Category Archives: The Boy

Rewriting The Day

So! Today is one of our much-anticipated spiritual retreat days. From nine to five, we spend time with others of our tradition, sharing ritual, discussion, and presentations or workshops on different topics pertinent to our practice.

And as I am publishing this at three in the afternoon, you can see that I am not there. Nor is HRH. We’re at home in quarantine, with a little boy who has scarlet fever.

I know, I know. Like mother, like son, I suppose. Fashionably retro.

Yesterday was a ped day, and he and I meandered over to the bookstore as we’d planned. He was awfully quiet, and chose to go lie down on his bed of his own accord before we left. I knew he wasn’t feeling great, but assumed it was the cold both he and I have been fighting all week. He had a low-grade fever but nothing serious, and didn’t have much of an appetite. He did fall asleep while watching a movie and had a two-hour nap, but that didn’t surprise me; the cold had been running him down quite a bit. Then last night after dinner he undressed for his bath and HRH called me in to look at the sandpapery, goosebumpy rash all over his body. “That’s scarlet fever,” I said. (Trust me; I know.) And by the time he went to bed the rash was beginning to deepen into the flushed pink colour that gives the illness its name.

I called our local source of all information — his preschool teacher! — and got the address of the best local clinic to visit. (My first choice is always my own GP, but she doesn’t work weekends.) We considered leaving it till Sunday morning, but decided it would be better to hit it early. His fever wasn’t high, and once the rash breaks out it doesn’t get really worse; long-term complications can arise if it’s not treated at all, but this was only a day in one direction or another. However, we realised that the sooner he got antibiotics, the sooner he could go back to school. The decision to hit the clinic sooner rather than later was also influenced by the insane wait times out here. The general GP shortage in our province seems to be particularly bad in this zone, so there are lots of clinics and they’re always full. If we got out in reasonable time, we thought, we could take the boy to his grandparents as planned, and get to the retreat late.

We were there at 7:30 when the doors were unlocked, along with a small crowd of other people; the doctors arrived at 8:00 and started processing patients; we were home by 11:00 with a few bottles of amoxicillin (oh, the unpleasant childhood memories resurrected by that banana smell). And we also all had a 48-hour quarantine, because the boy would still be infectious, and HRH and I needed 48 hours to ensure we weren’t incubating it ourselves. No contact with children or pregnant women for any of us, we were told. And that’s what clinched things, because one of the attendees at the retreat is pregnant.

So we’re at home today. We’ve declared it a TV day, and watched the last quarter of Avatar season 2 all in a row. I’ve baked chocolate cake; we’ve had popcorn. We’re making the best of not being able to attend the retreat (always frustrating, but especially so when you’re the one who organised it) or spend the day with Grandma and Papa. We can’t go to the concert we were planning on attending tomorrow afternoon, either, because all the performers are children, which has disappointed us dreadfully.

The clinic was terrific, though: great atmosphere and people, and the boy was cheerful and entertained himself with books and crayons. He got a purple mask to wear over his nose and mouth because he had a fever and cough, and he has decided to keep it forever and ever. It’s reassuring to know we have a really good clinic so close to us.

We’re making the best of things. He’ll be at home with me on Monday but back at school on Tuesday, and thank goodness, because I’m on my last week before deadline with the repurposing project and need all the time I can get. He says he quite likes the banana taste of the amoxicillin (better you than me, kid) and that’s good, too, because we’ve got four bottles of it in the fridge and another nine and a half days ahead of him taking it. Good thing we don’t burn toys and clothing after scarlet fever like they used to, because we bought a new tiny stuffed owl at the bookstore yesterday, too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cake to ice and an icing spoon to hand to the boy afterwards.

Brief Weekend Roundup: Halloween Edition

1. We spent Saturday in and around Alexandria/Maxville. We took Lady Jane, the 30″ Schacht-Reeves wheel, back to Bonnie and had a lovely visit with her, Rod, Darroch, and Carolyn. The boy quite enjoyed petting Kitten, their full-grown black and white cat, who responded with head bumps and purrs and entertained him by climbing into boxes. HRH scavenged some shutters from Darroch and Carolyn’s pile of water-damaged building supplies, and Carolyn led us to a place that had had shutters at a yard sale last week just in case they still had them, but they’d sold. We had a visit with Jan afterward, which was lovely, too. t! was absent at a meeting, but we met Whiskey, the lovely orange and white barn cat they’ve adopted, and the boy got to play with Carter, too. Not outside, alas; it was rainy, and we hadn’t packed the boy’s boots or rain slicker.

