Monthly Archives: May 2006

The Moment Of Truth

Guess what just arrived?

Now I get to sit down with it and see it as a real book! After, of course, I slap a sticky note on the front of one and put it on my shelf next to the spellcraft book and the Wicca book, to use as a reading and reference copy:

There’s an ungrateful part of my mind that’s saying to the satisfied part, I just got rid of the other box of author’s copies on the office floor, and now I have another one that won’t fit in the cupboard. Would that all my problems were as miniscule!

Garden!

I have just returned from eating dinner on the back deck, cooked on the new barbecue. (Thank you, whoever left the brochettes in the fridge; they were delightful.)

HRH spent the early part of the afternoon overhauling the gardens, because it was such a beautiful day. The mass of hostas that were growing along the side fence have been transplanted to various spots around the house. We took a trip out to price lumber and lattice to build the new side fence, and then to the nursery to buy our first set of plants. I now have rosebushes, lavender, and other herbs in the back corner. The huge creeping vine is gone from the back porch as well, as the trunk was beginning to split the floorboards. I think we’ll plant a clematis or two down below to replace it, to wind up the deck and along the side fence.

It’s beginning to feel somewhat like summer. It will feel more like summer once we’ve put in flats and flats of flowers, but we’re not going to do that until we’re certain the overnight temperature won’t dip close to the zero mark. I’m not tempting Nature like that, not when it’s done it twice in the past five years before Victoria Day.

Sunday

We spent a fabulous afternoon with the ADZO family yesterday. They fed us, which was unexpected but not unwelcome because they always create wonderful food, and Liam got to play with TAZ and her toys, and in general we all got to relax and share good company. It was remarkable to see Liam interacting with someone who is seven months older than he is; we can see how advanced he is in some respects, and the areas in which he’s definitely an eleven-month-old. He had an excellent nap in the morning and one in the early afternoon, and those allowed him to be sociable all afternoon and let us stay till past six o’clock. When we got home, he had some milk and passed out for twelve hours, with no wakings.

(Yes, we’re rather happy about it as well. Plus he went down for all naps and bedtime without a fuss. Two days of stress seem to have smoothed things over. Cross your fingers.)

We got to share in a first at the park: TAZ climbed the stairs to the slide, sat down at the top, then pushed off and slid down all by herself for the very first time. Liam’s first was much less impressive, but something to celebrate nonetheless: he climbed up the single stair from the sunken playroom into the dining room all by himself. And it looked at one point like he was playing peek-a-boo with TAZ across the wooden chest, because he was trying to mirror her actions of bending down behind it to hide and standing up to reveal herself.

Liam also consumed the most Cheerios I’ve ever seen him stuff into his mouth over dinner. Of course, a lot of them ended up in the seat of the high chair, but he ate tons of them despite that.

Once Liam’s morning and afternoon naps are solid (and they seem to be settling in well) I’ll be able to count on two blocks of an hour to an hour and a half of work per day. Oh: and Mousme is writing a swan story based on the Bonny Swans folk ballad too! I am very amused, and also very excited. I opened my Swan Sister file the other day, but not a single word was added because of the Invisible mp3s on the playlist. It was all good, though, because I played the cello instead, and Liam woke up fifteen minutes later, so I would have just been settling into the writing flow when I’d have had to stop.

I’ve been invited to a local BNI meeting in a couple of weeks, so I have to overhaul my business cards and recreate my handout literature. It’s interesting that this invitation came from someone whom I’ve never met (HRH has spoken to her on the phone once), who thought of me off the top of her head, and at a time when I’m ready to start taking a couple of freelance jobs on again. I’m looking forward to it.

A Good Thing

There are two more positive reviews up on Amazon, one for Power Spellcraft and one for Solitary Wicca. Each of them focuses on something I tried hard to do in the book reviewed, namely to be non-path-specific and to not preach love and light in Spellcraft, and to encourage the reader to modify and write their own rituals to express themselves in Wicca.

I feel all warm inside, like I did something right.

(I know, I know. But still, positive feedback from people I’ve never met, reassuring me that I got my point across: It’s a good thing.)

‘Not What We Give, But What We Share’

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who came out to the potluck BBQ t!-and-ai731-are-getting-married party last night. Tal, HRH and I truly appreciate your time and energy. The food was wonderful, and the company most excellent. I’m only sorry that I missed a lot of the party due to sitting in the baby’s room trying to get him to/back to sleep, or sitting in my bedroom next to the monitor so that I could hear him if he woke up yet again. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the guests who wandered in over the course of the evening to hang out with me and bring me drinks and lemon buns. (At one point the entire membership of Invisible was in my bedroom with me, save for the bassist. Of course, the bassist has been in other bedrooms of mine plenty of times, and besides, it was his own getting-married-party going on in the other rooms.)

Ironically enough, Liam woke up at eleven once everyone was gone. Go figure. Maybe it was the cessation of white noise. But apart from the initial rocky two hours of very-hard-to-get-him-to-sleep, he only woke up at eleven and again at five-thirty, each time for about fifteen minutes for soothing, then another five or ten minutes of grumpy complaining alone before falling asleep. That’s an improvement already.

We now have a plethora of hot dog buns in the fridge. No hot dogs, but plenty of buns.

HRH picked up a new barbecue yesterday morning in honour of the event, as we realised that there were between twenty and thirty RSVPs and there was no way that our mini camp BBQ was going to handle that kind of dinner traffic. We’ve been wanting a full-size one for some time, of course, and we found a really great one on sale for just under one hundred dollars, down from its usual price of one-forty-ish. Hurrah!

We also had a wedding rehearsal yesterday, and it’s going to be wonderful. t! poked gentle fun at me for getting choked up when I read one of my lines, but I think I have every right to get teary because it’s one of the lines he read at my own wedding six and a half years ago. The circle is now complete. Or something like that.

Band practice Saturday morning confirmed that the wedding gig will be more of the non-stress event we want it to be. We’ve temporarily removed two of our songs from the set in order to rework and polish them some more before reintroducing them in the fall.

Today: a lovely social afternoon with the ADZO family (once we ascertain the time)!