Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Computer Woes, Continued

Things have been very up and down. Mostly down, although a couple of the ups have been big enough to offset the smaller numerous down issues.

The USB port issue became enough of a problem that after taking it to a Mac-knowledgeable friend who tested, troubleshot, and updated me to Snow Leopard without solving the issue, HRH took it into the Apple-trained guys at work. They thought they’d fixed the issue, only for me to discover at home that none of my USB peripherals worked, exactly as they hadn’t before, and then the Mini decided not to power on at all. Or rather, it powered on, but the startup sequence never happened. So now I had no computer at all.

In the Bad Timing column, the day before I sent the Mac in to work with HRH I was contacted by a national organization that wanted to know my rates for copyediting. A fellow spinner and copyeditor (hello Mitioticspindle!) had referred me to them, since she couldn’t take their contracts due to workload. I was thrilled about this, because the publisher hadn’t offered me a project yet, and money was getting whatever the metaphor is for way past tight and there are utilities getting very cranky because they are unhappy with the size of the payments they’re getting. So, without a computer on Friday, I checked my work mail via my iPhone (bless it) and saw that the client I was negotiating with sent me two documents for which to return an estimate. This meant I needed a computer that would open them so I could respond as soon as possible, so I scrambled around trying to get the rickety ancient Dell laptop to work. I needed to download new converters for Word, but eventually it opened the documents, and I sent in my quote. And then bang, okay, sure: the quotes were acceptable, go ahead on the shorter one because they needed it ASAP, but they’d need approval for the larger one. And suddenly I was working, and had a deadline. (An aside: In perfect irony, my publisher contacted me that same Friday to offer me a project, which I had to turn down because (a) I had no computer, and (b) the new client was going to pay me more than twice the hourly rate.)

Gack.

So when the newly returned Mini didn’t start up Friday evening, I panicked inside while trying to get the Dell into some sort of usable shape. The project partially involved checking four pages of URLs, and the Dell took *forever* to open a web page. On top of that, it crashed a few times, and I either lost work (never very much, because I have autosave set to back up every five minutes or so) or lost time, which at this point was the more precious commodity. I’d quoted them for two hours of work, because that’s how long it should have taken. Instead, after factoring in the slowness of the computer, the crashes, and the couple of hours of research and my crash review course in APA style, which I hadn’t used since university, it took seven hours. HRH was home sick on Monday, thank goodness, because I’d budgeted three hours to be done over three nights, and I was nowhere near done on Monday morning when I wanted to do a quick half-hour review of the document before sending it in at noon. Blowing past my deadline is not how I wanted to begin my relationship with a rather important new client

The dead Mac was panicsome, too, because I have a book-length document to edit next, and there is no way I can do it on the Dell. So I contacted another friend with whom I’d discussed purchasing her Mac mini last fall when she no longer needed it. Originally it was for HRH, to replace his equally ancient Dell tower, but then he discovered that the new Star Wars MMO wasn’t being released for Macs (while disappointing, this actually saves me a heck of a lot of time) and so he ended up purchasing someone else’s secondhand PC. Fortunately she still had it, so once she clears her old files off it it will be mine, and I will have a computer with confirmed functional USB ports with no more iffyness. My mother is to be thanked for lending me the money to get this happening sooner rather than later, because the only way it was going to happen originally was for me to complete the book-length edit and be paid for it down the line, at which time I’d have the money to acquire it. I’ll use my Time Machine backup to set things up on the new computer, and all will be well (or else).

So the upshot of all of this is that there has been a lot of panic and tension in work-related areas. I am very behind on e-mail and news and online stuff in general. All my music and pictures are stuck on the Mac, and I can’t transfer new ones from the camera or the phone.

The Mac issue has also been interesting for the Apple tech who works with HRH. It’s a professionally fascinating and frustrating issue, apparently, because the USB ports are getting power, and yet won’t recognize or allow the signal of anything bigger than a mouse or keyboard to pass. He’s never encountered it. They’ve determined that it’s definitely a hardware issue and are examining code now. If it can’t be fixed beyond powering up and successfully initiating and completing the start sequence (which is now does), then we’ll have a media unit to stream stuff downstairs to the TV while I use the other new-to-me Mac as my work computer.

