Category Archives: Photographs

Fifty Months Old!

I’m totally blanking on the monthly update. I kept horrible notes this past month. So much of it would have involved the trip to Nova Scotia, so I point you back there.

His caregiver came back from Toronto Trek Polaris with a miniature sonic screwdriver for him, and he adores it. He ‘fixes’ things with it, including people’s teeth and ears. ( “Because I am fixer guy who fixes things,” he explains.) We put the kibosh on ‘fixing’ people’s eyes the first time he tried it, because the thing has a blue tip that glows when you press a button. He also loves to help in the garden with HRH, which is great. He helps water the plants, and tidy things up. He was thrilled to be able to help HRH paint the hallway, too.

We are running into an irritating problem with food. When he asks what’s for dinner and we tell him, he immediately says, “Oh, I don’t like that.” Now, this is patently untrue a lot of the time. We tend to prepare meals that we can all eat together, so the automatic response really, really gets on our nerves. Both HRH and I have blown up at it once each this past month. Part of it comes from his conflation of the terms ‘want’ and ‘like’ – we have to point this out to him sometimes – and part of it comes from the fact that if he could live on chicken nuggets, he would. Except his memory hasn’t caught up to his tastes yet, because when we give him chicken nuggets these days he sort of half-heartedly nibbles them, then decides he’s done. We just need to keep reminding him that the kneejerk reaction isn’t helpful to anyone.

The biggest drama of the past month happened the day or the day after we came home from Nova Scotia. I’d unpacked everything and placed a travel-sized tube of hand cream on the toilet tank next to my hair stuff, to remind me that I wanted to take it out to the car. He used the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then spun around… and knocked the hand cream into the bowl as it was draining. There was a shriek and screaming and he ran into my office crying so hard that we couldn’t understand him. HRH came running from wherever he was, and I had the boy by the shoulders trying to calm him down. We honestly thought he’d hurt himself badly somehow, although we couldn’t see any blood. We finally got him calmed down enough to understand that he’d knocked “the sunscreen, your sunscreen, Mama” into the toilet and it had vanished. He was deeply distraught, and we had to kind of hide the snickers while I hugged him and told him that it was okay, that it hadn’t been irreplaceable or expensive, and that we knew that it had been an accident. We talked about how important it was to close the lid before one flushed, and gradually the sobs stopped. HRH told him that when he was little he’d done the same thing, only he’d knocked his mother’s hairbrush into the toilet, and he’d been afraid his parents were going to be mad, too. “Did you get it back?” the boy asked, interested. “Oh, no,” HRH said. “Long gone.” And then we had a talk about where the drains go, and the boy decided that if we got a big net we could go to the water filtration plant and scoop out both the hand cream and Grandma’s brush.

The language. Ye gods. I live with him and I keep being surprised at how he expresses himself. One morning he came to my side of the bed with a small stuffed rabbit and said with pathos, “Mama, Snowball is sad. He is very sad. Tears are dripping from his eyes, do you see?” And his storytelling is evolving, too. The stories he makes up to tell us are becoming increasingly developed and complex. It’s really interesting to listen to him. His expression and inflections are making a large leap forward now, too; he knows how to modulate his volume, pacing, and delivery to enhance what he’s saying really well.

Let’s see, other firsts this month… riding in the canoe, riding in the motorboat, swinging in a hammock, roasting marshmallows, learning how to skip stones. Uncharacteristically, Nixie is allowing him to pet, kiss, and hug her. I still can’t get over how good he was on the two-day trip down to NS and back. I’m so proud of him.

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.

Let’s Try Again

Lost an entire post just now. That hasn’t happened in quite some time.

Five loads of laundry yesterday. Five. That’s significant, right?

Apart from that, I managed to edit a whole eight pages of Orchestrated despite having the file open for hours. I’ve hit Part Two, wherein I’ve left myself notes in the text like [write dinner scene here] because I was intent on getting the damn skeleton of the story down and done with. This means my light edits/rewrites are turning into more substantial rewrites, meaning my already slow pace is about to turn into the speed boasted of by turtles. The fibro-fog isn’t helping; I have little focus.

Yesterday I also began re-ripping the missing albums that iTunes can’t/won’t find. Turns out a few of my CDs were originally ripped into .wma format, and iTunes on the Mac doesn’t have an import/convert .wma function. Not a big deal, really. It’s just that I’m trying to find where iTunes is ripping them to, and I can’t. All the logical places I look haven’t turned anything up. (The Mac: “Just trust me. Everything’s going to be fine.” Me: “I know, I know, it’s magic, but even when doing magic I like to know what the ultimate destination for my energy is, thank you very much.”) I want all my music in one place so that I can back it all up at once.

