Category Archives: Photographs

Purple Mohair Update

Well, this is nice. I was worried that the mohair would get stiff when spun and plied this tightly, but I am pleased to be wrong. It’s not silk, or even Corriedale, but it’s not awful. It feels very sturdy, and it looks quite good. I don’t think I’d spin an entire project of sock yarn out of this (or rather, I don’t think I’d want to wear a sock made completely out of this yarn) but I’d probably wear a sock knit from yarn made of this plied with something else. So for what it’s worth: 0.2 oz/5 grams of hand-dyed 70% mohair/30% merino, chain-plied into light fingering weight yarn (that’s the orifice threading hook I made for myself this morning above the yarn):

For those who were interested in how the colour split in the dyeing process, yielding the pale purple, hints of blue, and touches of pink, here you go: this is what the variations look like spun up and chain-plied:

I have got to start remembering to throw the penny into the pictures for size comparison again.

Mohair!

Ceri has asked for pictures of my mohair adventures thus far, and so:

Today’s dye experiment: a soft lilac (it was supposed to be a pale plum, but purples are tricksy dyes)

Mohair laceweight (or what will be laceweight once I ply it) [IT WANTS TO BE LACEWEIGHT, I swear; it drafts so beautifully in a semi-woolen draw into a thread-thin yarn]:

Yesterday’s two-ply worsted weight (the large skein) and a mohair singles yarn (sport/DK weight, I suspect):

In non-spinning news, I am slogging through another epic fantasy project (I am definitely taking this genre off the list of genres I’ll accept from now on), and I roasted pork and made pork-onion soup today. Also, yesterday Gryff pelted down the hall into the living room, jumped on the wooden chest, and slid right off into the window. You know, the window that HRH sealed with plastic last week? Yes. One large cat-shaped hole in the plastic. HRH was *not* be pleased. (It was hilarious to me, too, until HRH came home.) He patched it with a spare bit of plastic, but there was much grr in the atmosphere. Not so fun. And then the boy brought a deck of cards into the kitchen and enthusiastically proposed that we all play Go Fish, and all was well.

And bloody hell, our phone battery is dying. It holds a charge for about a half-hour. This makes my weekly hour-long chats with my mum somewhat challenging. So tomorrow I’ll head over to Angrignon and buy a new one. (We’ve had the phone for about eight years, and the battery seems to last almost exactly four years, so not so bad.)

Monday

I know. I haven’t finished the boy’s monthly update, nor have I done the weekend roundup. They’re both energy-intensive, as was the weekend, and I don’t have any energy to spare at the moment. I worked all yesterday morning on a freelance assignment that was returned to me at the end of the day for revising (first time that’s happened to me in two years of working with this company) and then worked three hours on drafting a ritual that just about wiped me out from the amount of research and arranging and things like that. So, not so much with the journaling.

I finished Gran’s scarf on Sunday, though, and will share pictures with you:

As you can see, the striping was a bit more pronounced than I wanted it to be. (Note to self: Next time you want just a tiny bit of colour to show up here and there, spin the yarn first then dye just a spot or two instead of dyeing the fibre that then gets drafted and stretched out to cover even more area than you dyed.) The cast-on edge is a bit loose; I’m going to crochet a row or two along the edge to firm it up today.

So I overdyed it. I laid it out and used a squeeze bottle to apply a weak solution of the paler yellow dye (deliberately unevenly, thank you) to the white parts. This made for an overall variegated yellow scarf with touches of cream instead of a cream one with pale touches of yellow, but I’ll take it. It’s just kind of the photo negative of what I had originally planned. (This photo makes it look a bit green, but it’s not. It’s the colour of daffodils.)

In other non-related news, major library score last night: three new releases on my to-read list I didn’t know the library was even going to acquire (The Blythes are Quoted and The White Garden among them), two Kate Jacobs books, Frostbitten by Kelley Armstrong, and the copy of A Forest of Hands and Teeth was actually on the shelf where it was supposed to be. I am a very happy reader.

Fifty-Three Months Old!

