Category Archives: Music

The Thing Is…

… if you stick with something long enough, the bad parts usually get better.

Yes, orchestra rocked. Why would I drop something that challenges and rewards me? When it’s going badly it’s bad, but when it works, when everything comes together, it’s glorious. And I wouldn’t give that up.

Besides, Butterworth’s “The Banks of Green Willow” alone makes up for any frustration. (Including the frustrating passage of stormy strings a third of the way through where everything sounds like it’s falling apart, but is actually building before the absolutely gorgeous climax.) I’ve played some very pretty things, but I find this piece absolutely spectacular and it gets me every time. The transition in the middle is throat-clenchingly exquisite, and then the arrangement of the folk song at the end (the same one that Vaughn Williams used as the second movement of his Folk Song Suite, “The Bonny Boy”; Butterworth and Vaughn Williams were both interested in English folk songs, and Butterworth worked with Cecil Sharp to collect them) is gentle and ethereally beautiful in its simplicity.

I loved this piece even before I found out that Butterworth was killed in the First World War, after destroying the music he though unworthy of survival should he not return. His remaining catalogue is slim, and you can’t help but wonder what he destroyed, and what he might have composed had he lived through the war. Knowing it’s one of the few pieces that survived makes it all the more precious.

Weekend Roundup, Capricornucopia Edition: Sunday

Previously on the Weekend Roundup, Capricornucopia Edition: Friday and Saturday!

Together with t! and Jan, we figured out that we’d have to get up around 7:30 and start making breakfast at 8:00 in order for the rest of the day to run on time. As it was, we all kind of lingered in bed and got up around 8:00, but we only ended up running about fifteen minutes late (Although we got a bit later each time we had to pick someone up, which always happens; I just didn’t account for it in my schedule). We had waffles and sausages for breakfast, and then Jan and I picked up Daphne and Ceri and headed out to Karine’s place for our monthly Random Colour crafting meeting. Four of us even finished projects: Karine started and finished a birthday necklace for Daphne, Jan finished her socks, Ceri finished her mitten, and I finished Mum’s silk scarf at last! After a lunch of soup, salad, and brownies, I dropped people off at their respective homes and got back to hand the car off to HRH, who went and collected the boy from his grandparents’ house. The boy was overexcited and evidently really enjoyed his overnight. They set up a really quiet movie to watch, as it was a no-nap day, and I packed up my cello and music and drove to my monthly group lesson. It was the first one of the new year, and I love getting new music. We’re doing a lovely quartet arrangement of The Entertainer, a trio arrangement of Ashokan Farewell, and a quintet arrangement of a Corelli theme, and the sight-reading went pretty well in general. We finished by sight-reading some quartet and trio arrangements of some of the Suzuki material, trying them out to help our teacher decide what to programme.

And then after dinner, I had the incredible experience of actually scoring a Phat Fiber box on my very first try at one. It’s a monthly sample box coordinated by the Phat Fiber project, which showcases samples from indie dyers and sellers. There are three kinds of boxes: Fluff (mainly spinning fibre), Stitches (mainly yarn, patterns, and little accessories for knitters), and Mix (which is a selection from both). There’s only about fifty boxes per month, and competition for them is crazy. They go on sale in the Phat Fiber Etsy shop at a very specific time, and sell out within a minute. The only reason I remembered is because I checked my Ravelry forums late in the afternoon and saw the latest thread about the January box going on sale that day. I thought I’d missed it, but then realised that there’s a separate morning drop and afternoon drop for the boxes so as to make it fair for people in different time zones. So I sat here at 6:55 & reloaded till they came up at 7:00, and was absolutely stunned that I managed to get through the entire checkout process without losing the box from my cart to someone else with a faster Internet connection. My box is a Fluff box, of course, and I’m thrilled to be able to sample all sorts of different kinds of fibre in batts and roving braids and locks, lots of them blended with angelina or firestar for sparkle. The best thing is that every month has a different theme, and this month’s theme was For the Love of Books, so every sample will be inspired by a different book. This is the video preview of the January box, and I am so looking forward to getting the box in the mail and sorting through all the wonderful stuff inside! It’s a terrific way to try things out without committing to a large purchase form someone you don’t know, or to try something new you might not otherwise would have tried. And the best thing is that it’s only the price of a hardcover book. This was total beginner’s luck, and I’m still on the high of winning it.

