Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Argh…

I have to re-record them all. My voice level is too low, and my tone is too low too.

I only managed to find this out after trying to connect it to my computer, failing every way I tried, going online and looking up the manual, pulling the SD card out of it, putting it into my card reader and finding a USB port that would accept it. (Time wasted: one hour.) It sounded fine over the headphones plugged directly to the unit. I’m glad I double-checked.

Well, I guess I know what I’m doing tonight once the boy’s asleep. With a large glass of red wine, I might add. (It’s good to work at home.)

Potpourri

The monthly post about the boy is up and backdated.

First rehearsal with the new test conductor last night, and what fun. He had us playing the Schubert passably in pretty much no time at all. He’s younger than I thought (by quite a bit) and an oboist. We were missing an oboe so he pulled his out and wandered around playing the oboe theme while conducting. It was mildly alarming to have an oboist wander at you at various points, but it certainly encouraged each section to play out when they were supposed to. He greeted us in French and talked to us equally in both languages, which impressed us. I already like his musicality and his personality. There were grumpy people making their grumpiness known, but that’s not unusual, alas.

Best news of the night: One of the pieces he’s considering programming is Ralph Vaughn Williams’ English Folk Song suite! I bounced in my chair with excitement. (Otherwise I sat there in mild pain, because the particular chair I was in slanted nastily toward the back. Ugh. Time to look into one of those firm wedge cushions.)

I need to do two more takes of six brief sections of dialogue for this recording, then I’m going to hook it all up to the computer and listen to it. I’ve already noted which takes I need to delete because of an error on my part or noise interference (like helpful cats scratching or jumping up onto my desk and scattering papers). I fervently hope everything’s okay, because if not I have to do the whole thing over twice tonight once the boy’s in bed, and I don’t do work after the boy’s in bed very well. The boy and I are headed downtown tomorrow morning to ride on the underground train to hand this in.

This morning’s excitement included being addressed by a policeman, who pulled up next to my car while I was unlocking it after dropping the boy off. How long had I been there, he wanted to know, and was I not aware that I wasn’t allowed to park on this side of the street between nine and four? I blinked, looked at the signage, and pointed out respectfully that the signs indicated that motorists were supposed to park here between nine and four on a Thursday, and that in fact all the cars on the opposite side of the street were parked illegally. He looked at the signs, looked back at me, said, “T’as raison, j’ai mal identifié le côté de la rue,” and gave me a huge grin. I laughed and wished him a good day. There was such a difference between his neutral opening words and the tone of his reply to me. He must encounter argument and abuse pretty much regularly, so to have someone correct him politely must be quite a novelty. He gave me another huge grin once his partner had turned the car around and was headed back down the hill toward all the illegally parked cars. I think I made their day.

Damned Work Ethic

So the plan to not work didn’t happen. I’ve edited two stories, both needing a decent amount of work for various reasons (one was a first draft, one was shoehorning an already excellent 10K document into 2K words; my head justifiably hurts).

Made bread. Should probably eat lunch, although it’s almost four o’clock and I haven’t even thought about what to feed myself, let alone what to do about dinner.

Received the FedEx box with half a dozen photo albums inside it that document my general life from birth through marriage. Very odd. I saw pictures of people I haven’t seen in years, and realised that I don’t even own a photo of my paternal grandfather who passed away over twenty years ago. (Well, I didn’t until this morning, that is.) I ‘m looking forward to sharing the early albums with the boy, the ones of me as a baby and up to around five. The ones of me from about age eleven through sixteen make me cringe, but meh; part and parcel of my past. Some good haircuts, some bad. Particularly bad first pair of glasses when I was in something like grade four. (It was the eighties; I need say no more.) Lots and lots of Christmas morning pictures from various years. Bad t-shirt/shorts/kneehigh socks combos. Adorable handmade party dresses for the under-ten parties. I was fascinated to see photos that I dimly remembered, but remembered slightly differently. It was also interesting to see how my grandmother had labelled the photos. She assigned my CEGEP grad to high school, for example, which amuses me because all the photos she took of my high school graduation were lost since she hadn’t taken the lens cap off the camera. I’ll have to slip a note under the plastic for Posterity’s sake.

Today I landed a local recording gig for a self-published meditation CD set. That will be done next week after I come back from our Easter jaunt. Speaking of the Easter jaunt, today I also arranged a coffee date with a somewhat well-known podcaster that is partially personal and partially work-related, to happen Saturday night. We need to work out an actual interview arrangement for sometime soon, too.

I really need to walk away from the computer now.

Brief Weekend Roundup

I am effectively dead. I am calling in Not Living today, because that’s about as useful as I can manage to be. Work will happen tomorrow.

Friday: Excellent day running around with the boy. Dinner with Tal and Kris, which consisted of much laughter, wine, delicious food, and OMG Battenberg cake, which I have not in forever, or at least since Marks and Sparks abandoned the colonials closed their Canadian shops. Awful night of not-exactly-sleep where I am very, very ill for some reason.

