Monthly Archives: August 2008

TGIF…

… except the day of the week doesn’t really have much effect on the day to day argh that’s been going on. At least I’m going out to dinner tonight with two excellent women, so that’s something to look forward to.

There’s been lots of argh and grr happening, and I feel like I’m being nibbled to death by ducks cats. Did two installs of XP on the dead laptop; it died twice. Swapped the hard drive, started again. So far things are okay, except it won’t connect to the Internet via ethernet cable, nor will the screen accommodate a resolution above the halfway mark, leaving a frame of black around the display. And the most annoying thing is that I can’t find my wireless card, despite turning out the laptop bag, my desk drawers, and most of my office closet. It has absolutely vanished. It’s a little thing but it was what gave me mobility, and not findign it made me very, very cranky. If I haven’t found it by the end of the weekend I’ll have to buy another one.

The boy has made up for his sweet twos by hitting us with the Terrible Threes. That’s all I’ll say on the subject.

I started reading Elisabeth Le Guin’s Boccherini’s Body, a music analysis text based on the performer’s physical experience playing Boccherini’s music, specifically the cello sonatas and his quartets. It’s a fascinating theoretical approach and I want to be enjoying it much more than I am. The first two chapters were all I could handle; after that I had trouble focusing and following the theory and analysis to such a point that I’d reread a few sentences over and over and the meaning wouldn’t sink in. I hasten to add that this is in no way the fault of the author or the material; it has more to do with the fibro fog. So I switched to Elizabeth Wilson’s recent bio of Rostropovich and am much happier.

I’m going through a tough fibro week with worse than usual weakness in the hands, and joints that feel like they’ve never been oiled, ever. This morning is particularly bad, and it isn’t improving the way it usually does as the day progresses; in fact, it’s getting worse. Good thing today’s freelance work is simple online research and filling in blank fields in an Excel sheet. If it doesn’t clear up by this afternoon I may have to cancel on the dinner out, though, which I really don’t want to do.

Orchestrated Update

Total word count, Orchestrated: 4,050
New words today: Math tells me that there were 989, which isn’t the 1,000 I wanted but close enough for government work.

I shoved the story forward and started writing the next major plot point, and you know what? The story works perfectly well this way. I usually need to figure out how the story gets from A to B and I usually do it through writing. The in-between stuff often gets cut out, although it gives me valuable insight into character make-up and lives and motivation and secret dreams and so forth. This time, I just stepped over where the in-between stuff would normally be and picked the story up again. Maybe this synopsis thing will work for me after all. Whatever the reason, today it was easier to write the plot point than the stuff that would bridge to it.

So it feels like the actual story has begun. That’s a good feeling. Not that the previous 3K words weren’t story; it’s just that they were set-up and background and initial propulsion of character trajectory, and today’s work begins the setup of the Conflict part of the story. Or introduces the character who will initiate the series of events that build into Actual Conflict and create An Obstacle for my protagonist.

I would have had many more words had I not needed to refer to a list of characters that I knew I’d worked up. I couldn’t find the file anywhere. I searched through three sets of backups, to no avail. Then, after forty minutes of tearing out my hair, I realized that I’d wanted to print it out for ready reference. Where would I have put a printout like that if I’d managed to make one? I wondered, then spun my chair around, leaned forward, and pulled a file folder out from between two research books on the shelf reserved for my ongoing writing research. Voila: One file of hard copy reference stuff. I have no idea what happened to the computer file. I’ll have to retype it all, but at least I don’t have to do all the work of thinking characters up again and naming them and giving them quirks.

Jan brought me a USB hub that my computer recognises! Huzzah!

Busy

Yesterday was mostly good, with one huge time-out-worthy aberration just before dinner. Ten minutes’ worth of time out, in fact.

I made a single jar of jam this morning. I ordered new glasses, paid some bills, crossed another couple of things off my To-Do list, and now have (of course!) run out of steam, twenty minutes before Jan is due to show up for our weekly writing jam. If I am completely useless at the writing thing I may switch to doing the local freelance stuff that landed in my inbox at lunchtime.

I also had a half-hour conversation with an orchestra contact this morning. Looks like we have an executive meeting next week, and while I’m not an official member of the executive I seem to be invited along like last time because I have Valuable Input.

I need to reformat the laptop at some point today (or possibly tomorrow) as well, so I can give Liam something to do while I work (he is in love with Youtube because it has Veggie Tales and Thomas episodes, and there is always Peep!). Because if I’m on the computer he wants to be on the computer, which makes working while he’s at home somewhat of a challenge.

Off to write, come what may. There’s a thousand words of Orchestrated on my list of Things To Do that needs to crossed off.

