Beginning Again
I feel somewhat aimless today. I walked the boy to his bus stop, kissed him, and sent him off to his first full day at school. I walked home, went up the steps and inside the house, locked the door behind me, then paused to look around.
New house, new school routine. Back to work. Except I’ve never worked in this house before, and I’m having trouble settling in. I have to get used to the environment, to the sounds, the light, the scents, the energy. I don’t know if it’s going to help or not that I’m officially beginning a new project today, having done the prep at the end of July.
I know I’m going to poke at my desk and move things around a bit. What worked before for idle online stuff last week is not going to function well for Real Work. It’s an overcast day, and I’ve already gone from the brilliant illumination of the overhead light to my gentler desk lamp. That’s a start.
Part of it is also coming down after a weekend (really, three solid weeks) of activity. The packing, the move, the unpacking, the beginning of kindergarten, and the housewarming this weekend… it was all a lot of energy-intensive bustle. Now I’m alone in the house, sitting at a desk trying to switch into editing mode, and it’s hard to do. I haven’t worked like this in about six weeks. I have to retrain my mind.
I’ll ease in by writing the weekend roundup. Although even settling down to blog this morning made me skittish, and I got up and walked away several times, making up things to do around the house. I almost went right out to do the groceries as soon as I got home, but I made myself come inside to try to figure out what my new routine would be. A cup of tea, a biscuit, correspondence, news, journals and Twitter… these used to settle me into my workday, but not today. Not here. Not yet.
Weekend Roundup: Yet More Packing And A New Baby Edition
We have managed to exhaust ourselves, and it’s not even the move yet.
On Friday we went to the bank and got the bank draft for the notary, covering the down payment, the taxes, and the notary fee, another huge step that made it all a bit more real. We stopped by the license bureau to renew my driver’s license, had lunch together, bought a new toaster (you didn’t seriously think we could live without one for two weeks, did you?), researched washer/dryer sets, scoped Home Depot for new closet doors for the master bedroom (or at least something which which to cover the twelve feet of mirror that both of us find creepy), packed the knick-knacks, statues, and photographs, and stopped by the yarn store for some weaving supplies. (And good thing too, but that’s later in the story.) I drove hard to finish a freelance assignment I’d begun the day before, but I ran out of time. t! dropped off a slew of boxes for us, bless him, and stayed for supper.
Saturday I packed the wall of books in my office, my altar, and my knick-knacks. Once I’ve cleared the last few lingering things like cables and gloves off the bookcases we should be able to dismantle them, giving us a new place to stack packed boxes. Then pretty much all that’s left in here that I can do is my writing desk and the reference stuff and plastic bins of fibre-related stuff underneath it. Saturday afternoon Ceri called, saying that she was in her local hospital under observation for her blood pressure, and we talked for a good long time about stuff in general and possible premature delivery. We had steak and corn on the cob for supper, our first corn of the year, and it was tasteless and cardboardy. We’ll try again.
Sunday morning we had the upstairs neighbours down for brunch, the last one we’ll have like this. We’d packed our waffle iron (oops) but Blade brought his down to learn how to make HRH’s awesome waffles. There was equipment failure, though: the iron plates had too-small grooves and so the waffles self-destructed every time, so we gave up and I used the batter to make pancakes instead. But the company was good! While brunch was happening I got another call from Ceri, telling me that they were transferring her for possible induction to the same hospital I’d been transferred to, the one with the neonatal intensive care unit. We both got a bit weepy, me because I knew exactly what she was going through, and Ceri because she knew that I knew: I’m not ready yet, I was supposed to have more time.
We packed two-thirds of the kitchen that afternoon, until I had to stop because my back and hips were aching too much and my energy was wiped. Scott called and told us that the hospital was going ahead and inducing. At about four o’clock I brought out the loom and started measuring out a warp with the yarn I’d bought on Friday. I’d been planning a very different kind of blanket experiment to test a new technique I was considering using for my gift to them for the baby, and suddenly the experiment had a focus and a reason. I had the warp measured, threaded, sleyed, and wound, with half a blanket woven by the time we went to bed.
