What With One Thing and Another, Saturday Passed

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One of my favorite moments in the book The Princess Bride is the part where the boy’s father (yes it is a father in the book, not a grandfather) skips a bunch of boring text by simply saying “what with one thing and another, three years passed.” This was not one of my favorite moments when I was reading the book for the first time (after having fallen in love with the movie.) It became a quiet favorite moment many years later when I realized how very useful that storytelling trick is. I can skip the boring bits, simply skim over them, and get back to the important stuff. The only trouble is that no one but me knows I am making a clever reference when I use the phrase “what with one thing and another…” It is not highly quotable nor memorable to most people. It blends into the text of the things I write and no one gets to share a little smile with me and think for a moment about Wesley, Buttercup, and how for about a year when I was twelve I really believed that there was an S. Morgenstern and that I could find an unabridged copy of The Princess Bride. Which means that William Goldman’s own little joke worked on me, so perhaps it is fair to hide a sly reference in my words that no one but me will get. Except you, because you’ve read this, and now you’re in on the joke. It isn’t a big joke, just a little one that makes me smile inside.

What with one thing and another I haven’t had a proper Saturday for a month. The past three were variously disrupted with interesting things, all of which dictated my schedule. This morning dawned with nothing on the calendar and only a list of house things which I’ve been wanting to complete, but haven’t had time to do. So naturally I slept late. Because that is the proper beginning for a Saturday. Then I marshaled my forces (the kids) and compelled all of us to go outside where we made the front of our house look like maybe someone lives in our house. We also harvested walnuts from under the fallen leaves and pears from where they’d fallen on the ground. I discovered that there were still grapes hiding among the vines so we picked those too. I’ve been ignoring these fall things because I was so busy. I didn’t have time to do anything else, or so I thought.

There are many jokes about working for yourself. “Best thing about working for yourself is that you only have to work half days and you get to pick which twelve hours.” It is the sort of joke which is funny because it rings of truth. In theory our lives are supremely flexible because we set our own schedule. In reality there are hundreds of constraints telling us what must be done, when it must be done, and how it must be done. Work and family things don’t blend together, but they do tangle up and often interfere. One thing that has surprised me in the past year has been the re-emergence of Saturday as a housework day. Back when I was not working at business and was instead working on keeping house and raising small children, I used school-free Saturdays as a time to set the house in order and to teach the kids about housework. Then everything got muddled up with work spilling everywhere. But lately I put down the majority of the business work on Friday afternoon and don’t pick it up until Monday morning. It creates a space where I can look around me and realize that I want to sweep the front walk because those grass clippings have been there for two weeks and they’ve clumped up against the front steps so that everyone tracks some into the house. It is the sort of little task which theoretically should just get done in one of the spaces of the days, only the days keep running out of spaces. Or I run out of energy. Often the latter.

I picked up the pears by myself, crouched under the low hanging branches, not willing to kneel lest I discover my knee in the midst of mushy rotten pear. My hair often caught on branches over head, pulling strands loose and occasionally depositing twigs. One of which I discovered later when an acquaintance stopped by, and mid-chat I touched my head to realize that perhaps brushing my hair after the pair project would have been a good idea. The acquaintance was too polite to mention my birdnest-like hairdo, so I just put my hand back down and ignored it as well. Half of poise is deciding that these things are irrelevant. Before that conversation, there were pears, and I was by myself picking them up carefully because wasps like rotting pears and I do not like getting stung. The sun filtered through the yellow, orange, red leaves above me. Sometime next week all those leaves will be on the ground and finding the pears would be much more difficult. My back was aching because I’d done more physical labor that day than I’ve done in quite a while. I was glad because sleep has been elusive as my brain ran overtime considering projects. Devoting myself to clean up and harvesting was setting me to rights in more ways than one.

The kids complained as they pulled the husks off of walnuts. They don’t even like walnuts much and they’d already done quite a bit of work. Though Gleek admitted to enjoying the “cute little worms” she sometimes finds in the husks. The kids don’t even like eating walnuts much, but I do. I sneak them into cookies sometimes or crumble them on my salads. I give them away to neighbors. The walnuts are quite a bit of work because once the slimy husk is removed there is still a shell to crack and the nutmeat to pick out. Lots of packaging and work for something so small, yet having the tree makes me happy and I like having food that grew in my yard. Perhaps I should instead have made the kids help me with pears. They love to eat pear butter, except wasps would have led to kids not helping at all.

