Monthly Archives: July 2009

Stuff; Or, What I Did Today

The boy’s 49-months-old post is up and backdated. Thanks to Debra, I have a better idea how to use iPhoto and Preview, and so I could actually provide photos for the post. (I’ll get there, Mac.)

I’m currently editing a PhD thesis proposal for a biochemical engineering student whose native language is not English. It’s required me to look into the world of scientific style manuals, as opposed to the humanities style manuals I’ve absorbed over the years. Very interesting, though, and quite enjoyable. This is only one brief section of others that will come, too.

The boy left Blackie the bunny at home this morning, so I seized the opportunity that he has denied us for months and said, “INTO THE WASH, you innocent, horribly bedraggled thing!” Even soaking wet, I could see how clean Blackie was as I transferred him from washer to dryer. Four months of preschool grime really adds up on a best-buddy stuffed pal. When I took him out of the dryer, Blackie looked practically new. Aside from the four months of aggressive love that have marked him eternally, that is. I hope the boy is happy to see Blackie all shiny and clean and recognizes that he has survived the experience with cheer and aplomb, although part of me expects tears because I threw the rabbit in the wash without the boy’s permission.

Ceri and I were supposed to go antiquing and then to Ariadne this afternoon, but she was felled by a visit from the evil Migraine Fairy. I ended up messing with Garageband on my lunch break instead, and discovered that the Mac Mini doesn’t have a microphone jack. You need something like the iMic USB connector through which to run your microphone. So no sound clips of the 7/8 cello for you, Gentle Readers. I re-ripped a couple more albums and practiced the cello this afternoon instead. And I discovered that the Bibliotheque nationale downtown has tonnes of books on spinning, books that I’d otherwise have to buy. I’ll head down there either this week or next and get a library card, then take a pile of them home.

I really hope HRH is in the mood for Rock Band tonight.

In Which She Makes A Regretful Discovery

So this past week, I remembered that hey, wow, Worldcon is coming up! And the only reason I remembered was because we realized that the trip to Nova Scotia is rapidly approaching, and Worldcon starts the day before we come back. This tells me something important.

Now, we didn’t buy our memberships ahead of time; money was tight, and since we were going to miss at least a day we figured we’d buy weekend or day passes. And then we waited because I wanted to see what the schedule would be like, so I’d be sure to buy the pass for the day I wanted most. And the schedules were only recently finalized, which drove me nuts, although I’ve participated in large-event organization before and I know how hard it is to pin this stuff down early.

Except now the time’s almost upon us, and I’m slowly realizing something. The only reasons I want to go to Worldcon are:

1. The biggest damn F/SF industry party is going to be IN MY TOWN and to miss it would be just stupid. I’m never going to get to travel to one anywhere else.

2. I want to attend signings of a handful of authors.

And really, that’s it. And can I really afford to pay for passes when I’m not going to really do anything? (Really.)

I was much more excited about Worldcon last year. The excitement has really faded until now, a couple of weeks before the convention itself, I’m at the point where I can’t be bothered about it. And I feel guilty about it, because, well, see item 1 above.

As a corollary, I present opposing arguments:

1. I hate large gatherings of people, with a biting, burning passion.

1a. I hate meeting new people.

2. We have no friends coming into town for the event that we’d be wanting to spend time with there.

3. My areas of writing have moved out of F/SF and into mainstream, specifically YA mainstream. (Okay, there’s the Pandora book which is urban fantasy, but it’s the exception that proves the rule.)

It’s kind of telling when the workshops/panels/ sessions that interest me the most are two or three of the signings, the knitting circle and the spinning workshop, the bookbinding/conservation workshop, and a panel on YA or folklore or music here and there. I don’t absolutely need to go to these; I’d be going to them because they’re being offered and I’d need to do something because I’d paid to get in. That’s the wrong reason entirely.

It’s a lot of money for something I’m not passionate or excited about. And it’s hard on the heels of driving home from NS, too. I know what my decision is going to be, unless something major happens to change it.

Let’s Try Again

Lost an entire post just now. That hasn’t happened in quite some time.

Five loads of laundry yesterday. Five. That’s significant, right?

Apart from that, I managed to edit a whole eight pages of Orchestrated despite having the file open for hours. I’ve hit Part Two, wherein I’ve left myself notes in the text like [write dinner scene here] because I was intent on getting the damn skeleton of the story down and done with. This means my light edits/rewrites are turning into more substantial rewrites, meaning my already slow pace is about to turn into the speed boasted of by turtles. The fibro-fog isn’t helping; I have little focus.

