Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Owlet Update

I booked all of yesterday off, because the past few appointments I’ve had have taken more than all morning, and trying to squeeze scheduled work in after that and before the boy got home was just stressing me out. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and hot but with a decent breeze to offset the growing humidity. I dare say I’d have been less happy about it if the maternity wing of my hospital wasn’t air conditioned, but it is, so I spent the morning in relative comfort.

This time my wait was only an hour and a half long, and my appointment was very positive. Owlet has done some serious work, growing five weeks’ worth in two weeks (hello, 30-week growth spurt). She went from being three weeks behind to bang on target, all of her measurements coming in at an average of 30w5d (which was a day shy of where we were). She has shifted from a transverse position to head-down, and the placenta is in awesome shape and position. She weighs about 1658 grams, which is almost exactly what the boy weighed when he was born. My body is still showing zero signs of potential labour. “Congratulations,” my doctor said as she started to put the monitors away. “You are officially no longer considered a high-risk pregnancy. Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s obviously working.”

I am no longer considered high-risk! WOO-HOO!

All the good vibes (thanks, everyone!), bed rest, progesterone treatment, and extra ice cream have obviously worked. This is wonderful news for me, because as of today I’m at 31 weeks, the precise point where things went wrong last time with the boy. The “keep doing what you’re doing” instruction is rather key, though, so I’m keeping to the reduced activity. She didn’t tell me light bed rest was off the schedule, so I’m not throwing myself back into running around with the boy and doing grocery shopping or extended errands again.

While I was there, I made an appointment for a hospital tour in three weeks. I’m excited about it, because this is one of those lacunae in my experience. I mean, I’m very familiar with the high-risk clinic, and the ultrasound rooms, the first contact emergency area, and their nursery where the boy was transferred after his stay in NICU, but nothing else. They gave me a choice of June 26 or July 24, and maybe it’s just me, but July 24 felt like cutting it a wee bit close for comfort. So I’ll finally get to see my hospital’s labour and delivery rooms.

I got home around noon and managed to get an hour and a half of work done before I had to stop. See? Scheduling the day off and getting work done anyway feels like a major bonus or score somehow, like finding billable hours where you didn’t think there were any. I also made myself sit down and do an hour of heavy work on all my cello recital pieces, since work and bed rest had my practice record rather, erm, spotty in the two previous weeks and my performance at the group class last Sunday showed it. And once the boy got home, I finished spinning the first half of the BFL/silk for the lace cap, too, and started the second half. So it was a remarkably productive day.

I also went to orchestra last night for the first time after missing two weeks, and it was a wonderful evening. We were in a different rehearsal location, and it was very pleasant. We could never afford it on a regular basis, but it would be nice if we could. It’s where the youth orchestra practices, and when our conductor called break he encouraged us to engage in one of their rituals, heading to the local parlour on the corner to indulge in homemade ice cream. It would have been lovely, but rushed, and my wallet was also empty. And besides, the celli were all comforting one of our section, who slipped on the stairs on the way up the stars to the rehearsal room and smashed his cello.

I’m achy this morning, which is totally understandable, since I did more yesterday than I have done in ages. I also didn’t sleep very well, because the windstorm that blew down trees and power lines yesterday (and our metal gazebo in the backyard, which I am fervently hoping is salvageable) rattled our bedroom window all night and there was a cat bent on waking us up at all hours with aggressive purring in the face. I think I can just about finish the copyediting assignment I have today, though, since I hit roughly the halfway point yesterday. I can certainly get close enough to the end that I can wrap it up and probably send it back tomorrow (yay, more invoicing), leaving me all of next week for the bird book rewrites. I may leave myself open for one more copyediting assignment, but then I’ll book off for a couple of months and initialize my QPIP maternity benefits (which became available to self-employed workers the year after I had the boy, thank you, Quebec… although they don’t make it easy to figure it all out if you don’t get tax receipts, which I don’t, as I’m paid freelance from the US; I’ll be using the last two years of net income as reported on my taxes as source numbers).

