Lest We Forget

War’s not the answer most of the time; it’s often a trumped-up 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.

This year also marks the first anniversary of the death of a friend who I admire immensely: Emru Townsend. He fought a different kind of war, but a war nonetheless. In December 2007, when diagnosed with leukemia and a condition called monosomy 7, which meant that he had an increased risk of the leukemia coming back no matter how successful chemotherapy was, he and his sister Tamu created the outreach and public education event they called Heal Emru. It wasn’t about finding a stem cell donor who matched Emru (although that eventually happened); the program was built around their discovery that most ethnic groups were severely underrepresented in the bone marrow registries of North America and in other parts of the world. Heal Emru seeks to educate the public about this under-representation and to bring the plight of people from those ethnic groups seeking compatible donors to public awareness.

Emru blogged his illness and his treatments, and it makes for sober and thought-provoking reading. (The blog is now maintained by Tamu.) He found a compatible donor and had his transplant in September of 2008, nine months after his diagnosis. Unfortunately, although the stem cell transplant was successful, his cancer did not go into remission, and by the end of October it was clear that he wouldn’t make it. Emru may have passed on, but his war continues, fought by every one of us who simply walks up to someone and says, “Hey, have you heard about the bone marrow registry?”

The Heal Emru FAQs answer some of the common questions people have about bone marrow donation.
The Heal Emru site lists contact information for registries around the world.

Are you a match? Find out how you can help save Emru’s life: http://www.healemru.com

Got Twitter? Follow @healemru
Got Facebook? Please join the Heal Emru group, and if you learn something new, invite your friends.
Got Livejournal, WordPress or Blogger? Blog it!
Got Youtube? Subscribe to www.youtube.com/healemru
Just find someone you care about and tell them.

Contact info:

Hema Quebec http://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca
Canada Blood Services (Canada, except Quebec) http://onematch.ca/registry
National Marrow Donor Program (US) http://www.marrow.org

And find many more groups in these countries and internationally on the Registries page of HealEmru.com

The campaign may be called Heal Emru, but Emru’s name stands for every single individual who is struggling with an illness and needs a donor for stem cells, bone marrow, or peripheral cell transplant. The war to save lives continues.

Playing Hooky

Long draw: ye gods. I understand the theory and what should be happening, but I need better fibre to practice with, because the mill ends and seconds I’ve got are making a yarn that’s, well, tweedy, to say the least. I’m not expecting to make a perfect woollen yarn right off the bat, but the fibre’s jamming against the neps in it, no matter how I try to card them out. And a cat got into the lovely basket of rolags I carded while I was out last night; I came home to a shredded, tangled mess of fibre on the carpet. I don’t know who’s to blame, Nixie or Gryffindor, as they’re both fibre fiends, but the two of them are on my Naughty List at the moment.

One week ago we talked to the boy about the flu shot, what it was and why it was important to be vaccinated. He got upset ( “I don’t want a needle to take out my blood!” he cried, because the last time he saw needles being used was when HRH and I had our prises de sang done), but he agreed to go with us on the 10th because at that time children under five years plus their families were scheduled to be vaccinated as of Nov 9. The plan as we all worked it out was: HRH would book the day off and the boy would stay home from school. HRH would get his shot first so that the boy could watch, then the boy, then the boy could hold my hand so I wouldn’t be afraid. After our shots, we said that as a treat we could all go see Astro Boy in the theatre. And then, the very next day, Montreal changed the damn schedule again, and families of kids five and under were no longer eligible to be vaccinated at the same time. This meant that we effectively lied to him about doing it all together, which really didn’t sit well with us.

The revised schedule said that people with chronic conditions like asthma were eligible as of Nov 23, and everyone else as of Dec 7. So we told Liam that he could choose what to do: Either he could have his shot on Tuesday while we held his hand, then we’d go see Astro Boy and have popcorn like we were going to; or he could wait until the 23rd when I could get it at the same time. At first he said the 23rd, but then he asked again what exactly the flu was. We explained that it was a bad sickness that made little kids very very ill, sicker than adults, and the doctors and nurses decided that they would give all the kids their shots first to make sure they’d be okay, and then the mummies and daddies could have what was left over. He thought about it some more and said that he would go on Nov 10 after all, as long we held his hand, and then we could go see the movie together as we’d already agreed. We were so proud of him. The crying and protesting when we originally told him about the shot were dramatic, but I guess he’d worked all the scared stuff out then, and so the thinking about when to get his shot when we gave him the choice was more level-headed.