Monday morning we were pretty wiped. HRH took the boy to preschool, and I returned to the freelance project that I hadn’t managed to finish on Friday like I’d wanted to. Scott called around ten to let us know how things were progressing and to ask us to bring the stack of books and the camera I’d set aside on Saturday, expecting to go keep Ceri company before they decided to transfer her. I finished my project, handed it in, invoiced, handled my address change with the company, and officially booked off for the duration of the move. Then HRH and I drove up to the hospital we knew very, very well to drop off Ceri’s things and speak with Scott while Ceri rested.
Once home again, I realised that shoehorning a full workday into the morning had left me too burnt out to move on to packing the books in the living room, and HRH wasn’t much better, so I wove the rest of the baby blanket while we watched the middle part of The Return of the King (we’ve been re-watching the Lord of the Rings extended films at night because we’re too tired after a day of packing to do anything else). With every weft pass I was thinking health and safety, health and safety. I was going to finish it no matter what, because I was determined that this child was going to have something handmade especially for her ready even if she was a month ahead of schedule. When HRH went to pick the boy up I hemstitched the ends and took it off the loom. Since this was a new technique that I’d never tried before, I was worried that it might fall apart. But it didn’t, and it was exquisite; I foresee much potential with this technique indeed. I laid it out on the bed and took some photos (which will be shared in a project-devoted photo post once it has been gifted, I promise!), then prepared for the final step, which included felting it slightly in the washing machine. I used the gentle cycle just to be sure, and good thing. The so-called gentle cycle tore open all my protective layers and ties, leaving the blanket to agitate loose in the hot water, which is exactly what was not supposed to happen. I checked on it in time and rescued it, though, and while it’s felted a wee bit past what I wanted, it is certainly a success and I am thrilled with it.
After I put Liam to bed I drew myself a hot bath, because I have somehow screwed up my lower back and hips as badly as I did around the time I was pregnant (which, I have just realised, is the last time I moved, duh). I have to keep reminding myself to take it easy, but the repetitive motion of packing boxes and reaching up and down for things is doing a number on me. I downed some Tylenol and at the last moment paused, then took the phone into the bathroom with me, just in case.
Well, twenty minutes into the bath the phone did indeed ring, and I was out like a shot, grabbing a towel and the handset. Sure enough it was Scott, with the wonderful news that Ada Emily had been born just before six o’clock, right around the time I was pressing the water out of her completed baby blanket and hanging it on the clothesline to dry. I had finished it just in time for it to be ready for her. He told me to go ahead and tell people, and off he went to post quick notes on Facebook and Twitter from home.
When we got off the phone I sat down and had a very therapeutic cry. When someone else is going through something traumatic that you’ve been through, you worry about them. You know everything will be fine, but you still worry, and you feel for them, and I walked around most of the weekend becoming increasingly stressed and agitated, knowing what they were going through and being unable to help them any more than we were already doing, being a sounding board and support. Also moving a hell of a lot of energy around, through the blanket and otherwise, which is probably another reason why we were exhausted; the last time we did energy work that intense was when our own premature son was in that hospital and we were working for his health. There’s something about babies and births that makes you fight with everything you’ve got.
We all slept in an hour and a half later than usual this morning (apparently we’re all tired, what a surprise), which led to everyone scrambling out of bed in a panic and the boys leaving around the time they usually get to preschool. Today is the living room: we pack the books, an easy task (though long and tiring, because I did two English degrees and I’m a professional writer, and I’m not apologising for it) but one that disturbs me, because once the books are packed the house has officially been torn apart, and I still have another week and a half to live here. And that’s the halfway point packing-wise. There’s more kitchen, the rest of my office, and we’ll do some more of the boy’s room in the next day or so.
I have a double batch of bread rising to bake for Ceri and Scott so they’ll have two loaves in the freezer when they get home, I’m doing laundry, and the dishwasher is about to go on. I’m caught up on news and correspondence. HRH brought me a breakfast sandwich so I’m fed. Let’s do these books.
