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It feels like a week has passed since 6:30 am when my alarm went off. Monday feels like several weeks ago. I’ve washed up on the shore of the weekend. But the skies are clearing and hopefully I’ll be able to set sail again on Monday with calmer waters and a good wind.

I’ve been listened to respectfully by school personnel. I’ve been able to express my concerns. The team building has begun and I think I’ll have good teams. Now I just need to put kids to bed and sleep for many hours. Then I have to get up in the morning, wash Howard’s clothes, pack Howard’s clothes, arrange for a church activity, and take him to the airport. Kiki has homework which I need to monitor and I have to track Gleek’s food.

Sunday will be a respite. Monday I will help finalize Kiki’s class change, do my regular business things, and then I need to find my Writer hat. It is buried around here somewhere and I’m going to need it in order to make good use of the editorial notes I have for an essay that will be published next year.

But first, sleep.

The first day of a new schedule is always exhausting. This week I get to have three of them.
Today Link and Kiki both went to school for orientation days.
Tomorrow Kiki, Gleek, and Patch will attend their first day of school, but Link will not because he attended orientation all day today.
Thursday is the day that I will finally get to run through a complete day of what will be my new schedule.
I’m going to be tired this week.

This afternoon Howard discovered that Kiki had never seen The Addams Family. The oversight has now been rectified. Gleek and Patch watched it also.

I have to say that the movie still disturbs me on various levels. I laugh and I am disturbed. This is why my kids had not yet seen the film. It also means that the filmmakers did a brilliant job of hitting their intended mark. Patch and I have already had a discussion about how things in the movie are funny because they are exactly the opposite of what they should be.

I suspect we’ll be showing Addams Family Values later this week. Howard loves both films without reservations. I love them with reservations. And I think on the whole I’m glad to be disturbed by the wrongness.

This afternoon I found myself in The Waiting Place straight out of Dr. Seuss’ book Oh The Places You’ll Go! GenCon is finished and school has not yet begun. The space in between is long enough for me to get bored, but too short for me to begin new projects because I need to keep my brain clear for what is coming next. So I drifted around the house a bit aimlessly for a couple of hours. Then I realized I was not truly in The Waiting Place. I was in The Avoidance Place. I’m not sure how I fooled myself into thinking I haven’t got anything to do. So I kicked myself back into gear and began writing emails to straighten out details for Howard’s trip to Australia. I’ve only got two weeks to assemble a support crew for him. Fortunately there are a half dozen Australian Schlockers who are excited to help. Now I just need to figure out job assignments.

Also on the list of things to do: house organization, laundry folding, gardening, adjusting the kids’ sleep schedules, and business maintenance tasks. Oh, and there might be some school prep shopping to do. I should inventory the kids’ clothes. The happy news is that I can proceed at a nice medium pace instead of a dead run. I just need to keep track of my motivational energy. It keeps going awol.

My front room has suitcases, some of which are newly emptied, some of which are half emptied, and some of which are filled with things belonging to my parents. My desk is covered with receipts, invoices, shipping labels, and post-it notes. Large mounds of color-sorted laundry block the walkway into the family room, waiting for their turn through the washing machine. Mail sits on my kitchen counter to tell me the details of my kids’ school schedules. Then there are the children themselves, who need attention, reassurance, and settling back into a regular routine.

All of that and I am so tired I can hardly see straight. My energy ebbs far more often than it flows today. This is to be expected after the travel and work of last week. But I am working my way through. All of the tasks are closer to complete than they were this morning. This is good because I long for peace and order. I think I will find it soon.

Today is Pre-Convention Jitter Day. This regular event almost always coincides with Packing Day. This time around I have several flavors of jitters which make for fun combinations. I can mix I-am-leaving-my-kids jitters with traveling-on-a-plane jitters or alternately, with first-big-convention-and-running-a-booth jitters, or even meeting-online-friends-in-person-for-the-first-time jitters. I know these are jitters and not things which are logical, but the suppression of blatant illogical nervousness is tiring and has me feeling edgy. I just need to plow through my task list for today. Once we’re on the move tomorrow, all the jitters will vanish because I will not have to anticipate I will just have to react to whatever comes.