And then at the end of last week, Montreal changed the schedule yet again and said that kids under five and adults with chronic conditions (hello, asthma!) were eligible to get the shot a few days earlier than their respective revised dates. So the plan changed a third time to the boy and I getting the shot together on Nov 10. And so today we went out at eight o’clock and waited about half an hour in line to get into the clinic, at which point an incredibly streamlined process had us register, move to sit with a nurse to fill out the health questionnaire, then go right to be vaccinated. And we were so proud of the boy who only cried a bit, and who is very proud of his Band-Aid with a Lightning McQueen sticker on it. I have nothing but the highest praise for the volunteers and medical staff who are manning the Angrignon clinic. They’re cheerful, supportive, efficient, responsive, and good with adults but especially good with the children I saw being vaccinated. (The nurse who gave me my shot even offered me a Disney princesses sticker when he saw me watching the boy choose his own Cars sticker, but I declined.)

While the amazing ever-changing flu vaccination schedules in Montreal have annoyed the heck out of me, there’s one thing that has stayed constant, and I’m thankful for it: kids under five have been moved up, but never delayed as some other groups have been. But the quickly-changing information was making it a real pain to try to schedule anything. I understand that the schedule is being constantly revised according to the availability of the vaccine and the need to get the higher-risk groups inoculated as soon as possible. I wasn’t panicking about getting the shot – I’m not worried about getting the flu and the health complications from it, or there being a vaccine shortage; I’m more concerned about slowing the transmission of it through the population – but I was getting increasingly irritated at the inconstant schedule and contradictory information on official municipal versus provincial websites.

Anyway, it’s done, and we’re at home. The boy is watching cartoons, a huge treat on a weekday. We’ll do an early lunch, then a nap, and then we’re all off to the Colisee to see Astro Boy together.

ETA: Astroboy was lots of fun, and a decent little story without the usual tangents and dumb vaudeville stuff they put in kids’ films (there was a teeny bit, but it wasn’t toxic). The boy was literally on the edge of his seat for the last half. As for the flu vaccination, I have become increasingly achy and exhausted throughout the day, which is pretty much what I expected.

Yarn, Glorious Yarn

I just had to ply the singles on my bobbins, because I needed those bobbins in order to practice long-draw. Right?

Right.

It’s 83 yards of two-ply yarn spun on a Louet S15, from a Louet Northern Lights roving (colourway: Fire Moss, the sample of dyed fibre I got after the spindling class Ceri and I took this past spring). I love how these colours have blended; they’re all my favourites (deep reds, mossy greens, bronze). I call this Autumn Sumac because it has all the colours of a sumac tree in fall. I want to roll in this colour. I think I’ll spin the other ounce I have and maybe knit a neckwarmer. I may buy a whole half-pound of the stuff and do the Wrist Warmer Cocoon Shrug pattern with it. I thought about keeping these singles aside and trying to find a silk thread in a bronze colour to ply with them, but I needed those bobbins. Ahem. (One could have wound the singles off onto cardboard tubes, but that takes time, and one is not patient.)

Time to close all the windows. The problem with the jump away from EDT is that the sun suddenly goes down earlier, ergo it cools off rather abruptly. I should probably also think about something to do for dinner. Tacos? Tacos.

Weekend Roundup

This was a truly lovely weekend. We didn’t rush around, the weather was nice, we crossed things off the to-do list, I got work done, got reading done, had a cello lesson, and ate food. Really, that’s all I ask for.

Friday afternoon I had the deeply satisfying experience of refusing that benighted UPS package, and the driver said, “Good for you.” I’m going to be saving around twenty dollars by having the parcel shipped out via USPS, even paying the USPS shipping fee, and I’ll have to wait another couple of weeks to finally get it. I refuse to cave in and support UPS’s extortionate practices.