Stuff
Firefox’s auto-fill function tells me that I’ve used that title before. How unimaginative of me, on more than one level.
Hello, world, I’m really tired. I’ve been doing a lot of work, which is good for the financial side of things (alas that invoicing and accounting department turnarounds are not instantaneous), but draining on the mind and body level. And I’m pretty much just a flopsy, unfocused, warm body right now, which is not good for the current deadlines I’m working on. I find myself just kind of staring into space for longish periods of time. And I have no appetite, as is usual for this time of year, but which doesn’t help matters.
Speaking of work, I signed the contracts for the one-shot editing/re-purposing gig this fall (this is not the copy editing one but the second project to which my networking goddess of an editor at my publisher connected me) and mailed them off yesterday. Basically, I am taking an existing manuscript and cutting it in half, moving things round as necessary for clarity and flow. I’m looking forward to it, because it feels so much more proactive than reviewing manuscripts and pointing out what kind of editing they’re going to need in a very polite way via a 24-page evaluation sheet, but not really doing anything beyond pointing out what someone else will need to do to get it to publishing standard.
I finished a major backup of the Mac mini to data DVDs (because yes, I am paranoid, thank you very much), took a deep breath and wiped my external hard drive (which I backed up a few weeks ago), and then set it up as a Time Machine drive. So now I am backing up hourly, and I should stop worrying about losing stuff. I’m still going to back up writing, new photos, and music to data DVDs every month, because did I mention that I was paranoid?
Moving-wise I’m at that odd sort of point balanced between “I need this stuff for everyday living and working” and “holy cats I need to get all this stuff into boxes,” which is not good for my sanity or equilibrium. Yesterday I started the process of notifying everything that needs to know our address is changing. Bell, your website is annoying, and why bother to fill in an online change of address thing if I can’t confirm it online and you’re just going to have to call me anyway? I’ll save time and call you directly at some point. Hydro was lovely and straightforward, you can hit six fundamental departments of the provincial government with a single form, and the next time I’m at a real post office I’ll pick up a mail redirection form. (The tiny postal counter round the corner where I went yesterday to mail my contracts didn’t have said forms, which I sort of expected, but annoyed me nonetheless.)
I now have an Excel spreadsheet of what needs to be done between now and the move. It is depressingly long, despite crossing about ten things off yesterday.
The major bridge we have to cross between the current residence and the new one is doing weekend work through August and September, and guess which weekend they have chosen to reduce the three-lane southbound side down to one lane for major maintenance and reconstruction? Why yes, our moving weekend.
The boys come home early afternoon today, so I need to get as much crammed into today as possible. All I really want to do is go back to bed with a warm kitten to purr at me.
Catching Up
Let’s see, what of importance happened last week that I didn’t sit down and write about?
* A second job with my publisher in negotiation, this one for a single editing contract due in November. My editor is a networking goddess. Also, I hammered a lot of evaluation assignments home in the past two weeks and today I get to invoice for a very nice amount.
* The inevitable happened, and the boy lost Whitey-Blackie the bunny on a shopping trip Friday. Oh, the screams in the car after the first fruitless search when I explained that if he was lost and we couldn’t find him, then someone had found him and picked him up to give him a good home. “AAAAAAAAAH!” screamed the boy through his tears. “I DON’T WANT ANYONE ELSE TO HAVE HIM!” Cuddling him while he cried in the car was a sobering example of how sometimes all you can do is hold someone while they grieve or rage against the injustice of life, and that sometimes a mother’s kiss doesn’t make it all better. Retracing our steps the second time, we found the bunny stuffed under the bottom shelf in Zellers where we had been trying on new sandals that didn’t rub the boy’s feet to fresh blisters on top of the blisters of the day before.
* I had a lovely surprise Saturday morning. It was dull and gloomy, and I haven’t been sleeping well, so the boy was up playing and I was still lying abed with a book when the phone rang. “Who’s calling at this hour?” I said, leaping for the phone, but of course it wasn’t seven-thirty (which is what both the light and my inner clock were telling me), it was nine-thirty, and Bodhifox was on the line to wish me a belated birthday. I curled up in my office reading chair and had a very enjoyable chat with him. It set a lovely tone for the rest of the day.
