I am doing the book design for Emily Wright‘s upcoming A Cellist’s Manual. I am thrilled to be working with Emily on this project, and to be working on a book about one of my main interests and areas of… er… I can’t call it expertise, but fifteen-years-of-familiarity doesn’t roll off the tongue too smoothly. Anywhats, yay for Emily, and yay for book design, and yay for working on a super awesome cool project!

Scarlet fever update: Still alive. Am I not infectious yet? Am I not infectious yet? Am I not infectious yet? How about now? Now? Maybe now?

Technology: Apart from discovering iChat and iDisk (thank you, Emily) I gave Google Chrome a whirl this morning. I am surprisingly impressed with the speed. Unfortunately the Mac version is only in beta and none of the extensions and add-ons function in it yet, so I’ve binned it for now because I cannot, cannot, cannot use the web without an ad blocker. The end.

Knitting: I played hooky yesterday because this project is going sooo slooowly. That’s because the yarn I’m knitting it with is terribly thin (mostly; it bulks up here and there and the unevenness is also preventing me from getting into a rhythm). Yes, that’s right; it’s going slowly so I didn’t work on it much yesterday. And yes, it has a Christmas deadline. I have never claimed to be logical.

Spinning: I spun up 2.5 oz of the packing fibre my bobbins and kate extender arrived in while knitting-avoiding and did my very first three-play yarn, huzzah! I chain-plied a leftover single and when the boy got home I had him help me mix up some purple dye to colour it, and he was very excited about dipping it in and putting it in the microwave and rinsing it afterward. It’s very purple indeed, and the boy loved the whole process.

Weather: Holy cats, it got cold fast. It was about minus thirty C last night. It was plus seven C about ten days ago. That’s kind of sudden. Above-average temperatures to way below-average temperatures; uh-huh. No climate change happening, my foot.

Holiday countdown: Two days till we pick up what few gifts we’re buying this year, groceries, and the first Yule celebration; three days till the local family Christmas celebration; five days till our godfamily Solstice sing-song and celebration; six days till we leave for Toronto; eight days till the other family Christmas. Which means that yes, I am doing a full Christmas dinner on Sunday. I have to keep reminding myself of this, because the rest of my brain is firmly convinced that I don’t need to worry about that sort of thing for a week.

There you are.

Now back to this freelance assignment, which I received last night, started this morning, and want done by the end of the day so it can be approved and I can include it in tomorrow’s invoice. (Why the rush? Because accounting saw fit to change the freelancers’ Dec 28 invoice deadline to a Dec 18 deadline. Grr. Also, I got all the material to start on Emily’s book this morning, and I want to be working on THAT, not THIS.) I need to think of something to make for dinner tonight, too.

Fifty-Four Months Old!

According to the doctor’s measurements this week, he is 39 pounds and one meter and 106 centimeters tall. That’s two pounds heavier and just about two inches taller than he was six months ago. He got to stay the afternoon with his old caregiver after the appointment and loved it.

The biggest news this month, bar none, is the reading. With no prompting, of his own initiative, he spelled out “trains”, “steam”, and “boxcar” from one of his train collector books, and then sounded them out himself. I’m ecstatic.

It’s been a big month for movies! He saw the second half of The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, The Castle in the Sky, and the latest The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But the biggest hit has been The Nightmare Before Christmas. He went to bed singing “Something’s up with Jack, something’s up with Jack” over and over. Also, I was patiently asked “Mama, would you please not sing?” so many times during the film that I lost count. I made a copy of the soundtrack to play in the car and I think HRH is sick of it already. But he sings bits of the songs all the time, including ‘Kidnap the Sandy Claws,’ which would make both t!’s and Tal’s hearts burst if they heard him. We had no worries about bad dreams if he watched it. He’s very imaginative and sensitive, but not the kind of sensitive that leaves him vulnerable to being scared at night. We can show him pretty much anything and he takes the fun away from it instead of the fear. I’m thankful for that, because he’s a voracious film watcher.

They’re going to officially begin eliminating the nap at preschool in the new year. This makes me sad, sadder than the reminders of how much he’s growing in the form of too-short pants and sleeves on shirts, shoes outgrown before they’re worn out, increasing dexterity with pencils and markers and other growing-up indicators. At school he’s down to a half hour at the most, although at home he’ll still sleep a solid hour and a half, and when he wakes up they move him to the library room where he sits for another hour quietly on his own, looking at books. “He just loves books,” his educators say, and we kind of smile and shrug a bit. When you’re surrounded by them, how can you not love them? Books have been an integral part of his life since the moment he was born. He’s never not known books, something for which I am deeply grateful. My parents gave me plaque that says, ‘Richer than I you can never be, I had a mother who read to me’ and it’s a truth. We are currently reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe one chapter before bed each night, and he’s staying quiet for it even though there are no pictures other than the chapter heading in the hardcover copy I’m reading from. I am so thrilled that we’ve reached this point.

