Category Archives: The Boy

Weekend Roundup: Canada Takes Lots Of Gold Edition

This was a good weekend, despite setbacks.

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, which was notable for happening half an hour after I woke up. I’d been sleeping badly and HRH decided to let me sleep in, which was lovely, but then he realised at 8:26 that I had a cello lesson at 9:00, and woke me up when I’m usually stepping out the door. I got dressed in record time, he made me tea in my travel mug, and I flew out to the West Island. The lesson was pretty good. It’s nice to be asked, “How long have we been working on this étude?” and to answer, “Well, actually, you assigned it last week and this is the first time I’ve played it for you,” and then hear the teacher say, “Well, you’ve done what you needed to do with that, let’s look at the next one.”

I asked to work on ‘The Entertainer’, which we’re playing in a quartet arrangement for the June recital, and gah. I’m playing Cello 2, and there were some rhythmic things that I just wasn’t getting. My teacher tried all sorts of rearrangements and subdivisions to help me get it, and they just succeeded in confusing me more. I’m a very basic kind of ‘just play the correct rhythm for me and I’ll internalize it’ kind of girl; rhythm tricks just worsen my muddle. I got it in the end, mainly because a few bars later the same rhythm showed up with different notes, only preceded by two eighth notes instead of a quarter note and that seemed to make all the difference. Then we moved to the Boccherini minuet.

Oh, Boccherini. Really.

I have a hate/love relationship with pops and chestnuts. They’re overplayed and so I grit my teeth at them, turn them off when I can, and resist them. If I have to play them, I discover all sorts of lovely things about their internal workings, admit there’s a reason for their popularity, find something to like about them when I hear them, but I still don’t enjoy them. Boccherini’s Minuet is a classic example of an overplayed pop that I hate. And I hate it all the more now that I have to play it, because those opening sixteenth notes are a huge obstacle for me. I can play them in the repeats, but starting from a static bow? Gah. No.

It’s one of those pieces that is all about bow speed and weight and control and I’m sure it’s very character-building, but I’m hating myself because I can’t flipping get that mini-run of sixteenth notes. My teacher pointed out that I can play the piece with my left hand, and that I regularly play much harder pieces in orchestra. (In fact, she expanded that to cover all the Suzuki material I’ve done and will do, which was very gratifying to hear, since sometimes I beat myself up about being on book three after playing for sixteen years.) The point of this is to work the right hand, and my problem does in fact lie entirely with the bow. From a dead stop, I can’t micro-manage the speed to get that lovely sort of swoop and jump for precise phrasing on those two first bars. (There’s an argument in the music world about the validity of the Suzuki method for adults, and what people tend to forget is that review is a huge part of the method. Yes, after sixteen years, you can go back to the earlier books and work on the pieces with all your knowledge and still find technique to polish. The method is a philosophy, not just a set of books.)

We spent the last ten minutes focusing on phrasing those two bars and trying to play them over and over, and I finally said I had to stop because it was getting worse and I was tensing up and losing control of bow and phrasing entirely, and it was doing more harm than good. That’s the kind of thing that stays with me, and despite the lesson overall being great, I had to keep telling myself not to brood about it on the way home.

Saturday afternoon I went out to meet a wonderful couple to discuss performing their handfasting in April. It’s a renewal of vows, seven years to the day they got married, and the handfasting will be followed directly by a Wiccaning for their three and a half month old daughter. I’m very sensitive to working with people I don’t feel comfortable with, but as soon as I walked into their home I felt relaxed, much to my relief. They’re absolutely wonderful women, and I felt so at home with them right off the bat. And their daughter is exquisite.

I got home, watched half of a movie with HRH, then played with the boy till the local grandparents came over for pizza and babysitting. We headed over to Ceri and Scott’s that evening for cake and company, which was very enjoyable, until we got a phone call saying that the boy had been sick. Home we went, and the poor kid was sick a couple more times.

