Monthly Archives: August 2009

First Day Of School!

I’ve never been so excited about a first day of school that wasn’t my own.

I just waved HRH and the boy off on their way to their respective schools. HRH has to deal with hordes of confused new students as well as a flap of teachers who will all be asking him for things they ought to have asked him for two weeks ago. (Also, hard to prepare rooms for you if you haven’t given the tech your schedule.) The boy is now the oldest child at preschool and has graduated to the Big Kids’ Table, with associated assistant-to-the-teachers duties. Most of the time he feels very important and a Very Useful Engine, but sometimes he drags his feet. (I understand. Sometimes I want to be a kid with no responsibilities again myself.)

I wish this meant huge and exciting changes in my own life, but alas, it pretty much just means part time school has turned to full time school, and I don’t have the car to run errands on a weekday or two.

There’s a weekend roundup coming, and I know I still have to do the boy’s fifty-month update. I suspect the latter will be quite brief, as I covered a lot of the update-worthy stuff in the vacation recap.

In Which She Cuts Herself Some Slack

In self-defense (mental, emotional, physical) yesterday became a Tylenol-and-reading-on-the-couch day around one or two o’clock. I did manage to bake bread, and a pan of caramel pecan squares, which required brown sugar, but we didn’t have any, so I used a mix of white sugar and molasses, which changed the taste and now I’m all “meh” about them because they’re not what I was craving. HRH likes them, though. The day improved around five o’clock when the boys came home. I had a guerrilla cello lesson, snatched from the sea of heavily scheduled summer, which I was very excited about, because I knew I was doing things wrong, I just couldn’t figure out what. My teacher pinpointed them in no time at all, which was a relief. So was moving on from one of the things I’d started on my own after we’d tweaked a couple of things. “We don’t need to keep that one,” she said, and that was a nice little ego-boost. Part of what teachers do for you is isolate the point of an etude or exercise so you know what to concentrate on, and she pointed out that the two pieces I’d been working on were, in fact, designed to make me think of placing my third finger on the fourth-finger spot. Thinking of the ringing tones as the targets was one of the goals of those pieces. So aha, I wasn’t going about it all backwards, as I’d suddenly suspected. All in all, it was a very productive hour and a bit. I knew I was doing things wrong (couldn’t figure out what on my own, of course — yay, job security for teachers) but there were only three major issues: shifting while extending (bad bad bad — close the hand!), bowing too close to the fingerboard when playing in higher positions, and needing smoother bow changes. We’ve decided that smooth and flowing bow motion is going to be our focus for the next little while.

It was very nice indeed to be told that I’d been making progress over the summer. It may have been standard teacher encouragement, but it matters to me. I’m much too hard on myself as a matter of course, both in cello and everything else. I’m learning to let go gracefully, as a friend put it recently. I can’t do everything well. I have to allow myself to do things acceptably, so long as I enjoy them. Stressing doesn’t help the situation. Taking the afternoon off to lie down and read because I couldn’t face work with the headache I had is something I couldn’t have done a few years ago; I would have beaten myself up about losing work time. Having a child and being diagnosed with fibro taught me a very important lesson, namely that the standards I set for myself are too damn high and end up being destructive instead of supportive. Any day that you walk away from (figuratively, that is) is a good one.

Then I stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house to coo over Ceri’s current knitting projects, eat zucchini brownies that you’d never suspect were vegetable-ridden, and have tea. I was very good and only stayed forty-five minutes. When I got home I discovered that there had been unfortunate excitement, as HRH put it. The boy had gone to bed at the usual time and had thrown up an hour later. HRH had cleaned boy and bed up, but today I had to scrub the bathroom to get rid of the smell, and wash some toys that were unfortunate bystanders. It was touch and go this morning as to whether he’d actually go to the caregiver, as he hadn’t much appetite, and while twelve hours had gone by with no repeat performance or a fever, you can never be sure. He eventually decided that he felt well enough to go after waffling about it (he kept giving me woebegone looks; I think he was gunning for an extra day home with me) so off we went, an hour later than usual. We suspect it was simply something he ate yesterday, plus the heat and running around. His caregiver e-mailed me to say he’d had a great morning, ate lunch, and fell asleep almost immediately, so things appear to be all right again.