Today: Thirty-one weeks of pregnancy. Between five and nine to go.

Busy (Or Apparently Bed Rest Only Covers Physical Activity)

1. I have a new copyediting assignment due 9 June. It’s the companion book to the one I edited two weeks ago, which drove me moderately mad because there was no bibliography or sources listed and I had to track copyright info down. Why do people think it’s okay to not cite sources, even if what they’re using is public domain? It still came from somewhere.

2. The edits for the bird book I wrote came back, due 10 June. And they’re extensive. I expected this — told them, in fact, to expect it themselves what with all the major changes in direction on their end throughout the project — but apparently the timeline is tight (when is it ever not tight?) and I have to turn it around in two weeks. I have the official cover as well, and I’ll get around to sharing it at one point, when I’m not handling six trillion other work things.

3. I spent last Friday in the hospital because of unidentified bleeding on Thursday night. To make a long story short, I was admitted to the hospital for five hours of observation and examination to be told that my baby is wow super healthy with a strong heartbeat whoa who is very energetic (I could have told them that), I have zero contractions (I did tell them that), and my body was nowhere physically near demonstrating that premature labour was imminent (that’s what I couldn’t know and was worried about, because this is how it started last time: blood, then two days later wham, sudden labour). The doctor I saw theorizes that a blood vessel in or near the cervix was weakened and finally burst after the physical strain of violent vomiting during the gastro I had last Tuesday/Wednesday. She stressed that I did the absolutely right thing in going in, considering what happened last time. I would say that I at least got a free lunch out of it, but it was awful and I didn’t eat most of it. (Note to self: Pack a box of Twinings’ Lady Grey in the hospital bag, because ugh, their orange pekoe tastes like coffee grounds. Not that I am a fan of orange pekoe to begin with.) The Owlet had great fun kicking the fetal monitor for the hour and a half they had it on. They finally took it off. They told me that if anything untoward happened again to call them, but that otherwise, they’d see me in six to ten weeks.

4. I have been swatching for a lace cap for the Owlet to wear. (No, I have no idea what has happened to me.) The lace pattern was totally defying me until Ceri and I figured out that my understanding of the PSSO abbreviation and its explanations was not the same as what experienced knitters understand it to mean. Also, the pattern had different abbreviations in the intro material than were actually used in the body of the pattern, a copyediting thing that drove me mad. Anyway, I finally mastered the lace pattern with Ceri’s e-mail support, and I am now spinning some dreamy BFL/silk blend in off-white for the light fingering weight two-ply yarn I want to use for it. And because I love the yarn so much, I am further considering a longish coat in a simple lace pattern done on biggish needles out of the same weight of yarn, for a larger lace effect. Obviously, pregnancy has done something very odd to my brain.

5. I finished shoe #2 of the adorable origami garter stitch shoe set, and when I put them side by side I saw that because my tension was so very different between shoe #1 and shoe #2, the first would fit a 3-6 month old and the second would fit a newborn. Obviously the answer is to knit another set of squares to fold, because it will most likely match one or the other.

6. Instead, though, I found a new pattern, and knit this:

It’s another knit-a-shape-and-fold-it shoelet. My cast on, and therefore the upper edge of the shoe, seems a bit loose (I used the two-strand thumb cast on for its tidy edge), so I’ll probably need to tack the upper vamp together about 3/4 of an inch up from the toe. Blocking may help, though. Now I need to knit another one, which shouldn’t take me more than an hour like this one did, but apparently you can suffer from Second Shoe Syndrome the way people suffer from Second Sock Syndrome.

7. I have come to the very sad conclusion that I am not going to be able to weave the Manos Clasica blanket. It’s too much physical activity and standing up and bending over for someone on bed rest. I swatched a double moss stitch/seed stitch on size 15 needles though, to see if I could knit it instead, and while I could, I’m not sold on it. I think I’ll return to the idea of weaving it, but do it after the baby is born. She isn’t going to need a Manos Clasica wool blanket in July and August, after all. And she has handknit blankets coming her way from her Auntie Cate and her Nana anyhow.

