Category Archives: Blessings

Merry Christmas!

The turkey is brining, the stuffing is made, the rolls are doing their first rise. Today’s best Christmas present so far was the boy waking us up at seven instead of some ungodly hour as is his usual wont. The downside of this is that he’d thrown up in his bed at some point during the night and hadn’t told us. Ah, well. Both HRH and I had collywobbly tummies last night, so it only makes sense that the boy did too. Everyone is in much better health today. It must have been something we ate yesterday.

The boy brought his stocking to our bed and said, “Thank you!” every time he pulled something new out of it, and “Ah, cool!” when he’d liberated whatever it was from the tissue paper in which it was wrapped. He then bounded into the living room and pouted only a bit when we told him we were waiting for both sets of grandparents to show up before we opened the sea of presents under the tree. Yes, Santa came last night! I thought he’d been sane and had cut down on the number of gifts he’d dropped off, until I remembered that the local grandparents hadn’t brought over their set of presents yet. Oh well. At least the boy’s the very appreciative type and sincerely thanks the gifter both before and after he’d unwrapped something.

As is traditional, Nigella is my co-pilot today. Her cooking times suggest that I cook the bird for about three hours, while Butterball tells me to do it for four. I trust Nigella more. Besides, I can always push dinner back by a half-hour if I need to roast it a wee bit longer.

It’s nine-thirty. I should probably change out of the t-shirt and jeans I’m wearing into something a bit more classy before the grandparents arrive at ten. Although my socks are red and my t-shirt is green!

I send you all love on this lovely sunny winter’s day, and I hope everyone’s Yule week has been and continues to be as blessed as ours is.

The Yule Week Continues

Things just keep rolling on with fun and joy and love.

Last night the Preston-LeBlancs came over for a evening of seasonal music-making. It was the first time we’d ever tried anything like this, and while we were excited we were all a bit anxious too. It all turned out beautifully, even with the cold-suffering Tallis squirming in her mother’s lap while Paze played the alto recorder. Jeff’s guitar work sounded fabulous. I mostly played pizzicato in order to not drown Jeff out, but when we got people singing the better-known stuff I switched to arco. So much fun! The Bailey’s certainly helped, and HRH did his part by keeping the kids corralled and occupied until it was present-opening or singing time.

The quiche I made was delicious, too, although we never got around to drinking the mulled cranberry juice and I forgot about the Brie and pate. The afternoon started later than expected because HRH and I got stuck in several kinds of traffic in different places, throwing us an hour and a half behind schedule (the music only got bumped a half-hour, but there was a lot of lost time in there that cancelled other things such as hors d’oeuvre prep). When we got home after being in traffic for two hours and fifteen minutes, we found a three-foot snowbank in front of the driveway. The snow-clearing crews had done the first ploughing but the snow-blower hadn’t come by directly afterwards to remove the banks. Scarlet pulled up right behind us and she and HRH dug out a single car-width, then each pulled into the driveway one after the other. Naturally the blower showed up once they were done. But even that couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm for playing the real, traditional Christmas carols.

Today we awoke to another foot of snow, which gave HRH the opportunity to do something he’s always wanted to do. Our back deck has an oddly-placed gate that opens out into nothing. Once upon a time there was an above-ground pool in the backyard, and the gate opened onto a set of stairs that went into it. As there hasn’t been a pool in years, the gate has been fastened shut and is essentially just a part of the railing. Today HRH got the pile of snow in the backyard up to the level of the deck, so he opened the gate, and the boy now has a one and a half-storey snow slide from the back deck to the yard. The boy is shrieking as he throws himself down it on the little saucer sled and mumbling happily to himself as he trudges back up the stairs to the deck to do it all over again.

My parents arrived safe and sound in town last night (ahead of the storm, thank goodness) and will be here in an hour or so. (Which means I should wrap presents.) My mother will arrive laden with Christmas baking and a home-made tourtiere, our standard Christmas Eve dinner. There will, of course, be wine as well, lovely lovely wine that we cannot get in this province, and crab cakes. But best of all there will be my parents, whom we do not see often enough.

Family, music, joy, and love. It’s a good time of year. Not that we don’t experience these things during the other fifty-one weeks of a year, but this is a week we can all count on. I cherish these days, and count ourselves lucky to have them.

