Monthly Archives: May 2006

When You Least Expect It

Yes! Car trouble is precisely what I need just now!

If we were scheduled to do anything with you in the next 48 hours or so, consider it off. Two of the cylinders aren’t firing and there’s a dodgy little spark doing odd stuff where it oughtn’t. To the mechanic it goes on Monday.

On the sunnier side of life, it seems that we wrote a song today. Or rather, we finally got down to setting chords to the lyrics that ai731 wrote last (eep) August. So now a vocal melody and guitar solo can follow. Yay us.

Now I have to polish the one I wrote at the beginning of the month so it scans properly, and then we can set chords for that too.

Friday

Thanks to my wonderful mother in law, HRH and I got to play hooky for about four hours today.

X3 was… disappointing. The storyline vanished halfway through the film. Characterisation and motivation were non-existant. The scriptwriters should be shot for what they passed off as dialogue. On the other hand, there was action. A bunch of it, in fact. If I’d cared about any of the characters, I’d have enjoyed the action more.

Other than that, I mailed out a pile o’ stuff and finally got to deposit a cheque. I also tried to put a CD into my safe deposit box only to discover that it didn’t fit, even without the case; the disc is about five millimeters too wide. Argh! Looks like I’ll be buying a flash drive for this instead.

All in all, though, the day was a good one. And we had a bit of sushi for dinner, because it’s been a long hard week — no, a long hard two weeks — for both of us.

Briefly

Those new strings? Awesome! Except the thinner diameter really slices into my fingers. Ouch.

We had to flee the premises yesterday morning at seven-thirty because the floors upstairs were being sanded and the first coat of varnish put on. Drove HRH out to the place he’s painting (one hour and fifteen minutes), Liam and myself to the South Shore (forty-five minutes) to stay at my in-laws’ place (for three hours) before heading back to pick up HRH (one hour) and come home for the night. Even after airing the place out and burning good resin incense, I had a dreadful headache that pills couldn’t kill. Liam’s naps and location comfort zone were all messed up and we all suffered for it. Today they’re buffing and then a second coat of varnish is going on, and we’re not leaving until his first nap is finished; I don’t care how bad it smells. But when he’s awake again we’re headed back to the South Shore for the day. Depending on how everyone feels, HRH and I may leave him with his grandma for a couple of hours and go see X3. And I’ve got a pile of mail to go out, too, so we’ll have to hit a post office.

Book Roundup

I’ve been inhaling books lately, it seems. A lot of that has to do with the insomnia thing. In the past two weeks I’ve read The Wyrd of Willowmere by Alison Baird (that was pretty much overnight), Septimus Heap: Magyk by Angie Sage (the basic story is fine, but it has the irritating idiosyncracy of capitalising spell names and setting them in boldface, argh), An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (which was far and away better than A Dream of Scipio, probably due to the separation of narratives instead of interweaving them the way Scipio did), Four Seasons of Mojo by Stephanie Bird, Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King (also pretty much overnight, and Mousme was right, poor Russell), reread Travels With My Cello by Julian Lloyd Webber, and tore through The Serpent on the Crown by Elizabeth Peters (also pretty much overnight).

The result of this binge is that my stack of books to read has been brutally decimated. I’m down to a YA book that I put down half-read a couple of months ago (yawn) and a Dave Duncan book Ceri lent to me a while back. But there’s a new Jim Butcher out in paperback that I can pick up this week (Harry Dresden, yay!), and I should have a couple of non-fic research books arriving soon as well.

Quick Weekend Recap

We are so very, very tired of the rain. HRH has been cranky because he’s been working outside in it all week, Liam’s been cranky because he’s been stuck inside, and I’ve been cranky because their crankiness has been getting on my nerves. There was a brief period of sun over on the South Shore mid-afternoon when we dropped Liam off at his grandparents’ house today, and it did wonders to lift the general depression, even if it was only for a little while.

We did an elevation ritual this afternoon and because it started late we had to race off to pick up the baby as soon as the ritual was over, which meant we didn’t get to stay for the dinner afterwards. It was disappointing, because we’d really been looking forward to sitting down and sharing time with everyone involved. It sounds like the Rocky Road ice cream pie I made went over well, though. I’ll have to rely on other peoples’ reports.

Yesterday was a fabulous magic of cooking class, too, possibly the most successful one we’ve done so far.

I finally had the opportunity to restring the cello tonight (I so want to say “I restrang the cello”). These new steel strings are so thin! And they haven’t gone out of tune since I put them on! Steel strings are very stable, but I’ve never used them, because generally they’re a lot brighter than synthetic or gut core strings and I prefer a rich mellow tone from my strings. We’ll see how they settle in over the week. The tension is very different as well, so I’ll have to adjust my playing both at orchestra and at band.

A warm bath and bed are in order, I think. The gloom and rain have been sapping my energy.

And Onward, Part 2

– read and give feedback on a short story (yet another one I’ve had for too long)
– finish reading book for review, and write the review

All the review needs is another quick read-through before I mail it off tonight.

I don’t think I’m going to get to restring the cello, either, because I still have other mom-type stuff that has to be done before we leave to pick up Liam.