Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Weekend Roundup With Bonus Monday Material

Sushi Friday night! This was a long-awaited treat. We went to our favourite sushi restaurant with Jeff and Paze, and as we went out after the kids were in bed there weren’t tables when we arrived. We chatted at the bar for about half an hour or forty-five minutes, and when we finally got a table the chef sent over a treat for us as a thank you for being so patient. It was one of his personal creations, not on the menu, and was delicious: a roll of salmon around tuna and what may have been red snapper, all wrapped in nori and lightly sauteed so that the first five millimeters or so of the salmon were barely cooked, all drizzled with a gingery sesame-chili-green oniony sticky glaze that we all scraped up with our chopsticks after the roll was gone. Oh ye gods, it was all heavenly. The tiny bit of cooked salmon contrasted so beautifully in taste and texture with the raw. I want to be kept waiting for half an hour every time now. We also learned that they’re expanding! Finally, after a decade of going to this tiny restaurant that seats maybe thirty people, they’re taking over half of the next space in the mall, so we’ll be able to bring a party larger than four people, which currently strains the seating. (Perhaps they will also take reservations. You never know.) We’re very excited about this, not only for our benefit, but because it means the restaurant is doing so very well. They opened two new locations over the past few years, one in Vaudreuil and one in Laval, but this one has stayed tiny and intimate. I can’t say I’m thrilled with their switch in music from jazz classics to modern pop, but everything else more than makes up or it. Dinner was, of course, delicious.

Saturday morning I headed out to my cello lesson, which was pretty intense in the focusing department. It was also very physical in that we spent a lot of time talking about back muscles and doing various exercises in order to isolate their movement. I also got to choose between two pieces for my solo in the upcoming Christmas recital, and I chose another duet with M, a lovely two-cello arrangement of Mozart’s ‘Canzonetta sull’ aria‘ from Le nozze di Figaro. I get to play Susanna! The lesson was good, but by the time I headed home I was drained, exhausted, and dizzy, and when I got in I knew that I was going to be useless for the rest of the day. This was problematic because I’d scheduled a very necessary grocery run and various errands, most birthday-related, and then had to drive to the south shore through a detour around the reserve to get to my in-laws’ house for HRH’s mom’s birthday dinner. (HRH was being picked up by his dad that morning in order to go help put a new fence in.) Well, the day got shafted because I couldn’t focus enough to drive, which made me even more irritated than the original irritation about being downed by the fibro. The boy and I stayed home all afternoon, napping together, watching movies, and making cupcakes. In the end we rescheduled the birthday dinner for next Friday night and HRH’s dad brought him back home again, going above and beyond the call of duty by crossing the bridge and traveling the associated detour four times in total.

I was climbing walls by that point, so HRH insisted that we head out to make an appearance at Scott’s birthday gathering after the boy was in bed. As I didn’t have to drive I agreed, with the proviso that the moment I felt not-good we had to leave. Things went rather well, and there was excellent company. I spent a couple of hours watching people play the new Beatles Rock Band game while HRH drummed or sat out, and he even pulled off a very impressive vocal performance of ‘Yellow Submarine’. We came home to bed at a reasonable hour. Blade is to be commended for being the Responsible Adult On Site two nights in a row.

Sunday morning we went apple picking! I have never done this before. Formally, I mean; I’ve pulled an apple here and there from people’s trees to eat as a child, but I’ve never done the full-out trip to an orchard. We met the Murphy-Aubin clan at an “apple forest” near Oka and had an absolutely fabulous morning. The weather was glorious, the company was excellent, the apples were delicious, and the kids had a great time running around, up and down ladders, in and out of branches so laden with apples that they bent to touch the grass below. It was spectacular. I ate more apples in one day than I have over the past year, and every single one of them was indescribably delicious. We now have twenty pounds of apples. It was a lovely way to celebrate the first day of fall, although one day early.

