Brief Weekend Roundup & The Birthday Monday Activity Log

I am really, really tired of househunting. HRH spoke with one of the daycare dads last week who is a real estate agent, and when he complained about how quickly houses were selling — literally in less than 24 hours between the listing going up and agents calling for clients to see it — the dad nodded and said, “What’s happening is people are buying up houses in batches unseen, painting and doing slight renos required or uplifts like lighting, and reselling them at a profit.” HRH expressed his frustration at this, because it really screws families who are actually looking for houses to live in, and the agent agreed. He said it irritates real estate agents, too. He asked how many houses we’d viewed and when HRH said about thirty, he nodded again and said, “Yeah, that’s about the average these days.” So it’s nice to know we’re not just having an atypically horrible experience, but still incredibly frustrating to know that we’re being stymied by people who are just in it for the money.

Somewhat related: The house we saw yesterday was tiny but sweet, well-located in regards to amenities and school but the general neighbourhood was a bit more working-class than others we’d seen. And it had the most adorable cat, who was about six months old. She was mostly grey with small splotches of blondish red on her sides and white legs, and was very affectionate. She and the boy played all over the house while we viewed it. And we have come to the conclusion that we will never find a house with three bedrooms on the same level, because for some reason ninety percent of the houses we’ve seen have only two on one level and the additional room or rooms somewhere else. It’s very odd.

I spent an hour last night working through the Gigue of the first Bach solo cello suite with the bow, and the Prelude of the second suite in pizz. I used the heavy practice mute, and even so when HRH and the boy came upstairs the boy ran up to me and said I was so loud he could hear me even in the garage and the noise could really get on people’s nerves. HRH pounced on him verbally and the boy had a severe talking-to about speaking without considering how you’re phrasing something, and the difference between practising something to get better and just making random annoying noise, but even after we both had a go at it he didn’t understand. It was one of those parenting days where you’re certain nothing you have ever taught your child has sunk in, never. And way to go, kid, hitting me in the most sensitive hang-up I have about playing the cello.

Saturday night we had a double-header game of Settlers of Catan with the upstairs neighbours. Everyone pitched in with various alcohol and nibbly things, and it was a really awesome evening.

In good news, I discovered today while paying bills that I only have $21.05 left on my student loan. As of the end of the month I shall be free of it. While I should like to revel in having a few extra dollars a month, I shall be a sad and disciplined Responsible Adult and just program the equivalent monthly automatic payment to my credit line. Actually, it ought to go to my Visa, which has the higher interest rate.

Today, I:

– baked bread
– baked a birthday cake for myself
– paid bills
– finished my freelance assignment
– handled the post-weekend and daily correspondence

That looks kind of short. Hmm. Plans to go to the bank and the post office were rescheduled to tomorrow morning, because when I checked the thermometer outside it said that it was 37 degrees in the shade. If I don’t have to go out into the mid-afternoon heat, why would I?

And best of all, my lovely editor with the publishing company I worked with for a few years pinged me regarding a dearth of copy editors in the company. She’d told the copy chief about my super-clean manuscripts and the beginnings of my search for a more regular copy editing position. The chief thought I sounded marvellous and told her to send me her contact info so we could get started right away. I wrote her a “hi here I am you asked for me to contact you I’m looking forward to talking to you” message and am now waiting for a reply. Seriously, a regular book copy editing gig with a publisher would be the best birthday present ever. My editor rocks.

I’ve spun up four ounces of the Luscious Ditty batts in the Baby Silks colourway from Spin Knit & Life, and am about to resume filling the second bobbin with the other half of the batts. I’m using a modified longdraw for it and enjoying it very much. It draws beautifully, and spins up equally nicely. I think it’s going to make a gorgeous two-ply light sport weight yarn.

Joy!

Lots of terribly nice stuff happened yesterday.

I got halfway through my latest freelance assignment in about ninety minutes. MLG picked me up and we went out to the Burgundy Lion for lunch together. Let me tell you, it has been aeons since I’ve had a Scotch egg, and oh heavens, the one they serve is just lovely. So there was excellent company, and excellent food, and then the heavens opened and we had a terrific storm, something long overdue. HRH and the boy met us there. The plan was to pick me up on their way home, but the rain meant they stayed for lunch (on HRH’s part) and milk and dessert (on the boy’s part, as he had already lunched at school). The boy barely nibbled his sticky toffee pudding, though, so HRH and MLG polished it off quite happily.

