Category Archives: The Boy

Weekend Roundup

After being sick for a whole week, I’m grateful for a fabulous weekend. Friday was good; I ate bland food cautiously, but did a whole editing pass on the cello manual, got an hour and a half of practice in, yogaed, and even played some Wii sports that night after the boy went to bed (had the achy muscles the next day to prove it, too).

Saturday morning I had my first cello lesson of the year, and it went well. This may have had something to do with the hour and a half of work I did on Friday reacquainting myself with book 3, or the beautiful weather (cold, but sunny and still) but whatever the reason, I was in a terrific mood, and pulled off a decent Gavotte. We then filled my slate with working on the musicality of the Gavotte, the 3rd pos Ruined Castle tonalisation, and the Boccherini minuet. (Good grief, what is the Boccherini doing so early in book 3?) And with the pile of work we have to do for orchestra, that’s going to be plenty. When one’s teacher shakes her head over the orchestra material and says, “This is going to be a challenging programme,” you know you’re in for it. I’ve been very afraid to look at the orchestra material. As much as I love it all, it’s hard, and I know that means I will love it less very soon, and least of all right before the concert. It will take a couple of months before I enjoy it again.

I also have to keep reminding myself that the work I’m doing in the Suzuki material is supplementing my orchestral development in particular, and my musicality in general. It’s not like I’ve never used third position, or extended shifts, or seen these keys before. I’ve reviewing things I’ve learned elsewhere, and using simpler pieces to work bits of technique and provide a relatively easy environment to play with musical expression. I need to get past the oddness of telling people that I’m on book three, but I’ve been playing for fifteen years. (Whoa; I just checked, and I started in July 1994. That means we’re rapidly coming up on sixteen years.)

I’d intended to run a couple of errands on the way home but I’d forgotten that I’d have a cello in the car, so I rescheduled them for later in the day and made a cake when I got home instead. After the boy’s nap we all headed out for the errands and checked a couple of shops for a Star Wars action figure the boy has been hunting for, I made a pile of photocopies at the office supply shop (and picked up some tags for my skeins, although I forgot the larger binder I needed for my cello lesson material, grr), and then we went to the library. I scored a pile of books, among them a new Timothy Findley collection. One stops watching for new books to be published when an author dies, so this one slipped past my radar when it came out in 2004. Hurrah for libraries that actually keep up on Canadian lit! This is called Journeyman, and is a collection of articles and personal journal entries by Findley and edited by his partner, Bill Whitehead. It’s a nice companion to In Memory and From Stone Orchard.

The boy and I mixed a rub for the pork roast when we got home (dijon, flour, salt and pepper, various herbs) and the boy painted it on very intently. Then we made icing for the cake and frosted it (with an icing-sugar rescue from the upstairs neighbours, bless them). The boy put sugar sprinkles shaped like yellow baby chicks on the top (part of an animal set we’d bought to decorate one of his birthday cakes; the set had fish, dinosaurs, pigs, and chicks) and was delighted with the effect. The roast was fabulous, but the potatoes not so much; they’re a floury potato instead of a waxy kind, so I didn’t get the texture I was going for at all. And the gravy separated when I put the cold juices in, almost curdling, and it never got back to what I wanted it to be, either. It all tasted fine, of course. The cake was delicious, and was 95% gone twenty-four hours later.

Sunday morning we made pancakes for brunch, and then Ceri picked the boy and I up and we went to Ariadne Knits, our favourite local yarn shop, to play. I registered for the Spinning 102 class at the end of the month (exotic fibres, open to wheel spinners, not just spindlers, hurrah!), petted the Hound spindles but was steadfast in my resolution to not try one (the fifty dollars can go other places, like towards that workshop, or fibre, or, you know, groceries), and got most of the order I’d placed in November! My tencel and oatmeal BFL came in, as did the BFL/silk blend (soft, soft, soft!), but they’d been sent the wrong size of high-speed bobbin, alas, so the one thing I was really, really hoping for was not there.