Back home we napped, and then the boys took me to my group cello lesson, which was great fun. While I was there they did the groceries, then they picked me up and brought me home again. We had sausages and eggs for dinner, I called my mum to chat, and went to bed. I slept poorly again, though, and only got about four hours, which made Monday kind of hard.

The lack of sleep wasn’t the only thing making Monday hard. I opened my latest freelance assignment to find a 172,000-word manuscript presented in a font composed entirely of capital letters. (I am serious. The author screamed this novel. All five hundred pages of it.) Not only that, the classification was wrong; it wasn’t a fantasy novel, but religious fiction, which isn’t one of the areas I work in. After calming down I debated sending it back, but figured no, I would just be focused and ruthless like I’m supposed to be. I tend to give a lot more time to these evaluations than I ought to, and I need to learn how to be more precise and efficient. This is as good a place as any to begin. And I began by changing the damn font to Times New Roman and putting a big note on the front of the evaluation saying that in order to be read and evaluated the font had to be reformatted, and all page references were according to the new pagination. (I am still incandescent about it.)

Last night we had a Harvest ritual, focusing on celebrating our achievements over the past year. B brought a small bottle of ice cider, and we used our horn for the first time (although we offered the horn to the gods, ancestors, and spirits and used small glasses for ourselves, as most of us had colds). I am really enjoying how our coven is exploring a different way of celebrating, rather than using standard Wiccan format. We’ve chosen to explore the Germanic aspects of our tradition and heritage, and we’re finding that the philosophies reflect our goals and directions very well.

Today I finish up the evaluation, and if I have time, I may prep some more fibre to spin, or I may crack open the black roving I got with the wheel, or even try some of the silky BFL I have left over from spindling.

Chugging Along

Nothing like being the de facto principal cellist in the absence of the first chair on the first day of orchestra… and not embarrassing myself. Go me!

Yes, it was the first orchestra rehearsal of the season last night, and our principal cellist couldn’t make it. It’s entirely possible that the late notice caught her with a double-booking. Anyway, our new conductor graciously asked if I wanted to move into the first chair and I said, “Oh, no; I’m good right here, thanks.” So everyone else shuffled so as to be closer and the third chair moved up to sit first. And I discovered something: Even though we were sight reading, in general my rhythm and timing is more accurate. We all ran into problems with a badly printed copy of the music and nasty accidental-sown runs (oh, Beethoven, I love you but you’re a bastard, with your notation tricks of slurs across beats and those damn modulations within scale-like passages), but I was pretty reliable in entrances and so forth. I did lose my place more than I’d liked in the runs because everything was squished together, and I have trouble ignoring people who are playing the wrong thing at the wrong time to focus on my own technically correct stuff. Still, it was a good time, and bodes very, very well for the season. Also, yay for my intonation. Lessons and a new cello are working well.

And in related news, I can’t listen to the Schubert ‘Rosamunde’ theme without singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in my head. (Now you can’t either. Ha.)

On Tuesday I had a minor heart attack. I submitted my freelance project before lunch, and around five o’clock I got a note from them saying that they couldn’t read my file. “Are you using a Mac?” they inquired. “It looks like a conversion issue.” Oh great, I thought; the freelance people can’t read my Mac Word docs. They’re arriving corrupted. It hadn’t made a difference before when I used the iBook, but for some reason now it’s a problem. So I opened the file in Open Office, saved it, and sent it off to them, and all was well. Not only was all well, but they gave me an approval code right off the bat before reviewing it so I could get an invoice in by the end of the day to make the next pay period, bless them. I had deliberately not planned for that, figuring they’d be swamped.

My back’s been slowly improving each day, but yesterday I still had to spend a couple of hours lying down and reading. This morning I seem to be operational without the aid of tiger balm or painkillers, which is a huge improvement. Still being very careful, though.