8. Speaking of the baby being born, I looked at HRH the other night and said, “We have to start thinking of this baby arriving in about a month instead of two. That way we’ll be mentally prepared whenever it happens.” “Sure,” he said, “but not till it’s a month away from 36 weeks.” “That would be on this coming Thursday,” I said.

9. The boy turns six years old in two weeks. Be very afraid. I somehow have to plan a family birthday for him as well as a friend birthday two weekends after that, as well as prepping two cellists for a recital on his actual birthday weekend. I am kind of tearing my hair out, as bed rest is supposed to be low-stress, and having to juggle all this stuff like two work things in the space of one plus all the planning and prepping isn’t physically taxing, but is still energy-consuming.

10. More stress: If Canada Post goes on strike, then my freelance cheques that are due to arrive in mid to late June will probably be held up. That is bad, so very, very bad, because that money is desperately needed, or the renovations don’t go forward. I am crossing my fingers that the impasse between the (very reasonable plea for better work conditions/against slashing benefits and wages, read up on it) demands of the postal workers union and the corp itself is solved ASAP.

Light Bed Rest: First Impressions

1. Everyone panics. It is amusing, then not so amusing to explain the “no, neither I nor the baby are currently in medical danger, this is a preventative thing” over and over.

2. Everyone offers to come by to entertain me or somehow make things easier, because I must be bored or unable to handle household stuff. I am someone who suffers from social stress, so again, this is amusing on one level, not so amusing on another because I have to keep turning people down. This social stress is partly an introvert thing, partly a fibro thing: dealing with people takes energy, something I have in short supply on a normal basis. (Jan calls this kind of social energy “teaspoons,” a variant on the spoon theory allegory of spoons representing the finite amount of available energy to someone with FM/CFS. I love the term; it combines the idea of social interaction with the basic allegory.) Also, I’ve got lots to keep me busy, namely work, which for various reasons like finances and deadlines can’t be dropped. And household stuff is already minimised.

3. Lying in bed/on the chesterfield is dull. Luckily, as Paze pointed out, most of my hobbies are rest-compatible: reading, spinning, knitting, and eventually weaving (although that last one is actually the most intensive of them all, and I will have to break it down to very basic, brief units). And there’s always work, which has never been an issue, because I don’t commute and make my own hours.

4. I am actually capable of getting myself drinks, snacks, making meals, doing light laundry, walking to the corner to meet the boy’s bus, brief cello sessions, and so forth. It’s not like when they chained me to an IV stand at the hospital last time and told me I couldn’t get out of bed for two months after stopping labour halfway through the process. By prescribing light bed rest, my doctor is looking to further reduce the amount of energy I’m expending in order to shunt as much as possible to the Owlet. What I am not allowed to do is go out and do, well, most stuff. Orchestra will be on a week-to-week basis, and I will be taking Wednesdays extra easy to save up energy for it. HRH will be driving the boy and I to cello lessons, which is ideal, because driving is one of the things that totally drains my energy and stresses me when I have two cello lessons back to back at which to pay attention.

5. After bbqing and watching kids run about yesterday with friends, which was very pleasant, I put myself on 24 hours of full bed rest to recover, because things were getting twingy at the end of the day. In bed at six o’clock! Awake at three o’clock, because my body said, “Well, we’ve been in bed for nine hours, that’s normal, so it must be time to get up!” Just for the record, body, that is not on. The 24 hours of full bed rest today was, alas, down(up?)graded to light rest again, though, because poor HRH got violently ill in the wee smas, with what I suspect is an HRH-sized version of the 24-hour tummy bug the poor boy had on Saturday. So I was up with the boy this morning after all and handling all of the morning stuff instead of the half I usually do.

