Mission Accomplished

The bike scored on Kijiji has been received by the intended recipient. I learned this from hearing the boy yelling, “Mama, thank you for my bicycle!” through the back door.

He helped HRH put the training wheels on (they won’t be there long; both HRH and I are agreed that they can cause more problems than they solve), practised getting on and off, and then HRH took it round the front while the boy and I went into the garage to find his helmet. (Erm. We’ll need to replace that this summer.)

And off we went:

Only two wipeouts, mostly because he stopped watching where he was going on a slope. But there will be plenty more. There are so many driveways on our street that the sidewalk is sloped half the time, which made for wobbly steering and a hard time staying off the lower training wheel. HRH plans to take him to the old school round the corner to let him go on the flat playground surface; that will make balancing (and steering!) easier for him.

Zoom:

I love the blur on that picture. He wasn’t going fast, but I love the focus and the joy on his face.

There will really be no keeping up with him now.

Weekend Roundup, Easter Edition

Four-day weekends are extremely unusual. All the more so because HRH’s employers usually give them Easter Monday or Good Friday off, not both. In Quebec the government has decreed that an employer of a certain size must give its employees one of those two days off. Naturally, in the spirit of compliance, every place we intended to shop at on Sunday (assuming that everywhere that was open Good Friday would be closed Easter Monday) was closed that day instead, even though they were usually open on Sundays.

Anyway. It was a lovely Easter weekend.

I sent the freelance assignment out Friday morning, and got it back Friday afternoon confirming that yes, I’d have to do revisions on it because I wasn’t quite supportive and encouraging enough. Honestly, I’d expected this, and I told the editor so. I also pointed out that I’d already redone it twice on my end before my initial submission, so you can imagine what my original looked like. I turned it around and started checking my e-mail every half-hour to see if they’d approved it yet so I could invoice by the Monday deadline.

While I finished it HRH cleaned the BBQ and checked the gas levels, then took the boy out to do some grocery shopping. MLG came over for a late lunch of grilled three-cheese burgers and warm potato salad, with chocolate-peanut butter pudding for dessert. We had a most enjoyable afternoon indeed where we sat and/or worked or played outside in the backyard. I don’t know what was more draining: watching the boy play with great enthusiasm, watching HRH clean up the yard, watching MLG keep up with the boy, or just being in the unseasonably warm sun.

Saturday we dropped the boy off with the local grandparents, picked up the rest of our coven, and headed out to Maxville to spend the day with t! and Jan, who hosted the best Ostara ritual EVER. We had a real egg hunt: we each had a list of six clues, and corresponding eggs hidden in specific places on the property that we had to find! The eggs all had a letter on them, and when everyone assembled their eggs there was a message spelled out. The theme of the rit was being happy with imperfection and/or your best even if it wasn’t perfect, which was a very good message for most if not all of us, too. And the crowning touch was that the eggs were from their small flock of chickens (who are now gloriously full-grown and sporting glossy chestnut feathers). The digital thermometer indicated that the peak temperature was 31 point something degrees while we were there, and it was simply spectacular weather to be running around a couple of acres of land. Then we got to have quiche and two kinds of salads (one green and one a fruit/nut/rice salad) and I’d made a deep-dish butterscotch lemon pie for dessert. The only thing that marred the day was my back doing something odd while I was finishing up the pie that morning, and two hours in the car didn’t make it any better. As usual, we didn’t want to leave.

