Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

Fifty-Six Months Old!

There aren’t many photos this month. That’s part of what took so long; I couldn’t find pictures to accompany the post. I cheated and used some from just after the eleventh of the month.

There are some delicious phrases popping up in the boy’s conversations. The most recent one that slayed both HRH and I was, “Are you crazying me?” Another favourite exchange of mine happened at dinner, and went thusly:

    MAMA: So, what did you do at school today?

    SPARKY: I can’t tell you.

    HRH: …or I’d have to kill you.

    MAMA: He evidently goes to a ninja super-spy preschool.

The naps are down to every two days, and the days without naps are becoming more secure and less fraught with overwroughtness around dinner. It’s really quite a relief to know that if we miss a nap on the weekend it finally isn’t the end of the world; we can actually schedule or participate in activities that happen between noon and four now, like the rest of the world.

Bread and Jam for Frances is his new favourite book, slipping in under the wire this month. He was very interested in The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body book, which we took out of the library when he was home sick for a week. And he’s being very sneaky and not letting us know he’s reading; it only slips once in a while when he says things like, “Can we play the hide and seek game?” while pointing to an online icon with those words that he’s never seen before.

It’s been very Star Wars-y here. Apart from the action figures and spaceships he’s been focusing on, he and HRH have been co-playing through Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy on the Xbox, and I’m very impressed with how quickly he’s picked up buttons and combos to move around and do certain actions. (I still have to look at the buttons in order to know which ones to press; he doesn’t.) Then again, sometimes he just likes to play Artoo and fly around in circles while HRH struggles to hold off a horde of Lego stormtroopers on his own. His building with toys like Lego and Knex is getting more elaborate and imaginative, too. I love watching how intricate his playtime gets. He narrates complex stories about Jedis, Transformers, spaceships, cars, and trains, and a lot of it is internally consistent. And finally, on the toy front, Blackie is beginning to stay at home more often. He stills joins the boy for the occasional car trip to school or out on the weekend, but he gets left in the car.

The biggest problem these days is getting dressed in the morning. Like me he seems to need a lot of time to settle into the day, and getting him to have breakfast then get dressed before using whatever time is left to play is frustrating for everyone. It’s specifically the getting dressed part that stalls out, because he wants to play right after eating. I’m considering getting a timer from the dollar store and setting it to give him an independent marker to show when a certain time period set aside for an activity is up, because he seems to tune out HRH and I telling him he’s only got X minutes to do something. It’s worse when he’s sick or headachey, of course, but there’s still a bit of dawdling on a regular basis. Sometimes we can turn it into game or a race to see who gets dressed first, but we don’t always have the energy for that.

When he and HRH get into the car to go to school I wave, and when they pull out of the driveway they pause and wave again before the car pulls away. Lately, the boy has had his nose stuck in a book, and has waved without looking out the window at me to watch me wave back. He’s such an individual, and it’s so much fun to watch him grow.

2009 In Review

Better late than never. I’ve had this sitting in a file on my desktop, and I haven’t posted it because I was sure there was something I was forgetting. (There was: Neil Gaiman. Only the most exciting assignment I’ve ever been given, ever. Duh.)


Things I Did In 2009 That I Have Never Done Before:

Bought a brand-new cello.
Bought a spinning wheel and started spinning.
Joined a third social networking site (Twitter, which I vastly prefer to Facebook; I find FB very annoying, with a heck of a lot more noise than actual signal).
Canned a whole pile of garden tomatoes.
Performed a spiritual handfasting ceremony for two dear friends (not the same as legally marrying a couple, which I did for t! and Janice).
Sold my primary musical instrument (to someone very deserving!).
Bought my first Apple product, a Mac mini.
Interviewed Neil Gaiman in person.


Things I Did in 2009 Of Which I Am Proud:

I bought a new cello. If you follow my journal regularly you were privy to the angst I felt about the whole buying a new 7/8 cello when the 4/4 I had was so very excellent an instrument. This was a huge issue for me, because I had to deal with my preconceptions regarding thrift and what I deserve versus going overboard, and what constitutes any of those things. I am very, very happy with my choice to sell my first cello and buy this brand-new 7/8. The sound is evolving nicely and we play well together. We’re a good fit. This was HUGE for me. I am so very proud of myself for taking this enormously weighty step.

I am very proud of not quitting my cello lessons. As of mid-October it was one full year of lessons down, and I can tell that my technique has improved by leaps and bounds. I wasn’t ever really in danger of quitting them entirely, but I came close to asking to move to a biweekly schedule for the sake of finances, a move that would have had negative repercussions on my development.