What does an inventive kid do when you tell him that no, he may not watch cartoons or a movie? He goes into his room, scribbles on the chalkboard, and says, “This is my TV! And this is my remote!” he adds, waving the eraser. And then he goes and sits on the end of his bed and ‘watches’ the ‘television,’ narrating all sorts of dialogue. It’s much more entertaining than the real thing.

The boy has officially conquered pedals on tricycles, the only obstacle to upgrading to a bike. The other week he asked if he could go for a bike ride before dinner, and HRH agreed. The boy took the trike out to the sidewalk, HRH ambling along behind him, and suddenly the boy took off down the street and HRH had to run to catch up. Wow! Looks like we may be getting him a bike for Christmas, if we can find one (we may go with a camera instead and buy the bike in spring). He was playing with bikes at a store the other day and automatically went for the smallest ones, as he’s been doing… except we discovered that they’re now too small. So he’s up to the next size, the size I got when I was five. He’s having a bit of a problem with the pedaling forward thing, though, because he kept pushing back and braking it. Tricycle pedals are slightly in front on the seat, bicycle pedals are directly beneath.

His arms and legs are just so long. The sleeves of most new size 4 shirts, after a wash, are too short. And he has trouble pulling shirts off because the shoulders are a bit tight. He’s slim, though, so we run into a problem with pants that are long enough for his legs but too loose around the waist. And the feet, ye gods. Did I mention that his new winter boots are size eleven? And that he’s grown out of most of his socks?

We are in a full-blown pirate phase at the moment. Muppet Treasure Island is his soundtrack of choice in the car, he can sings all the songs, and dashes around the house with a pirate hat on over a bandanna, waving a paper sword, and being Long John Silver. We are commanded to sing lustily whenever certain songs come on. Fortunately he is a good-hearted pirate; he lined up all his stuffed animals and gave them all flu shots. I sacrificed bits of spinning fibre to be cotton balls, which we taped over their injection sites, and put stickers on top of the improvised band-aids. No one’s getting sick on his watch.

I took him to get his hair trimmed this past weekend and he chirped, “I love getting my hair cut!” And it isn’t just for the lollipop, either. Or the fact that the bookstore is right next door. Okay, I’m sure they play roles in his love for ‘the haircut store,’ as he calls it, but they really do seem to be afterthoughts. He just really likes the environment and the woman who trims his hair for him.

The day of his flu shot we all went out to see Astro Boy, as planned and promised. The plan was to have an early lunch, then for the boy to nap, then to head out to the theatre, but the plan got derailed at the nap part. He messed about in his bed for a while, then got up an hour later, then fifteen minutes after that. I put him back to bed with a light on and a pile of books so he’d at least have more quiet time. Then he dawdled on the way out so that we were clock-watching all the way there in the car, making it into the theatre just as the previews were ending while HRH made a brief stop to buy popcorn. There were a total of seven people in the theatre, so it felt like a private showing! The boy was enchanted by the film, sitting literally on the edge of his seat for the last half. He also happened to glance back and see the projection booth for the first time, which fascinated him. He asked about it repeatedly, and when the lights came up he ran up the stairs to see it. Very exciting. So was all the decor at Le Colisée, as it was the first time we’d taken him there.

He’s such a bright, perky kid. He displays such enthusiasm for everything. It’s both exhausting and inspiring.

Other posts that feature the boy and his doings this past month:

The flu shot
Choosing a book from the bookstore and raking leaves
Halloween!
The Halloween costume

Playing Hooky

Long draw: ye gods. I understand the theory and what should be happening, but I need better fibre to practice with, because the mill ends and seconds I’ve got are making a yarn that’s, well, tweedy, to say the least. I’m not expecting to make a perfect woollen yarn right off the bat, but the fibre’s jamming against the neps in it, no matter how I try to card them out. And a cat got into the lovely basket of rolags I carded while I was out last night; I came home to a shredded, tangled mess of fibre on the carpet. I don’t know who’s to blame, Nixie or Gryffindor, as they’re both fibre fiends, but the two of them are on my Naughty List at the moment.

