Fuzzy

Oh, fibro-fog, I have not missed you.

Actually, I think this is a combination of poor sleep and being up and moving too early in the morning, plus forgetting my glasses on the bedside table.

HRH and I went out for our annual blood test this morning at stupid o’clock. It occurs to me that now that we have health insurance, we could to this via private clinic and be reimbursed instead of sitting in the hospital for an hour and a half. Next time. Anyway, we took the boy with us because we figured it would be good for him to see it before he needs it done at some point, and also to kind of save time, as we could take him directly to Grandma’s house afterward. He was pretty good, too. We sat in the hallway of the blood lab along with fifty other people and read a book, played some games, and I let him play with the Touch, too. He came into the lab itself when we were called, and he sat with HRH while I had my prise de sang done, and then I took him to the bathroom while HRH had his done. I’d warned him ahead of time that when we were in the actual lab that he’d have to sit very quietly and not wiggle around, because there were lots of breakable things and people having sensitive tests done, and if anything went wrong they’d have to start all over again and there would be much crankiness. After we were done we left and he said, “That was fun!” (Okay, kid, whatever.) Then he threw his arms out to the sides and said with great excitement, “And I didn’t break anything!” A couple of the people waiting giggled a bit behind their hands, as did a few when we’d been waiting earlier and he’d asked me what a prise de sang entailed, then put an anxious hand on my arm and said, on the verge of tears, “But I don’t want them to take your blood out of your body.”

Then we all trooped over to the nearest Tim Hortons so there could be food and coffee, because we’d been fasting for the tests, and he was allowed to choose a whole doughnut for himself. He chose a chocolate glazed, and told me that I wasn’t allowed to cut it in half (which is what I usually do, half for each of us). He pretty much had three bites and then licked all the icing off, then washed it down with some chocolate milk.

I’ve had a couple of queries about how the spinning wheel recon went. Basically, I sat down and spun my fibre for two hours on a single-treadle Louet S-17, and as I suspected, I am completely and totally hooked. Never even tried the Victoria. A single treadle slow machine will be fine for me for a while, which is good to know because there are lots and lots of secondhand ones on eBay (although I’d love to buy one new, and support the LYS that’s been helping me with the research). Molly Ann wound the single I’d spun into a centre-pull ball with the ball winder (so easy!) so I could ply at home with my spindle (again, so much easier!) and I made honest to goodness real yarn last night after the boy was in bed. I have photos, but I can’t figure out how to get them out of iPhoto. Thank goodness for my library reference books, which I will make use of later. (Note to self: You need an FTP program before you start working the freelance gig again, oh hell. Although I can upload things for the blog from a web interface, thank goodness.) My biggest problem with the wheel is over-spinning the wool and putting too much twist into it, just like I do with the spindle. I need to treadle slower; I tend to speed up. But it’s so much easier, and so much smoother, and I can make a lovely fine single instead of something chunky because drafting is easier.

We’re off to see the new Harry Potter film this afternoon! And leaving, er, now.

ETA @ 8:25 PM: Peektures!

Here’s the first bit of plied yarn on the spindle, halfway through the process. I admit that I paused here to photograph it because of how perfect the yarn about to be wound onto the spindle shaft is. So even! So… worsted weight-ish!

And here is my first-ever baby skein of yarn plied from a single spun on a wheel. The length of the finished skein is about eight inches.

It is somewhat lumpy and not even (well, more even than my spindle stuff ever was), but I love it with much, much love.

Also, the Harry Potter film was very good indeed. Better than the last, which was probably my least favourite of the lot so far. Well-paced, nicely balanced, very nice camera work.

On My Way Out

The PC has officially been retired. Thank you; you did me good service when there was a gap. You stepped into the breach and soldiered on. Good PC.

And I almost forgot my appointment at Ariadne this afternoon to test spinning wheels! Thank goodness for playing with the shiny Touch, because I found a note to myself about it on my list of things to do today. I’m off!

Notes

I think all the e-mail addresses are working now. All I need is to go back to the PC one last time to make a second backup of the mail profile, the address book, and whatever else I think I need. Of course that means unplugging the Mac, which I am, understandably reluctant to do. Then ADZO has given me permission to hand the PC over to whatever charity refurbishes hardware for places that need computers, like other charities and churches and so forth. I want it out of my office by tomorrow. I want the space under my left-hand writing desk reclaimed!