Today: Finishing the cello manual layout and sending it off for approval; blocking Mum’s scarf; and that will take up the rest of my day, thank you very much. I’ve already handled a chunk of correspondence.

Weekend Roundup, Capricornucopia Edition: Friday and Saturday

This was a heavily scheduled weekend! It made for a long post, so I’m breaking it into two parts: this one (Friday and Saturday), and Sunday.

Going back into last week a bit, the layout of the cello manual is going very well, and it’s looking more and more like a real book. Today I get to finish photo sizing, adjusting placement, and adding captions, and then I have to look at the ordering of sections to maximize the use of the space available so that people don’t have to turn pages in the middle of an exercise or to compare the before/after kinds of photos.

The landlord is currently here, patching holes made by the plumber who had to come in to handle a leak last week. We averted disaster by moving things in the basement and setting up buckets and giant Tupperware storage containers underneath the buckling ceiling, because it was coming down at some point; the only question was when. Fortunately HRH got home in time to take a drill to the bending gyprock and drain it safely, and only our bathroom sink was out of commission (a pipe rusted through between the sink and the main drainpipe, so when the sink drained it flowed out a no-longer-existent join and poured right down inside the wall; fun).

We upgraded our ISP plan last week too, because we’re really being dinged for bandwidth use. We were looking at alternative to Sympatico, because my Sympatico address doesn’t work and hasn’t for a year; they claim it’s all right on their end and all the fixes we’ve tried on our own and via customer service have been useless. I’ve phased use of the address out, but there’s a SMTP issue as well that doesn’t allow me to use Sympatico server to send my domain e-mail since I switched to the Mac, but I’m phasing a lot of those out as well, so it’s less of an issue. We were more concerned about being charged a fee for change of service in the first year with a new company, as we’ll be moving to the south shore at some point, so when Sympatico confirmed that an upgrade wouldn’t be considered a new plan, we decided it was easier. The new wireless modem we ordered to go with it arrived on Friday but I haven’t set it up yet, figuring that if something goes wrong I’ll want it to happen after I’ve finished the layout on the cello manual and sent it to Emily for approval today. So the modem switch currently scheduled for tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to being able to use my laptop in bed, and the Touch anywhere in the house.

And last but not least, also on Friday we got the appointment to register the boy in kindergarten at the school right around the corner from his current preschool, and if the stars align his teacher may very well be one of the educators who was doing a stage in his preschool last year. I’ve tracked down all the papers we need, and the appointment also covers applyign for the certificate of eligibility for English instruction (bless my mother who has lept every single report card I have ever gotten, from elementary through high school; not only that but my parents had my own certificate of eligibilty in their safety deposit box, so I’ll bring that to the appointment as well). We were all misty-eyed; he cannot possibly be old enough to get on a school bus without us and go to school already. We were concerned about the living here and registering in a school in another zone under another school board entirely, but they didn’t bat an eyelash and said that if we hadn’t moved by the time school begins, we’d just have to be responsible for getting him there and taking him home every day. As this is essentially what we do every day as it is, there isn’t an issue.

