One Cobble at a Time

Shipping Volunteers

If you are local and would like to help with assembling and shipping challenge coin orders, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com. If you’ve already emailed and I responded no need to do it again. If you can only come for part of a day, we’ll take whatever we can get. We’d dearly love to be able to […]

Challenge Coin Shipping By the Numbers

Invoices printed: 2245 Invoices pending, waiting on info from backers: 331 Coins to be ordered: approx 26,000 estimated cost of those coins: $80,000 Glue dots needed to fix coins to packing boards: approx 20,000 packing boards needed:5000 padded envelopes to order: 1500 priority mail boxes to order: 950 space in my house that will be […]

Scheduling March

I sat down and counted. During the month of February there were 20 school nights. These are nights when it is important to run life on schedule so that homework gets done and people are in bed on time so that they can get up the next day for school. Out of those 20 school […]

Structuring Life to Make Room for Creativity

This blog post is a write-up from my presentation notes. I’ve given this presentation at LTUE. I’ll be giving it again at LDS Storymakers in May. As I wrote this from my notes, I noticed a major difference in the flow of a presentation and of a blog post. Speaking to a group is more […]

Renewing My Spaces

Every so often we would look at our walls and say “We really need to repaint.” Sometimes the words were triggered by corners where the paint had completely chipped away, other times it was contemplating the way that dirt collected on the sections of walls in front of the studs, thus creating a grid pattern […]

Painting the Front Room

January is a cold month with far too little daylight, so I try to fill it with fun projects. That way I blink and it is over. This is our front room. It hasn’t been painted since before we moved into the house. We’ve found it fascinating that the dirt accumulates differently depending upon whether […]

Adventures in Social Media

I want to fund a picture book, The Strength of Wild Horses, and the obvious choice for that is to run a Kickstarter drive. However those who are wise in the ways of Kickstarter have advised me that the project has a better chance to fund if I do some community building first. This makes […]

The Things on our Walls and What they Tell

Our decorating scheme for this house has been pretty haphazard in the fifteen years since we moved in. The walls are white because we’ve never spent the time or money to change them. We hung up some portraits and a picture of the temple because that is what one does with the walls of a […]

The State of My House

I have eight boxes of calendars in my front room waiting for Howard to draw and me to ship. Next to those boxes is a stack of packages that I assembled this morning and are waiting for me to put on clothes so I can take them out to the mailbox. There is also a […]

Stories of Today

There have been many impressive photographs today, scenes from Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey. I’ve never been to any of these places, so I view the photos abstractly, without any personal grief attached. Before the storm I never walked that crumpled boardwalk, I never shopped in the below ground shops that now resemble a salty swimming […]