Weekly Update

I see it’s been a week since I updated.

This past Saturday was Tarasmas. For those who know what that is, yes, it’s a bit out of season, but it was scheduled thusly on purpose. This year’s theme for the interconnected radio plays was history; the evening began with the creation of the earth and went from there. There were some truly inspired casting choices, some great moments where people stepped up to fill in for missing cast members, and great hilarity and deep literary and historical appreciation were enjoyed by all. We stepped out into a Siberian winter storm, one of which had gone on for several hours while we were indoors and yet hadn’t been responded to by city snow crews, so the drive home (for us and pretty much everyone) was interesting, to say the least. When we got home at midnight we discovered the next-door neighbours shovelling our driveway and steps, so I came inside to make coffee and HRH helped them do their own side. At that point there was about fifteen centimetres on the ground, and another five to seven fell overnight. The boy slept over at his local grandparents’ house, so HRH and I got to sleep in. I even brought HRH coffee in bed as an apology for having to wake him up at quarter past nine in order to shovel again. The boy was delighted with all the snow; he had his grandma out at nine AM to build a fort in the backyard, and we picked up a snow saucer on the way home that afternoon with him, so he and HRH could build more of his snow slide in our own backyard, as well as a fort built under the play structure.

The fibro is making things pretty miserable, as I outlined here. I’ve been making ruthless choices about what I can and cannot do, and most of the time it’s working, except for the appended guilt and frustration. I just kind of keep gritting my teeth and trudging forward, losing ground. Yesterday was one of the worst days I’ve had since that bad day two weeks ago. The boy was home on Monday thanks to a ped day (not-so-helpfully announced a single week before the day itself, the late notice of which completely bolluxed my planned work schedule for the week) so we drove out to the western tip of the island to see the doctor and get his vaccination booster shots (to which he said, “What? That doesn’t even hurt!” when the doctor injected him), then spent a couple of hours with Ceri and Ada. That was okay, although moderately tiring. Driving takes a lot out of me, and since my minimum commute to my bare-bones regular activities is forty-five minutes each way, it’s not inconsequential. But yesterday I had a cello lesson, so I gave myself an hour to brush off the car and have a leisurely drive. Good plan, and it would have worked if I hadn’t discovered half an inch of knobbly ice under the three inches of snow. It took me half an hour total to get the car clear, and I was so tired when I got in that I considered calling my teacher to cancel, except I’d done that two weeks ago when I had too much work to do and we’re missing a lesson next week because she’s out of town. So I got out there, exhausted, told her that I wasn’t in a good place, and she tried to give me something different and — she thought — intuitive to do, and it just stressed me out more. I don’t think I’ve adequately communicated to her what the fibro actually does to me in terms of focus, energy, and exhaustion-wise, because when I said I might not make it to orchestra the next night because I was so bad she just smiled and said, “I’ll see you there.” Or maybe she just knows me really well, and knows I’ll fight to get through it and sure, I’ll get there because I’ve made a commitment, but I’ll blow what energy I have for the next two days.

I’m fighting this weird zoning out thing while I do the 45-min drive out to my lesson, the boy’s lesson, and orchestra. Orchestra is the worst, because it’s at the end of the day. I don’t know whether it’s physical weariness, or fibro fog, or both. The drive takes so much out of me, and then I have to buck up and focus on the music for two and a half hours at orchestra (for example) and then I have to drive back home. I don’t know what to do about it. I keep telling myself it will get better as winter fades. I hate that it takes so much energy just to deal with the weather.

The book writing is going along. Because I’ve been so foggy and the typing of bird facts has been going so slowly, I haven’t been getting as much word count down as I’d like. I managed 3,000 words today though, which is more than respectable when I’ve been doing 1,000 a day for the past bit, so I’m happy with that. I have a 50% of book check-in date of February 15 next week, so I’m trying to get as close to 50% as possible. I’ll probably come in just under it, but I’ll have done all I can do to date. I need to choose six to ten actual bird entries and make them as complete as possible for the hand-in, too. That’s going to be time-consuming, and not yield much wordage.

