Category Archives: The Boy

Cautious

I was miserable late yesterday afternoon, and last night was worse. I either had a very bad system-wide reaction to something I ate, or had something gastro-like. It’s possible that it was related to the boy’s two separate episodes of illness last week (well, we thought they were separate, anyway) but whatever the origin, I’m just thankful it’s pretty much over. This morning it’s the traditional morning-after-the-night-before breakfast of tea and crackers, which is what I had for dinner last night, too.

The kicker is that I dreamed of making peanut butter marshmallow squares, so I woke up craving them. I don’t have butterscotch chips, or even chocolate chips to substitute. It’s probably a good thing.

The boy was very solicitous of my health yesterday. When I tottered out of my bedroom to read him a story before bedtime he met me and took my hand, patting it and saying, “It’s okay, Mama. I know your tummy hurts. Mine does sometimes, too. We’ll just go get you a couple of crackers, and that will help make things better.” Then he took me into the kitchen and opened the pantry, I got down a box of crackers, and we shared some. When I’d read him his story he turned to me and said very seriously, “Now, Mama, if you have to be sick, just run to the bathroom. You don’t have to be scared; I’ll be with you, and I’ll hold your hand, okay?” He was adorable; his tone was so serious and soothing. I loved it. I think we’re doing okay with this kid. He told me very proudly how he helped with one of the new babies yesterday, Sophia (nicknamed Kiki), and how he was officially at the Big Kid Table. HRH told me later that he’d had a couple of unsure moments at preschool, where he was evidently struggling with the very exciting ‘I’m a big kid and I take care of others and help the teachers’ concept while trying to integrate it into the ‘but I’m a little kid too’ reality. Apparently there were tears at one point, and when asked what was wrong he said, “I miss my dad,” which we think was shorthand for needing a reminder that yes, he was still a kid, and he wasn’t responsible for everything. It’s hard to integrate new responsibilities; there’s a lot going on internally with the whole self-consciousness and self-esteem and establishing one’s place in the world, forging new definitions and associations for interpersonal relations.

Today I’m planning to take things easy. I may cast on my lace scarf. I may knit some more rounds in my sweater. I’m certainly not going to work at the computer; sitting here is uncomfortable and hurts both my stomach and my head. I’ll read, and doze.

Weekend Roundup, In Which There Is A Visit To The Godforsaken Howling Wilderness

Wonderful, wonderful weekend.

Friday the boy and I had our special day out together. We visited the Melange Magique for incense, and the boy played with the resident cat Tequila and chattered away to Sam and Debra when she arrived. From there we went to Ariadne Knits to visit with Mary Louise and her ten-month old son Henry, and to inquire about the status of my wheel order. She tracked down my order for me and discovered that the model of wheel had been backordered at the CDN warehouse for a month. The order was closed on Friday morning, so it’s either on a truck or will be on one as of Monday, so I figure a week to two weeks at most for my wheel. I picked up a lovely skein of Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino fingering weight in soft variegated greens with which to knit a lace scarf. I will lick my hatred of fingering weight and lace in one simple yet elegant scarf for my fall jacket! We somehow spent an hour there, the boys interacting with one another and the store spinning wheel (the boy spent a lot of time turning it via the footman, and told a client who came in that he was spinning yarn for her to buy). Then it was home for lunch and rest, and then to the local movie theatre to see the new Miyazaki film Ponyo. It was very sweet, and the feel struck me as being a cross between My Neighbour Totoro with the magic of Spirited Away, and a dash of the humans-and-Nature-in-balance thing from Princess Mononoke. Excellent voice acting, truly stunning art (a lot of it takes place underwater or involves sea creatures), and a lovely score. The boy got very excited when he saw the Studio Ghibli logo on the big screen, as it’s a sketch of Totoro. Also: Astro Boy trailer! Woo! And Toy Story and Toy Story 2 coming out as a 3D double bill this fall!

