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I need a few more days like today, where I ignore my organized to-do list and instead just take care of the things which are right in front of me. For the first time in three months my front room has no merchandise or convention equipment in it, I can walk across my storage room without dodging or tripping, and my kids got most of their homework done. Of course there are still piles of things to take care of, but I begin to believe that catching up might be possible. Of course on Monday I’ll look at my list again and the dream will be over. Or maybe I really am starting to catch up.

I did not go to my 20th high school reunion. We didn’t go to Howard’s either. In both cases travel was expensive and the timing was not good. Then there was the fact that I didn’t feel a deep emotional need to go. I was not needing to reconnect with my younger self because I was far too busy with my current life.

This evening I went to a twenty year reunion for a comedy troupe, the Garrens, that performed on my college campus during the first years of my married life. I don’t remember how it came about, but Howard ran sound for the troupe and Howard’s brother, Randy, was part of the group. Every Friday night we would pack up the sound gear and I would watch the shows while Howard worked his mixer. I got to be a reasonably good assistant with toting the gear, but for the most part I just stayed out of the way, present but not participating. I wasn’t a member of The Garrens, I was adjacent.

Upon arriving at the reunion, my first surprise was that anyone recognized me at all, but they did. My second task was to recognize the faces of people I sort-of used to know now that they have twenty years more experience written across their features. By the end of the evening the faces just looked like the people I knew and photographs started looking really young. A comedy troupe reunion is a true pleasure because everyone who spoke was funny. I laughed a lot. Yet more important than the laughter was the real love and connection between all of these friends. They were family for each other during those formative college years. Many of them have continued to visit and spend time together through all the time that followed. I got to witness all of that.

Naturally I spent some time thinking about myself and my life twenty years ago. This is the point of reunions really, a chance to connect past with present and to recognize the passage of that time and the accumulation of experience. So much has gone fuzzy. I know that we ran sound for show after show after show, but I remember little of the shows themselves. They blur together. I remember sometimes going out to eat or laughing with the troupe members, but at that point in my life I was not good at building friendships or making lasting connections. I lost track somehow.

When the evening ended, Howard and I walked out through the Wilkinson center, which was alive with college students in the midst of Friday night antics, just like it used to be when I went to college. We looked at each other and knew that we are now the old people, the ones who show up on campus for events and then go away again. I’m actually okay with that. Ten years ago, or even five, I felt a longing to be part of that college energy, when so much was beginning. Tonight we walked on past, glad to be where and who we are. College life sounds exhausting. I like the life we’ve built.

It occurs to me that many times in my life I am the one standing next to the main event. Howard was involved with musical groups and I got to tag along. Howard ran sound for The Garrens, I assisted. When Howard took up cartooning, I’ve gone along for that ride too. I am an instinctive facilitator. It is only in the past seven years or so that I’ve started building my own things instead of coasting in the wake of other people’s things. Twenty years ago no one in The Garrens knew how much that being in a comedy troupe would affect their lives. I wonder which of the many things I’m doing now will be the one that changes everything for Sandra of twenty years from now.

Today was far less interrupted than yesterday, for which I am grateful. Link came home happy for the first time since school started. His math teacher put some accommodations into place for him and we have a meeting with an administrator on Friday to figure out what else needs to be done. We’ve finally settled into enough of a routine that we can see which troubles were adaptation issues that go away by themselves and which were going to be ongoing challenges.

I also spoke with Patch’s teacher. She taught Gleek two years ago and this fall I told her that Patch was quite different. Today she says she sees more similarities than differences, which makes sense to me. It is like the way that people say all my children look alike, but they look very distinct to me. My eye tunes out the similarities. So the teacher and I are both seeing Patch’s low-level anxiety. We intend to watch it and I need to take some steps at home to help Patch feel in control. I don’t think we’ll see anything like the intensity we saw from Gleek, because: differences. I just have things to keep an eye on.

Gleek read a sad book today, one that affected her mood. It was a literary type book that explores real-world problems and doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending. She says she is glad that she read it. I can see how the sadness in the book reached in and pulled up some of the sadnesses that she has inside, the ones she’s been ignoring because life is pretty easy for her right now. I know we still have things to work on with her. She needs solid skills for managing anxiety and stress. This gives me the first hint of how we’re going to find and address those needs while life is happy. Time for me to find the right books. Ramona the Pest helped her in kindergarten, we’ll find another book for now.

After two weeks of college happiness Kiki hit her first snag. She miscalculated her financial resources and needed to call home for help sorting it out. Truth is that she’d already solved the problem before calling, she just needed someone to double check and make sure her solutions were good. It is the same sort of double-check that Howard and I give to each other all the time. So she’s having fun and she likes having adult freedom, but sometimes adulthood is scary and she misses home. Learning how to be an adult is a large portion of what I expect she’ll learn in college this year.

I managed to end my day with more order than I began it, which is a first for the month of September. Howard spent the day in the land of painful charlie horses, which was not our favorite. Here’s hoping tomorrow can be less charliehorsey and more get stuff done.

Yesterday I wasn’t sad to be missing WorldCon. Today I am. Brains are funny that way. It hit me when I was sitting in Sunday School. All summer I sat there with Kiki on one side and Howard on the other. Today they are both off having adventures, doing new things, while I did all the usual things.

But then Kiki called and she succeeded where my Dad has failed for years, she convinced me to put Skype on one of my computers. Totally worth it to see her, and to let her see her siblings and her kitty. So the evening is better than the morning.