The spinning wheel got its second coat of stain this weekend. I chose a warm gold to put over the cool dark walnut, and it’s perfect; it came out exactly that shade I wanted it to. I’d give you a picture, but I can’t seem to take one that looks any different from the first one, although they look very different in real life. I was going to wax it last night, but I opened the tin of furniture paste wax HRH had brought home from work and slammed it shut again immediately. It stank. There was no way I was going to breathe that while I waxed all the fiddly stuff, nor did I want any hint of that chemical smell clinging to the wheel. So I’m currently searching for a non-petroleum-based wax. My mother tells me she uses Brimax, so I’m looking for that. There’s a distributor in Pointe-Claire, but I don’t know if they sell direct to retail customers; I’ll have to call and ask later this week. Etsy lists a few handmade organic beeswax- and carnuba-based polishes with either lemon, orange, or lavender oil in them, so I may order one of those. I could always concoct one myself, too; there are enough recipes out there. I’d have to find the ingredients first, of course.

The boy and I encountered our first challenging cello practice this past Monday. He whined and complained so much that he didn’t even ask for a sticker when, five minutes in after the ten-minute struggle to get him set up, I said that maybe we should do it another day. He decided that maybe it would be better to practice as soon as he got home from school, then have his snack and play on the computer a bit, because then he wouldn’t have to be told repeatedly to get off the computer and set up for the practice session that actually enjoys when he isn’t wanting to be doing something else.

Right. Boy-fetching time.

Wheel Progress

I started staining the wheel yesterday. The European alder and birch softwood is taking stain to different degrees depending on the angle of the wood and how it was shaped. For example, some places are paler because the wood was cut or sanded with the grain, so the wood cells aren’t as open and thirsty. If the sanding or shaping took place across the grain — like most of the spindling, I discovered — it soaks the stain up in great gulps leaving nothing to wipe off and swathes of dark colour behind. I wonder if I shouldn’t have used some of that wood conditioner prep stuff to even it out (not that I knew this would happen, or where; you can see some sections of the pieced wheel rim are darker right next to paler sections, for example). Eh; done is done.

Last night it took half an hour to do the table and an hour to do the drive wheel alone. As you can see, the spindles of the wheel still aren’t done; they’re very finicky, and I’ve asked HRH to do those. There are more bits and pieces and fittings like bobbins and whorls and pegs to do, too, and the lazy kate to stain.

This is just the first coat. I have to sand these and do at least one more coat of stain, and as it’s come up so dark already I’m considering applying a lighter, more golden-toned stain over top to warm it up (I know I have at least one half-can of golden mid-brown left over from staining various shelves and the Louet). The table and the flyer are the colour I was hoping for, using Miniwax Dark Walnut 2716. I may adjust my level of sanding depending on what piece I’m doing, to try to get more off the darker parts. Waxing it will warm up the colour a bit, too, because right now the finish is quite matte and absorbing light instead of reflecting it.

Because my retailer was short-shipped the rods and tension peg for the lazy kate in the original wheel delivery, they shipped separately from the North American distributor directly to me, and the parcel guy dropped them off today. The boy and I had made it all the way to the corner when the van pulled up to our house, and as there was already a decent amount of snow to trudge through plus wind, I made the decision to keep trekking to the bus stop even though the boy kept pointing out the van. The postman would drop off a card and I’d collect the parcel at the post office tomorrow, I reassured him. Well, we’d gone round the first corner and had reached the next when there was the beep of a horn, and I looked up to see that the parcel guy had pulled his van over to the other side of the street and was waving at me. So the boy and I scurried across the road and he gave me my package of rods and pegs, bless him. “I saw you’d left and I thought that maybe your husband was home,” he said cheerfully, snow whipping into his face as I signed for it. “I knew you weren’t far.” I thanked him fervently. I shall pick up a Tim Hortons gift card and leave it by the door to hand to him next time he drops by. Except I don’t think I’ve ordered anything else that would arrive by parcel post, now that I have both my spindles, the wheel, and the short-shipped stuff; the DVDs and books I’m waiting for arrive by regular mail. Doesn’t this mean I ought to order something new?

What I Read in January 2011

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan
Among Others by Jo Watson
100 Birds and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells
iPhone: Fully Loaded by Andy Ihnatko
Death Without Tenure by Joanne Dobson
The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson
A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R. King (reread)
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King (reread)
Beacon Street Mourning by Dianne Day (reread)
Death Train to Boston by Dianne Day (reread)
Emperor Norton’s Ghost by Dianne Day (reread)
Bohemian Murders by Dianne Day (reread)
Fire and Fog by Dianne Day (reread)
The Strange Files of Fremont Jones by Dianne Day (reread)
Side Jobs by Jim Butcher
The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan
Fire by Kristin Cashore

Among Others was really, really good. It’s very subtle, assumes the reader can think and construct necessary backstory from clues within the narrative, and has two or three of the best descriptions and comments about magic that I’ve ever read.