We knitted for a while and chatted with MA. I worked on the boy’s scarf; he did one whole stitch on his own and then bounded off to play with storage cones again. The boy played very well with the toys on the shelf and the books (“Can you read this to me, Mama?” “Um, it’s German.” “Oh. Then I’ll read it.”) and the games on his camera. When it was time to leave he reluctantly got dressed and packed to go, and when we were home we hauled Ceri in for tea and cake, and we all knitted some more. I have now knitted back all the stuff I’d frogged on Mum’s silk scarf and beyond. There’s only 0.2 of an oz left (which is what, five grams?) and while that sounds like nothing, it’s a pretty fine yarn and so there’s more than you’d think. That tiny ball of yarn feels like it hasn’t gone anywhere, though, which is understandable, I suppose; after knitting a couple of feet over Christmas I ignored it for a week, and then adding and frogging fiveish inches this past week means it’s stayed pretty static overall.

I decided to make spaghetti for last night’s dinner, and that was delicious, too. I have just discovered that crushing a final clove of garlic and stirring it in just before serving the sauce adds a very nice flavour. It was a very good weekend food-wise… no, it was a good weekend all around. I’m very thankful for it; I really needed one.

Not the 2009 Retrospective Post

I’ve tried doing the 2009 retrospective post, but it’s very slim and I keep thinking I must be missing something really big, so I’m sitting on it for the time being.

In other news, I’m sick, which is really annoying as I’ve had to cancel two things already this year. (I think it’s two. Last year’s Cancel-O-Rama may be blurring into this year.) This feels suspiciously like gastro, which is not the way I wanted to begin the year. And to top it off I’ve pulled my back today, so I’m in a fabulous mood because even sitting hurts and I have work to do.

Speaking of which (work, not the back) I am currently in the throes of the design and layout for A Modern Cellist’s Manual, and I suspect that Emily and I are having way, way too much fun with it. It’s great to be able to chat with someone three time zones and four thousand kilometres away, and send samples of things back and forth immediately. Living in the future is very useful. It also helps to be working with someone who has a very similar sense of humour, who coincidentally loves the samples I send to her.

Our postman retired at the end of December. He let us know as we were leaving before Christmas (literally; HRH stopped the car so I could get out and watch to see if there was any mail to be put in our box). I said a heartfelt thank you for everything he’d done for us and wished him an excellent retirement, but I wish I’d known earlier so that I could have given him a gift certificate to Tim Horton’s or Chapters. He was truly fabulous, always focused but cheerful, with a dry wit. He never complained about the piles of books I used to order as research when I was on a contract. I will miss him.

HRH has already repaired the CD tower that fell apart in a spectacularly attackish way on New Year’s Day (thank goodness for MLG, Mackay, and Ceri, who were all here and who helped rescue the hundred-plus CDs and the pieces of the unit, because HRH caught it across his back and was stuck). It has been screwed into the wall so it won’t attack anyone again.

I am dragging my feet about finishing Mum’s silk scarf. It’s very annoying because I only have about five inches to go, but wow, the resistance I’m getting from my subconscious is something else again. I’m scheduling an episode of Slings & Arrows (season 2, aka the Macbeth season) per workday to watch while I knit, but even that’s not motivating me very well.

Thanks to the piles of snow we’ve gotten over the past two weeks, HRH and the boy have once again built the massive slide in the backyard that starts at the little door off the back deck and winds around the outside of the yard. The boy positively flies on his little saucer-sled and makes it about three-quarters of the way around the yard before stopping. It’s hilarious to watch.

I haven’t really spun anything this year so far, other than a sample to show the Marcs what the process entailed, but it will come. If I made resolutions, one would be to spin more and sell the resulting stuff so I don’t have to worry about what to eventually make with it and at least cover the cost of the fibre. I can spin, enjoy the process, and then Etsy it without anxiety.

And finally, I have moved my dresser out of the corner of our bedroom because the puddles of frigid water behind it and the black mold were just too much to keep up with. This way the air circulates more and will theoretically slow the problem down.

Right. Back to some editing, and then some knitting.

Christmas 2009 Roundup

This what I’ve got. I’m really tired, and it’s kind of superficial, but it’s all you get.

