Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Yesterday, Things Went Wrong

It could have been worse, of course, but:

1. The phone line, which was supposedly fixed, went dead again yesterday. And then came back this morning. Then it was dead again. And now it’s back up again, but for how long?

2. My printer is officially also dead, which means I need to buy another new one. I’ve tried everything I can to get it back on its feet. Although this one lasted me two years and worked wonderfully when it was operational, so I shouldn’t grumble too much. I seem to replace them every two to five years, and while that seems horribly wasteful to me, it’s probably the lifespan of what’s made these days. (Which disappoints me on a whole other level. I don’t like thinking of small appliances and electronics as disposable.)

3. The new umbrella stroller I bought yesterday at half price to replace our old tatty one (a canopy! reclinable!) was missing two wheels, and I didn’t discover it until I unpacked it after dragging it and the baby in our other stroller home. So I have to take it back again today.

4. My rickety Windows laptop finally bit the dust. It won’t even boot up now.

So I baked chocolate shortbread bunnies. They were very good. And I made veggie-cheese nuggets and froze them for quick Owlet meals, but it took great strength on my part not to eat them all myself.

Update!

1. We have an operational phone again! After the spectacular failure with the last live chat thing with Bell, yesterday’s session went off without a hitch, and an hour later the phone rang. It was Bell, telling me they’d fixed things from their end. I was staggered. I’d expected it to be a song and dance and entail a tech here on site being annoyed, and having to argue with head office… but no. So it was a thing on their end and not our wiring, and they fixed it, and it’s all good now.

2. No word from the magazine position I applied for… but the work gods gifted me with my first freelance editing project from the publisher in almost exactly twelve months this week. I am so incredibly relieved. My professional self-esteem was taking a really bad hit, as was my sense of financial responsibility regarding being able to handle my bills and the household bills I used to cover, too. Unexpectedly being a one-income family for a year really hurt us a lot. I’m always going to be bitter about being denied maternity benefits. (The kicker is that if Owlet had been born a year earlier or later, I’d have made more than enough to qualify for the benefit program.)

3. Two days left of school, including today. While I am excited for Sparky, I am also realizing that this means he will be home 24/7 until camp begins, and I get exhausted with both kids home in just an hour after school. I have also realized that unless we build a daily schedule, he is going to want to drift all day from playing Pokemon on the DS to watching videos and playing games on the computer, to watching movies downstairs, all things he does once his homework is done after school and he is free to relax. And while that keeps him out of my hair, it also is way, way, way too much screen time. We need to schedule cello, and perhaps an hour-long block of quiet reading time (possibly concurrent with Owlet’s afternoon nap), and I have a French workbook that we’ll do two pages of each day. We may schedule a walk, too, so we all get out.

4. Owlet has figured out how to sit up on her own (finally — it came very soon after she figured out Real Crawling), is cruising around the house at an alarming rate, and is practising crouching down and standing up again without holding on to anything. Eek.

General PSAs

1. Our phone voice line is officially on the fritz after being dicky for the past two weeks, and Bell can’t open a help ticket because they’re experiencing technical difficulties. (Fills me with confidence, that does.) Our internet is still functional. If you need to get hold of us, please use e-mail (or a Twitter DM or Facebook message if you’re on either of those, since notifications for those go to my e-mail as well).

2. The Canada Day concert is rapidly approaching: July 1 at 8:00 PM, in St-Joachim church in Pointe-Claire village. It’s free! It’s fun! Come early and enjoy the festivities in the village, and stay for the fireworks after the show!

3. One week left of school. Gods help us.

4. No reply yet from the magazine to whom I submitted an application for the position of part-time editor last Friday. I am totally not stressing. Totally not.

5. Happy Father’s Day weekend to all the dads out there!

The State Of Cello

I see that all I’m managing is a blog post every couple of weeks, which is not so great for my record keeping. I’m going to try to blog more often. (That makes it sound like I haven’t been trying. I pecked this out last night on my iPhone during break at orchestra using Evernote, then synced it up this morning, copied it to the blogging software, and edited it. Whatever works. It’s not something I can do for anything large and writing-related, though I have been using the same process to make notes for the basis of the kids’ posts.)