Saturday morning the boy woke up at five. I sent him back to bed where he stayed very obediently till about six-twenty, but he didn’t go back to sleep. Then an hour or so later he experienced digestive upset, which was no fun at all for the poor kid. HRH was gloomy and predicted canceling our long-planned trip out to the Fearsranch to spend the day with Fearsclave and his lovely wife Carolyn, but I was stubborn. We’d already reduced the trip from an overnight to a day trip, and I wasn’t losing the single day. I bargained for leaving an hour later, and all was fine by then. We arrived in Alexandria at eleven-thirty on the dot and the fun began. The boy romped with Jack the dog and crawled after cats, then pulled books on trains off the shelf and brought them out to the swing on the back deck to share with Carolyn while the gentlemen hacked away at the threateningly overgrown tomato patch. There was a late lunch of corn on the cob, Greek salad, and homemade whole-wheat bread. We even had dessert first, a delicious lemon-blueberry-vanilla cake with vanilla glaze and strawberries on top. After lunch we wandered next door to the abode of Fearsclave’s parental units to coo over Bonnie’s new-to-her 30″ white ash Saxony Schacht-Reeves spinning wheel, and they left me there, spinning piles of BFL fibre that Bonnie just kept cheerfully handing to me. The slowest ratio on the Schacht-Reeves is 14:1; the fastest on my forthcoming wheel is 10.5:1! She also showed off her bouquet of spindles, which were lovely, and her fibre stash.

Dinner was a wild turkey, slow-roasted at a low temperature with lots of liquid to counter the leanness, potatoes and beans form the garden, and a Caesar salad. I whipped up some sage and onion gravy for the turkey and baked a pecan pie for dessert, and everything was delicious. Unsurprisingly, the wild turkey had a different texture and taste from the supermarket kind. The only oops was that we whipped the cream for the pie into butter. Heh. Around five o’clock the boy was a bit punchy so we asked if we could put a movie on for him, and wonder of wonders they had Kiki’s Delivery Service on DVD, which we haven’t seen in ages because our VHS player finally died. We paused it so we could all gather for dinner around seven, through which he was slightly drunk on sun and exercise and a missed nap, putting his arms around people and leaning his cheek against theirs, professing his love, and saying, “I like these people. These are nice people, Mama.” He went back inside to finish watching his film while the rest of us had tea and dessert, and we left with great reluctance around eight-thirty. The boy was fast asleep before we got to the end of the road. (Apparently we just missed t! and Jan on their way home from Tal’s housewarming party, which was a shame.) I was thoroughly pleased by the boy’s behaviour: he was polite, thoughtful, exuberant, and a very good boy in general. There were a couple of hiccoughs, such as his inability to remember that we told him (over and over) not to pick George the very old cat up, but George didn’t seem to mind, thank goodness; and when we were leaving Carolyn gave him her copy of The Jungle Book on DVD, and he was so tired that he held it and said, “But I don’t need this.” We had a whispered discussion about how when someone offered a gift we accepted it gracefully with thanks, and there was eventually a mumbled thank you. (All was well the next day when he saw it on the table and bounced up to it, saying, “I need to watch this today! It’s my new movie!”) He was very taken with all the adults who wandered in and out through the day. All in all, we had a wonderful time, and we didn’t want it to end. As we brought him out to the car the boy said, “I don’t want to go home. Can’t we stay here?” As his resistance to the idea of an overnight had been one of the deciding factors in making it a day trip instead, the whole-hearted about-face was satisfying. (The other reason was Monday was the first day of school for both the boy and HRH, so a full day at home before it seemed like a good plan. And it was.)