The harvesting activites have added to my list of projects for next week, yet they have lowered my stress level by reminding me of things that I love. I can see it in my thoughts and manifested in this post where I abandon the tightly focused presentation of small ideas and instead am content to drift from topic to topic. The whole thing is really one long digression, but then the title of the post should have been a clue. What with one thing and another Saturday passed, which means that this whole post could be skipped by those who just want to hear news of projects. The day was a pause, a side note. It did not forward the plot. The fact that I wrote it makes me remember why I wanted to find that mythical unabridged version of Princess Bride. I knew that the things which had been cut were probably boring, but I still wanted to see them. It was during the same era of my life that I read the 1500+ page unabridged Les Miserables and was fascinated by its meanderings. Sometimes the pauses and the digressions are the point.

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Schlock Moving Day November 2nd

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We signed the warehouse lease. I’ve arranged for light, heat, insurance, and mail delivery. The time has come to move all of the stuff. (Stuff being tons of books from the storage unit and many boxes of other merch from my basement.)

If being part of the Schlock Mercenary shipping day sounds like fun to you, email schlockmercenary@gmail.com for specific details and addresses. We’ll start work at 9:30 am and work until we’re done or when I have to return the rented truck at 3. As usual we’ll provide food and gifts of merchandise. We’ll need to limit the number of volunteers to around 10 people or we’ll start to have crowding and transportation problems.

NOTE: This will be hours of heavy lifting. I mean literal tons, thousands of pounds of stuff. If you have a bad back, bad knees, or other easily strained body parts, please wait for an alternative volunteer opportunity.

For the amusement of those far away, but who wish us well, I will be sure to write about the fun and post some pictures. After I’ve rested.

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Things Falling Into Place and Psychology

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It has been two weeks of things falling into place. The first warehouse I toured turned out to be the one we needed. The lease was signed two days later. Business insurance looked to be complicated, but then it wasn’t. An appointment got cancelled in the middle of a busy day. I thought I’d have to spend time waiting around for a delivery truck, but the shipment of Tub of Happiness got held up in LA and won’t arrive until next week, which is far more convenient. The psychiatrist’s office had to reschedule Gleek’s appointment for several weeks later, which gave just enough time for the school year to settle in more. We have things to discuss. Then at church a conversation with Gleek’s youth leaders led to a recommendation for a therapist who does art therapy. Gleek’s first appointment is next week. I could continue the list. Last Spring was full of turmoil, road blocks, and struggles. During those struggles we laid lots of ground work and things are falling in to place now.

Today was the meeting with Gleek’s psychiatrist and next week is her first session with a new therapist. I feel very ambivalent about both of those things. There is a part of my brain that wants to argue about expense and effort. She’s doing really well right now. She’s mostly happy. She’s got straight As in school. Okay, I’d like to see her socializing more with people face to face instead of online, but surely we don’t need a therapist for that. These thoughts burble in my brain, trying to get traction. Yet I know that Gleek has lots of things to learn about how to handle her stresses and emotions. Things are good now because she’s not being challenged. She is not under stress. This means that now is the time to be working on things so that when the next stressful time hits, she has skills to manage it. It is logical. I’m pretty sure this is the right course, but I don’t want to do it. Therapy is hard. We have to face things instead of letting them slide. Surely I have enough projects going on without adding another one. Yet I can’t but think that so many of the other things are going so smoothly to make space for this and for things like this.

Gleek is not the only one with things to work through. Her struggles last Spring significantly undermined my confidence in my parenting. The attendant therapy sessions did not fix that, because over and over I was shown how things I was doing fed into and exacerbated Gleek’s stress. The biggest change that took place was in me. I shifted my management of things, set some new boundaries, and rearranged schedules. Then the troubles evaporated, which is good, but I wish I could feel like they went away because Gleek learned something rather than because I did. Of course if I was the one creating the problem, then maybe it isn’t laying in wait to ambush us. Maybe it is actually solved. Any time a child is in crisis, psychological experts look to parents as part of the solution. Unfortunately finding solutions also creates guilt, because I didn’t figure it out sooner. If only I’d been better. If only I was able to be consistent instead of letting the rules go blurry and putting them back later. If only, if only, if only. Those “if onlys” don’t help, but I have to see them and work through them in order to get rid of them.

