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Grief is stored in small, odd places. I bid my sister and her family farewell this afternoon. We hugged and I cheerfully waved as they loaded into the car. It was an hour later that I wandered into my kitchen to clean up and found the plastic cups with their names written on them in sharpie. (It cuts down on the “all the glasses are dirty” problem if everyone has an assigned cup.) As I threw the cups into the trash it hit me that they are gone far away and it will be a long time before I see them again. I miss them already, even while being glad to have my office back. I can cheerfully wave goodbye to the people, but throwing old cups in the trash makes me cry. Go figure.

I bought a cat carrier today. I have no plans to take my cat anywhere. I’m pretty sure she would not like the carrier at all. However last month when people all over Utah were being evacuated from their homes due to fires, I realized that in an emergency the only way we’d have to evacuate our cat would be in a cardboard box. Also, at some point we are likely to need to transport her to a vet. So now we have a carrier that will stay folded up next to our 72 hour emergency kits. Sometime in the next ten years I’ll either be really grateful to have it, or will finally know that I could have used that money for something else.

My house is really quiet. The kids have all retreated into electronic games and books. We all need some introvert time. Next week Gleek ventures out to an away from home camp and Patch has a half-day lego camp all week. My house will feel empty. I will probably spend that emptiness shipping t-shirts as they are due to arrive next Tuesday. For now, I’m trying to re-configure my house and my brain to focus on convention prep and school prep instead of extended family bonding.

Disrupted sleep. Easily stressed. Restless when awake. More than usual hair loss. Increased anxiety. Feeling like I’m neurotic/crazy.

It is time to get my thyroid tested.
Again.
Then it is time to talk to my doctor and see if he believes in the spontaneous healing of a thyroid gland a decade after it was damaged. I’m half convinced that the gland is still failing, it is just headed for hyperthyroid territory after dwelling in hypothyroid land for a decade. If it is, I’ll deal. We’ll treat the thing and I’ll be back on thyroid meds in higher doses. I’d just like to stabilize for more than four months in a row.

In happier thoughts, a conversation I just had with Howard:

Me: Our anniversary is on Sunday. This year you won’t be away at GenCon. That’s kind of nice.
Howard: It is. What do you want to do for it?
Me: Be married.
Howard: Again? We’ve done that for the last ninteen years.
Me: Yeah, I know. But I like it. It makes me happy.
Howard: Okay. We’ll do that.

My mother used to say that the way to handle four kids easily was to have seven kids and have three of them be somewhere else. Since she did have seven kids, I guess she knew whereof she spoke. This evening feels like that. My sister’s family has been staying with me for over a week and at times the house has felt crowded. Adding five people to a household can do that. I also carried some internal tension because I feel responsible to take care of guests. Sometimes those two things combined with fatigue in unpleasant ways. Then my other sister came to stay overnight with her four kids. There were thirty-six hours of togetherness and activities. I felt on-duty as hostess pretty much all the time even though no one else expected me to assume that role. At four my second sister and her kids left. Those of the rest of us scattered into various pursuits and quiet games. Suddenly instead of being hosts and guests, we just relaxed. I wonder if this is a stage of an extended stay. I suspect it must be. At some point all the people in the household adapt and just begin to live around each other. Whatever it is, it is lovely. I can feel myself unwinding. Strange how a house with ten people in it can feel spacious and restful.

My sister and her family are staying in my office, which has been transformed into a guest space. This is not preventing me from getting my work done. They’re quite understanding that sometimes I need to sit at my desk. They’re also self-employed with an internet-based business, so they understand. We all cooperate and everything gets done.

What I am not doing is puttering around and relaxing by being on the internet. I’m fine with intruding on them to work, but it feels selfish to intrude so I can read random internet things. I still do some puttering using my laptop, Calcifer, but my usual patterns are disrupted. I’m discovering that a desire to clean and organize is flowing in to fill the time vacancy. Since de-cluttering and cleaning are good things, I’m just rolling with it. By this time next week I’ll have hauled piles of things off to thrift stores and my house will feel more spacious. It’ll be a good way to enter the home stretch between now and the beginning of the school year.

Today began with half the neighborhood showing up in my back garden expecting breakfast. Fortunately our bishopric was handy to sling pancakes and supply paper plates. Thus we had our ward pioneer day breakfast. My sole responsibility to the event was to supply a location, which I was happy to do. It gave me impetus to complete a bunch of gardening projects which make me happier every time I step outside my back door. It is lovely out there. Of course the required moment of panic was supplied by the fact that the sprinklers ran and drenched the lawn just before the event was due to begin. However things went well anyway. I got to sit and visit with friends whom I see at church every Sunday, but somehow never get to really talk with. Picnic conversations are different than church hallway conversations. I wonder why that is.