Saturday morning I took the boy to get his hair cut, and then we went next door so I could pick up The Intentional Spinner that I’d ordered to replace the copy of Spin Control that I’d bought and later that day won in an on-line draw. The boy had saved up twenty dollars and though he tried to get me to say he could buy a train instead of a book, he eventually went up the escalator with great enthusiasm and chose the copy of Warman’s Lionel Train Field Guide 1945-1969 that he’d been sighing over every time I checked out the needlework books on the adjacent shelf. (We have proceeded to read this book before each nap and bedtime. No, really. We started with some of the text on how to use the book, then the evolution of the Lionel packaging, and then the captions under the pictures of the trains. Not exactly a brilliant narrative, but he’s enthralled.) When we left the bookstore we stopped by Jess’s house to finally collect the carton of Vanilla Coke she’d bought for me on a trip to Vermont at Thanksgiving.

Saturday afternoon I got some Yule knitting done and read another chunk of An Echo in the Bone. I also learned that my proper 7/8 soft case arrived at the luthier! This is going to be a straight trade for the 4/4 case that my 7/8 cello came with. I originally told the luthier I’d stop by next Saturday but that doesn’t make sense time- or gas-wise; I’ll send the 4/4 case over with HRH on Friday, and he’ll make the ten-minute trip to the luthier’s shop after work on Friday on his way to collect the boy. We also moved the DVD cabinet out of the living room and into the hallway, where it doesn’t look bad at all, to free up one whole baseboard heater. As the house has been very damp and chilly lately despite the heat being on, we also trotted out the dehumidifier that had been part of the downstairs apartment’s appliance suite, scrubbed it within an inch of its life, and plugged it in to see what would happen. As we’d suspected (and yet still to our somewhat grim horror) it pulled a good couple of cups of water out of the air in just ninety minutes. This flat has always had a problem with window condensation and mold in dark corners, but we’ve never actually used a hygrometer to measure the relative humidity. The recommended level is around 50%; from the lists of warning signs we’ve just read we suspect ours is about 100%. Anyway, we don’t particularly want to be running a dehumidifier all the time, as it takes a shocking amount of electricity, but the difference in the air was palpable. I think we’ll run it in a different room for an hour or so every day.

Saturday night we attended a dinner party chez Luanna, and ye gods, it was everything anyone who’s ever attended one has said they are. We’ve had to miss every single one of these we’ve been invited to for the past gods know how many years, so to finally be there was a huge thing. The food and the company were spectacular. We had a fabulous time and came home with souvenir programmes menus complete with recipes and photos of what was served. Shall I boast about what we ate? Oh, of course. When we arrived the wine was flowing freely and there were platters of hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen, delicious little crab things on baked wonton wrappers, homemade bruschetta, and prosciutto/melon/fig bites in crisp little bite-sized cups. Our first course was a potage of zucchini, mushrooms, and leeks, followed by duck a l’orange, roast baby potatoes with herbs, and green beans with pine nuts. Dessert was the impressive poached pears dipped in chocolate… which turned out to be stuffed with chocolate-nut truffle filling. I am not a huge pear fan, but these were cooked to perfection, and the chocolate and nuts didn’t hurt in the least. I have not been this enthusiastic about food in possibly years.

Sunday morning we went grocery shopping, which was oddly enjoyable. Usually we are very tense when we shop in grocery stores, generally due to the oblivious and rude nature of fellow shoppers or the non-availability of an item of which we are in dire need, but people were moderately sane and the only thing on the list that we didn’t get was the name brand butter that was on sale, which wasn’t a huge issue because the basic no-name brand of sweet butter I usually buy was only twenty-five cents more expensive at its regular price.

The weather this weekend was a treat. Yesterday in particular was a gorgeous warm fall day, with sun and only a slight breeze and a high of something like fifteen degrees. When we got home from doing the groceries the boys played in the pile of leaves outside. They claimed to be raking, but I knew what was actually going on.

The huge maple tree out front drops an equally huge number of leaves around this time of year, and after scraping them up into a huge pile (and spreading it all out and raking it up again and again) they hauled the leaves into the backyard to pile on the vegetable garden on top of the compost we’d already spread there. It was so warm that we opened the windows. (Also good for removing extra humidity in the fall, we learned.)

