The anthology galleys are done and out of my hands. I had to send them away or I’d have kept poking at them.
Onward!
ETA ten minutes later: And now I am in that curious post-novel ennui phase where I can’t settle down and do anything. This is ridiculous. I should go make tea and take a notebook into the living room and scribble ideas out.
ETA @ 5:00: 460 handwritten words of setup. Am pleased. Now off to make polenta.
Okay, who allowed this June thing? And why is it still going down to something like five degrees at night? Hello, late spring: We would just like to remind you that summer is twenty-one days away, and if you want to get any love you’d better start warming up to us.
As previously noted, on Friday afternoon after his nap we took the boy to see his first movie in a theatre. We really managed to arrange the best combination of circumstances: the perfect time of day, the perfect film, the perfect age. Go us! We sat in the very back row in case we needed to make a quick exit; he sat on a booster seat and we shared a little kid’s combo of popcorn and the tiny bag of Twizzlers that came with it. He didn’t talk a lot, only made the occasional comment, but he laughed and gasped and said, “That’s silly!” and such things at the appropriate moments. He got slightly upset at something at one point and started to whimper a bit, so I told him that it was all right, that it was just a movie and part of the story, and held his hand. Afterwords he whispered, “Thank you for holding my hand, Mama.” The majority of comments were heartfelt bursts of, “I love you, Mama!” which is shorthand for “I’m having an awesome time!”Up will never be my favourite Pixar film (I honestly can’t say what is at the moment) but they stayed true to their story and their characters, and the execution was as beautiful as it always is. Also, I cried about five or six times; it was very well-told.
Friday night I had my first post-recital cello lesson, where my teacher told me how impressed she’d been with my bow control and intonation. We looked at the current Suzuki 2 piece I’m reviewing, and I get the feeling she thinks I’m going to be done my book 2 review by the end of the month, which just so happens to be the end of her teaching year. We talked about setting up a review plan for the summer and basic prep work for book 3 in the fall. She also reminded me that I take good notes, and to review them regularly to remind myself about pronating hands and dropping shoulders and elbow angles. I feel a bit less panicked about two months without structure now. We finished by looking at some of the tricky passages in the orchestra music, and I’d done very acceptable fingerings for most of it, only really changing one. Was rather proud of that. I must be learning or something.
On Saturday Ceri took me to a spinning workshop as an early birthday present. We sat in the sun on comfy couches and chairs at Ariadne, and learnt about fibre and how to draft and how to use a drop spindle. The instructor looked at us all and said, “Hmm, well, I guess I’ll demonstrate how to use a wheel once we’ve covered plying, because you’ve all caught onto this really quickly and we’ll have the time.” My major problems are connecting a new draft to the draft that’s being spun (my joins come out lumpy); drafting evenly enough so that my resulting yarn is even; and keeping the spindle going with just a single twist of the fingers. I know there’s a technique where one taps the whorl that keeps it going, but we were parking it while we fed the twist up the draft. It was exciting in a relaxing sort of way, if that makes any sense. I demonstrated when we got home, and the boys were duly impressed. Wrapping the single for plying was just as annoying as it had been in the workshop, though. HRH: “Could you… knit with that?” Me: “I could go get needles and do it RIGHT NOW.”
But I didn’t.
Ultimately I’d like to spin enough to string my loom (note to self: using the loom will work better if you have a shuttle and a heddle hook) and make something. As I was falling asleep that night I thought it would be really nice if I could make something for my mother using yarn I’d spun myself and woven on the loom. Evidently there’s still an eager first-grader inside me, sticking macaroni to a tin can and spray-painting it gold to give to her on Mother’s Day. Why do I have such expensive hobbies? I think I’m a relatively simple creature, but I end up playing the cello and spinning. I need to sell another book just to supply myself with accessories and raw material.