One week ago we talked to the boy about the flu shot, what it was and why it was important to be vaccinated. He got upset ( “I don’t want a needle to take out my blood!” he cried, because the last time he saw needles being used was when HRH and I had our prises de sang done), but he agreed to go with us on the 10th because at that time children under five years plus their families were scheduled to be vaccinated as of Nov 9. The plan as we all worked it out was: HRH would book the day off and the boy would stay home from school. HRH would get his shot first so that the boy could watch, then the boy, then the boy could hold my hand so I wouldn’t be afraid. After our shots, we said that as a treat we could all go see Astro Boy in the theatre. And then, the very next day, Montreal changed the damn schedule again, and families of kids five and under were no longer eligible to be vaccinated at the same time. This meant that we effectively lied to him about doing it all together, which really didn’t sit well with us.

The revised schedule said that people with chronic conditions like asthma were eligible as of Nov 23, and everyone else as of Dec 7. So we told Liam that he could choose what to do: Either he could have his shot on Tuesday while we held his hand, then we’d go see Astro Boy and have popcorn like we were going to; or he could wait until the 23rd when I could get it at the same time. At first he said the 23rd, but then he asked again what exactly the flu was. We explained that it was a bad sickness that made little kids very very ill, sicker than adults, and the doctors and nurses decided that they would give all the kids their shots first to make sure they’d be okay, and then the mummies and daddies could have what was left over. He thought about it some more and said that he would go on Nov 10 after all, as long we held his hand, and then we could go see the movie together as we’d already agreed. We were so proud of him. The crying and protesting when we originally told him about the shot were dramatic, but I guess he’d worked all the scared stuff out then, and so the thinking about when to get his shot when we gave him the choice was more level-headed.

And then at the end of last week, Montreal changed the schedule yet again and said that kids under five and adults with chronic conditions (hello, asthma!) were eligible to get the shot a few days earlier than their respective revised dates. So the plan changed a third time to the boy and I getting the shot together on Nov 10. And so today we went out at eight o’clock and waited about half an hour in line to get into the clinic, at which point an incredibly streamlined process had us register, move to sit with a nurse to fill out the health questionnaire, then go right to be vaccinated. And we were so proud of the boy who only cried a bit, and who is very proud of his Band-Aid with a Lightning McQueen sticker on it. I have nothing but the highest praise for the volunteers and medical staff who are manning the Angrignon clinic. They’re cheerful, supportive, efficient, responsive, and good with adults but especially good with the children I saw being vaccinated. (The nurse who gave me my shot even offered me a Disney princesses sticker when he saw me watching the boy choose his own Cars sticker, but I declined.)

While the amazing ever-changing flu vaccination schedules in Montreal have annoyed the heck out of me, there’s one thing that has stayed constant, and I’m thankful for it: kids under five have been moved up, but never delayed as some other groups have been. But the quickly-changing information was making it a real pain to try to schedule anything. I understand that the schedule is being constantly revised according to the availability of the vaccine and the need to get the higher-risk groups inoculated as soon as possible. I wasn’t panicking about getting the shot – I’m not worried about getting the flu and the health complications from it, or there being a vaccine shortage; I’m more concerned about slowing the transmission of it through the population – but I was getting increasingly irritated at the inconstant schedule and contradictory information on official municipal versus provincial websites.

Anyway, it’s done, and we’re at home. The boy is watching cartoons, a huge treat on a weekday. We’ll do an early lunch, then a nap, and then we’re all off to the Colisee to see Astro Boy together.

ETA: Astroboy was lots of fun, and a decent little story without the usual tangents and dumb vaudeville stuff they put in kids’ films (there was a teeny bit, but it wasn’t toxic). The boy was literally on the edge of his seat for the last half. As for the flu vaccination, I have become increasingly achy and exhausted throughout the day, which is pretty much what I expected.

Weekend Roundup

This was a truly lovely weekend. We didn’t rush around, the weather was nice, we crossed things off the to-do list, I got work done, got reading done, had a cello lesson, and ate food. Really, that’s all I ask for.