Saturday morning I had my weekly cello lesson, where we worked on musicality, using the Lully Gavotte as the focus. I learned a tonne of stuff about using the weight of my bow arm and staying in the string, which was really nice considering I hadn’t worked on my lesson stuff at all during the week. (There was lots of work, and orchestra, and I looked at the orchestra stuff and not the lesson stuff, okay?) We looked at the Boccherini minuet, which I’m starting next, and talked about my solo for the spring recital; I think I’m going to do the Bach Gavotte in C minor. HRH dropped me off at my lesson and while I was there he took the boy to get his hair cut, then picked up birthday presents for a party happening next weekend. They came back to get me and we dropped a snowsuit off in Pointe-Claire for a little boy coming over from England next month (half an hour early, argh, but my lesson didn’t go twenty minutes overtime the way it usually does), drove home to drop off the cello, and then we went to get groceries. Back home we did a whirlwind cleaning session, had lunch, then the boy napped; under duress, but he did, thank goodness. When he woke up we took him over to the local grandparents’ place for his very first sleepover ever, which was very exciting. Back home I made a scallop gratin with extra butter and garlic, and spooned the extra sauce over pasta for a very nice and easy supper. Then I started getting ready to go out to Capricornucopia, the annual January cooperative playwriting and -staging extravaganza hosted by various friends born in January, with audience participation.

While I was getting ready my cell phone beeped, telling me that I had a text message. I don’t get many of those, so I went to check it out, and when I read it I laughed and laughed. During the week a friend had asked if I’d be interested in recording a message to be used in a game he was running on the weekend, in which key information and plot points would be delivered to the players. I agreed, he sent me a script, and we discussed different ways of recording it. The Mac mini has proved recalcitrant in recording till now, refusing to recognise my microphones or pickups, but I had the idea of using the MiniDisc in record mode as a sort of preamp while running GarageBand, and it actually worked. I sent the first message to him in mp3 format, and it had worked so well that he had the idea of recording a longer sequel message to be accessed by the players if they got to that point in the game and needed the next set of information. Well, evidently they did, because the text message I received Saturday evening was from one of the players, sent in character, thanking me for the tip. And since the point of the first message was to maintain cell phone silence so they couldn’t be traced, I texted back that I’d told them not to use cell phones, which the GM tells me got a good laugh from the players. It was a lot of fun to do, and I’m told that the players not only didn’t recognise my voice (which boggles my mind, as many of them know me, but pleases me as well) but thought the recording quality comparable to a video game tutorial or something. I am terribly chuffed. I am also glad that we did this only a couple of days before the actual game, because I don’t think the GM or I would have been able to keep the secret much longer than that.

We then headed out to Capricornucopia, which was wonderful because we got to see people we don’t see often enough, as well as people we see often but always enjoy seeing more of. This year’s play was a Choose Your Own Adventure style, where the playwrights had chosen key points at which the audience voted, and the actors were given different scenes to follow according to the audience’s vote. It was ambitious, and hilarious, and featured on the spot singing, dance numbers, and jazz hands (because jazz hands make everything better).

Afterward t! and Jan came home with us and slept over.

More! Go on to Weekend Roundup, Capricornucopia Edition: Sunday

Fifty-Five Months Old!

It was Christmas, which always kind of decimates the January monthly post. The boy had a terrific holiday season, ranging from Santa to various parties at school and with friends, such as the godfamily singalong. He helped make cookies and pies, and to prepare meals, and was very helpful in general. He really got into the spirit of things, and having a four-year-old child in the house means you can’t help but get into the spirit along with them. He’s still a little unclear on the concept of a secret, though, and was so excited that he would often run up to people and say, “We got you a present, and it’s [insert gift here]”. Fortunately we did a lot of clapping hands over ears or mouth, and what bits of information managed to escape were either missed by the giftees or were about gifts the recipient already knew about.