While the boy napped I worked on the assignment I’d received on Friday afternoon, because if I could finish it and hand it in, chances were very good that both it and the one I’d already handed in on Friday would be approved by five PM on Monday and I’d be able to invoice for both of them, doubling this invoice total. I managed to do it, too, so I’m just waiting for the approval codes for each so I can plug them into my invoice and send it off. I’m getting better at the efficient handling of evaluating these manuscripts. It helps when they’re non-fiction; I can scan them with less investment. The co-ordinators have just figured out that I’m experienced in religion, so that’s what three of the last five have been. I greatly prefer them to the epic fantasies.

And I had my cello lesson last night, where we worked on the group pieces for the recital. The great Focus on Shifting continued, with the key thing I brought away from this particular lesson being the concept of shifting over the wall instead of through it, using the slight elastic bounce off the fingerboard to travel on the string to the target position and then rejoining the fingerboard with another elastic motion. I worked on this about a year ago, using the mental image of a jellyfish or a squid swimming for an analogy to the motion required (whatever works, okay?) and it’s so rewarding to see that absolutely none of it stuck with me once we stopped talking about it. I also had a note on my Brahms waltz/lullaby piece that said WRONG FINGERINGS, noted as such after the last group class when I got tangled up and saw everyone else was shifting differently, and hoo boy, were they ever wrong. We went forty-five minutes over time as a result of trying to get them corrected. My teacher is an absolute saint.

Today’s to-do list includes a short proofreading job, doing up that invoice, and typing out the draft of a formal ritual which also involves transcribing Norse poetry. Also, it would be really nice if my late freelance cheque finally arrived.

In Which Life Is Not Fun

UPS just showed up with my secondhand lazy kate and bobbins.

Guess what? There’s a huge brokerage fee, plus GST, plus PST. All calculated on the value, which UPS determined was $106, which is the value of the item plus all their service fees. (How they can get away with saying their services qualify as part of the total value of the shipment, I cannot fathom. I originally misunderstood the $106 to be the value declared by the seller, but a close inspection of the fine print on the copy of the bill I was given indicates that no, UPS is just a bully and a bastard.)

Total brokerage fees? $57.84 CDN.

How much did I pay for this secondhand set? $60 CDN.

How much is this lazy kate + bobbin set new? $120 CDN.

I could cry. This was supposed to save me money. I’m ending up with a used product for the same amount of money I would have paid for new. I could have ordered it via my friends at Ariadne Knits and supported them for the same cost.

The UPS guy was so, so nice. He talked about all sorts of options, including never using UPS cross-border because of the inflated fees (he says he works for UPS and never uses them!) and asking people to declare the actual value paid or as used goods between 1-10$ so the associated fees are much lower.

I don’t even have the parcel now, because not only am I morally opposed to being charged an insane amount of money to obtain my already-paid-for-shipping-and-all goods, my credit card is useless and I didn’t have the cash. He’s coming back tomorrow. What really makes me angry is that I tracked this parcel from the day it was sent, and not once did they include any info about charges, which would have made me ready for them so I could have had the money on hand, or at least been emotionally prepared for having to refuse it or whatever the shipper and I decided to do about it. He says they do it on purpose, and I fully expect that they do. He gets this kind of reaction all the time, and he thinks it is completely unfair to those receiving the parcels. And 90% of the time, people pay the fees, because what else can they do? They’ve ordered an item they want and/or need, after all.

I feel like I’ve been kicked. I’m trying to find some sort of solace in the fact that I helped a fellow spinner out, but it’s kind of hard. Money’s tight, and I was trying to do what was best; I found the item used and at a good price, saved up for it, and now I feel like I’m being punished somehow for trying to do the right thing. Anyway, I’ve sent the shipper an e-mail to try to work something out. If I refuse it and it gets sent back to her to be shipped again via the post office, we lose the original UPS shipping fee, but the PO would have to charge $40 in order for our total shipping costs to match the extortionist import fee UPS is trying to charge me. And from a quick glance at the fee tables on the USPS site, it looks like it will cost between $10 and $15 to mail, which at least saves me about $25.

