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In preparation for shipping books soon, I ordered a pile of shipping supplies. 16 packages arrived this morning via UPS. As I watched them unload I mentally checked off the items I’d ordered. There was one package I couldn’t identify. I looked at it closer and realized that it was not part of my shipping supply order, but it was definitely addressed to me.

I took the mystery package inside and opened it. Inside were copies of Alcatraz and Mistborn: The Well of Ascension. I pulled the books out with delight and read the note enclosed with them. An LJ reader and Schlock fan (Blackcoat) attended a book signing that is part of Brandon Sanderson’s book tour. He took the time to get these books signed and then mailed them to us.

This delights me on several levels.

First and foremost, someone cared enough to send us books. Even more than that, he cared enough to get the books inscribed “To the Tayler family.” It is easy to have an impulse to do something nice for someone else. I have those all the time. But following through is another matter entirely. There are thousands of phone calls I’ve intended to make, but didn’t. Thousands of flowers not given. Thousands of cookies not made. (Actually lots of those cookies did get made, they just didn’t get delivered to the intended recipient.) The unexpected kindness, given with no thought of return, is priceless without measure. I’m honored to receive.

Second, we know Brandon Sanderson. It amuses me greatly to think of Brandon writing this inscription without a clue about which Tayler family these books are going to. Or perhaps there was some conversation and Brandon knew exactly who the books were bound for. That makes me happy to think about too. Either way kind people were conspiring to do something nice for us.

Third, These books arrive in the middle of a rough week. Now I have new books to read while Howard is gone. Yay for good fiction!

(Some of these things I already knew, but that doesn’t stop me from learning them again.)

Junior High band concerts exist for the purpose of teaching beginning students how to properly behave while performing. This makes them good venues for teaching other kids how audience members should behave at concerts. Unfortunately that is not a restful experience. Next time I’ll limit myself to one learning performer and one learning audience member.

Gleek can not treat music as a passive experience. Music is to be sung to, or danced to, or clapped to, or bounced to. She loves music dearly, but she is compelled to participate. She’ll make a great learning performer, just now she is not a respectful audience member.

Reading about Harry Potter’s dead parents just before one of the kids discovered the heart monitor was an unhappy congruence. They were all a little worried until I explained that I was just spying on my heart to see what it is doing. I haven’t heard about it since, so hopefully none of them have acquired new fears about this.

When they assured me that wearing the heart monitor was completely painless, they forgot to mention sticker removal. They also forgot to mention that these particular stickers sometimes cause enough skin irritation that they leave little blisters around the edges of where they were located. True it isn’t really painful, but it is annoying. And I’ll be wearing high collared shirts until the red marks go away. (A moment of insight this evening made me realize that it was not the stickers themselves which caused the red rings. It was a chemical reaction between the “sticky” and the “sticky remover.” Prior to using the “sticky remover” there was no more irritation than that caused by a bandaid. The scientist in me totally wants to test this theory, but not enough to give myself more chemical burns.)

Good friends make a world of difference. This includes my backyard neighbor who spontaneously invited me and all my kids over for dinner yesterday, thus saving me from attending the Junior High concert with children who were starving as well as hyper-active. And the friends who followed Howard home to keep us company when I was ready to melt into a little puddle of fatigue and stress. And the friend who called this evening just to talk and was completely understanding that even though I wanted to talk, I had to manage all my evening chaos.

Gleek and Patches both need more Mommy time.

Link and Kiki both need help with photography projects.

Cub scouts really enjoy pretending to be injured while thier friends pretend to administer first aid. They particularly liked the life threatening injuries or the ones that had blood to be staunched.

I like going shopping with Howard when we’re both relaxed and interested in enjoying the experience. Going out to lunch with Howard is fun too. He leaves tomorrow for the last trip of this year. I’ll be glad when he gets home.

If you ever have to go do a fretful medical thing, I highly recommend taking a professional humorist along. It makes things so much more fun. Fortunately I had one handy, so I hauled Howard with me to go get my heart monitor.

In the car on the way down:
Sandra: “I can just pretend we’re driving together in the car for no particular reason.”
Howard: “Is that this morning’s quota for denial?”
S: “De Nile is my friend. It has fish in it.” Short pause for thought “And mud. It has fish and mud.”
H: “And crocodiles.”
S: “But they’re okay cause I just pretend they are my friends.”

The heart monitor has seven wires attached to sticky patches. The wires connect to a little box the size of a deck of cards. It is optimally designed to read the electrical impulses of a heartbeat without being overtly annoying. It is not designed to be discreet. It is all lumpy under my clothes. So I’ll be wearing stuff baggy for the next 24 hours. I’ll also apparently be keeping a journal of anything which might affect my heart rate. Things like eating, exercising, being upset, etc. The monitor also has a little blue button on it. I am supposed to push the button if I think a heart event of any note is taking place. This puts a little marker on the recording. So far I’ve yet to use the blue button. As much as I don’t like my heart going flippity-flop, I want it do demonstrate the capability at least once today.