Sunday we were thwarted in our scheduled errand-running, so we kicked about at home. HRH and I had hidden M&M eggs around the living room before we went to bed Saturday night, and I slept pretty badly, partially due to the wrenched back, but not helped in the least by Gryff ‘finding’ some of the eggs, knocking them down from wherever he’d found them, and chasing them around the floor. I got up four times to ruin his fun, finally shutting him in the bedroom with us until HRH woke up and thought that the cat had somehow shut himself in and let him out to wreak havoc upon the eggs again. The boy woke us up at six, saying that there were eggs everywhere in the living room; HRH and I had some fun being sleepy and not understanding what he was saying before we got up and watched him run around the with a tiny basket, collecting what he could find. He patted himself on the back quite a bit, saying, “I’m a very good hunter,” interspersed with wiping perspiration from his young brow at various points in the endeavour. We refrained from pointing out the ones he didn’t find, but after getting up the second time (because we went back to bed, of course) we discovered that he’d dragged his chair out of his room and had used it to pluck the higher level of eggs he’d missed on his initial go-round.

He had a nap, a good thing because it was beginning to look like he had a spring cold, although we were crossing our fingers and hoping it was allergies. When he got up we went over to HRH’s parents’ house, where there was another egg hunt (this one included chocolate for HRH and I, too, which was a lot of fun because my mother-in-law is great at hiding things in almost-in-plain sight). For dinner we had an absolutely fabulous prime rib roast, with a nice pinot noir from Oregon, of all places.

Monday morning we were scheduled to go visit Miranda and baby Tristan, but we cancelled it because the boy’s cold was very definitely a cold and not allergies. The last thing a week-old baby needs is a cold. Instead, we ran the errands that we couldn’t run on Sunday, which included buying the webcams. At home I tested mine out by plugging it in, and oh, how I love Apple’s recognition-awareness; I opened iChat and clicked the green video button, and voila, the computer knew what it was and where it was and there was video. HRH started trying to install the other on his computer so we could test them, but as he’s got a PC it would have entailed loading all the software and so forth, so I’ve packed it up again and will just take it with me to my parents’ house and install it on Mum’s laptop there.

I made a delicious quiche (I think the pie dough was even better after being frozen, as I’d made a double batch to have enough for the lemon pie and Monday’s quiche) and Ceri and Scott came over for a late lunch and a visit. The boy was going down for his nap just as they arrived and didn’t wake up till about half an hour before they left, and was in an odd mood when he did wake up so he hid in his room doing his own thing. My rewrites on the freelance project were accepted so I got to fire off a quick invoice by deadline, which made me very happy indeed.

After dinner HRH headed off on a Secret Mission, so I got to play with the boy through his bath and put him to bed on my own. HRH showed off his score when I emerged: a practically new bicycle for the boy, one of the ones I’d been stalking on Kijiji last week. (Ours has the colours flipped, red where the blue is and vice versa.) It’s a real pity we couldn’t pick it up before the weekend so the boy could have enjoyed it during the brilliant weather, but the seller was gone for Easter. We have it now, and are feeling very smug about paying half-price for a virtually new bike; the seller said his daughter had been on it maybe five times before she outgrew it.

It’s three days till I leave on the train to stay with my parents. I’m already stressing about what to bring with me and what I might forget.

Whoosh!

And the week is past already. Good grief. Here’s a precis of what I didn’t blog about when it happened:

Mum went in for hip replacement surgery on Monday, and was wiggling her toes approximately two hours after surgery, so we are all very pleased about that. (Mum, your crew of extended-family-kids up here have said that if there’s anything they can do for you in the next month or so, you’re to call on them, and they’re serious.)

The boy got an Easter parcel from his non-local grandparents and his favourite thing (other than the chocolate, of course) was a pair of plaid shorts.

Lots of lovely feedback about the concert regarding the programming and the execution and the church. Very nice indeed. I don’t think it was recorded, which is a pity, because of all the concerts I’d like a copy of this is certainly up there on my list.

We’re going out this weekend to buy two webcams, one for my Mac, one for a PC laptop. I’ll bring the PC one with me to my parents’ house and set up a Skype account for them down there so we can see and talk to HRH and the boy. I’ll be leaving the PC webcam with them, too, so the boy can ‘see’ them more often. The webcam and Skype account will also come in handy for virtual cellofamily meet-ups. And yes, I am having lots of fun imagining things like cello quartets played together while the cellists are in three different countries. The sound won’t be brilliant but it will be a lot of fun.

