Category Archives: Spirituality

Weekend Review: Saturday, Pre-Solstice Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend Roundup: Yule Fair Edition!

Well, more than the Yule Fair happened, but this helps me remember which weekend it was when I scan post titles.

These weekend roundups are getting so full and so damn long that I’m going to start breaking them into two parts just so I don’t end up piling every category I’ve got onto them… next weekend, that is, because if I break it here the Saturday one is still a huge chunk and the Sunday one is two paragraphs. Despite how full it was, there was still plenty of time to sit and relax so it feels like we actually had a weekend instead of two days jam-packed with rushing around. Not sure how that happened, but there you are.

Friday was our trip to Ariadne Knits to install ourselves on the chesterfields and knit for about three hours straight. It was glorious. The new layout and shelving are both great (this is one of those magic spaces where the more they put in the bigger it feels, oddly) and MA received our cupcakes with great enthusiasm. I’d carefully packed Devon’s wrap to work on, but when I got there I realised that I’d forgotten to pack the chart I’d done for it (not chart, exactly, more like six pages of every row typed out so I could cross each one off as I completed it; look, there are two different repeats going on simultaneously at different intervals, okay?). Fortunately I’d packed another Yule gift that needs to get done (no details, the recipient reads the journal!) so I knitted on that and got it to about 75% done. My posture while knitting sucks, so I had to get up and wander around periodically to stretch my back. I did not, in fact, succumb to the lure of trying a Hound spindle on one of these walkabouts, thereby saving myself from a $50 impulse buy, but I did buy a $4 sample pack of Falkland fibre (oooh, soft and cushy but less sproingy than merino) in order to try the resident Hitchhiker wheel. I hadn’t been sure it was operational or just decor, but it does function. As she handed it to me MA mentioned that the reason she hadn’t bonded with it was because it was a bit flippy, and when I started spinning with it, wow, was she ever right. I had to treadle relatively aggressively to avoid the jam and stall that the leather connection between the footman and the wheel ran into every few revolutions, and yes, without warning the flyer and bobbin would suddenly flip and start winding the opposite direction. Very frustrating indeed. I played with the entire range of tension but it didn’t have much effect. MA said that she’d wanted to love it, but it just didn’t work for her. I know there are people who rave about it, and I think it’s unfair that something so cute and adorable doesn’t spin perfectly for everyone. On the other hand, setting it up was totally intuitive, as was adjusting it; the design really is ingenious. It’s an excellent example of why you should try a wheel before you buy it, though. I’d have been frustrated and heartbroken if I had ordered a Hitchhiker as my first wheel and hadn’t been able to use it. (Although knowing what the demand for them and resale value is like, I’d have been able to sell it without losing much money and look at other wheels.) I also bought the copy of the winter issue of Spin-Off that they’d put aside for me.

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, where we worked the pieces for which I was playing new lines. Last group class I volunteered to move from the first line of ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ to the second line in order to keep it on the programme. We’ve been working on this piece for an entire year. It wasn’t ready for last Christmas so it was bumped to the spring, and it wasn’t ready then either so it was rescheduled for this Christmas. And then we lost one of our musicians, which left our youngest cellist on this piece alone on the second line, and he needs someone steady to keep him on beat. I love this piece, especially in this arrangement, and we’ve all worked so hard that I didn’t want to see it cut. I’ve worked hard on the top line, too; it’s the melody, and it’s got some soaring bits and challenging shifts that I’ve really polished. But cutting it would disappoint everyone, so I stepped up and said I’d move to the second line if it meant keeping it. The other song I’ve moved lines on is V’la l’bon vent (do click through to the YouTube video of the McDades singing it, holy wow), a French Canadian winter song that I only heard for the first time this fall when I’d been assigned the piece. Our arrangement was done by my teacher’s father, and it has a lovely little swirling wind theme in the second part. It’s a call and response song that overlaps, so the timing is everything, and after learning the timing of the top line having to recast the timing for the second line, even though the line is simple, is breaking my brain a bit. When I played my part of the duet recital piece M and I are doing I had the very encouraging comment that my teacher really had nothing else to tell me. We could, of course, tweak and finesse till the cows come home, but with a week till recital it’s as solid as it needs to be. I am so happy about this. One more duet rehearsal on Tuesday, then the dress rehearsal on Saturday morning, and the recital is next Sunday.