The computer issues and the new client have made the past six days pretty stressful. We had a bit of a respite on Sunday when we had the families with whom we’re connected by being godparents all over, and it was just a lovely afternoon. The food was delicious, the kids played together beautifully, the babies were all smiley and social and loved being passed around from person to person, and it was good to finally see people, which, as I have chronicled here, hasn’t happened since late November or early December since schedules and plague wrote off all social activity during the holidays.

So that has been my professional and technological life lately. Yay for new contracts and what is hopefully a permanent new client. Boo for computer issues that are really making executing those contracts nigh impossible. I’m getting tense about having gone two weeks without syncing my phone or backing up the computer, too.

Imbolc Joy

Dear readers…

Pagan Pregnancy has finally been released. It is an e-book, and there are no plans to publish it in hard copy. But I am so incredibly thankful that it’s at least been made available in any format after four years of waiting! It’s currently out for the Kindle, and it should be appearing on other platforms very soon. (The rest of my backlist is also available in e-book format.) Heartfelt thanks go out to my editor, Andrea, who fought long and hard to get this released after the initial publication was cancelled four years ago.

The bird book (it does have a name… Birds: A Spiritual Field Guide) is also now available, and is a real live book. I’d post photos of my box of author’s copies of the bird book, like I always do when I announce a book’s release, but as I said yesterday the USB ports are dead and I can’t get anything off the camera. Just use your imagination to visualise a box full of books with this gorgeous cover:

Imbolc, a festival of new life and creativity, seems a fitting time to announce these pieces of news, yes?

Slogging

Things have been pretty cranky lately. The boy was sick last weekend, which necessitated cancelling a much-anticipated outing to see Real Live People whom we hadn’t seen in ages, and it’s still trailing on; he’s got a cold and is carrying a low-grade fever that’s not high enough to keep him home, so he goes to school, and then it’s higher when he gets home from school but is low enough to send him out the next day. He’s also dealing with a lot of social stress, both from friends and bossy/manipulative kids at school and here at home while he works through growing-up stuff.

He’s not the only one carrying a lot of stress. Financially things are pretty much stretched as taught as they’ll go; I logged back on as an active freelance copyeditor with the publisher again at the beginning of January, three months later than we’d planned, but nothing’s come my way yet. I’ve had to drop cello entirely for now, though I’m hanging on to orchestra every two weeks as my single get-out-of-the-house-and-see-other-adults time. Nana has made it possible for the boy to continue his own lessons, for which we are very grateful. Owlet is charming but wearing on us all, as she’s working through a lot of her own developmental stuff plus her two lower incisors are taking their not-so-sweet time about breaking through the gums. Her sleep patterns are all over the place (today she didn’t sleep for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time, and is just as disagreeable as you might imagine as a result). Our nights are still broken a lot, and I don’t do at all well on fragmented sleep. Basically, I’ve run out of what energy I had in reserve, including the new-parent adrenaline that sees you through the first couple of months, and I’ve got nothing left.

In good news, the boy got his spot in the International School we were hoping to transfer him into. Now we get to angst about the social stress of switching him into a new school that’s full French immersion. In not so good news, the USB ports on my computer have decided to stop working, and none of the permission-resetting/PRAM resets/redownloads of updates have worked so far. I can’t sync or update my iPhone, use my printer, or back up via Time Machine to my external hard drive, and the USB receiver for my wireless mouse only works some of the time. All of this makes me pretty crazy, as my computer is my sole method of accomplishing work, and if I can’t work I can’t… no, I’m not even going there. I could always use HRH’s computer for work if I have to. In the meantime, Berny is very kindly talking me through repairing permissions and PRAM resets and reinstallation of updates, just in case it’s something along those lines, but nothing’s worked so far. Next up is upgrading to Snow Leopard, something I hadn’t done because it came out two weeks after I got my Mini and I wasn’t going to risk botching something that worked perfectly well. (Yes, years of Windows updates have scarred me.) HRH is going to talk to the certified Mac repair guy at work to see if he has any ideas or solutions, too.

So, um, yes. Things are hard, and weary, and I can’t get up here to write much at the moment. There’s Owlet’s six-month post coming up later this week, though!