Sunday was our at-home/errand day. HRH picked up new shoes, and we went to the hardware store to pick up stain for the forthcoming wheel, new work gloves for the boy and I, and a belt pouch for HRH’s work essentials. The boys washed the car while I chatted with my mother, and that afternoon we did garden work, liberating a good two dozen full-sized potatoes and about six dozen tomatoes. I dashed out to pick up new jars for canning (because if one is canning, one needs jars, something I’d completely forgotten about) and to have a cup of tea with Ceri, then came back to start the process. In the past I’ve had horrible luck peeling tomatoes, even with the boiling water/ice water dip, but yesterday it worked like a charm. I suspect I’ve just not boiled them long enough is the past. I was quite disappointed that so many fresh tomatoes only yielded me four 500ml and one 250 ml jars of canned, but that’s what you get when you cut up things with lots of juice and seeds, I suppose. (Note to self for the future: Don’t start boiling the water for sealing the jars till you’re almost done ladling the stuff into the jars. Also, try making crushed tomatoes instead of doing a cold pack.) We were going to have steak with garden potatoes and carrots, but the steaks I’d bought had gone bad, so we defaulted to soft tacos.

Okay, there. That was the weekend. Lovely and relaxing. And really nice weather during the days, too, with rain at night.

In Which She Cuts Herself Some Slack

In self-defense (mental, emotional, physical) yesterday became a Tylenol-and-reading-on-the-couch day around one or two o’clock. I did manage to bake bread, and a pan of caramel pecan squares, which required brown sugar, but we didn’t have any, so I used a mix of white sugar and molasses, which changed the taste and now I’m all “meh” about them because they’re not what I was craving. HRH likes them, though. The day improved around five o’clock when the boys came home. I had a guerrilla cello lesson, snatched from the sea of heavily scheduled summer, which I was very excited about, because I knew I was doing things wrong, I just couldn’t figure out what. My teacher pinpointed them in no time at all, which was a relief. So was moving on from one of the things I’d started on my own after we’d tweaked a couple of things. “We don’t need to keep that one,” she said, and that was a nice little ego-boost. Part of what teachers do for you is isolate the point of an etude or exercise so you know what to concentrate on, and she pointed out that the two pieces I’d been working on were, in fact, designed to make me think of placing my third finger on the fourth-finger spot. Thinking of the ringing tones as the targets was one of the goals of those pieces. So aha, I wasn’t going about it all backwards, as I’d suddenly suspected. All in all, it was a very productive hour and a bit. I knew I was doing things wrong (couldn’t figure out what on my own, of course — yay, job security for teachers) but there were only three major issues: shifting while extending (bad bad bad — close the hand!), bowing too close to the fingerboard when playing in higher positions, and needing smoother bow changes. We’ve decided that smooth and flowing bow motion is going to be our focus for the next little while.

It was very nice indeed to be told that I’d been making progress over the summer. It may have been standard teacher encouragement, but it matters to me. I’m much too hard on myself as a matter of course, both in cello and everything else. I’m learning to let go gracefully, as a friend put it recently. I can’t do everything well. I have to allow myself to do things acceptably, so long as I enjoy them. Stressing doesn’t help the situation. Taking the afternoon off to lie down and read because I couldn’t face work with the headache I had is something I couldn’t have done a few years ago; I would have beaten myself up about losing work time. Having a child and being diagnosed with fibro taught me a very important lesson, namely that the standards I set for myself are too damn high and end up being destructive instead of supportive. Any day that you walk away from (figuratively, that is) is a good one.

Then I stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house to coo over Ceri’s current knitting projects, eat zucchini brownies that you’d never suspect were vegetable-ridden, and have tea. I was very good and only stayed forty-five minutes. When I got home I discovered that there had been unfortunate excitement, as HRH put it. The boy had gone to bed at the usual time and had thrown up an hour later. HRH had cleaned boy and bed up, but today I had to scrub the bathroom to get rid of the smell, and wash some toys that were unfortunate bystanders. It was touch and go this morning as to whether he’d actually go to the caregiver, as he hadn’t much appetite, and while twelve hours had gone by with no repeat performance or a fever, you can never be sure. He eventually decided that he felt well enough to go after waffling about it (he kept giving me woebegone looks; I think he was gunning for an extra day home with me) so off we went, an hour later than usual. We suspect it was simply something he ate yesterday, plus the heat and running around. His caregiver e-mailed me to say he’d had a great morning, ate lunch, and fell asleep almost immediately, so things appear to be all right again.

