In a few days Howard will depart for the Writing Excuses retreat in Chattanooga Tennessee. I am not going this year. This is a fact that I would have expected to make me feel sad, but right now I’m in the part of the school year where I want everything to hold still and fall into a recognizable pattern for two weeks in a row. We do have the school start and end times as a pattern, but so many other things are in flux. We had Salt Lake Comic Con. Then we had sickness, which led to school absences, which led to make up work. We had the elementary orchestra start up and first it was on Wednesday morning, but then it moved to Friday morning, and there was a mandatory meeting which was only attended by about one fourth of the parents with kids in orchestra. Then it was mid-terms with accompanying parent teacher conferences. And of course there is the eagle project which was mixed in with everything else. So right now I’m very glad that I will spend next week at home instead of adding further disruption.
My tune will likely change when I see tweets and pictures from the retreat. It is in a place I love with people I love to be around. I’ve been seriously short on socializing with friends and so I’ll be sad to miss that part. I know I will because of late I’ve felt quite covetous of social media posts depicting gatherings of writers. I’ll get another turn to go to this sort of event. In the meantime, I’ll hope that next week is unremarkable and calm.