He was terrific about opening gifts this year. Last year he was ill and lost interest in the process, and at recent birthdays he’d been more excited about ripping the paper off and seeing what was inside before jumping immediately to the next gift. This year, though, he returned to his previous behaviour of opening and playing with the item inside, exploring it thoroughly before moving on to the next thing. Unless it was clothes, of course, which didn’t interest him much at the time, but he was been enjoying them very much as we take new shirts and socks out of the drawers come time to get dressed of a morning. He got piles of new books (we had to remove the basket of toys on the bottom shelf of his bookcase in order to make room for them), clothes, and a few very carefully selected toys. This was a Star Wars Christmas in a couple of ways: we got him the Clone Wars animated movie, and the local grandparents gave him a ship from the Clone Wars line. It was also a Lego Christmas, as he got kits from the upstairs neighbours, the Oakville grandparents, and MLG.

And holy cats, the progress he’s making on following directions in those kits. On the harder kits we’ve been getting him to sort the blocks and help put together the simpler parts while we assemble the bulk of the unit, but he got a kit of small work vehicles on Christmas day and he pretty much followed the pictograms to assemble one on his own, being talking through the harder bits by myself or HRH. It’s thrilling to watch that kind of thought process, the ability to turn a picture into a fine motor process with actual three-dimensional items.

He got very upset about our Christmas tree. You see, we left on the 23rd, and there was no point leaving it up while we were gone; for one thing, it would be prime cat disaster material, and for another, it would be a fire hazard. We got it early in order to enjoy it for two weeks, planning to take it down the night before we left. The boy cried and cried, and said that he wanted to keep it, and that Santa had to put presents under our tree. (He was going to put presents under the tree at the house we’d be in on Christmas, we pointed out, but this did not calm the angst about whose tree under which Santa would be placing whose presents.)

It’s winter, and there’s snow, which means he’s ecstatic about being outside and rolling around in the stuff. Back when the local grandparents bought him the wagon for his second birthday, we asked them to get one that could be converted to a sled of sorts by switching the wheels for skis. For the first time this winter HRH swapped them out, with the boy’s help, and the boy has been gleefully dragging it all over the yard. They took it down to the corner store, and while it bumps and scratches on the barer patches of the sidewalk it really flies when it’s on snow. It’s like a new toy. Also in backyard news, the slide from the back deck has been built again, this year with extra banking so that when the boy goes down on his saucer he really zings around the perimeter of the yard and ends up pretty much at the base of the stairs to the upper apartment. He only has to get up, grab the saucer, and drag it a couple of feet to the deck stairs, drag it up the steps, and he’s ready to launch himself off the back deck again.

His nap is officially being phased out. He naps only twice a week at school now, otherwise staying awake through the general rest time in another room with an educator and his best friend at preschool, working on letters and words and reading. Unless, of course, he very obviously needs a nap, in which case he has a lie-down. At home we’re playing it by ear. If he’s running on high, then we do the nap thing in order to give him a break. If he’s fine, then we carry on without it.

With zero surprise to any of us, the new TMBG album has been a super hit. So much so that after owning it for three days he was singing a good chunk of the songs and acting out the videos. They’re doing a dinosaur unit at preschool this month, and he informed one of his educators that he was going to be a paleontologist when he grew up. “Ah,” she said to the educator who had been running the material, “so you’ve gotten to the paleontology part of the unit?” “No,” said the dino-unit educator. “We haven’t.” And they both just looked at the boy, who went on to burble happily about what paleontologists do.

We’re about to embark on the kindergarten open house merry-go-round, which terrifies me to a small degree. I happened to see an ad in the local paper for one this past week, so I casually looked it up and discovered that kindergarten registration happens at the beginning of February. In two weeks. With education being a provincial responsibility, and children being on the civil roll, one would think the government would think to point out the necessity of upcoming registration via mail, but apparently not; one is supposed to pick this up by osmosis or something. Perhaps daycares generally mention it, but the other kids in preschool with the boy have siblings so everyone else knows, and mentioning it to us may have slipped his educator’s mind. We’ve already missed the open houses for the more exclusive schools (last November, how helpful), so now we get to catch what we can. And there’s the added tangle of moving at an undetermined time this summer to be closer to HRH’s job (and oh, the money we will save on gas alone) so will there be problems registering for a school in anther zone and under another school board’s aegis while we’re still living here? The Internet is remarkably unhelpful in this respect. Actually, the Internet is remarkably unhelpful about the whole kindergarten issue; I am mostly directed to contact individual schools. Which makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose, but isn’t comforting at all for someone who likes to research intensively before walking into an actual person-to-person encounter. I hate not having information. I’m also told by the Internet that I should have obtained a certificate of eligibility for instruction in English a year ago to make sure we have one on time in case there are bureaucratic issues, which is not constructive in the least. If I don’t know I have to do it, I can’t do it. It will all work out, I’m sure. I’m just going to quietly deal with anxiety attacks here in the corner until it is.