The remainder of my day was mostly spent on house things. For some reason my brain decided that cleaning house and organizing was a necessity. I did quite a lot of that. I have even more that I still want to do. I keep finding clutter that I want to discard. A trip to the thrift store is pending. But first I must have a sabbath. I like those.

I’m experimenting with the concept of siesta. Today I needed to be up early to get some gardening work done before the day got too hot. I also tend to stay up late because the evening hours are so lovely out of doors. Rather than be chronically short on sleep, I’ve been trying to find a quiet mid-afternoon hour when I can nap. It doesn’t work every day. This afternoon it did. I lounged in my hammock swing and dozed. It almost made me long for a full hammock so that I could lay down instead of recline. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll just grab a pillow and a blanket to lay on the lawn. It is lovely in the shade of our trees.

Not everything today was nice. The internet was full of not-nice and news of tragedy. I hugged Howard tight this morning and told him he had to stay home today, which is not an entirely rational reaction to a shooting at a theater, but then rationality is hard to come by when so many emotional strands get a good hard yank. So I hugged Howard, who’d gone to a midnight showing, and then I worked in the garden all day. And I napped. Because sometimes the best thing I can do is just get on with the stuff that needs doing.

“Wow. This Bathroom is freakishly clean” said Patch. It is possible that we should scrub things around here more often, even when we aren’t expecting lots of company. I’m scrubbing today–because I’m expecting lots of company.

In other news, this is also the day when I first had my writing career conflict with my writing career. I’m quite accustomed to Howard having conflicts, family vs business conflicts, community and school conflicts. The last week of September offered me two mutually exclusive possibilities and I had to choose. It was sad because there are empty schedule spaces on either side of the conflict. However I have come to realize that the adage “Opportunity only knocks once” is a lie. Life can be arranged so that opportunity comes around regularly. Yes I had to choose this time, but another time I’ll get to pick the thing I had to turn down.

And now, back to scrubbing.

Wrote up a post with lovely pictures I’ve taken in the last couple of days. Unfortunately the internet connection here chokes on uploading images. So I’ll have to post it when I return to my connection at home.

One of the nice things about my kids being older is that I can disappear into my bedroom for two hours and know that they’ll be fine. Having a movie, a laptop, and headphones is a lovely retreat. Afterward I’m ready to be social with my relatives again. Time to hand out glowsticks to children. The games will invent themselves from there.

Today I’m headed off to the land of Cabin Without Internet. I shall be spending my time there bonding with relatives and helping coordinate the family reunion activities. Sometimes it is good to walk away from my online life. I will chant that any time I feel withdrawal symptoms or anxiety over the quantities of mail that will be waiting for me upon my return. I have to remember that Howard will keep his eye on things. All will be well.

The other day my friend made an animated jpg purporting to illustrate where there are wild fires in Utah. It showed the entire state in flames, which is kind of how it feels. In the past week over a dozen large fires have burned forests and homes while requiring thousands of households to evacuate just in case. It seems that every single day brings report of a new fire. Nearby states are suffering the same or much worse. Colorado is suffering a fire of epic proportions. Yet at my house all is normal. I work on my projects, do my work, and the only direct effect of the fires is that sometimes the sunlight is red from smoke and yesterday we got a light coating of ash. Yesterday a friend told me that a couple of years ago the law was changed preventing people from gathering deadwood in national forests. He posited that this lead to a build up of underbrush. I suspect that much of this is caused by last year being so wet and mild while this year has been dry. Obviously something is different this year. We get one or two big fires every year, not more than ten in a single week.

Thus far I don’t know anyone whose home has burned, though I know several people who have been evacuated or were at risk of evacuation. I find myself thinking through the contents of our house and making a list of what I’d take if I could only remove one van load of combined things and people. There are lots of things in my house I’d miss if they were destroyed, but only a very few items that I would bother to pack. Most of the space would probably go to kid treasures. They love their things far more than I love mine. Mostly I would pack things that would let us continue to function as a business and a family while we were in exile.

Independence Day is next week. I’m not sure if I’m all that excited about lighting fireworks. I’ve kind of had enough of the smell of smoke.