While Waiting

Life goes on, of course, and I’m trying to keep busy, which is a challenge when you’re exhausted. We’ve started watching the Read or Die TV series with Marc after rewatching the OVA, which is fun. In the attic, HRH and his dad have finished everything but the drywalling and laying the laminate floor, although we are still waiting on an electrician. The boy and I went up into the attic during the terrific thunderstorm we had Monday afternoon and delighted in hearing the rain pound the roof about three feet above our heads.

I sat down yesterday to gather all the info I needed for the QPIP application for maternity benefits for self-employed workers, and discovered that I hadn’t made the minimum income last year required to qualify for the program. This was really, really annoying. The programme didn’t exist for self-employed workers the last time I had a baby, so this was going to be a nice bonus, but now I can’t take advantage of it. Equally annoying in a different way is the fact that HRH can’t take paternity leave. Or rather, he could, but there are a couple of major obstacles. First, it would require him taking the weeks immediately before plus the first week of school off again, which did not go over well last year when we moved the week before school started; and it would also mean training someone else to do his job while he’s gone because the technician is essential personnel at this time of year. This is more trouble than it’s worth and very risky to do besides, because then they may not take him back but put him somewhere else instead (his permanency guarantees him *a* job, not necessarily the job he’s got at the moment if he goes on leave of whatever kind). And second, taking paternity leave means bringing home only 75% of his salary, which we cannot survive on if I’m not working, which I can’t because hello, I’ll be taking care of a baby. If he chose to take it he’d only get 3 weeks at 75% pay, or he could do 5 weeks at 70% but that would be even more financially suicidal for us.

It just sucks on so many levels. If it were any other time of year he could take, say, a week apart from his five days of compassionate leave (that’s at full pay, whew), and we might get by. If we’d had the baby last year, there wouldn’t be an issue because I made twice as much in 2009, which puts me well over the minimum. I’m cranky about it because the money would have been nice, as I can’t really take on freelance work again for at least two or three months when things have settled down to a point where I can start shoehorning a productive hour at the computer in here and there, which means the cheques won’t start arriving till the end of the year.

The good thing that came of this annoyance is that I was angry enough to pull out my cello for the first time in a month, physical awkwardness be damned, and I played the Prelude to the Bach G major solo cello suite the best I’d ever played it. Owlet was all “Whoa whoa whoa, what is this, no no, LOUD” so I had to stop after playing it twice and then noodling experimentally through more of the first two suites. But it made me feel fantastic. I haven’t played it in well over a year, so to just sit down and pull it off made me really appreciate all the hard work I’ve been putting in at lessons and orchestra. Also, it served to remind me that callouses fade when you don’t use them. Ow, my poor left hand fingers.

I’ve been slowly getting through A Dance With Dragons and I’m still not sure where I stand on it. There’s so much going on in the grand scheme of things that nothing feels like it’s moving, although that can often happen in a middle book of a series. People keep leaving Westeros so more and more of the action is taking place elsewhere, and the reader has to keep learning about new cultures. It’s all moving the story in a way, but it’s doing it slowly enough that it doesn’t feel as rewarding as it used to. I bought my first eBook, too, which is actually a Laurie R. King novella only available in electronic format, and I am saving that to read in hospital. No, I lie; that’s my second purchased eBook. I bought, read, and enjoyed Cate Polacek’s Tempus House in May (aha, I knew I missed something in my May booklist! eBooks are going to be harder to keep track of, I suspect, because I can’t pile them on my desk as I finish them).

I pulled out a braid of Louet Karaoke fibre (half wool, half soysilk) in the Parrotfish colourway on Saturday (more pale greens and purples, with touches of gold and blue) and finished spinning it today. I’m chain-plying it to preserve the colour changes and suspect I may use it to knit an Oriental Lily dress for Owlet, should she ever decide to make an appearance. The soysilk was finicky to draft, though, and made for an overall weird chunky , sticky drafting experience. Curiously, I had similar issues when drafting silk pencil roving from Ozark, so I had an idea of how to deal with it (hold it just less than a staple length apart and snap it between the hands); it just made drafting the blend tricky, because the soysilk would slide past the wool, muddling the colour changes a bit. I’d have preferred sharper colour changes, so if I ever use this fibre again I’ll split it by colour and spin from the fold or something.