I’m fumbling through the first few days of adjustment quite well. What keyboard combinations do I use to approximate this or that desired function? How do I sync the new Touch and the computer? Why has all the info on my Touch vanished after syncing? (Oh; one can only sync the desktop to the iPod. Well, that’s odd. It would make sense to be able to do it both ways, as the iPod acts like a PDA you carry around, so in my mind one should be able to upload changes from it to the main system.) Some things need to be double-clicked, some don’t. I’ve set up Open Office for now, till I get iWork. The screen resolution seems to have finally settled thanks to determined effort on my part to try every single possible resolution plus tweaking sharpness and interweave and mumblemonitortechspeak. My main problem is that everything is easy. Too easy. There’s a tiny bit of my brain that’s chittering away, saying, “But you don’t know how it works.” To which I say, “Yes, absolutely. Which means that it’s magic!”

I’m going to sound like a broken record: I can’t get over how quiet it is. I can listen to music playing in the next room with no difficulty. I am so relaxed, it’s slightly anxiety-inducing. It boots up incredibly quickly. The boy is very impressed that it makes “the WALL*E sound” when it’s turned on.

Today I went to the license bureau to pay for my next two years’ worth of driver’s license fees (why yes, my birthday was four days ago, why do you ask?), had a very enjoyable breakfast with ADZO, and went to the library to pick up an armful of reference books on Macs and how to understand the inner workings of iTunes (because things I expect it to do or recognise don’t happen), some graphic novels (who knew there was a whole section of English graphic novels in the back corner?), and a new book on writing by Graham Swift called Making an Elephant: Writing From Within. I’m always very excited when an author whose work I analyzed in my thesis comes out with something new. Which reminds me, I think David Lodge released a new novel recently. I’ve already read A.S. Byatt’s latest.

I am trying very hard to not think about how much money I have spent on major purchases in this past month. The new cello and computer have both been a long time coming, of course. I’m just twitchy about that much money going out within that small a timeframe.

Astute readers will have noticed that the monthly post about the boy hasn’t gone up. July’s like that: there’s the concert, then recovery, then my birthday, and the first two weeks just don’t really exist properly. And then this year there was the computer stuff, too. I’ll get to it next week.

To work! Which in this case is reading. And re-ripping the albums iTunes claims don’t exist. And there ought to be some more cello work, too.

Almost Perfectly Smooth…

Everything has gone/is going very well, except the setting up of mail accounts and transferring of old mail to the new computer, which isn’t working at all for some reason. There had to be something, of course. Fortunately, my primary work and personal accounts were made Gmail accounts at the beginning of the year, so I can check them on an ongoing basis. And I can access my Owldaughter accounts via a web interface as well,though they’re not used often so it’s not crucial at the moment. But still, argh; if this doesn’t work I’ll have lost yet another chunk of archived stuff and my address book. In a way it’s therapeutic, because I am a moderate pack rat when it comes to mail: I like to keep things for reference. But in another way it’s annoying, because there was a bunch of stuff in folders that was important. And I really, really hope I haven’t lost my address book this time like I did thanks to the last two crashes. It’s a different situation, but past experience does tend to shed a negative light on everything. I’ll be reconnecting the PC today and recopying all the pertinent files again.

So if you e-mail me something I might not see it for a while, and I may be slow in responding till the email connections are all straightened out.

Mac Transition Complete; Or, Stealth Computing

Coming at you live from the new Mac Mini, complete with the tiny wireless keyboard the guy threw in for free! It’s not my ergo keyboard, and it’s a French layout, but it’s fun. Apple isn’t kidding when they say that Macs are fully functional right out of the box.

And it is SO QUIET. This was one of the major reasons for going Mac, because the constant noise of the fans and the drives in my PCs grated on me very quickly. I am Stealth Girl now.

I’m using the VGA adaptor and it’s making screen resolution a bit odd, but I’ll try to find a solution for it. I may need to upgrade the screen at some point, which isn’t the end of the world, as it’s about five years old. And the Touch is charging up as we speak. Tomorrow I’ll download Firefox and Thunderbird.

I’m very, very happy. Also, I’m happy. And did I mention happy?