2. It snowed Saturday night, big fluffy Christmas-like flakes. There were about five centimetres on the ground Sunday morning, which prompted the boy to cry, “Come up and see! It’s January outside!” Most of it melted in the sun we had earlier in the day, but there were still snowy patches on the shady sides of roofs this morning.

3. Sunday morning we had our first family sabbat celebration with the Preston-LeBlancs. This is a direct result of dropping the pagan playgroup that we variously left because of travel time, conflict with choir, too many kids making concentration and discipline hard, and a general sense of losing the focus of the group’s initial mandate. We decided to do our own thing, and I think the first one was very successful. We did a brief talk on what Samhain was about, I led a very simplified version of an ancestral visualization that HRH wrote years ago, Paze read two poems and a storybook, we did a craft, and ended with a song. Without consulting one another overmuch we managed to use very similar themes in our units, and the kids seemed to enjoy it very much. Then we got to sit down and share a lovely lunch. I’d made vegetable cheese soup and biscuits, and Paze brought apple dumplings. It was all really lovely.

4. We headed over to HRH’s parents’ house for Halloween prep. The boy decided the pumpkin should have lightning eyes, a lightning nose, and a lightning mouth, so HRH carved it that way and it looked great. Despite being so thick it really glowed because the light bounced off the surprisingly pale interior. We were using a pumpkin from Jan and t!’s farm, and the flesh was very white. HRH left most of it in instead of scraping a lot of it out, as he would usually do to facilitate carving, so that I can hack it apart and cook it for pie fillings and soup.

5. This year, the boy finally got what Halloween was all about. I painted his face to look like two big dark eyes and paler feathers, but the detail was lost in the dark and he just looked like he had splotches around his eyes. He loved it, though, and enthusiastically trick-or-treated around his grandparents’ neighbourhood, chirping “Trick or treat!” or “Bonne l’halloween!” in his muddled fashion. The last couple of houses he waved at HRH, who had been walking up to the doors with him while I waited at the bottom of the driveways, and said, “You both stay here, I can go alone.” Back home he helped his grandfather hand out candy and got to see all the cool costumes (the undisputed winner was the guy who came as a bedside table, complete with lampshade on his head and a tabletop around his neck decorated with a tablecloth, book, glass of water, and pair of glasses on top). One parent cooed at him and said “Are you a dog?” “No!” he said, “I’m a owl!” and spread his wings, then turned around and did the most hilarious tail waggle at her.

He had an odd breakdown at bedtime last night, crying because he didn’t want the weather to get colder. “Well, there’s Christmas,” I said, and he sobbed that he liked Christmas, but not winter. And no, he didn’t like making snow forts and snowballs and snowmen any more, he never wanted to go outside again, he wanted to stay inside where it was warm all winter. I can’t blame him, really. I suspect this came about because he was tired and overtired, really, from a long intense day with lots of excitement.

And now I get to have a bowl of that incredibly delicious leftover soup. I’m on my third pot of tea, trying to cut through the yuck in my sore throat, but the cold I woke up with today has left my head blessedly clear, thank goodness. I’ve been handling my to-do list quite capably this morning, and all that’s left is work on the repurposing project and some celloing this afternoon.

Friday Photo Post

I promised you pictures!

First of all, the ones everyone has asked for: the boy’s Halloween costume! (Better ones to come on Halloween itself, I promise.)

He thought this one up, I found the perfect fabric in the remnant bins, we looked at a bunch of patterns then sketched our own version, and then we — ahem, pardon the pun — winged it. This made for some stormy costuming sessions because I had to fit it and alter it a lot, and this was Not Fun At All for the boy. He was so whiny and uncooperative that I had to lay down the law and inform him that if he didn’t help by having fitting sessions, everything was going to be thrown out and he’d have no costume for Halloween. It reached its apex on Wednesday when I put it on him to mark the position for the Velcro and he looked at himself in the mirror and burst into tears because he didn’t look like an owl at all, he said. From experience I know how hard it is to let go and accept how good your costume looks even if it falls short of the perfect vision in your head; it’s not an easy lesson to learn. Yesterday I adjusted a few small things and made ear tufts to sew onto his hood. He tried it on when it was complete and he was absolutely delighted. “Mama, I love it! This is the best owl costume ever!” he said, and that made it all worthwhile. He put it on with great excitement this morning and off he went to school in it for a day of Halloween activities.