I hate being penalized for trying to do the right thing. I hate it.

ETA: A couple of people have asked, so let me clarify: This is not duty, it is brokerage alone. UPS evaluated the parcel and said, “We have decided that you need not pay duty on this. Now pay us $58 for telling you so.”

ETA LATER: The seller is an absolute star. She was as indignant about the brokerage fees as I was, and has told me to absolutely refuse the package. She’s never shipped anything cross-border via UPS before, and you can be darn sure she won’t do it again. When it gets back to her she’ll ship it out via the post office, and she’s offered to absorb part of the cost. I’m so thankful that she was as aghast as I was and agreed to work with me to get around this, even though it means a bit of extra effort on both our parts. So I won’t have my lazy kate and extra bobbins for another couple of weeks, but the time is worth the $40 I’ll ultimately save.

In Which She Enjoys Living In The Future

I love living in the future.

Item one: I can place a reserve for new acquisitions at the library online, check my profile, find out that they’re in before the library calls me, and show up to check them out before they’ve even made it to the reserve drawers. I scored An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (an additional yay for the library taking your advice about new books to buy via online request forms), and Alexander McCall Smith’s The Lost Art of Gratitude. Seriously; check out that trio of bestselling authors! And they’re all on my bedside table. (The books, not the authors. It would be very crowded otherwise.)

Item two: This morning I jumped up and down on Twitter about the hat-trick of library books, because I have friends who understand that sort of thing.

Item three: Two seconds later Peter Gregson, a pro Scottish cellist I follow on Twitter and natter with on occasion, sent me a direct message saying that Sandy McCall Smith is a friend of his, and he’d be happy to pass along anything I might want to share with him.

Yes, the future is a wonderful place, where I can connect with people around the globe, and one of the people on my Twitter list and in our extended cello family knows one of my favourite authors and will say hi for me. (I asked him to say that Smith’s work had brought my ex-pat Scot mum and I much joy. Figured that covered pretty much all the bases.)

Weekend Roundup, Halloween Edition

Saturday morning we headed out to Karine and Adam’s place for a birthday party. We were the first ones there, so we blew up balloons and put up streamers while Adam got the birthday boy into his costume and Karine whipped up a fabulous brunch (first round for the kids, second round for the adults!). I was fighting a headache and realised halfway there that I’d forgotten to put on my glasses, which didn’t help at all. (I swear, I have to think of something to get around the dark-glasses-on-a-dark-dresser problem.) Almost half the invitees had to cancel due to illness, which was sad, but those in attendance had a wonderful time. There were a moments where my heart nearly broke, though; the boy came to get me at one point and said, “Mama, they’ve locked the door and won’t let me in.” The birthday boy and his school friends had closed the bedroom door against him, and he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him play. So I sat with him in the playroom with an arm around his shoulders and tried to think of a way to explain it but couldn’t put it into words for him, so I just hugged him and offered to help him build with the toys at our feet. But then there was a stack of birthday cupcakes and presents, so everything was all right.

We headed home and it took the boy a while to settle for nap, of course. When he woke up HRH had hollowed out the pumpkins in preparation for carving them, and we got the boy to draw the faces for them. The results were great!

We packed up the pumpkins and headed out to the local grandparents’ house, where the boy does his trick or treating. Except it wasn’t that easy. The transport ministry had closed down half the Mercier bridge, so there was a single lane going each way. We figured it would just take a bit longer to get across, but when we encountered a staggering lineup at our alternate entrance (our regular one was closed) we tried a second, then a third, and discovered that most of the entrances to the bridge were closed, and all the traffic was being funneled through LaSalle onto one on-ramp and taking this way would eat up an insane amount of time. So after forty-five minutes of being five minutes away from our house in various directions, HRH decided to take the Champlain bridge and drive all the way around the south shore of the river to get to Chateauguay. We got to my inlaws’ house an hour and a half after we left. Normally, it’s a fifteen minute trip.