In flipping around the iTunes store I just saw that one of the top twenty classical albums is “Ultimate Chopin.” This makes Chopin sound like some sort of hard-assed extreme composer. Yo! Put on the ULTIMATE CHOPIN! We got some serious butt-kicking to do! I mean, really.

I can hear gentle rain on the leaves of the tree outside my office window. It smells wonderful. This is nice. I hope it stays like this for a while.

Now to switch the laundry, and maybe write that final [missing bit here] of Orchestrated. I wish I hadn’t lost my writing playlists in transferring to the Mac. I miss them.

Wednesdays

While for other people it’s the middle of the week, it’s just another day for me. There’s bread rising, I need to go out and collect the tomatoes that are falling off the vines, and I should eat something. There’s a cello lesson tonight, too.

I discovered this morning that the Rock Band USB mic is actually recognized by the Mac, and records the cello. Unfortunately, it’s a mono mic and the sound is awful. But what I did discover by listening to the playback is that my sound is too timid most of the time. If I want it to sound better, I have to go all out; no holding back, giving notes their full value, especially before a rest, and so forth. Vibrato! Positions to avoid open strings! The whole nine yards.

In unrelated Apple news, I would like my Touch to actually connect to the internet when it says it’s connected.

It was cool enough this morning that I turned off the A/C and opened all the windows to let air move through the house. So much cooler, right away. The A/C and strategically-placed fans can only do so much for so long.

Twenty pages got edited yesterday. I found one last [write this bit] that I’d forgotten about, and that’s the last one in the book. Then I go back to trying to find a good hook to open with. I wrote a new prologue and a new opening page for the first chapter last week; let’s see if they’re still any good when we get to that point again.

Yawn

Yeah, I know. The Court’s a bit boring these days. If I’m here, I’m tired and uninspired. If I’m away, well, I’m away.

I made homemade bruschetta with pearl onions and tomatoes right out of the back garden last week. Piled it on freshly baked focaccia and couldn’t stop eating it. That ended up being dinner for me. I used Lu’s recipe, roughly, but used lime juice in place of the red wine vinegar. I don’t think I put any herbs in at all. Just tomatoes and onions that tasted like sun, plus sea salt, the olive oil, and freshly ground pepper.

The editing/second draft work on Orchestrated continues apace. I’m at the Oh Noes Accident And Hospital part of the story, which means I think I’ve bridged all the [write this bit here] gaps that I needed to bridge. I’ll find out as I continue on, but I seem to remember everything being pretty straightforward from this point to the end. This could, of course, be an entirely falsified memory cleverly crafted by my subconscious in order to maintain sanity.

With the air conditioner installed as of last Saturday morning, we are blessedly free of the high heat and humidity warnings that are piling up. And as an added bonus, I no longer hear the landscaping crews and power tools working outside. We were trying to make it through the summer without installing it, and really, we did very well. The summer has been cooler than usual, but apparently the weather’s making up for that with a vengeance. Yesterday around six o’clock the thermometer in full sun on the back porch read 42 C/106 F, and that was before factoring in the humidity. (Putting in the A/C unit two weeks before September. What is this world coming to?)

Camping last weekend was lovely. There was plenty of tree cover to shade us from the sun and a very good fire pit on our site, which ended up being the central gathering area for everyone. Lovely new people; and so the (co!)coven grows. The only bad part of the experience was arriving to find the fire pit still smoldering, which means the people who used it before us weren’t responsible. The not sleeping well and waking up in lots of pain wasn’t great either. But everything else was enjoyable. There were many marshmallows roasted.