Sunday was the multi-family outing to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. The Zouak family had to bow out, as poor ADZO is still recovering from an appendectomy, but everyone else was still on board. Google lied through its virtual teeth when it said it would take just under three hours to get there. It took us two hours, and we ended up knocking about the museum lobby and lunchroom for forty-five minutes waiting for the others. The drive there was wonderful, one of those early summer mornings where all the colours are extra-vivid. The boy was very patient (as patient as someone on the threshold of four years old can be) and was overjoyed when the rest of the party arrived. The museum is half closed, as they’re undergoing extensive renovation, but the holdings that were on display were terrific. Lots of dinosaur bones from Canada, and great life-sized models. The other floors were mammals and birds, all very interesting. There’s some great interactive stuff presented on touch screens, which thrilled the boy because buttons and dials and such are always Very Cool. He’s still at the “what’s around the next corner” stage, which is hard to control when the rest of your party is taking the time to really look at the exhibits, but once we got to the higher floors he started focusing better. It’s a quite remarkable museum, and it was all brilliant enough that we decided we’d be going back next spring once the renovation was complete. We enjoyed our packed lunches in the lunchroom, and we left just after one o’clock for the trip home, knowing the boy, although apparently fine, would very soon reach saturation level. The drive home was not as nice, with dramatic pressure changes back and forth, storm fronts all around, and really dreadful wind.
Overall it was a wonderful weekend. Now, back to work. The anthology galleys are due back tomorrow, and I want to finish a second pass on them. I have a new freelance assignment that’s due on Friday, too (blessedly short). And I came up with two story ideas on the trip to the museum yesterday that I want to noodle about with. One is courtesy of something Liam said while reading a book in the back seat, so I think I will write it for him. It’s going to end up being a short chapter book, possibly for the eight to ten age range. We shall see. It’s quite nebulous at this point.
I was poky this morning, dragging my metaphorical heels and saying, “I don’t wanna work.” And I spent what I thought was a lot of time kicking around online, hopping through my usual stops of news and journals and Facebook and Twitter and various forums, looking for distraction. I made bread. I don’t think I really settled in to the documents I had open on my desktop till around eleven.
And now? Wow. Freelance assignment finished, half the galleys done, and two hours of cello interspersed throughout. And I thought I was wasting the day. I shall have a glass of wine as a reward!
Well, to be honest, it’s felt like lethargy, but it’s mostly been workworkwork and headaches, none of which are particularly conducive to writing blog posts. And it would be more of the same old, same old:
Work: Turned a freelance assignment around in five work hours; this is so much easier when the manuscripts are good. Got kudos for struggling through the last one that was so hard to read. Billed for three evaluations in ten work days; very nice. Got the galleys for the anthology, due back in ten days. Found a glaring error in the very first story. Sigh.
Cello: Excellent lesson Tuesday night, with yet another spontaneous appreciative comment from my teacher about how my left hand, confidence, and intonation have all really improved, both in my lesson and ensemble stuff as well as orchestra. Now we just really need to train the final tendencies to lift and lead from the wrist out of my bow hand and we’re good. (Ha ha ha. This is, of course, a lifetime-long struggle.) I was feeling pretty darn good about my celloing. And then yesterday I had another two-hour duet rehearsal with my partner, in which my bow was controlled by aliens. I’m serious. I certainly had no say in what it did. It sounded awful and squeaky and I shall wrap the frog in tinfoil so they don’t do it again during the recital on Sunday. We did good work, but I sounded awful in the duet. It did a real number on my self-confidence.
Weather: Yesterday was sunny with a hot wind; all the windows were open and the scent of lilacs poured in. It almost hit 30 C. For the first time, I officially wore no socks. Hello, summer. Today is damp and overcast and not warm. Hello again, spring.
Food: No interest. Thinking of food to feed other people is hard when you don’t feel like eating.
Boy: He has started drawing people and is very good at it. I nearly cried when he drew one in front of me for the first time. (Representational drawing is a big step; representational drawing of human figures is even bigger.) Language skills continue to freak me out. He’s been guaranteed a full-time preschool slot as of mid-August, which is fabulous, but which also means that I will never have the car to myself on a weekday again come the new fall term. He’s about two-thirds my height, which isn’t tall to begin with, but he’s about to turn four; c’mon. We also found out that the little con artist can and does use the pedals on the school trikes, which he claims he cannot do.
Cats: Cricket has been throwing up her food for a while, so we got her some Hills sensitive-stomach stuff and she’s kept it down just fine. Except Nix has figured out that Cricket’s getting Special Treatment, and won’t eat her own food now: she hooks the new food out from under Cricket’s nose and eats it herself. If we put Cricket in another room to eat, Nixie ignores her own dish entirely. Nixie is pretty much fur, bones, and whiskers and can’t afford to not eat. Scarlet told me about an Iams formula that is good for sensitive stomachs and is cheaper than the Hills, which she feeds to her herd of beasts, so we can feed it to all three cats and no one has to feel left out. Good grief.