I came home to collect the boys, and we went out for hot dogs and french fries for lunch before heading downtown to Le Melange Magique for the Yule Fair and my panel discussion. There was terrible traffic thanks to the the entrance to the highway leading down town being closed, so we detoured and I got there later than I’d wanted to, but others were a bit late, too. The panel was fabulous! We had eight of the contributors there, plus a few fair attendees, and we moved the chairs so we were all sitting in a circle with everyone mixed up so it became a round table discussion about the issues people brought up under the publicly-identifying-as-Pagan heading. It was fantastic. I loved how people asked questions of one another during the intro/quick summary of how they got to where they are, because it led to sharing other ideas and information. We could easily have gone for another hour.

The boy wasn’t napping, obviously, so after a bit of socialising and signing and stopping to buy handmade soap and bath treats from my favourite supplier Essentials (whose proprietor gave a broken Tub Twirler bath ball to the boy; he decided that night he had to have a bath so he could try it out… we have new Essentials fan!) we headed home to give HRH a break from corralling him and to save the rest of the world from the meltdown that might occur (to the boy, not HRH). I managed to miss saying goodbye to many people, and I didn’t even get to say hi to Judika. It all goes so quickly and there are so many people that it’s hard to keep track of who and when and where.

Back home we did a major overhaul of the kitchen, something that’s been on the schedule for a while. HRH’s parents replaced their dining table and sideboard this past summer, and we inherited their old set. The sideboard has a hutch and replaced both the rickety narrow table we had along one wall that supported all my cookbooks, my tea, and the robot baker, and as we sorted through everything we realised that it could house what was being stored in/on the old microwave cart we were using to store liquor and the ever-present Thing Drawer/Cupboard. So we spent a lot of the day sorting through old papers and fuses and elastic bands, moving furniture, recycling phone books and old vet bills, and figuring out how everything would fit in the best configuration in the sideboard. (The silverware chest! The crystal bowls! They all have an actual home now!) HRH located and hung the corner shelf for the phone and the pencil cup, as that was the other thing the microwave cart held. The room looks much bigger now, and we feel like we’ve leveled up in the adult world yet again, as both our families had sideboards and hutches while we were growing up and so it’s a benchmark of sorts.

And then the boy and I decided to bake gingersnap cookies from the latest issue of Fine Cooking, and he was very helpful indeed, cracking the egg and adding all the ingredients I measured out for him, and even turning the stand mixer on to blend things. He rolled out the dough and used the cookie cutters (trees and stars!) and put the cookie sheet in the oven, but made the mistake of touching the rack with a bare finger to push it back in (I was the one handling the oven, so it was unexpected). The dough is easy and cookies are delicious, especially if you put them in the oven to reheat and crisp up a bit before snacking on them a day later. You really do have to chill the dough, though, otherwise it smooshes all over when you try to lift the shapes onto the baking sheet, but try to explain that to a four-year-old. We baked half the batch; the rest of the dough is in the fridge for another day.

Sunday morning we went out right at nine and did the week’s grocery shopping, and we were home by ten, giving us the rest of the day to relax or get various house things done. HRH vacuumed while the boy and I played our cellos, and the boy wrote a song called ‘Blackie Loves Christmas.’ He told me the words, I wrote them down, and then together we wrote the music. It is an official though brief Christmas song, and he has been told that if he likes, we can sing it for the Preston-LeBlancs at our Yule gathering and singalong. After his nap the boy and his father put up the Christmas lights and the garland outside. We planned out the rest of the month, too. We usually put our tree up on the Solstice, but that isn’t sensible this year as we’re leaving on the 23rd. In order to have time to enjoy it, we’ll be buying it and putting it up in two rounds this Thursday and Friday. Putting it up so early really feels odd. We’re planning to take it down the night before we leave, too, so it’s not left as a hazard for the cats and Blade, who is house-sitting.

I started spinning the Ozark silk roving I bought for another Yule gift, and it’s not like spinning the tussah silk at all. I was warned that I’d have to fluff it up, so I did, and I split it pretty finely, but there are areas that are dyed more heavily than others and they’re a bit crunchy, so drafting kind of stalls there. There are places where the end of the staple is very obvious in the single. I wasn’t as comfortable spinning it; I really preferred the tussah. It wasn’t till I woke up this morning that I realised I hadn’t predrafted any of it: I just fluffed it, split it, and spun right from the ends, drafting and fluffing a bit more as I went. When I spin the other ounce today I’ll predraft and see if that helps. I may try combing a bit of it to see what that does, too. If worst comes to worst I can buy the other 2oz of roving in this colourway at Ariadne, if yesterday’s single isn’t usable.

Dinner last night was roast pork (with a dijon/maple/herb glaze and roast baby potatoes, om nom nom). And then it snowed just before I went to bed.

The end.