Lady Jane goes home tomorrow. Here she is with the pretty fluorite-coloured Projekt B BFL in progress:

Here’s the skein of heavy laceweight Shetland I spun from the three one-ounce batts Bonnie gave me when she dropped the wheel off. I plied it with silk thread:

A random picture of Gryff and Cricket enjoying the sun in one of the living room windows:

The artist at work:

He’s really getting good at writing and sounding things out. He’s also entering the “this doesn’t look like the vision in my head” stage of drawing (see also: Halloween costume not matching his vision exactly, above). And so when he has drawn something he’s unhappy with he sometimes crosses it out, but this one evidently needed a bit of extra definition because he wrote “Not Right” in the upper right corner:

Last week we needed to overhaul his weekly lunch menu, and he decided he was going to do it after I wrote out Monday’s sandwich. He needed me to spell some things (bologna, anyone?), but otherwise he sounded them out and wrote them down on his own after checking with me to make sure they were right:

Monday Thoughts

This round of fibro medication isn’t doing what I’d hoped it would do. I’m sleeping well, but I still have the low energy issue and difficulty focusing and concentrating. Now, I do remember that this medication wasn’t a universal panacea when I first took it, but the results were better than this. The only difference I’m seeing is that I sleep like a rock at night and am very groggy for the first four hours of my day. Perhaps not coincidentally, I forgot to take my medication last night, and while I woke up pretty much every hour and didn’t get any deep sleep, I feel better and more focused this morning than I have in a while. I recognise that a couple of weeks of bad sleep like this would lead to me feeling not-so-great-any-more in the mornings, but it does suggest to me that maybe the medication I used before is not quite right for me at this time.

We are not doing Halloween at the new house. We asked the neighbours next door what Halloween was like here and were informed that it was dead, and not in a fun-scary-Halloween-celebratory kind of way; last year they had about two kids stop by. This is, in actuality, a good thing for us, because we were trying to figure out who was going to stay home and hand out treats and who was going to walk around the new neighbourhood with the boy, as well as how to get him over to see his local grandparents to show off his costume like we’ve done every Halloween so far. So instead we will take the boy, his costume, and our pumpkin (about which we are very excited indeed, as it was grown at Rowan Tree Farm by Jan and t! and will make very good pie or soup afterwards) over to HRH’s parents’ house, carve it there, and then trick or treat around their neighbourhood as we’ve done in the past.

Speaking of costumes, the boy is very good at thinking them up, but not so good at being patient with the design and fitting part of it. I got half of it done yesterday, at least. The sewing machine was located, along with my boxes of sewing accessories, and the machine even worked with no problems. (Yes, I was concerned. I have had sewing machines conk out too often during costume construction.)

Saturday afternoon the boy had his follow-up appointment at the Talwar Research Institute. We really enjoy participating in these studies, and it’s always nice to have a researcher pop out for a moment to share a particularly interesting or amusing experience with the boy. It’s also nice to be told that one’s child has a really solid moral compass. It’s not like HRH or I go out of our way to talk to him about right vs wrong, but we do discuss it in relation to things he sees in movies or situations in books or daily life, and he’s sensitive enough to see that certain behaviours hurt other people’s feelings, too. One of the things he reports daily is who is “in the red” at school. His teacher has a traffic-light chart on the wall, and everyone’s name starts in the green zone each day. If a child receives a second warning regarding his or her behaviour their name gets moved into the yellow and they lose a certain number of playtime minutes which are instead spent in the Thinking Chair, and if a third warning is issued their name is moved into the red zone and they have to sit in the Thinking Chair during all of free play time. This fascinates the boy, and he is determined to stay “in the green.” It’s interesting to see how he responds to clearly defined social parameters and expectations in an environment that’s composed of people all his own age and roughly similar social skills, as opposed to preschool where ages ranged from eighteen months to four years and social skills were proportionally varied. And it’s also fascinating to observe his responses to disturbances within that social environment, particularly when they’re initiated by his peers, and to the consequences of those disturbances. School is, we often forget, about socializing people just as much as it’s about teaching them concepts and skills.