I am proud of sticking it out in second chair at orchestra and not asking to be moved. I really, really struggled with the music this past fall, and I came very close to asking to be switched. Actually, I did ask, indirectly; I told the section leader that if she wanted to rotate me to the back to give someone else a chance, I’d be fine with that. She immediately vetoed that idea, which felt nice on one hand, but made my heart sink a little on the other. I’m sure this is very character-building for me.

I am thrilled with, and proud of, switching to a Mac computer. I’m pretty set in my ways (mainly because it takes energy to learn something new and there’s not a lot of that to spare) and learning a whole new interaction with a computer system was a bit intimidating. Apple made it very easy for me, though, and I’m terribly pleased with the whole affair. I vastly prefer it to Windows machines.

I am freakishly proud of stepping into the spinning hobby. Like the 7/8 cello and the move to a Mac, I researched exhaustively for months (rash is nowhere near my middle name) and finally decided to buy a spinning wheel. I thank Ceri form the bottom of my heart for giving me the early birthday present of a spindle workshop last spring.

And finally, I am also proud of the interview with Neil Gaiman. Not only did I step up to the plate and take the assignment from the lovely and talented Tamu at fps magazine instead of backing down because it would have been easier, but I actually got through it without fainting or choking or forgetting how to speak English. It was also just a pleasure to meet him and talk for twenty minutes. He is a wonderful person.

Good Things About 2009:

Taking up spinning. I can’t communicate how deeply this has affected me. It relaxes me, engages a part of my mind that I haven’t often engaged, and occupies my mind just enough to let everything else settle. Plus I get pretty yarn out of it.

Like last year I’m sure there’s more, of course; a lot of this year was good. But these are what stand out in my memory. I am still thankful for my friends, appreciative of them and their strengths, proud of their accomplishments and successes, and love spending time with them. I’ve also further refined my stop-spending-time-with-people-who-drain-me technique, with excellent benefits to my psyche and physical health. And I’m still working on the maintaining a decent balance as regards my physical energy, too, which goes well enough now that I understand I have to manage the energy carefully thanks to fibro.

Not-So-Good Things About 2009:

Scarlet fever. Come on. I mean, really. (Not that it was bad, just annoying. It was nowhere near as awful as the time I had it as a kid. I was fully operational and non-delirious the entire time. But still – scarlet fever?)

How Did I Do With My 2009 Wishes?

Further refine and develop my cello skills
Yay!

Finish and polish and start querying Orchestrated
Finished writing it and did a full edit on it, which is two out of three, anyway. Then the last quarter of 2009 happened and bam.

Keep on writing
Um. My writing has really, really, fallen by the wayside. I’m so tired that I can’t think ideas through any more. This really upsets me on one level, but on another I don’t have the energy to be upset. I suspect I’m shifting into a more editorial phase of my career, and you know, that’s just fine right now. After five books for the publisher and two and a half for myself over the past six years, I figure I’m entitled to some down time.

Start making all our own pasta
Fail! And all due to the unwillingness to invest in a pasta maker or attachment for the KitchenAid.

Plant, harvest, and preserve more vegetables from the garden
Win! We enlarged the garden by a quarter this year and got a really good crop of tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and carrots. We had a surprise cucumber plant emerge three months after we’d planted the seeds. The potatoes really worked well this summer, too, and they were delicious, although we didn’t’ get anything like a big yield (better than last year’s afterthought experiment, though). Our green onions did well too, but they were so small that it was hard to use them. It felt like I was wasting more than I actually got into the pot. Perhaps not the most efficient of crops; maybe full-size onions next year.

Save more money
Well, debt accumulation has been stopped in its tracks, but paying it off is happening very, very slowly. Part of this has to do with my income readjusting, since I no longer consult with the publisher and get large chunks of money as a result; I get smaller amounts trickling in on a pretty regular basis.


Wishes for 2010:

1. Further focus my energy on a smaller group of friends. This means narrowing my online circles as well as real life. I just don’t have the energy or the time; I can’t help or support everyone. HRH has already begun doing this in his own way. It’s not that I don’t like certain people with whom I’m easing myself out of a closer sphere of interaction; it’s mostly that I can see there are people who end up causing me exhaustion both mental and emotional, whether I enjoy interacting with them or not (and that covers both online and/or off).