We came home and opened all the windows to the thunderstorms that continued all through the afternoon. I had a wonderful time sitting in the open patio doors to the front porch, blowing bubbles with the boy into the rain.

After the boy went to bed, HRH gave me my birthday present early:

I adore my fox and my copper deer, but this one is my absolute favourite. I love the colours and the knotwork. So my deer got moved to the right and my owl now hangs in the very middle of the art collage wall of my office. I need to adjust the empty spaces, but I have to do that every time I get a new piece. It’s like a puzzle.

I have a wonderful husband. He’s very talented, and original art designed specifically for the recipient is such a special gift. He’s going to look into the cost of making full-colour prints from the Celtic totems series of paintings, too. We’ve meant to assemble pictures of them all in one place online for a while now; I’ll have to add that to my ongoing list of things to do.

The Week’s Work So Far

For the past day I’ve been sorting through all the files on my 300 GB external hard drive. I’m prepping it for reformatting to serve as my Time Capsule backup destination disk, so I can set my Mac to initially back up completely then incrementally upon changes. I actually have all those files on my Mac (most of them more current) which is why I only backed up about half of the external music and documents to data DVDs. My external hard drive stuff is about four months out of date, but it’s better to have slightly out of date stuff than no stuff at all. And in fact I am doing this with the intention of being redundant, because I plan to back up the current documents on my Mac to data DVD as well. I added my newer music to the fourth music backup data DVD already.

And I have just realised that I have to back up all HRH’s stuff as well, since we put it on here when he switched computers two years ago. And he has about 10GB worth of files I have to sort out and put on two data DVDs before I can reformat the drive. Sigh.

So far this week, I have:

– done an entire manuscript review and handed it in (there was a bad moment where I thought I had a day less than I did, because I’d typed the wrong due date into my agenda; the day-later deadline was very welcome after the not-much-done day of Monday, when the boy was home)
– got the approval for it and closed the file
– sorted through all 300GB of my external hard drive
– backed up about half of my music to data DVDs (I didn’t bother with the stuff I own on CD)
– backed up the important documents to data DVDs (about half)
– baked foccaccia for lunches
– baked a loaf of bread
– did laundry
– reworked the first five pages of Orchestrated
– wrote about 800 words longhand on the Victorian supernatural story
– had the boy home on Monday, ran errands, went to the library

Now because the heat has finally gotten to me and I can’t focus at the computer any more, I am going to go spin for a while.

Re: That Birthday Thing

I’ve had a couple of queries about what I’m doing for my birthday this year, because it’s upcoming and I’ve said nothing about it.

Well.

The original plan was to do the annual birthday picnic, which I enjoy. It’s not planning-intensive, I see people, we share food, we get fresh air, it’s nice. I was even looking forward to it.

Except this year, I am fully exhausted. I was low on energy, and then there were two weeks of prepping and camping and concertizing. Actually, now that I think about it, most of June was high-consumption in the energy department, what with the recital and the boy’s birthday happening in the first half of the month. When I say that I am flatlining I am using the word figuratively, but it’s appropriate because emotionally and energy-wise, I’ve got nothing. I’m numb. I’m literally exhausted; I ain’t got no more. I fell asleep at the early birthday thing my inlaws did for me and couldn’t eat my cake. The very idea of packing up and going out to a picnic makes me tired. The thought of dealing with people socially is fatigue-inducing.

And now, even worse, the city’s perishing under a nasty blanket of heat and humidity. Even with a thunderstorm predicted for Friday, the weekend is going to be miserable and more of the same weather we’re suffering now. If I wasn’t exhausted now, going out to picnic in oppressive heat and humidity when we’re all being told to stay indoors out of the sun would suck any energy I had. And I’m certainly not going to make other people do it.

The irony is that for once the Polaris convention is scheduled for the weekend after my birthday, so the ten or so people who would normally be out of town are actually available this weekend. Fibro, your timing sucks. (Not that in my experience you have ever displayed good timing. And not that this decision to postpone is to be entirely blamed on you; the weather is also culpable.)

I’m going to wait till I’m more with it so that I can actually attend and enjoy my birthday picnic. I suspect that early August might be better. (For my energy levels, I mean. Although the idea that early August will have better weather is kind of amusing, too.) I have (quietish) things booked over the next couple of weekends anyhow.

So there you are. A birthday; I have one soon. A celebration; we will have one later. I promise.