Sunday morning he woke up with a fever, and all he wanted to do was drink water. We’d already cancelled our attendance at his monthly pagan playgroup, so I installed him on the chesterfield with a blanket and some stuffed animals and the Sunday morning cartoons. I cautiously introduced watered juice when he asked for it, then got him to nibble a graham cracker a few hours later. He didn’t want lunch, just juice, but the fever peaked in the early afternoon and had pretty much subsided by the end of the day, at which point he ate half an apple, a bowl of Rice Krispies, and some rice and chicken. Still, apart from his three-hour nap, all he wanted to do was curl up on the chesterfield and watch movies, which was fine until the men’s gold medal hockey game came on and he wanted to watch Star Wars. HRH and I ended up in my office watching the HD stream on my computer. And what a fabulous game! I enjoyed the simultaneous discussion happening on my Twitter list, too. I said last week that Twitter was like having all my friends from all over working together in the same room, popping heads up now and again to chat, and this was similar: it was like we were all watching the game together. When the boy’s movie was over we put the Olympic recap on so we could all watch it together, and even had a picnic in the living room. HRH and I watched the closing ceremonies, too, even though they got progressively weirder and weirder, although I put up with the beavers and moose and voyageurs for the sake of Michael Bublé. The Sochi presentation was incredible.

I am not an Olympic fan. I think there’s an awful lot of controversy about the cost and the impact on the host cities that isn’t considered enough. I’m always irritated by the general emphasis on sport and the lack of equivalent support for arts and culture, and the Olympics just highlight this imbalance for me. And frankly, I’m not a sport fan in general (other than curling, because that’s my game). But being a citizen of the host country for these winter games finally broke down my curmudgeonly resistance and invoked my patriotism. Between the summer and the winter Olympics I will always choose the winter games, and damn, but Canada is good at sports that involve ice and snow. Part of my resistance also comes from the fact that downhill skiing and snowboarding and bobsleighing and such things bore me, and that’s what’s on mainly at the beginning of the winter games. I used to watch figure skating but it doesn’t do it for me any more. However, I happened to watch the women’s freestyle aerial ski jump last Wednesday night for the first time because HRH was watching it when I came home from orchestra, and it was fascinating. We saw the men’s aerial freestyle final too, and the women’s final hockey game, and the women’s final curling game. I’m not much of a hockey fan (my heyday for that was back in late high school), but if pro hockey was played the way the women’s gold medal game was played, I’d watch it regularly. Maybe part of my lack of enthusiasm came from the fact that I’d have needed cable TV to watch the things that actively interested me in the first half of the games.

And I can’t deny the impact my own patriotism had on me. I am a complete and total sucker for our national anthem, especially when sung by enormous stadiums full of people who are crazy proud of our country. The damn ‘let’s make sure they know whose game they’re playing’ Coke commercial that changed to ‘now they know whose game they’re playing’ after Canada won the gold in both women’s and men’s hockey even made me cry. And the whole making history by winning the most gold on a host nation’s home soil? Yeah. I may not be a sport fan, but I am Canadian.

But if I couldn’t have our fabulous national anthem, I’d want Russia’s. I’ve always loved it, and the choral rendition of it at the closing ceremonies was thrilling.

Apart from all that, I tried to spin the overdyed fibre I did last week, and it had felted. I split the roving lengthwise and spun it without drafting, and in the end I have dreadlock-like yarn that I have called ‘Chocolate Cherries for Cthulu’, because it’s dark brown with touches of dark red and green, with green sparkle here and there. It’s awful, although I love the name. No one will ever be able to do anything with it, either. It’s that bad. I’m chalking it up to a learning experience.

Today is March first, and we’re in the home stretch for spring! It was a very spring-like weekend, too.

Friday Photos

Somebody won two medals in the preschool Olympics. Plus he was the flagbearer in the closing ceremonies.

The Olympics was very exciting for them. They do this every year, having events like Rolling the Biggest Snowball and Sled-Pulling as well as hockey and such things, but when the Olympics are actually going on at the same time it’s extra-special. They got to watch bits of the real thing at lunchtime, and the boy told us all about building an inukshuk and spray-painting it with food colouring yesterday. I really hope that they took pictures of everything, because I’d love to see it all.