Friday afternoon I had the deeply satisfying experience of refusing that benighted UPS package, and the driver said, “Good for you.” I’m going to be saving around twenty dollars by having the parcel shipped out via USPS, even paying the USPS shipping fee, and I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks to finally get it. I refuse to cave in and support UPS’s extortionate practices.

Saturday morning I took the boy to get his hair cut, and then we went next door so I could pick up The Intentional Spinner that I’d ordered to replace the copy of Spin Control that I’d bought and later that day won in an on-line draw. The boy had saved up twenty dollars and though he tried to get me to say he could buy a train instead of a book, he eventually went up the escalator with great enthusiasm and chose the copy of Warman’s Lionel Train Field Guide 1945-1969 that he’d been sighing over every time I checked out the needlework books on the adjacent shelf. (We have proceeded to read this book before each nap and bedtime. No, really. We started with some of the text on how to use the book, then the evolution of the Lionel packaging, and then the captions under the pictures of the trains. Not exactly a brilliant narrative, but he’s enthralled.) When we left the bookstore we stopped by Jess’s house to finally collect the carton of Vanilla Coke she’d bought for me on a trip to Vermont at Thanksgiving.

Saturday afternoon I got some Yule knitting done and read another chunk of An Echo in the Bone. I also learned that my proper 7/8 soft case arrived at the luthier! This is going to be a straight trade for the 4/4 case that my 7/8 cello came with. I originally told the luthier I’d stop by next Saturday but that doesn’t make sense time- or gas-wise; I’ll send the 4/4 case over with HRH on Friday, and he’ll make the ten-minute trip to the luthier’s shop after work on Friday on his way to collect the boy. We also moved the DVD cabinet out of the living room and into the hallway, where it doesn’t look bad at all, to free up one whole baseboard heater. As the house has been very damp and chilly lately despite the heat being on, we also trotted out the dehumidifier that had been part of the downstairs apartment’s appliance suite, scrubbed it within an inch of its life, and plugged it in to see what would happen. As we’d suspected (and yet still to our somewhat grim horror) it pulled a good couple of cups of water out of the air in just ninety minutes. This flat has always had a problem with window condensation and mold in dark corners, but we’ve never actually used a hygrometer to measure the relative humidity. The recommended level is around 50%; from the lists of warning signs we’ve just read we suspect ours is about 100%. Anyway, we don’t particularly want to be running a dehumidifier all the time, as it takes a shocking amount of electricity, but the difference in the air was palpable. I think we’ll run it in a different room for an hour or so every day.

Saturday night we attended a dinner party chez Luanna, and ye gods, it was everything anyone who’s ever attended one has said they are. We’ve had to miss every single one of these we’ve been invited to for the past gods know how many years, so to finally be there was a huge thing. The food and the company were spectacular. We had a fabulous time and came home with souvenir programmes menus complete with recipes and photos of what was served. Shall I boast about what we ate? Oh, of course. When we arrived the wine was flowing freely and there were platters of hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen, delicious little crab things on baked wonton wrappers, homemade bruschetta, and prosciutto/melon/fig bites in crisp little bite-sized cups. Our first course was a potage of zucchini, mushrooms, and leeks, followed by duck a l’orange, roast baby potatoes with herbs, and green beans with pine nuts. Dessert was the impressive poached pears dipped in chocolate… which turned out to be stuffed with chocolate-nut truffle filling. I am not a huge pear fan, but these were cooked to perfection, and the chocolate and nuts didn’t hurt in the least. I have not been this enthusiastic about food in possibly years.

Sunday morning we went grocery shopping, which was oddly enjoyable. Usually we are very tense when we shop in grocery stores, generally due to the oblivious and rude nature of fellow shoppers or the non-availability of an item of which we are in dire need, but people were moderately sane and the only thing on the list that we didn’t get was the name brand butter that was on sale, which wasn’t a huge issue because the basic no-name brand of sweet butter I usually buy was only twenty-five cents more expensive at its regular price.

The weather this weekend was a treat. Yesterday in particular was a gorgeous warm fall day, with sun and only a slight breeze and a high of something like fifteen degrees. When we got home from doing the groceries the boys played in the pile of leaves outside. They claimed to be raking, but I knew what was actually going on.