Stopping To Think; Or, In Which She Gets Philosophical

We tend to get caught up in our plans.

Plans are important. They give us direction and structure and context. But sometimes we forget to revisit them, to look at them and make sure they still match who we’ve become in the time between making the plans and the now. Because in the same way that adorable kittens become seventeen-pound cats and tiny babies become strong energetic children bound for kindergarten in less than two months and the novels you write take unexpected turns, we change, too, and to expect us to stick to a plan made for someone five years younger is moderately unrealistic. Five years is a lot of living, and a lot can happen in that space of time.

I’m not saying that everyone should scrap all their life plans. To completely reinvent a life plan every few years would be pointless and a waste of energy. But it’s important to re-evaluate, to seriously examine who you are and what you need on a regular basis to make sure that the details still apply. Otherwise, at some point you’ll lift your head and realise that you’re living the life or writing the book you planned out when you were twenty-eight, only now that you’re twenty years older you wish you weren’t.

Would those intervening twenty years be wasted? Not really; life experience is life experience. But it would have been nice to notice that you were changing along the way, and that the life path you had planned out wasn’t flexible enough to match you as you were evolving. It comes down to a question of efficiency, I suppose. And being as happy with yourself as you can be. Tiny changes along the way to match who you are at any given time are more efficient than a drastic life change at a much later date. Drastic changes are rather challenging to pull off; minor shifts are usually easier to handle.

Amanda Palmer, in a blog post wherein she did some self-examination in the light of her recent experience at a Lady Gaga show, said something that really made me stop and think:

here’s the thing.

it sometimes kills us to believe this, but you are ALWAYS free to choose a new path and hop off the one you’re on.
your expectations of yourself can change on a daily basis. it’s FINE.

your expectations of YOUR LIFE from when you were 12 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old, they will gnaw and haunt you. no doubt.
every love you left, every love you never chased, every career path you didn’t follow, every instrument you didn’t practice, every time you kept your mouth shut and should have spoken up, every time you said too much.
but none of that exists NOW. it’s gone, over, non-existent.

the same way your parents’ expectations haunt you. and your teachers and the noise of cultural expectations haunt you.
all these voices in your head bicker and argue and obscure the real key to freedom:
your ability to stand still and ask:

who do i want to be

and what do i want to do

RIGHT. NOW.

?

No, I’m not considering something drastic; I’m more philosophical at the moment than anything else. I just found this interesting in the light of a discussion we’re having over chez Emily’s Stark Raving Cello Blog about regrets and pie charts and difficulty embracing the now. We can change the parts of our lives we’re not happy with. It can be a scary thing to do, yes. I left a perfectly safe job to write, and following my bliss paid off (and yet, as I pointed out over there, I very often do not wish to be doing whatever I am currently doing at any given moment, so a major life change is not a guarantee of eternal contentment). And significant change should never be a whim; life plans need to be taken seriously. But we can look at our lives, ask what makes us happy right now, and embrace it without judgement. We need to accept that past things are past things, stop letting them drag us down, stop worrying about things beyond our control, and start focusing our energy on what we can do instead. Because really, we all need more happiness and less anxiety in our lives.

Can I do all that? I have to be honest; no, not completely. But I can try.

Catching Up: Concert Recap Plus Brief Weekend Roundup

There was a national holiday, and a concert, and house stuff, and a barbecue with good friends, and the boys on holiday from school and work, and it was hot.

Well, yes, there are details, but essentially that was it.

The Canada Day concert was good, I think. I am personally not happy with my performance, but neither am I upset. I’m just neutral, because I don’t have the energy to be happy or mad. (This is a theme that has carried through the last week or so, and if I had the energy I might be interested or concerned but, well, I don’t, so.) I am very aware that my not-as-good-as-it-could-have-been performance is directly related to the exhaustion and fibro, and I’m… well, not perfectly okay with that, but I accept it. My bowings were all over the place, which was disappointing because I am very proud of my bowing work and to have it all scuttled in performance is disheartening. Our conductor’s wife is a cellist and she spoke to us after the concert about how to improve our sound, which was both encouraging and tiring. I’ve done so much work already on my sound and bow arm in the past almost-two years. I had a scattering of friends attend the concert (thank you, MLG, Marc M, Lu, Phil, and Amanda!), which was lovely, although we were missing quite a few of our regulars. About half my teacher’s students came to see us, too, which was great, and a new friend or two as well.

