Monthly Archives: November 2007

A Discourse Upon Vehicles And Food (With A Multitude Of Parenthetical Remarks)

This morning, I opened the front curtains to see the minivan next door parked on an odd angle in the driveway. So odd, in fact, that upon closer examination we saw that the back end of the van had slipped sideways on the ice, coming to rest against the back bumper of our car.

HRH inched our car forward and cranked the wheel, easing it back and out past the crooked van bit by bit, manoeuvring past the upstairs neighbour’s car on the other side. He parked it across the street for me and left to catch the bus to work.

When the next-door neighbour came out he stared at his van and walked all around it, as if he suspected someone of hitting it. Then he looked across the street at our car. I wish he’d looked out his own window half an hour earlier and seen his vehicle leaning on our back bumper; things would have been a lot clearer.

Anywhats, the boy had a lovely outing this morning with his caregiver (during which, I am told, he happily sighed ‘Oh…kissmas!’ while gazing at a Budweiser advert), the car now has the winter tires on (take that, winter!… except it’s a balmy five degrees above zero now), I have (useful) stocking stuffers for Sparky, as well as the new ornament for my annual ornament exchange with HRH, and one for the boy, too. I also treated myself to a Happy Meal on the way home, one of the approximately two McDonald’s meals I have in a year. (Did you know that one cheeseburger — a plain cheesburger, not a Quarter Pounder or anything larger — constitutes one-third of your daily recommended sodium intake? Yeah. Bleargh. Why I wanted it, I do not know.)

While we’re on the topic of (quasi) food, last night I made a huge pork roast that was juicy and tender. It was so successful, in fact, that the boy actually picked pieces of pork out of his bowl and ate them, along with a lot of gravy and corn (kernel by kernel, of course). This is huge, because he doesn’t like meat very much. And I did what Nigella suggests in one of her books: I cut the fat off before I pulled the roast out, put it in a separate pan and roasted it alone while the pork was resting in order to make crackling. I have been craving crackling for about seven years now. And after eating a piece the size of a pink school eraser, I’m done for the next seven years again. Instead of warming the corn on the stovetop or in the microwave I tossed it in a Corningware dish and slipped it in the oven while I roasted the crackling. If I’d been thinking I would have done the same with the mashed potatoes to make the top crisp.

We did an elevation ritual last night that was a lot of fun and felt really good. I’m realising that shouldering a lot of ritual work over the past few years has really burned me out. I enjoy ritual with others, but being the one to come up with and/or lead a disproportionate number of them takes away from that enjoyment because I’m busy facilitating everyone else’s experience. It’s always nice to participate in someone else’s ritual for a change.

Concert Recap

This is going to be short one. Why? Because it was a good concert, nothing went horribly wrong, and I walked out feeling fine. No deep observations or life-changing moments; it was just a good concert.

The really noteworthy thing was an audience member standing up as the final applause died, asking us to play the ‘just beautiful’ second movement of the Haydn symphony again. We played it for him. It was a lovely way to end the evening.

I was somewhat concerned about the audience’s potential reception of the Peer Gynt suite, because it’s one of those stereotypical pieces of classical music — everyone’s heard Morning and In the Hall of the Mountain King, after all, and has an opinion about it whether they consciously know it or not. In the end what seems to have happened is what I was hoping for: everyone knows these pieces from recordings or as cartoon soundtracks, and so hearing a full orchestra play them is a completely different experience. It’s much more complex and rich. And they got to hear one of my favourite pieces from the suite, Ã…se’s Death, which is beautiful and very moving. There was music committed in that particular bit. (There was music committed all over the place last night, really; Valse Triste, for example.)

The clarinet soloist blew everyone away (no pun intended). He’s fourteen. Yikes.

There was a minor kerfuffle in our cello section after the warm-up, and it’s got me thinking about the interpretation of the word ‘amateur’. In my mind, being an amateur doesn’t mean you get to show any less respect to your fellow musicians, the conductor, or the audience than a professional would or does. Even as an amateur one approaches music and one’s colleagues seriously, with consideration and commitment. Being an amateur is no excuse for laziness. I think there may be more to say on the subject, but it needs to brew in my mind for a while.

The emergency-glued bow frog survived the night, thank the gods. I did the dress rehearsal with the heavy bow, and I hated it. My principal looked at it and told me that the main problem was the weight distribution, so she suggested wrapping an elastic band around the frog and tucking a quarter inside to help redistribute the weight. It helped a bit, but I really do prefer my main bow. I kept the heavy bow with me in case the emergency fix fell apart in concert, though. I’m somewhat afraid to get the frog replaced on my main bow, as I don’t know what it will do to the weight or balance of it.

Other noteworthy things that happened which were not music-related: I got to meet Tallis (who was beautifully behaved), and we received the chocolate mint Girl Guide cookies we’d ordered.

Thank you to Jeff, Paze, Devon, Tallis, Ceri, Scott, Daphne, and HRH for coming out to support us, and to Blade for babysitting. (Poor HRH only arrived halfway through the Peer Gynt suite and two movements before the break, as the boy had had a late nap and thus his bedtime was late too.)

