The Mac Transition Begins; Or, SQUEE!!!

HRH just handed me a gift bag. While the boy napped and I made Thai noodle salad, he’d gone out to buy ice for the cooler and what he called “a thick card.”

Inside the bag was a joint gift from Meallanmouse and himself: an iPod Touch! It’s Meallanmouse’s original Touch, which was replaced by her new iPhone. And as I’d been looking for a secondhand iTouch to use as an e-book reader, and she was going to sell hers, well, the stars aligned and I have a new toy!

(“Don’t you want me to open it at the picnic this afternoon?” I said when he handed it to me. “No, I want you to open it now to have enough time to play with it before we head out,” he said.)

Scott showed me his Touch at dinner last night, and it further cemented my resolution to get one. Hurrah for things going excitingly well and friends conspiring! And further to the stars-aligning thing, I found a classified listing for someone selling a few-months-old top-model Mac Mini with eighteen months of warranty left on it, for less than the base model I was saving up to buy new. We talked, we clicked, and he took his ad down. HRH and I are heading out Tuesday night to look it over and pick it up if all is as it should be. And so my transition to Mac will be complete! (Once we ascertain that my ergo keyboard and my compact mouse are recognized by the Mac, that is. If they’re not HRH will bring me an Apple set home from work, as they have boxes of used ones taking up space.) I am resisting my desire to connect the Touch to my computer and start loading it with exciting things, because I don’t want to brick it. I’m waiting for the Mac Mini, under the admittedly naive belief that two Apple products will play together better than an Apple and a PC.

Now I am looking out the window disapprovingly at the gathering clouds. We’re meeting a small number of friends at the park for a picnic, and if it rains I will be very displeased indeed. Especially since I have enough Thai noodle salad here to feed a small army. Also, if I cannot show off my shiny new toy I will pout.

Forty-Nine Months Old!

Big things this past month have been taking the GO train into Toronto and the TTC subway for the first time, and taking pictures. He wanders off with the camera any chance he gets. And about a third of his pictures are actually usable, to. I may put together a Boy Photographer post at some point. He took pictures of me playing my cello one day, and if he hadn’t fiddled with the settings and turned the dial to Movie he’d have had some excellent shots. Even with the Movie setting on, if he’d kept the camera on me instead of winging it crazily around the room it might have worked. We may keep our eyes out for a decent low-end camera for him — not one of the kids’ ones, those are terrible, but one that won’t die if dropped. That’s my biggest fear right now, because he’s come close to smashing it against something a couple of times, and I really don’t feel like replacing my digital camera for the second time in three years, thanks.

To everyone’s surprise, he had a very negative reaction to his first pool experience this summer. He loved it last year, and splashed around while holding on to whatever adult was with him. But this year, his teacher went into the pool with him at preschool when the weather finally warmed up enough to do so, and he shrieked and cried. He explained later that it was cold, but we think this was shorthand for “I’m a year older and I know bad things can happen and while I trust my teacher that’s a lot of water, there. Oh, and it’s also a bit chilly.”

He is thoroughly in love with the Animaniacs. My work here is done.

After months of on-again-off-again suggesting it, we finally got around to reading Ursula LeGuin’s Catwings series, and he is in love. He also really enjoyed the Brambly Hedge stories, but the Catwings are his favourites among the new books.

The very last guppy finally went to the big aquarium in the sky, so we took a trip to the local pet shop and bought three sturdy polka-dot mollies. We tried to convince him that a small school of neons would be awesome, but he wanted the spotty mollies, so the spotty mollies he got. “What will you call them?” the salesman said as he decanted them into a bag. “Um, I don’t know,” said the boy. “Well, my name’s JF, if you wanted to call one after me,” the salesman said, which amused us. The boy amused us even more when he eagerly said, “Yeah, yeah — I’ll call them all JF!”