I think I’ve gotten to the point where all the “make or break” decisions are made. All that is left is to deal with the consequences. I’m mostly done organizing and planning, now I just need to execute. This is much less brain-twistingly stressful and is just merely busy. Adding to the relief is that some of the tasks, like book release shipping, are totally complete. The huge majority of those packages have arrived to their owners without incident. I can deal with the odds and ends. The church swim party is done. I had my retreat. Things have been shipped to both Indianapolis and Australia. The Indianapolis shipment is already confirmed as having arrived. So the business things have moved into a place that is more routine.

This means it is time for me to pick up some of the things that I have let slide. I need to start moving the kids’ bedtimes earlier. I need to get back to cooking regular meals. Also my house is in serious need of organizational attention. Unfortunately my high gear seems a bit worn out right now. I’ll be picking those things up steadily and slowly. Time to walk, not run.

I just had a very pleasant experience with Comcast customer service. I didn’t know that such things existed anymore. The tech was local to me, completely patient, and walked me through a dozen troubleshooting steps. As we did them, he explained why each step was valuable and what we hoped to learn. It turns out that our router may be feeling its age, but because the guy was so helpful, I now know how to do the electronic version of kicking it to make it start again. Yay.

Sometimes life is too full of things and I can’t process all of it. Then my brain shuts down. I find myself reading a book without having made a conscious decision to read, or I realize that I’ve been staring at the wall for the last 30 minutes, but I can’t remember a thing that I was thinking about. It is a normal defense mechanism. Usually when I discover it, I just give myself a break and write off the next hour, afternoon, or day. I have no space for that. I’m scrambling to finish things so that I can create space. It does not help that I have a sudden influx of things happening beloved people, about which I can not write because the stories are not mine to tell. Not helpful and not anybody’s fault. For some types of news there is no convenient timing.

In the category of Good News, because I think today should have more of it:

I just sent of the large shipment of merchandise to GenCon. In a mere 5 days I will know whether it arrive intact. It is out of my hands now. There are still things to send, but not today. I’ll think about those next week.

Kiki has made friends with a local professional artist and between the two of them they have plans which essentially amount to an apprenticeship for Kiki. I could not be happier. She is going to get to do amazing projects and learn tons about being a working artist.

The Children’s Museum in Salt Lake is an excellent time for a nine year old and a seven year old to hang out for three hours. They had a great time. I would love to write a whole blog post about that trip, but I’m afraid I won’t have the space in my brain before life moves on to something else.

All the invoices are sorted for shipping. I am incredibly grateful to my Janci and really glad that she’s worked with me on this before. She kept me on track this morning. In fact the whole “prep for the shipping day” project is on track.

Howard spent part of our writing group hammering out plot points to finish off this Schlock Mercenary book. It makes me glad and is full of fun.

Next weekend I get to flee all my business things and spend time with my kids. In fact, despite how crazy busy I have been, I think I’ve done fairly well at making sure the kids get spaces each week where their things come first.

The garage is now emptier than it was yesterday. Two tons of books were transferred to the storage unit via my van and half a dozen boy scouts who did their good deed for the day. We also brought back 17 boxes of a different book so that I can put together a freight shipment to GenCon. Hopefully by the middle of next week we’ll have cleared out the garage enough that Howard can park in it again.

By tomorrow my house will be emptier too. The parakeet has already gone home, and soon my brother’s family will decamp. Then we’ll be back to just our family in the house. Over the next few weeks the population here will continue to fluctuate as kids run off to various camps and visits. Things will not truly settle down again until after GenCon.

I don’t want to skip any of the cool things that are coming, but I miss quiet routine.