Catching Up

I managed to revise thirty-nine pages of Orchestrated today. Go me! Also spent some of the day backing up files and such, because tonight is the night that I go to view and probably buy the Mac mini! Oh, new computer, you have only been, what, three years in the planning? No more scrounging something together from old computers downstairs! You will be under warranty! The idea is positively intoxicating.

Yesterday in the mail I got a gift certificate to my local yarn shop, purchased for me by my lovely and thoughtful editor! And today I made my appointment to go test drive the two Louet wheels they have (well, one is the shop’s, the other belongs to one of the owners). So on Thursday, that is what I will be doing. Very exciting.

Today’s bad thing was my lovely owl plaque developing a hole int he middle of it. It was a museum plaster cast of an Egyptian bas relief of two owls, and it’s hung by a scooped-out bit in the back and a bar across the resulting hollow. I moved the nail it hangs on, and was hooking the plaque over it… and the nail went through the plaque at the thinnest part. I had a horrible moment of kneejerk despair, and then I breathed again and put it down gently. Perhaps HRH can fill it in, or at least help me find a paint that matches the sort of buff-colour finish of the plaster, so we can drybrush over the white plaster that’s showing around the hole where it all crumbled; maybe the hole will be less noticeable then. It’s right in the middle of one of the owls, though.

Boy needs to go to bed!

Weekend Roundup, Birthday Edition

What a lovely weekend!

Saturday HRH went over to his parents’ house and helped his dad build the new back deck until they got rained out. The boy and I lazed around the house all morning: he watched the fifth and final disc of the first season of the Animaniacs, while I read and surfed online. HRH came home halfway through the boy’s nap once it had started to rain, and wow, did it ever rain for the rest of the day! We sat on the back doorstep and watched the wicked storms roll in, and when it began to be too wet back there we opened the front living room wall living room patio doors and sat there watching the rain pound the road and the huge maple tree whip around in the high winds. HRH had to go downstairs and rescue the garage from flooding, as the drain at the base of the driveway had blocked with dirt and maple keys. It was fabulous storm, and watching it was a lot of fun, too. At one point the thunder rolled and Liam clapped, then said, “That’s the big man in the sky with his hammer!” HRH turned to me and said with deep satisfaction, “My place in Valhalla is now assured.” The storm’s damage was impressive, including flooded highways that created miserable traffic problems that we saw but fortunately didn’t have to deal with, as we drove in the opposite direction that night.

HRH’s parents arrived at five, and I opened my birthday gifts from both sets of parents because the boy was nearly beside himself with excitement wondering what was in them. My parents had given me a copy of The Cello Suites (the recent book by a Montreal journalist, not a recording, because I have at least three four five of the latter) and a fabulous tiny micro-grater, while HRH’s parents gave me a lovely candle and money to put toward whatever I liked. Then HRH and I headed out to meet Ceri and Scott for a sushi dinner that had been planned for about four months. We ate fabulously delicious sushi, and then discussed the merits of moving on to a place like Rockaberry’s for dessert versus returning to their place to play Rock Band. The discussion didn’t last long: Rock Band it was! We played for a good couple of hours and then drove home in yet another storm in order to release HRH’s parents from babysitting the boy, so they could go home before the storm got any worse.

Sunday morning they tried to let me sleep in but the boy was too excited about the day. “Do you know what your presents are? Will they be surprises?” he kept sneaking in to my room to whisper. We went back to HRH’s parents’ house so HRH could help his dad finish the deck that had been rained out the day before, and the boy, his Grandma and I went out to pick up groceries. Once back home, the boy napped while HRH went out to pick up ice and my not-so-secret-by-that-point birthday present, and I made a Thai noodle salad for the small birthday picnic I’d planned.

One of the intangible birthday gifts I received came during my weekly phone call with my mother. My parents had flown out to Vancouver to visit with my grandmother last week, while they were there they took Gran out to the library. They set her up at a computer, put a set of headphones on her, and my dad cued up the URLs to some of the videos taken at the Canada Day concert. It didn’t quite sink in for her until my dad moved the cursor to point at me in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, at which point she exclaimed quite loudly (she is rather deaf and had headphones on, after all). Fortunately, the people around her in the library were amused rather than upset. Mum says Gran was quite overcome and couldn’t stop talking about it. “I knew she was in an orchestra, but I had no idea it was like that,” she apparently said. I’m just thrilled that she finally got a chance to see and hear a concert, and I’m especially pleased that it was this particular performance. One of the ideas behind the MiniDisc player was to send her some sort of recording, but she doesn’t have a CD player or a computer, and I have no way to record it into cassettes (if she even has a cassette deck any more), and as we saw on Canada Day, the MiniDisc may not be capable of handling the level of music produced by the orchestra. The video was a much more personal way of sharing it with her. So once again, I’m thankful that the HD video was made.