The insane housing market led us to make an offer on July 1 with which we were ultimately uncomfortable, so we refused the counteroffer. Rumours that we bought a house are therefore unfounded. I am both okay and not okay with this. I am very, very awearied by this househunt, and of this crazy-stressful market that has houses selling three days after they go on sale. I am tired of feeling like we have to offer on a house while we are standing in it to ensure that we have a chance. And while I know we made the correct decision, I can’t help but feel that I turned down a perfectly serviceable house. (Despite the fact that it was missing a third bedroom and the boy’s bedroom would have held his bed and dresser and that’s about it. And the fact that it was further away than we wanted to be. The house wasn’t spectacular enough to balance the distance issue.) Our agent is fabulous and reassured us that if we felt at all iffy we were doing the right thing by continuing to look. But thirty houses and four offers in, I am pretty depressed.

I missed the chamber orchestra end-of-season party because we attended a lovely barbecue with Rob and Kristie and half their wedding party (the other half had attended an earlier barbecue). It was wonderful to have some of my questions and concerns addressed and put to rest, and I am really looking forward to performing this ceremony. It was fun to be with people I hadn’t seen in a long time, and others I don’t see often enough, and to see the number of kids running around with one another. That night the boy had a fever teetering on the edge of do-we-take-him-to-the-hospital-or-not, but I kept an eye on it, and he was pretty much back to normal the next morning, if a little clingy.

Saturday HRH went out to do some plastering, so the boy and I hung out together. He now has his first electric toothbrush, as he saw mine and for the first time coveted it instead of being nervous. There has been a lot of enthusiastic brushing of teeth since we brought it home. He also napped for two hours, so I suspect that his body was still fighting whatever triggered the fever. We picked up a few groceries, and for that night’s dessert I made peanut butter sauce for ice cream, and built most excellent sundaes with vanilla ice cream, dark chocolate and the peanut butter sauces, real whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles. They were so good that I called the upstairs neighbours down to feed them some, too, while the boy had an evening splash in his tiny pool.

Sunday my in-laws had an early birthday dinner for me, at which I embarrassingly fell asleep before supper and couldn’t eat a piece of my own cake. I’m really, really tired, okay?

The freelance work I’m currently doing is labour-intensive and focus-intensive, both not ideal for my fibro-fogged state, and not overly fabulous pay, so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for something else. t! sent me a link to an online freelance thing, asking if I’d heard of them, and I saw that they hire copyeditors. Aha! thought I. I like to copyedit. Straight copyediting is faster and easier than reviewing a manuscript for flaws and weaknesses and telling someone else how to edit it. So I retooled a resume (which had to be done anyhow, as it’s three years out of date) and went through the whole online application process, only to have it tell me at the end that they were only looking for writers from my region, which made me quite cranky. Still, it led me to wonder why I’d never contacted my current freelance place to ask about a test for editing, so I did that. No answer yet, as I enquired on a holiday weekend.

And great; the doctor’s office just called to cancel the boy’s appointment, because the doctor has had a death in the family and has gone home for a week. So the boy is at home with me and we have the car for no reason, HRH having taken the bus to work. Although it means we missed the home-based daycare strike thing this morning. Our daycare isn’t striking, and they were anticipating physical harassment from union people who had called with thinly-veiled threats, and all the parents had been warned that they would encounter difficulty dropping their kids off as a result. The boy’s best friend there happens to be the daughter of a regional police supervisor, so HRH and I fervently hope that he showed up in his marked car and in full uniform to drop her off and casually hung around with a cup of coffee or something. Because physically preventing parents and kids from walking into their daycare? Not cool. Kids shouldn’t have to deal with stuff like that in association with a place they trust, and that’s why our daycare refused to join the strike action in the first place.

The boy has been pretty good so far this morning about leaving me to work in my office. There have been interruptions, but not as bad as usual. I think we managed to impress upon him the importance of me working. The cancellation had him thinking we were both free to play, but I think I’ve cleared that up now.

Back into the fray.

What I Read in June 2010

Charlie Bone and the Red Knight by Jenny Nimmo
Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier
Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster
Size 12 is Not Fat by Meg Cabot
Tales of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong
Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd
River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters
Romancing Miss Bronte by Juliet Gael

I tried to read Susan Vreeland’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, something I’d been looking forward to for some time, but I couldn’t get past the sixth chapter. I just couldn’t get into the characters.