We had a good drive down; thanks to the mild farewell snowstorm that hit the evening before and was still happening when we left, there were messy roads till Kingston, but after that it was fine. There was less and less snow as we went southwest; as close as Cornwall we were noticing significantly lower snow-to-square footage on the side of the road. The only other thing of note regarding the drive down was that thanks to multiple rest stops being closed for renovation (read: levelled to the ground) and one stop’s fuel pumps being cordoned off for some reason, there was only ONE fuel stop open between the QC/ON border and Toronto. Crazy. Of course, we are brilliant, and do not rely on the rest stops; we pull off the highway and fuel up/eat in non-rest-stop type places. Usually Kingston, actually.

The boy did cookie baking with Nana the morning of the 24th while HRH and I went out shopping. The stores were remarkably quiet, the streets sane, and we were mystified. I picked up Dragon Age for the Xbox for HRH and told him to forget I’d done so; we found a copy of TMBG album in Toys R Us, of all places, after months of being foiled at finding it in local record and bookstores. We looked for Star Wars action figures there, too, but couldn’t find any decent ones. We hit a dollar store, where we could not find any Xmas socks, alas (the boy adores Xmas socks with a passion, and getting him a new pair every year is a Thing) but they did have a snowman cup that matched the Santa cup the boy had in his stocking last year, and found some stickers and a remarkably decent pair of binoculars there, too. As the action figures were a bust, we picked up a copy of the Clone Wars movie for him, too.

We got home and I wrapped our gifts for everyone with the boy, which was kind of an exercise in patience. After putting him down for a nap, we went out to local yarn store to look at the wheels I was going to rent, only to discover that they were closed. I’d asked via email if they were open on the 24th and they’d said yes; not there or on their website did they say anything about closing early. They closed at 2; we got there at 2:15. I was a tad annoyed. It was a good thing HRH had managed to fit my wheel in the car, so I wasn’t left without one all week.

On Xmas morning, the boy got up to find his stocking and a basket in front of his bedroom door. He came into our bed to open it all, ate both snowmen chocolates, thought the binoculars and cup very cool indeed, and was thrilled with his books and the Transformer.

We dressed and had breakfast, then opened our gifts. I was so tired that I just kind of sat there with gifts on my lap and watched everyone else open things. The boy kept passing gifts out before we’d finished opening the last round. He got lots of books and clothes. I received lots of kitchen stuff that I’d put on my wish list a while back (an adjustable sink strainer, not one but two offset spatulas, a digital oven thermometer) and things I hadn’t asked for like a new Silpat rolling pin, and linen dishcloths, potholders, herbs, and sea salt from Provence. HRH and the boy got me the padded iTouch skin I’d asked for (sorry, Meallanmouse; it is no longer the Little Pirate Computer, as the boy used to call it; it is now the Little Flowered Computer).

My cousin and his family came over after the boy’s nap for the last round of gifting and a truly wonderful roast beef Christmas dinner. They almost didn’t because most of them had colds, but we all shrugged and figured that unless someone was deathly ill, there was no point in cancelling our plans. And it turned out they weren’t really very ill at all, so I’m glad they came. On the other hand, HRH and my father were on the edge of nasty colds themselves, which got worse at various rates over the week.

On Saturday the 26th we ventured out to the local bookstore to spend happy gift certificates, and I got three books from my wish list, one I found, a new calendar, adorable owl holiday cards for next year (because yes, our holiday cards were also thrown out along with the tags and bows and ribbons), and renewed my discount card. (No, the gift card did not cover all this; only half. And the store did not have three of the books that had been higher on my wish list, nor were they anywhere within commutable distance.) We were again really rather surprised at the lack of insanity on the roads and in the shops. Very civilized.

On the morning of Sunday the 27th HRH and I left the boy making Rice Krispie squares with Nana and icing the rest of the batch of cookies they’d made on the 24th, and hit the local Michaels for yarn and sketchbooks on sale. The boy insisted that he wanted his handknit scarf in black, so I got two skeins of black Wool-Ease Thick & Chunky and cast on to knit a double-thickness scarf in the round, nice easy straightforward knitting that I could do in the car without having to count. I also got a basket to keep my yarn and wheel accessories in. Then we headed out to the LYS that had been closed on the 24th, and I ended up buying some light brown Coopworth and my very first Malabrigo ever, the worsted weight merino in the Stonechat colourway. It’s so wonderfully soft and squooshy that I may never knit it; I might just cuddle it for the rest of my life.