* We had friends over on Saturday night and ordered in an incredibly large spread of General Tao, beef and black bean noodles, spicy peanut butter ravioli, and other things. This was a belated birthday thing, too, and was an inspired alternative to all of us going out. The food cooled a bit beyond what I’d have liked while I put the boy to bed, and I should have thought of putting everything in the barely warm oven to keep it hot. And Ceri made a peanut butter pie which was kind of like an ice cream pie with chocolate sauce that was light and delicious.
* I am so very tired of talking to people about the house. I was tired of it two days after we sealed the deal, and so many conversations still lead back to it. Yes, it’s a house, it’s lovely, we’re happy, but all I seem to do is repeat the same information over and over when people ask about it, which is boring to me and thus, I assume, boring to others. That said, it must be recorded here that after all is said and done, our combined monthly mortgage payment is going to be slightly less than our current rent. It’s only by about six dollars, but it’s the principle of the thing, and makes us very happy. Also, no one seems to make the kind of light wooden-leg loveseat I want for the new living room, and I am peeved. We have picked our paint colours, though. Earthy and creamy tones, as usual, because they work for us.
* I picked up the new Scott Pilgrim graphic novel on Friday, and finished it in about twenty minutes, handed it to HRH, and watched him finish it in about forty-five. (An excellent wrap-up of everything with some really good storytelling; I am pleased with it.) We then sent it home with Scott on Saturday, which was only right as he and Ceri had lent us the first five as they came out. Besides, he left me Tongue of Serpents, the new Temeraire novel, in return, so everyone is happy.
* I had literally just finished reading The Lost Years of Jane Austen, which posits that Jane travelled to New South Wales (AKA Australia) with her aunt and uncle Leigh Perrot, when Scott brought me the new Temeraire novel… which takes place in the same place at essentially the same time, so all the place names and locations and general conditions are familiar to me. Very synchronous and convenient for my mindset.
* The boy and I stopped by the library on Friday (post-Whitey-Blackie incident; the bunny stayed in the car, as all toys are doing from now on) and I discovered that they had the first two Moomintroll books on the new acquisitions shelf on the kids’ side. I jumped up and down and exclaimed and snatched the first one, and the boy totally brushed me and my excitement off, heading for Dewey numbers 625-629, which are his regular turf. That night I said we could read the first chapter at bedtime, but he said no; then he compromised, saying I could read him a picture book of his choice and then the first chapter of whatever this chapter book I was so excited about might be. And it turns out that when we got to the end of that chapter, he took my arm and said, “No, Mama, you should keep reading.” We read a chapter and a half the next afternoon while HRH vacuumed, and another chapter and a half that night, and a chapter last night, too. We’re going to have to go back for volume two sooner rather than later. Or perhaps we shall buy them, which would make me very happy indeed. I found my first Moomintroll book at a church sale when I was about ten, and loved the series so much.
* I spun 4 ounces of Corriedale into a single comparable to the single I spun last weekend of the HAY batts, and dyed it a deep sort of crimson rust colour yesterday. It’s drying now, and I’m hoping the colour complements the HAY single well enough to ply them together this week. I also experimented with dyeing 4 oz of the local wool/mohair roving I had, mixing up what I thought should be a celery green and looked it in the pot, but when the roving dried it was more of a cheerful lemon-lime colour. I tried blending some with a bit of white Tencel on my hackle comb, but while it breaks the solid green up a bit it doesn’t have the lighter sheen I wanted. I think I’ll spin the green roving as-is, then possibly overdye it with a bit of blue. My problem so far is I think I’m mixing up really weak dye solutions (a quarter-teaspoon of dye powder total to about eight cups of water) but they’re stronger than I expect. This green would have worked if it had been about a third of the concentration. From now on, I’ll mix the solution and then use maybe half of it; I can always do a second dye bath to deepen a colour, but you can’t take dye out.