In flipping around the iTunes store I just saw that one of the top twenty classical albums is “Ultimate Chopin.” This makes Chopin sound like some sort of hard-assed extreme composer. Yo! Put on the ULTIMATE CHOPIN! We got some serious butt-kicking to do! I mean, really.

I can hear gentle rain on the leaves of the tree outside my office window. It smells wonderful. This is nice. I hope it stays like this for a while.

Now to switch the laundry, and maybe write that final [missing bit here] of Orchestrated. I wish I hadn’t lost my writing playlists in transferring to the Mac. I miss them.

Yawn

Yeah, I know. The Court’s a bit boring these days. If I’m here, I’m tired and uninspired. If I’m away, well, I’m away.

I made homemade bruschetta with pearl onions and tomatoes right out of the back garden last week. Piled it on freshly baked focaccia and couldn’t stop eating it. That ended up being dinner for me. I used Lu’s recipe, roughly, but used lime juice in place of the red wine vinegar. I don’t think I put any herbs in at all. Just tomatoes and onions that tasted like sun, plus sea salt, the olive oil, and freshly ground pepper.

The editing/second draft work on Orchestrated continues apace. I’m at the Oh Noes Accident And Hospital part of the story, which means I think I’ve bridged all the [write this bit here] gaps that I needed to bridge. I’ll find out as I continue on, but I seem to remember everything being pretty straightforward from this point to the end. This could, of course, be an entirely falsified memory cleverly crafted by my subconscious in order to maintain sanity.

With the air conditioner installed as of last Saturday morning, we are blessedly free of the high heat and humidity warnings that are piling up. And as an added bonus, I no longer hear the landscaping crews and power tools working outside. We were trying to make it through the summer without installing it, and really, we did very well. The summer has been cooler than usual, but apparently the weather’s making up for that with a vengeance. Yesterday around six o’clock the thermometer in full sun on the back porch read 42 C/106 F, and that was before factoring in the humidity. (Putting in the A/C unit two weeks before September. What is this world coming to?)

Camping last weekend was lovely. There was plenty of tree cover to shade us from the sun and a very good fire pit on our site, which ended up being the central gathering area for everyone. Lovely new people; and so the (co!)coven grows. The only bad part of the experience was arriving to find the fire pit still smoldering, which means the people who used it before us weren’t responsible. The not sleeping well and waking up in lots of pain wasn’t great either. But everything else was enjoyable. There were many marshmallows roasted.

My spinning wheel still has not arrived. I am antsy and cranky about it, as we are rapidly coming up on a month since I ordered it. I was hoping to have it by Saturday, as that’s when we’re heading out to the Fearsranch in Alexandria for an overnight, and both Fearsclave and his Wicked Old Step-Mother want to see it. Of course, the WOSM has just gone out and bought her own gorgeous double-drive double-treadle Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel, so we may end up geeking out together over hers instead of mine, as was the first plan, or comparing the wheels, which was the second plan.

I have a cello lesson tomorrow night. I need to play for a while today.

This is the boy’s final week of part-time preschool. As of next Monday he is full-time, which means this Thursday is his last day with the caregiver, and Friday is his last weekday at home. We’re going to go see Ponyo together to mark the occasion.

So yeah. Not very exciting, here. Mostly tired, with a side of exhausted.

It’s Friday…

… which probably means something. Except it doesn’t, because I work at home. Not that I can do that today, as the boy is home with us due to rescheduling, and grr. It’s been one of those Days of Broken Ears, you know? That frustrates me more than outright naughtiness does, somehow. (Although this morning’s episode in the car of rolling down the window and then asking if he could do so was outright naughty, because he can’t roll the window back up on his own. “But I did ask! I asked at the end!” he protested when I reamed him out. Not on my watch, kid. Do it without first asking again and your seat’s going back in the middle of the backseat, where you can’t see out the windows properly.)