Anyway, tempers were tight and gas was getting dangerously low when we go to the Champlain, but right then the sun came out. It had been an extremely windy, rainy day up till then, but the sun suddenly broke through at just the right angle for magic to happen. As we crossed the Champlain we saw the fattest rainbow I’ve ever seen grow from the opposite shore and reach up to the clouds. I rolled down the window and took a photo:

Then we looked in the rearview mirror, and the sky behind us was on fire. Copper and gold and blazing apricot-bronze; absolutely incredible. When we got across the river I rolled down the window again (rather dangerous in the high winds, whoa) and took photos looking back at Montreal:

We had to stop for gas in La Prairie, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing, and we got to the boy’s grandparents’ door just before six-thirty. After a quick gulp of alcohol to soothe the stress we’d incurred on the way and much admiring of the decor there we got the boy out the door. He loves dressing up, he loves the decorations, he loves the candy… he is not such a big fan of older kids in scary costumes. In fact, after the first house he started digging his heels in because there were two teenagers right behind us wearing horrific rubber masks whom he saw every time he left a door, and on the corner he stopped and started crying, asking to go back home to Grandma and Papa because he was scared of costumes. The woman in the next house heard him and came out to talk to him, and she jollied him up nicely, getting him to come to her front door to see her decorations, and talking to him about the scary costumes. It turned out she worked at the local elementary school and knew exactly how to handle it. (Another example of how what one’s parents tell you doesn’t count, but hearing the same stuff from a different adult is OK.) The boy left in a much more cheerful mood, and I suspect the woman talked to the teenagers behind us because at the next house they stopped to talk to the boy and lifted their masks so he could see they were just people underneath. He was better then, and got to a whole two more houses before saying he was tired and wanted to go home. So this year he hit a total of five houses, three or four fewer than last year.

At home was more fun for everyone, actually, because my mother-in-law had finger food for us as well as more alcohol, and the boy had a delightful time answering the door in his costume and handing out candy. My father-in-law kept slipping more candy into our bags as well! It was a perfect Halloween night: windy, not too cold, piles of wet leaves all over the ground, with wisps of clouds racing across an almost perfectly full moon.

I slept horribly that night, despite being in a wonderful mood going to bed. I got two hours of sleep before midnight, then woke up so very completely at midnight that I had to get up. I knitted Gran’s scarf till two, spun some of the dye sample I’d done a while ago, spun some Aran-weight singles and plied them, then took some herbal sleeping pills and went back to bed around four. I got one hour of sleep before the boy woke us up at five, because of of course the clocks had gone back the night before and his body knew it was six. He tried to snuggle with us but wouldn’t stop squirming or talking so HRH put him back to his own bed, and I slept on and off till nine.

We went out to vote in the municipal election at ten, and wow, worst voting experience ever. The gym in which they were supposed to set up this polling station had been damaged by the wind and rain the previous day so it was squeezed into a cafeteria area instead, and the insensitivity of those waiting was just boggling. It took about forty-five minutes before our station was clear, and a good half of us waiting were polite, but the other half were just asses and made things miserable for everyone else… and this was within the first half-hour of the polls being open. The abuse the volunteers were receiving was dreadful. Now, okay, smaller area, perhaps not as many booth open per polling station number, but at the same time every single person had to unfold five ballots, mark them, and fill them in again. With only one person per booth allowed in the room at a time, yeah, that’s going to slow things down. Anyway, no one I voted for was elected, a result that I fully expected.

As the voting process took twice as long as we’d expected it to take, HRH pretty much had to leave as soon as we walked home because it was open house day at school. He took the bus in while the boy and I stayed home for lunch and a rest. We drove in after the boy’s nap to pick HRH up, and discovered that the open house had been insanely busy and successful.

Dinner was remarkably delicious homemade spaghetti sauce made from the garden tomatoes I’d canned two months ago, and then I headed off for a cello lesson. These are getting better, although I’m still having moments where I freeze up or can’t work through a small problem. My teacher had to remind me about things we’d worked on months ago — caterpillars, the little bounce in the shift that provides shock absorption so the shift doesn’t sound harsh — but for once my right hand was behaving. So now my focus is on smooth shifts, elegant ones, done at the same speed my bow hand is moving at instead of rushing the shift.