Trudging

Things are moving along. I feel somewhat as if I’m kind of walking in place, though.

More unconnected point-form stuff, also out of chronological sequence:

1. We had a wonderful concert on Saturday night. I did as well as I could have done considering the fall I’ve had, and I was fine with what I didn’t pull off. There was an odd moment in the Furiant, the final movement of Dvorak’s Czech Suite, where our conductor tried to up the tempo and I appear to have been the only one who noticed, so rather than play at his tempo for more than three bars and have it sound awful I stuck to what the rest of the orchestra was doing. It really was a terrific night overall and I want to say more except I can’t really think of what to say. Our flute soloist, a fifteen-year-old girl, was brilliant in Chaminade’s Concertino. The boy got to examine our percussionist’s tympani, which thrilled him to bits (and thank you so much for that, Terry!), and he saw his first piccolo on the way back to his seat. Jeff and Devon kept HRH and the boy company in the audience. The next concert will feature Beethoven’s 4th and Mozart’s Don Giovanni overture, two of my favourite pieces, and will take place on Saturday 2 April 2011, so don’t say I didn’t give you enough advance warning.

2. Saturday morning we moved the boy’s room around. We took out the armoire and put it downstairs in the laundry room (where I am now using it as a linen closet, and I am ridiculously pleased about having everything folded neatly behind its small doors or in its drawers), swung his bed around to be under the window, switched his dresser and his bookcase, and centered the toy storage unit along the wall between his cupboard and bed. It works extremely well, and the boy thought most of it up. (He was not entirely happy about giving up the armoire, though.) HRH also put a new-to-us television antenna on the roof, and holy cats, we now get HD channels and some big US channels like CBS and Fox and NBC, plus (this may be the best part for me) half a dozen PBS channels. Wow.

3. Sunday I had a group cello rehearsal, which I got to just in time. The boy went to a birthday party in the first half of the afternoon, and HRH went with him. Originally I was going to take him but HRH proposed giving me some time off, for which I was very thankful. I ended up chatting to my mum for an hour and a half on the phone. The birthday party was at a local gymnastics studio, complete with a trainer to guide the kids, and the boy had a blast, so they got home a bit later than we’d originally anticipated. Apparently they do a summer camp and lots of his friends from preschool will be taking classes there, so we shall keep that in mind. The rehearsal went all right: a lot of it is basic three-part carol arrangements that took a single play-through. However, there are two big main pieces we need to focus on next week, both with timing that requires a goodly amount of concentration on my part and I need to play them with other people to cement what the changes sound like. I really enjoy our group lessons.

4. On Friday Ceri and Ada came over to hang out, and we had a very nice time. Ada fell asleep on me, which was a wonderful experience. Then I went to their place on Monday to babysit Ada while Ceri went to the dentist, and I got her to fall asleep again. I am somewhat stunned. She is a lovely baby, so easy to handle, and with a sweet nature. In about two years I am going to host a Fairy Goddaughter Tea Party, because I may not be a fairy godmother, but I think I can safely classify all three of my goddaughters as fairy godschildren. We shall dress up and wear hats and have a real tea party, and we shall use the very good china tea set with violets on it, and have tiny butterfly sandwiches and miniature cakes, and we shall have a wonderful time.

5. Now that I have delivered projects and signed contracts, I have begun the long 6-8 week wait for cheques to arrive. Which puts their arrival… after Christmas, grr grr grr. My bank account is getting very thin; I can see the bottom, and that makes me very uncomfortable at any time of year, but one always feels more financially iffy in December. I should able to cover my regular bills, but even that may be tricky. This is the bad thing about freelancing: you can’t count on a regular paycheque, and sure the cheques are big when they arrive, but you have to make them last until the next undetermined paycheque.

6. I’m halfway through my copy-editing project. I ought to finish it tomorrow, in fact. But then, as the boy has two ped days (well, he’s home with me for the first ped day and off to visit with his local grandparents for the next, but HRH is planning stuff for Friday), I am anticipating not being able to really work again until next Monday, at which time I’ll do a final look-see to make sure I’ve covered everything and then hand it in.

That’s enough for now. Editing used up all my focus for the day.

