– read and give feedback on a short story (yet another one I’ve had for too long)
And it was a pleasure doing it, too.
You know, I could listen to Invisible’s covers of Folsom Prison Blues and Holiday In Cambodia over and over and over… ah, the magic of playlists.
While we were out dropping Liam off at his grandma’s, naturally the parcel postperson came by with a parcel for me. It’s probably one of the secondhand books I ordered for research, and I’ll have to go pick it up after five.
BUT! When the regular postperson came by, I got my consultant check! Now I can schedule a trip out to the bank, to deposit it and put my bond in the safe deposit box along with some CDs of Liam photos and a computer backup. The mail also brought me a set of coupons for the office supply shop, for insane amounts of mailing labels and sticky notes. I love sticky notes, but I’m still working with the package my father in law gave me a year and a half ago, and after that I have the package from this past Christmas to use up. And really, would I ever use 3700 mailing labels in my life?
As of this morning, all Important Papers have been filed at the Palais de Justice and/or mailed to the respective correct governmental offices to put the final touches on t! and Janice’s wedding. There’s a significant weight off my chest. The entire time I had the papers I was sure something was going to go wrong. I’m still vaguely suspicious; it all seems to have been much too easy.
To do this afternoon:
– 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
– completely restring the cello with the snazzy new Evah Pirazzi strings (yes, I finally got to the luthier this morning to buy the new A)
Last Friday I got 312 words written in Swan Sister while Liam napped, but it looks like I’m not even going to get a chance to open it this afternoon.
So many people I know will appreciate this comment made by Kino Kid about the Da Vinci Code movie:
It’s a hoot to see a film, and watch the hero say, “Quick! We need to get to a library!”
Because you know, that’s the first thing I say in pretty much any situation. Hey, let’s look that up! or, Ooh, I have a book on that!
(Somewhere out there, Blade and Scarlet are killing themselves laughing…)
Let’s start with the day that will require less introspection and time expended in actual writing of the post: Mother’s Day.
It began just after nine o’clock, which was positively the best present I could have been given. We got to bed at around two AM after the wedding, and that whole insomnia thing that’s been hitting me hard for the past while has really been giving me a beating. To wake up and realise that I’d slept almost six hours was wonderful. HRH got up as soon as he heard the baby early in the morning, and they let me sleep in. When I did wake up they came in to say hi, and Liam gave me a painting he’d made for me while I was asleep. He was mildly reluctant to give it up, but eventually it was all mine.
We had brunch, then we left to get flowers and head over to my in-laws’ place for the afternoon. And a lovely afternoon it was, too. We spent some time with neighbours, then ate Alaskan crab legs while Liam napped a very short nap, then we had steak and vegetables and salad. Liam joined us for the main course, and had his first taste of steak. He polished an awful lot of it off, along with zucchini and manadarin oranges from the salad. And he ate it all with his fingers, too. I’ve been mildly concerned about how he hasn’t been interested in eating any non-bread product with his fingers, but it’s like a switch was thrown on Sunday: the only way he’s really happy eating now is by picking things up by himself and putting them into his mouth. Of course, his patience runs out long before he’s eaten the amount that he usually eats when we feed him with a spoon, so we have to be careful.
Sunday night I went out to a concert with Pasley. L’Ensemble Sinfonia was playing the final concert of their season at the Oscar Peterson auditorium in NDG, and since I’ve been starved for live classical music played by someone other than myself, I really wanted to go. I’m so glad we did, because it was simply wonderful. The soloists for Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante were phenomenal, and the orchestra was impressively precise in ther performance of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, a notoriously challenging piece. We were so impressed that we’ve decided to subscribe to next year’s season together, which also solves the problem of missing out on live music.
So all in all, it was a lovely day. I’m lucky to have wonderful family and friends with whom to share days like this.
Something else to engrave on my cerebral tissue:
It’s important to keep writing even if you think you’re writing crap because writers are crappy judges of their own writing.
Matociquala, of course. (I do read lots of other author journals, I do; it’s just that she has a knack for coming up with Punchy Truisms That Resonate.)
It’s like night and day around here. The cold is practically gone (which we knew already) and with the asthma meds allowing him to breathe properly, Liam is back to normal. Now he’s trying to get in as much playing as posible to make up for the past two days.
The nurse at the clinic weighed him last night, and he’s 22 lbs 8 oz. Gah.
And today at dinner, he played peek-a-boo for the first time all on his own. He pulled his lap napkin up over his face, waited until someone said, “Where’s Liam?”, then pulled it down triumphantly and grinned and grinned and grinned when we said, “Peek-a-boo!”
I got an hour of napping done this afternoon, thank goodness, because for various reasons I’ve only slept a total of about fifteen hours over the past five days. (Hello again, insomnia, I have not missed you, now leave.) I’m so looking forward to dinner, a warm bath, watching House MD with a glass of Dad’s Pinot Noir, and then going to bed to sleeeeeep. The cold was threatening to turn into flu this morning, and I’ve been on the edge of it all day, so a really solid night of sleep will help kick it.
I’ve been MIA for a bit, and I know there are things I ought to journal — the wedding, the wedding gig, my first Mother’s Day — but things have been a wee bit busy the past couple of days. Liam’s cold was fine up until yesterday when suddenly his breathing began to be laboured and raspy, and he developed an odd barking cough. Late yesterday afternoon I called our GP but she’s away for a week, so we took him out and tried to find a clinic that was (a) open and (b) would take kids. On our fifth try, we got an appointment at a pediatric clinic for later in the evening. The clinic doctor’s opinion was that he probably had asthma, although it could be bronchitis or pneumonia, and prescribed a liquid Ventolin. If it didn’t improve, he said, take him to the emergency unit at the hospital.
Well, neither HRH nor I slept last night, and Liam didn’t get much shut-eye either, because despite the medication it sounded like every breath was going to be Liam’s last. This morning we packed him up and took him to the hospital. Triage went off without a hitch; it seems that babies with breathing problems jump the queue considerably. (Or maybe it had something to do with Liam trying to lean over in order to kiss the triage nurse.) The hospital doctor’s evaluation was similar and yet different: yep, Liam has asthma, and he explained the whole threshold/resistance to lung irritation thing to us rather well. Something on top of the cold pushed him past his asthma threshold — the trees flowering, the pet store yesterday, a bit of milk going down the wrong tube, whatever — and his little lungs said that enough was enough and seized up in self-defense. He prescribed a course of Ventolin and Flovent in actual inhalers (he was rather scornful of the clinic doctor because apparently no one gives kids liquid Ventolin any more, and it’s much less effective), plus a corticosteroid to deal with the pressure the last of the cold was putting on the pulmonary system. Liam has a funky face-mask thing with a hole in the end for the inhaler, and he’s taken to it like a champ. (It has bears on it. Very cute.)
It was unreal. Thirty seconds after the first shot of Ventolin, his breathing was already easier. After the Flovent, it was like last night never happened. I took him into his room and nursed him for less than five minutes before he was out cold while breathing normally.
So Liam’s latest adventure is over, and now maybe we can all get back to what qualifies as normal around here. Sometime over the next couple of days I’ll get down to journaling about the weekend, especially the wedding, because I need to put it down in words for myself.