Sunday afternoon we headed out to my cousin’s home for dinner with them, and we had some lovely beer: Hockley’s Dark. He had it in a litre bottle with a swing cap. (I’m noting it here for future reference. There’s not much else to say other than it’s delicious and we will be haunting the closer LCBOs for it.) He also gave me a g&t made with Hendrick’s gin, which was the most flavourful gins I’ve ever tried. I find a lot of gin sharp, but this was mellow and smooth.

Monday we saw The Princess and the Frog, which was fun because I can’t remember the last time my mother and I saw a new Disney film in the theatre together. It was fine, but it will never be among my favourite Disney films because it just didn’t grab me, despite loving the palette, the designs, and the message. I think a lot of it was the music. While I appreciate a lot of Randy Newman’s stuff, he’s not among the composers whose music I really enjoy. Part of it was also my inability to feel close to any of the characters, and the vague sense that the story was rushing, somehow. At the end, when the couple was transformed back into humans, the boy sighed and said, “Oh, I wanted them to stay frogs,” which may have been my favourite moment of the entire experience. (Hey, if you were a four year old boy, don’t you think staying a frog would be more magical?) I may enjoy it more after watching it when it comes out on DVD.

My mother’s silk scarf (not previously mentioned here because it was a gift, but this was the yarn… I’ll post a picture when it’s done) was not ready in time for Christmas. I wrapped it unfinished and let her open it so I could knit for the rest of the trip in front of her, but even then, although I increased its length four- or fivefold, I didn’t finish. I admitted to myself on the Monday that even if I did heroically polish off the knitting part, I couldn’t block it, so I gave myself permission to slow down because I’d need to do the after-knitting finishing at home anyhow. The silk just doesn’t move the way the Koigu did. And I lost a lot of time moving lifelines, because the silk was splitty and my lifeline yarn slowly shredded. I ended up switching to unwaxed dental floss for the lifeline.

We left the morning of Wednesday the 30st and made very good time to Maxville, where we spent the afternoon and night with t! and Jan and Rowan Tree Farm. This was absolutely wonderful, as when we visit we usually need to leave a couple of hours after we get there in order to be home for the boy’s bedtime, which also means (ahem) that both of us cannot indulge in alcohol. No such restrictions this time! We also got a surprise visit from Fearsclave and Mousme late the day we got there, which was delightful as we don’t see either of them often enough. We slept over, and it worked beautifully. Upon rising the next morning the boy and I visited the chicken house with Jan (the boy just can’t seem to remember to call it a hen house or a chicken coop, and really, ‘chicken house’ is so cute I’m not pushing it very hard) and the boy got to help find the eggs and tried to pet any chicken that got too close to him. We were rewarded with two crows from the rooster as we walked back to the house for breakfast (t!’s justly famed French toast). HRH and t! had a most excellent time playing bass together on the Wednesday night and the Thursday morning, and the boy had a marvelous time romping with Carter (spending a lot of the non-playing time walking around with his arm slung over the dog’s shoulders), and I got to chat and knit with Jan. It was all sorts of good crammed into about twenty hours, and we left with much regret at noon on Thursday the 31st.

We got home around one o’clock and did a quick stop at the grocery store so that we could gather supplies for the scallop dish I was to take to the New Year’s Eve dinner at Ceri and Scott’s house, as well as supplies for the New Year’s Day chili I was making for a couple of other friends. Dinner was lovely, although we were very tired and left not long after midnight. The boy woke us up on the first of January by wishing each of us (and all three cats on the bed, individually) a happy new year’s day. The huge pot of chili turned out very well, despite my ongoing anxiety about it not tasting chili-like enough and its refusal to thicken until I tossed some cornstarch into it. I made the accompanying cornmeal muffins with gluten-free potato flour, so my gluten-intolerant guest could eat them, and while they didn’t rise as much as the cornmeal muffins I make with regular flour (as expected) they tasted delicious. And not being able to decide what jelly to put atop the brie as it baked resulted in taking all three little jelly jars out to the table, where people got to put a dab of Jan’s jalapeno jelly, Ceri’s red pepper-garlic jelly, or my mum’s port wine jelly on crackers of baguette spread with just brie. A brilliant solution, if I do say so myself, and one that proved yet again how damn good baked brie is. Things were so relaxed that I completely forgot to bring out a platter of cookies and baked treats afterwards.