He used to sleep on his side, but recently he’s begun sleeping like I do, on his back with his arms above his head. (I have no idea how I get that way; I fall asleep curled up on my side.) But sometimes an arm gets trapped underneath him, and twice now he’s woken up crying in the morning because he can’t feel an arm or hand, because they’ve fallen asleep. And then he cried because the pins and needles sting as the blood gets back into the affected area. A couple of weeks ago we were in the basement one evening and we heard a fitful cry over the baby monitor, a cry unlike anything we’d heard from him since he was a very tiny baby. Now, he never wakes up crying; no nightmares, nothing. So we hurried upstairs and he was still half-asleep, unable to move either of his hands and forearms because he’s somehow gotten them both trapped underneath him. I rubbed them till the pins and needles went away, and cuddled him back to sleep.

Apart from the Santa visit, the big thing this month has, of course, been SNOW! Again this year his educators are shaking their heads and saying they’ve never seen a child so in love with the snow. He rolls in it as soon as it starts falling, which of course leads to much washing of a muddy snowsuit. In the middle of the big storm we had this week he turned to his teacher and said, “Now? Now is it winter?” and she gave up on explaining the whole solstice thing and just said, “Yes, now it’s winter.” “Yay!” he said. “I love winter!” And when HRH got him out of bed the other day, he asked excitedly, “Dada, is it snowing again today?” HRH answered in the affirmative. “The snow likes me!” the boy sad happily. “No,” HRH said, somewhat wearily, “The snow loves you.”

What I Read in November 2009

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness by Nahoko Uehashi
Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella
Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong
The Blythes are Quoted by L.M. Montgomery
The White Garden by Stephanie Barron
Knit The Season by Kate Jacobs
Knit Two by Kate Jacobs
Never Learn Anything From History by Kate Beaton
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith
An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon
Ironside by Holly Black (reread)

I had deep things to say about a couple of these titles but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten my pearls of wisdom. I know; such a terrible loss. So the short form:

Leviathan: Utterly brilliant, and the first of a trilogy, which I did not know, and was left on a nasty cliffhanger at the end. Argh!

The Blythes Are Quoted: Definitely not The Road to Yesterday, the book cobbled together from bits of this, Montgomery’s last manuscript. This was sensitive, painful, and an interesting balance between Montgomery’s usual themes and storylines and unexpected ones.

Twenties Girl: I wasn’t impressed with the last couple of Kinsellas I read (the latter half of the Shopaholic series), so this was a very pleasant surprise. It had a plot! And characters I didn’t find completely vapid!

Knit the Season: Jacobs is getting more mileage out of Georgia now that she’s dead than she did when she was alive. This felt flat and kind of forced. Knit Two was a decent read, though not as good as the first in the series.

Never Learn Anything From History: Kate Beaton is a brilliant Canadian artist and humourist who produces history-based comic strips. Here, lose yourself in her website and her journal (the comic up at the time of writing is Sexy Tudors, which is a scream.) Chortle as you will. The Brontës shirt will be mine; oh yes, it will be mine. (And here’s the link to the original Dude Watchin’ with the Brontës comic because, well, just because.)

Monday

I know. I haven’t finished the boy’s monthly update, nor have I done the weekend roundup. They’re both energy-intensive, as was the weekend, and I don’t have any energy to spare at the moment. I worked all yesterday morning on a freelance assignment that was returned to me at the end of the day for revising (first time that’s happened to me in two years of working with this company) and then worked three hours on drafting a ritual that just about wiped me out from the amount of research and arranging and things like that. So, not so much with the journaling.

I finished Gran’s scarf on Sunday, though, and will share pictures with you:

As you can see, the striping was a bit more pronounced than I wanted it to be. (Note to self: Next time you want just a tiny bit of colour to show up here and there, spin the yarn first then dye just a spot or two instead of dyeing the fibre that then gets drafted and stretched out to cover even more area than you dyed.) The cast-on edge is a bit loose; I’m going to crochet a row or two along the edge to firm it up today.

So I overdyed it. I laid it out and used a squeeze bottle to apply a weak solution of the paler yellow dye (deliberately unevenly, thank you) to the white parts. This made for an overall variegated yellow scarf with touches of cream instead of a cream one with pale touches of yellow, but I’ll take it. It’s just kind of the photo negative of what I had originally planned. (This photo makes it look a bit green, but it’s not. It’s the colour of daffodils.)

In other non-related news, major library score last night: three new releases on my to-read list I didn’t know the library was even going to acquire (The Blythes are Quoted and The White Garden among them), two Kate Jacobs books, Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong, and the copy of A Forest of Hands and Teeth was actually on the shelf where it was supposed to be. I am a very happy reader.

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.