I was slightly disappointed in Death Without Tenure. It didn’t feel as tight as the earlier books in the series.

The Lost Hero was great; The Red Pyramid felt slow till the last quarter.

I am obviously pulling out old favourite mystery series set in historical eras and doing some serious comfort reading. Stupid winter.

Weekend And Otherwise General Roundup

The big standouts this weekend: The boy’s first cello lesson, his first at-home practise on Sunday evening, and the arrival of new spinning equipment.

If you hit the previous post or the RSS feed early on Friday afternoon, you may have missed the two small updates to it, including photos.

The biggest obstacle to the lessons may be the travel time. Forty-five minutes, while fine for me because it’s roughly the length of a cello concerto so I get a sense of completion, is long for a squirmy boy in a snowsuit in the back. We’ll have to figure out a way to keep him busy.

Otherwise, the lesson went really well. There was lots of information that an adult would absorb almost immediately about how to sit and how to hold the cello, but the boy had to be talked through it. It was really fascinating to watch the Suzuki method being enacted with someone of the age for whom it was originally developed. He adores his tuning song ( “Ants, Ants, Ants, Digging in the Dirt, Dirt, Dirt, Going under Ground, Ground, Ground, All the way to China, China, China” for the four strings, ADGC), loves the “catapult” exercise where he holds his cello hand out to the side, palm up and hand slightly cupped, then bends the elbow and the hand is “released,” catapult-like, to land on the fingerboard. His teacher lent him her completely adorable Twinkle Bow to use for the week (because the bow that came with the cello set is a 1/2 bow, so it’s extremely unwieldy for (a) the 1/4 cello and (b) the child who needs the 1/8 cello), and put two tiny frog stickers on it so he had a visual reference for mid-point and balance point when he does his bowing exercise (which, he will discover, is the rhythm variation A of Twinkle). He was very proud of showing her that my luthier taught him how to make a bunny shape with the fingers of his right hand, then the bunny opens its mouth a bit and slides over the frog of the bow, teeth and ears kept long:

Not only is the bow two inches too long for the cello it came with (and therefore probably three to four inches too long for the boy), the 1/4 cello is unwieldy; we’ll be needing the 1/8. At the proper angles, his endpin is only extended two inches and his reach around the upper bouts is limited; he can’t get the bow down between the fingerboard and the bridge. The oversized instrument may have been a contributing factor in the slight mishap that occurred about three-quarters of the way through the lesson, when he twisted an odd way without holding onto the neck and the cello slipped off his body and fell to the ground. I thought my heart was going to stop. We all froze, our teacher picked it up and examined it, and all seemed to be well… but it could have gone very, very wrong. She asked him to apologise to me, then taught him about the three points of contact (knees, chest, floor) and the correct way to stand up and sit down with the cello so that he’d have a better understanding of the mechanics.

He’d drawn a picture for her (unprompted) that he gave to her at the end of the lesson, which she put up on her fridge. When we pulled out of her driveway, he sighed deeply and said, “I’m going to miss my cello teacher.” So I think it went well. She made quite an impression on him.

When I got home from my (quite excellent) ensemble lesson on Sunday, we set up his little chair and his endpin plank for his first at-home practice. This little cello doesn’t keep its tuning very well at all. I don’t know if that’s a commonality to all fractional celli or an idiosyncrasy of this one, or even because it’s literally newly set up and the pegs might not fully fit the pegholes properly. I may put a drop of peg dope on the pegs to keep them from slipping as badly as they’ve been doing. Anyway, after I wrestled with the pegs for a bit he got to sing his tuning song about the ants, practised his catapult, did his pizzicato rhythm practice, then again with what he and his teacher call “the magic bow”, and finally with fingers 1 and 2 of the left hand in prep for fingering. He loved it, and I did, too. I wish my practice sessions could be that fun.

In completely unrelated news, this arrived on Friday morning just as the boy and I were walking down the driveway to go to the bus stop:

I had a noon deadline, so I exerted magnificent self-control and didn’t open it until after I’d handed my project in and had made myself lunch:

I love that the maker signed the bottom of the table:

I bought walnut-coloured stain, tack cloths, foam brushes, and fine sandpaper on Saturday morning. HRH will borrow one of the tins of wood wax from work once I get to that point in a week or so. Once it’s all stained and waxed, we’ll assemble it. I figure it will be functional by mid-February (coincidentally, my next big deadline, so it’s probably a good thing it won’t be ready before that).