After getting me wired, Howard and I went shopping together. The stores were not very exciting (Office Max, Sam’s Club, Robert’s Crafts, and a storage unit) but it was fun to be there with Howard. I like hanging out with him and exchanging whimsical comments. Things like seeing a whole roll of raffle tickets for sale and suggesting we should buy them because then we would totally win the prize.

On the trip home we amused ourselves by reviewing the heart monitor instructions. One entire paper was devoted to assuring nervous heart patients that while these tests take several days to process, if there is something to truly be concerned about, it will be addressed quickly. Only they didn’t say “quickly” or “urgently” or even “In an emergency fashion.” Instead they said “emergently.” I think they were trying to express emergency and urgently in the same word, but I’m not sure.

Howard then spent the rest of the drive finding creative uses for the word “emergently.” He demonstrated merging gently. He demonstrated emerging into an intersection gently. There was at least one more, but I forget what it was.

I love Howard. He can make me laugh even when I’m going to one of my least favorite places in the world. The heart monitor was handed out at the same hospital which did my radiation therapy. It is also the same hospital where Howard stayed for when he had myocarditis. The care and people there are excellent, it just is not a happy place for me. But Howard makes me laugh and asks cheerfully if I’ve gotten to push my blue button yet.

I do not know what I’d do with out him.

Life marches on despite my personal emotional crises. The children need to go to school and to be fed, and to be made to do homework, and to be put to bed. There are necessary business tasks. Laundry happens. None of this goes away because I choose today to have an emotional crisis. It merely piles up if my crisis causes me to neglect it. Fortunately having stuff to do keeps me from spinning in mental circles, so that is good.

I had my fourth session teaching the creative writing class today. It continues to go variously. The early class continues to be loud and chaotic, but each of the kids there has produced multiple stories. They sizzle with energy and some of it lands on the page. Derailment Boy continues to be a major distraction. He doesn’t really want to be there. Today I found out that his dad is currently dating the mom of one of the giggle girls. This explains much of his behavior. I can see the conflicts raging inside him. And in her too. Neither of them is particularly happy about the prospect of the other as a step sibling. Not only that but the talked about how their parents are going to abandon them to the care of relatives and go on a cruise together. Apparently I’m hosting a soap opera as well as a writing class. But addressing the issues by talking about them a little helped Derailment Boy calm down some.

I’m having a harder time pulling stories out of the afternoon class. I get them excited and creative and they start to write. They’re so excited that they take the stories home to work on them. I then never see the stories again. They vanish never to return. I need to send a note to parents pleading that they help the stories get finished and sent back. I need to have finished stories to include in the book.

Last night we got to have dinner with some long time friends. They’ve lived 20 minutes away from us for a decade, but somehow we fell out of touch. I’m glad that they made the effort to contact us and to host us for dinner. It was really fun. We’ll need to do it again soon because we’ve barely scratched the surface on getting reacquainted. Also they have pet chickens and my kids think that is the coolest thing ever. Gleek in particular loved picking up the chickens and carrying them around. These were really nice chickens. They would just let the kids walk over and pick them up. That is completely unlike all my prior experiences with chickens, which all involved pecking and flapping.

Now if only my kids would go to sleep so Howard and I could have our together time.

You aren’t supposed to notice your heartbeat. It is the fundamental rhythm of your life. When that steady beat comes to your attention, it is only because something has gone awry. Sometimes that “awry” is joyful, like the sudden jump in heart rate when that one special person notices you. Other times the “awry” is terrified, as in the thumping heart and adrenaline surge of a vehicular accident.

For the past month my heartbeat has occupied a significant portion of my attention. This is because it has begun, for no apparent reason, to trip over itself. I’ll be sitting at my computer and suddenly Thump THUMP with a succession of smaller beats as it finds a rhythm again. This has been worrisome, although the word “worrisome” completely understates the gamut of fear, hope, and denial I’ve felt over the past month. I hoped it was stress and would therefore go away. I hoped it was a thyroid imbalance and therefore easily fixable. I hoped many things. Mostly I hoped that it wasn’t a real sensation, that I was somehow making it up. The world is a very strange place when you spend time hoping you have a psychosomatic illness.

I’m not completely stupid. I’ve been to two different doctors over this. One did an EKG which was completely normal. The other did a thyroid test that was completely normal. The next step is to wear a heart monitor for a 24 hour period and hope to catch one of the thump events on tape. I’ve had the prescription for that sitting on my fridge for almost two weeks while I tried to pretend that I didn’t need to do it. In order for me to spend over $300 and 24 hours wired to a device, I have to admit that I believe there is something wrong. I twisted and turned a lot trying to not face it. This morning I finally called to schedule the heart monitor.

Because something is wrong.

And I don’t know what it is.

And that terrifies me.

I would be a lot more complacent right now if I could believe in the omniscience of doctors. But I’ve been through a medical ringer before and I remember how much of what they do is based on guess work. That’s probably when I figured out that my doctor is no smarter than I am. He just has a different education and experience set. This means that for ordinary illnesses I hardly need him at all. I can figure it out by myself. In fact I’m often better off managing things by myself because viruses don’t get better more quickly for having spent a $20 copay to identify them as viruses.