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 7,551
New words today: 2,511

I originally ended at 6,721 to yield another 1,682 word day, but that was too much of a coincidence, so I did a short expansion on spoken magic and ended up with 6,905. That gave me a day’s total of 1,866 and I said heck, I can add another 44 words to make an even 1,900. So I did, talking about the use and care of cast iron, and I just kept going, because I might as well finish the section. Of course, that left me fifty words below 7,000, so I did it again. And then again when my daily total was 2,487, because 2,500 looks so much better.

Heh.

So much for stopping at four o’clock to give myself some time off before I have to go make supper. But an extra eight hundred words in half an hour? I’ll take that any day, thanks.

(Twelve percent done! Woo-hoo!)

The Good And The Bad

HRH found the combo brush/scraper in the garage. Yay! Just in time for umpteen centimetres of snow!

We have a Monday appointment to have our snow tires put on. More yay!

WHY are there so few new words in this book? I have been working ALL DAY. There are references all over the floor! I have tracked down historical information from everywhere! I have expanded incomplete phrases! Okay, there’s a tenth of a book here already, but it feels like there should be more.

That’s it; I’m working till four and then I am stopping.

Kissmas

Late last week, Liam came up to me and put his arms around me, saying, “I love you, Mama.”

This is a big thing, because while he has done this with prompting he’s never initiated it all on his own before. Over the past week he’s done it frequently, and it does wonders for the morale, especially coupled with the recent increase in spontaneous kissing.

And in other kissing-related news, a neighbour across the street became rather overzealous and put their Christmas lights up along their outside banisters last weekend. Liam got out of the car last Monday evening and stopped dead.

“Mama, what that?” he said. “Kissmas! That Kissmas!” he answered himself. Then he stepped out of the way of someone coming along the sidewalk ( “Uh-oh, people on the sidewalk”), and as she passed he turned and called after her, “HAPPY KISSMAS, PEOPLE!”

Two-thirds of the way through November and my son is already wishing people the joy of the upcoming season. Gah.

But… Kissmas. I love that the way Liam puts it, it’s a festival revolving around kissing. Not a bad idea at all, when it comes down to it.

Even cuter, he sang me his very own Kissmas song yesterday, which sounds suspiciously like Happy Birthday but goes: “Happy Kissmas…. to you…. Happy Kissmas, Happy Kissmas to you!”

This holiday season is going to be a lot of fun, methinks. This year he has figured out what presents are, after all. Come the beginning of December we’ll do a holiday collage, with a new picture or object to stick to it every day at breakfast, a twist on the Advent calendar thing. I’ll see if I can interest him in making paper chains, too.

Friday Morning

It feels odd to be sitting down to work at eight-thirty. HRH took the car to work today, dropping the boy off at his grandma’s on the way. Usually I’m not at my desk before ten o’clock. I like it. I may ask that this become a regular thing on Liam’s grandma days.

There’s nice light in here this morning. Although it’s overcast, there are lazy snowflakes drifting in the air, and what light there is is bouncing off the snow on the ground. Yesterday’s freezing rain completely coated the maple tree out front, and every single twig was coated in a glistening sheath. When we went out this morning to put Liam in the car, the breeze brushed the branches and I heard clicks and cracks, a sound that I haven’t heard in months. The poor blue cedar in the corner of the back yard is equally frozen, and already bending towards the snow-covered ground. Every year it happens earlier, and every year we think we’ve lost it to the weight of an ice storm. We’ve tried tying it to the telephone pole behind it, propping it up with wood… we’ll see if the roots actually stay in the ground this year, and if so, for how long.

Liam and I made our first loaf of bread in the new bread machine (or, if one reads the French on the box, the ‘robot baker’), and it’s delicious. The texture is nice and even throughout, not too light, and not too crumbly. The crust is even, too. It’s good to know that I can bake one or two of these a week, that it will be fresh right up until it’s eaten (yesterday’s is half-gone already) and not preservative-ridden. I like knowing exactly what goes into the things I cook. My one regret is that the smell of baking bread doesn’t permeate the house, but if I’m craving that then I can always take the dough out of the machine after the second rise and bake it in the oven instead. I’ll try a whole-wheat version next, and buy some seeds to make a flax-sesame-poppyseed version too.

There was a Liam-related accident with my cello bow yesterday, resulting in a snapped frog. I have another bow but it’s heavier, and as I haven’t practised this set of music with it I’m concerned that it will adversely affect my performance or cramp my hand. Some of the Grieg requires a light touch, for example. HRH is bringing home some Krazy Glue tonight, so we’ll try to fix it that way and I’ll see how it works tonight at the dress rehearsal. If it doesn’t work the frog can always be professionally replaced, but that’s not going to happen by tomorrow night. The temporary solution doesn’t have to hold beyond the end of tomorrow’s concert. I’ll bring both bows, just in case.

Research books for the hearthcraft book are starting to arrive, and there are more second-hand ones to order today. Except I’m currently watching my outgoing cash flow very, very closely at the moment. One of the problems with doing freelance work is that you do the work and get paid at an unspecified time later, on someone else’s schedule. It makes for a nice surprise when the cheque finally lands in the mailbox, but the watching of the mail until that point isn’t as much fun.