The take away from the consultations this week is that Gleek needs more stress in her life. She needs the good kind of stress where she goes to an activity, tries new things, and meets new people. Gleek is happy about this prescription because she wants to take a gymnastics class. So I’ll add that to my list of things to set up. She’ll be less happy about the second half of the prescription, which is to limit her time spent in electronic worlds on the computer. She needs time to be bored and to find good ways to stop being bored. Fortunately adding fun activities will cause the second to happen very naturally.

The good news is that I don’t have to create an extensive plan and execute on it. I just need to figure out what comes next and do that. For tonight, it means putting kids to bed. Tomorrow I’ll be spending my morning work hours setting up utilities for the warehouse. After that I’ll be crafting the Kickstarter information or pounding my way through some book layout. The good news is that tomorrow is both Friday and the end of term, so the kids are all pretty much homework free for the weekend. Step by step we do all the things, working and guiding things so that they fall into place.

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Patch’s High Intensity Schooling

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I chose the school program that Patch is in with my eyes open. It is a gifted program, academically accelerated. Since it is an opt-in program the teachers ask a lot of parents in the way of support. In making the choice to put Patch and Gleek into the program two years ago, we weighed a lot of factors and ultimately decided that this was the best possible one. Even though it would sometimes be hard and other times it would be harder. So I choose this. I’m not sorry I did it. I know that it is still the right choice for our family. But I’m still going to complain a little.

Monday an explorer story was due. In order to write this story, Patch had to read a biography about the assigned person, include three try-fail cycles, have at least two characters, one character required to be native, and feature the major geographical landform for which the explorer was famous. Pretty exacting, but doable. Particularly since we’ve known about it all month. Patch was assigned Louis Hennepin, about whom no one has ever written a biography. Hennepin is usually a footnote or paragraph in books about La Salle. So we checked out an encyclopedia of explorers where Hennepin was mentioned more than once. Patch wrote a two page story.

Tomorrow the explorer game is due. This is a board game based on the story. It must have a map, the major landform, give information about the landform, and information about the explorer. Playable by 2-4 kids. Patch likes this sort of assignment, which means I did not have to do nearly as much work as I expected. Mostly I helped make sure all the information things went into the game.

Two projects in a month is fairly standard for this class. Usually there is a lighter one in the first half an a bigger one for the second.

Next week Booko is due. This is bingo filled out with books that Patch has read. Since he enjoys reading, all we have to do is make sure he can get five in a row. This month was Mystery, poetry, 900s book, Beehive award book, and Story collection. Then there is a book report on the genre of the month. These book reports can be anything from shooting a video commercial to bringing in treats based on the book. It isn’t hard, it is just a project we need to remember to get done.

Next week is also Halloween. The kids are requested to wear costumes based on characters from books. This is one way for the teacher to acknowledge that Halloween has become tricky ground for 5th graders and to give them all a socially acceptable excuse to still dress up. But, putting together a costume is an additional project.

Then there are the regular rounds of spelling, math, writing etc. Most of which Patch can accomplish in 20 minutes or less on a daily basis. If Patch pays attention to homework and projects for an hour per day, he can definitely keep up. No problem. In fact he has enough hours to spare that I sometimes feel guilty over the quantity of time he plays video games.

Guess who has to make sure that hour per day happens every single day? Most days I’m fine with that. All I have to do is nudge and Patch goes and gets his work done. The projects require more focused attention. Which is hard to come by on a day like today when I’ve spent all of my energy making sure all of my own projects are being moved forward. Add to that the impending end of term on Friday, which means making sure that Link and Gleek are on track. Which they are, but Link also has about an hour of homework each day and half the time he needs me to participate in some way. I suspect that I’ll be able to back off as the year progresses, but for now, this is how it is.

It is a lot, all of this school support. Yet when I think about what my kids get to do, I know I’ve chosen right. Patch got to make a game. He got to write a story. Later in the year he’ll participate in writing a declaration of independence, write and perform an opera, and a hundred other amazing things. Those things would not happen for him without this high intensity program. The idea of doing such things on our own is attractive, no grades, no pressure, but the truth is I would never get them done. I am far too pressed by projects to voluntarily pick up more. I have as evidence the past few summers when my children did almost nothing academic because I was too busy with business things and with being so very glad to rest a little bit.

So, the abundance of projects is driving me a little crazy this week. Next week will be better. By the week after that, many of the projects will have begun to clear. Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean it is the wrong choice.