Saturday: Resting in bed with tea until I decide I am able to get up and drive safely. Excellent cello lesson. Visit to the mall to pet the Easter farm animals. Scored a secondhand copy of Lego Star Wars for the Xbox, and a secondhand controller which is red so I will play better. Lunch out consisting of hot dogs and fries, as I had promised the boy. After nap, we all head out to the south shore so I can drop by the luthier and renew the rental of the 7/8 cello for two more months. Then all three of us play our new video game, and the boy is quite good at figuring out what’s what. We end the day by watching the Deserts episode of Planet Earth.

Sunday: Summer tires put on the car. I make my first homemade tourtière. After nap we head out to have a home-hosted sugaring off meal with excellent friends and many children. Everyone eats too much breakfast-style food drenched in maple syrup. I think the tourtière is too dry and kind of wishy-washy on the seasoning, but everyone else claims it’s awesome. (Next time I’m doubling the sage and cloves, not boiling off as much of the broth, and using a different pastry recipe.) After the boy’s in bed HRH and I head out for our once-monthly steampunkian-horror game, which was most excellent. I got nine more rows of the lap blanket done. (It’s the only knitting I’m getting done at all, and only during this game.)

Which brings us to today, where I feel lethargic and achy. The damp weather doesn’t help.

My mother has informed me that the FedEx shipment I missed is not in fact my cello goody bag, but a box of photo/scrapbook albums she and my dad shipped to me from my grandmother’s apartment in Vancouver when they went out to visit her last week. I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Win!

Hello, spring!

Good Things of the Day So Far:

1. The exchange rate. Hello, an extra twenty-three cents to every American dollar I just deposited into my bank account!

2. SUN! I had to take off my scarf and then my velvet jacket while running my errands. The sunroof was opened, the car window was rolled down. All the house windows are now open as well. I’m wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt for the first time in, oh, months. Also for the first time in months, I am not cold.

3. I have daffodils that I bought from the Cancer Society! So many that they all don’t fit in my little Caithness vase!

4. A stack of new library books. Om-nom-nom.

5. Not one but two pairs of leather shoes purchased at Winners: a pair of plain black Rockport Mary Jane flats, and a pair of taupe Clarks casual Mary Jane heels. (Curiously, the heels are more comfortable than the flats.) I paid less for the two together than I’d have paid for either of them separately. SCORE! (Of course, taupe isn’t my thing; I’m kind of, heh, neutral about it. I intend to have them dyed, I just can’t decide on black or brown. Because, well, CLARKS, and holy cats they’re comfy.)

And finally:

6. The anthology ms. has already been approved. The request for my delivery cheque was just put in. HOW COOL IS THAT?

Yeah. A good day so far.

Enough Tax Stuff For The Day

I declare the tax stuff half-done. Everything got sorted, and all but three of the ten stacks of receipts have been calculated. My calculator doesn’t have an ‘erase current input without erasing the ongoing total’ function and the decimal button is finicky, so if I make a mistake I have to begin all over again. As a result it feels as if I’ve actually calculated about twenty-seven stacks of receipts so far. I really, really wish there was wine in the house.

I only made half of what I made in 2007, which isn’t surprising as I didn’t work in-house for three months with a major local game design company. All I did was write one book, and do the freelance evaluation gig. Which means I’m anticipating some kind of return, the only question being how much (or little!) of one. Money coming back is always good.

Tomorrow I’ll calculate the utilities and such, and go through my credit card statements for the correct conversion from USD to CDN amounts on research book orders from the first half of the year when I was writing the hedge witch book. As I sorted I was actually impressed to see that on half of them I’d noted down the Canadian conversion as the credit card statements came in, so go me; it’s not going to be as much of a nightmare doing it as last year’s was. (Yes, I can learn from my past mistakes.) I think we need one more receipt, and then HRH can call our awesome tax guy.

Hello, Day-After-Deadline

This is the day where I wander around aimlessly because what’s been driving me for however long I’ve been handling the project is gone, but I don’t have the brainpower to start something else up again right away. This time it isn’t so bad, as it’s only been two months, but it’s enough to make me need a bit of a time before jumping into something different. I can’t completely break with the project mentally yet, either, as my editor will be getting back to me today or tomorrow with her initial response.

I need to reinitialise my freelancing gig again, and I have to get back into the headspace to revise Orchestrated. I scheduled collating and calculating all my 2008 receipts for the taxes for this week, so I need to get into the headspace for that, too. Today, however, is my official Do-Nothing Day. Which of course means I’ll do other stuff like wash dishes and empty the dishwasher and make bread and plan out an Actual Meal Of Some Kind for dinner instead of kitbashing an hour before the meal. I should practise, as well. Not that I haven’t played tonnes of cello over Friday/Saturday/Sunday, but there were a couple of new things assigned at my last lesson that I haven’t even looked at yet.

Now I need to select and print some photos to go out with a small package. One of the things I need to do is hit the post office today, so hopefully the sun will come out again because I don’t want to go out into the cold, damp, dark day, even if I’ll be on the bus for a bit of it. I’m tired of being chilled.

(Oh, hell; my colour cartridge is out of one ink, so the colour is totally off. Looks like the yellow, as the resulting test picture is eerily purple. So much for photos. Gnarr.)