It’s been a lovely holiday, but we really need to get back on schedule; we’ve all been sleeping later in the mornings and staying up later at night, and staying in our jammies later than we ought to. The long car trips have thrown the boy’s nap schedule into disarray, as have the various different locations he’s been staying in. A return to schedule will be good for us all.

Nowell!

A lovely, lovely carol singalong tonight with the Preston-LeBlancs, marred only by the boy’s meltdown when it got to be an hour past his bed time (first because he wanted to go home, then because he wanted to stay). We did get there later than I wanted to, because the boys got home later than I expected, but we had a wonderful time when we settled down at last. We had a lovely buffet of hot hors d’oeuvres and cheese and nummy little things, and drinks, and opened presents before turning to the music. Both sets of children were enchanted with their respective gifts, and other than the same CD we exchange every year (no, it’s not like regifting fruitcake; every year we buy one another a specific CD so we both have a copy), they gave me a print of one of my favourite Waterhouse paintings, St. Cecelia, which positively glowed in its heavy gilt frame when we saw it in person last month at the MMFA exhibition. The reproduction is surprisingly good, much better than most of those done of Waterhouse’s other works.

We were a guitar, a recorder, and a cello, each sightreading; always interesting! The adults gamely improvised Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman for the kids, and we had lovely versions of Away in a Manger and Silent Night, and courageous attempts at other carols. The boy squeezed in between my oldest goddaughter and myself and we sang Silent Night together (this version was all open strings on the cello, so I didn’t need to actually read the music), the boy looking up at me with a smile and copying the shapes of my mouth to sing the sounds. With his quickness at absorbing music and words, it ought to be easy to familiarise him with the traditional carols like the Gloucestershire Carol, Coventry Carol, and the Holly and the Ivy. I foresee a proper Solstice mix CD next winter.

I love this tradition our godfamilies share. Most of us could have kept on playing for a good long time, but small persons have their limits. Next year, we’ll definitely do this on a weekend afternoon in order to have more time to actually play and sing, although there’s something special about doing it at night, with the midwinter darkness outside the snow-framed windows that reflect the twinkling lights on the tree.

We’ve been back for a couple of hours, but I’m still wide awake. I should make warm vanilla milk and curl up in bed with my current book, Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country. It’s a reread, as I am completely out of new books and have not had the opportunity to get to the library for a month. We are hitting the local Indigo a day or so after Christmas for their annual thirty percent off all hardcovers sale, and the new Charles de Lint will be mine. I’d buy the new Elizabeth Bear hardcover too, but none of the shops in that area have it in stock, for some reason. (Our local Chapters claims to have two in stock, but I looked for it when we were there last Saturday, and it wasn’t on the shelf in either the fantasy or SF sections. You fail yet again at matching stock and inventory, Chapters store 00794. I give up on you.)

Weekend Roundup: Sunday, Solstice Edition

Sunday morning we had the upstairs neighbours over for our now-annual Yule waffle brunch and small gift exchange. Blade and I were still in fine form from the party the night before and snarked all morning, amusing ourselves terribly. The boy got a Lego tow truck kit from them and decided that I should be the one to assemble it. I don’t work with Lego very often because I simply don’t think in three-dimensional block form very well, but give me a kit with instructions and I’m fine. They gave me a lovely Celtic knot print in my favourite autumnal earthy colours, and a sampling of Saxon chocolates, including my favourite sea salt caramels!