* Working on some nudges and fixes of Emily’s cello book (second edition! if you own the first edition it is now a collector’s item!) made me want to play the cello, so I pulled it out and played for half an hour. I regretfully sent a note to my cello teacher saying that the plan had been to set up lessons again after everyone’s stuff in July was done, but now that we’re moving in three and a half weeks I just don’t have time, what with packing and work.
* Music-wise I have been thoroughly enjoying Zoe Keating’s new album Into the Trees, and Hans Zimmer’s score to last year’s Sherlock Holmes. I also recently picked up Danny Elfman’s score to The Wolfman, with lots and lots of lovely dark cello, but it has, alas, suffered in the aforementioned company, and so I have tucked it away for re-introduction later when my brain is not obsessed with other music.
Right, enough of that. This is what happens when I don’t blog for a week.
Weekend Roundup: Sheep to Shawl/Alexandria/Maxville Tour Edition
Giddy from the house news, we left Saturday morning at about ten to nine to drive to Alexandria ON for the Twistle Guild’s Sheep to Shawl event. Held at the Glengarry Pioneer Museum, this was an informal small gathering of fibre artists and vendors. It was a lovely day. We had three brief thunderstorms roll through, but we just hitched our wheels and chairs closer to the centre of the awning we were under and kept on going. The boy had an enjoyable day playing about and visiting the various buildings on site one by one, eating his picnic lunch (packed in his new Artoo lunch box, a birthday gift from Ceri and Scott!), and petting the local cat, who was very friendly indeed. He took me on little tours to the museum buildings after HRH has taken him to see each one, showing me the interesting things and explaining various items to me. There was a sheep shearing in the early afternoon, which was very interesting to watch and fascinated the boy:
The Twistle spinners are a great bunch and I was made very welcome. I spun up all 3.5 ounces of the HAY batts I’d won from Phat Fiber a couple of weeks ago. I got a lot of comments on it from both spinners and visitors; I suspect this is due to the fact that I was the only one spinning something brightly coloured (and possibly the only one using longdraw; I didn’t get a good look at what others were doing, but my impression was that their hands were all very close to their wheels). I was very good and didn’t buy anything, mainly because I had no money, but also because I am now aware that anything brought into the house needs to be moved in four weeks. If the rest of my summer wasn’t so wildly booked I might have planned to head up on a Friday to spin with them again.
Things started packing up around threeish, mainly because it looked like there was yet another thunderstorm rolling in, and I was the last spinner to leave. We headed over to Darroch and Carolyn’s, where we were soon joined by an ever-increasing crowd of assorted friends and relatives. At Darroch’s request I made what is known as Evil Chocolate torte, the flourless chocolate cake I’d made for a gathering there before, which went over very well with the crowd. The boy and I went to bed around eight, and the next morning we had coffee and tea with our hosts while the boy had two bowls of cereal. Just past nine AM we headed over to Rowan Tree Farm to visit with t! and Jan, who fed us brunch, too. The boy checked on the chickens and ran around madly with their dog Carter.
Time with friends is always much too brief. We left for home around midday, all thoroughly exhausted. The boy and I watched movies while HRH went and sanded plastered drywall, and we ended the day with homemade pizza. Everyone slept like logs.
Today has been handling the slew of congratulations and questions about the house, and negotiating another editing gig. My lovely editor put me in touch with yet another in-house project looking for someone, and I talked today with the project’s editor about reducing a manuscript for republication. My bid to raise the fee for the project gig was met with regretful refusal due to their budget constraints, so I’m working within their budget. I was psyching myself for a two-month turnaround, but it turns out the delivery date is in mid-November, so I’m slightly giddy and somewhat relived that I won’t be trying to cram it into my life along with the move. And Jeff and Paze stopped by to give me their birthday gift, a lovely selection of handmade chocolates (which are very, very good indeed).
And in final news, the boy has scraped more elbows and knees in the space of three days than ever before, and he also consumed a full litre of milk in about twelve hours. I think we’re seeing a growth spurt.