And finally, the other big news of the month is the removal of the back of the car seat to make it a booster seat only! This is a huge relief for everyone. The boy is at a height and weight where it’s possible, and it’s much less fuss. We’re all thankful.

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.)

Weekend Roundup: Yule Fair Edition!

Well, more than the Yule Fair happened, but this helps me remember which weekend it was when I scan post titles.

These weekend roundups are getting so full and so damn long that I’m going to start breaking them into two parts just so I don’t end up piling every category I’ve got onto them… next weekend, that is, because if I break it here the Saturday one is still a huge chunk and the Sunday one is two paragraphs. Despite how full it was, there was still plenty of time to sit and relax so it feels like we actually had a weekend instead of two days jam-packed with rushing around. Not sure how that happened, but there you are.

Friday was our trip to Ariadne Knits to install ourselves on the chesterfields and knit for about three hours straight. It was glorious. The new layout and shelving are both great (this is one of those magic spaces where the more they put in the bigger it feels, oddly) and MA received our cupcakes with great enthusiasm. I’d carefully packed Devon’s wrap to work on, but when I got there I realised that I’d forgotten to pack the chart I’d done for it (not chart, exactly, more like six pages of every row typed out so I could cross each one off as I completed it; look, there are two different repeats going on simultaneously at different intervals, okay?). Fortunately I’d packed another Yule gift that needs to get done (no details, the recipient reads the journal!) so I knitted on that and got it to about 75% done. My posture while knitting sucks, so I had to get up and wander around periodically to stretch my back. I did not, in fact, succumb to the lure of trying a Hound spindle on one of these walkabouts, thereby saving myself from a $50 impulse buy, but I did buy a $4 sample pack of Falkland fibre (oooh, soft and cushy but less sproingy than merino) in order to try the resident Hitchhiker wheel. I hadn’t been sure it was operational or just decor, but it does function. As she handed it to me MA mentioned that the reason she hadn’t bonded with it was because it was a bit flippy, and when I started spinning with it, wow, was she ever right. I had to treadle relatively aggressively to avoid the jam and stall that the leather connection between the footman and the wheel ran into every few revolutions, and yes, without warning the flyer and bobbin would suddenly flip and start winding the opposite direction. Very frustrating indeed. I played with the entire range of tension but it didn’t have much effect. MA said that she’d wanted to love it, but it just didn’t work for her. I know there are people who rave about it, and I think it’s unfair that something so cute and adorable doesn’t spin perfectly for everyone. On the other hand, setting it up was totally intuitive, as was adjusting it; the design really is ingenious. It’s an excellent example of why you should try a wheel before you buy it, though. I’d have been frustrated and heartbroken if I had ordered a Hitchhiker as my first wheel and hadn’t been able to use it. (Although knowing what the demand for them and resale value is like, I’d have been able to sell it without losing much money and look at other wheels.) I also bought the copy of the winter issue of Spin-Off that they’d put aside for me.

