Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Awesome

My friends are awesome. Most of you know this, because you are either a friend in real life, or you have read here before how awesome they are.

Today’s proof of awesome: Ceri just bought me a knitting pattern so I can make a lightsaber for the boy. Ceri is made of awesome.

I’ve been having a really tough time lately for a variety of reasons. This, and the news about how advanced the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World movie is (they’re filming in Toronto this spring!) have been the highlights of the past two days.

As of Monday afternoon I’ve also been negotiating another book project. Not mine, exactly; picking up someone else’s anthology collection after their departure. More news once things settle and we see where they are.

Misled

You know your mind is really trying to distract you when it comes up with the idea of transcribing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” for the cello. Leonard’s slightly menacing version, of course; none of these cheerful boppy covers.

    My mind: No, really! It would be *awesome*!

    Me: Not today, it wouldn’t.

    My mind: But but but — it would be cool! It would sound great on the cello!

    Me: Transcribing it would take forever. I have no reason to do it, and it would sound odd as a solo piece. And I’d need at least a bass to back me up. Possibly also a piano. Not that I have anywhere to play it.

    My mind: You know people who play both!

    Me: SHUT UP. I’m working.

ETA @ 4:00: The interview’s as done as it’s going to get today; I’ll proof the first draft tomorrow during the boy’s nap before sending it off. I am going to metaphorically plug my fingers in my ears to ignore the weird Leonard Cohen thing, and cast on the blanket instead. I should keep working on Bodhifox’s hat but the needles and yarn are both smaller/finer and my hands feel clunky today because of the cold. The slippers have a pattern repeat and so would take too much attention. Also, well, shiny new project. So sue me.

Sigh

Just another day here, Gentle Readers. Tired, achy, cold the usual. Only more because the after-effects of the flu are still dogging me.

In the Good News column, I finished and uploaded my freelance assignment yesterday (it was like beating my head against a brick wall; you all know how I feel about plagiarism, and this project quoted pages and pages of another book and blew right past the concept of Fair Use, while merrily paraphrasing other original material without attribution) and I finished my first pass through the galleys of the book this morning. Now I’m doing my second quick pass to make sure the edits I’ve made aren’t stupid (and have caught a couple where I phrased the requested correction badly, thereby demonstrating that my second pass is indeed necessary). Once that’s handed in early this afternoon I’ll have to move on to the next two things on my to-do list. One is an interview for an online community, and the other is a private pro bono one-page thing to write that has repeatedly been dropped down on the list of things to do because it’s non-paying. If I can get all that done today I’m free Wednesday and Thursday to work on my own stuff. Except it’s highly unlikely that finishing both today will happen. I need to do some cello work too, both on mine and the current trial 7/8 (Cello 7, for those of you with scorecards at home).

In the meantime, what I want to be doing is knitting my lap blanket. Except I do not yet have the needles or the yarn for it. Stupid space-time continuum, messing up my plans. Well, the boy and I are home together Friday, so I have proposed a trip to the bookstore for him if he comes yarn-trawling in places like Zellers with me. (Me, the bookstore? It doesn’t have the book I’m looking for. Bah. Although I do need to get a miniature wall calendar for my office wall.)

ETA: Aaaaand… as of 12:14 PM I am done, done, done! The proofs have been sent back and I am going to reward myself with a half-hour of browsing through colour cards for yarn to try narrowing down my yarn and colour choices for the lap blanket. The I think I’ll work simultaneously on the interview and research the one-page history. (In other words, I’m going to have two documents open at the same time and use one to work-avoid the other. This is a technique that actually works sometimes.)

Back To Bed

Last night I felt off. This morning I thought I was okay but have grown steadily worse. Hello, flu.

Despite the wooziness I’ve been working all morning, and the day so far can be summed up as follows from my Facebook status updates, because I don’t have the energy to sum it up in new words:

Autumn is officially sick with the flu. Good grief, world, what are you trying to DO to me? Haven’t you seen my workload? 9:27am

Autumn just cancelled her cello lesson. She can has chicken noodle soup in bed now? 11:02am

Autumn is Oh, copyeditors, why have you left both “staffs” and “staves” as-is in the same paragraph? 11:47am

Autumn is wondering why her little mackeral tabby cat smells like fabric softener. 1:02pm

Autumn is 230/256, has one chapter left to proof, and is going to bed. Urg. 1:34pm

And this is me, off to bed. Or at least the chesterfield with the afghan and a cat. Be good, Internets.

Virtuous

I have further caught up on the holiday backlog of e-mail and cleaned out most of my in-box, I have yogaed, and I have celloed. I am very pleased to see that my cello skills haven’t completely crumbled in my two-week hiatus. In fact, wow. Positive proof that my two months of lessons have made a definite impact and improvement. The Lee piece sounds excellent, especially considering that this is only the third time I’ve played it. But in the interest of full disclosure and humbling myself, the piece from the Mooney book sounds awful: I can’t get the damn rhythm of “Erik’s Minuet.” I subdivide, I count, nothing works. Argh. It figures I’d stumble on the easy piece and whip through the more challenging one.

Now for a snack (because I had an early lunch before celloing), and then work. I think I’ll do the first half of the proofs today, or however far I get so long as it’s at least five chapters. Drat; I need to download and install Foxit on this computer so I can mark them up if necessary.