All in all I’m doing very well so far. The clinic called me to go in to pick up two prescriptions and a requisition form for follow-up tests in two weeks the day after my last hospital appointment, which was ironic seeing as how it’s a 45-minute trip both ways and they obviously hadn’t yet gotten the news that I was on light bed rest. It can take a few days for info to trickle between the hospital and the clinic, I have discovered. This should no longer be a problem as I’m being followed at the hospital from hereon, though. Which means, alas, no more free clinic wi-fi while I wait hours past my appointment time. Sigh.

Picking Up

The first couple of days after driving toward a major book deadline are always odd. There’s a simultaneous sense of complete freedom after a number of months, but also of fatigue and the inability to focus on much at all. And then there’s the weirdness of trying to settle back into a regular life again after being deadline-focused and working overtime for a while.

Yesterday I handled e-mail and stuff, and let the copyediting team know I was available again after delivering the long-term project that had taken me off the roster. I cleaned up my desk and shelved the stack of bird books that I’d had next to me for reference throughout the writing of the book. I made bread. I read some more of the new Charles Todd book, A Lonely Death. I napped out of necessity. I spun some more of the Wensleydale I got in my three-month subscription to Northbound Knitting’s fibre club last fall. (I think I’m making a heavy laceweight single, because it’s very pretty as-is and I don’t want to halve its yardage by plying it with itself.) I’m glad I have a fibre stash, because I’m certainly not buying anything new for a long time what with finances being very, very tight for the next six to eight weeks as we are a single-income household now until I receive my cheque for delivering the book. (I am seriously glad the welcome tax finally landed, because the huge chunk of money I had set aside for it was starting to get impatient, but my presently-empty bank account is sad and lonely now.)

I was supposed to go in to the blood lab at the hospital today for my second round of blood tests and the oh-so-exciting-sounding-but-actually-boring glucose challenge test, but I came home early from orchestra last night after experiencing a couple of dizzy spells. I figure fasting and then driving through rush hour morning traffic for a blood draw after a set of dizzy spells might not be the best thing right now, so I’ve pushed that to Monday. (Huh. I just checked the website, and apparently the blood lab is open till 3:00 now instead of 11:00, and I could have sworn it was only open Monday through Thursday but the site says nothing about that.) It was also up in the air because the boy woke up with an asthma attack yesterday and a nasty cold announcing its presence, and by dinner last night he had no appetite and a fever of 100.5, so he might have been staying home today. He woke up with just the cold, though, and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so I sent him off to school after a dose of decongestant.

Today, gentle readers, is tax stuff. Yes, we are late, for only the second time ever (ironically, the last time was also when we were expecting a baby) because I had so much work to do in the past two months that I couldn’t spare any to sort out all my freelancer stuff and make lists. Today I pull out my folder of receipts etcetera and make piles of different categories to add up, check up on much we paid in utilities, and make that list of questions to ask our most excellent tax guy. There are a tonne of unknowns this year, you see. We bought a house, and I have no idea what that does to my freelancer claims (do I claim part of the mortgage payments the way I claimed part of our rent? what about city taxes?), or what proof we need to claim first-time homebuyer stuff, or even what we can write off or what tax rebates are available to new homeowners. This year is really complicated. And no, despite the Canada Action Plan ads, there’s not a hell of a lot of info available online either federally or provincially regarding it; this is why we have a Most Excellent Tax Guy who knows all this stuff and can tell us about it. To each his or her own area of expertise!

So there you have it. I have said it on the Internet, and so it must be true: Today is devoted to tax stuff. There’s other stuff I have to do, like update my pro site with info about the upcoming book and the Gaia Gathering conference I’m speaking at this month, but I’m going to let that slide till tomorrow because I’m really tired. If I can accomplish one major thing a day for the next few days, I think I’m good. In the last week before deadline I borrowed energy from future days, something fibro folk do out of necessity sometimes, but the penalty is always a long recovery.

