Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

The Thing Is…

… if you stick with something long enough, the bad parts usually get better.

Yes, orchestra rocked. Why would I drop something that challenges and rewards me? When it’s going badly it’s bad, but when it works, when everything comes together, it’s glorious. And I wouldn’t give that up.

Besides, Butterworth’s “The Banks of Green Willow” alone makes up for any frustration. (Including the frustrating passage of stormy strings a third of the way through where everything sounds like it’s falling apart, but is actually building before the absolutely gorgeous climax.) I’ve played some very pretty things, but I find this piece absolutely spectacular and it gets me every time. The transition in the middle is throat-clenchingly exquisite, and then the arrangement of the folk song at the end (the same one that Vaughn Williams used as the second movement of his Folk Song Suite, “The Bonny Boy”; Butterworth and Vaughn Williams were both interested in English folk songs, and Butterworth worked with Cecil Sharp to collect them) is gentle and ethereally beautiful in its simplicity.

I loved this piece even before I found out that Butterworth was killed in the First World War, after destroying the music he though unworthy of survival should he not return. His remaining catalogue is slim, and you can’t help but wonder what he destroyed, and what he might have composed had he lived through the war. Knowing it’s one of the few pieces that survived makes it all the more precious.

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.

Lest We Forget

War’s not the answer most of the time; it’s often a trumped-up excuse that veils another agenda. But that’s not going to stop me from honouring the men and women whose job it is, or who volunteer, to go out and risk their lives in confrontations beyond what most of us can envision. It’s their commitment and courage I honour on Remembrance Day. I honour our peacekeepers, too, the people who go to other countries to help rebuild after times of turmoil. And support staff — doctors, drivers, cooks, all those people who are necessary to the machine of war and who rarely get recognition for being in danger as well. And those left at home, who carry the double burden of hope and dread for their loved ones.

There has to be a better way. But even when someone figures it out, I’ll keep on saying thank you to all those individuals who gave lives, limbs, time, and innocence to the wars. I honour and respect their personal decisions, even if I disagree with the governmental decisions that created the need for them.

This year also marks the first anniversary of the death of a friend who I admire immensely: Emru Townsend. He fought a different kind of war, but a war nonetheless. In December 2007, when diagnosed with leukemia and a condition called monosomy 7, which meant that he had an increased risk of the leukemia coming back no matter how successful chemotherapy was, he and his sister Tamu created the outreach and public education event they called Heal Emru. It wasn’t about finding a stem cell donor who matched Emru (although that eventually happened); the program was built around their discovery that most ethnic groups were severely underrepresented in the bone marrow registries of North America and in other parts of the world. Heal Emru seeks to educate the public about this under-representation and to bring the plight of people from those ethnic groups seeking compatible donors to public awareness.

Emru blogged his illness and his treatments, and it makes for sober and thought-provoking reading. (The blog is now maintained by Tamu.) He found a compatible donor and had his transplant in September of 2008, nine months after his diagnosis. Unfortunately, although the stem cell transplant was successful, his cancer did not go into remission, and by the end of October it was clear that he wouldn’t make it. Emru may have passed on, but his war continues, fought by every one of us who simply walks up to someone and says, “Hey, have you heard about the bone marrow registry?”

The Heal Emru FAQs answer some of the common questions people have about bone marrow donation.
The Heal Emru site lists contact information for registries around the world.

Are you a match? Find out how you can help save Emru’s life: http://www.healemru.com

Got Twitter? Follow @healemru
Got Facebook? Please join the Heal Emru group, and if you learn something new, invite your friends.
Got Livejournal, WordPress or Blogger? Blog it!
Got Youtube? Subscribe to www.youtube.com/healemru
Just find someone you care about and tell them.

Contact info:

Hema Quebec http://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca
Canada Blood Services (Canada, except Quebec) http://onematch.ca/registry
National Marrow Donor Program (US) http://www.marrow.org

And find many more groups in these countries and internationally on the Registries page of HealEmru.com

The campaign may be called Heal Emru, but Emru’s name stands for every single individual who is struggling with an illness and needs a donor for stem cells, bone marrow, or peripheral cell transplant. The war to save lives continues.