A Brief Update…

… in point form, because putting together paragraphs that flow from one to the other takes more focus and energy than I’ve got, but some of this is news worth sharing:

1. How about the weather round here lately? This has got to be the brightest, warmest November I can remember in a long time. The forecast is either sunny, or says overcast and we get clear sun instead. Today was so beautiful I shucked off my jacket for the drive home. There was truly gorgeous fog this morning, too, which was lovely to watch while listening to Glenn Gould’s 1980 Goldberg Variations and drinking tea.

2. I got to spend a bit of time with Ceri and Ada this morning, which was thoroughly enjoyable. While I was there I finished prepping my 4oz of gorgeous firey Polworth fibre. I always forget how much I enjoy stripping and predrafting fibre; I always want to jump right into the spinning. Prepping the fibre means I get to handle it and touch it and get a real feel for the staple length is, what the crimp is like, how well it drafts, how springy it is, and generally listen to how it wants to be spun. Ceri sent me home with three pounds of Honeycrisp apples. Which, if you know how big Honeycrisps are, means there are six apples. I may eat them all myself and not share them with other family members. ( “Fruit? What fruit? We have no fruit.”)

3. I had a very good cello lesson today indeed. I had to skip last week due to work, so I was concerned about how today would go, but apart from being rocky on some of the Christmas ensemble stuff in extended sixth position, my recital piece went really very well. We’re just working on speed now. It felt very good indeed to hear my teacher say, “If you’re like this now, just think how good you’ll be in another month!”

4. I am rereading The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay. I remember being underwhelmed by this when it came out, but having read Under Heaven only a few months ago, I knew that’s the style I needed to read right now, so I pulled it out. I am enjoying it very much this time round.

5. I am annoyed at my printer. It told me it was out of the black ink, so I refilled the cartridge myself. Turns out this brand and model needs to have the cartridge chip reset if it’s refilled, or it keeps reading as empty, so I had to go out and buy a whole new one. Once I’d put that in, the printer informed me it now couldn’t work because the colour cartridges are low. Couldn’t it have told me all of this at the same time? I’ve been without a printer for two weeks now and I have to wait till the next paycheque to buy colour ink, which hasn’t gone down well with the boy at all, because he has been asking for colouring pages downloaded from the Internet to colour after school. I’ll stop by the ink refilling kiosk in the local mall next time I’m there and ask if they can reset the chips; if they can’t I’m doomed to buying new cartridges every time, which annoys me a lot.

6. Yesterday I returned the take-an-existing-manuscript-and-turn-it-into-a-different-book repurposing project with trepidation, but got a “Wonderful!” from the editor almost right away. I think it’s pretty solid, but if there’s anything that requires tweaking I told him to let me know and I’d handle it right away. I also told the copyediting department that I was good to go as of immediately, then idly wondered how long I’d be between projects. Well, not long, it seems! I was assigned my first copyediting project today, to be returned in two weeks. It’s relatively short, very formulaic so it has clear coding to be done, and has already been approved by the editor so it’s likely to only need a very light hand. It’s a great project with which to essay the copyediting waters. I am ridiculously excited about it. I get paid by the hour, too, which is so much more fair than a flat fee.

7. Half an hour after I got that e-mail today, I received an offer for the book I wrote a sample and proposal for last month. It looks like it’s a go! I’m not going to give you any more than that until I’ve signed the contract, but the terms were okay and we’ve got a verbal/e-mail go-ahead agreement. This is the first kind of book of this type the publisher has done, so we’re all taking a bit of a gamble on it. It’s due in May 2011, with 50% to be seen by February somethingth. So I’ve got very pleasant work ahead of me indeed, what with copyediting and a new book.

Weekend Roundup

What a glorious weekend! The sun was bright, and the temperatures were kind enough to be around 8 degrees C (which felt much warmer in the sun). It was very good for general morale.

The weekend began at 5:00 on Saturday morning when the boy woke us up in a panic because he was throwing up. We suspected one doughnut too many the evening before, but reconsidered our diagnosis to be the gag reflex brought on by a coughing jag when he demonstrated the coughing-almost-to-throwing-up again a couple of hours later. The boy snuggled in bed with me, feeling very sorry for himself, while HRH got up to made himself a pot of coffee and read a bit before heading out to get in line at the garage to have the tires changed to the winter set. He was back by 9:00, to our surprise (the garage opened at 7:00 and as it’s the weekend before Quebec law requires snow tires, we anticipated long lineups), and then he just kept going! He brought all the Christmas decoration boxes in from the back shed, tested all the sets of outdoor Christmas lights, then took the boy out to buy various caulking and sealants and strings of Christmas lights to replace the dead ones. While the boy napped (rare in this day and age, usually only when he’s ill) HRH climbed up on the roof and set the hooks, then put up the lights. When the boy got up he and HRH went for a walk to see the terribly overkill but amusing Christmas decorations on the house the next street over, complete with a Santa-piloted red biplane on the roof. (People, it isn’t even halfway through November yet!) My Saturday accomplishments were finishing weaving the black scarf then sewing the knitted hood to it, and rereading most of Sailing to Sarantium. I was pretty fried by an intense work week. I finished the repurposing project; all I need to do is finish the layout coding and I’m done, so it will be handed in right on deadline tomorrow.