In An Effort To Focus On The Good Things…

… instead of the things currently driving me up the wall, I hereby present a List of Things for Which I Am Thankful or Excited About.

1. All I need to do is proof the overdue-new-to-me assignment I was given, then I can upload it and it’s gone. (Which is what I should be doing right now, but I have to decompress first.)

2. The roads were fairly clear yesterday. Traffic was not wholly insane.

3. My cello lesson was awesome. I got one new technical exercise assigned, one new Mooney Position Pieces exercise, two new pieces in the Suzuki book (apparently I’m doing that well) (the corollary to this, of course, is serves me right for practising the next few in the book after the piece I just did in recital), and a lovely three-movement cello duet sonata thing by S. Lee (op. 60 if anyone’s keeping score) (and ooh, I just discovered that my teacher gave me the first and second sonatas, not just the first!).

4. The Murphy family (no relation, although we have messed with people’s minds that way, heh) sent HRH, the boy, and I a special gift: two of the extremely awesome cat cupcakes that Elspeth had as part of her birthday cupcake extravaganza! Mmmm, cupcakes. With icing in the middle. And fondant cats on the top.

5. The boy was remarkably good during this morning’s bank/breakfast/seasonal shopping run. (Except when he REALLY wasn’t, but we are focusing on the good things.) We really enjoyed lots of it together. He asked for pancakes for lunch and I figured why not, so he ate three (!?), asked for a glass of milk, and went for his nap mostly without acting up or major incident. (I suspect he finally figured out I was about to completely snap after having to deal with certain of his shenanigans while shopping.)

6. Two complete strangers in the dollar store passed me three loonies to buy him the three wooden train cars he was coveting. I’d told him he could choose one and he couldn’t decide. I was staggered. I mean, sure, I’ve done things like that before for others, both for strangers and friends (and on a much, much larger scale too), but I’ve never expected it back. Complete strangers? Giving me loonies? To buy the boy the trains he was stroking? They were both moms with grown-up kids in other cities who they couldn’t treat like that any more, they said. The boy, who had been behaving very well at this point of the trip, was a perfect gentleman and said thank you and told them very excitedly all about what he would do with them when he got the trains home. I guess this is life demonstrating the ‘pay it forward’ principle. Thank you, universe!

7. I found four of the main things I needed for Yule, three small things, and two unexpected very small things. What I did not get were two of the other main things because the boy was acting up and also none of the stores I went to had one particular thing in stock. I could have checked two more shops but we ran out of patience time. I knew it was time to go home when I couldn’t string a complete sentence together to talk to one of my favourite bookshop clerks, partly due to having to keep grabbing the boy before he wandered off or pulled one. more. thing. off a shelf, partly because I couldn’t think my way through an unexpected obstacle (someone’s postal code? and phone number? off the top of my head? so not going to happen).

8. We cased the mall’s Santa set-up (you think I’m kidding? The boy went all the way around the fences, running his hands along the edges and calculating how far he could reach into the fluffy fake snow, found every single entrance and exit, and I will bet you that he has it memorized) and checked the visiting hours for the Official Santa Visit tomorrow.

9. The boy got a return letter from Santa in the mail today! He probably would have been much more excited if he hadn’t been trying to open those new train cars at the same time.

10. I finished the first colour block and a third of the next block on HRH’s scarf last night while we watched some of the making-of features on the Prince Caspian DVD. One and one-third down! Eighteen and two-thirds to go!

11. We shared a nice chummy breakfast in the mostly empty food court, sharing a breakfast sandwich and some juice from Tim Horton’s while we looked at the Nutcracker decorations (or, as Liam calls them, ‘the Christmas soldiers’). And the boy learned how to make a wish and toss a penny into the fountain.

There, see? I’m in a much better mood now. It doesn’t matter that I only got some of what we went out for, and that the groceries didn’t get done at all. We had lots of fun in between the argh bits (and really, the argh was mostly an aggregate of the usual things one has to tell a three year old over and over and over, which I know perfectly well must happen because of how their brain are rewiring but still gets to me) and encountered unexpected kindnesses.