In Which She Chronicles Her First Time Knitting With Her Own Handspun

One and a half repeats, half-width swatch of the pattern for my eldest goddaughter’s Yule gift, a convertible wrap/scarf/capelet/hood, knit with the Navajo-plied sample of my own handspun yarn:

Notes for the record (because my journal is mostly for my reference, after all): Swatch measures 6.25 inches wide by 3.75 inches high, pinned out (4 x 6 unpinned). There’s a bit of variation in the thickness of the yarn used, which is understandable; this is the first fibre I’ve spun of this type, and the n-plying was a bit tricky to get used to. But the pattern forgives a lot of the variation. Overall the yarn is pretty even, nice and solid, and knits decently. It’s not as soft as I wanted it to be; I suspect the two-ply will be softer once knit (it’s certainly softer to the touch in the skein), and that may end up being the element that decides two-ply vs. n-ply in the end. I want it to feel soft against her throat. If it’s beautiful but a bit scritchy, she’s not going to want to wear it. As for the pattern, easy-peasy. The hardest thing is going to be remembering which row I’m on of which repeat. I will make a list and check off every row as it’s completed.

(Gentle readers, you’ll have to bear with me as I publicly natter and keep notes about this project for the next two months. I can’t write about the other Yule gifts I’m making since the recipients read the journal. Someday my goddaughter will be old enough to read it, too, and then we won’t be able to squee about the cool stuff we think up for her any more. Speaking of which, I could have sworn we capered about in words and photographs regarding the truly stunning wand HRH made for her this last spring, complete with stunning storage box, but I can’t find it anywhere. Hrm.)

Okay, I have to admit, this particular swatching was a total spinning geek thing. Most knitters hate swatching, especially because swatches aren’t one hundred percent reliable (it also slows you down, because everyone wants to jump right into the Exciting Making Of Things!, and knitting a swatch is the equivalent of checking your materials and measurements sixish times before starting [needle size correct? yarn weight correct? yarn composition correct? affected by washing? stretch? definition?] and of looking both ways fourteen billion times before you cross the street). But swatching a handspun to make sure it behaves the way you need it to (before you spin/ply it all up and discover that it’s useless for the purpose for which it was intended)? Crucial. Because otherwise you not only waste your knitting time, you waste the fibre you’ve spun and the time used to spin it. Also, I’ve never knit with (a) a handspun yarn, let alone (b) a handspun yarn I produced myself. So yes, this was a total spinning geek thing.

I’ve been spinning with the wheel since I got in a third week of September, but the fibre has been for experimental purposes only, or for other people. It wasn’t until I couldn’t find the right yarn with which to knit my goddaughter’s Yule gift and realised that I could spin the yarn I wanted to knit with that I really, truly understood how spinning and knitting were going to work together for me.

I don’t think of myself as a knitter. I’ve finished all of nine things in the past year since I began knitting, mostly hats (two) and scarves (three). Things beyond simple knit stitch scare me. I’ve only just mastered yarn overs and k2tog. I can’t purl to save my life unless I do a bunch of them in a row; alternating purl and knit breaks my brain. Ribbing makes me suicidal or homicidal, depending on the day.

But spinning? Love it. The problem with spinning is you end up with yarn, and you have to figure out some way to use it up. Offloading it to friends once it’s good enough is one way. (Gods bless Ceri, who cheerfully supports this method; so much so that she buys me fluff to spin up so she gets yarn at the end of the process. If anyone else wants in on this, let me know; I am not kidding. Fully serious. You want handspun yarn? Ask; we can work something out where everyone benefits.) The other logical way is to use it up by knitting with it myself.