2. Focus on my spinning. I going to let this be my relaxing thing for the year, and I’m not going to worry about using what I spin. A couple of months ago I decided that in early 2010 I’d open an Etsy shop and list stuff there as I spin it, and hey, if it sells, then I recoup the money for the fibre and some of the time, and I get to do more. It’s the process I love, not the product to be used for a specific project of mine. (Actually, I do love the product; I adore looking at skeins of yarn I’ve spun, and petting them, too. I just don’t want to be saddled with piles of them that I’ll never use.)

In Summary:

If I had to assign a value to 2009, I’d say that again, it’s been an overall good year. Watching the boy grow and develop in leaps and bounds (if one more person tells me that he’s ahead of his peer group in language, social, and physical terms I may pull my hair out) has been fabulous. HRH got his permanency, which means barring humungous disaster, we’ll be okay for the next twenty-five years as pertains to his career. We’re looking at a move to the south shore in 2010 as well, to be closer to HRH’s job and the boy’s kindergarten. I hate moving, but I’m actually looking forward to this because eof what it means to us.

So here’s to a quiet, successful, fulfilling 2010.

Warning: Technology Upgrade Ahead

I’m about to start trying to install the new wireless modem. If we vanish from e-mail and online interaction for a couple of days, you will know that things went horribly, horribly wrong.

Wish me luck.

(At least I got the penultimate draft of the book layout to Emily yesterday; I wanted that done before I tried this, just in case.)

ETA, 30 minutes later: Huh. That was fast. How refreshing to have something go well the first time when dealing with this company. The wireless through my Mac mini even works; my iPod Touch is accessing the Internet with great glee. Did you miss me?

Self-Defence

I just had to post something else, because looking at the last post was driving me crazy every time I opened my browser. I’m almost done the weekend roundup and the boy’s 54 mos post; I’m pecking at them and I’m kind of tired, and as the days go by I’m less interested in them, you know? This is why I try to journal ASAP.

Work news: Now that we’ve confirmed it, I am all backflippy to announce that I am doing the book design for Emily Wright‘s upcoming A Cellist’s Manual. I am thrilled to be working with Emily on this project, and to be working on a book about one of my main interests and areas of… er… I can’t call it expertise, but fifteen-years-of-familiarity doesn’t roll off the tongue too smoothly. Anywhats, yay for Emily, and yay for book design, and yay for working on a super awesome cool project!

Scarlet fever update: Still alive. Am I not infectious yet? Am I not infectious yet? Am I not infectious yet? How about now? Now? Maybe now?

Technology: Apart from discovering iChat and iDisk (thank you, Emily) I gave Google Chrome a whirl this morning. I am surprisingly impressed with the speed. Unfortunately the Mac version is only in beta and none of the extensions and add-ons function in it yet, so I’ve binned it for now because I cannot, cannot, cannot use the web without an ad blocker. The end.

Knitting: I played hooky yesterday because this project is going sooo slooowly. That’s because the yarn I’m knitting it with is terribly thin (mostly; it bulks up here and there and the unevenness is also preventing me from getting into a rhythm). Yes, that’s right; it’s going slowly so I didn’t work on it much yesterday. And yes, it has a Christmas deadline. I have never claimed to be logical.

Spinning: I spun up 2.5 oz of the packing fibre my bobbins and kate extender arrived in while knitting-avoiding and did my very first three-play yarn, huzzah! I chain-plied a leftover single and when the boy got home I had him help me mix up some purple dye to colour it, and he was very excited about dipping it in and putting it in the microwave and rinsing it afterward. It’s very purple indeed, and the boy loved the whole process.

Weather: Holy cats, it got cold fast. It was about minus thirty C last night. It was plus seven C about ten days ago. That’s kind of sudden. Above-average temperatures to way below-average temperatures; uh-huh. No climate change happening, my foot.

Holiday countdown: Two days till we pick up what few gifts we’re buying this year, groceries, and the first Yule celebration; three days till the local family Christmas celebration; five days till our godfamily Solstice sing-song and celebration; six days till we leave for Toronto; eight days till the other family Christmas. Which means that yes, I am doing a full Christmas dinner on Sunday. I have to keep reminding myself of this, because the rest of my brain is firmly convinced that I don’t need to worry about that sort of thing for a week.

There you are.

Now back to this freelance assignment, which I received last night, started this morning, and want done by the end of the day so it can be approved and I can include it in tomorrow’s invoice. (Why the rush? Because accounting saw fit to change the freelancers’ Dec 28 invoice deadline to a Dec 18 deadline. Grr. Also, I got all the material to start on Emily’s book this morning, and I want to be working on THAT, not THIS.) I need to think of something to make for dinner tonight, too.

Backdated Posts

Finally written and posted:

The weekend roundup.

The boy’s fifty-three months old post.

