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“Every time we go to the book store, you buy a journal or two. Are you like a collector of journals? How many empty journals do you have anyway?” Gleek asked me. We were on our way home from the bookstore. She’d earned a trip out to buy something fun and while she was there I decided to see if there was something I could use to replace my almost-full journal. I opened my mouth to protest, but the answer to that last question is at least six. Pretty sure most people don’t have six empty journals waiting for words. I don’t collect journals, not really. There is no joy in just purchasing them, nor in having lots of them. It is just that once I start a journal, I have to live with it for the next year or more. This means it has to be one I like, and it is common for me to bring a journal home and realize it is not quite what I want.

So I’m not really a collector, more a picky journal keeper. For a long time I just bought the same brown or black journals because the size and texture were right. But lately I’ve wanted something prettier. I found it in a book from Peter Pauper Press, but I don’t want to get the same book again. I want something different, but still pretty. Which leaves me looking at journals that are too big, too small, to thick, too expensive, too puffy, not pretty, too plain… etc. This time I think I’ve settled on buying a book that is labeled as a refill for fancy leather journals. The cover of it is blank, which means I could do something pretty with it.

I find it amusing that Gleek is the only one of my family who has noticed my accumulation of journals, since she is also a lover of notebooks. None of hers are empty. They all have bits of stories, journal entries, sketches, and other snatches of writing in them. Almost none of them are full. Where I pick a single notebook and stick with it until it is full, Gleek flits between books as strikes her fancy. Which is fine. I like having someone who is happy to spend twenty minutes looking at journals with me.

About a week ago I opened my mailbox and burst into laughter. This is what I saw.

I think it was nice of the mailman to give her a pillow, don’t you?
I knew instantly who the pigeon was from. My friend Mary had tweeted a picture of her outgoing mail just a few days before. The pigeon was featured in the tweet along with a link to the Pigeon Post site. I even considered buying a pigeon kit because the whole idea seemed fun to me. Mary did not mention to whom she was sending the pigeon, hence my delighted surprise.

If you followed the link to the pigeon post page, you’ll note that postal pigeons have legs. This pigeon lost hers in transit.

But her message arrived intact. She sat on my counter for several days, and made me happy every time I looked at her. I was tempted to keep her, because of the happy, but the purpose of a postal pigeon is to carry messages, so I wrote a letter and refilled her pouch.

She went into the mail almost a week ago, so she has probably already arrived at someone else’s house. (First class mail arrives in two days.) I hope that friend is as happy to see her as I was.

It is the hour of homework and here I am in my kitchen ready to supervise, help, and enforce. Only my teenager took his homework downstairs and I actually believe he’ll get it done with out me hovering. My tween has no work to do because the local junior high prefers to keep as much work at school as possible. (This is the natural result of being a title one school. For at least half of the student population, work sent home never comes back.) My ten year old has homework, but he’s plowing his way through the list all by himself without drama or much need for my help. I don’t have much to do during this homework hour, which is a real dream compared to some of the ones I’ve seen before.

I look around and things are settled. We’ve finally got a routine and I’m able to relax for a bit. the temptation is to rest a lot, but now that I’ve caught my breath, I need to step up preparations for the next things. I want to get the house more organized before the holiday business hits me hard. October is barely a breath away from when we have to begin our holiday pushes. I don’t want to think about that. I want to breathe the cool outdoor air. I want to clean up the girl’s room before Kiki comes home this weekend. I want to have gardened even though I’m not currently looking forward to pulling weeds.

More than anything else I am relieved to discover that my resting state has become a calm happiness instead of a weary sadness. I spent six months with weary sadness and it was not my favorite.

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.