I’ve knit three more inches of the back of the lace cardigan. It looks just like it did in the last post, only longer. Knitting lace to length is somewhat annoying, because you really have to pin it out to measure where it’s at in order to have a proper idea of what its actual length is since lace looks like a ramen noodle disaster while in progress on the needles. And I picked up a skein of brownish orange embroidery floss to embroider beaks on our mobile owls, I ordered a yard and a half of owl motif fabric for the coverlet the boy wanted me to make for the baby, and a stamp to use to make thank you cards. I’d almost decided on some Cluny lace to finish the short ends of the woven blanket, but I re-examined the edges and I might be able to live with them as they are after all. In fact, all they may need is a row or two of single crochet to secure them a bit more. Which means I have to look up how to do that, because I have forgotten how after my one use of the technique to finish something eighteen months ago. Something to do tomorrow while waiting for the Owlet…

Weekend Roundup: Canada Day Edition

The concert was just lovely this year. And I am still pregnant, so I have broken the Die Fledermaus overture curse (I didn’t get to play it last time we prepared it because the boy arrived early!). A slightly higher chair meant that suddenly my endpin-at-full-extension no longer held the cello at the proper angle to skim the bump, so I had to switch to playing sidesaddle, which I hadn’t prepared… but it all worked, even though I looked like a poster child for How To Not Play The Cello:

And now I get to put the cello away for a month or so, unless I feel like taking it out and noodling with it for a bit. My teacher suggested using a block for my endpin, which would lift it up a bit more.

The orchestra got together to give me a card with best wishes and a little cup, bowl, and bib set for the baby, which was terribly sweet, and they’ve asked for pictures and news as soon as we have it. I was told I was so darn cute that night by three different musicians. ‘Cute’ is not a word I’d use to describe a pregnant cellist, but hey, whatever works for them. I was also informed that I was a trouper. I take my commitments seriously, so bowing out mid-season just wasn’t an option for me; on one hand, I was in it for the season… and on the other hand, I’m just selfish, and I loved the music and didn’t want to give orchestra up, as it was the one thing that got me out of the house. The concert itself wasn’t a problem so much as the occasional rehearsal evening where I looked at the time and my energy levels and my physical state and grumbled all the way through my forty-five minute drive to our rehearsal location. But actually rehearsing always made it worth it. Some people were surprised that I intend to be back in September as well, but others weren’t; they understand that getting out one night a week when you have a new baby is good for the sanity.

And our good deed of the night was finding someone’s iPhone after the fireworks, and they came to pick it up the next morning (though we offered to drive it back on our errands today; it’s a 45-minute drive, after all) and they brought chocolates as a thank you!

It seems to be a sudden FAQ, so no, I have no birthday plans this year due to a certain young lady who could arrive any time. We knew I’d be either exhausted and in the last days of pregnancy, or exhausted because I had a newborn, so deliberately haven’t planned anything. (On the other hand, a great way to ensure she’d be born around that time would be to plan something that we’d then have to cancel dramatically at the last moment…) Also, three separate important people have pointed out that they are out of town in mid-July when the Owlet could very well make her debut, which either means that yes, she’ll be born when no one is around, or that she’ll stubbornly hang on till the beginning of August. We shall see.

I have had a sudden influx of handmade gifts! Ceri knitted a lovely newborn hat out of Manos silk blend in my favourite Wildflower colourway, and a pair of Canadian flag baby socks that I’d seen ages ago and loved. And Jan gave me a hat-cardi-shoelet set in a lovely cool pale green yarn that she’d not only kitted, but entered in the Maxville Fair and won second prize for a 2- or 3-piece baby set! (Her Chausson Mignons are much more mignon than mine. Wait, you haven’t seen mine yet, because I still haven’t written a knitting/spinning roundup. Sigh. Take my word for it.) I should assemble everything and photograph it so you can be jealous, and add it to the as-yet-mythical knitting/spinning summary.