Also regarding cello, I realised this week that I think an important part of studying music is knowing when to put a piece aside for a bit and work on something else. We need time to internalise what we’re learning without the mechanics in the way. Sometimes barrelling through it harms instead of helps. Lots happens in the mind without the cello under the fingers. And at my weekly lesson (Sunday was actually last week’s lesson) we started working on Mooney’s Position Pieces for Cello vol 2, to help out with some of my ensemble pieces for the upcoming spring recital. I’m also working on exercises in Suzuki vol 4 to support the recital and orchestra work, which amuses me because I’m working through the pieces book 3.

I had to go to the doctor for something minor but very irritating on Tuesday afternoon, which necessitated pulling HRH out of work because I can’t get to the doctor via public transport, which in turn required pulling the boy out of preschool because there wouldn’t be time to go back to get him through traffic. And then we waited in the doctor’s office for an hour and a quarter. Sigh. I didn’t have time to hit the lab on the way home but I did get the antibiotics I needed, and they’ve been working.

I pulled the third draft of Orchestrated out again this week, cutting things out of the first chapter ruthlessly, and poking at the brief book summary for a query letter and the three-page detailed synopsis. I’ve been at a very awkward stage with this book for a while now. I need outside eyes to look at it, but I’ve been feeling that I can’t ask anyone to do so because (a) my writer friends are either swamped or (b) triggery about writing issues at the moment, and (c) I’ve agreed to beta for other people in the past and bailed consistently because I’ve been swamped or exhausted myself. Reasoning that it’s much easier for people to handle looking at only the first five pages (the number commonly requested by agents) plus the brief and full synopses rather than two hundred pages of novel, I pulled those eight pages total and asked three wonderful people for help, and they’ve agreed to give me feedback on them. The goal is to tweak till the end of April, then start going down the list of agents.

And work sent me a freelance project Wednesday afternoon, after I waited for four work days. The timing was frustrating because in order to have it approved by Monday to add it to my invoice, I’d need to hand it in early on Friday. And of course, today is Good Friday, and for the first time at this job HRH has both Good Friday and Easter Monday off (this is known as Irony, because we’re not spending the weekend with my parents as we have in the past, when HRH has had to book the Monday as a vacation day), so the boys are both home, which skebards the idea of me working all morning. Plus we’re having a guest over this afternoon. So I had to crush two days of work into one day, and on top of that it was a really rough assignment, one of the ones where you have to crush a author’s dreams by pointing out all the very deep flaws in the manuscript. I worked a bit last night (forgetting that I had to be at the bank to deposit a US cheque with the teller before eight because thy’d be closed Friday, dashed out and was the second to last person they allowed in before they closed the doors, whew), did a final polish and last proofreading this morning, and sent it off. I did the best I could. Now I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it’s either approved before five PM on Monday, or that my rewrites are minimal.