This was always going to be a problem for me, because as I pointed out above, I don’t think of myself as a knitter. Someone needs a hat or a scarf, so I make one. My office is cold, so I make a lap blanket. I need slippers, so I knit a pair. The boy falls in love with Star Wars, so I knit a lightsabre. (Just work with me on this one, okay?) I don’t stash yarn the way other knitters do; I go out and buy what I need when I need it.

So yes, it took me this long to figure out that I could actually spin a specific yarn for a knitting project I wanted to undertake. Because for me, it’s primarily about the spinning, not the knitting.

(Except in this case, where I decided to make something special for my goddaughter because I remember how I felt when one of my relatives gifted me with something grown-up around this age. I decided to knit a beautiful wrap for her, but I couldn’t find the perfect yarn for the project. Enter spinning as the solution. In this instance, I worked backwards: a knit project needed a handspun yarn, instead of a handspun yarn needing a knit project.)

Anyway, despite my thick skull and amusingly slow connecting of the dots, I here demonstrate my first knitted handspun sample. I’m really extremely proud of it, and I think I have every right to be. Because I not only knitted that swatch, I spun the yarn with which it was knitted. And it acts like real yarn. I can’t get over that bit.

Of course, swatches lie like lying things, so I can’t trust it fully. But I can admire it, even before washing and blocking it. And I invite you to admire it, too, if you like. Really. I’m horrible with compliments, but I’m so thrilled about this particular accomplishment that if you want to compliment it or me, I won’t stop you or duck it, I promise.

Next up: Knitting the same sample with the two-ply made from the same handspun singles I did the n-ply with. Ceri has confirmed that the two-ply is softer to touch and the colours seem brighter, so we’ll see how it behaves when knitted with the same needles in the same pattern. I suspect it will be a bit splittier, but the way it feels may make up for that.

Bits And Pieces

The Corriedale I spun shrank when I washed it, apparently significantly judging from where it’s hung when I tried to fit it back on the skein winder to evaluate it. It covers only three of the pegs and makes a loose triangle now instead of fitting around all four pegs to make a snug square. Better it shrink now than later after being knitted, but still; annoying. I’ll have to reskein it and measure it again to make sure Ceri has enough for her project. It looks very pretty in its little temporary twisted skein, though. (And upon trying to reskein it I find that it has tangled somehow, despite my careful tying. Grr. We’ll need to use the ball winder on the weekend. I need one of my own. Well, that should thrill the boy.)

The elastic on pretty much all my trouser socks has relaxed, even on the ones I haven’t worn yet. Everything I’ve put on so far falls down around my ankles. This is really, really annoying, because I love my patterned trouser socks for this time of year, and I haven’t even worn half the ones tucked away in my bin yet. It means I have to sort through my sock bin yet again and toss out what are perfectly good socks except they don’t fit my calves. (No, I have not lost weight or muscle tone; the elastic has gotten old, that’s all.) I don’t even know if thrift stores will take them. [ETA: No, wait! I know what I need: These funky brown sock garters I bookmarked ages ago! Hah, I just saved a whole slew of socks. Or I will have once I have the money to order these.]

I went to orchestra last night, and although everyone was horrified at how I looked and sounded I managed remarkably well. Working the first movement in such detail earlier this week helped a lot. I probably should have left at break, because I didn’t get much work done in the second half (and the bowings and slurs for the third movement are awful, I need to clean them up to make them readable which means a lot of corrector fluid), but even just being there absorbing the right kind of sound and the conductor’s directions was better than missing it entirely.

Today is one of those odd Twilight Zone kind of days where the sun hasn’t actually come out so I don’t know what time it is, and having an hour-long nap around lunch has further messed up my sense of where I am during the day.

I am working my way through polishing the freelance thing, taking plenty of breaks because I’m exhausting myself thinking through sentences. One of my breaks was to engage in a meme going around called the Handwriting Meme. I’m not big on memes and quizzes, but this struck me as really interesting. We read e-mail and people’s online journals all the time, and we rarely see their handwriting. I wasn’t specifically tagged by anyone (and good thing, because I hate that) but at least two people whose journals I read threw it open to anyone who wanted to play along. So here, for the record, is mine. Click it to embiggen so as to make it readable.