And two days before, this arrived in the mail:

As I was on deadline I didn’t try it out right away, but I did sit down Friday evening to test-spin some… vitamin cotton. Yes, I was crazy enough to have saved the cotton stuffing from the last few vitamin bottles, and I fluffed it up and used it to test this new Spinner’s Lair reclaimed walnut and oak spindle that weighs in at 0.88 oz. And you know what? Using a good-quality handmade spindle beats using a heavy, mass-produced, beginner’s spindle, hands-down.

If I can spin vitamin cotton on this thing, I can spin anything. I no longer hate spindles.

In other non-related news, I’m getting used to the iPhone. The headphone jack is on top instead of the bottom as well as being on the left instead of the right, which is now my most commonly enacted mistake. It annoys me that when I pull it out of a pocket I have to flip the thing around to access the home button and iPod controls, unlike my Touch, which had the headphone jack on the bottom so it went into a pocket upside-down with the controls easily accessible if I put my hand in my pocket. I need to work on focusing the photos I take with it, too, as you can see from some of the recent images here. It eats battery charge, something I have learned is a common weakness of the 3G series; to partially combat this one must be careful to close apps before putting it into sleep mode. Figuring I had nothing to lose because there was nothing on the iPhone yet and therefore a factory restore wouldn’t kill anything, I updated the iOS to 4, and all was well. I figured if Apple had to have fixed whatever killed most 3Gs back when the iOS4 was released last fall in the last two updates, and I seem to have been right. Now I can run my more current purchased apps like Toodledo and so forth.

My mouse is being annoying, sluggish and recalcitrant even though I just changed its battery and cleaned off the optic sensor, the ungrateful thing. I’m going to go back to working on the bird book.

The Saga Of The Boy and His Cello

So not long ago, I reported that the boy had decided upon the instrument he was going to learn to play, and that contrary to what he’d been discussing for the past year, it was the cello. I called the luthier and requested that they set up both a 1/4 and 1/8 size rental cello for him to try, because he was in that weird crossover space between the two sizes according to all the tables and lists we could find. My luthier said that they had both sizes in stock; they just needed to set them up. The boy bought his first music book and was very excited to start. That was three weeks ago. I set up his first lesson for the 22nd, thinking that two weeks would be more than adequate.

When I’d heard nothing from the luthier for those two weeks after my initial contact with them, I called my teacher on Friday the 21st to cancel the next day’s lesson and tentative confirm the following Saturday instead. Now, my local luthier is actually a satellite branch of a major luthier in town, and is only open three days a week. That means that two weeks translates to six working days. I understand that. I also know that they have a lot of open work orders, and it’s hard to fit everything in when you’re only open three days a week.

They phoned that Saturday morning, and I called them back after missing the call. The 1/4 was ready, they said, although they were having problems with the 1/8’s bridge and were waiting for a new part; it might be another two weeks for that size. No problem, I said! Could we come try the 1/4? If that fit, then they wouldn’t have to pursue the 1/8 setup. Sure, they said! Come by any time this afternoon!

The boy got very excited, and we planned to head over right after lunch. Well, as lunch was winding up, the luthier called again. Um, we’re so very sorry, they said; the rental 1/4 isn’t completely ready after all. We mixed up two different work orders.

Would it be ready by next Thursday, I asked? Maybe; they’d have to call me to confirm that the following week, they said.

The boy was crushed. So was I, in a different way. I was trying to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak; I didn’t want his enthusiasm to lose momentum. That night he asked if he could practice the cello he had, so I got the viola out and taught him the names of the strings, and we worked on the Twinkle rhythm, and he learned how to sing the note names of the first two bars, and put on a little concert for HRH. It was awesome. At orchestra on Wednesday I asked my teacher what else we could do, and she reminded me of all the early bow exercises like windshield wipers, the tree frog climbing up and down the stick, and so forth.

This morning I noticed that someone had pencilled the word ‘hope’ in lowercase letters across the bottom of the printout of the group cello class schedule that sits on my music stand. It just about broke my heart. So, it being Friday, three weeks after my initial request, and not having heard anything from the luthier, I called them early this afternoon to see what the status of everything was. They made sure to check by talking to the workshop guys to be absolutely certain of their answer, and lo and behold, the rental 1/4 is ready! So today, I will meet the boy at the bus stop after school, and I will be able to tell him that yes, we will be going to the cello store to try a cello, and if it fits we will definitely rent it and bring it home, and he can have his very first cello lesson tomorrow. He will be over the moon.