At the beginning of this thing I spent a lot of time with Dr. Google. That was where I learned that what I have are “palpitations.” I also learned that the shakiness and anxiety that accompany them are common. I’ve observed symptoms closely, trying to collect enough data to figure this thing out by myself. Stress, lack of sleep, and caffeine make the palpitations worse, exercise does not. Pretty much every source ended with telling me I should go see a doctor, but then so do the entries on sore throats.

I’m done trying to research and guess. I’m done hoping it will just go away. Tomorrow morning I go get wired.

I loved Star Blazers as a kid. I remember watching it in the afternoons. So when I saw it on Netflix, I borrowed the first disc to share with my kids.

We just watched the first part. I’m still trying to decide whether to cry with nostalgia, laugh at the horrible hokey-ness, or wander away bored.

I think that Americans are a little nutty about safety. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is constantly issuing recalls, particularly of children’s toys and gear. I do believe that some of these recalls are necessary, but I also believe that many people are unduly stressed by them. Recently thousands of toys were recalled because of “high levels of lead” in the paint. I’ve done some research into lead poisoning. I did it because I acquired an old, painted dresser and I wondered if it was covered in lead based paint. I contacted my county health department. That is where I learned that unless the paint is pealing off and someone is eating it in quantity, there is unlikely to be a problem. However they happily sold me a lead paint test kit for a few dollars. I swabbed the dresser and it was clean.

The children who end up with lead poisoning live in old houses with old paint that is flaking and turning into lead dust. There is a difference between being careful about lead and being paranoid. I have declined to get rid of Gleek’s Polly Pockets. She is not in the habit of scratching the paint off and eating it. Even if she were, the supposedly “high” levels of lead in the paint are actually quite low and probably not dangerous in small quantities.

I feel the same way about magnetic toys. A recent article listed them as one of the biggest hazards of the year. Really? I know that the magnets should never be in the hands of small children who might eat them, but is that really a reason to take them out of the hands of every child everywhere? Somehow I think that far more children are endangered and injured by household chemicals than by magnets or minuscule amounts of lead in paint. It is ironic that parents panic about these toy recalls, but will leave toxic cleaners under the sink in the bathroom.

It all boils down to responsibility. I don’t believe that it is the job of the toy manufacturer or the CPSC to keep my children safe. That is my job. I must look at the toys and items in my house and decide whether I consider them a danger to my children. I do read the recall notices, but only rarely does my judgment determine that the recall was essential for my family. I also do not assume that a product is safe merely because it has not been recalled. Nothing is completely safe. Freak accidents happen. An informed parent who judges based on research rather than paranoia, and who supervises appropriately, is the best way to keep kids safe.

Lately my thinking has been fuzzy. I can’t be at my best every day, but “best” has been much harder to come by lately. Usually I can hold task lists in my head. It is like there is a shelf in the back of my brain where I can put thoughts that I don’t need right now, but that I’ll need soon. I can quickly reference the shelf and grab the things I need. Lately the shelf has been more like a hole. I put thoughts there and the vanish. If I want them back I have to recreate the conditions that made me think them in the first place. I’ve been using lists a lot lately. Lists don’t vanish so long as I keep them all neatly in my planner.

Gleek lost her first tooth on Tuesday. It has been wiggly for weeks. She is very excited at this milestone. She shows her excitement by grinning to show off the hole in her mouth. She has three more teeth that are wiggling as well.

We received a proofing copy of Tub of Happiness from our printer. This is an unbound, low-resolution, cheap paper, copy of the book. It makes me happy to hold it. The book is that much closer to being real.

I had parent teacher conferences for Gleek and Link. It is so nice to talk to teachers who have no particular concerns that they want to discuss. Gleek and Link are both doing well in their classes. The teachers are not worried for them at all. Gleek has no behavioral issues and her teacher is very impressed with her reading and pattern-recognitions skills. Link needs a little more practice reading aloud, and a little help getting started writing. But that is it. No long conferences. No special arrangements necessary. It is all going well.

Next week Howard leaves for the last convention of this year. I’m supposed to be in high gear getting some last minute things done. I wish I could find high gear today.

Link received an award certificate for perfect school attendance during the months of August and September. He is so pleased with the certificate that he wants me to frame it and put it on the wall. He plans to have perfect attendance all year so he can have a collection of these certificates. He deliberately requested that we not go on any trips during the school year that would make him miss school. I’m happy to comply. I hadn’t planned a trip for this year anyway. I did mention that he might have to miss school if he gets sick, but he assured me that he’ll just be careful and stay well.

I was going through old journal entries and realized that most of them were “lessons learned” rather than “what I’m going through.” I’m not sure what it means, but the tendency was interesting to notice.

I walked Patches to and from school today. He rode his bike. It was fun to watch him feeling so grown up as he carefully dismounted and walked his bike across streets and around any sidewalk that looked the slightest bit “slanty” He also practiced wiggling the handle bars so that the bike went zig-zaggy, riding standing up, riding with no hands for brief periods at slow speeds, and holding on to the handle bars at places other than the handgrips. Periodically we had to stop so that he could dismount and sit in the shade for 2-10 seconds.

And now I need to go mow my lawn.