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Picking up the Pace on all the Projects

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A few weeks ago I posted the first sketches from Strength of Wild Horses. Today I got to peek at the first finished pieces.

Isn’t it beautiful? Look at all the colors. Angela’s use of color astounds me every time. I’ve seen scans for about a third of the images. I am so happy to see each of these pictures and really excited to see the rest. The rest are coming soon. This means that tomorrow I have images to start putting on the Kickstarter page. Of course tomorrow I’m also making sure Kiki gets back on the bus to college, talking to insurance agents on the phone, working on LOTA, going my visiting teaching, helping kids with homework, and attending pack meeting. In fact all my days for the next few weeks are like a spinning plate act while I try to keep all of the projects on track so that they can hit their deadlines.

I don’t mind. All of the projects are happy ones, and Strength of Wild Horses is probably the happiest of all, because it is mine and Angela’s. Just look at the beautiful picture that Angela made. There are going to be thirty more like it. I am so excited to be putting this book out where other people can love it too.

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Spending Saturday

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Saturday evening with my four kids downstairs shouting and laughing over Super Smash Bros Brawl. Mid battle my two daughters start singing a song together, one with a familiar tune, but non-standard lyrics. It is a pretty good conclusion for a day which began with me getting up before dawn to find the Greyhound stop where Kiki would get off the bus. Our day has also included some design work for me, Art work for Kiki, homework for Link. We took a break to watch giant robots punching giant monsters and to marvel at the tactical idiocy which did not have humanity setting up a patrol to guard the sole entrance from the monster realm. I mean, why let the monsters get a mile from land before trying to destroy them? Granted, they would still have had problems, but lots less property damage and many lives saved. It is a good thing that the monsters and robots are so fun to watch. Anyway. We probably could have spent more time outside in the beautiful weather. So many of my neighbors spent the day clearing their yards an preparing for winter. That would have been a good use of time. Yet it has been a good day.

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Thoughts on Self Promotion

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As I’m contemplating making a promotional push for the upcoming Strength of Wild Horses Kickstarter, I’m also doing much thinking about self-promotion in general. Most people I know are not comfortable saying “Look at me! Buy my stuff!” I’m no exception to that rule. In order to get this project funded I’m going to have to do a lot of promotional activities on the internet, but I made a realization which makes all of that easier. I’m not promoting me. This isn’t about me, or my career, or making money. What I am promoting is Amy and her story in Strength of Wild Horses. Unless I promote it, that story will not have the chance to be released to the public. So in the next month or so I’m going to be reaching out to people and saying “Look at this project I love. I think it is amazing. If you think so too, please pass the word along so people can know about it.” I can do that, because I love Amy and her story. I love the pictures that Angela is creating to tell Amy’s story. I love when I hear from people who have the first book and they tell me that Amy’s story is loved by their kids. I won’t be doing self-promotion, I’ll be doing Amy-promotion.

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Thoughts in My Brain During the Writer Hangout

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I am sitting in a room with four other writers. We’re all typing away at our computers or sometimes just staring at them. Four people being together so we can ignore each other and vanish into the worlds inside our heads. Writers are strange people. This writer’s hang out is an experiment and part of my brain is distracted by evaluating it. Is it working? Do I like this room? What if three more people show up? We’ve only got two more chairs. These chairs aren’t very comfortable. I wonder if the Book Group room at Orem Library would be better. It has cushy chairs. I’m supposed to be relaxing and creating fiction, quieting my brain. Instead there is all this noise. Distractions. The others are all typing. I wonder if I’m the only one for whom the presence of other people tugs at my attention. Or perhaps I just need to adapt, try this again until it feels normal. One thing is certain, if I had not scheduled this Writer Hangout I would not write anything today. The press of other commitments would have taken all of the time.

…

And then I open my story, the one I haven’t looked at in months. I begin typing and my awareness of the others in the room fades. I write. For six hundred words I only hear my characters. Then the room comes back. These chairs really are not comfortable. The other thoughts return, but they are no longer hectic and tense, they flow. I am calmer for having been a writer for awhile. Yet time has come to go back to the other things.

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News and Updates

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Tomorrow (Thurs Oct 17) I’ll be hosting a Writer Hangout at the Provo Library from 11am – 1pm in study room #155. You’re welcome to join us. We’ll mostly be writing, but there will also be some visiting. Over the next weeks I plan to hold more of these in various locations until I find one that fits. If no one else shows, I’ll still be there, writing.

