Monthly Archives: December 2007

New Day

Today: bright sun, then snow, sun, snow. Just above the freezing mark, too. Beautiful.

Yesterday was A Very Bad Day, all of it happening after 3 PM. The burn on my left hand from a splash of hot oil caused by a can opener being thrown into a pan of frying ground beef seems to have been relatively neutralized by the lavender oil I put on it, but the right foot damaged by an overturned kitchen chair is causing me problems today. It was a two-year-old day. Enough said.

Today I had intended to print out a two hundred page document, but I have just realized that I have to go through it and accept all the damned edits I did in Track Changes first. So it has to be put off yet again, and it’s already been rescheduled over and over for the last two weeks for a variety of reasons. Grr. At least today I’ll get to switch back and forth between the hearthcraft book and this other document as I get stuck on one and need a break. And it will be nice to take a final look at the other document as well, as I’ve been second-guessing my edits on it. Rereading it will help refresh my memory and help me get in the right headspace for the associated cover letter, too.

Thirty Months Old!

As he grows older these updates are becoming very hard to do in the way I used to do them, so I’m making it easier on myself just noting things down and doing a kind of photo album instead: fewer deep observations, tighter prose. I miss the slightly more emotional tone, but I just can’t capture it the same way as he ages. I think it has something to do with how he’s becoming more and more of his own person. He moves me just as deeply, but in ways that are harder to define in a monthly post. I’ll also link posts I’ve done throughout the month with Liam-associated milestones or observations for reference.

So, here we go.

Liam no longer walks to the car; he ‘walks in a snow!’. And when the world is so very white and so very fluffy, one cannot blame him for recategorizing the snow along the way as more important than getting in the car to go wherever we’re going. He keeps trying to pick up chunks of snow on the driveway, to bring them into the car or into the house, whichever way it is that we’re heading. Fortunately the chunks have always self-destructed before he reaches his destination, so we haven’t yet had to have the talk about the ephemeral nature of snowballs. He is very solicitous of my safety outside too: “Careful, Mama, it slippy,” he tells me with very precise delivery. He is fascinated with snowplows and snow removal vehicles (but then, who isn’t?). And he keeps wanting to eat handfuls of snow, which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t trying to pick it up off the driveway.

Lately he has jumping about like a mad thing, and both feet leave the ground. This is a great improvement over the jumping motion with the body, knees bent and all, but without the departure of soles from floor as he did a few months ago when he started ‘jumping’. Last month one foot got off the ground; now both feet do. Liam jumps about ‘like a kangaroo!’ with immense enthusiasm. His co-ordination is improving daily, probably due to the challenge of moving about in snow gear. He goes up and down stairs with ever more confidence, and improves at climbing in and out of the car daily. He can whip a kitchen chair over to the counter and handle things on the surface a bit too well now for comfort. And he brushes his teeth on his own remarkably well, although HRH still needs to do a quick follow-up to make sure everything is clean.

When he trips or accidentally whacks his hand against a doorframe or some such thing, he wails — no tears, just the wails — then kisses his hand or his own knee and keeps on going. Mother-makes-it-better kisses are already being phased out. Soon I will be redundant. Also, I am no longer allowed to dance or move in any kind of rhythmic fashion when music is playing. I should have seen it coming when I was forbidden to sing.

His new favourite film is The Cat Returns. Current favourite books include Ten Apples Up On Top! (for which he insists on having an apple to balance in his head, then eats it while reading the other books before bed), The Tale of Tom Kitten, and The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Liam counts things incessantly: orange slices, the ducks in the bath, stairs, chicken nuggets… We’re hearing the use of ‘mine’ and ‘my’ a lot all of a sudden. The need to classify things as belonging to someone has become very important. “That my cat,” he says of Maggie, “that my chair, that my kitchen, that my mama, that my dada; that Mama’s book, that Dada’s boots.” Also frequently heard is the exclamation of “OH NO! ROBOTS!”, which kills me every time, especially when he’s playing with his trains. Evidently robots are the antagonists of choice in Liam’s play world. The other new saying is “Let me be!”, used when we try to get him dressed or up and moving when he’s doing something.

Firsts this month include dinner at an adult friends’ house with no other children, during which he behaved himself well (thank you, Ceri and Scott), and the introduction to the joys of a ball pit (for which we thank you again, ADZO).

He got a pair of new boots last week. He’s wearing size 3X to 4 tops, size 7.5 to 8 shoes, and size 3 pants now. He’s sleeping ten to eleven hours at night, and has on average a two-hour nap in the afternoon. Liam has his two and a half year old appointment with the doctor at her new location on Thursday, so we’ll have formal measurement of weight and height and so forth then. We know he’s over thirty pounds, and guess he’s around 33. I’ll update this post with the particulars when I’ve got them.

Pertinent posts about Liam this past month:

First day of playing in significant snowfall, and dinner with Ceri and Scott
Liam tries to pluralize
Liam requests a song of Mama
Kissmas and spontaneous expressions of love

And now… more photos!

And the thoughtful/serene/peaceful photo to wrap it all up:

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 12,398
New words today: 2,129

Potpourri, potpourri, potpourri. Who knew I’d have so much to say about it. Well, all right, I made point-form observations about household gods and spinning, too.

I’m going to go simmer a cinnamon stick, a few cloves, and some orange peel now. It ought to smell a lot more like Christmas in here.

ETA: Bah! No cinnamon sticks! I used powdered cardamom instead because I thought it would smell good and be a decent alternative to the powdered cinnamon.

Book-Related Links of the Day

And I thought my 1,600 words-per-day quota was ingrained:

Pullman spent seven years in a shed at the bottom of his Oxford garden, doing his three pages a day (no more, no less). About one in ten pages made the cut. The mathematics alone is impressive.

