June 2026

This week I have been in the mountains of Colorado with five other members of the Writing Excuses podcast team. We’re all staying in a house together and recording podcast episodes. It is lovely, but also exhausting because of all the focused performance and thinking. I am incredibly grateful to have this group of friends and business partners who are so kind and gracious with each other even when we’re all tired.

Night before last my stress level sky rocketed because I got messages from my young adults who are holding down the fort at home. They were having a partial power outage. When they looked at the breaker box nothing was flipped. They scrambled to run an extension cord to the fridge from one of the working outlets, then I got to try to manage scheduling electrical service from 500 miles away. The electrician identified our 35 year old main panel as the source of the issue.

Charred is never something you want to see as part of your electrical system.

The electrician made a temporary fix, the permanent fix would require cooperation and permits from both the power company and the city. I was hoping to be able to wait until after I came home in two more days to address things further. But the temporary fix only held for about three hours. This switched everything over into urgent mode and I had a shiny new power box installed by 8pm the same day. As a bonus, we upgraded the amperage for our whole house. This was clearly work that needed to be done, it was just the timing which I wouldn’t have picked.

Today I’m feeling much more relaxed than I was yesterday (when I was an anxious mess.) I’ll get to record some more episodes soon, because for the season we’re recording the hosts asked me to talk about some topics related to Structuring Life for Creativity. Tomorrow we travel home and I’ll get to sort out all the finances and household things that need to be adjusted because of this adventure. I also intend to have words with my house. This is the third time it has saved a major issue for when I am gone instead of when I am home. Obviously it doesn’t happen every trip, but there is a clear pattern. Also obviously I need to be paying better attention to the small signs of problems. We’d noticed flickering lights over the past few weeks which was almost certainly related.

For today I get to record and enjoy mountain views. Tomorrow I drive home.

It is two months since I last posted. In that time I made and planted garden beds.

I still have work to do. The pavers need to be evened up and I need to sweep sand into the cracks to set them. On the back side of the garden I want to build a path to the back door of my garage. Yet… here is the result of doing some work bit by bit. I now have a garden instead of a weedy mess.

I also have more words written, a crowdfunded project that is funded, another project that I’m getting ready to make live in July, and a short story finished. Lots of little progress toward the activities I was wanting to do more. It is a start.

This summer is going to be full of travel and projects. My garden beds are now in a state where I can just tend the plants in them. Larger garden projects can wait until fall. Instead I’ll sneak in time to work on writing the stories I’m not sure how to sell.

This is a small update, less thorough that I would have liked, but it is written in the spirit of stealing small bits of time to do things I want and that make me whole. I would like to be blogging more, so here is a small shovel in the ground, the beginning of blogging more often as I can claim time.