My spinning wheel still has not arrived. I am antsy and cranky about it, as we are rapidly coming up on a month since I ordered it. I was hoping to have it by Saturday, as that’s when we’re heading out to the Fearsranch in Alexandria for an overnight, and both Fearsclave and his Wicked Old Step-Mother want to see it. Of course, the WOSM has just gone out and bought her own gorgeous double-drive double-treadle Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel, so we may end up geeking out together over hers instead of mine, as was the first plan, or comparing the wheels, which was the second plan.

I have a cello lesson tomorrow night. I need to play for a while today.

This is the boy’s final week of part-time preschool. As of next Monday he is full-time, which means this Thursday is his last day with the caregiver, and Friday is his last weekday at home. We’re going to go see Ponyo together to mark the occasion.

So yeah. Not very exciting, here. Mostly tired, with a side of exhausted.

It’s A Cello Thing

If I start thinking of second position as being 1 on 2 instead of 3 on 4, my targeting and intonation might improve.

(Yeah. Stupidly obvious. I know. Trust me, I’m cradling my head in my hands wondering how I got so off-course.)

It’s Friday…

… which probably means something. Except it doesn’t, because I work at home. Not that I can do that today, as the boy is home with us due to rescheduling, and grr. It’s been one of those Days of Broken Ears, you know? That frustrates me more than outright naughtiness does, somehow. (Although this morning’s episode in the car of rolling down the window and then asking if he could do so was outright naughty, because he can’t roll the window back up on his own. “But I did ask! I asked at the end!” he protested when I reamed him out. Not on my watch, kid. Do it without first asking again and your seat’s going back in the middle of the backseat, where you can’t see out the windows properly.)

The hallway looks spectacular. The colour is a dark cappuccino, and HRH redid all the white trim that chipped off (yeah, not such great quality) when we used the baby gates as well. It’s the colour I’ve been seeing in my mind for the past four years instead of the washed-out-milk-with-a-drop-of-coffee-in-it with a chalky finish that was up there. I hated that finish; you couldn’t wash it, because any swipe with a damp cloth left swathes of permanent colour-change. Very frustrating.

It’s back to school season, and I’ve somehow completely disconnected from it this year. We walked into a department store this week and were attacked by Back To School!!! stuff, and I kind of shrugged and said, Oh, that time of year? It’s probably partly to do with the weather and its not-very-summery-ness. But otherwise, meh. Maybe getting the Mac and the Touch last month assuaged my new-school-supplies need for the year.

We officially have tomatoes. Two plants broke, but HRH rescued the fruit and they’re ripening on the shelf outside.

And… my contributor’s copy of Out of the Broom Closet arrived this morning! It’s a very handsome book and I’m so pleased with it. I’m not going to do a hero shot; I’ll wait for the box of author’s copies to do that.

We’re leaving tomorrow for an overnight camping trip with out local covens, which should be nice and relaxed. (Do you hear that, world? Nice and relaxed.) I handle organization of the two other annual local co-coven events, so this one I told others to handle. Other than offering to bring the camp stove/BBQ, a sack of corn on the cob, and outlining a menu for lunch, it’s someone else’s show/lists/booking/schedules, for which I am grimly thankful. All I have to do is show up and camp. Besides participating in rituals, that is. And any rit I don’t have to write or run these days is a good one; I am so burnt out doing that and the organization thing.

Right; they boy has shut himself in his room to read on his bed. I will try to take advantage of this by working some more on Orchestrated. Yesterday there were about twenty pages edited, and three new ones appeared. I found a decent timer app for Macs that helped immensely; I set it for five minute intervals and realized that by giving myself a five-minute minimum, I was also giving myself permission to write past five minutes. I found myself restarting the timer over and over. Also, the day seemed to go very slowly for some reason, which helped a lot.

Right. I have just been asked for crackers and cheese. That, then work.