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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.

The pavement was warm beneath my bare feet. Eighty seven degrees makes for nice pavement. Weather reports told of coming hundred degree days when the walks and street would be too hot. Then I would either have to wear shoes or jump my way over to the soft grass. I walked my garden, the space for vegetables, the lawns, the weedy flowerbeds. I’d not had much time to look around and plants were thriving, mostly the grassy ones, but in between I could see the things I wanted. I leaned over and pulled one clump of grass and then another, until I’d spent an hour on my knees and one small bed was cleared. If I could only spend one hour each day, my gardens would be lovely. I can’t be certain I’ll have that hour, or that during that hour I’ll have the energy, but the one cleared bed represents progress, a step in the right direction.

My to do list shows similar progress. I’ve crossed off two dozen things today and added twenty. This means that my list is a tiny increment smaller than it was before. I’m beginning to complete things. That feels very good.

My mailbox is full of email to answer.
My task list is full of things I did not do yesterday or the day before.
My house is full of people.
My desk is covered in papers.
My laundry baskets are full of clean clothes to put away.
My garden is full of weeds.
My calendar is full of appointments.
My kitchen counters are spotlessly clean because of all the things I have to do, dishes is the one that my brain seized upon to do very thoroughly. I’ve also sorted the pencil drawer, and sorted the mess of random things at the end of the kitchen counter. I wish my neurotic attempts to assert control over all the things would manifest in a way that actually removes tasks from my list and emails from my box. Instead I just have to give up for the evening and try to reboot my brain with sleep. Hopefully it will function more effectively tomorrow.

I need to figure this out, because part of what is manifesting is my regular summer reaction to the lack of solitude. It hasn’t been as bad this year because the kids have leveled up in entertaining themselves quietly and in foraging. Yet I still need to figure out how to induce one of those days where I do all the things and create spaces. It would be lovely if tomorrow were that day.

Today began with me getting liquid nitrogen sprayed in my face and ended with me owning a new car. The actual details are much more mundane than the story that sentence promises. Surely such a sentence demands details involving villains, sharks with lasers, escapes from certain death, and probably an explosion.

Instead I went to the doctor’s office because there was a spot on my face that probably wasn’t anything, but sometimes I worried that it could be something, so I made the appointment. The doctor agreed that it was likely nothing cancerous or dangerous, but recommended we freeze it so that it would go away and stop bothering me. So we did. It stung quite a bit, but the doctor was very careful not to get any in my eyes.

The new car was completely unrelated to the liquid nitrogen. It was the right time and so Howard and I spent several hours debating options and then waiting for paperwork, after which I drove home a white Mazda 5. I need to name it something interesting before it acquires a boring label instead. The car loan gods smiled on us and we ended up with 0% financing. So that was a nice part of the day.

The first thing I did in my shiny new car was buy groceries. Life is so much boringer than stories. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that sharks with lasers are much more enjoyable when watching them than actually experiencing them. I’m sufficiently tired after my ordinary type of day.

Somehow I arrived at the evening of this day and I can not properly account for the hours. I must have done something, hopefully it was useful. Yet the only things I can really pinpoint as having completed are going to a dentist’s appointment, answering some email, and taking Gleek to get her hair sheared off into a pixie cut. Gleek loves the cut, says it is the first haircut she’s had that feels like her, and swears she’ll keep it that way forever. Kiki also loves it. Patch and Link are not so thrilled. I’m fascinated to watch the conversations about gender norms unfolding between my children. I’m also thinking about what it says about our culture that getting a haircut qualifies as a daring thing to do. This still does not answer the question of where did my day go. I’ve had a really focused and effective week. I suppose that had to fall apart sometime.

Yesterday the advance copies for The Body Politic showed up. Five shiny books which herald the coming of five thousand more in about four weeks. The arrival of advance copies means it is time for Howard and I to shift into book pre-order mode. Then there will be book release and shipping. It says something about how life has felt lately that contemplating a book shipping actually sounds relaxing and familiar.

For now I think I need to declare myself done attempting to work today and begin my weekend. Hopefully I can wake up feeling ready to do all the things.

I stepped outside my house and into the peace of my garden. Yes it has areas where the grass has grown waist high. No there are not nearly as many blooming plants as I would like, but it still breathes peace into me. This is my place and it has nothing to do with packages or emails.

Howard and I were short with each other yesterday. In hindsight I see that he was anxious about this trip. His last writer’s retreat was difficult for many reasons, one of which being that he was not prepared. It makes sense that his back brain would drive him toward extra preparedness. I, on the other hand, was still trying to finish up the last of the coin shipping and also trying to gather all the threads of things that need to be done before my departure next week. We frustrated each other without meaning to do so. Then at the end of the day we talked it through a little, carefully though. The trick is to let each other know the shape of the anger without creating more. Tonight none of it feels quite so urgent and I wonder why I got upset.

I scroll back through my blog entries and they are full of shipping updates for the past weeks. This is an accurate representation of how my life has been. I hope to be able to reclaim it, to have time for slow thoughts, to really see my kids. They’re around me all the time. I answer queries and help them solve problems. Yet when I get absorbed into weeks of work urgency I don’t really see them when I look at them. My brain is holding on to the work thoughts instead of focusing on the kids. Tomorrow is Saturday and I’ve closed down work for the week. I’ll pick it up again on Monday in a mad rush to complete things before I leave, but Saturday belongs to my kids and my house. Sunday I hope to rest. Resting would be lovely.

Of course I have to remember how to do it. I’ve been doing one thing after another for so long I hardly know how to stop. Perhaps I’ll figure it out this weekend.