Today I woke up feeling slightly dazed but good after eleven hours of sleep. I must have needed it! HRH was sorting through the boxes in his office and reorganizing things. The boy and I went out to the bookstore as soon as it opened to look for the fourth Ga’Hoole book and to take advantage of the 25% off sale for iRewards members. We finished book three last night, and last time we looked they had multiple copies of all fifteen books in the series, but today we were disappointed. I suppose they wanted shelf space for other things going into the holiday season, and the movie came out almost two months ago now, so they returned all but a few copies of books one through three, a copy of fifteen (what? I so do not understand how chain stores choose to stock their titles), and two copies of a short story collection. The boy chose the short stories and another small stuffed owl that he bought with his own money ( “I am collecting owls,” he told me), while I looked in vain for any of the books I want to read. I’m going to have to order them, which makes me sad, because I like shopping at real bookstores, and I miss it. We got home to find that HRH had vacuumed, and we all had lunch. Then I sat down to work on the programme notes. HRH called me downstairs to look at how he’d reorganized the laundry room (brilliant, and I now have a table to use for folding and sewing) and talked to me about a door for my office. I have been doorless since we moved in, because the French door we brought from the old place was 30″ wide, whereas the doorway is 32″. There was a knotty pine folding door in the storage room downstairs with beautiful stained glass insets that was supposed to go at the top of the stairs, but we never installed it because we didn’t want a door there. Well, today HRH measured it, found that it was 31 and some fraction of an inch wide, took it apart into two pieces, installed hinges on both sides, and hung them in my doorway. There are well-meant but slightly tacky roses woodburned on the hallway side, but HRH is going to sand those out. Then we shall oil the wood, and it will all be even prettier. Here’s what it looks like when the two halves of the door are closed:

And here’s my newly rearranged music corner next to it. I can reach the lightswitch properly instead of sliding my hand between the bookcase and the wall, I no longer trip over the music stand, and my cello isn’t crammed between the window and the shelves! The room feels even bigger now:

Once the doors were up, together we hung the pictures in the hallway that had been cluttering the hall table and lying underneath it since we moved in. I can’t believe the amount of work he accomplished this weekend.

Then I made cookies once I’d finished my work. (Translation programs are unintentionally amusing; Google told me that “sash dance” was “danse avec guillotine,” which made me laugh for much longer than it ought to have. I understand why it translated it that way — in French one of the terms for a window sash is a guillotine — but it’s still wrong, and just reinforces my interest in how idiom does or doesn’t translate.) Now there is a French roast in the oven, rubbed with butter, Dijon, garlic, and basil. The house smells amazing.

It’s been a wonderful weekend. It feels good to be going into a new week this refreshed and positive.

Lest We Forget

War’s not the answer most of the time; it’s often an excuse that veils another agenda. But that’s not going to stop me from honouring the men and women whose job it is, or who volunteer, to go out and risk their lives in confrontations beyond what most of us can envision. It’s their commitment and courage I honour on Remembrance Day. I honour our peacekeepers, too, the people who go to other countries to help rebuild after times of turmoil. And support staff — doctors, drivers, cooks, all those people who are necessary to the machine of war and who rarely get recognition for being in danger as well. And those left at home, who carry the double burden of hope and dread for their loved ones.

There has to be a better way. But even when someone figures it out, I’ll keep on saying thank you to all those individuals who gave lives, limbs, time, and innocence to the wars. I honour and respect their personal decisions, even if I disagree with the governmental decisions that created the need for them.