While waiting for another freelance assignment to land, I was aimlessly wandering through the files on my computer, waiting for something to jump up and say “Me! It’s time to work on me now!” Nothing really did. I’m at one of those low points in the process where I’m not immersed in something and I need something to work on that I’m excited about. Slogging is necessary at times, but when one is looking for a new main project, it’s good to have at least some interest in what you’re about to sink time into. I found Wings & Ashes, the novella loosely based on Swan Lake I’d written a few rough scenes for two years ago. I knew I’d written more than what was in the file, so I dug through notebooks until I found what I’d done, and transcribed seven pages of writing. When creatively frustrated and uninspired, transcribing handwritten stuff from two years ago can help one feel not totally useless. And it eased me back into the story. We’ll see what happens now, because just before I logged off last night the next freelance assignment landed in my FTP folder. It’s a short one, though, so I’ll work on that this morning and do a couple of hours on Wings & Ashes this afternoon.

The dough for cinnamon buns is rising, I have the Schubert tenth and thirteenth string quartets lined up, and a full pot of tea. Let’s see how far I can get.

Weekend Roundup, Labour Day Edition

As it has been many many months since my hair was cut, I booked an appointment for Saturday morning at 8:30, and an appointment for the boy at his ‘haircut store’ (his term, not mine) for an hour later. My stylist moved salons, so this was my first trip to the new location. It’s closer, it’s more posh.. and also more expensive. Still, I’ll pay it gladly to keep working with a stylist who doesn’t condescend to me and who actually does what I ask her to do. My hair is now even shorter than it was at its shortest last year. Heh.

There was a Tim Horton’s two doors down from the new salon, so the boy and HRH headed there for a treat while I got my hair cut, then we moved on to the boy’s appointment about five minutes away. The boy loves getting his hair cut, so that wasn’t a problem, either. Then we wandered to the bookstore, where the boy found a Transformers collector’s guide that we told him to save up for, because it was fifteen dollars and he had already chosen an early reader book to buy. He kept insisting that he had the money, and we kept telling him that he didn’t, and that lots of coins in his money box did not necessarily translate to a large total sum of money, especially when they were mostly nickels and pennies. He was not pleased with this, to put it mildly, which necessitated his removal to the sidewalk outside the store while I paid for our books. I was apologized to when I emerged from the shop. We then stopped at our local Best Buy to pick up a birthday gift certificate for HRH’s dad, where the boy found a Wii terminal that was demoing the swordplay game from the Wii Sports Resort kit and proceeded to do a creditable job for a four year old player while giggling madly. While he did I checked out the webcams (no luck), and the cases for iPod Touch (finally, win!). We coaxed the boy away from the Wii and took a quick turn through the two video game shops for a secondhand copy of Sports Resort, but again, no luck. We’ll put it on the list of things to surprise him with at Yule.

Sunday morning we joined Ceri, Scott, and Ceri’s parents for brunch. We haven’t seen Aubrey and Carmel in eight years (almost exactly, as it was for Ceri and Scott’s wedding!). It was lovely to spend time with them again. The boy thought them very fine as well, and gave them huge hugs and kisses when we left. He spent lots of time digging through an old box of Lego and action figures that Scott had unearthed, and playing on the play structure in the backyard. Brunch was delicious. After the boy’s nap we headed to the south shore for HRH’s dad’s birthday dinner, which was also wonderful. We had a lovely time relaxing in the backyard, and then indulging in a huge pile of barbecued ribs. There was no traffic on the bridge, which was surprising because there had been several warnings about closures, which didn’t seem to be closed after all either there or back. And then when we turned onto the street before ours we saw emergency vehicles, and as we turned onto our own street we saw that one of the duplexes in the building across and one over from ours had burned out during the three hours we were gone. HRH and I were a bit freaked out for the next couple of hours. The shock of coming home and seeing it so drastically changed was bad, but being here while it was happening would have been worse. Our next-door neighbour told us that there was so much smoke it was like night-time. Somewhat reassuringly, the flat above the one that burnt and the ones beside it were relatively undamaged, if one discounts the hole the firefighters had to punch in the floor and roof of the flat above to vent the smoke. Good construction.

