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This morning was great. I was focused and got piles of stuff done. I assembled the final cover layout for Scrapyard. I also did a tweaking pass through the innards. I even filled up some more white spaces with art that I’d scrounged from Howard’s office. I also handled email and contacts for several ongoing communications. Howard and I were handing each other tasks constantly all morning long. I love how we’ve learned to work smoothly on collaboration. I never would have believed it in high school, but group work is fun when I have the right team. It is all coming together and so are three or for other behind the scenes business things.

For all the good work I got done this morning, I still have hundreds of things left to do. Unfortunately I can’t run hot like that indefinitely. Around 2:30 PM I fizzled out. The rest of the day has been spent drifting with the exception of some critical mommying tasks. Fortunately my parents provided Chinese food for dinner. Yummy food that I did not have to cook first is always a good thing.

January was devoid of happy news. There wasn’t any bad news either, but with it being mid-winter I really felt the lack of good news. Apparently all the good news was lurking and waiting for January to be over. Paperwork that I’ve been waiting for since last September finally arrived. Scrapyard is nearing completion. Howard had an interview with a newspaper reporter for an article which should appear in a local paper in the next couple of weeks. Sales in the store are back up. So I’m feeling pretty good about business stuff.

Add to that the fact that my parents are staying with us. This makes the kids very happy. As far as they are concerned, having grandma here is like having a live-in Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. What child wouldn’t love an adult who gets down onto the floor with them, plays whatever they wish, and has an endless supply of stories for their entertainment. Grandpa is a dispenser of electronic delights. He has cool gadgets in his pockets and he will sit and read the word bubbles in Animal Crossing for Patch who can’t read them himself. The kids are going to miss Grandma and Grandpa when they have to leave on Wednesday.

Sometime in the past two days Howard and I bowed to the inevitable and we gave a name to the cat I rescued from under our deck. She has taken up residence in a nook out in back of our house where we provide her with food, a cozy box for sleeping, and Gleek and Kiki both spend extended periods of time out there supplying her with the attention she craves. The girls are delighted to have a lap kitty. The cat is delighted to have warm laps with petting. It works out really well. So far the kids have all been very good about washing their hands as soon as they come in and changing their clothes if necessary. I’ve only had minimal reactions. This makes me glad. I’ve felt for a long time that Gleek and Kiki would really benefit from having a pet. The boys think the cat is nice, but they don’t spend much time with her. Buying cat food felt odd though. That is not something I ever expected to do.

This next week is book crunch week. Howard and I have decided that what we’d like to give each other for Valentines Day is a completed book. This means Howard needs to color the bonus story, finish the cover elements, approve the layout, write some extra notes, write acknowledgments, and perhaps draw a couple of margin art pictures. I need to double check the layout to make sure everything is working, shift around the sections which are not working, find margin art for all the remaining white spaces, assemble all those fiddly footnote boxes, make all the recommended copy edit changes, send a down payment to the printer, create a color print out of the final version, then ship it all off. Oh, and then there are the tasks to finish up the slipcase layouts for the boxed sets. We’re going to be busy this week, but it is the happy busy of “almost done.” By March 1st we should be ready to dive into working on book 6.

I have a houseful of people. This happens fairly frequently as various family events occur locally and my family needs a place to stay. I love that being in a central location means that I get to see most of my family frequently. The down side is that, being an introvert, I start feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of people and noise. Then I go hide in my room for awhile. Fortunately most of my family are also introverts, so no one gets offended when I hide, they all understand. In fact, they do some hiding themselves on occasion. I just find it hard to feel like a good hostess when I am hiding from my guests.

In the chaos of today, I forgot to monitor Patch. Of all my kids, he is the one with the strongest need for silence and the lowest tolerance for chaos. He loves to have friends or cousins over. When they come, he will play very happily right up until he melts into a puddle of abject sadness over some small incident. This happens when his tolerance for noise and crowds are passed. Sometimes he can sense the need in himself and he will seek out a quiet place to play. Other times he’s having too much fun to stop himself before the tantrum arrives. This evening I recognized that he was in need of quiet. I took him to my room and the two of us had a quiet time together. We talked about needing to be away from people, about needing calm. I think Patch was relieved to know that both Mom and Dad have the same need. Even better, he was glad to know that if he ever needs an empty space, he can come to us and we’ll make one for him. He sighed with contentment and lay his head on my arm, hugging it tight. I hugged him tight too and we lay in the quiet for awhile.

Final stages of book layout + family in town = no brainspace for blogging.

This evening I opened my door to discover my parents standing on the front doorstep. I knew they were coming, but didn’t expect them until tomorrow. The mix-up was due to my own faulty internal math. It went like this. “Parents are leaving their house on Tuesday. They’ll spend a night on the road. This means they’ll arrive on Thursday.” Somehow my brain skipped Wednesday in the calculation. Anyway they’re here now and they’ll be staying for a week. The kids are all thrilled. Having Grandma and Grandpa just show up is about the coolest thing ever.

