The Loneliest Astromech…
… now has a name: A-6.
And our Loneliest Astromech has been enrolled in kindergarten (yay!) in a lovely school (yay!) that has FOUR kindergarten classes, two English and two French. That’s a healthy school (yay!). Now we get to wait for his invitation to the incoming kindergarten Teddy Bear Picnic in May, and for the certificate of eligibility for instruction in English to arrive. And as we’re not going to have a local address by the end of May, we’re going to need an inter-school board agreement form signed by our local board and the board whose area in which we’re registering. These are apparently not a problem. So that’s all taken care of. And HRH and I went out to breakfast together before the registration appointment, and spent some time driving around the area scoping out houses for sale.
The past few days have been moderately insane work-wise. I had a deadline at noon on Monday, followed by an invoicing deadline (hurrah for projects that are approved almost instantaneously), and the first draft of an op ed article. Tuesday was the school stuff in the morning, and work on the cello manual in the afternoon. Wednesday was struggling with the last obstacles of the cello manual (in which I triumphed over not only Word but Open Office), sending it in PDF to the client for proofing, and then doing the rewrite on the op ed article and submitting it on deadline. Today I have an easier copyediting project and deadline, and the edits for the now-proofread cello manual.
The week’s been hard because it started off so well, but went downhill fibro-wise. Yesterday saw me battling fatigue almost from the start; I exhausted myself in the shower trying to wash my hair (who knew holding one’s arms up over one’s head took that much energy?). I ended up cancelling my attendance at orchestra when I realised that I was shivering uncontrollably from the fatigue, and cancelled today’s practice date as well to give myself plenty of time to recover.
The experimental spinning of cotton is continuing apace, and it’s continuing to be frustrating. Every time I think I’ve figured out how it wants to be spun, something goes wrong. I’m snapping the stuff on the bobbin somehow, probably because the single isn’t perfectly even and the twist is collecting in the thinner spots, but when it happens I can’t reconnect it without making a knot, and it snaps somewhere else, so I end up throwing away metre-long lengths of yarn. It also takes for-freaking-ever to spin, which is frustrating; after a couple of hours I don’t have very much to show for it. I resorted to just splitting the roving in half lengthwise and spinning very chunky singles to accomplish something.
Right. To work, fibro fog be damned.
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.
Apropos Of Nothing
Someone bring me a margarita. A proper one, with the ice all crushed in it.
No, nothing to celebrate. I just think a nice, cool, lime margarita would go down really nicely about now. Good for the throat, you know. Oh, hey, if we need a reason, how about we celebrate the fact that I m upright and functional?
I just did a bunch of author maintenance stuff. Now, back to the anthology ms.
Andrew Lloyd Webber Meets Tom Clancy…
This made me laugh for much, much too long. Penny Arcade, you made my day with this:
Tom Clancy’s Phantoms of the Opera
Apocalypse Meow
Our apocalypse; let us show you it.