The local grandparents arrived just past ten-thirty for our early Christmas celebration. The boy was very patient for all of ten minutes, so we settled down and started opening presents. He’s at the age where he can actually appreciate each gift he opens again, instead of just enthusiastically opening things left, right, and centre. There weren’t as many gifts as there usually are, for which was very thankful. Part of this is due to the fact that we didn’t have both sets of our parents here, so the floor around the tree wasn’t as crowded as usual, but part of it was that we were all pretty restrained this year. We gave HRH’s dad a movie, and his mom a hand-knitted scarf, and Liam got a camera of his very own, which he began using right away, taking some very respectable pictures of his favourite ornaments on the tree.

The big hit, though, and the present we saved for last, was the early gift that Santa brought him: the racetrack he’d asked for when he saw Santa at the mall. (I knew HRH’s parents had bought him something from the Cars line of toys, so I pinged his mom to see if that’s what they’d gotten, and it was, so we were all covered. Bless them.) A very close second was Anakin’s Clone Wars starfighter, which went to bed with him for both nap and overnight.

HRH and I both got wallets (with money inside, hurrah!) and socks (it amuses me that when you get socks as a kid you’re let down, but as an adult you’re thrilled because it’s one less necessity you have to buy). I got a lovely plum-coloured knitted wrap that’s just gorgeous and so very soft.

My best gift, hands-down, though, was this:

It’s HRH’s newest painting in his Celtic Totems series. My office smells like oil paint, as it was still a wee bit tacky when HRH brought it up for me. (Kudos to Blade, who improvised a nice cover the other day when I was downstairs in the basement office and said, “Hey, it smells like varnish or something down here.” “Oh, I accidentally hit the button on one of my spray paints,” he said. Apparently when I’d left HRH looked at him and said, “Smooth. Thanks.”)

While everyone else played with the toys and nibbled on the various seafood and other hors d’ouevres that HRH’s parents had brought, I started getting food going. I’d brined the turkey the night before, and had realised while falling asleep that I didn’t have enough bread with which to make stuffing. I made a batch in the breadmaker as soon as I got up, a whole wheat/herb quick bread that I shredded and toasted in the oven when it was ready. In retrospect I shouldn’t have toasted it into croutons, because the whole wheat bread was already drier than white. I mixed up the stuffing and put half in the bird, and half in a baking dish, then put the turkey in the oven. Then I mixed up pie dough, because I was short a pie shell thanks to the previous day’s disaster, and had the worst time trying to get it to stick together. I kept adding ice water and it just wouldn’t cling. Eventually I squeezed it together and put it in the freezer to cool off a bit before rolling it out and mixing up the pecan pie filling. And then I discovered that unlike the little aluminium plates that prepared pie shells come in, my metal pie tin doesn’t fit in the oven next to the roasting tray, so I had to take the turkey out to blind-bake the shell for twenty minutes. I couldn’t afford the next half-hour it would take to bake the pie entirely, though, so a quick phone call confirmed that the neighbours were fine with us borrowing their oven, and HRH went upstairs with it. I set our timer to remind us to go get it when it was ready. The bird went back in the oven, was ready around quarter past four, and HRH carved it for me while I made the gravy. I heated up my mother in law’s excellent special mashed potatoes in the oven as well as baking the other half of the stuffing (which turned out to be unneeded on the table), and parboiled carrots before frying them in butter and doing a quick maple syrup glaze. And then we all feasted, feasted, feasted! The pecan pie was lovely, even though some of the filling managed to work its way through the shell and caramelize on the bottom. A soft dollop of whipped cream balanced it nicely.

Somehow, I completely forgot to make rolls to go with dinner. Didn’t even think about them in the overall meal plan.

After his grandparents left, there was a bath for the boy, the second chapter of Prince Caspian, and then bed. He woke up for no particular reason around ten while I was in the bath, although I didn’t find out till I checked on him between bath and bed. I cuddled him back to sleep, and fell asleep myself. A very full day, and forgetting to eat properly in the middle of it was not a good thing. Apart from that, though, it was wonderful. We are so blessed to have close friends and family with whom to celebrate the season. And the celebrating has only just begun!

Weekend Review: Saturday, Pre-Solstice Edition

On Saturday HRH and I had a treat: we got to drop the boy off with his local grandparents early on, and go out all day by ourselves!