I was complimented on my knitting while the boy was in his research session, too. The researcher confessed that she’d tried knitting a couple of years earlier and been defeated by thin, thin yarn and tiny needles, and I told her my secret was bulky yarn and huge needle size. Because really, how else do you make garter stitch look impressive enough to compliment when you’re really not much of a knitter? I’m knitting a dense hood, because my ears are starting to ache from the cold wind at the boy’s bus stop. I’m going to graft it onto a scarf knit from the same yarn but more loosely so it actually wraps around my neck and shoulders (if I knit it at the same density as the hood it wouldn’t drape much). I should travel with a spindle and some dyed fibre to really freak people out in waiting rooms. Spinning that fluorite-coloured BFL on Lady Jane is going really well, too. I don’t know how long spinning 8oz would have taken me if I didn’t have a deadline by which I needed to return the wheel, but I can guarantee it would have been longer than three weeks. I am impressed with my spinning focus and output.

Speaking of knitting and spinning, something that I’ve been thinking about lately is an entry on the Sustainably Creative blog about learning not to hover between resting and doing. Nobbs is an artist with myalgic encephalopathy/chronic fatigue syndrome, and the post talks about wandering aimlessly through your tasks and getting not much of anything done as opposed to doing ten minutes of focused work and actually getting something done. This past week when I’ve found myself drifting in front of the computer and unable to focus on thinking through work I’ve stood up and walked away to do something concrete and tangible with my hands, like knitting for half an hour or spinning a half-ounce of fibre or baking something. I may not feel like I’m getting enough work done at my computer (and I’m not if I judge myself by my insane pre-fibro outputs of eight years ago, but it’s hard to shake that and work with a more practical and sensible set of expectations), but at least by the end of the day I can look at something else I’ve accomplished. The fibro is really doing a number on my self-confidence as related to my work output, and part of me is terrified that I’m just lazy. I know; if I’m worried about it, chances are good that I’m not, but you can’t reason away an illogical fear.

And in totally unrelated news, I promise you a photo post soonish, since the owlies have been lax on the photo front these past few months. The camera is frustrating and I’m taking fewer photos of shareable quality, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t post pictures at all.

Right. On to more laundry, and then some focused work. I’ll set the timer for ten minutes when I get back. The tea timer is my friend in regards to focused work. So is protein, I’m discovering. Cheese and crackers coming up!

Wedding And General Weekend Roundup

I conducted my sixth rite of passage ceremony of the year this past weekend. (The current score is two weddings, four baby blessing/namings, if you’re filling in a scorecard.) It was a particularly meaningful one, as it united two dear friends whom I’ve known for a combined total of about forty years in front of 120 people, and it was beautiful in several respects. The wedding party (and some of the guests) chose a medieval/Renaissance theme for their dress, and the effect was very pretty. We told the boy everyone was dressing like knights and ladies and he got very excited, so I found him a small basic shirt and HRH made him a wooden sword and shield that he painted and varnished, which were a huge success. Had we more time, I would have tracked down some Buchanan tartan fabric and made him a tiny kilt to match HRH’s, but my local fabric shop yielded nothing but every other tartan under the sun and I didn’t have time to go into town to track some down.

It was really special to conduct a ceremony for an audience of that size. The compliments we got on the ceremony were very gratifying, and went beautifully apart from one or two minor hiccoughs. I’m used to being in the north for a ceremony, so of course west is to my right, yes? Except I was in the west, so south was accidentally designated west, and west was, well, west prime. I believe the two pieces of music for the attendants’ entrance and the bride’s entrance were switched, but it worked very well. And in general, it was just wonderful to be able to priestess such a special ceremony for people whom I love dearly, and then to see so many old friends and spend time with people I don’t see often enough. Also, it’s always great to see one’s friends all dressed up. The boy had a wonderful time running around with a small army of children, too.

There was car drama this weekend, too. We had a nor’easter hit Friday afternoon and evening, and our car chose that particular time to die. The battery, we discovered, was the original one, and no longer held enough of a charge to turn the engine over, even when boosted by another car. What was curious was that all the accessories such as headlights and radio still worked. Fortunately HRH’s parents were on their way over to stay with the boy while HRH and I went to the wedding rehearsal, so they rescued us from sitting in a parking lot in the storm and took us home, then helped call a tow truck for the car (who hooked its leads right up to the engine in the back and kicked it into operation, though it tried to die whenever HRH slowed for a stop sign). HRH bought a new battery but we didn’t have time to install it before we left (very late!) for the rehearsal in my inlaws’ car. The next morning HRH installed the new battery and everything worked perfectly. As the tow driver had said, seven years on the original battery is a pretty darn good run. As much as it played havoc with our schedule this weekend (we had to cancel the boy’s follow-up appointment with the behavioural psychologist researchers at McGill on Saturday morning, which disappointed both of us) we’re very, very thankful that the battery didn’t decide to roll over and die on our Thanksgiving drive either to or home from southern Ontario.