I’ve been watching Craigslist and Kijiji listings like a hawk, looking for a secondhand bike for the boy (because eighty dollars for a new one? gack). So far we’ve had one strike, and one no-reply. On a whim I also looked for looms in Toronto and I found a listing for a 32″ folding rigid heddle loom, for less than half the retail price even before exchange and what shipping would cost me. I shot off a quick query, and wonder of wonders it was still available, so I have put the money aside for that and I’ll pick it up when I’m visiting my parents. (Note to self: Bring the big suitcase so you can get it home.) It’s a Kromski Harp, one of the models I’d wished I could get my hands on and had put out of my mind as nigh-impossible. I went so far as to inquire about the Kromski Fiddle, the Harp’s 16″ poor cousin, and one of the few Canadian retailers told me that it would be $165 plus about $60 shipping, so I nixed the whole idea and pulled out the vintage four-shaft loom I had and started bashing away at it, trying to make things work instead of easing into the weaving world via rigid heddle loom. Rigid heddle loom are less complicated than my four-harness table loom and much more portable, and it’s the portability and weaving width I’m really excited about. Apart from being over the moon about the find and the incredible price, I’m thrilled about having a weaving width of about 31″, about twice the weaving width of my current table loom. It’s less flexible regarding pattern potential, but I’m at a point where I’m more interested in basic weave fabrics right now anyway. And the folding loom comes with the place for a second block for a additional not-included heddle, which creates a two-harness situation and extends the pattern possibilities to the equivalent of a four-shaft loom (each rigid heddle has an up, a neutral, and a down position, which creates two sheds). And did I mention that it’s portable? And that it has a weaving width of something like eighty centimetres? I’ll enjoy sharing it with my mum on my visit. Also, this means I won’t have to rent a spinning wheel from the shop that disappointed me at Christmas, and that I won’t be stuck knitting all week, something that would certainly drive me mad.

Now, I need to make potato salad. Have a wonderful Easter weekend, everyone!

What I Read in March 2010

The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran
Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan
The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
Muse & Reverie by Charles de Lint
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
Farthing by Jo Walton
The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
A Cotswold Mystery by Rebecca Tope
Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: The Wyrm King by Holly Black
Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: A Giant Problem by Holly Black
Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: The Nixie’s Song by Holly Black
When Autumn Leaves by Amy Foster
The Good Neighbors: Kith by Holly Black
The Good Neighbors: Kin by Holly Black
The Queen’s Governess by Karen Harper

Weekend Roundup: Spring Concert Edition

We had a good dress rehearsal Friday night. This church has fabulous acoustics. The celli were a bit crushed as the front pew hadn’t been moved, so some of us were staggered and our principal ended up turned so that she was almost facing the sanctuary instead of the first violins. They had lovely padded folding chairs, though, and bonus cushions that some of the cellists filched from the pews to use as added elevation at the back of the seats.

On Saturday we had a very relaxed day at home, for which I was very thankful because I was fighting a low-grade but insidious headache for most of the day. Looking for music to listen to in my burned CD box, I found the copy of the Aria soundtrack mp3s that Marc gave me. Now, I know that theoretically the Xbox can play mp3s, and I wanted to listen to this music without calling it up on the computer and turning my speakers so that they faced the door to the office, so I turned the console on and put in the disc. The Xbox does indeed play mp3 discs! (Not that I doubted you in the least, Ceri. I just needed to prove it to myself.) The problem was that the Xbox wasn’t being run through the stereo (it used to be, but must have been accidentally left out of the last Massive Rewiring Run that also ended up running the Blu-Ray player through the stereo only and not the TV at all), so the music only came through the TV speaker, and sounded awful and flat. So when the boy went down for his nap, HRH unplugged everything, sorted it out, and wired all the consoles and the Blu-Ray player into the TV and thence to the stereo. We now have everything in surround. Muah-ha.

We had an early dinner, got dressed, and headed out. The boys dropped me off at the church for our warm-up, and went to feed Ceri and Scott’s cats and reassure them that they had not been abandoned. From all reports the cats were kind of casual and all “Oh, hi. Food? Well, if you want to, but we’re not starving.” (Which is, I suppose, a good thing. But somewhat odd, as anyone with cats will know.) The concert was very well-attended, with the church pretty much full. A huge thank you for their attendance and support goes out to Paze, Tamu and Patrick, John and Mel, HRH and the boy, and Marc M, who left another engagement to come to the concert and then went back, bless him.