Monday we’d left blissfully unscheduled and open. Good thing, too, because my back was so bad by that point that I was pretty much bed-bound. We went out late morning to the pharmacy to buy tiger balm (ours has gone AWOL) and lotion and such things, and we discovered that tiger balm now comes in a lotion form dispensed from a pump. It’s heavenly. I spent much of the day reading or asleep thanks to the muscle relaxants I was taking. I was able to get up and do a third round of tomato canning mid-afternoon, and then made a really nice spaghetti sauce for dinner.

Over the weekend I also managed to reknit all the stuff I’d frogged on my short-sleeved sweater, which makes me very happy. The boy asked if he could help me last night and was upset when I asked him not to, so I got out the size 11 needles and a ball of rainbow yarn, and cast ten stitches on for him to knit. At the moment we’re at the ‘Mama holds her hands over his hands’ stage, but he is very enthusiastic about wrapping the yarn over the RH needle to make the new stitch. He has decided that he is knitting a scarf for his teacher (first it was a hat “because hers is getting very old”, but I suggested the easier scarf instead and he took the suggestion readily). I also managed to read three books over the long weekend. Amazing what being stuck in one place can do for sedentary pastimes. The weather over the weekend was lovely, too; clear, not too hot, nice and cool in the mornings.

Today I’ve been very, very careful. Sudden movement is bad, as is twisty side-to-side motion. If I sit down and stand up very slowly and remember not to turn while I’m doing it, I can get around. I proofed, polished, and handed in the freelance project I’d pretty much completed on Friday this morning.

And… I just got a call to tell me that orchestra is beginning tomorrow night! Which means I have to scramble for my augmented dues, about which I’d entirely forgotten. There’s a silver lining to my spinning wheel being delayed; I have extra money in the bank.

Ups And Downs

Friday’s score:

+1: Started and finished the freelance assignment. Hah! Put it aside to be proofed and submitted on Tuesday. (No point in racing to get it handed in on Friday; Monday’s a holiday and it wouldn’t get approved in time to invoice on Tuesday anyhow.)

+1: Lower back hurt so much that I yanked Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary out of my stack of reference books to use as a foot rest. Wonder of wonders, it fits under the desk, is the perfect height to take some of the stress off my back, and is surprisingly comfy.

+2: Good cello lesson. Also found out we’ll be playing Beethoven’s Eighth this fall with orchestra, as well as a Mozart overture, Schubert’s Rosamunde suite and something clarinety. (A bonus to studying with the principal cellist, who learns the programme ahead of time in order to do bowings.) Whee! I was hoping hoping hoping we’d do Beethoven with this new conductor! Good cello lesson stuff included dynamics and expression. Not-so-good stuff included intonation (stupid left elbow) and impatient sulky right wrist (who wants to lead like it used to and leaves the right elbow in the dust when I’m not paying attention). Lessons are officially set for Saturday mornings, Friday or Sunday evenings if my teacher will be out of town on Sat. (Note to self: I really need a mirror to practice with. I should cruise garage sales.) Also, I got group lesson material for the Christmas concert.

-2: Started reading two books, both pretty boring/badly written/not conducive to actually reading. Good thing two other books I reserved are in at the library (My Life In France and The Demon’s Lexicon, the latter of which I requested them to purchase, and they did!)

-1: Frogged all two inches of the in-the-round top-down short-sleeved sweater I started in April and tucked away in May, then pulled out to work on again two weeks ago. (Evidently I am not a summer knitter.) Frogged because I was increasing at every marker… including the one placed to solely identify the middle back as well as the four raglan markers at which I was supposed to increase, because I didn’t think the instructions through. Durr. Froggity froggity frog. Cast it all on again. I was surprisingly sanguine about frogging all that work and redoing it. Maybe it’s the lovely Harmony needles and the deliciously soft Pima cotton I’m using, or maybe I’ve achieved that knitting Zen thing. (Ha. Not likely. I think I just didn’t have the energy to get upset.)