Speaking of the Mac, it doesn’t have a formal name yet. My PCs all had names drawn from Norse mythology — Freyja, Valhalla, Bifrost, the Dell laptop is Nehelennia — but I suspect the Mac has energy that’s more Egyptian in nature. The Wii is named Isis; I think perhaps this is Nephthys, although Ma’at is tempting. I’ll think about it some more. (The Touch may be Nephthys, actually, making this one Ma’at. Hrm.)

Pursuant to the spinning obsession, I found a used Louet S15 on eBay that was listed at a $50 opening bid and comes with a bulky flyer included, so I calculated shipping, looked at my budget, and bid on it. I’m currently winning, but if someone tops my highest bid within the next five days I can still add another twenty dollars before I hit my self-imposed max total of $200. Seeing as how a new wheel would cost me $400 at the least for the very basic entry-level models, $200 including shipping is decent indeed. If I win the damn thing my brain could give over the RAM it’s currently devoting to wheel research and reviews to things that need it, like planning dinner and actual work, instead of constantly returning to the wheel thing when it ought to be thinking of other issues. Actual spinning would be more relaxing and have tangible yield for the time invested than obsessive wheel research online (actual yield = time missing, nothing concrete accomplished, lots of info buzzing in the brain, irritation at the to-do list not diminishing). I know that realistically if I win the wheel, the Obsessive Research slot will be assigned to fibre. But I’m doing that already as part of the overall wheel research thing, so I am being optimistic about the possibility of some leftover RAM.

Huh. There is a ladybug on my office wall. I saw something crawling and did that hiccup of panic, thinking it was a spider, before I looked and saw that it was in fact a Coccinellid. She’s now crawling up the copper deer painting HRH did for me five years ago, and settling down in the knotwork:

Right. I need some Excedrin for this headache, and then it’s back to Orchestrated.

Fuzzy

Oh, fibro-fog, I have not missed you.

Actually, I think this is a combination of poor sleep and being up and moving too early in the morning, plus forgetting my glasses on the bedside table.

HRH and I went out for our annual blood test this morning at stupid o’clock. It occurs to me that now that we have health insurance, we could to this via private clinic and be reimbursed instead of sitting in the hospital for an hour and a half. Next time. Anyway, we took the boy with us because we figured it would be good for him to see it before he needs it done at some point, and also to kind of save time, as we could take him directly to Grandma’s house afterward. He was pretty good, too. We sat in the hallway of the blood lab along with fifty other people and read a book, played some games, and I let him play with the Touch, too. He came into the lab itself when we were called, and he sat with HRH while I had my prise de sang done, and then I took him to the bathroom while HRH had his done. I’d warned him ahead of time that when we were in the actual lab that he’d have to sit very quietly and not wiggle around, because there were lots of breakable things and people having sensitive tests done, and if anything went wrong they’d have to start all over again and there would be much crankiness. After we were done we left and he said, “That was fun!” (Okay, kid, whatever.) Then he threw his arms out to the sides and said with great excitement, “And I didn’t break anything!” A couple of the people waiting giggled a bit behind their hands, as did a few when we’d been waiting earlier and he’d asked me what a prise de sang entailed, then put an anxious hand on my arm and said, on the verge of tears, “But I don’t want them to take your blood out of your body.”

Then we all trooped over to the nearest Tim Hortons so there could be food and coffee, because we’d been fasting for the tests, and he was allowed to choose a whole doughnut for himself. He chose a chocolate glazed, and told me that I wasn’t allowed to cut it in half (which is what I usually do, half for each of us). He pretty much had three bites and then licked all the icing off, then washed it down with some chocolate milk.

I’ve had a couple of queries about how the spinning wheel recon went. Basically, I sat down and spun my fibre for two hours on a single-treadle Louet S-17, and as I suspected, I am completely and totally hooked. Never even tried the Victoria. A single treadle slow machine will be fine for me for a while, which is good to know because there are lots and lots of secondhand ones on eBay (although I’d love to buy one new, and support the LYS that’s been helping me with the research). Molly Ann wound the single I’d spun into a centre-pull ball with the ball winder (so easy!) so I could ply at home with my spindle (again, so much easier!) and I made honest to goodness real yarn last night after the boy was in bed. I have photos, but I can’t figure out how to get them out of iPhoto. Thank goodness for my library reference books, which I will make use of later. (Note to self: You need an FTP program before you start working the freelance gig again, oh hell. Although I can upload things for the blog from a web interface, thank goodness.) My biggest problem with the wheel is over-spinning the wool and putting too much twist into it, just like I do with the spindle. I need to treadle slower; I tend to speed up. But it’s so much easier, and so much smoother, and I can make a lovely fine single instead of something chunky because drafting is easier.