I think I shall sort the receipts and bills, then nap, then add them up. Doing both in a row without a rest is just asking for horrendous errors. And I ought to eat lunch in there, too.

Bird Book Done: Check

The bird book has been handed in to my editor. I always forget how long checking bibliographies takes.

I wish I had more energy to be enthused. I feel rather run over, partly from contorting myself and the material to deal with the imposed changes and cuts in the last six weeks, partly from dealing with the election. I wish I had a better sense of what this book was like, because it feels very fragmented to me. Not a surprise, perhaps, since three-quarters of it consists of brief reference entries on birds, so my usual sense of flow and evolution doesn’t apply here.

I’m going to break for lunch and possibly a brief nap, then start typing out the introduction for the companion journal. Yesterday afternoon was technically the deadline for both the book and intro, but my editor gave me a couple of days’ leeway due to her workload, bless her.

ETA: And the intro for the companion journal and the edit of the sample record sheet is also done and handed in. Now I get to pass out for half an hour before I go meet the boy’s bus.

Numb

It’s not a good place to be less than a week before deadline.

If this was a numbness born of overwork or a really good run, it would be different. But it isn’t. Instead, I find myself having difficulty maintaining a level of enthusiasm for a project that has been slowly morphing away from my original vision to something very much less than what it ought to have been, mostly in the last month. Production realities concerning rights and availabilities have dictated the changes and cuts, and there’s no way around them within the book’s design and instruction. We’ve proposed alternatives, but they’re not happening.

I feel like I’m marking time, and this is somewhere I never wanted to be. I like to be proud of my work; I like to be excited about it. I’m sure that by the time this book’s proofs come back to me I will have come to terms with its new format and be fine with it, but I need to be at that point now in order to keep giving it my all. But since the latest round of cuts arrived just before I left on holiday I only got to apply them today, and it had a pretty depressing impact on my productivity. I had to handle rewrites concerning the book’s outline, purpose, and mandate in the introduction and first half, and it was disheartening.

I just want it done so it can be someone else’s problem for a while (not that I want my wonderful, wonderful editor to have to handle even more problems surrounding this project, as she’s already juggled lots of them and rescued some of what was slated to be cut — and this is the two weeks leading up to her wedding!). The irony is that in order to get it done I have to be motivated, and I’m having difficulty mustering the energy for that at this level of work-related depression.

I do want to stress that just because this book isn’t going to be what I had planned for it to be, it’s not going to be a poor quality product. It’s going to be something different, that’s all, and I will know it’s different, and that’s what makes me sad. In theatre and creative writing we talk about the audience/reader not seeing the gaffer or masking tape holding everything together, and this is a similar situation. I will always know what it could have been, and therefore what it is not. It is going to be a beautiful book, I do know that; the interior and exterior art are spectacular.

Oh, birds. I love you so much. My file of deleted material is bulging with wonderful stuff. I’m holding onto it in the hopes that we can publish an expanded edition some day, or insert the bonus material in the e-book version. But I’m also not holding my breath.

Round One: Done

I just finished the last bird entry in Birds: A Spiritual Field Guide.

This completes my rough draft. There is work still to be done, namely expanding point form information in the first half of the book about historical divinatory practices involving birds into actual paragraphs (yay, haruspication!), checking facts I’ve highlighted, rewriting a rough meditation or two, and that kind of thing. Having had to cut five birds for sure and possibly five more due to art issues has brought me in at almost 8K under my target word count, which is making the most of a bad situation, as from here on everything just gets bigger.

But essentially? That’s all editing and polishing. And then I will obsessively check how I’ve presented the info in each entry, and wibble about how some things don’t fit, and how some entries have piles and piles of cultural mythology and folklore and others do not.

I have an introduction to write for the companion journal over my Easter holiday as well. I should copy my roughs to a USB key right now as well as printing them out to scribble on. And then it will all be handed in on May 2.

Now, if you don’t mind, I am going to go fall over.