Today and tomorrow are devoted to proofing the galleys of the bird book (FULL COLOUR, people! It’s gorgeous!). Wednesday is a doctor’s appointment for me, and one for the boy, and then next Monday I proof the companion bird journal, and then I am Officially Off. I turned down a copyediting gig that was due July 17, because I couldn’t guarantee that I could do it and get it back on time what with the exhaustion that hits during final couple of weeks (or the baby that might land).

Potpourri

1. I had another prenatal appointment yesterday. Everything is spot-on. My doctor was so excited about me going past the 31-week mark that I had to laugh at her.

2. HRH has finished the stairs to the attic, and they are beautiful. He has also temporarily cleared out all the insulation so we can lay the floor. We have been able to revise the flooring plan because we discovered when he cut through the ceiling that the existing attic floor/first floor ceiling was made with tongue-and-groove strips, solid enough to be walked on. Seriously, this gets better and better; first, actual windows existed up there under the siding, and now a floor? The attic was genuinely designed to be another room that the original owners just didn’t tell the builders to complete.

3. After today, there are only two days of kindergarten left for the boy. He has a kindergarten celebration tomorrow afternoon, where the parents will go in and watch them sing songs and that sort of thing, then they will get certificates, and then there will be cake and juice for everyone. Where did this academic year go? Didn’t he just take the school bus for the first time?

4. As the end of the school year approaches the boy has been bringing home workbooks and folders and artwork. I had no idea they wrote and drew journals as part of their curriculum, but he sat down with me yesterday and read me all his journal entries, about one a week since they began in January, and I was stunned. They don’t teach formal reading or writing in kindergarten, or so they say; they encourage sounding things out and phonetic spelling as steps toward it. This means that yes, there are letters missing and incorrect letters, but the sounds are mostly there. I now have a six-year-old who sounds out every written word he sees with ease, reads above his theoretic grade level, and who does a pretty impressive job of writing words down just from listening to them or saying them. I can read his journal entries without referring to his teacher’s interpretation below. I find this kind of evolution of how to read and write absolutely fascinating. Here, here’s an example from two months ago; I’m giving you this one because I recognised it right away. This is a pretty precise depiction of Ceri and Scott’s basement from where you’d be standing if you paused in the archway into the TV room and saw Scott and Liam playing video games together. I even love that he drew Scott’s computer desk off to the right.

I also love that he wrote and drew about something important to him each time: spending the day with a special friend, building in his Lego City that lives on a board under his bed and is pulled out to play with, visiting grandparents, the best part of a field trip, and that sort of thing. We’re going to keep up the journal exercise weekly over the summer. He seems excited about it, it’s a great way to keep working on practising his letters, and I love the idea of tucking it away in a memento box for him to look at years from now.

(Have I mentioned that I find how kids learn fascinating? I do. I find the stuff they don’t learn just as fascinating. Like how the boy still can’t grasp riding a two-wheeler bike.)

5. I am currently struggling with internal tension about the postal strike. I fully support the CUPW’s right to demonstrate, call for collective bargaining, their requests for proper contracts and the pay scale and benefits they’re fighting to keep, including maintaining pension details for existing and new workers that got hit when the economy tanked. (It drives me up the wall that CP keeps saying mail volume is down and that’s why they’re not agreeing to the union’s requests to maintain what was in their last contract because they’re “unrealistic,” but they’re neglecting to acknowledge that to make up for it they’ve been accepting more paid admail to be delivered over the past few years, which has made up the shortfall in lettermail in both volume and profit. Admail; you know, the unaddressed stuff that the postperson sorts, carries, and puts in everybody’s mailbox that you take out and put right into the recycling box.) The one-day rotating strikes slowed things down a bit, but that was fine. When Canada Post cut operations to three days from five, effectively going to part-time for everyone, it slowed things down more and I chafed a bit, but at least things were still moving. But when Canada Post locked their workers out completely to create a national situation, things went badly for me. I have three (no, four by now) rather important freelance cheques coming to me from the US that are now stuck in the system. They were due to arrive the second week of June at the earliest, and we budgeted accordingly. Now that budget is screwed and have been scrambling to rebalance things; money originally scheduled to go one place is being diverted to go others and things are being left for a later date that ought to be paid now, and buying the last few baby things we need keeps getting shuffled later and later. The attic has taken a hit, too, because we were going to use part of my biggest cheque to buy the initial round of supplies, timed to happen with the beginning of the month-long vacation HRH had booked. (Although things look brighter in that department due to parental generosity, so at least HRH won’t be sitting here off work, twiddling his thumbs and wasting time, waiting for the cheques to arrive in the mail so we can get building.) So yes, things have been rather stressful and unhappy around here money-wise for the past two weeks. And just as bad, important outgoing mail got stuck in the strike as well, like our taxes and my application for cord blood donation, which needs to be received by Hema-Quebec before I get to 36 weeks. The life of a postal service-dependent freelancer is not a happy one. And it really annoys me to read comments like “We don’t need the post office, everyone should go to e-mail billing and direct deposit!” on news articles, because that demonstrates a really poor understanding of how businesses function (and also assumes everyone has internet access, which is also erroneous).