We’re off to see the new Harry Potter film this afternoon! And leaving, er, now.

ETA @ 8:25 PM: Peektures!

Here’s the first bit of plied yarn on the spindle, halfway through the process. I admit that I paused here to photograph it because of how perfect the yarn about to be wound onto the spindle shaft is. So even! So… worsted weight-ish!

And here is my first-ever baby skein of yarn plied from a single spun on a wheel. The length of the finished skein is about eight inches.

It is somewhat lumpy and not even (well, more even than my spindle stuff ever was), but I love it with much, much love.

Also, the Harry Potter film was very good indeed. Better than the last, which was probably my least favourite of the lot so far. Well-paced, nicely balanced, very nice camera work.

Forty-Nine Months Old!

Big things this past month have been taking the GO train into Toronto and the TTC subway for the first time, and taking pictures. He wanders off with the camera any chance he gets. And about a third of his pictures are actually usable, to. I may put together a Boy Photographer post at some point. He took pictures of me playing my cello one day, and if he hadn’t fiddled with the settings and turned the dial to Movie he’d have had some excellent shots. Even with the Movie setting on, if he’d kept the camera on me instead of winging it crazily around the room it might have worked. We may keep our eyes out for a decent low-end camera for him — not one of the kids’ ones, those are terrible, but one that won’t die if dropped. That’s my biggest fear right now, because he’s come close to smashing it against something a couple of times, and I really don’t feel like replacing my digital camera for the second time in three years, thanks.

To everyone’s surprise, he had a very negative reaction to his first pool experience this summer. He loved it last year, and splashed around while holding on to whatever adult was with him. But this year, his teacher went into the pool with him at preschool when the weather finally warmed up enough to do so, and he shrieked and cried. He explained later that it was cold, but we think this was shorthand for “I’m a year older and I know bad things can happen and while I trust my teacher that’s a lot of water, there. Oh, and it’s also a bit chilly.”

He is thoroughly in love with the Animaniacs. My work here is done.

After months of on-again-off-again suggesting it, we finally got around to reading Ursula LeGuin’s Catwings series, and he is in love. He also really enjoyed the Brambly Hedge stories, but the Catwings are his favourites among the new books.

The very last guppy finally went to the big aquarium in the sky, so we took a trip to the local pet shop and bought three sturdy polka-dot mollies. We tried to convince him that a small school of neons would be awesome, but he wanted the spotty mollies, so the spotty mollies he got. “What will you call them?” the salesman said as he decanted them into a bag. “Um, I don’t know,” said the boy. “Well, my name’s JF, if you wanted to call one after me,” the salesman said, which amused us. The boy amused us even more when he eagerly said, “Yeah, yeah — I’ll call them all JF!”

Gryffindor has taken to racing into the boy’s room when it’s bedtime, throwing himself on top of the bed and flopping over with great force, looking up at us with an expression that says, “I am so heavy you cannot possibly pick me up to toss me out.” After the story has been read and the light has been turned out for the snuggle part of the bedtime ritual Gryff often stomps up the bed, purring loudly, and thumps into the boy or I lovingly. Sometimes the boy wants him to cuddle some more, but usually he says as I leave, “I don’t want Gryff to stay.” Especially since the night he had to shoo the cat away from the tank and those shiny plump new fish. Very traumatizing. When I go in to check on him last thing before I go to bed, adjusting covers and turning off the music and opening or closing windows, Gryff often pushes his way in with me and leaps up on to the bed, finding a cosy nook to do some intense snuggling and purring before I shoo him out again. It makes us feel good to know that Gryff chooses to play and be with the boy. Even Nixie is allowing him to pet her gently when he finds her, an unforeseen turn that the boy recognizes as being extremely special.

“Are these bad guy socks?” he asked when he put on a pair of Transformer socks the other day. Very important to know when you’re four. It sets the tone for the entire day, you see.

Other boy-themed posts:

Rocking out with the new Rock Band set
The trip to Nana and Grandad’s house
The grand finale to the Week of Birthday

Canada Day Concert Redux

It is my very great pleasure to share with you the video taken of the entire Canada Day concert.

Bless Martine and Daniel for shooting the HD footage, for editing it and posting it to YouTube; and even more so for burning all those concert DVDs for the orchestra members! It was a real treat to sit back and enjoy the concert the way the audience did, and as the Blu-Ray player and TV are hooked up to the surround stereo and subwoofer, I got to hear the orchestra in all its glory. (Okay, the church is very echoey, and at times our articulation isn’t as clear as it could have been and those two issues = occasional muddy sound, but hey! There’s sound to be heard!) And I appreciate it all the more because my audio recording was such a miserable mess.