And later, when I need a break (and I will, because I remember what page proofs are like) I will sew up the ends of HRH’s scarf and put the tassels on, because I went over to Ceri and Scott’s house last night and Ceri gave me a J crochet hook of my very own. The test tassel I did was too long, so I’ll need to find an intermediate-sized book to wrap the yarn around. And in other knitting news, I did indeed frog those two inches of hat last night; I cast the Softwist yarn on my size 8 Addis instead, and wow. I prefer bamboo needles to metal, and I thought the slippery yarn on the super-slick metal Addis would be a match made in hell, but it’s spookily easier, somehow.

Right; Foxit has downloaded. Time to install and get to work.

Work!

It feels good to be working again. Today, I:

– got the galley proofs for the hearthcraft book coming out in April (due back January 13th)

– got my first freelance evaluation assignment of the year (due back January 12)

– and wrote!

Orchestrated:
New words today: 3,376
Total word count, Orchestrated: 58,625

And it feels very good indeed. Today I wrote the crucial Bad Thing and started the fallout from it. Muah-hah. Doesn’t feel like much of a climax at the moment, but that’s probably because I’m too close to it and it’s been building for some time. Also, first draft, so no pressure.

So yes, good thing I got a chunk of Orchestrated written today, because I’m probably not going to be able to do much about it for the rest of the week.

In An Effort To Focus On The Good Things…

… instead of the things currently driving me up the wall, I hereby present a List of Things for Which I Am Thankful or Excited About.

1. All I need to do is proof the overdue-new-to-me assignment I was given, then I can upload it and it’s gone. (Which is what I should be doing right now, but I have to decompress first.)

2. The roads were fairly clear yesterday. Traffic was not wholly insane.

3. My cello lesson was awesome. I got one new technical exercise assigned, one new Mooney Position Pieces exercise, two new pieces in the Suzuki book (apparently I’m doing that well) (the corollary to this, of course, is serves me right for practising the next few in the book after the piece I just did in recital), and a lovely three-movement cello duet sonata thing by S. Lee (op. 60 if anyone’s keeping score) (and ooh, I just discovered that my teacher gave me the first and second sonatas, not just the first!).

4. The Murphy family (no relation, although we have messed with people’s minds that way, heh) sent HRH, the boy, and I a special gift: two of the extremely awesome cat cupcakes that Elspeth had as part of her birthday cupcake extravaganza! Mmmm, cupcakes. With icing in the middle. And fondant cats on the top.

5. The boy was remarkably good during this morning’s bank/breakfast/seasonal shopping run. (Except when he REALLY wasn’t, but we are focusing on the good things.) We really enjoyed lots of it together. He asked for pancakes for lunch and I figured why not, so he ate three (!?), asked for a glass of milk, and went for his nap mostly without acting up or major incident. (I suspect he finally figured out I was about to completely snap after having to deal with certain of his shenanigans while shopping.)

6. Two complete strangers in the dollar store passed me three loonies to buy him the three wooden train cars he was coveting. I’d told him he could choose one and he couldn’t decide. I was staggered. I mean, sure, I’ve done things like that before for others, both for strangers and friends (and on a much, much larger scale too), but I’ve never expected it back. Complete strangers? Giving me loonies? To buy the boy the trains he was stroking? They were both moms with grown-up kids in other cities who they couldn’t treat like that any more, they said. The boy, who had been behaving very well at this point of the trip, was a perfect gentleman and said thank you and told them very excitedly all about what he would do with them when he got the trains home. I guess this is life demonstrating the ‘pay it forward’ principle. Thank you, universe!

7. I found four of the main things I needed for Yule, three small things, and two unexpected very small things. What I did not get were two of the other main things because the boy was acting up and also none of the stores I went to had one particular thing in stock. I could have checked two more shops but we ran out of patience time. I knew it was time to go home when I couldn’t string a complete sentence together to talk to one of my favourite bookshop clerks, partly due to having to keep grabbing the boy before he wandered off or pulled one. more. thing. off a shelf, partly because I couldn’t think my way through an unexpected obstacle (someone’s postal code? and phone number? off the top of my head? so not going to happen).

8. We cased the mall’s Santa set-up (you think I’m kidding? The boy went all the way around the fences, running his hands along the edges and calculating how far he could reach into the fluffy fake snow, found every single entrance and exit, and I will bet you that he has it memorized) and checked the visiting hours for the Official Santa Visit tomorrow.

9. The boy got a return letter from Santa in the mail today! He probably would have been much more excited if he hadn’t been trying to open those new train cars at the same time.

10. I finished the first colour block and a third of the next block on HRH’s scarf last night while we watched some of the making-of features on the Prince Caspian DVD. One and one-third down! Eighteen and two-thirds to go!

11. We shared a nice chummy breakfast in the mostly empty food court, sharing a breakfast sandwich and some juice from Tim Horton’s while we looked at the Nutcracker decorations (or, as Liam calls them, ‘the Christmas soldiers’). And the boy learned how to make a wish and toss a penny into the fountain.

There, see? I’m in a much better mood now. It doesn’t matter that I only got some of what we went out for, and that the groceries didn’t get done at all. We had lots of fun in between the argh bits (and really, the argh was mostly an aggregate of the usual things one has to tell a three year old over and over and over, which I know perfectly well must happen because of how their brain are rewiring but still gets to me) and encountered unexpected kindnesses.

Now, I will proof that assignment and upload it, and then, Gentle Readers, I will knit some more once I’ve mixed a batch of bread dough and another of pizza dough.