One Cobble at a Time

Inventory Day at the Schlock Warehouse

When my front room looks like this: Then I know it is time to have an inventory day. These packages are the returned merchandise from Chicon with a couple of boxes of books from the UVU Book Academy thrown in for good measure. The Chicon boxes only just arrived because the truck they were in [...]

Being Back at Home

One nice thing about being away from home for a week, it makes me glad to return to all the little tasks of the house. I’d completely forgotten that there is a satisfaction to dishes and laundry. Doing these things definitely becomes a burden over time, but being away from them for a week let [...]

Preparing for Departure

Who will bring in the mail while I am gone? I don’t know. I know I mentioned to Howard that he could stack it in the bin at the end of the counter, but that was just one of a dozen small conversations where I gave Howard details of little household tasks that I track [...]

In Quest of an Edible Lunch

The volume of kvetching over school lunch offerings increased this fall. Though that sentence does not paint an accurate picture. My kids would state their complaints if asked, but mostly they engaged in silent protest. Two of them independently decided that they would rather go hungry than eat anything served at school, and a third [...]

Organizing the To Do List

Yesterday I sorted all my thoughts for the week to come and I compiled a big To Do list. It was a list full of small tasks, most of which would only take me a couple of minutes to complete. The hard part was that these tasks were scattered across eight or nine different life [...]

Life Begins to Settle

Something important happened last night and I almost missed noticing it. Howard and I were both pretty stressed about packing him for WorldCon, so I summoned pizza for dinner. The kids descended like locusts once the magical circles of goodness appeared. They were all right there, so I did a quick survey of each child, [...]

Responsibility Fatigue

I stayed up too late last night because I ran out of responsibility. All yesterday, indeed all week, I have been the organizer of schedule. In theory, the job should not be onerous because we are merely reinstating a slight variation of a long-familiar schedule. No one is rebelling, everyone is glad to fall into [...]

Organizing the House

In the past six months my house has grown steadily more organized, clean, and attractive. I still have a lot of work to do, but improvement is visible in almost every room. I’m glad for this. The push toward organization and beautification began last fall when I sat in my messy office and pictured what [...]

Being Between

For the first time all summer, I find myself between. There is no more work I can do for GenCon and I can’t yet begin post-GenCon accounting. I’ve mailed all the things to ChiCon, but have to wait for Howard to get home before the final preparations. I’ve finished off the house organization projects which [...]

Shirts take over my life

My day has been all about t-shirts and making five dozen little judgement calls about what to ship, how to ship it, and when to ship it. The fried brain situation is not helped by the fact that I’m actually managing four different t shirt priority streams. There are the shirts which have been pre-ordered [...]