Yesterday I also began re-ripping the missing albums that iTunes can’t/won’t find. Turns out a few of my CDs were originally ripped into .wma format, and iTunes on the Mac doesn’t have an import/convert .wma function. Not a big deal, really. It’s just that I’m trying to find where iTunes is ripping them to, and I can’t. All the logical places I look haven’t turned anything up. (The Mac: “Just trust me. Everything’s going to be fine.” Me: “I know, I know, it’s magic, but even when doing magic I like to know what the ultimate destination for my energy is, thank you very much.”) I want all my music in one place so that I can back it all up at once.

Speaking of the Mac, it doesn’t have a formal name yet. My PCs all had names drawn from Norse mythology — Freyja, Valhalla, Bifrost, the Dell laptop is Nehelennia — but I suspect the Mac has energy that’s more Egyptian in nature. The Wii is named Isis; I think perhaps this is Nephthys, although Ma’at is tempting. I’ll think about it some more. (The Touch may be Nephthys, actually, making this one Ma’at. Hrm.)

Pursuant to the spinning obsession, I found a used Louet S15 on eBay that was listed at a $50 opening bid and comes with a bulky flyer included, so I calculated shipping, looked at my budget, and bid on it. I’m currently winning, but if someone tops my highest bid within the next five days I can still add another twenty dollars before I hit my self-imposed max total of $200. Seeing as how a new wheel would cost me $400 at the least for the very basic entry-level models, $200 including shipping is decent indeed. If I win the damn thing my brain could give over the RAM it’s currently devoting to wheel research and reviews to things that need it, like planning dinner and actual work, instead of constantly returning to the wheel thing when it ought to be thinking of other issues. Actual spinning would be more relaxing and have tangible yield for the time invested than obsessive wheel research online (actual yield = time missing, nothing concrete accomplished, lots of info buzzing in the brain, irritation at the to-do list not diminishing). I know that realistically if I win the wheel, the Obsessive Research slot will be assigned to fibre. But I’m doing that already as part of the overall wheel research thing, so I am being optimistic about the possibility of some leftover RAM.

Huh. There is a ladybug on my office wall. I saw something crawling and did that hiccup of panic, thinking it was a spider, before I looked and saw that it was in fact a Coccinellid. She’s now crawling up the copper deer painting HRH did for me five years ago, and settling down in the knotwork:

Right. I need some Excedrin for this headache, and then it’s back to Orchestrated.

Today Started Out So Well; Or, A Vague Weekend Roundup

No, really. The weather is nice, I had an okay weekend, I slept decently, I was looking forward to working.

Then a couple of stupid things happened that got under my skin, things that would have rolled off my back on most other days. The latest was condescending communication from someone whose classified ad I queried about this morning. (You may never speak to me again, but didn’t your mother teach you that you should be polite to people anyway as a rule? Also, reading non-present intent into my very clear query and shutting me down by answering something I didn’t ask was rather insulting, as was telling me you’d already made the sale to someone less fussy because your item was priced so inexpensively.)

We have a clothesline again, thank gods. On the other hand, the boy is now big enough that the clothesline can only hold half a regular load of his laundry. Also on that other hand, I can’t find the little brace that holds the upper and lower parts of the line together, and half our clothespegs have disappeared. I’ll add them to the ongoing list of household things to pick up. (Hey, we only just succeeded in picking up rechargeable batteries that were put on the list a month ago, and the clothesline that broke late last fall.)

We enjoyed a lovely belated birthday dinner of ribs at my inlaws’ house on Saturday, before which HRH and the boy played in the pool. The boy got to the point where he was jumping off the side of the pool into HRH’s arms and going for rides around the shallow to mid-deep areas. Much progress made from the nervous boy he was in pools at the beginning of the summer; very good.

The weekend consisted of grocery shopping, a haircut for the boy, going to the bookstore, more grocery shopping, working in the vegetable garden, and a game on Sunday night. The boy and I messed about with our cellos on Sunday, too, and he conducted me as I played Twinkle. This was amusing because he was beating very slowly in two, and would get distracted in the middle and stop, then wonder why I wasn’t playing.

HRH has promised to finish the inserts for my modified cello case today so I can cover them and get the cello back into the hard case in the corner, instead of having both the hard case there and the cello in the soft case on my office floor. I’m increasingly nervous about the boy and the insane cats going in and out of my room.