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, where we worked the pieces for which I was playing new lines. Last group class I volunteered to move from the first line of ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ to the second line in order to keep it on the programme. We’ve been working on this piece for an entire year. It wasn’t ready for last Christmas so it was bumped to the spring, and it wasn’t ready then either so it was rescheduled for this Christmas. And then we lost one of our musicians, which left our youngest cellist on this piece alone on the second line, and he needs someone steady to keep him on beat. I love this piece, especially in this arrangement, and we’ve all worked so hard that I didn’t want to see it cut. I’ve worked hard on the top line, too; it’s the melody, and it’s got some soaring bits and challenging shifts that I’ve really polished. But cutting it would disappoint everyone, so I stepped up and said I’d move to the second line if it meant keeping it. The other song I’ve moved lines on is V’la l’bon vent (do click through to the YouTube video of the McDades singing it, holy wow), a French Canadian winter song that I only heard for the first time this fall when I’d been assigned the piece. Our arrangement was done by my teacher’s father, and it has a lovely little swirling wind theme in the second part. It’s a call and response song that overlaps, so the timing is everything, and after learning the timing of the top line having to recast the timing for the second line, even though the line is simple, is breaking my brain a bit. When I played my part of the duet recital piece M and I are doing I had the very encouraging comment that my teacher really had nothing else to tell me. We could, of course, tweak and finesse till the cows come home, but with a week till recital it’s as solid as it needs to be. I am so happy about this. One more duet rehearsal on Tuesday, then the dress rehearsal on Saturday morning, and the recital is next Sunday.

I came home to collect the boys, and we went out for hot dogs and french fries for lunch before heading downtown to Le Melange Magique for the Yule Fair and my panel discussion. There was terrible traffic thanks to the the entrance to the highway leading down town being closed, so we detoured and I got there later than I’d wanted to, but others were a bit late, too. The panel was fabulous! We had eight of the contributors there, plus a few fair attendees, and we moved the chairs so we were all sitting in a circle with everyone mixed up so it became a round table discussion about the issues people brought up under the publicly-identifying-as-Pagan heading. It was fantastic. I loved how people asked questions of one another during the intro/quick summary of how they got to where they are, because it led to sharing other ideas and information. We could easily have gone for another hour.

The boy wasn’t napping, obviously, so after a bit of socialising and signing and stopping to buy handmade soap and bath treats from my favourite supplier Essentials (whose proprietor gave a broken Tub Twirler bath ball to the boy; he decided that night he had to have a bath so he could try it out… we have new Essentials fan!) we headed home to give HRH a break from corralling him and to save the rest of the world from the meltdown that might occur (to the boy, not HRH). I managed to miss saying goodbye to many people, and I didn’t even get to say hi to Judika. It all goes so quickly and there are so many people that it’s hard to keep track of who and when and where.

Back home we did a major overhaul of the kitchen, something that’s been on the schedule for a while. HRH’s parents replaced their dining table and sideboard this past summer, and we inherited their old set. The sideboard has a hutch and replaced both the rickety narrow table we had along one wall that supported all my cookbooks, my tea, and the robot baker, and as we sorted through everything we realised that it could house what was being stored in/on the old microwave cart we were using to store liquor and the ever-present Thing Drawer/Cupboard. So we spent a lot of the day sorting through old papers and fuses and elastic bands, moving furniture, recycling phone books and old vet bills, and figuring out how everything would fit in the best configuration in the sideboard. (The silverware chest! The crystal bowls! They all have an actual home now!) HRH located and hung the corner shelf for the phone and the pencil cup, as that was the other thing the microwave cart held. The room looks much bigger now, and we feel like we’ve leveled up in the adult world yet again, as both our families had sideboards and hutches while we were growing up and so it’s a benchmark of sorts.