I heard the meowing through the heating ducts. This puzzled me quite a bit since I’m allergic to cats and we have never owned one. Then I realized that the meowing was merely resonating in the heating duct and was in fact coming from outside. The vocal cat in question must be underneath our back deck, up against the wall of our house. I could tell because I was in the unfinished basement storage room. This was the point where I went rushing upstairs and threw on my coat because I’ve been hearing the same meowing sounds off and on for over a week. When I’d heard it before, I’d been standing on the deck in question, but unable to locate the noise. The poor cat was stuck under our deck for at least a week. I suspect that the crack it had wiggled through then froze over, trapping the poor animal. I had to pour hot water over the hose hatch to get it to unfreeze enough to let the cat out. I’ve never seen such a grateful and friendly animal. She is skin and bones. She must have gotten adequate water from the melting snow, but she was starving. I fed her tuna for starters because it was the only thing I had, but we switched to dry cat food as soon as I could acquire some from a neighbor. The cat was as hungry for touch as she was for food. She kept walking away from the bowl to be petted and if I walked away, she followed me. (I’m not actually sure the animal is female, it could be a neutered male.)

Unfortunately my allergies quickly started acting up, so we transferred the cat, the bowl of food, and an old towel to our sunny front porch. Kiki has been out there with the cat for over an hour. The cat is completely uninterested in leaving the porch and is very interested in coming back into the house. This animal has obviously been someone’s pet, but either got lost or abandoned. This same cat came begging to our back door several times last fall, so she has been on her own for awhile. Now the kids are all hoping that we get to keep the cat. I’m holding the “we need to ask around for the owner” line, but I honestly don’t hold out much hope for finding the owner. We may have acquired a cat. Not something I had on my list to do today, but I couldn’t leave the poor thing trapped. Then having rescued it, I could not fail to feed it.

This picture does not show how skinny this poor cat is. When you pet her you can feel every rib and every vertebra.

I’ve been in a funk for nearly a week. It is the low-level kind of a funk where I still function. No one but me can tell that I have the funk, but it sucks the joy out of just about everything. I felt like hiding from everyone. I felt like cutting my hair or dyeing it. I even did research into seasonal affective disorder and matched my feelings to the symptom list. I kept trying to wrap my head around it, re-frame it, describe it, talk myself out of it. None of that worked well. I was fairly certain that a large part of the problem was that I’d overdrawn my emotional reserves for several weeks in a row. But I was having trouble figuring out how to put anything back in.

And then I went to church. I wasn’t expecting church to help much today, because I spend the first hour wrestling with my own kids on a bench and the second two wrestling with an entire class of active four-year-olds. I was expecting church to be draining, not filling. The opposite occurred. I found myself filled with energy and hope and happiness, because I knew I was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. There is one child in my class who has the same high-energy and distractibility of my Gleek. Handling him takes all of my attention, but it is well within my capabilities. He is the reason I was put with that class. I can give his mother, my friend, a break from managing him. I can give that same break to the other mothers as well. I know how desperately I needed that break sometimes when all my kids were home all day. I came away from church exhausted, but happy and peaceful.

There have been times in my life when I have routinely come home from church wondering why I bothered to go. Those were the years where I attended merely because I wanted my children to learn that church is what we do on Sunday. Sometimes there were years when church was my respite, my break from the rigors of 24/7 mommy duty. Now church is my chance to give to others the gift that I already received. No matter what, I’ve known that attendance at church is right for me and for my family. And even on a day like today when I did not get to listen to much of what was said there, I still come away more whole than I was before. Now that I am home it is like my head is clear and I can see the things I need to do to refill my emotional reserves. I can also see that the refilling has begun, I just need to keep up the good work.

The other day I was putting something away in our coat closet, when I realized that the though of just stepping inside the closet and closing the door was very appealing to me. Similarly, several times this week I’ve come home from some errand and spent a few minutes just sitting in the car. Sitting in the car is quiet and no one needs me to do anything. The feelings did not make much sense, because while my life this week is busy, my life is always busy. If my life is ever not busy, I’m sure I find a way to make it busy because I like having many things to do. The busy-ness of this week is no more stressful than the busy-ness of any other week. Nothing is high stakes. Nothing is particularly urgent. It is all the one-thing-after-anotherness of daily living.

Last night it really clicked for me why I have this desire to hide in the closet. I have been stretching myself and meeting needs without taking time to do the things that make me feel whole. Or rather, I’d somehow disconnected the emotional rewards from the things that make me whole. I was at a discussion group last night with five other mothers. I’d been asked to talk about my writing projects and how doing them is a help to me and to our family. As I began, I was not quite sure what to say because lately it has all felt like necessary business rather than soul-healing enjoyment. It was so good for me to be in that discussion, to see the things that I do through these other pairs of eyes. They asked how I find time for the blogging I do, and I did not have a ready answer. All of the writing and blogging have become so much a part of my life that I do not even see them as unusual. But to these other women, it was unusual. And realizing that, I was better able to see once again how much I love what I do. My blogging and my fiction are turned to many purposes in my life and in the lives of others, but first and foremost they make me whole. Somehow I had disconnected that. Now I just need to hold onto it. I need to remember that my writing has intrinsic value to me no matter what anyone else thinks of it. Sometimes my desire for affirmation leads me to seek from others the approval I should be giving to myself. And this does not only apply to writing, but to any activity which makes me whole.