I finished my proposed table of contents and a sample chapter for a book project my editor asked if I’d be interested in writing, and she likes it, so we shall see if it’s ultimately approved. It’s a relatively short book that would be due in May of 2011, it’s a topic that interests me, and it would require research, something I love to do. I’m in the home stretch of the repurposing project as well, due on November 15.

The boy is doing splendidly. School is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, get him excited about discovering new things and giving him tools to do it on his own. He sounds words out everywhere, and makes lists of words that begin with the same sound. His drawing skills have gone up a level or two as well; he uses a pencil to draw an outline and then colours it in carefully, and his art is getting ever more recognisable. He loves taking different things and mashing them together to make something new and creative, and that goes for three-dimensional building toys as well as two-dimensional art. He’s coming home with poems and songs, French words and rhymes, and it’s wonderful. He has even done two book reports; the kindergarten version, anyway, consisting of drawing a map of the places in the story or a picture of something he learned from the book. These reports are kept, and they eventually form a record of all the books the child reads from the school library. He loves school, and I love that he does.

I’ve arranged to buy a friend’s used iPhone in January. It just makes sense. It will replace my iPod, my cellphone, I will be able to make voice memos with it (something I dearly wish I could do easily while driving), record cello lessons and practice sessions with it (something I can’t do with my first-generation iPod Touch), play podcasts away from the computer without having to find speakers to wire into it (again, the first-gen Touch doesn’t have a built-in speaker), and take decent photographs with it. All I need is a pay-as-you-go voice plan, because I work at home and use wifi, so a data plan would be pointless. It means I don’t have to buy a Mac-compatible microphone that the Mini will recognise or a new camera (I may want a better camera than the iPhone eventually, of course, but it will serve my basic needs as well as or better than the eight-year-old borrowed camera I’m using now, and the battery will last longer!).

What else? I think of things to journal about now and again while I’m doing stuff but don’t have a chance to make a note before I forget them.

It’s getting colder and colder. I got an earache from the wind at the boy’s bus stop the other day, so I am knitting a hooded scarf. The house seems to be holding heat pretty well. I’m about halfway through spinning the 8oz of wood violet-coloured fibre, and I’d better get a move on if I’m returning Lady Jane in a week and a half. I pulled out a piece of fabric I’d woven early this year and laid it over the middle of the white chair in the living room, because it’s getting coffee drips and crayon marks on it as well as general dirt from cats and people, and I quite like how it looks. So does HRH, who, when I said I would weave a wider piece to cover the whole chair, suggested I weave another matching one to go on the settee. (The sheepskin is currently on it, and Nixie won’t touch it; she stretches and contorts herself to step around it. Odd little cat.) Good thing the yarn is a Zellers standby. This time, though, I’ll use the same yarn for warp and weft and weave it on the 32″ rigid heddle loom, and make the weave a bit less loose.

I had a cello lesson today, and orchestra is tonight. I’ve tried to avoid driving out there twice in one day, but it’s an exception; my teacher’s substitute schedule went haywire. Cello is going all right. I feel like I’m on the verge of grasping something and I can’t quite do it, or even put it into words. I feel as if I’m juggling a trillion tiny balls — rebalancing bow hand, rebalancing left hand, minute shifts with thumb, practising vibrato, minute movements of the left elbow to readjust left hand, large movements with right elbow to propel the bow while not allowing the wrist to get the upper hand (so to speak), minute adjustments to extensions from one position to another… and then handling subtle dynamics, being musical, and precise with phrasing on top of it all. Sometimes I almost get it. Then I have to think about one of the balls and a bunch of others drop. I”m trying to get into the habit of playing the cello first thing in the morning before turning the computer on to handle correspondence and news, and it’s tricky because it takes my hands and fine motor skills a while to rev up in the morning; always has.

Okay; that’s all I’ve got right now. Time to go meet the boy.