It was a shopping day, mainly. We hit the big Chapters on the West Island and found gifts for seven or eight people in one place, which shortened our day impressively. We were thwarted in our attempts to obtain the new TMBG kids’s album yet again and told them to correct the damn inventory already so we’d stop asking them to find it for us, and to prevent other people from going through the same exasperating exercise. (Seriously, people: stock’s been at three since September. Are they actually in the store? No. No one’s been able to find them any time we’ve asked for it.) Thsi time they gave us a coupon that gave us 15% off a book as an apology, which impressed us. And when we got to the cash I discovered that I had a 25% off coupon in my wallet, so the camera we bought for the boy was less than we thought it would be, and we had the swipe-twice card as well. It was a good experience; always nice to be told at the cash that you’re paying substantially less that you expected to pay.

We picked up what we needed at Omer de Serre and Best Buy with little to no pain and stress, and would have gone to the dollar store for the usual socks, mittens, pencils, and Christmas cups for the boy’s stocking except the lines were positively ugly, so we picked up our groceries instead and went home. I wrapped what presents I could, having discovered that somehow all our tags, ribbons, and bows had been thrown out in on of the several garage clean-ups this past year. Fortunately, we still had a bunch of gift bags and some usable tissue paper, and I cut up some of last year’s Christmas cards for tags.

At home I made lemon meringue pie for the co-coven Yule gathering later that afternoon. We will never again buy the No Name pie shells (in the interest of full disclosure, I do have to say that I usually buy the Tenderflake shells if I buy shells at all HRH picked these ones up). I baked the first one and it came out of the oven in pieces, although it had gone in as one unit. I rescued the second shell before it did the same. Homemade lemon pie filling is delicious, especially when one uses brown sugar instead of white; it has a lovely butterscotchy undertone. Piles of meringue, thanks to the stand mixer. In fact, the recipe made so much filling and merigue that I layered the pieces of the first shell in a baking dish, poured the remaining filling over it, and covered it with the rest of the meringue. Of course, this means we have a lemon pie here, and I have no idea when we’ll eat it.

We packed the upstairs neighbours into the car and got to the hosts’ home for the co-coven party, and it was just lovely. Good company, good food (sushi! Chinese fondue with the best broth I’ve ever tasted! duck and bison meat! an absolutely fabulous hot spinach and cheese dip om nom nom!), lots of laughing, very social cats, a great simple but important ritual, and an all-round wonderful time. Our gift exchange was reduced from the usual baked item and a gift for our Secret Santa exchange to a single “make or bake” item (money’s tight all around), and as luck would have it I drew HRH’s name. On Friday I knit him a striped cup cosy for his take-out coffee (he always forgets his reusable travel mug at school) from the leftover yarn I used to make his Gryffindor scarf last winter, then I hand-felted it so it could be washed without a problem, and it was a hit! (I was told later that it also fit beer bottles, which amused me.) I was the only person who made my gift instead of baking it! I got a tin of very excellent Rice Krispie squares (no cat feet were involved in the making of them, I am assured). We had to scurry away to collect the boy so that his bedtime wouldn’t be too insanely late, but it would have been wonderful to sit and laugh some more.

The boy was sitting quietly in his grandparents’ living room looking at a book when we arrived, all bathed and in his pyjamas. They’d had a wonderful day together, decorating the tree, baking cookies, and playing. We also collected the turkey for the next day’s festivities, and a lovely evergreen swag that my mother-in-law made for our front door. Back home we curled up in bed and read the first chapter of Prince Caspian together, and then it was bedtime. Everyone needed sleep, because Sunday was to be our local family Christmas celebration!

Backdated Posts Up

The boy’s 54 mos post is finally complete with photos, here. I think I’m just going to do last weekend’s stuff is basic point form. I’ll update this post with the links when it’s done.

ETA: Yeah, okay, I just can’t bring myself to do point form posts. Fortunately (or not so fortunately, as my sleep has sucked lately thanks to the dry cough) I’m wide awake, so voila!

Weekend Roundup: Saturday With A Side Of Friday (backdated)
and
Weekend Roundup: Sunday, Holiday Recital Edition (backdated)

Just in time for this weekend to happen. *headdesk*