The huge maple tree out front drops an equally huge number of leaves around this time of year, and after scraping them up into a huge pile (and spreading it all out and raking it up again and again) they hauled the leaves into the backyard to pile on the vegetable garden on top of the compost we’d already spread there. It was so warm that we opened the windows. (Also good for removing extra humidity in the fall, we learned.)

While the boy napped I worked on the assignment I’d received on Friday afternoon, because if I could finish it and hand it in, chances were very good that both it and the one I’d already handed in on Friday would be approved by five PM on Monday and I’d be able to invoice for both of them, doubling this invoice total. I managed to do it, too, so I’m just waiting for the approval codes for each so I can plug them into my invoice and send it off. I’m getting better at the efficient handling of evaluating these manuscripts. It helps when they’re non-fiction; I can scan them with less investment. The co-ordinators have just figured out that I’m experienced in religion, so that’s what three of the last five have been. I greatly prefer them to the epic fantasies.

And I had my cello lesson last night, where we worked on the group pieces for the recital. The great Focus on Shifting continued, with the key thing I brought away from this particular lesson being the concept of shifting over the wall instead of through it, using the slight elastic bounce off the fingerboard to travel on the string to the target position and then rejoining the fingerboard with another elastic motion. I worked on this about a year ago, using the mental image of a jellyfish or a squid swimming for an analogy to the motion required (whatever works, okay?) and it’s so rewarding to see that absolutely none of it stuck with me once we stopped talking about it. I also had a note on my Brahms waltz/lullaby piece that said WRONG FINGERINGS, noted as such after the last group class when I got tangled up and saw everyone else was shifting differently, and hoo boy, were they ever wrong. We went forty-five minutes over time as a result of trying to get them corrected. My teacher is an absolute saint.

Today’s to-do list includes a short proofreading job, doing up that invoice, and typing out the draft of a formal ritual which also involves transcribing Norse poetry. Also, it would be really nice if my late freelance cheque finally arrived.

Weekend Roundup, Halloween Edition

Saturday morning we headed out to Karine and Adam’s place for a birthday party. We were the first ones there, so we blew up balloons and put up streamers while Adam got the birthday boy into his costume and Karine whipped up a fabulous brunch (first round for the kids, second round for the adults!). I was fighting a headache and realised halfway there that I’d forgotten to put on my glasses, which didn’t help at all. (I swear, I have to think of something to get around the dark-glasses-on-a-dark-dresser problem.) Almost half the invitees had to cancel due to illness, which was sad, but those in attendance had a wonderful time. There were a moments where my heart nearly broke, though; the boy came to get me at one point and said, “Mama, they’ve locked the door and won’t let me in.” The birthday boy and his school friends had closed the bedroom door against him, and he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him play. So I sat with him in the playroom with an arm around his shoulders and tried to think of a way to explain it but couldn’t put it into words for him, so I just hugged him and offered to help him build with the toys at our feet. But then there was a stack of birthday cupcakes and presents, so everything was all right.

We headed home and it took the boy a while to settle for nap, of course. When he woke up HRH had hollowed out the pumpkins in preparation for carving them, and we got the boy to draw the faces for them. The results were great!

We packed up the pumpkins and headed out to the local grandparents’ house, where the boy does his trick or treating. Except it wasn’t that easy. The transport ministry had closed down half the Mercier bridge, so there was a single lane going each way. We figured it would just take a bit longer to get across, but when we encountered a staggering lineup at our alternate entrance (our regular one was closed) we tried a second, then a third, and discovered that most of the entrances to the bridge were closed, and all the traffic was being funneled through LaSalle onto one on-ramp and taking this way would eat up an insane amount of time. So after forty-five minutes of being five minutes away from our house in various directions, HRH decided to take the Champlain bridge and drive all the way around the south shore of the river to get to Chateauguay. We got to my inlaws’ house an hour and a half after we left. Normally, it’s a fifteen minute trip.