In Which She Is Pretty Darned Happy

There was a glorious sunrise this morning, all apricots and burnished peaches and corals. It was slightly overcast, so when the sun rose high enough to be seen over the horizon it illuminated the underside of the clouds, so there were pinks and peach clouds floating in front of the overcast background, and a slice of brilliant glowing colour right along the underside of the overcast sky, and beyond that, bright blue. If there’s something good about the sun rising later at this time of year, this is it: we’re all awake to see it work its magic.

I got fiftyish pages edited yesterday. I’m taking out em dashes, rearranging words, tightening sentences up, removing things that create atmosphere but do it with too many words when I can do something to similar effect within the actual scene itself, weaving it into the action. I’m also picking up small inconsistencies (place names, timeline) and fixing them. Karine and I shared a lovely sushi lunch, too, after a couple of false starts (the place we once ordered lunch from closed, the place HRH and I defaulted to wasn’t open for lunch). O’Sushi (the name amuses me) makes decent sushi: firm rice that isn’t too sticky, velvety fish and crisp veggies, very fresh-tasting. The only thing missing was a bit of zing, so next time I’ll know to add wasabi to all the maki and nigiri (I usually avoid wasabi). Nothing outstanding, but very solid for an order-out place.

Today is more laundry, cupcake-baking and -icing, bread-baking, and then a trip to Ariadne Knits with Ceri to knit and nibble the aforementioned cupcakes (not only is it Ceri’s birthday, but it was Ariadne Knits’ birthday three days ago! Our favourite LYS is two!). I suspect I will actually step up and try out one of the Hound Design spindles the shop got instead of just petting them and weighing them in my hands, which may be dangerous. An afternoon off will be lovely. Not that it’s entirely off; I have some serious Yule gift work to accomplish while there

Tomorrow morning it’s cello, and then at 12:45 I’m moderating an hour-long Out of the Broom Closet panel with eight to ten of the local contributors to the anthology at the local Yule Fair hosted by Le Melange Magique. The boy has asked to be there, and he has been told that it depends on how his morning goes.

Sigh

Great all-day co-coven workshop yesterday, despite three people missing due to illness, work schedules, or unavoidable extracurricular responsibilities. Today? Hello, full-blown cold and fibro flare-up. I can’t even lie down without the body hurting, but I don’t have the energy to do much while upright. HRH took the boy to monthly playgroup, thank goodness, although he really didn’t want to. I know he’ll enjoy himself once he gets there.

This afternoon is the group cello class, and then tonight is the monthly steampunquian RPG. I know everyone will understand tonight if I just kind of sit there and listen. The cello class is what’s going to be the challenge, but I also know that once I’m there and in the middle of it adrenaline will carry me. It will take a day or two to recover from the weekend, though.

My LYS e-mailed me yesterday to tell me that the winter issue of Spin-Off had arrived, even though I hadn’t asked them to put one aside for me. I love them. When I was last in to place that big order for fibre and a bobbin, MA said that I could come in and use the store’s drum carder any time I wanted to mess about with it. I suspect she’s figured out that I am easily sucked in by new toys if casually left alone with them and allowed to talk myself into acquiring them. (I have neither the space or the money for a drum carder, or the need for it right now. Nobody worry.)

I officially finished the first skein of yarn on my goddaughter’s wrap yesterday, and wound the second into a centre-pull ball and joined it to the WIP. I’ll knit up what I’ve got then wash and block it to see how big it is, but I suspect that due to the weight of the yarn it won’t open up as much as I want it to. Which means, of course, that I will have to acquire and spin up another two ounces. Despite having swatched with the yarn and the needle size I’m using, I think I should have gone up a needle size to account for the alarming amount of blooming the yarn is doing while being knit. Six (or what might possibly become eight) ounces for a shoulder capelet/wrap/hood really seems like too much. I should have spun it finer, or perhaps the test yarn I made was plied more tightly. Handspun yarn blooms sneakily as you knit, even after you’ve set the twist and thwacked it. Oh well; lesson learned. It’s a learning curve, right?

I need more Tylenol.

List of Things Accomplished on a Friday

schedule set in stone and released
reminders sent out
ritual polished
(and retyped)
final research completed
which enabled
workshop lecture notes to be fully written out
incenses blended: one, two, three
grocery list made
laundry done
two loaves of bread made
(now awaiting eggs and more flour
to attain cinnamon bun dough
that shall rise overnight in the dark chill of
the fridge)
cello played (though I practiced
none of my assigned work)
various small things
looked up, followed through,
checked, and confirmed

to unwind,
I spun bamboo (for the first time)
not as pleasant an experience
as it ought to have been

dinner (homemade pizza) was
a trial
(not the pizza, the dining experience)

I would be looking forward to this weekend
so much more
if every single waking moment wasn’t scheduled

and it’s not even December yet.

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.