Let’s start with a cello post.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to schedule a couple of lessons leading up to the summer recital. I’d been going to the group lessons and working on the group pieces, but I dropped private lessons entirely in February. When my teacher asked if I was doing something for the recital I wibbled. I hadn’t planned on it, as I hadn’t been really working on anything properly, although I’d been playing Allegro Moderato, the last assigned Suzuki piece now and then. She said she’d like me to, but if I didn’t feel comfortable doing the Allegro I’d started in January (and had all of two lessons on) then I could pull out something old and brush up on it. I agreed, because it would feel odd to play in the group pieces but not a solo, and it would be the first recital I didn’t play in since I started lessons again three years ago. (Is this really going to be my sixth recital with this teacher? Wow.) So for my first lesson in months, I brought in a pile of things I’d played sixteen years ago and had read through at home as potential back-up, but I set Allegro Moderato on the stand and played it for her first. She said, “Oh, this will be fine; we just need to polish it a bit here and there.” That made me feel remarkably good. I was relieved to know I hadn’t broken it irreparably over my months of practicing alone. Now, I’m not entirely happy with it; I’d like another two weeks of working on the targeted areas. I’m playing it at a slower speed than I’d been practicing it at home, because I couldn’t get it to hang together smoothly enough the other way. (It’s, um, very Moderato.) But I won’t crash and burn. (I hope?)

Orchestra is fun. We’re working on the Canada Day concert, which has a Northern theme, Russian and Scandinavian music… and one Canadian piece, too! We’re preparing Glinka’s Ruslan & Ludmilla overture (which we’re taking at a sane seed, so my initial conniption has been assuaged), both Peer Gynt suites, Finlandia, Borodin’s wonderful Third Symphony, and a piece by our conductor, Stewart Grant. I’m still sitting last chair, and that’s just fine and relaxed for me. It’s not like I have lots of time to work on my stuff at home, though it’s not a very challenging programme cellistically. I’m really enjoying this programme a lot. I won’t lie; it’s probably a wee bit due to the less challenging skill level required to pull it off as compared to our last couple of concerts, but also it’s also because I’ve loved most of this music for ages.

My A string is starting to feel rough. I may have to replace it. In fact, I haven’t taken my cello for a tuneup since I bought it two years ago; I can’t afford it. But it seems to be carrying on quite well, and if it’s taken two years for the A string to reach this point, then I’m pretty impressed, frankly. And the sound just keeps getting better. The 7/8 was a good investment: it still sounds fabulous, and much better than an entry-level student model is expected to sound.

Catch Up

The flight was fun, and Sparky was thrilled with it all and very well behaved. Apparently he handled it all like an old pro. (Genetic memory?) Owlet travelled decently on our drive down to join him at my parents’ place, but needed me back there with her for the second half of the trip. Coming back was easier (though I expected it to be harder balancing two bored, cranky kids) because Sparky entertained her by just being himself and giving her company. There’s a whole different rhythm to travelling with a baby that I’d forgotten about — you stop every ninety minutes to two hours just to get out of the car and feed them, give them a change of environment, that sort of thing. Good thing she’s half on solids now, because nursing was pretty much a washout as there was way too much to look at. Naps go right out the window, because you gauge your rest stops by if baby’s sleeping, and inevitably they wake up five minutes after you pass one and the next isn’t for another hour… but all things considered, it went well. Sleeping went okay at my parents’ house, too, after the first night where she spent all but the first hour or two in bed with us. The last night she did her usual two wakeups to nurse and went back to sleep in her own bed each time. Of course, back home she was all off again, waking up every hour or so the first night and finally spending the last few hours in bed with me. And there was no morning nap the next day, despite trying twice. But it’s okay; we’ve been going with the flow and are slowly settling in, riding out the bumpy bits that are appearing at odd times.

We had a lovely trip. The weather was great, and the kids were cheerful and well behaved. We saw my cousin and his family (who are moving to BC this summer, so we won’t get to see them often any more). We ate piles and piles of my mother’s delicious food. On Sunday Sparky went with Nana to the aircraft museum where my dad works so HRH, Owlet, and I got to do a quick run to the used baby clothes store and score some stretchy leggings that fit her because suddenly none of her pants are big enough. (PSA: Just give up on buying 12mos size clothes, people. Grandma recently bought two gorgeous 12mos tops for Owlet, and one barely fits, while the other — the one I like more, which figures — doesn’t at all. Both looked plenty large enough, so I give up.)