The hallway looks spectacular. The colour is a dark cappuccino, and HRH redid all the white trim that chipped off (yeah, not such great quality) when we used the baby gates as well. It’s the colour I’ve been seeing in my mind for the past four years instead of the washed-out-milk-with-a-drop-of-coffee-in-it with a chalky finish that was up there. I hated that finish; you couldn’t wash it, because any swipe with a damp cloth left swathes of permanent colour-change. Very frustrating.

It’s back to school season, and I’ve somehow completely disconnected from it this year. We walked into a department store this week and were attacked by Back To School!!! stuff, and I kind of shrugged and said, Oh, that time of year? It’s probably partly to do with the weather and its not-very-summery-ness. But otherwise, meh. Maybe getting the Mac and the Touch last month assuaged my new-school-supplies need for the year.

We officially have tomatoes. Two plants broke, but HRH rescued the fruit and they’re ripening on the shelf outside.

And… my contributor’s copy of Out of the Broom Closet arrived this morning! It’s a very handsome book and I’m so pleased with it. I’m not going to do a hero shot; I’ll wait for the box of author’s copies to do that.

We’re leaving tomorrow for an overnight camping trip with out local covens, which should be nice and relaxed. (Do you hear that, world? Nice and relaxed.) I handle organization of the two other annual local co-coven events, so this one I told others to handle. Other than offering to bring the camp stove/BBQ, a sack of corn on the cob, and outlining a menu for lunch, it’s someone else’s show/lists/booking/schedules, for which I am grimly thankful. All I have to do is show up and camp. Besides participating in rituals, that is. And any rit I don’t have to write or run these days is a good one; I am so burnt out doing that and the organization thing.

Right; they boy has shut himself in his room to read on his bed. I will try to take advantage of this by working some more on Orchestrated. Yesterday there were about twenty pages edited, and three new ones appeared. I found a decent timer app for Macs that helped immensely; I set it for five minute intervals and realized that by giving myself a five-minute minimum, I was also giving myself permission to write past five minutes. I found myself restarting the timer over and over. Also, the day seemed to go very slowly for some reason, which helped a lot.

Right. I have just been asked for crackers and cheese. That, then work.

Obligatory Vacation Roundup

I’m so tired. It’s partially the post-vacation Fibro Strikes Back effect, and partly the horribly oppressive weather. It takes so much energy to think, let alone move.

Right. So we left for Nova Scotia on Saturday August 1, on the highway out of the city around 9:00. I have to say that the drives at either end of the trip were spectacular. Excellent weather, a minimum of traffic, and the very best kind of company in the car itself. There was almost (almost!) enough room for the cello in the trunk. There very well might have been if I already had the 7/8 soft case my luthier has on back order for me (we’re switching the current 4/4 case for it).

I’d have to check my Twitter feed for details about the drives, but really, it’s enough to say that they were remarkably smooth and quick. Well, except for the horrendous traffic around Drummondville. There had been some kind of accident, bad enough that three sets of flares had burned down by the time we passed the location, and we drove at 10 kph for an hour along with countless other people. (I’m not kidding. I wish I was.) We live in a stunningly beautiful country, and I am reminded of this every time we drive through the Saguenay region on the way to the New Brunswick border. The highway travels right along the river, and there are small mountains that look like sleeping dragons (and yes, every time we drive through the area I think there must be a story in that somehow, “The Sleeping Dragons of the Saguenay”).