We packed for the picnic, and on the way to the park we stopped to pick up balloons, as the boy says all birthdays require balloons. Unfortunately, the wind was so strong that half an hour after we arrived they were tugged loose from the picnic backpack to which we’d attached them, and they rose to tangle in the branches of the huge poplar tree under which we sat. It was pretty, but not as pretty as having them right there with us, and rather put paid to my plan of sending them home with the kids in attendance. Everyone had made some kind of salad to share, which was terribly amusing, but they were all very different: pasta salad, strawberry/walnut/spinach salad, two-potato and corn salad, my Thai noodle salad, and I think I’m missing one. It was a light and refreshing meal. I didn’t bake a cake this year; instead, we’d bought one that morning that was nice and light and not too sweet. There were nine adults and three kids, which made for a small and relaxed group. Pasley, Jeff and the girls gave me a lovely amber-coloured beaded necklace with a photo pendant of an owl on it (and a moon on the other side!) and a set of earrings to match, and Devon drew me a really excellent card of me playing my cello.

We wrapped everything up around six, and came home. I played with the iPod Touch that HRH and Meallanmouse had given me and thanks to the free wifi network nearby downloaded a couple of free apps (Twitterrific and Stanza being the ones I am the most excited about) and then several free e-books. (A Room With a View! Howards End! Persuasion! Sense & Sensibility! Pride & Prejudice! Jane Eyre! The Prisoner of Zenda! And just to blow the curve, His Majesty’s Dragon!) Now I have lots of my favourite books with me all the time, and I will never be caught without something to read again. This makes me disgustingly gleeful, and also smug. I can’t get over how crisp and clear the screen is, how easy it is to read on it, and how accurate the on-screen keyboard is. Liam wandered into my office after his nap yesterday and said, “What’s that?” “It’s, um, like a little computer that plays music and I can read books on it, too,” I said. He climbed on my lap and watched me tap my way through some things, then asked if he could try it. I pulled up Notes for him and said, “Why don’t you try typing your name?” He hunted and pecked, and again I was amazed at how accurate the keyboard was, even for preschool fingers. He slipped off my lap and left my office with the Touch, saying, “I’ll bring this back to you when I’m finished with it.” I found him in the living room typing things. He’d figured out that if he turned it so that the screen was landscape instead of portrait, the keyboard enlarged. He’d also found something that made a terrible buzzing sound, so I rescued it before he could do something irreparable to it. The Touch is currently decked out in the cartoon skulls and bones skin that Meallanmouse had on it, which amuses me because it is so cute and so punk at the same time. “Does the Touch have a name yet?” Ceri asked me this morning. “At the moment it is called the YAY NEW TOY, all in caps,” I replied.

The boy developed a cold last Thursday evening, which means he got it at school at the beginning of last week. It’s not bad, but I have it now too, of course. Which, apart from the sad loss of the lovely balloons, was the only down side to the weekend. Well, I would have liked to have seen HRH some more, but we did get out on Saturday night, and that was absolutely wonderful. And tonight’s meeting has been cancelled, so perhaps we will be able to play some more Rock Band together. (It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one to know that I hold the bass like a cello because it’s easier on my hands and arms. This is fine in the Wii version because the upright position triggers overdrive as soon as the option is available, but the Xbox wants me to move the bass to trigger it and won’t recognise the left/down motion I make or the return to upright, so all that lovely energy was wasted. Scott told me to use the Select button, which works very well instead, except I need to time it properly so I don’t start missing notes.)

So all in all, the birthday weekend was very pleasant indeed. It was relatively low-key, and I have a new toy whose code name is YAY NEW TOY, and there is a piece of cake left in the fridge for me. I have a pile of new music by The Donnas, courtesy of Ceri, to speed me along my day of work. And my birthday celebration continues throughout the week, what with the Mac Mini appointment Tuesday night, and my local family birthday dinner this coming Saturday night!