In Passing

I’m handling several deadlines at the moment. I’ve got a major project deadline next Monday, which really means I need to be finished on Friday and then do a final proofread pass on Monday. This has been a four-month long repurposing project, where I’ve been taking a manuscript and rearranging it to make something different. It’s pure editing, and I’m thankful to have had the four months, because there was packing and moving in there, plus the horrible, horrible fibro aftermath. A lot of this project has been turning pages and scrolling through a document, thinking about where to put what in order to have it make the most sense thematically. And since thinking has been hard, no thanks to the fibro fog, it’s been challenging. I’m almost done, though, and I feel very positive about it. Apart from the OMG-deadline-deadline-deadline! panic that’s setting in right on schedule, of course. I’m also struggling with my “But it could be better!” crisis that hits me before I hand a project in. Sure, it could be better. It could always be better. Or perhaps not better; perhaps different is a better descriptor. Most creative types could poke at things forever. You don’t actually finish things; you just let them go.

I’ve got a concert in ten days, too, and I’ve got deadline panic setting in about that as well. I’m not where I wish I could be for this performance thanks to the fibro backlash I’ve been suffering this fall, and I’m having the crisis about sitting second chair that I regularly have every two concerts or so. I love the music on the programme, though, which makes up for a lot. I’m also handling a deadline for the programme notes, which slipped my to-do list a week ago and now I’m having to shove that into moments between work on the major freelance project to get them done ASAP so that they can go along to the next people in the production process.

I’m having issues with a supposedly relaxing hobby, as well. I don’t know why I try to knit things, sometimes, I really don’t. My project notes on Ravelry for the hooded scarf I’m trying to make look like this:

18 October: Planned:
* Hood: garter stitch with Lion Thick & Quick yarn on size 11 needles (for a denser fabric to better protect ears from the wind)
* Scarf: garter stitch with Lion Thick & Quick yarn on size 15s (for better drape)

First go:
26 Oct 2010: Hood finished and immediately frogged. The fabric was too stiff. I swear to gods I swatched with the 15s and the fabric was too loose, so I went with the 11s, but sometimes swatches lie. No, they lie most of the time, actually. Sometimes a 4-inch swatch doesn’t tell you how a 12 x 20-inch piece of knitted fabric will behave.

Second go:
* 28 October: Hood knitted on size 15s; cast on 30 stitches with Lion Thick & Quick (this worked, hurrah)
* 3 November: Doing the scarf part as a One-Row Lace Scarf in the Thick & Quick on the size 15s. If it’s not long enough by the time the skein ends, I’ll pick up stitches and knit some Bernat Harmony onto each end.

Third go:
OKAY FINE. Look, here’s what’s happening.
* Early November: Knitted a One-Row Scarf with an entire skein of Lion Thick & Quick, as above. It was a better drape for the hood, so it got folded and seamed and the original garter stitch rectangle hood got frogged.
* Nov 7: Cast on for the scarf with the Bernat Harmony held double on size 15s, which drove me crazy in about three minutes. Frogged it. Cast on size 11s with a single strand of Bernat Harmony, knit a couple of inches. Felt too thin. Frogged.
* Nov 9: Gave up on the knitting and warped the Kromski Harp rigid heddle loom with the Lion (with a draft something like 10-0-2-0-2-0-10-0-2-0-2-0-10 to create the same sort of visual impression that the One-Row Scarf creates when done in bulky yarn and left unblocked), and started weaving using the Bernat Harmony as a warp.

The good news is that the woven scarf looks as if it will work out just fine. Which is also good for my sanity, because really, you know? I can’t even handle garter stitch rectangles properly, let alone an actual pattern. I should just stick to spinning and weaving to relax. Speaking of which, the 8 oz of BFL I spun on Lady Jane has all been chain-plied on my Louet S15, and I have 522 yards of fingering weight yarn:

Very pretty. It will be made into a wrap for me (except I obviously SHOULDN’T KNIT IT, which means I need to think about a weaving draft instead). I wish I could shake the feeling of being irresponsible when the fibro is at a point where I can’t do much other than sit and get some spinning done. It uses a totally different part of my brain and conscious mind than work does.

The boy is doing much better, thank you all for asking and sending your get-well wishes. He’s as good as new after the scarlet fever, although he’s still on the amoxicillin till sometime next week. Our bad colds are also pretty much things of the past, thank goodness.

Right. Back into the fray.

Fall Concert Announcement

It’s November, which means that yes, the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra’s fall concert is nigh! This concert’s theme is Transcontinental, and takes you through a variety of European musical styles.

