Monthly Archives: December 2008

Huzzah!

My feeds are being picked up again by the RSS readers that recognised them before the new theme! Woo-hoo!

Sometimes all you need to do is wave sharp pointy and heavy blunt things at the computer and threaten certain doom sleep on it. :)

Of course, clicking on the ‘subscribe to feed’ link still takes you to a page of error messages, but hey. One thing at a time.

At this rate, I may have enough courage to try updating the entire installation again before the end of December. Assuming I can face the potential of Losing Everything Yet Again.

Also? Snow! Lots of it! With a bonus round of freezing rain in the middle! Winter is very definitely present, judging by the size of the ploughed snowbanks at the end of the driveway.

And… I have half a scarf. Go me!

ETA: I’ve just had a report that a reader can’t comment because the comment box doesn’t show up at all, in either Firefox or IE. Anyone else having a problem? If you don’t have one of my private addresses scribble a quick note to owldaughter AT gmail DOT com. (I can’t fix this one, or take the blame; this is a prepackaged theme that I have not messed with in any way, shape, or form. It’s also not the theme I wanted, though, so it’s not my Theme of Choice or set in stone.)

More new stuff: ‘Catastrophic’ low voter turnout for the provincial election this past Monday (no, really? what with election fatigue, a general hatred of government after the federal fiasco, and minus forty-after-windchill temperatures?), and apparently we had 17 centimetres of snow last night on top of the however many we got during the day.

Further Wiktory!

Gentle readers, I have a fully functional set of armwarmers.

Naturally I leapt directly into doing up the faggot lace scarf. Which isn’t going as quickly as it could, really, because I’m using size 15 needles in wood, which are blunt, and the wool/silk/cashmere yarn isn’t as soft and slippy as the merino was. (Ah, merino. I miss you already.) I could use my shiny metal turbo circular needles and just use them like regular needles, but they’re a different size. I’ll give this version of the scarf another four or five rows and see how it goes.

(Note: I have nothing to knit once the scarf is done. Augh! I could do test swatches in the acrylic I have stashed in the cupboard for arts and crafts, but it’s acrylic and it’s scritchy and doesn’t flow well. I have become a yarn snob in less than four weeks. It’s awful.)

Lots of snow out there. And it’s still coming down, in much fatter and fluffier flakes than it was this morning. Evidently everyone forgot how to drive this morning, because it took HRH an hour and a half to get into work instead of twenty minutes.

The boy is now at the coughing stage of the cold. Lovely. I suspect we will be running out of tissues very, very soon. We’ll bake cookies after his nap, and have them with real hot chocolate topped with frothed milk.

Winter: Present!

Yesterday after doing a bunch of HTML for the pro site (yay me), I spent much argh-filled time whacking at php and css code about which I know, well, exactly nothing (argh, why does WordPress hate me so?). Then I played the cello very loudly for about an hour, polishing up the recital stuff for this coming Sunday. I toyed with the idea of suiting up in my down-filled winter coat and going out to vote (because here in Canada our punishment for being less than stoic about sub-Arctic temperatures is being forced to vote in YET ANOTHER ELECTION — did I mention that my municipal riding has a by-election I must vote in next Sunday as well?) but decided to wait for HRH and the boy to come home so we could all do it together. I played more cello instead. I’m really happy with how my technique has firmed up over the past two months with my teacher: my sound is so much better.

Going out with the boys was kind of fun, because we looked at all the Christmas lights that are up in the neighbourhood as we walked to the polling station. And also because the boy carried my voter card and handed it importantly to everyone who needed to look at it, telling them with confidence, “I’m here to vote.” He went in with HRH, and as HRH and I swapped places I could hear the ripple of “He’s so cute!” comments coming from the tables of scrutineers. Apparently he helped HRH hold the pencil to mark the ballot, and put the actual ballot in the box. (Which isn’t entirely legal, but evidently the cute factor won out over hard-hearted scrutineers who might have insisted on By The Book electoral activity. Everyone seemed to approve of the Start Them Young attitude we have about it.) (Oh, the election results? Our province elected a Liberal government for a third term, this time as a majority. The PQ has surged back into the position of official opposition, the leader spouting all sorts of rabid separatist rhetoric in the post-results speech that wasn’t really heard during the campaign. Thanks for stirring up local anti-Canada sentiment again with your idiocy at the federal level, Stephen Harper. You idiot, you’ve thrown our province back into the late seventies.)