Must release the crankiness. Must work.

Cello Blog Heads-Up

Cellists, check out Emily Wright’s excellent photo post on bow grips! (I meant to post this last week and forgot, but checked it out again this morning, so here you are.)

Actually, if you’re a cellist and you’re reading my journal but not Emily’s thoroughly delightful and educational Stark Raving Cello Blog, (a) why?, and (b) get thee hence to bookmark it. She’s got a book coming out later this year, the purchase link to which many of us are poised to click as soon as it goes live.

Fuzzy

Oh, fibro-fog, I have not missed you.

Actually, I think this is a combination of poor sleep and being up and moving too early in the morning, plus forgetting my glasses on the bedside table.

HRH and I went out for our annual blood test this morning at stupid o’clock. It occurs to me that now that we have health insurance, we could to this via private clinic and be reimbursed instead of sitting in the hospital for an hour and a half. Next time. Anyway, we took the boy with us because we figured it would be good for him to see it before he needs it done at some point, and also to kind of save time, as we could take him directly to Grandma’s house afterward. He was pretty good, too. We sat in the hallway of the blood lab along with fifty other people and read a book, played some games, and I let him play with the Touch, too. He came into the lab itself when we were called, and he sat with HRH while I had my prise de sang done, and then I took him to the bathroom while HRH had his done. I’d warned him ahead of time that when we were in the actual lab that he’d have to sit very quietly and not wiggle around, because there were lots of breakable things and people having sensitive tests done, and if anything went wrong they’d have to start all over again and there would be much crankiness. After we were done we left and he said, “That was fun!” (Okay, kid, whatever.) Then he threw his arms out to the sides and said with great excitement, “And I didn’t break anything!” A couple of the people waiting giggled a bit behind their hands, as did a few when we’d been waiting earlier and he’d asked me what a prise de sang entailed, then put an anxious hand on my arm and said, on the verge of tears, “But I don’t want them to take your blood out of your body.”

Then we all trooped over to the nearest Tim Hortons so there could be food and coffee, because we’d been fasting for the tests, and he was allowed to choose a whole doughnut for himself. He chose a chocolate glazed, and told me that I wasn’t allowed to cut it in half (which is what I usually do, half for each of us). He pretty much had three bites and then licked all the icing off, then washed it down with some chocolate milk.

I’ve had a couple of queries about how the spinning wheel recon went. Basically, I sat down and spun my fibre for two hours on a single-treadle Louet S-17, and as I suspected, I am completely and totally hooked. Never even tried the Victoria. A single treadle slow machine will be fine for me for a while, which is good to know because there are lots and lots of secondhand ones on eBay (although I’d love to buy one new, and support the LYS that’s been helping me with the research). Molly Ann wound the single I’d spun into a centre-pull ball with the ball winder (so easy!) so I could ply at home with my spindle (again, so much easier!) and I made honest to goodness real yarn last night after the boy was in bed. I have photos, but I can’t figure out how to get them out of iPhoto. Thank goodness for my library reference books, which I will make use of later. (Note to self: You need an FTP program before you start working the freelance gig again, oh hell. Although I can upload things for the blog from a web interface, thank goodness.) My biggest problem with the wheel is over-spinning the wool and putting too much twist into it, just like I do with the spindle. I need to treadle slower; I tend to speed up. But it’s so much easier, and so much smoother, and I can make a lovely fine single instead of something chunky because drafting is easier.

We’re off to see the new Harry Potter film this afternoon! And leaving, er, now.

ETA @ 8:25 PM: Peektures!

Here’s the first bit of plied yarn on the spindle, halfway through the process. I admit that I paused here to photograph it because of how perfect the yarn about to be wound onto the spindle shaft is. So even! So… worsted weight-ish!

And here is my first-ever baby skein of yarn plied from a single spun on a wheel. The length of the finished skein is about eight inches.

It is somewhat lumpy and not even (well, more even than my spindle stuff ever was), but I love it with much, much love.

Also, the Harry Potter film was very good indeed. Better than the last, which was probably my least favourite of the lot so far. Well-paced, nicely balanced, very nice camera work.

On My Way Out

The PC has officially been retired. Thank you; you did me good service when there was a gap. You stepped into the breach and soldiered on. Good PC.

And I almost forgot my appointment at Ariadne this afternoon to test spinning wheels! Thank goodness for playing with the shiny Touch, because I found a note to myself about it on my list of things to do today. I’m off!