And then the boy and I decided to bake gingersnap cookies from the latest issue of Fine Cooking, and he was very helpful indeed, cracking the egg and adding all the ingredients I measured out for him, and even turning the stand mixer on to blend things. He rolled out the dough and used the cookie cutters (trees and stars!) and put the cookie sheet in the oven, but made the mistake of touching the rack with a bare finger to push it back in (I was the one handling the oven, so it was unexpected). The dough is easy and cookies are delicious, especially if you put them in the oven to reheat and crisp up a bit before snacking on them a day later. You really do have to chill the dough, though, otherwise it smooshes all over when you try to lift the shapes onto the baking sheet, but try to explain that to a four-year-old. We baked half the batch; the rest of the dough is in the fridge for another day.

Sunday morning we went out right at nine and did the week’s grocery shopping, and we were home by ten, giving us the rest of the day to relax or get various house things done. HRH vacuumed while the boy and I played our cellos, and the boy wrote a song called ‘Blackie Loves Christmas.’ He told me the words, I wrote them down, and then together we wrote the music. It is an official though brief Christmas song, and he has been told that if he likes, we can sing it for the Preston-LeBlancs at our Yule gathering and singalong. After his nap the boy and his father put up the Christmas lights and the garland outside. We planned out the rest of the month, too. We usually put our tree up on the Solstice, but that isn’t sensible this year as we’re leaving on the 23rd. In order to have time to enjoy it, we’ll be buying it and putting it up in two rounds this Thursday and Friday. Putting it up so early really feels odd. We’re planning to take it down the night before we leave, too, so it’s not left as a hazard for the cats and Blade, who is house-sitting.

I started spinning the Ozark silk roving I bought for another Yule gift, and it’s not like spinning the tussah silk at all. I was warned that I’d have to fluff it up, so I did, and I split it pretty finely, but there are areas that are dyed more heavily than others and they’re a bit crunchy, so drafting kind of stalls there. There are places where the end of the staple is very obvious in the single. I wasn’t as comfortable spinning it; I really preferred the tussah. It wasn’t till I woke up this morning that I realised I hadn’t predrafted any of it: I just fluffed it, split it, and spun right from the ends, drafting and fluffing a bit more as I went. When I spin the other ounce today I’ll predraft and see if that helps. I may try combing a bit of it to see what that does, too. If worst comes to worst I can buy the other 2oz of roving in this colourway at Ariadne, if yesterday’s single isn’t usable.

Dinner last night was roast pork (with a dijon/maple/herb glaze and roast baby potatoes, om nom nom). And then it snowed just before I went to bed.

The end.

A Rainy Thursday

It’s pouring outside. December 3, and it’s pouring. HRH tells me that there’s a 40mm rainfall warning out for the region. This is entirely wrong; it ought to be snow.

We got new music at orchestra last night, so now I can share the programme for the spring concert (27 March 2010! Don’t say I didn’t give you enough advance warning this time!):

Sight-reading new music is always an… interesting experience. I can give you the correct rhythm, or the correct notes, not both, especially on something I’m not familiar with, like the Debussy. (Or something like Vaughn Williams, whose music I am familiar with and adore, but who is, erm, somewhat eclectic in his use of rhythm and key signatures, I am discovering now that I have the chance to see the scores.) On the other hand, I aced the Haydn. It’s nice that it was the last thing we did before we left.

That lovely skein of dyed mohair I showed off yesterday bled in the twist-setting bath, and is duller now, which makes me very sad indeed. It’s not unattractive, just not the brighter colours I loved. Kind of like leaves get after they’ve been off the tree for a day or so, now that I think of it. I really need to figure out a way to get the greens to set properly as the other dyes do. I’m currently discussing it with a bunch of other dye-people on Ravelry and they’ve got some suggestions for me to try. It may have something to do with our hard water. I’ll mess with amounts of vinegar and length of time the fibre is heated/left to absorb dye, even if the dye looks exhausted.

I handed in my freelance project yesterday, so today is back to the Poppy book. I have one hundred pages left before I run out of story. Let’s see what happens. Karine is coming over to work in the downstairs office today, and we have a sushi lunch scheduled. I deposited three freelance cheques in my account last night, so I deserve a little treat.