She’s not the only one whose clothes need replacing. Thank goodness the weather has turned and the boy is wearing splash pants and his raincoat, because his snowsuit is shot. Today we had to send him back to his room twice because both the original pair of pants and the second pair he tried to put on were too short. At least Owlet has boxes of summer dresses waiting for her, which I may switch her into early and put leggings and long-sleeve shirts underneath.

In news about me, I have a fully functional Mac mini again, thanks to the tireless efforts of HRH and the Mac tech at work in combining the one with the failing logic board and the slower, smaller one. They maxed the RAM, which pretty much balances out the slightly slower processor. I have a new to me monitor as well, thanks to Molly Ann. It is such a relief to be able to sync my phone and back stuff up again. The only down side is that the optical drive in the Ariadne mini burns CDs only, so my stack of DVD RWs isn’t much use to me any more. In other news, my client finally got back to me after I sent them a formal message about invoicing them for the work I broke my back to get them on deadline day and to which they didn’t respond at all, and I think I’ve been sidelined. Their reason for not responding to me for two weeks was that they were moving, and the things they asked for quotes actually needed more work, and if they needed me they’d let me know. Whatever. I just wish I hadn’t turned away the project from my publisher because the new client indicated they only needed approval and a purchase order number for the important book-length project before I started on that. It would have been tight time-wise, and frustrating because I’d have been working on the rickety, crashy laptop, but I’d have had work and money by now.

I miss cello dreadfully. I remember now that there was a gap of no-cello-at-all when Sparky was born because I either couldn’t fit practice time in or couldn’t practice because he’d wake up. The location of Owlet’s bedroom and the small footprint of our house means that I can’t practice upstairs or downstairs while she’s asleep, and she only sits and listens to me for about five minutes if I plunk her in a chair upstairs and practice with her right there. Having to drop my private lessons to every two weeks and then stop entirely has depressed me and is eroding my skills, and doing orchestra only every two weeks because we can’t afford the gas to get me out there is awful. I’m walking out of every rehearsal pretty demoralised because I just can’t stay on top of things, and we’re playing stuff that demands a lot of focus and precision. I think I’m going to try to make every rehearsal from now till the concert (which is is ONE MONTH, peoples: April 14! mark your calendars!), just to make sure I absorb as much direction as possible. Part of me wants to give it up to eliminate the stress, but then I’d be giving up the one thing left that I have to get me out of the house sans baby, and also the one cello-related thing left in my life at the moment, and I’m too stubborn to do that.

Our bulbs are poking their wee green heads up in the gardens, and we are very much looking forward to actually gardening this year. Go spring!

Okay, baby’s awake. Off we go on errands.

Not Dead

And my computer is still hanging on by a thread as well (not that I get a chance to sit down at it for more than a heartbeat every couple of days). I got the replacement (plus a monitor and keyboard and speakers and wow; I now own a bit of Ariadne Knits history and I am so thankful to Molly Ann!), only to realise that apparently my Mini is a souped up model with a hard drive that is four times the size of the replacement, which only has the standard issue HD. My processor is faster, too. I think the only thing to do is swap the hard drives and take the slight speed cut, but that depends on the Mac tech guys at HRH’s workplace again, so I’m still in a holding pattern.

Still no response from the client I did the edits for over two weeks ago. I sent them a second more formal reminder today saying that as I hadn’t heard from them on this date and this date, in response to any of the submissions or quotes, I had to assume the edits on the first project were acceptable and to please give me the info required for invoicing so I could bill them, and that hey, I can’t sit here and wait for you forever to get back to me after me saying that yes, I was available for you and the projects you proposed. I’m already cranky because I turned down my publisher’s project that was offered to me the same day since I was going to be working on the new client’s stuff. Today I got wise and attached a return receipt to my email, so I know it was received and read, at least. I’m so frustrated with how this is going. Finances are not getting any easier. I just want to be working again.

Health-wise, we’ve been riding a merry-go-round. Sparky had to be picked up from school last week because he got threw up and had a mild 24-hour gastro. Owlet and I developed severe and sudden likely-different gastro this past Sunday night. I’d only been well for a few days after the nasty sinus/head/flu thing the week before that took ages to work through, so it kind of felt extra unfair. It hit HRH the next night, possibly because he’d been up all night before taking care of the two of us so his body was already exhausted. And tonight the boy crashed with a fever, a cough and congestion, and no appetite, and I’m really hoping it’s not the nasty gastro we all had; that would be remarkably unfair, too. Though not entirely surprising, as my doctor said there are a few evil strains flying around this season and it seems a bit worse than usual. We’re all so exhausted.