We tried to stop in Grand Falls for the night but the hotels were full, so we called ahead to Woodstock and stayed there. The boy was enchanted with the motel room we got, which had a small room off the main room. “This is my room?” he said as we walked in, “It’s… aweshome.” This was his first experience with hotels, and we were prepared for it to go badly, but he slept very well indeed. I brought my laptop and we watched some Animaniacs before bed, which he thought very exciting too. All along the trip he told people that he was headed for the ocean, to put his feet in it.

We drove to Mahone Bay the next day and got there around 3:30. My mother had called while we were on the road and said that all the cousins were down and there would be fifteen people for dinner at the cottage that night. I said, “Um, sure.” (My mother was also down on vacation, staying with my aunt.) When we arrived the cottage was empty, thank goodness, and so HRH unloaded while I took the boy right down to the ocean. We took off our shoes and without any hesitation he waded right in and kept going, soaking his clothes. We leaned over and dipped our fingers in and then touched them to our tongues, and he paused for a moment and said critically, “Not bad… I like it!” (We’d already warned him about not drinking it, but tasting was important.) The air was so fresh.

Everyone showed up (and I mean everyone: all my cousins but one, everyone’s progeny, three generations of people) and it was so much fun. I was slightly leery of that many people at once right at the beginning of the stay, but it was fabulous. We all picked up right where we left off the summer we went down for Ceri and Scott’s wedding eight years ago, all at ease with one another and parenting everyone else’s kids in the ocean from the deck, and drinking and nibbling and laughing. The boy threw himself into his generation of cousins with great glee, running around in the ocean and climbing on rocks with them. I always forget how much I love this branch of my family, how at ease I am with them. My cousin currently located in Hamilton came down with his family too, and he took all the kids out in the fishing boat. The boy was a bit traumatized when the boat turned and passed the cottage, as he thought they were coming back, but he heroically held on and didn’t burst into tears till we lifted him out of the boat and he clung to me, sobbing, “I missed you! I wanted you there!”

The next morning it rained, but that was fine; the boy got to explore the cottage. Over the week it rained mostly at night, with lovely clear days; absolutely perfect vacation weather. The boy went into the ocean every single day. When the rain cleared a bit we picked my mother up and drove to Lunenburg to see the ships and the fisheries museum, and we had lunch (a nice mix of seafood appetizers for Mum and I, fish and chips for HRH; the boy had chicken, as he had pretty much everywhere). I think we went to my aunt’s house to have dinner with my aunt and mother that evening, and the boy got to spend time with a ten-year-old cousin visiting from Ottawa to do a two-week sailing course. (Yeah; lots of family in and out and about. There were logistic problems a couple of days before we arrived, we heard.)

Tuesday was our in-town day, where we parked in the middle of the village and walked to all the shops we wanted to visit, then stocked up on groceries for the stay. We went to the candy store to buy fudge (the creamiest fudge I have had from any shop, ever!), sighed over Birdsall-Worthington Pottery, visited Amos Pewter where the boy watched a craftsman make a beautiful spun bowl (we bought a triple maple leaf ornament for the Yule tree, and I bought a lovely pair of earrings), and I went into Have a Yarn, which was an absolutely lovely shop. The salesgirl gave me a card for someone in Lunenburg who spins and sells stuff but we’d already made our trip to Lunenburg; next time, I guess. I finally cracked and bought fibre to spin, even though my wheel hasn’t arrived yet: two 50gm braids of mulberry/heather Blue-Face Leicester sliver and one of green/brown merino. I also picked up a couple of packages of wool fibre seconds from Brigg & Little to mess about with, as they were only three dollars each. It’s clean but it still has a bit of vegetable matter in it and noils here and there. I tried to comb it yesterday, but I need cards because it’s shorter than I thought. (I has a stash! Oh noe!)

