Category Archives: The Boy

Brick Walls

As if the last two weeks have not possibly sucked enough, today HRH woke up extremely ill and incoherent and spent the majority of the day in bed. I myself am remarkably weary of being sick; this cold is dragging on and on. Then this afternoon, when Liam and I reached the doctor’s office for his 15 mos appointment (which had been rescheduled three times already), we discovered that the doctor had been called out moments before on an emergency and the rest of the day’s appointments were cancelled. We rescheduled for next Tuesday, the only time the receptionist could give me.

Next Tuesday is, of course, one of the days I had to add to Liam’s daycare schedule because of the amount of work I have to do. So I lose one work day there. I’ve lost this Friday as a work day as well, as Liam’s grandma is out of town. And I have no idea what’s happening on Monday; I’m assuming Liam’s caregiver is not receiving, what with the statutory holiday and all. That makes for a total loss of three days, which is a week’s worth of work for me.

Is everything in the sky moving backwards or something?

When I went to draw a Tarot card last night, I saw that the last one I’d pulled around ten days ago was the Ten of Swords, the Yes, it really is that bad card. I should have known. But the Ten of Swords, while being not a great card initially, also encompasses the whole ending-is-a-beginning concept. So I’m watching for things to turn around and look up. I drew the Seven of Wands today, which suggests being successful in competently implementing what I want to implement (the specifics of which remain nebulous at the moment, but which generally include getting work done, and done well, and being on top of all the stuff I have to handle, and being not-stressed, and happy again).

So there. Yes. Tired of the bad and the crap and the sick. Ready for better things.

ESTC Update

Liam’s with his caregiver today, and will be on Tuesdays for the next couple of weeks while I handle both writing this book and editing another MS. I’m grateful that she can take him the extra day, because after losing last Friday to the holiday-that-wasn’t-restful and yesterday to crap, I really needed a good solid successful day of writing.

Total word count, ESTC: 35,352
Total words today: 1,282

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
35,352 / 50,000
(70.7%)

Seventy percent complete. Yet again I waver between rejoicing and panicking. And yes, I’m already past this week’s scheduled total.

Today was about expanding notes on goddesses into real sentences and coherent paragraphs. I did 820 words last Wednesday that I forgot to record, too. HRH just called and says he’s picking Liam up, because he’s been working only ten minutes away today, so I think I’ll use the bonus hour to plan out what I’ll do tomorrow (elemental meditations, I think).

What Holiday?

We’re back. Yes, we decided to drive to Toronto, stay one day, then drive back Saturday, and then HRH would drive four hours in the opposite direction to work on Sunday. It was ultimately his decision, and I can understand why he did it: to stay home would mean everyone brooding and a totally ruined family vacation this year.

Well, things weren’t great yesterday, being the day after the drive home, what with everyone being stuck in cars for long periods of time, and both Liam and I with really bad colds, and sleep being not restful. Scarlet and Blade made us dinner on Saturday night after we got home, which was unexpected and so kind, and then again last night, and just before that they even tried to kidnap my son in order to give me fifteen minutes of peace with a cup of hot tea. It would have succeeded, too, if I hadn’t just put him down for the night, two hours early. As it was, I loved the tea, and the thought, and the caring.

I thought today would be all right. Or better, at least. And it’s not, because I just downloaded five days’ worth of mail and found a deliberate insult waiting for me that has made me see red. What little benefit I got from the weekend has been totally ruined. And I use the same phrase I used in the first paragraph to make a point: All that effort, down the drain.

I am livid. And I’ve calmed down to this point, after an hour. I can finally string vaguely coherent words together. I don’t think I’ll be able to work today, I’m so furious.

Email is such an easy way to take calculated shots at people. You don’t have to look someone in the face when you insult them. It’s cheap, and it’s cowardly. And everyone I know and call family or friend should know better.

Don’t expect to hear from me again for a while.

Brief Liam Update

We have been pretty miserable here for the past few days. Liam’s been waking up every two to three hours at night in full howling end-of-world mode. Sometimes we can get him back to sleep, sometimes not. This morning began at 4.30, and the three of us walked through the day like zombies. The appetite is more miss than hit. So he’s a crank because his food and sleep are off, and we’re cranky because he’s not eating or sleeping normally, which means we’re not sleeping properly. Plus the fact that he’s a crank wears us down too.

He’s still a good kid. He’s just going through something, whether it’s teething or working out a new schedule for himself with only one nap, or working through night terrors. We’re just very, very tired, and out of energy to deal with pretty much anything.

However:

New words this week: “peekaboo”, “socks”, and the sound of a rooster crowing.

New food: leeks. (The verdict? Pretty decent.)

New actions: waving bye-bye when people are actually saying bye-bye, fitting two single MegaBloks together, opening the crank-powered windows in his room, setting bath ducks on a shelf. There are more, I’m just so wiped I can’t think of them.