Friday wins out in the plus column. I’m not counting the insane drivers on the highway last night who wouldn’t let me merge and the eighteen-wheelers who shoved me into lanes I didn’t want to be in.

Weekend Roundup, End Of Summer Edition

I’ve got the second round of canned tomatoes happening. I think I’ll get one more round from the garden. Some of the weather has been so bad this past month that we’ve lost lots of green tomatoes, and a couple of entire tomato plants. Still, I’ll have about a dozen jars, which is more than nothing. I may buy a bushel of tomatoes from the market and do a whole bunch more preserving this season. It feels very much like canning weather, what with the sudden dip in temperature to high teens or very low twenties.

This was a packed weekend, made more difficult than it should have been by my increasing fibro flare-up, now with exciting bonus back pain, seized lumbar region, and spasms. Friday night HRH mowed the lawn and vacuumed, because we were going to be out pretty much all weekend. Saturday morning we visited the Preston-LeBlancs for a lovely tea party, where we all settled down and relaxed and knitted or chatted or drew, and feasted on cinnamon rolls (I tried a new recipe, yum!), zucchini brownies, berry cake, and zucchini bread. Back home there was a quick lunch then a nap, for both the boy and I because I wasn’t feeling well. After nap HRH and the boy went grocery shopping, because I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed to do it, and then we all went upstairs to have Chinese fondue with Blade and Scarlet, which was a lot of fun.

Sunday morning was the monthly Pagan playgroup meeting, which the boy adores. It was a belated Lughnassadh-themed circle, so I baked my Lughnassadh herb bread to share afterwards, and that was a hit. While the boy napped I made cookies, and when he woke from his afternoon nap we packed them, the corn pot, and the cello up for the beginning-of-season BBQ at my cello teacher’s house. The boy wore his Superman t-shirt and the little red cape ADZO had made for a birthday party, and ran around the beautifully landscaped backyard through pergolas and archways and lovely shady areas. There was fabulous corn on the cob, hot dogs, delicious artisan sausages, salads, and the usual fun BBQ fare, and it was nice to talk to people we don’t often speak with. After dessert we set up and did some playing, which was fun too, although it highlighted how lax we’d all been with practice over the summer. Then it was home for a quick to-bed, Blade came down to be the Designated Responsible Adult On Site, and HRH and I headed back out for our monthly RPG night. During which, I must say, I laughed harder than I’d laughed in ages, and appreciated how all the clues finally fell together.

The boy discovered the Justice League yesterday. He’s known about them, but he finally saw a couple of episodes, and now we are all referred to as superheroes. I am, of course, Wonder Woman, and HRH is usually cast as Green Lantern. I think this month’s treat will be a season of JL on DVD.

I went back on active duty with the ongoing freelance gig this morning. Orchestrated‘s pretty much done, the bank account’s looking low, and I need discipline. Also, I suspect that by working on someone else’s deadline again, the spinning wheel I’ve awaited for the past six weeks should arrive at the shop within about three days in response to my drastically reduced free time. Because life is like that.

In Which She Imitates A Sloth

Not purposefully, mind you. It’s just how I feel after overdoing it yesterday. Fibrosloth! (Hmm. May need a fibrosloth icon.)

Yesterday morning I found myself craving fresh peaches, with no idea where the craving night have come from. Amanda then told me that she’d seen the first Niagara peaches now available here in markets; Mum mentioned she’d bought her first peaches last weekend, but I thought it would be at least another week here. Yay! Then I had the weirdest urge to learn to play The Swan. What is *with* me today?, I wondered. So with an hour before I had to leave, I pulled out the sheet music to The Swan. (Well, I didn’t have peaches, so cello it was.) And lo and behold, there was much absence of suckage in The Swan! (Well, except for bar 8. Stupid scale run with accidentals.) Judging from my well-meaning but full of fail previous fingerings, I was enthusiastic but not confident enough in shifting before. Or rather, not confident enough in my knowledge of the geography of the fingerboard, meaning I tried to shift as rarely as possible, leading me to play in awkward positions longer than I really needed to. I even managed some nice subtlety of expressions and some very attractive timbre.