HRH has booked today off, as he had a bunch of vacation days he needed to use by the end of May. The tentative plan is to go see the new Star Trek film, except I’ve had an awful headache for the past twelve hours. If it doesn’t get better, I’m calling it off. He’s taking next Thursday and Friday off as well, and the plan for next Friday is to take the boy to see Up in the theatre, his first such outing. It’s probably proof of my lethargy/fibro flareups/perpetual headaches that I’m more excited about next week’s film outing than today’s.
Victoria Day Weekend is generally planting weekend around here. We’re more concerned with getting things into the ground than being able to wear white again without offending traditional fashion rules. It’s generally planting weekend because (a) it’s a long weekend, (b) theoretically it’s warm enough that night frosts are over, and (c) because we say so. And so of course, Saturday it poured rain, and Sunday was rainshowery and overcast and downright cold; both days saw really high winds. And the temperature, flouting Victoria Day decree, went within four degrees of freezing at night and only barely made it to 10 C during the day.
So our original plans for all-out gardening were put on hold and we did small dashes when we could. Saturday morning we went out and picked up fourteen bags of black earth to add to the beds, and four double flats of cosmos for the front garden. The boys put the cosmos in while I hid in a dark bedroom, trying to deal with a migraine. On Sunday HRH went out and got four double flats of pansies to line the front garden and scatter through the back garden. On Monday afternoon we went out and picked up twenty-four tomato seedlings, lots of mixed lettuce greens, and seed packets of green onions, carrots, cucumber, peas, and poppies. The boys planted all of that (except the poppies) while I made dinner. Monday afternoon was really the nicest weather of the entire long weekend, sunny and warm enough to leave off one’s jacket and garden in just a long-sleeved jersey.
That was the gardening component of the weekend. There was, of course, more. Saturday was dubbed the Day Of Baking. I made my first ever batch of homemade ice cream, from the recipe in the most recent issue of Fine Cooking, and froze it in a pan, beating it with a hand-held mixer once an hour. I did that three times, and it ended up beautifully creamy. (The original plan was to finally buy an ice-cream maker, but the only one I found was too expensive. Bah; who needs a machine?) I also baked the most incredibly brownie-like cookies to use in making ice cream sandwiches. The first tray didn’t spread as much as I’d hoped, so I pressed the second batch down to be thinner, and those worked better. I had five egg whites left over, so I made meringues, and if I haven’t said it enough, I love my stand mixer: I set it up to beat the egg whites and sugar and walked away for ten minutes. When I came back it was so think I could spoon some up and throw it on the pan, and it would keep its shape. Incredible! I had to bake them twice, though, because it was so damp on Saturday they kept going sticky. I left them in the cool oven overnight instead of a container, then baked them the second time for three hours at 100 F, to thoroughly dry them. It worked, too; they were light and crunchy all the way through.
Victoria Day itself was a beautiful, sunny day, most welcome after the rainy overcast days of Saturday and Sunday. We visited Ceri and Scott for lunch, and ate delicious gourmet burgers and grilled veggies done on the barbecue. Dessert was sandwiches made from my ice cream and chocolate cookies, with meringues to follow. It was absolutely wonderful. Ceri and Scott also sent us home with a small slide they’d found behind their shed, which fits perfectly within the space on the swingset that used to house the odd glider/seesaw thing we took down. Liam is over the moon.
For those who want to know the outcome of the dramatically bad manuscript evaluation I had to do, I kept slogging and handed something in with a note explaining the drastic shortcomings and the lack of examples that are usually required to demonstrate problems that need to be addressed. (Hard to prove a negative regarding plot or characterization when you can’t find any.) The department got back to me with kudos for handling a hopeless case and said they understood how hard it must have been, and thanked me for sticking to it and for being as encouraging as I had been. Result: warm fuzzy feeling. Go me.