A couple of people have asked me what the fuss is about trying both the 1/8 and the 1/4, and why we aren’t just buying him a secondhand instrument. It’s like this: We want to buy him a secondhand instrument, absolutely, because renting one for a year would work out to the equivalent of buying a used one from the parent of another small cellist anyway. Problem is, if the 1/8 is what fits him right now, it certainly won’t fit him for very long, and we’d have to sell a secondhand 1/8 to upgrade to the 1/4 size in the near future anyway. If we’re renting, then I know we can upsize the 1/8 as necessary. Then, once he’s firmly in the 1/4 size and will be there for a couple of years, then we can buy him a used cello. If he fits the 1/4 right off the bat, then we’ll rent for the minimum three months and buy a used 1/4 at the end of it. Also, there are the is-he-ready-for-this and is-this-really-for-him issues. Three months will give me, his teacher, and him all a good idea of if this is going to work or not. If it’s not, we drop it after the three months, and try again later. If it works, then we can buy with confidence.

Cross your fingers for us, gentle readers. We really want that 1/4 at the luthier to be the right size. I think it will be, but there’s always that uncertainty.

I am going to need a new icon of him playing the cello. This one of him at twenty-two months old, while thematically appropriate, is woefully out of date.

LATER: Gentle readers, we have achieved cello:

The luthier and I think the 1/4 is a smidge large, but we’ve got it until the bridge for the new 1/8 comes in and gets shaped. If my teacher is fine with this, then the 1/4 it is.

SATURDAY: Yeeeeeah. We definitely need the 1/8; the 1/4 is just a bit too much to handle. Also, we need the proper size bow; the set came with a 1/2 size bow, for some reason. My teacher sent him home with her Twinkle Bow for the week to work with, a fully functional 10″-long miniature bow used to teach children how to hold a bow properly and use the proper wrist and elbow motions.

The boy, leaving his first lesson in the car: “Sigh. I will miss my cello teacher.”

Remembering To Breathe

Today, I have:

    – Finished my copyediting project and handed it in, right on time

    – Called the luthier to ascertain that the 1/4 size cello is finally ready for the boy to try (more on that later, it deserves its own post)

    – Unpacked the spinning wheel that arrived this morning (more on that later, too)

    – Finally gone to the post office to mail out two packages and a letter that have been sitting here since Monday

    – Bought various pharmacy things like vitamins, etc.

    – Gone to the library to pick up the books on hold for me (and also scored the new Alexander McCall Smith book in the Isabel Dalhousie series from the New Releases shelf)

    – Finally gone to the bank to deposit the three (!) freelance paycheques that I’d been carrying in my wallet for over a week

    – Paid bills; we are now totally up to date on utilities (in fact, I overpaid one, I think)

I’m catching up on what didn’t get done because I knocked myself out last weekend and Monday. Still taking it ve-e-e-e-ry carefully, and turning down new commitments and outings or evaluating already-scheduled ones as they come, though. I have the rest of the winter to get through, after all. I have been reminding myself to breathe all week, and it seems to have worked.

Hindsight

I did something not-very-bright yesterday. I made bad decisions, and I’m paying for them today.

The fibro is bad. The cold snap makes it worse. Struggling with heavy winter clothing is exhausting. Driving in the winter is draining, draining, draining. As an added bonus, I have a head cold, which on its own would be enough to put me on the chesterfield at this time of year with the fibro.

I don’t look sick. However, I am sick, with a chronic illness that is kicking my butt right now, like it does every winter; I just somehow forget how bad it gets.

I cancelled cello today. I am declaring a moratorium on all social events for the next two or three weeks except Tarasmas (unless I am literally unable to get out of bed that night). Regularly or already scheduled stuff will have to be evaluated as it comes. Work (sigh) and the basics like staying upright and remembering to eat have to come first.

In completely unrelated news, I have a new-to-me iPhone 3G. It is heavier than my first-gen Touch, and the on/off button is on the top right instead of the top left. These two things alone are throwing me off. There is a camera to play with (Cricket had the honour of being the first thing I photographed), and an interesting-sounding voice memo function that I can’t figure out yet. I have to go to the library to find a book on how to use an iPhone. Yes, I am that lame. I have the basics down — it’s essentially a more complex Touch, after all — but I’m going to need to know the why and how of things. At some point I will need to upgrade the iOS to the current version, and eventually initialise the actual phone part, too.