Thanksgiving Roundup

We drove down to spend Thanksgiving weekend with my parents. It was simultaneously the best and the worst drive we’ve had. The worst, because it took us an hour and forty-five minutes to get to Kirkland. The best, because after that it was clear sailing. We left after HRH and the boy got home, which meant we hit the highway at about 4:15. Sure, that’s the beginning of rush hour, but we accounted for that and even so it should have been okay… except there was an accident on every single highway we took: on the bridge into town, on the 20 west, and on the 13 north. The 40 west was just slow.

Once in Kirkland we flew at our usual speed, though, and really enjoyed the deep colours of the trees lining the road. The boy got to watch a small light plane take off at the private airstrip, keeping pace with us as it taxied and lifted off. We picked up dinner and ate in the car, trying to catch up on some of the lost time. When night fell we pressed our heads against the passenger windows and watched the stars, tracing patterns in them and talking about constellations. The boy napped on and off, but didn’t actually sleep much. We arrived around 11:30, about an hour and a half after we’d planned thanks to the slow start. But everyone slept hard, and the next morning was bright and sunny and surprisingly warm for the season.

My parents took us up to the Halton Trolley Museum, and we spent hours there, riding all the operational trolleys, having a hot dog picnic, and strolling through two huge sheds of old trolleys and streetcars. It was the perfect day for an outdoor museum like this one. The sky was that perfect autumnal blue, the sun was golden, and the colours on the trees of the forest through which the tracks wound were quintessentially fall. Our last trolley ride was on the 327, an open trolley car from the late 1800s, and the motorman asked if it was our first visit. When told that it was, he told the boy he could ride up front with one adult, and that was such a treat. The sun and the smell of the leaves, the sound of the wheels on the rails and the soft grind of the pantograph on the wire above were wonderful. Trolleys are so relaxing. The older ones had exquisite stained glass accents, pendant lighting, glowing woodwork, and lovingly restored plush or leatherette seating. In the sheds we found an old green trolley that used to run through our own neighbourhood between downtown Montreal and Granby in the 1930s to the 1950s, a trip that would take about two hours.

The next day was just as beautiful as the day before. The boys washed the car, and my cousin and his family came over for Thanksgiving dinner, at which my mother excelled as usual: Beef Wellington (for ten!), roasted heirloom carrots, fennel, and potatoes, French beans, rolls, and for dessert there were butter tarts, pumpkin tarts, and a lemon pie. There’s nothing like seeing a huge roast wrapped in a crust come out of the oven like that. And for hors d’oeuvres before it all there were three cheeses, smoked salmon, and three pâtés, and there was a lovely Henry of Pelham red wine. Seriously, it was divine. And it was great family time, too. Mum had some leaf garland and ghost-making crafts lined up for the kids, bless her, and I love spending time with my cousin and his family. We washed all three kids in the tub together (we’ll have to stop that at some point, but right now they’re still young enough to think it’s a big treat and they look forward to it) and off they went home, and the day was over.

The drive home the next morning went really well, too, although it’s always harder going home because everyone’s had an intense couple of days and late nights. It felt wonderful to come home to the house after our first trip away.

Tuesday was a decent cello lesson, where we started working on my piece for the December recital. It was nice to hear my teacher say that it would be ready with no problem after a bit of a late start on it. I did work on it this past spring on my own thinking I’d play it at the spring recital, but we ended up not doing it because we missed a month of lessons due to various things.

It’s Halloween in two weeks and I have to finish designing the boy’s costume. The costuming was hidden behind We Are Going Away For Thanksgiving Weekend and The Wedding The Next Weekend, but once we’re past that it’s clear sailing. His school photos came in too, so we’ll have to sit down and go through the website to choose a background and order them. I’m personally leaning towards a traditional non-photo background, because I find the photo backgrounds really detract from the person in the picture.

Fibro-wise I am starting to settle with the meds again. It’s hard to get up in the mornings, a side effect I remember very clearly from last time. I need to adjust the time when I take the pills, otherwise I’m groggy for too much of the morning. Work is going well, too; I got a lot of writing done today on the sample entry for the proposal due next week, and it’s the best work day I’ve had since before we moved.

There you are. That’s about it so far.

Day By Day

Yes, things are quiet. I’m sorry about that. I’m tired, I’m on new medication and it’s a struggle to get used to it, and there’s stuff I have to get done before I jot things down here. And by the time it’s done I’m exhausted and can’t string two coherent words together.

Cello is going well. My teacher is patient and sympathetic about what I’m handling right now, for which I’m very grateful. We had a cello sectional at orchestra this week, and that went much better than I expected.