Now, I will proof that assignment and upload it, and then, Gentle Readers, I will knit some more once I’ve mixed a batch of bread dough and another of pizza dough.

Hello, World: A Rare Weekend Post

I just wanted to share this little fact with you: Life is okay. In fact, it is verging on Downright Good.

The gathering at the Fearsranch was much lower-key that initially advertised. First of all, there were three or four people missing, which made things so very much easier for me. And second, everyone was tired, it being the end of a week and after long amounts of travel on pretty much everyone’s part. The fact that every single individual I met in person for the first time was Made of Good Stuff helped immensely, too. Everyone was Made of Win. I expected this of Bodhifox, my main reason for being there, who felt exactly the same in-person as he does in his journal and over e-mail, but I didn’t have more than a passing familiarity with the others and no expectations whatsoever (beyond “eep people I do not know”). So Made of Win was a good thing. And my flatlining wasn’t as much of a handicap as I’d feared.

There was food. There was drumming. There was cask-strength Macallan. There was a lovely huge bonfire. There was good sleep. There was glorious sun, and breakfast, and discussions about house building (and oven-building and erecting mead halls and rebuilding the front porch), and sad goodbyes said. And there is photographic evidence plus summary and another decent summary the likes of which I don’t have the brainpower to pull off.

Pretty much the only bad thing that happened was I somehow flipped my knitting around and knit three or four rounds before realising it. I pulled the circular needles out and discovered that my swatch had lied to me (with great huge lies! I will never trust yarn again!) and if I had in fact finished the hat the way it was dear Mousme would be wearing it around her shoulders instead of her head. So I pulled the whole thing apart and cast on forty less stitches, and now I have five inches of hat and just made my first ever decrease! Had the Dreadful Thing occurred at home I would have gone ballistic, but the combination of being exhausted and happy and being elsewhere made everything all right.

We’re making pulled barbecue pork for dinner, and feeding a couple of friends whom we called on the off chance they were free (this will never work — you are? yay!). We came home from the Fearsranch with perry (pear cider, with which I am in love), and there is beer now too. I intend to bake Brie. No, I don’t understand it in the least. I’m exhausted. I should be comatose and unable to function. But somehow the night out with excellent people and the subsequent breakfast revived me. HRH and I are considering monthly or bi-monthly Friday night escapes, if they’re this good. And when you get home it’s only early Saturday afternoon, so you still have half a day plus another whole day of weekend.

And now I am going to go knit some more. I wonder if I’ll get to the double-pointed needles part of the project today. At this rate Mousme will certainly have the hat by Yule, and possibly much earlier. (Yes, I was worried about that before. But removing forty stitches from a round makes things progress so much faster.)

Weekend Roundup

Things are moderately insane here, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s being shifted lower on the list of priorities. Bear with me if I owe you a reply about something via e-mail or a phone call or blog post or something. In the meantime here’s a very brief overview of the last three days for my own records.

Friday Ceri and Phnee came over for a long-anticipated day of writing/crocheting/knitting. I haven’t laughed that hard in ages. I somehow managed to get a thousandish words written, which mystifies me because I’m fairly certain I spent most of my time talking about books and yarn and spontaneously rewriting TMBG songs to be about knitting instead of Advil. And eating. Dear gods, the food. Not that we planned to eat piles of it, just that it was pretty steady. Phnee baked muffins ( “These are delicious,” I said. “They should be,” she said, “they’re your recipe.”) and brought biscuit dough to bake on-site. Ceri brought tea sandwiches for lunch, two kinds of preserves (OMG the carrot cake preserve that I wanted to eat with a spoon), and there was baguette and baked Brie with onion confit and pots and pots of tea. The only shadow upon the day was that Phnee’s laptop decided to turn its nose up at the perfectly good electricity here at the palace.