[ETA: I have just been told that the final event was Ice Cream Eating. His win in this event pushed him from the silver to gold medal standing. That’s hilarious.]

And here at home, this is what the bobbins of the singles from the crockpot-dyed fibre looked like:

(Sorry about that third one; I had begun plying them and belatedly realised that I needed a picture, so it isn’t very clear. It’s the only one I took, so it’s all we’ve got.)

And the plied yarn:


[ETA: This is actually a good example of how different yarn looks when different plying techniques are applied to the same singles. In the first photo, standard three-ply yarn is at the top of the photo, and chain-plied yarn at the bottom. The difference is that regular three-ply has three different strands coming from three different bobbins, whereas chain plying uses a single strand pulled through a loop made earlier in the strand. It’s essentially single crochet plus twist. Regular three-ply can look barber pole-y; chain-plied preserves colour change along the strand, so there’s less contrast and a smoother, more subtle shift in colour from one end of the finished plied yarn to the other.]

Weekend Roundup

Saturday morning we went out to the la Co-op la Maison Verte store in NDG to pick up gifts for a baby shower. It was snowing, and the boy put on his sunglasses and “snowboarded” down the sidewalks. He looked great, had a tonne of fun, and it really amused me. After lunch the boy and I packed up, picked up a new friend (yay!) and her adorable baby boy, and headed out to the West Island for Miranda’s baby shower. It was terrific to see Debra again (and she hosted a lovely party indeed), and to see Tamu and Phil, neither of whom I had expected to see. (No, I didn’t think about what other guests might logically be there; you may laugh at me.) The boy was very shy and clingy, and spent a lot of time hiding behind me or cuddling me. We gave Tamu a lift back to the metro so she could stay a bit longer, so it was a full car on the way home what with three grown women, a boy, and a six-month-old baby, which was a lot of fun.

Sunday morning I made big pancake breakfast, then realised I didn’t have the energy to go out and do the groceries. So HRH went alone, bless him, and I dozed in a chair while the boy played. When HRH got home I dragged myself to bed and had a two-hour nap.

Once awake again I made lunch, then made peanut butter-chocolate brownies from the Martha Stewart’s Cookies book, and hmm; her recipes are usually great, but this one wasn’t quite right. I substituted cocoa for the chocolate (I usuallly do this, because it’s less expensive) and cut a bit of the sugar comme d’habitude, but next time I’ll use less cocoa, a tad more sugar, and make twice as much peanut butter filling! Then I made hasty chocolate pudding, because I had promised the boy a few days earlier that we’d make pudding for the first time. The boy made it with me, stirring ingredients together and pressing the buttons on the microwave to cook it. (Recipe review: Pretty good for six-minute pudding. I halved the recipe, used brown sugar, added a tablespoonful of butter with the vanilla, and it was great. Next time, I’m cutting a bit of the cocoa, though, and I can’t believe I said that. And it really needs whipped cream to balance the chocolate. Although it occurs to me that a peanut butter swirl through it would be amazing. Hmm.) Then I puttered while the boy napped and HRH briefly went over to his parents’ house.

My monthly group cello lesson later that afternoon was great; we had a new student there, and did some good work on the Corelli. I’m having a stupid time counting, for some reason; I got lost in the middle of everything that I wasn’t playing the first cello line for (I’m fine with first and whatever the bottom line is, but I’m wobbly on the middle voices because I’m not sure how the harmonies are supposed to move or sound like yet). Despite this, our first read-through of Joplin’s “The Entertainer” went pretty well. We sight-read a new piece, “Soldier’s Joy,” that will be paired with “The Ashokan Farewell,” as well as getting the official new music for our quartets and trios. I really enjoy my group lessons, and I wish we could do them more often, although I know they’re a tonne of work for my teacher and the scheduling is enough of a nightmare.

Here’s some pictures of the plied Coopworth I spun up on Friday. The colour on the top photo is more accurate.

That’s 191 yards of nice, springy, lofty, woollen-spun yarn made from 4 oz of chocolate Coopworth roving (real roving, not misnamed combed top), two-ply, 11 wpi.