1. Write your username.
2. Write your 2 favourite bands/groups of the moment.
3. Write something you love, aka lemme see your heart.
4. Write the name of your favourite person of all time.
5. Write the name of your recent favoured person.
6. Tag 6 people to do this meme.

In other news, hello, it is the first of October, and I still haven’t finished the boy’s September monthly update. I’m trying, but I’m just slogging. And now there’s another one to do in ten days. I don’t have the mental energy. Even acknowledging the fibro I get pretty down on myself. And then I read Laura Hillenbrand’s “A Sudden Illness” in which she outlines her life with chronic fatigue syndrome, and I am so desperately thankful that my chronic illness is nowhere near the degree of hers. At the same time I feel a bit better about not having the energy to think things through, about not being able to find the right word, about not engaging in discussions that I’m passionate about. Too many times this past weekend I had to stop in the middle of a statement because I couldn’t think my way through to the end of it, which was really frustrating. I end up being brusque with the people who press me to continue or want to hear more, because I can’t think properly. It makes me sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about or as if I don’t care, and I hate that.

I know it’s also going to take me forever to get back to what-passes-for-normal-in-fibro operating levels once I finally kick this flu-cold thing, and knowing that makes me irritated as well. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why spinning appeals to me so much. I’m sitting down, it’s a sensory-based activity that doesn’t require a lot of analysis and mental gymnastics, and I feel productive because there are tangible results. I suspect this is one of the reasons why writing has been frustrating me lately, because it requires me to think and I get lost so easily. You know, I can handle a lot about fibro: the aches, the sleep thing, not having a lot of energy available… but the fibro-fog that clouds my thinking processes? This, I hate the most.

In Which She Makes A Regretful Discovery

So this past week, I remembered that hey, wow, Worldcon is coming up! And the only reason I remembered was because we realized that the trip to Nova Scotia is rapidly approaching, and Worldcon starts the day before we come back. This tells me something important.

Now, we didn’t buy our memberships ahead of time; money was tight, and since we were going to miss at least a day we figured we’d buy weekend or day passes. And then we waited because I wanted to see what the schedule would be like, so I’d be sure to buy the pass for the day I wanted most. And the schedules were only recently finalized, which drove me nuts, although I’ve participated in large-event organization before and I know how hard it is to pin this stuff down early.

Except now the time’s almost upon us, and I’m slowly realizing something. The only reasons I want to go to Worldcon are:

1. The biggest damn F/SF industry party is going to be IN MY TOWN and to miss it would be just stupid. I’m never going to get to travel to one anywhere else.

2. I want to attend signings of a handful of authors.

And really, that’s it. And can I really afford to pay for passes when I’m not going to really do anything? (Really.)

I was much more excited about Worldcon last year. The excitement has really faded until now, a couple of weeks before the convention itself, I’m at the point where I can’t be bothered about it. And I feel guilty about it, because, well, see item 1 above.

As a corollary, I present opposing arguments:

1. I hate large gatherings of people, with a biting, burning passion.

1a. I hate meeting new people.

2. We have no friends coming into town for the event that we’d be wanting to spend time with there.

3. My areas of writing have moved out of F/SF and into mainstream, specifically YA mainstream. (Okay, there’s the Pandora book which is urban fantasy, but it’s the exception that proves the rule.)

It’s kind of telling when the workshops/panels/ sessions that interest me the most are two or three of the signings, the knitting circle and the spinning workshop, the bookbinding/conservation workshop, and a panel on YA or folklore or music here and there. I don’t absolutely need to go to these; I’d be going to them because they’re being offered and I’d need to do something because I’d paid to get in. That’s the wrong reason entirely.

It’s a lot of money for something I’m not passionate or excited about. And it’s hard on the heels of driving home from NS, too. I know what my decision is going to be, unless something major happens to change it.