Overall, I am very pleased with my performance in this video. Two things leap out at me. One, I tend to make small faces while I play, mostly tightening of the mouth during different phrases. It’s not in reaction to mistakes, it’s more like… expression. It probably can’t be seen from the audience, but seeing it on screen when the camera was on the celli was very odd. This summer I’m going to work on relaxing the muscles around my mouth when I play. And two, I’ve been working on lowering my right elbow, and damn it, every once in a while it pops up like a chicken wing. Down, elbow! Down! Something else to work on this summer.

There were a couple of places in the video when I waved my hands at the screen and said, “The celli! The CELLI! They have the theme, the violins are just playing a repeated note — pan RIGHT!” And there was the odd place where the camera would pan to the brass… just in time for them to lower their instruments. But those are understandable in a live recording, and really, I’m just thrilled to have the record of the event. Especially on DVD! Merci encore, Martine et Daniel, vos efforts et votre générosité sont vraiment appréciés!

Weekend Roundup

I’ve been low on fibro spoons the past few days. Here’s a brief recap of the weekend.

Friday: I moved my office around. HRH stopped by on his way to get more paint, and helped. The window is now at my back. I like the new layout; curiously, there is more room in the office now. We’ll see if the fresh perspective helps the writing process. At least now people can’t come in the door and watch what I’m doing over my shoulder. I managed to get twenty pages of Orchestrated edited, a minor miracle considering I spent three hours on the first page. I could see that it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t fix it properly, either. Cello lesson Friday night, the last before fall. The Suzuki book 2 review is officially over (yaaaaay!) although my teacher wants me to further polish the last two pieces on our time off. My summer homework: working through Position Pieces vol 1, working the page of exercises she wrote out, reviewing book 1 in thumb position, and looking at the first piece in book 3. Cool links of the day: Ottawa’s NAC Orchestra puts music archive online; and I discovered Kevin Fox, whom I can only describe as a cellist with the voice of Elvis Costello.

Saturday: HRH headed out to do a half-day of painting to finish up Mousme‘s kitchen, so the boy and I made cookies, painted with watercolours, and watched video of Neil Peart. Friday afternoon I had timed a Craiglist query perfectly and snagged a used Rock Band set for the Wii, and Saturday after the boy’s nap we collected it and set it up. The included USB hub, which is supposed to pull power from the Wii when plugged in, doesn’t, so we can only use two peripherals at once till we find a powered hub. As no one is particularly moved to do vocals, this is fine for now.



We need another guitar peripheral so I can play bass while the boy rocks out on guitar (perhaps we won’t plug his in). I’m not enamoured of the fret keys on the guitar; the red one seems to be stubborn on the lower frets, while the green is stubborn on the higher ones. I suppose I’ll get used to it. (I am amused that I refer to them as ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ when they have nothing to do with the frequency of sound produced. Well, they’d be lower or higher if it was a real guitar.)

Saturday night HRH and I were supposed to break the Rock Band set in properly, but I was too tired and he couldn’t really drum while the boy was asleep because the kit sounds exactly like my cousin Iain’s practise pads used to sound when he practised for pipe and drum band (in other words, loud and sharp).

Sunday: We ran errands. Looked for a powered USB hub but couldn’t find one for less than $50 so left it for now; picked up the silencer pads for the drum kit; bought Tal and Kristie’s housewarming present (breadmaker!); bought an ice cream maker for us (something I’ve been on the fence about for two years). Picked up a couple of 4 litre jugs of water because despite promising there would be news on Friday, LaSalle still has us all under a boil-water advisory. Early lunch and nap, then off to beautiful, bucolic Hudson for a Very Important Orchestra Meeting, at which we did a recap of the year and the conductors we’ve evaluated. We chose our new conductor (thereby also approving the substantial fee increase) by unanimous vote. We’d intended the vote to be by secret ballot, but people were just so enthusiastic that it wasn’t necessary. While the orchestra met, the boy ran around and around the gorgeous property, played with the dog and counted frogs in the waterfall/pond. Back home, made dinner, put boy to bed, set Blade up as the Responsible Adult On Site (Now With Rock Band) and headed out to an RPG, which hadn’t met to play in, um, very long. Hurrah for fully-assembled parties, and action finally beginning. Feels like things are underway at last.

I’m so very excited about this new conductor. I think he can do a lot for us, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can be better integrated into the local music scene.

The only bad thing about the weekend (other than being short on spoons) was buying rechargeable batteries that would only work in a proprietary charger not once, but twice. Two different brands; two different sets of tiny tiny fine print. Not amused.

Right; on to editing.