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.
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:
I am really, really tired of househunting. HRH spoke with one of the daycare dads last week who is a real estate agent, and when he complained about how quickly houses were selling — literally in less than 24 hours between the listing going up and agents calling for clients to see it — the dad nodded and said, “What’s happening is people are buying up houses in batches unseen, painting and doing slight renos required or uplifts like lighting, and reselling them at a profit.” HRH expressed his frustration at this, because it really screws families who are actually looking for houses to live in, and the agent agreed. He said it irritates real estate agents, too. He asked how many houses we’d viewed and when HRH said about thirty, he nodded again and said, “Yeah, that’s about the average these days.” So it’s nice to know we’re not just having an atypically horrible experience, but still incredibly frustrating to know that we’re being stymied by people who are just in it for the money.
For the past day I’ve been sorting through all the files on my 300 GB external hard drive. I’m prepping it for reformatting to serve as my Time Capsule backup destination disk, so I can set my Mac to initially back up completely then incrementally upon changes. I actually have all those files on my Mac (most of them more current) which is why I only backed up about half of the external music and documents to data DVDs. My external hard drive stuff is about four months out of date, but it’s better to have slightly out of date stuff than no stuff at all. And in fact I am doing this with the intention of being redundant, because I plan to back up the current documents on my Mac to data DVD as well. I added my newer music to the fourth music backup data DVD already.