Weekend Roundup

Saturday afternoon was our monthly Random Colour crafting meeting, sans Phnee, alas, as the RCMP rearranged her work schedule thanks to the Olympics. HRH and the boy visited with Scott while Ceri and I headed out to Vaudreuil, and the boy packed every single one of this Star Wars toys for the occasion (including the new TIE fighter from MLG’s stash o’ Star Wars toys we have squirrelled away in the basement to produce at various intervals.) At our monthly crafting meet we all got to show off what we’ve been doing lately, which is always fun, and Karine made me a lovely illusion necklace the likes of which I have been coveting for over a year. While there I spun a bunch more of the neppy, snaggly Coopworth; I just want it gone.

I took Ceri home and we enjoyed some light pre-dinner entertainment as provided by the boy, who directed us in making various animal noises from the next room, saying, “Cut, cut, cut” with great sorrow when we did it wrong. We spent a good hour laughing ourselves silly; it was so much fun. Dinner was an incredibly delicious slow-cooked ham done with brown sugar, accompanied by mashed potatoes, and instead of choosing one or two vegetables to cook there was a raw veggie platter with dip to go with it all, which was a fabulous idea. We grazed before dinner and feasted once sitting down on carrots, peppers, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, and broccoli. To which the boy exclaimed, “Mmm, broccoli, I love broccoli!” but then handed me his pieces quietly after biting into one, saying, “I forgot, I don’t like broccoli.” He loved the look of the cherry tomatoes but once again didn’t like them when he tasted them.

Sunday morning we went out to the bookstore. This was supposed to be a Mama+boy trip, but Mama was pretty wiped from a heavy work week and a bad fibro week on top of that, so HRH came along to drive and offer moral support. The boy had a Valentine gift certificate from his Nana to spend, and he chose a train and a book. Then we meandered over to the pet shop to look at the animals, and after that the boy and I directed HRH to a little shop in Dorval where we bought his birthday present, a tuner for his bass (because he was borrowing my tuner, and that was just going to end in tears someday when it got lost or left behind or broken). We had a slightly late lunch and the boy resisted a nap, falling asleep late and waking up earlier than he needed, which meant he was all out of sorts when we sat down to make a Valentine for his local grandparents. We finally got it done, and the boy sad he wanted more rest, so we compromised by taking a quiet movie to his grandparents’ house.

HRH’s birthday dinner was ribs from the Bar-B-Barn, followed by an almond chocolate cake. The boy decided that we had to hide under or behind the table and jump out saying “Surprise!” when HRH came back into the kitchen for dessert, which was terribly amusing.

A very full weekend, although it doesn’t seem like it when typed out.

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.

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.

The Woes of Preschool

This morning, the boy refused to answer to any name but ‘Artoo’, and communicated only in whistles and beeps. It was frustrating, but also adorably geeky. And I do freely admit that I bear significant responsibility for his Star Wars obsession.

When he came home, he nearly broke my heart.

    MAMA: Hey, how was school today? Did you have fun?

    SPARKY: [dejectedly] No. Artoo did not have fun at all today.

    MAMA: You didn’t? Why not?

    SPARKY: [genuinely disconsolate] Because Princess Leia wasn’t there to put the secret plans in Artoo on the ship.

    MAMA: Oh!

    DADA: You know who —

    MAMA: Yes, I know who Princess Leia is. [His very best friend at school has gone away on a week-long vacation, to a place where there is a zoo. She gave him an early Valentine because she was going to miss their party. They’re inseparable, and I know this week is going to be very hard for him.]

    SPARKY: Princess Leia has to put the plans in Artoo, but she wasn’t there, and Artoo was very sad. Mama, will you be Princess Leia?

There’s nothing like not having your best friend there to play Star Wars with you when you need her to. I don’t know if his friend is even familiar with Star Wars, but I’m sure the boy’s enthusiastic explanation would have been both inspiring and entertaining.

And yes, I played Princess Leia for him. And then Threepio, coming along and asking “Secret mission? What plans?”, which amused him to no end.