Yesterday…

… was a complete washout. I spent the entire day struggling with technology in some form or another. A USB port that had been working perfectly well up till yesterday around noon, and into which was plugged my external hard drive, decided to malfunction (yes! I show as a drive! no! there is nothing on me!). At first I thought my external hard drive (you know, the one that holds everything as a backup, plus all my music?) had given up the ghost, so that’s where I focused my attention once I recovered from the heart attack. After a couple of hours I discovered that it was the USB port creating an I/O problem. The tower won’t recognise the USB hub I own, so I had to juggle my peripherals. (Six. I have six things that require a USB port. There are only three ports that function now. Oy.) Then I tried to get the printer my dad had sent home with me to work, with zero luck. There were power issues (no matter where I plugged the damn thing in it wouldn’t turn on) and when I finally resolved that (by, erm, hitting it) I discovered that it won’t print anything. Oh, it thinks it’s printing, but nothing appears on the page. Even when the ink cartridges are full. Even after cleaning both sets of contacts and the ink intakes on the printer itself.

I did cross other things off my to-do list, but it was the kind of day where there wasn’t enough accomplished to account for the energy invested, and the grr of the hardware issues mightily outweighed the minor relief of crossing things off the list. So I got exactly no work done, other than sending an invoice for hours worked so far on the local freelance project I did before I left for Toronto. The boy’s thirty-eighth month post is late as a result. I can’t return a book to Amazon because I can’t print out the return form; I’ll have to beg Scarlet to print it out for me tonight.

Rawr. And gnarr.

The boy and I are running errands today. Wish us luck.

Thirty-Eight Months Old!

I think the biggest milestone over the past month has been Liam’s first official haircut. I’ve been cutting it myself at home when I could, but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t keep it as even as it should be, so in he went. He was pleasantly distracted by the movie they were showing (CARS!), and ran up to his stylist to thank her twice at the end of it all. He chose a red lollipop, naturally; they seem to be his favourites. The other big thing this past month has been the bike trailer. He has dragged everyone who has stopped by down to the garage to show it off.

His current favourite books are the Henry and Mudge series. Like lots of the other books we read together they’re early reader books, but they’re perfect to read aloud. Henry is a very Liamish boy. Mudge is, well, a huge Great Dane. Liam started calling Gryff Mudge for a while. And let me tell you, when they galumph and chase one another up and down the hall, Gryff certainly sounds like a Great Dane. (HRH told me the vet weighed Gryff when he was taken in with the infected bite, and he’s eleven pounds now. Gah.) I love looking in the rear view mirror while driving and seeing him sitting casually in his booster seat, legs loosely crossed, a book held open on his lap.

In the food division, the recent winners are ice cream bars on sticks, corn on the cob, and any kind of meat on a bone of some sort. Seriously. It gives us both great pleasure to watch him hold a bone in his hands and tear the meat off with his sharp little teeth. His snack of choice is fresh mangetout peas from the garden. (Note to self: plant lots and lots more mangetouts next year.) Last week he ate a banana as if it was a cob of corn — peeled it completely then held it horizontally and ate bites out of it that way. He has also discovered what he calls ‘iced cappuccinos’. I crush some ice cubes in the blender, add some milk and chocolate syrup, blend it all together, and serve it to him with a straw. It’s basically a chocolate milk frappé, but to him it’s a very grown-up drink and he loves it.

Current fave music is the Snacktime album by the Barenaked Ladies. He’ll even dance to it, and encourage other people to dance as well. He still won’t let other people sing it, though. “No,” he’ll say, “that’s my song.” Meaning, of course, that no one else is allowed to sing it. He’s still a big fan of ‘The Mesopotamians’ and ‘Dr. Worm,’ too.

He’s been having trouble with his sleep patterns lately. His naps have been comparatively brief (an hour instead of two), and he’s been fighting bedtime in general. He gets up after the door has closed, cries, and pushes our buttons. It’s hard to keep the frustration under wraps. He wakes up between five and six AM, often with a mid-night waking as well. We’re buying a set of bunk beds from HRH’s officemate next month, and I’m hoping the novelty of a big bed will help him stay in it. We’ll get to choose new sheets and a coverlet, too. We plan to set up the bunkbeds but leave the upper mattress and the ladder off the unit. Voila: instant tent once one has hung fabric off the two open sides.

On the other night-time hand, he’s only wearing a pull-up at night in case of emergency, and he’s dry more often than not. So good for him.