Friday night HRH and Jeff H. shared a rental van to bring the rest of the bunk bed pieces home and move our no-longer-being-used double dresser to chez Jeff and Airea. Saturday morning HRH and Liam built the bunk beds (and I’m not kidding, the boy actually did help move the mattress and the base through the hall and into his room, and helped screw things together) and there is now a pirate ship construction site lion cage tree house in Liam’s room. I felt like death on toast, so I kind of dragged myself around and stayed out of their way. Saturday afternoon I had a strings-only rehearsal so I dragged myself to that. Managed not to embarrass myself, despite not being wholly there in mind or body. Came home, had a hot bath, rested, reheated homemade pizza for dinner, and then once the boy was in bed we headed out for Emru’s visitation. One never knows what to expect regarding visitations or funerals, but any uncertainty was immediately dispelled as soon as we stepped into the memorial complex. There was upbeat music playing, and people laughing and chatting. The family we spoke with were all equally upbeat, and the whole event really was the celebration of Emru that it couldn’t help but be. He had been dressed in a beautiful white dashiki with exquisite white embroidery around the collar and down the yoke, and a lovely black and white woven cloth of African design was draped over the lower half of the casket. (Perhaps slightly irreverent thought: I’d forgotten how darn tall Emru was.) We met all sorts of people and ended up being among the last to leave. On the way home HRH and I talked about how we really didn’t know much about what the other wanted regarding death arrangements, and discovered that we pretty much intuited the basics anyhow. It’s something we need to think about properly, though, especially now that we have a child. (HRH, of course, isn’t difficult at all: there’s a pond, and there will be a glorious fire, and several days of drinking and loud music of various kinds. Most of us know this. Mine’s similar.)

Sunday I woke up feeling a bit less like death on toast. I mostly worked on the programme notes for the upcoming concert while HRH and the boy played in the construction site tree house. With this new bed the furniture has been rearranged a bit and his toys now live in the two drawers under the lower bunk, so we’ve eliminated the shelves that used to hold his toy bins. Now the room has a very play/activity feel to it, what with the multi-purpose upper bunk (which doesn’t have a mattress on it and will soon have a set of those interlocking foam pieces to make it a bit more comfy), the easel, and the craft table. He has decided that he should be listening to his music while he’s in there, so his CDs have been moved into his room. He’s been playing there instead of in the living room, which is great because it means HRH and I can now relax in the living room when we need to rather than being dragged into the boy’s play. Mid-morning we had our usual pancake brunch, then we went out to buy the boy a play tool set because he’d had so much fun helping HRH build the bed and move the pictures and shelf on his wall. I kept working on the programme notes, which I finally finished last night; I just need to translate them today. I made candles while the boys watched Toy Story and used up the last of my vegetable/soy wax; I’ll need more before Yule. After dinner we had a concert where the boy played the drum and HRH and I alternately got the little xylophone thing and the bells to play and I laughed so much that I cried.

In bed last night I finished Thornyhold (why have I not read this novel before? Oh, right, because I went through my Mary Stewart phase in late high school, before it had been written), read the first quarter of Snake Agent, and wrote a thousand words. It didn’t feel like I did a lot yesterday but apparently I did.

Today: Translating, and doing the first half of my next evaluation assignment. And hopefully some writing, because I’m feeling behind and I really don’t want to lose the momentum of the past two weeks.

Also, Good Things

Because I should note these things for my records:

Gas is currently priced at 88 point something cents per litre, which is a full fifty cents below the high it hit this past summer. I honestly never thought we’d see it below a dollar again. (The ninety-nine point whatever cents it was sitting at does not truly qualify as under a dollar.)

And today is an incredibly beautiful Indian Summer day, warm and sunny and still. Heavenly. We’ve had highs in the double digits for the past three days.

Oh, let’s add a few more thing to be thankful for and call this a Blessings post:

The bow hold and the leading with the elbow thing last night at orchestra. Look, I can be taught! (The mess I made of the Vivaldi? Not so good. Ditto on the scale runs in the Haydn. But you know, that can be easily remedied by the thing called Practise. I just need to remember that there is Orchestra Stuff to Practise as well as Lesson Stuff.)

Sleep. Sleep is good. So is my son calling “RISE AND SHINE!” from the living room when I’d gone back to bed to snuggle with Nixie and, erm, had fallen fast asleep again. Oops. Extra sleep, kitten cuddles, a conscientious son. All good things.

There was no one on the roads this morning. No one. I wonder where everyone was.

Did groceries, got lots of meat and such for a decent price. Treated myself to a bag of chips.

Now, to work.