Work is… problematic. Trying to focus with the fibro was bad; trying to focus on it while working through the period of adjustment with the new medication on top of the fibro is harder. I know it will all even out in the long run, but when I repeatedly forget the sentence I’ve just read it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be able to get past it. I can do bits of the repurposing project at a time, but trying to remember where other thematically-similar material is in a 200-page document when I’m muddled by medication is frustrating and depressing. I’m doing work on the book proposal and sample chapter away from the computer, which is great to a point, but I’m going to have to come back and start organizing it into something coherent at the computer next week. I finally gathered up the courage to take down the old pro website and upload the new iWeb one after a few more tweaks, too, and I’m very happy with it. I aced the copy-editing test, and start with that department at the beginning of November, too.

Spinning proceeds apace. I’m starting to get used to Lady Jane, although I’m still experimenting with her. I’ve plied the Shetland with silk thread from my local Fabricville, which went very nicely and yielded about 230 yards of lovely soft black yarn. Lady Jane spins the wood violet-coloured BFL I’m working on beautifully, too, and I’m interested to see how that chain-plies. I like it so much that I’ve planned to make a wrap out of it, so I stopped by Ariadne to buy the second 4-oz braid of the colourway so as to have enough.The drive band seems to be stretching and getting floppy, though, and I originally moved the mother-of-all to account for it, but then the treadling got stiff. I checked with Bonnie and she gave me the go-ahead to move the MOA as close to the wheel as possible and then trimming the drive band, and now it treadles beautifully with no stiffness at all. The new drive band just stretched, I think. I still have to check my spinning books to see what they say about adjusting Saxony wheels in Scotch tension, as it’s completely foreign to me. I like the Scotch tension a lot, though. I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to try double drive before I give her back.

I’m still trying to find a comfortable angle at which to spin, though. My knees seem to complain if I’m sitting straight on or at too much of an angle. Interestingly, I’ve switched my fibre and twist-controlling hands. Usually I hold my fibre in my left and pinch with my right while drafting straight back from the orifice past my left side, but I reverse my hands on the Saxony and draft in front of me to my right, at a right angle to the orifice. Speeding up my drafting has been a challenge; there have been a few slubs in both the Shetland and the BFL. I’m still not wholly sold on the idea of DT, though. At least I don’t think I am; I’ll try something on the Louet next week and see how odd ST feels after a week and a half of DT. It still just feels like another method, and I don’t know if I have a preference for one over the other. Overall I feel like I’m not good enough for a Schacht-Reeves, but I also know something like this would last me my entire spinning life and give me lots of room to grow.

I also accidentally taught myself how to knit Continental-style (I think; I haven’t formally checked against a video yet) and finished half a replacement handwarmer for the boy that way. (He lost one and was devastated, so I knit a replacement, and of course someone found the lost handwarmer at school, so now we have one in reserve against the next time it happens.) It happened when I wondered what feeding the yarn over my left hand would do, and then I saw that I didn’t have to actually wrap the yarn over the needle; I could just sort of flick it up with the needle tip. The first few stitches were awful but by the next row it looked just like the other way. I fact, my tension was better and my first finger wasn’t locking up.

Meallanmouse lent us the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the flickering issue we had with the last set we tried to watch is still there but not so pronounced as to make it impossible to watch like last time. I don’t know if it’s the different discs, the new TV, or the Blu-Ray player, but whatever the reason we can actually watch it this time without both of us getting headaches, so we’ve stuck it out and are enjoying it immensely. HRH and I watched the first two episodes together and then decided that yes, the boy would adore it, so we introduced him to it the next day and rewatched those episodes with him. Now we get to watch an episode every day together after HRH gets home before supper.

Last weekend the boy went down town to McGill to participate in a research study, and was very excited about it. They video the interviews, and apparently when they asked him if he knew why he was there he chirped, “Of course: I’m here for an experiment!” with a little double hand-flip thing as if he was displaying something, and cuted the researchers right out. The next day we went to Ada’s naming, which was lovely even if I did leave out an entire paragraph of introduction at the beginning. If you have to drop something, dropping the least-essential bit is the way to go. It was a beautiful day with good weather, fabulous food, and excellent company.

Okay, you’re caught up with my endlessly scintillating life. The rest of today is work where I can between laundry and the long list of errands before Thanksgiving weekend.