Wednesday we went to Ross Farm, a place I’d visited often as a child. The biggest attraction for the boy was the litter of barn kittens who were pouncing around, although he did climb on the fence to talk to the horse, talked to the chickens for a while, ran around the barn with the carriages and wagons with interest, and showed me a spinning wheel in the main house with great enthusiasm. That night we had my mother over for dinner, and we prepped and ate five pounds of mussels and six pounds of local lobster. It was delicious, and dirt cheap. The boy was very interested in the lobsters while they were alive and in the process of boiling them on a fire HRH made on the beach, but wasn’t as enthusiastic about eating them. We roasted marshmallows over the coals once the rest of us had eaten our fill, though, and that was very exciting. It was wonderful to have my mother there while we were in Nova Scotia.

I’d wibbled about buying the pewter pendant that matched my earrings, and so I went back on Thursday evening to buy it on our way to meet my aunt at the pub. I stopped wearing a necklace when the boy was born and lately I’ve wanted to start wearing one again, but none of my symbolic jewelery has felt right, my amber is all too big for everyday wear, and my more expensive stuff isn’t practical. I’ve strung the pendant on my short white gold chain, and it feels lovely.

A coupe of days into the stay I poked through the CDs in the basket by the resident CD player, and wondered if someone had stocked them just for me. Among them were a Joshua Bell album, an early Yo-Yo Ma/Emmanuel Ax recording of the first two Beethoven cello sonatas, and a three-disc set of Jacqueline du Pre material. The third (called ‘Recital’) saw a lot of play. And because it was so damn quiet at the cottage, we could leave all the windows and doors open and hear the music drifting down to the beach. Heaven. I really missed the cello; I spent most of my cottage time reading instead. (HRH has promised to build me a Prakitcello for future trips!)

The drive home was even shorter than the drive there somehow, even accounting for the hour delay due to the accident at Drummondville on the way. We made it all the way to Edmunston the first day by four-thirty, and were home early afternoon on Saturday August 8.

The boy loved it all. He happily spent hours standing in the water, relocating handfuls of seaweed or rocks to different places. He played with sticks, water pistols, and the hammock. We saw little fish, all manner of waterfowl and shore birds, crabs, plenty of winkles and snails. HRH took him out in the canoe a couple of times. He slept hard and well every night, was awesome in the car, and was one of the reasons this trip was such a success. He has already decided that we’re going back next year, and has told us several stories where he packs up his friends and extended family and takes them all to Newfoundland (“You mean Nova Scotia,” we correct him every time) to put their toes in the ocean. And really? It’s not to hard to twist our arms. If we don’t go back next year, then certainly the year after that.

Another Vague Weekend Roundup

The humidity is melting my brain.

Friday afternoon HRH came home early and announced that he was taking me out to lunch, so we checked to see if our favourite sushi spot was still open for lunch (it was!) and headed out for a light sushi nibble. We shared a salad and had just enough sushi to make us feel fabulous. We hit two bookstores (one had a lineup directly from hell so we went to the other for the gift we wanted), did groceries, picked up what we needed at the pharmacy, and then had a stop at home before collecting the boy, who had spent a fabulous day with friends he hadn’t seen in a while. When the boy went to bed I put the mute on the cello and played for a while. Just as I feared, the cello doesn’t come to mind very often now that lessons are on hold for the summer; I play once or twice a week and that’s all. But I’m working through Mooney’s Position Pieces book one, and on some independent stuff too.

On Saturday HRH was supposed to hit Mousme‘s place to continue painting while she was away for the weekend but there was a key kerfuffle, so while he waited by the phone the boy and I took the bus to the fabric store to buy some velveteen to cover the Styrofoam inserts HRH had carved for the hard cello case. The bus trip was fun, except for the tears that made an appearance when we got off the bus ( “But I don’t want to get off the bus — I want to get back on that bus! I don’t want to take a different bus home!” What the hey? Good grief.) We found some really nice taupe/grey velveteen on the bargain shelves and brought it home. We had a brand new bus on the trip back, and the boy charged right to the back seat and had a blast swinging his legs and jabbering about how excited Dada would be to know we had been on one of the new buses, with the new seats and the new paint!