And a new photo for you all, because it’s been a while:

(Scarlet had brought down some Harry Potter stickers that day, and Liam had one on his forehead for a few hours. In some way it feels like we’ve come full circle from this photo!)

Today he played my cello (remarkably well; I moved my fingers to make different notes, and he bowed), and played HRH’s bodhran for the first time too.

I was in bed at six last night. Tonight I may make it all the way till eight.

ESTC Update

Total word count, ESTC: 32,131
Total words yesterday and today: 1,444

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
32,131 / 50,000
(64.3%)

The week is not getting better. With Liam’s regular homecare person away on vacation, I’ve been recruiting friends to come play with him for a couple of hours while I try to work. Apart from the average daily quota on Wednesday, yesterday was pretty much a failure thanks to Liam being cranky and clingy and spending most of his time hanging over the child gate in my office doorframe crying for me. This morning I discovered that my mother in law wasn’t expecting to watch Liam today, as he’s also going over there tomorrow, and I had a moment of sheer panic wondering if I would get any work done at all this week other than those two hours Wednesday afternoon. She rallied, however, and has taken him for a few hours so that I can get something done. Stricken from the list of things to do today as an unfortunate result were a nap (Liam’s been waking up two to four times throughout the nights recently, and HRH sleeps right through it), and the purchasing of a new ink cartridge for the printer and a pair of jeans that fit. The shower is going to happen, though, come what may.

On top of it all, Liam appears to be showing every classic sign of beginning to teethe again: rashes, excessive drool and the accompanying cough, incessant chewing, the night wakings…. Can we just have some time out, please?

In general, things have been working up to a point where I would like to scream. Perhaps cry, or some sort of similar expression of frustration. My so-called vacation is a mountain of work, and the next weekend trip might not even happen thanks to bad scheduling. I have a wild urge to throw everything I agreed to organise and do back at the people for whom I’m doing it, and telling them all to deal with it themselves.

I did have a nice evening out last night: Pasley and I went to see The Illusionist, which was a beautifully made film. I enjoyed it a lot.

I’ve done a few hundred words today and that’s going to have to be enough, because I have other stuff piling up that’s due this weekend and next week for various commitments, and I have no other time in which to do them. And I have to go pick the boy up early.

Baby Hurricane!

We had a lovely time with Arthur and Curtana yesterday. Liam was a little reserved at first when Arthur arrived and dove straight into the toys, but by lunchtime they were passing food back and forth.

Together they managed to go through the house like a miniature tag-team hurricane, pulling every single toy out and most of the books down from the shelves. I’ve never seen every toy on the floor before. It’s rather frightening. Liam doesn’t have a lot of toys, but the toys he does have are sets of things — two sets of blocks, two sets of balls, stacking cups, two Fisher Price vehicles with their attending Little People — so when they’re all out of their storage they spread out. Plus there were the stuffed animals that we keep trying to stop people from giving to us. (Actually, people have generally listened to our plea for no stuffies, but Liam keeps adding some of my stuffed animals to his, like my fox and my Eeyore and my puffin, so his collection is expanding and mine is shrinking.)

In general, Liam only has three or four things out at a time. But all in all, two small baskets and two shelves in the living room made a scary tempest of toys. Time to go through those two little baskets and condense them into one, I think, and get rid of the toys he played with when he was younger and doesn’t really play with any more.

At some point I’d like to actually talk to Curtana in a grown-up fashion — about the things she’s studied, what she’s worked on, gaming and reading and so forth — but I was absolutely dead by the time they arrived yesterday, thanks to washing the kitchen floor three times in a row (once because it was kind of sticky, once because Liam had managed to snag the tea cosy and pull it down… along with the teapot full of cold tea inside it, and once because he managed to knock a kitchen chair into the cats’ water and food dishes and spilled them everywhere), and I was fascinated by how the two boys played in different ways, and interacted. The teaming up to trap the cat in the bedroom, beaming at her from either side of the bed, was particularly amusing.

I’ve got a lot of work to do today to cover what didn’t get done on Wednesday. I’m at an odd point with this MS: I’ve got about sixty percent down in each chapter (yes, yes, except for Chapter Two, that gets done last; and the chapter about dealing with grief, which I don’t particularly want to deal with myself so I keep skipping over the two pages of it that exist), and now I have to try to see what isn’t there yet and ought to be. Unlike the spellcraft book, when I wake up in the morning I don’t already have an idea of what topic I want to work on that day, so when I sit down to work I scan through the file to see what catches my interest. There have been an awful lot of days recently where nothing does. Not because it’s uninteresting, simply because I don’t actively feel like working on the topics in this book just now. (I secretly want to be writing a Regency comedy of manners. No plot, no clearly defined characters, and certainly no time. It’s simply what I want to be writing for some reason.)

I may just roll a d10 and work on the chapter whose number randomly comes up.