The concert went very well. It was tight and a lot of fun. Oddly enough, I didn’t have the choking-up problem at the end of the Butterworth where I usually do; this time it was at the beginning, during the gorgeous clarinet solo. There was a minor hiccough in the Butterworth, but so very minor (although these things always seem major to the people involved when there’s a hiccough) and at the best possible moment it could have happened, a perfect transition point. I don’t remember anything particularly worthy of triumph on my part, but I do remember enjoying playing the Haydn even more than I usually do. I nailed one of the nasty Debussy bits I always fail at but fluffed it the second time it came up, most likely due to White Stick Syndrome. Overall, I enjoyed the whole thing. After the concert I got a spontaneous hug from the boy and an enthusiastic, “Mama, that music was so good!” Although when I put him to bed he seemed somewhat stuck on the wasps, asking why they kept coming back, and indeed why they were in the music at all to begin with. He wasn’t so sure about them.

(Today I opened iTunes and instead of choosing something specific, I wanted a surprise, something I probably hadn’t heard in a while. I told it to play my entire catalogue of mp3s on random. It gave me… Vaughan Williams’ ‘Wasps’ overture. I don’t know if this is evidence of a sense of humour, or evidence of a complete lack of one.)

Sunday morning HRH made waffles as a huge treat, and I did a batch of scones. The boy and I picked up Paze and Devon and headed out to our monthly Pagan playgroup. (This is why I made the scones. I proceeded to forget my Tupperware container there, sigh.) I’m having trouble settling into this year of the playgroup. It’s half again as big, which isn’t exactly the problem; it feels like there’s too many older kids feeding off one another, and it makes focusing hard. The older kids run around and act crazy in the next room before and after the meeting, and the boy always asks to join them. Every time I say no, because this is supposed to be a quiet, focused time for learning and crafts, and if he starts he won’t stop. “But they’re doing it,” is his standard comeback, to which I usually reply that just because someone else is doing it doesn’t make it right. And snack time used to be bowls of healthy things like veggies and fruit and cheese and scones, and this meeting had piles of cookies that the kids focused on instead of the hummus and pita and grapes. (The Girl Guide cookies for sale were a different matter entirely; they’re sealed. I was just stunned at the platefuls of cookies the older kids had, and which the boy asked for because he saw them; he ignored everything else because the older kids only ate the cookies. I’d like to see purchased cookies banned from the group’s snack time.)

We got home and the boy had only a bit of sandwich before nap time. HRH headed out to take a look at poor Mousme’s buckled basement floor after severe water damage (much more severe than anyone had suspected, as he discovered that there was pink insulation as well as that blue Styrofoam insulation packed between the floor joists, all of it still soaking wet from the flood, with water beneath it all). While he was out I made the heroic decision to pull out the top-down sleeveless sweater I cast on in April 2009 in order to work through the bits that scared me (binding off for the cap sleeves, casting on fewer stitches there in the next round to form the body under the arms). This is the sweater that I frogged last October and cast on to knit again, then stopped at the sleeves because I was worried that I’d ruin it somehow. I just went ahead and did it this weekend, reasoning that if I ruined it I’d only lose about four inches of work and could always start again. Anyway, the scary-to-me bits are done. I have some very iffy raglan increases and some loose stitches that I am hoping will block out when it’s all done. I’m past the hard part, but I am such a bad knitter that I managed to knit a circular rubber stitch marker INTO the row I was working on while I was doing a cable cast-on increase in the middle of a row. It’s now woven into the sweater. I’ll have to cut it out when it’s all done. I now see why some people use split rings as markers. However, now I’m on the straight knitting bit for the body of the sweater. I’d like to say it’s all fine from here, but I think there’s a bit of shaping under the bust. It’s probably just k2tog, but it’s the placing that’s tricky.

I had a cello lesson last night, where we played through some of the ensemble stuff. I have another this Wednesday, as my teacher is gone over Easter weekend, and then one next Tuesday because I’m gone the weekend and following week to help Mum after her surgery. I didn’t have a lot of focus; I kept wandering from tenor clef into bass in a piece that stayed entirely in one clef or the other (a holdover from Debussy and Vaughan Williams, which jumped back and forth between the two clefs all the time, I think) and dropping accidentals. Not my finest hour, but some good work done on phrasing and shifting nonetheless.