– From An Interview With Philip Pullman, which also features the quirky statement, “He is the most successful writer since Roald Dahl to have worked in a shed.” Pullman makes a few interesting observations about films from books, and how people receive and interpret a story, as well as giving background.

And my other writing/reading-related link for today: Why Don’t We Love Science Fiction?, an essay that sports the subtitle of ‘The British are sniffy about sci-fi, but there is nothing artificial in its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves’.

(Both via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Weekend Roundup

A respectable weekend, marred only by the bad decision to go out grocery shopping Sunday morning. I really hate people who don’t think beyond themselves while in a public place. I hate people who hover behind me in shop aisles glaring at my back when I pause to take something off a shelf even more. And I hate that I get tense and get snappy with HRH because of it, as he’s the one who pushes the cart when we all go out together. We couldn’t get out fast enough.

Aside from this, we had a great Saturday afternoon out at the ADZO household, where we reconnected with lots of people we don’t see often enough, ate so much delicious food that our hosts just kept putting out on the counter in front of us, enjoyed a very nice red wine and a surprisingly good honey brown beer, and gawked at the number of kids running around. (They almost equal our numbers. If two or three more come along, that’s it; our generation is history.) Liam discovered the joys of the ball pit, an inflatable wading pool filled with balls in which he played with great enthusiasm, working himself up to the point where he’d take a running start from the kitchen and launch himself into it head-first, chortling all the way.

The Christmas lights went up on the front of the house Saturday morning, thank goodness, so there’s a least a touch of Yule around the house. Liam helped me wrap the banister of the indoor staircase with garland too, although it seems more sparse than it was last year for some reason. On the list of things to pick up this week once there have been paycheques are a couple of wreaths (one for my office door and one for the front porch railing) and a good indoor garland to loop above the front window, as well as some candles and good ribbon. We can’t get our tree till the weekend, but when we do I’ll be looking for one that’s a bit bigger than we need (not hard, as HRH always enthusiastically reaches for one that’s taller than the room can really handle) so we can cut lots of boughs off the bottom to use as further decorations. We often use the stump that we trim off the tree as a symbolic Yule log, too.

Sunday afternoon, the postal truck delivered the first box of the season, from my parents (which surprised me completely — Sunday delivery already?). It contained a tin of sugar cookies theoretically addressed to Liam, two books for me to read, a box of Lady Grey tea, and the most adorable apron for Liam to wear while we bake.

For once, the weekend didn’t feel rushed. And this is HRH’s last full week at the college; next week is private reno work, and the first couple of weeks of January are free. A real vacation! Hurrah!

And last but quite certainly not least, last Thursday Liam and I went out to get him a pair of new boots, as the ones he had fit him but didn’t come high enough to keep snow out of them. (His test to see if they fit and worked? Jumping in them like a kangaroo, then stomping around like an elephant.) While we were out I did my usual quick look around for the DS game I’d worked on in the spring that was released last month, and I finally found one on a shelf. I brought it home, popped it into the DS, and had fun actually playing through the first couple of games the team had been working the bugs out of while I’d been doing contract work for them. And then I called up the credits for the thrill of seeing certain names I knew were there. (HRH and I are the sort of people who sit through credits at films, too; it’s important for us to show appreciation and respect for all the people who have put time and effort into something. Even now I get a thrill of seeing friends’ names scroll by at the end of Saturday morning cartoons, knowing so many who have done and still do storyboards, layouts, character and location designs.) And then, to my utter astonishment, my own name scrolled by. They’ve credited me as part of the linguistics team, right after the main linguist who helped develop the project. I felt like someone had just taken all the oxygen out of the room. This was unexpected, as I was a contractor who wasn’t on permanent staff; as a freelancer brought in to tweak [ED: Oh, all right, HRH, how’s ‘manage’?] the word database I hadn’t any expectation of actually being credited as an official team member in any respect. This was a completely different kind of thrill from opening a box full of author’s copies of a new book I’ve written, or seeing my books on a bookstore shelf. I don’t know if I can put my finger on why, other than the shock of the unexpected. It was fun, too.

I just spent a quarter-hour doing a phone survey on federal issues such as security, the Afghanistan mission, and the RCMP. If there had been an option to answer “I run after a two and a half year old all week so any news goes in one ear and out the other”, I would have selected it three-quarters of the time.

Today is okay so far. I worked out some numbers: if I write 1,666 words each of the three days a week I work, I will have 60K done in three months. That brings me to mid-March. And I’ve already got 10K down, so we can readjust that to about 1,300 every work day. Not that it’s going to change my regular goal of 1,600 anyway; that number is so deeply ingrained into my work mind that it’s the default quota no matter what. So it looks like two and a half months of 1,600-word work days, giving me a half-month to tweak things. (And cut words out, which is always the problem by that point; I go over the total target because there’s so much to fit into such a small space.)

And now, back to work.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 10,269
New words today: 1,468

Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane really is quite illuminating for a neo-pagan who creates a temporary formal sacred space as necessary for worship and/or spiritual work, as it examines the definition, concept, and construction of sacred space quite thoroughly. Anyone who does this should read it; they’d likely go ‘hmm’.

The more I throw into the document, the more I move around. It evolves more in form and flow every time. Each day it’s a little closer to something coherent.

One-sixth complete!

*poke* *poke*

It being thirty-two days since I submitted my invoice for the last freelance job I did, I gently prodded my contact there this morning about the overdueness of the matter. I just got a response telling me that accounting had been advised, it was being handled immediately, and I ought to have the cheque next Wednesday. This is nice, but I will be more pleased when I have the cheque in hand. There is shopping that needs to be done and payments that need to be made, and it’s frustrating to be on hold at this point in the season. Particularly when I’m feeling rather flat and apathetic; a shot of holiday activity would help a lot.