Gryffindor has taken to racing into the boy’s room when it’s bedtime, throwing himself on top of the bed and flopping over with great force, looking up at us with an expression that says, “I am so heavy you cannot possibly pick me up to toss me out.” After the story has been read and the light has been turned out for the snuggle part of the bedtime ritual Gryff often stomps up the bed, purring loudly, and thumps into the boy or I lovingly. Sometimes the boy wants him to cuddle some more, but usually he says as I leave, “I don’t want Gryff to stay.” Especially since the night he had to shoo the cat away from the tank and those shiny plump new fish. Very traumatizing. When I go in to check on him last thing before I go to bed, adjusting covers and turning off the music and opening or closing windows, Gryff often pushes his way in with me and leaps up on to the bed, finding a cosy nook to do some intense snuggling and purring before I shoo him out again. It makes us feel good to know that Gryff chooses to play and be with the boy. Even Nixie is allowing him to pet her gently when he finds her, an unforeseen turn that the boy recognizes as being extremely special.

“Are these bad guy socks?” he asked when he put on a pair of Transformer socks the other day. Very important to know when you’re four. It sets the tone for the entire day, you see.

Other boy-themed posts:

Rocking out with the new Rock Band set
The trip to Nana and Grandad’s house
The grand finale to the Week of Birthday

In Which She Successfully Subverts A New Generation

I bought the first season of the Animaniacs yesterday.

This is something I’d intended to do for a while, but never got around to it. Then Tamu passed her Dot t-shirt on to me at the Canada Day BBQ (there’s a long story here about how there was one of these shirts left for sale at Nebula, just before I started working there, and the day I went in to buy it Tamu had purchased it; fifteen years later she has been weeding out her wardrobe and remembered I loved this shirt, so passed it along to me in pretty much perfect condition to use as a sleep shirt, yay!) and the boy saw me wearing it and asked who the cute creature in the graphic was. So I tried to explain the Animaniacs to him. Anyone who has seen the Animaniacs knows that such an explanation is doomed. So I resolved to pick up a season of the show, because it was rather wrong that I didn’t own any.

The boy was initially disappointed — I told him I’d picked up a surprise and he must have thought it was something he’d asked for. “But I don’t want this, I didn’t ask for it,” he said, on the verge of tears. HRH had a little talk with him about how nice it was of me to buy him a present, and how I wanted to share something fun that I liked with him. So he said we could put the first disc in. Initially he sat as far away from the television as he could and was a bit bemused, but gradually I saw him move closer to the TV, and then he really got into it. “I love the Animanaics, they’re my favourite movie!” he exclaimed somewhere around the end of the first episode. “Is there more?” Oh, oh yes, my son. There is lots more.

In fact, we finished the first disc last night, staying up an hour later than his usual bedtime to do so (“Just one more, Mama, please, please?”). He curled up on my lap and rested his head on my shoulder, determined to see it through to the end. “Hey, I have him!” he said at one point, pointing to Yakko, and he’s right. Once upon a time when Tal, t! and I were throughly immersed on the Animanaics, finding a delightful parallel between the three characters and our own personalities (oh, the song sessions in various cars on various trips!) Tal found stuffed toys of each character and presented the appropriate one to each of us. When Liam was born he passed his Yakko along to him. Until now, Liam’s never really been interested in it, but that should change around nap time today. (I think my Dot is still in a box. I shall remedy that.)

I am charmed by the fact that the boy crawled into bed with me this morning and asked to watch the Animaniacs instead of his regular Friday-at-home-with-Mum cartoons. Why, yes, yes you can, my son. Muah-hah-hah.

This is also slightly bittersweet for me because the only video I had of the show was a best-of complied for me by Emru. I lost the video in the last move (although I’m sure it’s somewhere in a box that hasn’t been opened in a while) and our VCR died anyhow, so we wouldn’t have been able to watch it. But I’ll always associate the Animaniacs with him as well as Tamu, Tal, and t! — a noble host indeed. When the series was first released on DVD Emru tried to get a review copy for me through fps, but it didn’t materialize. I did get to review the first season of Pinky & the Brain, though, which was an acceptable consolation prize. It has still never been quite right that I own a season of that, but not the Animaniacs.)