I really had a tough time dealing with this. As an author, I know what it’s like to get an editorial letter. Even though these evaluations are anonymous, I felt like I was slaughtering this author’s hopes and dreams. A couple of writer friends, one of whom also copyedits, pointed out that part of a writer’s job is receiving criticism and applying it to improve the product, just as part of the editor’s responsibility is to critique in order to elicit a stronger product. Neither are enjoyable one hundred percent of the time, but we both have to perform our duties to the best of our abilities. We owe it to ourselves, to one another, and to the product. While I wasn’t functioning as a traditional editor in this instance, I was responsible to pointing out weaknesses and errors in order to ascertain what level of editing was required to bring it to publishable standard. And when I have to say that the writing is of such a low quality that I can’t find the story the author is trying to tell, well, I get downright miserable, because that’s not news I ever want to have to tell someone.
Let’s see, what else? I finished reading Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest; a most beautifully written book. And I finally began The Children’s Book, the new book by A.S. Byatt. I hadn’t known a new one was out until I saw it on the new release shelf at the library two weeks ago. It’s gorgeous; I will own it. Possibly even in hardcover. And HRH and I finally saw the fourth Indiana Jones movie, which was not as abysmal as the world said it was when it came out. Yes, it was flawed, and yes, there were things I would have changed about it, but it wasn’t the travesty we’d been led to believe it was.
Right; on to the day. I have a new freelance assignment, and there is cello in my future, both practise and a duet lesson tonight. Recital on Sunday! Five days!
Yesterday was all cello, all the time. Well, not precisely; I did three hours of errands and grocery shopping and such in the morning. But I had an excellent two-hour duet rehearsal with my partner, then had half an hour to tidy up, and headed then off to my cello lesson. It was great to hear my teacher say that it was really coming together, and there were just twiddly things to do to the duet. When I was packing up she said that in general I was sounding good: my bow was more confident, and my intonation was really improving. It put me in a great mood as I left, and it stayed with me for the rest of the day, even through the traffic from hell on the highway that nearly made me late to collect the boy from the caregiver. (Hello, construction season. I have not missed you.)
The night before had been orchestra, so in effect I had five hours of cello in the space of eighteen waking hours. *flexes her callouses* I have to find a way to keep my left hand relaxed through the Vaughn Williams; I’m using way too much pressure. It’s not like I have to press any harder with my left fingers if I’m playing louder, after all. It’s all about bow speed.
I’m currently struggling with my latest work project. My job is to evaluate several different aspects of a manuscript in order to recommend the proper level of editing. I’ve run into a situation I’ve never had to deal with before, namely that the writing level is so low that I can’t find the plot or any characterization. I need to supply examples of things to be fixed, and it’s very hard to prove a negative. Spending yesterday away from it was helpful, I think; I did what I could on Wednesday, and now I’m going to try to wrap it up today. The bad ones take so much more time than the good ones, partly because it’s harder to read them, and partly because it’s difficult to be diplomatic about the shortcomings. It takes me more time to write up my report than it does to make my notes on the problems.
I’m also struggling with a decision regarding tomorrow’s outing. Originally we were scheduled to spend Victoria Day weekend with my parents, but HRH realised that it’s the Creative Arts show tonight and he couldn’t take Friday off to make the trip out to southern Ontario worth the drive. The substitute plan was to travel to the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa for the Glenn Gould exhibit, which I hadn’t known about until I saw that it was being held over till May 18. I’ve missed every major Gould event for the past ten years, so the new plan was to do this on Saturday. Except the orchard planting last Saturday really exhausted me, and I’m still not operating at one hundred percent. I’ve been achy and low on energy all week. I don’t know if another two-hour drive plus a museum visit is going to be worth the energy invested in it. I can’t find a review of the exhibit, which would help me decide if it’s worth it or not. It’s a decision that will have to be made Saturday morning.
In the meantime, the 1981 Goldberg recording, some Dragon Moon Darjeeling, open windows, and good incense.
Have had tea and breakfast. Have caught up on news, correspondence, the Hydro questionnaire I was bugged about on Sunday. Slate cleared for work on the newest assignment. (Yet another epic fantasy ms. to review. I may have to take epic fantasy off the list of subjects I’ll accept.)
The unfair: Despite all this virtuous activity, I have a bad headache, am still suffering on and off from a bloody nose for no apparent reason, and the cold than began manifesting yesterday has entrenched.
I’m going back to bed for an hour. If I’m not back by lunch at the latest, send more cats.
LATER: Back and better, thank you.
ETA: Oh, and that Hydro questionnaire? We’re already so damned efficient that the best it could recommend was “You could save $63 annually by installing electric thermostats instead of using the old manual ones!” Gee, thanks, Hydro.