6. The boy went to La Ronde, our local Six Flags amusement park, for the first time this past Sunday, on a free pass with his best friend, her mum, and HRH. They had a fabulous time. I am shocked at the expense of these sorts of things, so a free pass is pretty much the only way it could happen. (Although HRH told me that season passes for a family are less expensive than a single admission for said family, if purchased before a certain date, so we may look into that as a gift to him next year since the boy had The Best Time Ever.) They spent the day mostly in the family ride area, the majority of which seems to have been installed in 2005. I am jealous, because he got to go on the Belgian carousel built in 1885 and bought for Expo 67, which runs on electricity right now but is being restored to run on steam power again, complete with its steam organ:

7. Tomorrow is the boy’s last day with his rental cello, then I take it back to the luthier. We couldn’t renew the rental even if we wanted to, with this stupid cheques-stuck-in-the-mail issue. But hopefully practice will be back to normal as of Tuesday morning, because on Monday we are taking that day trip to Ottawa to see secondhand 1/8 cello at a steal of a price, see the newly redone Nature Museum (which we last saw a couple of years ago in the midst of renovation) and also walk past the Parliament Buildings.

8. There’s a post with knitting and spinning and stuff to come, I promise.

I think that’s it for now.

Away Time

I am swamped with work and countdown to this weekend’s recital, so I haven’t been here and won’t really be for the next week, either. I’m late on my Books Read in May roundup, and that has to wait, too. Short form:

– Lovely weather, but as is expected the humidity rising, so there are good days and bad days.

– The boy turns six on Saturday, and has a school field trip to a local national park for frog and butterfly exploration on Friday. They had caterpillars in class to observe in the latter half of May, and the kids saw them make chrysalises and hatch into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies, which the class released last week. Very exciting.

– The boy finally realised what playing in a recital meant at his lesson last Saturday, and there were some tears because it would be different from his usual environments of lessons and home practice. His teacher worked with him sensitively and they changed his piece to a duet with her; we also scheduled him to be second, so he isn’t playing first and alone.

– Owlet is doing fine, and passed her brother’s gestational record of 31w2d this past weekend. Go Owlet! I am exhausted and in pain a lot of the time, which isn’t a surprise considering the stupid amount of growth that was accomplished in a very short time on top of my pre-existing fibro and scoliosis issues.

– Also this weekend, there were suddenly a half-flight of stairs, a landing, and a big hole in the ceiling to the attic. Next up: Plywood floor, framing walls, vapour barrier and ventilation layer, lifting insulation, plasterboard. Windows have to be installed in there somewhere, and wiring run to be certified by an electrician.

– Did I mention I am swamped with work? I handed in the copyediting gig, but now it is all bird book rewrites all the time, and I am having panic attacks at the amount of work that needs to be done by Friday night. Technically I have to hand it in on Monday morning at 8 or 9 AM, but I won’t be able to work on it all weekend because of dress rehearsal, guests, birthday party, and recital, so Friday’s the deadline.

– We have a lead on a secondhand 1/8 cello for the boy at an insanely low price. It’s in Ottawa, so we’ll trundle down there for a day trip the last week of June and check it out, as well as visiting the redone Museum of Nature and walking through the Parliament buildings. Even if it needs new strings and a bow rehair (both of which I fully expect) it will still be less expensive than the other secondhand one listed here in Montreal.

Right; back into the fray. Wish me sanity and an even head.