After his nap he cheerfully suggested, “I know! Let’s play Rock Band!” and so I tried the drums for the first time ever. Holy nasty timing on the bass pedal. Give me the bass guitar back, please. Then we went out for ice cream, which was as hilarious as usual because the boy always gets chocolate and his face is a mess during and after the experience. Then we walked to the fruit stand nearby and picked up a tray of mixed berries, and stuffed ourselves on them during the drive home along the Lakeshore. We put the boy in his bathing suit and turned the sprinkler on in the back, and he soaked himself and screamed quite happily. (Placing the sprinkler so it drenches the slide? Priceless.) I baked two loaves of bread, and we ate one in entirety for dinner. Ice cream, fresh local berries, homemade bread: I count this a winner of a summer weekend dinner, personally.

Once the boy was in bed I cut out, fitted, pinned, and sewed the velveteen covers for the cello case inserts, and they’re essentially done except for the final handstitching of the end flaps. (I also need to trim and reglue the existing velveteen lining where HRH took out the built-in curves that were interfering with the 7/8’s position, but that’s cosmetic.) There was Sewing Machine Dramah where it refused to work, producing loops and snarls and jams instead of the smooth line I needed, and the Internet was useless; I have no idea where my manual is, and I couldn’t find one online. Nothing I did worked, not adjusting bobbin tension, not adjusting spool tension, not rethreading repeatedly, not changing bobbin thread, not changing the spool thread, not cleaning, not waving my hands over it and chanting mystical gibberish. Not until I did it all over again in a different order, that is, and magically the problem vanished. I did a thorough cleaning, and that may have been a factor; evidently the last major thing I sewed on it was HRH’s Van Helsing coat, because holy cats, the amount of black fluff inside it. Oh no, hang on; I sewed and then tore apart and remade a kick-ass black mock suede corset for band after we moved in; that’s what it all is. I hang my head in shame for not cleaning the machine properly afterward. I must admit to essentially leaving it alone for four years, though. I did some sachets on it, hemmed a baby sling, and made curtains for the boy’s room, but that’s pretty much been the extent of my sewing aside from the corset since we moved and the boy was born. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I missed sewing while I worked on the inset covers. One of the things I did to distract the boy from his tears when we got to the fabric store was take him to the catalogues to look through the costumes, and he found a standard superhero pattern and declared that wanted to be the Flash for Halloween. I told him that it was duly noted and we’d revisit the notion in September (which is five weeks from now, WHERE DID THE SUMMER YEAR GO). We never did get around to making the lovely little pirate coat for which I gathered all the materials and accessories a couple of years ago; he wanted to be a superhero or an engineer instead. Maybe this year he’ll actually let me sew something for him.

Sunday morning we dropped HRH at Mousme’s house so he could strip wallpaper and paint her bedroom. The boy and I had a lovely morning out and about, and everything was spectacular until nap time, when he had a tearful meltdown about no, not needing a rest, really. Then it was about how noisy his room was and it was quieter outside it so he’d sleep out there (no), and then it was about wanting to keep me company while I worked (also no). I finally got him into our bed and snuggled him until he passed out an hour and a half after he usually does, and he slept for an hour before we left to pick up HRH. We had tacos for dinner followed by freshly made chocolate ice cream, then the boy had his bath and went to bed without a problem. There were some impressive thunderstorms that went through last night, which unfortunately necessitated closing the bedroom window, which faces west. If we weren’t going to NS soon I’d have HRH put the air conditioner in, just to take some of the damp out of the air. It’s not that it’s hot; it’s just wet all the time, and everything smells musty.

Okay, I need to go lie down. The day’s work is done, and despite being adequately hydrated and fed I’m dizzy and kind of flopsy. I knew this wouldn’t be a good fibro day after two nights of broken and low-quality sleep, but I just got up to answer the phone and am having more difficulty than I expected. I guess it’s reading or staring into space for the rest of the day.