I headed out to meet friends for lunch via bus and Metro, and used the Touch as an MP3 player for the first time. It was stupidly exciting. Also embarrassing, because I couldn’t figure out how to actually get something to, you know, play. Oy. Yay for random button-mashing. (Or touch-screen mashing. Oh Apple, why can you not be consistent in what needs a double-click and what does not?)

Lovely lunch in the company of excellent friends, but I ended up totally wiped regardless. We had a three-hour lunch, then MLG offered to keep me company and drive me to the library as it looked like rain, but we walked all the way back to where he’d parked at Mackay’s, and that ten-minute brisk walk plus the humid air downed me. It’s a worse fibro week than I thought. So no Bibliotheque nationale for me; he drove me home instead, bless him.

So this morning I had to figure out whether I should drive downtown to the library after dropping Liam off and picking something up from Paze, or go in by bus and metro tomorrow. I felt so stupidly paralyzed by the decision. Thursdays always feel rushed anyway, but if I drove I could get the whole thing done in less time. And there’s always meter parking around Archambault around ten in the morning. I made the decision to go, but by the time I got to Paze’s I was wiped. Yesterday’s outing just killed me. By the time I left her place I knew I couldn’t go downtown; I could barely concentrate enough to get home. No driving downtown for me. I did do the local running around (had to hit the bank three times, because I forgot one of the several transactions I had to do EVERY TIME, gah) and came back home to do the freelance thing.

I started working on the last part of this particular freelance gig, and in waltzed the self-doubt. I don’t know whether some of this doesn’t make sense because it’s bioengineering-speak, or because English is the writer’s second language. It occurs to me that it might also be due to the fibro-fog, requiring me to reread sentences several times in order to make head or tail of them.

Well, I’m done now; I’m just doing a final reread to make sure I haven’t missed anything, before sending it off to the grad student. Then I think I shall pass out.

Accomplished

Two chapters edited of the proposal, no time wasted on research about roving or wheels, practically no checking of LJ and RSS feeds.

Of, course, this is because I finally got around to watching The Guild today. But it worked. And it felt more active than frequent breaks to check news and stuff.

I’ve really been enjoying this editing job. I realised today that I am a total editing geek, because I like taking someone’s writing and focusing and refining it to be clear and tight. Cut those excess words! Put the important words where they get more attention in the sentence! Sharpen that point!

Yeah. I’m lame.

I did some basic planning for the NS trip this morning too. Bless Ceri, who said, “Why don’t you just hit a visitor’s information bureau when you get to the end of your rope and they can help you find inexpensive accommodation for the night? That’s what we did when we moved.” This takes piles of pressure off me to find three or more potential places to stop and stay throughout New Brunswick, depending on when we absolutely cannot be in the car any longer. Chances are very good they’ll be able to find a motel cheaper than the ones I’ve been able to find (because gack, too expensive, thanks). So instead I collated all the visitors centres along the route. Heh. It occurs to me that this what we did when we honeymooned in Scotland, and if we can do it in a foreign country we can do it in our own. I also checked to see if there was a yarn store where we’re staying, and what do you know, there is. Also heh. Their web page didn’t say they sold roving, but they deal with a bunch of local sheep farms, so they might have a few.

Yesterday I experienced a fibro/migraine teamup that knocked me flat halfway through the day. Urg. Fortunately today I am much better. Tomorrow I need to make a list of local places to visit while on vacation, and start a list of what to pack. I’m having lunch out with MLG and Paze, and then making my grand trek to the Bibliotheque nationale to get my subscriber card and borrow all fifteen (which is my max) books on spinning.

In weather-related news, summer has finally arrived: It’s finally hot enough to make chocolate kind of squishy if not stored in the fridge. Now if the dozens upon dozens of green tomatoes in the garden would just ripen, I would be thrilled.

Dinner!