Today, however, the boy is home with a cold. He impressed his teachers to no end yesterday by asking to have his nose blown when necessary, and then actually blowing his nose when a tissue was applied to it. “We have five year olds who can’t do that,” his teacher said in astonishment. I’m hoping he’s over the really bad part so he can go to school tomorrow, otherwise I suspect he’ll be home until Friday. (And as if on cue, there is a call of, “Mama, can you blow my nose please?” from the living room.) With the number of colds making the rounds of schools and just about everywhere else, I shouldn’t be surprised. Most people I know are sick, too. This is the part of winter that isn’t so much fun.

Last night I also cast on my second armwarmer and am two-thirds of the way done. Amazing how quickly it goes when you’re curled up in front of the election coverage. I might even be able to start my scarf today, if I feel up to trying the lace pattern that I twisted so badly on my test yarn.

Right. Off to return to the boy, who is watching Richard Scarry cartoons on TV while I check out what’s going on in the world. I intend to finish that armwarmer before lunch. I need them: my office is on an outside corner and is poorly insulated, so I get all sorts of cold radiating in from the corner in which my computer is set up. Yesterday I wore woollen tights under my jeans and a shirt under my heavy woollen sweater. Also, they’ll help my hands warm up faster when I play the cello.

Erm

Messing about the with journal today. Specifically with the sidebar. Beaks and wingtips inside the journal at all times please.

Also handled a pile of pro site stuff today. Am feeling very accomplished.

ETA: Best I can do for now. I can’t restore my original Owly theme; it appears to be very broken all of a sudden. When I try to edit the background of this one, all the style vanishes completely. I miss my header. And how much do you want to bet that the RSS feeds are now broken *again*?

ETA again: Yup, they’re broken. Stupid error message! It must lie in the mySQL tables! About which I can do NOTHING!

ETA yet again: And huzzah, now the feeds are broken in a different way. I give up again. *headdesk*

Wiktory Too!

Gentle Readers, Mousme’s hat v2.0 is finished.

I would have finished it last night, in fact, had I brought my DPNs with me to the gathering we attended. Had I been extra conscientious I would have stopped this morning and bought another ball of yarn to do a few more rows, but I decided the hat didn’t really need them, and cheated used a six-inch length of acrylic to run through the stitches at the crown and pull them together.

Today I bought the new skein of black merino yarn I need for my second armwarmer while on a yarn shop recon mission with Ceri, as well as a ball of licorice-coloured wool/silk/cashmere blend to knit up a quick scarf to use. I would have invested in three lovely skeins of cashmere to make a long full one, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my mother has bought me something very nice to fill in the neck of my new red coat (which continues to garner approval) and so I’m not sinking sixty dollars into yarn just yet.

“You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me.”

I skipped into the living room to tell HRH that the luthier had a new 7/8 for me to try.

“When would you go?” he asked.

“I’m thinking this Friday afternoon,” I said. “Next week’s lesson is Friday night and I won’t be racing off anywhere once it’s done, so I can ask my teacher what she thinks of it and we’ll have the time to discuss it. If I go then, I can meet you at work afterwards and we can both head over to your parents’ place to pick up the boy.”

“Mama,” said the boy, suddenly standing in front of me. He raised a finger and shook it at me, looking very serious. “You should never, never, never, ever go shopping… without… a boy.”

We looked at him, mouths open. He nodded again, certain of himself. “Yes. You should never go shopping without a boy.”

HRH and I melted from the cuteness, and we finally broke out of the stasis to laugh and laugh. I grabbed the boy and hugged him hard. Then I went and hunted up “Disobedience” by A.A. Milne to read to him for the first time.

Cello Squee!

Guess where I’m going next Friday afternoon? Yes indeed, to the luthier in order to try out a new 7/8 cello!

It’s nice to be excited about new celloness again instead of mopey about how the whole Mystery Cello thing turned out. But that’s still not off the list entirely, it’s just delayed for a few years. (A few meaning something like a decade or so. Maybe I’ll look forward to it as a fiftieth birthday present to myself.)

My cello fund has been nibbled at by bill- and gas- and grocery-mice, but I can put a down payment of three-quarters on this cello if it’s the right one (and if they let me instead of buying it outright), and chances are very likely that by the end of the year I’ll have the remaining money necessary to pay it off in entirety. If not by then, certainly by the end of January. Then I can turn to selling my current cello and recoup hopefully at least half of the cost of the new one, if not more.

I’m not looking at buying a cello for the sake of buying a cello. I’m waiting for the right one. I’ve turned down two, after all (and had one bought out from under me, but let’s not go there). It just feels good to be doing something about it again.

And maybe this time I’ll remember to buy rosin while I’m there, damn it.