And then I came home and had a hot bath, started to reread the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and had a good sleep. The end.

Good Things

1. The leaves on the lilacs out back are ready to pop. They’re so excited about spring that even the branches have a green tinge to them.

2. This morning, thanks to a post on a weaver’s Yahoogroup I belong to, I followed a link to an Etsy listing, and I FOUND OUT WHAT MAKE MY LOOM IS! Yes, those are all caps, and no, I didn’t think I would be this excited about it, either. Turns out I have a Structo Artcraft 600 loom, probably from the late 1930s judging from the iron levers, when they stopped making toy looms and started making real ones. And just with that wee bit of knowledge I tracked down some Structo history, a Yahoogroup devoted entirely to Structo looms (where I found the original owner’s manual in pdf form with the original patterns done for it by a well-known weaver of the time), and had the excitement of adding my loom’s specs to my profile on Weavolution (sometimes referred to as “the weavers’ Ravelry”). I am so thrilled. There’s a whole subculture of Structo loom owners out there, and they’re considered sturdy workhorses with flexibility. Hmm, sounds like my Louet spinning wheel…

3. The taxes got done on Friday. It didn’t take as long as I expected it to because I had fewer receipts and such to sort out than previous years. I made more than I thought I did last year (the Canadian equivalent for my anthology editing fee was more than I remembered it being) and I spent much less, mostly because I wasn’t working on an original contracted book and so didn’t need the research materials. (Well, there’s also the fact that my two major purchases were a cello and a spinning wheel, neither of which qualify as work expenses.) I’ll probably break even, which is no fun because I was hoping for a couple of thousand back to dump on my Visa, or into my very empty ING account. But bundled together with HRH and with the RRSP tax credit, we’ll probably be okay. It’s done, which is the main thing.

4. My mum goes in for hip replacement surgery today. Keep her in your thoughts!

5. I have a pot of beautiful purple hyacinths that the boys brought home for me last week. They bloomed and now the entire house smells like spring. And I saw two little crocuses (crocii?) just about ready to open up in the front garden yesterday.

6. The concert rocked! More on that in the weekend roundup, which is next.

The Best-Laid Plans…

… of those being virtuous and preparing info for tax reports gang aft agley.

The plan of the day was to take my file of collected business receipts into the living room, spread everything out in the sunbeam on the floor, sort things, then add the sorted piles up, then enter it all in my spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would be e-mailed to HRH at the end of the day, who would print it out at work (no, I still do not have a functional printer, because I can’t afford to refill the colour ink cartridge so that the black ink cartridge will work. I hate this stupid co-dependent cartridge thing). Then we could call our awesome tax guy, drop the stuff off, and pick it up in a week or so when I’d have received a freelance cheque and could pay him.

That was the theory, anyhow.

The actual order of events went like this:

    9:45 EDT: Okay; taxes today. Going to carry my messy, bursting-at-the-seams file of stuff into the living room and work on the floor in the sun. To me, my calculator!

    10:30 EDT: Receipts sorted into general piles. Now sorting into more precise subcategories, and the fun of adding it all up. Losing my sunbeam, though.

    10:45 EDT: GAH ARRG RAWR — Gryff just tore through the room, caught the carpet in his claws, yanked it up and over as he went, scattered the sorted receipts, and overturned a full mug of tea on it all. I sopped up what I could, hung the worst of the larger pieces of paper over chairs to dry, then peeled the soaking receipts apart and lay them in what sunbeam is left. When it’s dry I’ll have redo all the piles. ARGH!

So I and this task are on hold until things are less damp.

The bitter irony is that only last night I looked at Gryff, who was on my lap while I spun the rest of the chocolate Coopworth long-draw and plied it all up, and said, “Your claws need a good trimming, mister,” because he was poking my knees with them.