Anyway, tempers were tight and gas was getting dangerously low when we go to the Champlain, but right then the sun came out. It had been an extremely windy, rainy day up till then, but the sun suddenly broke through at just the right angle for magic to happen. As we crossed the Champlain we saw the fattest rainbow I’ve ever seen grow from the opposite shore and reach up to the clouds. I rolled down the window and took a photo:

Then we looked in the rearview mirror, and the sky behind us was on fire. Copper and gold and blazing apricot-bronze; absolutely incredible. When we got across the river I rolled down the window again (rather dangerous in the high winds, whoa) and took photos looking back at Montreal:

We had to stop for gas in La Prairie, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing, and we got to the boy’s grandparents’ door just before six-thirty. After a quick gulp of alcohol to soothe the stress we’d incurred on the way and much admiring of the decor there we got the boy out the door. He loves dressing up, he loves the decorations, he loves the candy… he is not such a big fan of older kids in scary costumes. In fact, after the first house he started digging his heels in because there were two teenagers right behind us wearing horrific rubber masks whom he saw every time he left a door, and on the corner he stopped and started crying, asking to go back home to Grandma and Papa because he was scared of costumes. The woman in the next house heard him and came out to talk to him, and she jollied him up nicely, getting him to come to her front door to see her decorations, and talking to him about the scary costumes. It turned out she worked at the local elementary school and knew exactly how to handle it. (Another example of how what one’s parents tell you doesn’t count, but hearing the same stuff from a different adult is OK.) The boy left in a much more cheerful mood, and I suspect the woman talked to the teenagers behind us because at the next house they stopped to talk to the boy and lifted their masks so he could see they were just people underneath. He was better then, and got to a whole two more houses before saying he was tired and wanted to go home. So this year he hit a total of five houses, three or four fewer than last year.

At home was more fun for everyone, actually, because my mother-in-law had finger food for us as well as more alcohol, and the boy had a delightful time answering the door in his costume and handing out candy. My father-in-law kept slipping more candy into our bags as well! It was a perfect Halloween night: windy, not too cold, piles of wet leaves all over the ground, with wisps of clouds racing across an almost perfectly full moon.

I slept horribly that night, despite being in a wonderful mood going to bed. I got two hours of sleep before midnight, then woke up so very completely at midnight that I had to get up. I knitted Gran’s scarf till two, spun some of the dye sample I’d done a while ago, spun some Aran-weight singles and plied them, then took some herbal sleeping pills and went back to bed around four. I got one hour of sleep before the boy woke us up at five, because of of course the clocks had gone back the night before and his body knew it was six. He tried to snuggle with us but wouldn’t stop squirming or talking so HRH put him back to his own bed, and I slept on and off till nine.

We went out to vote in the municipal election at ten, and wow, worst voting experience ever. The gym in which they were supposed to set up this polling station had been damaged by the wind and rain the previous day so it was squeezed into a cafeteria area instead, and the insensitivity of those waiting was just boggling. It took about forty-five minutes before our station was clear, and a good half of us waiting were polite, but the other half were just asses and made things miserable for everyone else… and this was within the first half-hour of the polls being open. The abuse the volunteers were receiving was dreadful. Now, okay, smaller area, perhaps not as many booth open per polling station number, but at the same time every single person had to unfold five ballots, mark them, and fill them in again. With only one person per booth allowed in the room at a time, yeah, that’s going to slow things down. Anyway, no one I voted for was elected, a result that I fully expected.

As the voting process took twice as long as we’d expected it to take, HRH pretty much had to leave as soon as we walked home because it was open house day at school. He took the bus in while the boy and I stayed home for lunch and a rest. We drove in after the boy’s nap to pick HRH up, and discovered that the open house had been insanely busy and successful.

Dinner was remarkably delicious homemade spaghetti sauce made from the garden tomatoes I’d canned two months ago, and then I headed off for a cello lesson. These are getting better, although I’m still having moments where I freeze up or can’t work through a small problem. My teacher had to remind me about things we’d worked on months ago — caterpillars, the little bounce in the shift that provides shock absorption so the shift doesn’t sound harsh — but for once my right hand was behaving. So now my focus is on smooth shifts, elegant ones, done at the same speed my bow hand is moving at instead of rushing the shift.