Book Mailing: Day 2
Today was much calmer. We had fewer people show up for the first part, which was perfect because there was less work to do. It was good that the chaos level was down a bit because we reached the difficult orders where the book packers had to look at each invoice to know what to put inside the package. By about 2 pm all the orders were filled. That’s when we relocated the party to our house. 10 volunteers all followed me home and helped us move over a ton of books from our garage to our basement. They made a chain and just handed the books down and got over 60 boxes moved in about 20 minutes.
Then we had the best part of the day. All our wonderful worker friends sat around with us and ate pizza while talking about fun stuff. I wish my voice hadn’t completely given out by that time, but it started the trek to gone yesterday and finished it today. I hope it is at least somewhat back tomorrow for the book release party. I’m looking forward to the party. Tomorrow I get to play. I’m so relieved to have all those packages out. I know this because at one point I found myself laughing uncontrollably over a joke that simply wasn’t that funny. It was funny, not 5 minutes of laughter funny. In the end everyone, including me, was laughing because I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s just so nice to be done.
I didn’t even mind bringing all the kids home. In fact I curled up on the couch and snuggled them while we watched a DVD. I honestly couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to sit motionless on the couch snuggled up with my little people. They were so glad to have mommy sitting still. We watched the first two episodes of the first season of the original Star Trek series. My kids have never seen these shows. I haven’t seen them for years. I was surprised at how good they are. Yes there were things that made me want to laugh out loud, but the meat of the series is speculative short stories based around a stable set of characters. I’ve spent so many years telling jokes about Star Trek cliches that I forgot that the jokes are exagerated for the sake of humor. The kids were all enthralled. And after each episode I had to have a long discussion with Link about filmmaking tricks, people in monster suits, why we have salt in our bodies, and why it isn’t possible to suck all the salt out of our bodies. I’m looking forward to more snuggling while watching episodes. Perhaps I can create happy memories of Star Trek for my kids. I’d like that, because watching those episodes was like being transported back home to my childhood when they were regular television fare for me.