Circle Saturday the 20th of November on your calendars. At 19h30 in the Valois United Church in Pointe-Claire (70 Belmont Ave., between King and Queen), the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will present the following works:

    Rossini: La Cenerentola overture
    Bartok: Rumanian Folk Dances
    Chabrier: Excerpts from Suite Pastorale
    Chaminade: Flute concertino, Op 107 (Soloist: Stephanie Morin)
    Dvorak: Czech Suite for Orchestra, Op 39
    Brahms: Hungarian Dances 6 & 1

Admission is $10 per person; admission is free for those under 18 years of age. The concerts usually last approximately two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all. And it bears repeating that children of all ages are very welcome indeed.

Rewriting The Day

So! Today is one of our much-anticipated spiritual retreat days. From nine to five, we spend time with others of our tradition, sharing ritual, discussion, and presentations or workshops on different topics pertinent to our practice.

And as I am publishing this at three in the afternoon, you can see that I am not there. Nor is HRH. We’re at home in quarantine, with a little boy who has scarlet fever.

I know, I know. Like mother, like son, I suppose. Fashionably retro.

Yesterday was a ped day, and he and I meandered over to the bookstore as we’d planned. He was awfully quiet, and chose to go lie down on his bed of his own accord before we left. I knew he wasn’t feeling great, but assumed it was the cold both he and I have been fighting all week. He had a low-grade fever but nothing serious, and didn’t have much of an appetite. He did fall asleep while watching a movie and had a two-hour nap, but that didn’t surprise me; the cold had been running him down quite a bit. Then last night after dinner he undressed for his bath and HRH called me in to look at the sandpapery, goosebumpy rash all over his body. “That’s scarlet fever,” I said. (Trust me; I know.) And by the time he went to bed the rash was beginning to deepen into the flushed pink colour that gives the illness its name.

I called our local source of all information — his preschool teacher! — and got the address of the best local clinic to visit. (My first choice is always my own GP, but she doesn’t work weekends.) We considered leaving it till Sunday morning, but decided it would be better to hit it early. His fever wasn’t high, and once the rash breaks out it doesn’t get really worse; long-term complications can arise if it’s not treated at all, but this was only a day in one direction or another. However, we realised that the sooner he got antibiotics, the sooner he could go back to school. The decision to hit the clinic sooner rather than later was also influenced by the insane wait times out here. The general GP shortage in our province seems to be particularly bad in this zone, so there are lots of clinics and they’re always full. If we got out in reasonable time, we thought, we could take the boy to his grandparents as planned, and get to the retreat late.

We were there at 7:30 when the doors were unlocked, along with a small crowd of other people; the doctors arrived at 8:00 and started processing patients; we were home by 11:00 with a few bottles of amoxicillin (oh, the unpleasant childhood memories resurrected by that banana smell). And we also all had a 48-hour quarantine, because the boy would still be infectious, and HRH and I needed 48 hours to ensure we weren’t incubating it ourselves. No contact with children or pregnant women for any of us, we were told. And that’s what clinched things, because one of the attendees at the retreat is pregnant.

So we’re at home today. We’ve declared it a TV day, and watched the last quarter of Avatar season 2 all in a row. I’ve baked chocolate cake; we’ve had popcorn. We’re making the best of not being able to attend the retreat (always frustrating, but especially so when you’re the one who organised it) or spend the day with Grandma and Papa. We can’t go to the concert we were planning on attending tomorrow afternoon, either, because all the performers are children, which has disappointed us dreadfully.

The clinic was terrific, though: great atmosphere and people, and the boy was cheerful and entertained himself with books and crayons. He got a purple mask to wear over his nose and mouth because he had a fever and cough, and he has decided to keep it forever and ever. It’s reassuring to know we have a really good clinic so close to us.

We’re making the best of things. He’ll be at home with me on Monday but back at school on Tuesday, and thank goodness, because I’m on my last week before deadline with the repurposing project and need all the time I can get. He says he quite likes the banana taste of the amoxicillin (better you than me, kid) and that’s good, too, because we’ve got four bottles of it in the fridge and another nine and a half days ahead of him taking it. Good thing we don’t burn toys and clothing after scarlet fever like they used to, because we bought a new tiny stuffed owl at the bookstore yesterday, too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a cake to ice and an icing spoon to hand to the boy afterwards.