And now I have crossed everything off today’s to-do list except laundry. The bread’s on its second rise, and I have some cello to work on. Last night’s rehearsal was amazing but incredibly draining; with the fibro being the worst it’s been in two years, I’m moderately concerned about keeling over halfway through the second part of the concert on Saturday night, and no, I am not kidding. I think what will save me is that fact that the Beethoven is at the end on the actual concert night.

Cast on Devon’s wrap yesterday, and got two of the sixteen repeats done. I have to keep reminding myself that blocking opens up the lace. Because the yarn is thicker but I didn’t change needle size, it’s not open lace like the original. We’ll see what happens.

In Which She Enjoys Living In The Future

I love living in the future.

Item one: I can place a reserve for new acquisitions at the library online, check my profile, find out that they’re in before the library calls me, and show up to check them out before they’ve even made it to the reserve drawers. I scored An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (an additional yay for the library taking your advice about new books to buy via online request forms), and Alexander McCall Smith’s The Lost Art of Gratitude. Seriously; check out that trio of bestselling authors! And they’re all on my bedside table. (The books, not the authors. It would be very crowded otherwise.)

Item two: This morning I jumped up and down on Twitter about the hat-trick of library books, because I have friends who understand that sort of thing.

Item three: Two seconds later Peter Gregson, a pro Scottish cellist I follow on Twitter and natter with on occasion, sent me a direct message saying that Sandy McCall Smith is a friend of his, and he’d be happy to pass along anything I might want to share with him.

Yes, the future is a wonderful place, where I can connect with people around the globe, and one of the people on my Twitter list and in our extended cello family knows one of my favourite authors and will say hi for me. (I asked him to say that Smith’s work had brought my ex-pat Scot mum and I much joy. Figured that covered pretty much all the bases.)

Gnarr

This morning I am on a homicidal rampage against HP.

When I got the Mac my printer worked, yay (unlike my previous Windows PCs where I had to install sixty trillion things to get my peripherals to work); no need to install all the HP software that takes up huge amounts of space and that I don’t use. And then I said to someone I’d scan and e-mail them a printed photo. For some reason, that didn’t work at all. The printer says it isn’t connected to the computer when I try to initiate the scan from it; the printer says there’s no scanner hooked up when I try to go at it the other way around. This is hunh?-worthy, because my printer is an all-in-one unit, so if the printer is connected and works, then the scanner is also connected and should work. So last week I finally downloaded the Mac software from HP and installed it. The scan worked. And then the computer froze upon reboot the next morning. But since then there hasn’t been a problem, not that I’ve tried another scan.

Till this morning, when HRH asked me to scan and send an image to him at work.

Nothing works. Nothing. I tried going at it from sixteen different directions. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling four times; now the software and drivers won’t even install without crashing. I downloaded non-HP software that claims it works with my scanner; it doesn’t recognize it.

My research online tells me that an awful lot of people using Macs have the same problem with HP printers of all models and types, despite HP claiming to be fully Mac-compatible. Apparently HP is dreadful in general with their drivers, but even more so with Macs.

Gods-damned HP. Why do I keep buying their products? Why? (Because they’re cheap. And I’m paying for it in other ways.)

This means I may need to need to buy or acquire a third printer within four years. I am not pleased. Although HP was so ashamed of the bashlash they experienced upon the release of Snow Leopard because they’d utterly failed to match the upgrade (they actually told people to buy new printers instead!) that they decided that it would be a good move to develop Snow Leopard-compatible drivers after all, and finally made sure the scanner part of the all-in-one units like the one I have would actually be supported, after ages of ignoring them in the driver updates. So if I upgrade to Snow Leopard, the printer and scanner should work. This is worth thinking about, as Snow Leopard is only $35 and by all reports is very shiny and exciting. Still; I shouldn’t have to upgrade my OS from a perfectly functional release to get my scanner to work. HP should be releasing fully functional updated drivers concurrent with every previous OS upgrade instead of crippled ones that only address one of the functions in an all-in-one.

I can’t even spin to relax because I don’t have spare bobbins, and I can’t go ahead and ply the stuff I’ve got because I still don’t know if I’m using the n-ply or the two-ply for Devon’s wrap.

I had Girl Guide cookies for breakfast. I suspect I’m going to make chocolate chip shortbread cookies very soon, and probably focaccia for lunch. Also, if it’s going to go up to 14 today, would the sun please come out?

rawr rawr rawr. and grump.

Maybe I’ll retake all those awful swatch photos while listening to decent music. I’m not calm enough to open my new freelance assignment and work on it just yet.