Today I am uploading the Tub of Happiness reprint files. There are 1377 images in the book, so it is going to take most of the day. Fortunately uploading is mostly a process I can walk away from. So I walk to where the sketch pages need to be trimmed and I work on that. We’re just about ready for Howard to start the process of signing and sketching copies of The Body Politic. We’ll be shipping these next week. I still need to pin down the exact days, but it’ll be Tuesday-ish through Friday-ish. Once I know the days for certain, I’ll have to put out the call for volunteers. Fortunately this shipping process is much smaller and simpler than that for the coins. The vast majority of the orders are one book into one box. we won’t have to assign people to stare at rows of coins and check them against an invoice. A few days of work and it will be done.
More of it would be done already except getting our furnace and AC replaced has proved to be distracting. I spent part of yesterday dismantling my shipping room so that they would have room to work. Today I have three men traipsing through my house carrying large things and making banging, clattering, and drilling noises. Also the house is stuffy because no AC. This afternoon or tomorrow I’ll get to reassemble my storage room. That process will be complicated by the fact that I need to sort merchandise into things that need to go to WorldCon and things that need to go to our storage unit rather than taking up space in my storage room.
Also distracting is the fact that this looks to be one of our most expensive weeks ever. The HVAC system replacement is not cheap and this morning Kiki came and showed me the amount due for her tuition, meal plan, and dorm fees. That number was not unexpected, but staring at it the same day as the other bill made the math portions of my brain kind of unhappy. Looming on Friday is the consultation with an oral surgeon about Kiki’s wisdom teeth, which very probably need to come out. It all adds up. The good news is that, as the boss of my company, I can decide that the Taylers did a really good job shipping all of those coins and perhaps they deserve a bonus. Thus money flows from the business account to the family accounts. But before I can do that, I have to sit down and do math on all the things which the business needs to pay in the next few months. I’m pretty sure it will all work out. I just need to sit down with the accounts and crunch all the numbers. This would be easier to accomplish if my work computer were not busy uploading and my house were not full of construction noise.
Three weeks until our lives shift from summer schedule into school schedule. Two weeks to GenCon. Four weeks to WorldCon. Book shipping next week. It is a lot to track and one of the reasons that I don’t actually attend any of the events. Me leaving the house adds significant layers of complication to everything. For this year I’m glad to stay home.