Today we’re bound for the EcoMuseum, and I’m going to sneak my three Animaniacs CDs into the car as another surprise. Whee!

In Which She Discovers Subtlety And Hidden Meaning

So I just hit the one-third mark in the manuscript on this oh so exciting voyage through second draft. Slog, slog, slog. O motivation, where art thou?

And then out of nowhere, I found Hidden Meaning in something one of my secondary protagonists says. When I wrote it, I just meant for him to be talking about the main protagonist’s situation. But lo, upon this rereading, I have realized he’s talking about himself and his own situation as well. What’s even better is that the protagonist replies to him about her own situation — she has no idea about his health issue at this point — and could very well be describing his own denial anyway.

“Stop trying to tell me I’m right to be so upset.”

“You have every right.” He stood his cello case in the corner of the entry hall and pulled off his jacket. “But it sounds to me like you’re already telling yourself it’s okay to lose.”

“Well, yeah. That’s the point.”

“But it isn’t.” He turned at looked at her, hard. “She’s come out of nowhere and is trying to take something that belongs to you, for whatever reason. Don’t give up before you’ve even stood up to defend what’s yours.”

“Don’t you get it? I’m trying to trick myself.” Clare dropped her own jacket on the landing, grabbed the viola case, and walked away from him into the living room. “If I pretend I don’t care, I can play properly. If I admit that I do care, I can’t concentrate.”

I would like to take this as proof that I know what I’m doing, but if it happens without me planning it, I can’t call it genius; it’s more likely to be a lucky coincidence. I should credit my subconscious instead. Apparently it’s both craftier and smarter than I am.

Dear City of LaSalle…

… any time you want to give us more information on the boil-water advisory issued last Wednesday evening (July 1 for those keeping score at home), we’d be more than happy to receive it. Cause you know, you told us you’d have results on Friday at the earliest, thereby setting up the expectation that we’d have news in two to three days. I know Wednesday was a holiday, and there was a weekend in there, but come on. We’re on day six of the advisory, and if there’s been nothing concrete in the test results, at least tell us that testing is ongoing and thank us for our patience and continued co-operation. I know you don’t want to spread misinformation or raise alarm more than you already have, but even a “stay tuned” note would go a long way right about now.

I’ve been optimistic and given you the benefit of the doubt, but really. The ball is being dropped in a major way.

No love,

Autumn

ETA: Well, thank you. Although why did you wait till Monday to run the tests?

Canada Day Concert Redux

It is my very great pleasure to share with you the video taken of the entire Canada Day concert.

Bless Martine and Daniel for shooting the HD footage, for editing it and posting it to YouTube; and even more so for burning all those concert DVDs for the orchestra members! It was a real treat to sit back and enjoy the concert the way the audience did, and as the Blu-Ray player and TV are hooked up to the surround stereo and subwoofer, I got to hear the orchestra in all its glory. (Okay, the church is very echoey, and at times our articulation isn’t as clear as it could have been and those two issues = occasional muddy sound, but hey! There’s sound to be heard!) And I appreciate it all the more because my audio recording was such a miserable mess.

Overall, I am very pleased with my performance in this video. Two things leap out at me. One, I tend to make small faces while I play, mostly tightening of the mouth during different phrases. It’s not in reaction to mistakes, it’s more like… expression. It probably can’t be seen from the audience, but seeing it on screen when the camera was on the celli was very odd. This summer I’m going to work on relaxing the muscles around my mouth when I play. And two, I’ve been working on lowering my right elbow, and damn it, every once in a while it pops up like a chicken wing. Down, elbow! Down! Something else to work on this summer.

There were a couple of places in the video when I waved my hands at the screen and said, “The celli! The CELLI! They have the theme, the violins are just playing a repeated note — pan RIGHT!” And there was the odd place where the camera would pan to the brass… just in time for them to lower their instruments. But those are understandable in a live recording, and really, I’m just thrilled to have the record of the event. Especially on DVD! Merci encore, Martine et Daniel, vos efforts et votre générosité sont vraiment appréciés!