Looks like March is going to come roaring in like a lion. We need the snow for ground water levels, but I am really looking forward to wearing lighter jackets, putting my boots away, and watching spring flowers bloom.

I completely missed the Owlyblog’s tenth anniversary on February 12. I meant to do a thoughtful post dedicated to it and everything, but I didn’t, so here: Ten years. That’s a long time. Go me. Go owlies. Go you, dear readers. I’d put exclamation marks in, but that suggests energy, which I do not have at the moment.

Excelsior, yes?

A Random Number Of Things Makes A Random Post

1. Still haven’t heard back from the new client about (a) the project I edited for them, (b) the second quote I did for them, (c) the third quote I did for them. Now I think they hate me and I made horrible, glaring APA mistakes in the project I killed myself to get to them.

2. On the other hand, it’s just as well for the moment, because…

3. The Mac mini still has not had its USBs fixed. In fact, when HRH brought it back home after taking it in the second time, it wouldn’t start up at all. On the eleventh try it did, and I haven’t turned it off since then for fear it won’t start ever again. I keep expecting it to just roll over and die.

4. Now it’s lost its sound output entirely. All the options to turn it back on are greyed out. It’s definitely a hardware issue. I give up.

5. In the Good News column, I get the new-to-me Mac mini on Monday afternoon. I am not thinking about the nightmare of transferring the contents of my hard drive from one to the other.

6. I have been horribly sick the past two or three days. I’ve been achy for most of the week, but yesterday things got so bad it hurt to lie down. My throat is horribly sore, I’ve been alternating between chills and sweats, and lethargy and awful headaches have been dogging me. So yesterday just before supper I handed HRH the baby, took a hot bath, fell into bed and slept through two feedings. Poor Owlet has been out of sorts as well, so I’ve been dosing her with Tylenol regularly, too. I feel marginally better today, so much so that I was well enough to take Sparky to his cello lesson this morning. Still achy and throat sore and headached, but almost tolerably so.

7. In cello news, I got my copy of Suzuki book four this morning! I am very excited. I’ve played the Breval before; in fact, it was my last recital piece with my first teacher… um, fifteen years ago (oh my gods, I now officially feel way damn old). (Because mention of long ago inevitably raises the question of how long I’ve been playing: I started as an adult beginner in 1994.) I’m still off private lessons until I make money, but we have a group lesson tomorrow and I get to provide accompaniment for the kids’ half of the afternoon as well my parts in the adult pieces later.

8. I am underwhelmed by the new Tim Hortons’ lattes. The one I tried today tasted like scalded milk and old coffee, despite sweetening. I’ll give it one more go, next time a mocha latte because chocolate makes everything better, but I suspect I’ll be sticking with iced cappuccinos from that particular chain.

9. This weather is wrong, wrong, wrong. We’re averaging about one degree above zero, and the snow is almost all gone (not that there was very much overall accumulation this winter to begin with), and while it’s nice for walking with the baby, it’s awful for the ground water and the coming growing season. We already have bulbs a centimetre above ground in the front garden. It’s wrong, I tell you.

10. Owlet is working out the crawling thing. She can lift her front half; she can get her rear in the air and try to tuck her knees under her hips. Unfortunately, she can’t do both at the same time, because when one end goes up the other goes down. Hilarious.

11. Oh, the candid pictures you will get when I can get them off my phone and camera!

12. Speaking of pictures, two weeks ago we all went and sat for a formal family portrait at the local department store. The deal was a free session and free 10 x 13 print, and anything else was up to you. Owlet and I went and saw the proofs the other day, and they were wonderful; I was shocked that everyone looked so good at the same time. And while I really, really couldn’t afford it, I managed to wring some money out of my Visa and pick up prints of the two family poses. We’ve never had formal photos taken, ever; the last ones someone who is not a family member took of us were at our wedding thirteen years ago. The lady even slipped in an extra sheet of prints for me. When I have a printer that connects to a real computer again I’ll scan one and post it for you all. I shall also scan and print more for family and friends.

Okay, that’s about it on the update front. Bedtime.