After the rapids, the calmness is surprising. It is the same water that was tumultuous only minutes ago, but it spreads out wide and calm, barely a ripple. I liked this Monday morning far better than I liked most of the weekend. I’m still behind on lots of work. Disorganization is evident in corners all over my house. But we are beginning to see how things need to go. I cleaned off my shipping desk, really sorted it instead of shoving things out of the way so I could package quickly. I opened up and completed the post GenCon accounting. I helped Link navigate some communication issues with his teachers and classes, because most of the challenge for him will be figuring out how to track the assignments. I went to the gym. But these are just things I did. More important, things felt possible today, like I was not doomed to fail at everything I tried. I like not feeling doomed.

I was extremely grouchy this afternoon. It was the sort of grouchy that resents the adorable multi-generational family in Sam’s Club who are obviously having a pleasant evening, yet I resent them anyway because they are blocking the aisle with the cart and grandma’s wheelchair, particularly when I’m on my third pass along the aisle searching for an item that turns out not to be there. (Seriously Sam’s Club? You carry krill oil pills, but not chewable vitamin c tablets?) Then I’m grouchy all the way home because it is rush hour and I have to be on the freeway with all the other cars. Mostly though I was grouchy because the morning was so nicely efficient, then Gleek started being sick, then she spiked a fever, then two hours vanished without reducing my task list. Then we started to configure the new iPad 4G we bought to be our point of sale device, but it refused to connect to cell service because it claimed that it had been reported stolen. So then I had to call the seller and packages the thing back up and send it back. Odds are good that we’ll get a functioning iPad without too much trouble, but my brain spins alternate possibilities and even the best case scenario means I have fewer days to get comfortable with the point of sale system. Hence all the grouchy.

Tomorrow morning will be spent shipping packages. My house is jumbled up in preparation for this. By tomorrow afternoon the packages will be gone, Howard will be off to the airport, and hopefully I will have evicted the grouchy as well.

I am very grateful that all of the things continued to work during the years when we were constantly terrified that we would run out of money. I am glad that we have the necessary money this year when all of the things are breaking.

But I am tired of surprise expenses.
Teeth are expensive, air conditioning is expensive; furnaces, doctor’s appointments, diagnostic appointments, vehicles, furniture, vacuum cleaners, computer repair, and dishwashers–all expensive.

That is all.

It was mid-afternoon yesterday when the trucking company called and fractured my attention for the rest of the day. Four pallets of books, 5000 copies, will be arriving at my house tomorrow afternoon. We have suddenly shifted into book shipping season and I wasn’t expecting to hit that until the middle of next week. Early is good though. It means I can ship books to GenCon with a comfortable margin to spare. It means that Howard has more time to get the sketching done. Yet there is this list of things I wanted to complete before the books arrived and now I’ll be running things in parallel, which is more normal than not, but I keep dreaming of finishing tasks before starting other tasks.

We’ve entered the middle of summer muddle. This is when Howard and I look at the shamble of our schedule and have a conversation about how we really should be getting up before 9 am and also perhaps regular meals would be better for the children than letting them forage through the cupboards. I’m not yet to the point where I look forward to having school as a provider of schedule in our lives. I may never reach that point this summer because the onset of school brings with it challenges that sound exhausting. However I do wish that our days had more structure without me having to be the one to create and maintain it. I’m far too prone to letting the structure go wibbly wobbly.

It does feel like the arrival of the books this afternoon will tip us over into the approach to summer’s end. We have five weeks and that time begins to feel short for all the things we have to do. For Kiki it feels quite long she’s ready to begin her college adventures now. Among the things I’d like to do in the next five weeks are some of those summer activities, like swimming, that we’ve yet to do. Sometimes I feel vaguely guilty about that, because summer is when families go on trips and see relatives. Instead we’ve mostly stayed home. I’ve got five weeks. I should do something more with them.

I can tell that we’ve settled into summer because the kids have begun squabbling. Those first few weeks of June we were all so relieved to be done with the school year that the kids dove into Minecraft and I let them. I was still in full-bore shipping mode on the challenge coins. Then I was arranging everything so that the kids would be safe during my trip to a retreat. Then we were clearing up odds and ends, putting the house back into order. Yet now I can tell that the video games are not quite so compelling. The kids spend more time pinging around and deliberately annoying each other. We need a new focus, which is not something I really want to have to create on a Friday afternoon when the outdoor temperatures are a hundred and four degrees.

I am restless too. I have lots of work to do, but focus is being difficult to find. This is not helped by my desktop computer displaying multicolored digital confetti and then defaulting to a blue screen. So instead of working on the Jay Wake book, I unplugged it and took it back to the company that fixed it only six weeks ago. I mused on the trip home how strange it is to not be panicked over the computer failure. This sort of thing used to speak doom to me, but today I was only annoyed. I wandered instead, looking at house chores to be done, doing some reading, and hoping that my listless day would be followed by one where I was focused and productive. I much prefer the days where I do all the things.

For the kids, July is empty. They have nothing scheduled and thus will be hoping for trips to swimming pools and Trafalga. Howard and I have full schedules. We need to work like the wind. Some of the imbalance is addressed by me requiring more chores of the children, but I do feel guilty for not providing something else, new experiences, things that become memories. I ought to be making them read, practice math facts, learn programming, complete that Eagle scout project, etc. This is one of the reasons I do not home school. I get worn out from the daily effort of figuring out what to make for dinner. There have been times when I was quite efficient and organized about it, but then I fail to update the meal plan and it all falls apart. I can’t imagine that home schooling would run very different. It sounds exhausting. Because for all that I’m an organized person and I do all the things, eventually I run out of willpower and end up mired in a day like today where I do almost none of the things.

By August the summer will be winding down and the school anxieties will begin. I’ll have one starting college, one starting high school, and one starting junior high. I expect heavy parenting there. But for the length of July I can not think about all of that. We can just feel the heat of the days, try to get the work done, and try to find moments to remember.