We’ve been having problems in general with whining and encountering resistance to any idea that isn’t his own. We try to remind him or tell him ahead of time about things so as to avoid the sudden change of direction or activity, but the immediate response to any prompt is still resistance. In fact, he’s been resisting things in general, running the gamut from deliberately doing the opposite of what we ask to simply ignoring us, to throwing a fit. I know he’s working things out, testing boundaries and confirming structure, but it’s very wearing. He’s also been very screechy and shouty. Liam is a very strong personality, and it’s hard to grit one’s teeth when he looks at you and does something deliberately to provoke you. Forget the terrible twos; these are the infamous threes. Not to imply that he’s a stress all the time; there are long stretches of fun and cheery Liam, and then suddenly there is a horrid moment of vexation derived from naughty behaviour or something positively Not On, for which he gets a turn in the Time Out chair. (Suddenly turning around and biting Mama for no reason until the teeth meet but the skin isn’t broken qualifies as one of those Not On things. Especially when followed by laughter.)

I figured it was about time he got to play with one of the consoles, so I bought Endless Ocean for him to play, and he’s having a ball. He feels extremely important holding the Wii remote, and once we’ve set the game up he won’t let us touch it. We’d opened it and played it before HRH came home that day, and Liam took great delight in showing HRH how things worked (going so far as to say, “Here, Dada, I’ll show you how it works” in a very officious manner). He’s lost his game a couple of times by hitting a sequence of buttons, but he doesn’t care; he likes being able to move the diver around and switch between first-person and third-person views. And he is very chuffed about having figured out where the A button is. He acquired his dolphin friend over the weekend and now has way too much fun making it do tricks.

When he sees that my computer is on he gathers a bunch of his trains up and patters into my office, eagerly saying, “Hi Mama, can I play in your office? Can I watch Thomas and friends?” He has discovered the joys of YouTube, and the seemingly endless supply of child-directed reenactments of Thomas episodes using the actual episode narration and toy trains moved around in front of a video camera. It’s the main reason I want the laptop up and running properly again, so I can work and he can do his internet-related stuff at the same time. ( “I’m working,” he said importantly the other day when I’d gotten the laptop up and running, albeit temporarily, as he sat there and typed away at the keyboard. “I’m sending you a message.”)

He is very sensitive, and he’s working that out in his own way too. He unintentionally made me cry the other day. He trundled his blanket-covered toy shopping cart up to me. “Mama,” he said in a coaxing singsong way, “I have a surprise for you!” “Really? A surprise?” I said. “Wow! What is it?” Liam whisked the blanket away to reveal the little stuffed black and white cat he now calls Maggie. “Ta-da!” he said. “It’s Maggie-cat!” And I burst into tears, surprising both of us. He looked very unsure as I reached out and picked the toy up and crushed it to my chest. “Thank you,” I said. “Mama?” he said uncertainly. “Are you okay?” “Yes, lovey,” I said through the tears. “It’s just that you surprised me. And I miss my Maggie-cat so very much, more than I thought I did, I guess.” He still looked kind of spooked, so I held out my arms and cuddled him along with the toy. I couldn’t stop the damn sobbing, not for a while. He cuddled me and patted my arm, and finally said, “It’s okay Mama. It’s just a stuffed Maggie.” And I laughed through my tears. I his world, it made sense. And sometimes we need to take a three-year-old’s point of view and say to ourselves yes, it’s just a stuffed Maggie. There’s no need to be upset. She’s something to squeeze and love and play with, and if we can’t have the real Maggie (as he seems to finally understand, or at least he’s stopped saying “We’ll find her again later” at any rate) then a stuffy is just fine.

Liam-themed posts over the past month:

– The new bike trailer
– Mama’s birthday, Liam’s first car wash, and Mama’s new bike

If you missed the 37 month post (and didn’t we all) I did one a couple of weeks ago and back-dated it.

Today So Far

We have been having a terrific thunderstorm for the past hour. Very loud. Cats have scattered.

However, because it has been overcast since I got up at seven, it feels like it’s still seven. Possibly also because I started working at eight, and have managed to carry six or seven shelves’ worth of my office books downstairs into the communal office space. I have room on my office shelves for new books now. Or rather, to place the books that were double-shelved or piled on the floor. There’s a bit more order in my chaos. I am pleased. Maybe this afternoon I’ll thin out some of my books in the living room to carry downstairs too, such as the philosophy and critical analysis ones, to occupy the downstairs shelves as well and free up room for the triple-shelved books and new acquisitions that have been shoved here and there over the past year.

I got my contracts with the Big Local Company in the mail today; I’m told my cheque was cut yesterday and will be here early next week. About time.

Orchestrated Update

Total word count, Orchestrated: 3,061
New words today: Erm, no idea. Forgot to count before I started, then messed around with the existing stuff. Possibly 700? Not a lot, at any rate.

But I did a bunch of thinking and longhand note-jotting, discovered that my protagonist’s mom is a single mother, and made a rough schedule of events that occur within the six-month spread of the novel. All of this is very important. Now I can just refer to the timeline if I need to know what next majorish event occurs and jump to writing that if I need to. I also compressed the events from a full school year into a half year. Much better.

Jan was back for our weekly writing date! Hurrah! Only another week or so of it before she moves to Ontario, though.