This morning we signed a lease on an office/warehouse space. It is a small space for a warehouse, but still bigger than what we’ve had before. I’m surprised how quickly and smoothly picking the right space went for us. I really expected to spend much longer looking around and feeling ambivalent. Instead I’ve got keys in my pocket and a whole new list of things to do. The landlord needs to do some cleaning and fixing, the biggest of which is to the heating system. Somehow our unit is connected to the furnace from the next unit over, which is not ideal. I have to acquire insurance for the location which covers liabilities and possible damages to inventories in case of unfortunate events. I’m also accumulating a list of things to acquire, like garbage cans. Then there will be all the moving in. It is interesting that I’m not feeling stressed by this list. Instead I feel happy, because I’m gaining more space for business and more space for family.

We’ll almost certainly be having some sort of a “help us move” event with food and merch for minion volunteers. If you’re a person with a strong back and think the idea of helping haul tons of books from a storage unit to a warehouse sounds like great fun, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com to get onto the volunteer list. That way I can contact you when I know more details.

I’ve received word that the Tub of Happiness reprint has arrived in LA. Soon it will be on a truck bound for Utah. It will be the first thing delivered to our new location. So I’ll get to see how this works.

Angela is spending this week putting together the final art for Strength of Wild Horses. I expect to spend the lion’s share of next week putting together the Kickstarter page and generally preparing that project to launch. Once it launches I’ll need to do layout for the book and there will be lots of work to do to maintain and push the Kickstarter.

The Jay Wake Book has been sent off for what I believe will be the final test print. If this one looks good when it arrives, I’ll be making it available to the public.

I’m in the middle of layout for Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. I have the recolored strips from Travis and am in the process of cropping them and checking for errors. So fare I’ve gone through about a quarter of them and identified two fixes. Then I’ve got to put them all into place in the book. The bonus story is completely scripted and drawn. I believe it is in Travis’ hands being colored. Hopefully we’ll have the whole thing bundled up and sent off for print soon.

Howard is working on the 2014 Schlock calendar. It is about a quarter complete. I’ll have to take a pause from prepping LOTA and Kickstarter to make sure I’ve got all the calendar layout in good shape. I have to update the handy holiday list and the pages themselves. This one needs to get off to print soon so that people can have their calendars before Christmas.

We also have promised to put together the Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins. Editorial work on that project has not begun, but needs to.

On the home front, Link and Patch are needing regular homework support. Fortunately they’re both good workers and we’ve found a rhythm that works. Gleek is enjoying her year of almost complete freedom from homework. Kiki will be coming home to visit this weekend once we figure out if she can catch a ride with friends or if she needs to ride the bus.

Wow. Lots to do. I’d better get back to it.

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Getting a Warehouse for Schlock

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At some point in the last month it became obvious to me that our business needs a home of its own. We’ve been making things work, reconfiguring rooms as necessary so that our family room is sometimes for play and other times a business space. I like the idea of multi-use spaces and we’ve been doing things this way for a long time because we had to. The trouble is that the highest stress work times are exactly when I would most benefit from having an organized home. Yet those same high stress work times invariably turn my home chaotic because we have boxes of inventory and shipping supplies stacked into most of the corners. My neighbors have almost never seen my front room without stacks of boxes in it. I try to comfort myself that they’re always different boxes. It is not that we’re sloppy, but the boxes are always there.

Not only are there boxes everywhere, but my shipping room is in the basement and our storage units are two miles away. This means I have to haul boxes of books from our storage unit downstairs where I rearrange books into customer packages and carry everything back up the stairs again. As systems go, it is far from efficient. We never have the space to set up a test booth so we can plan ahead. Add to all of this the fact that when Kiki comes home from college to live with us for a month in December and for the summer next year, she will be coming as an adult with an art business of her own. She simply doesn’t fit into the shared bedroom space that used to be hers. Not anymore. Which made me realize that maybe it is time for the business to grow up and move out of the house.

I began looking at office/warehouse spaces today. I expected to spend several weeks looking and thinking before finding one that would work. Instead I made an appointment with one guy who owned three units near each other. I walked into the second unit and realized that it is pretty much perfect for everything that we need, even in the right price range. Not only that but some of the left over furnishings from the prior tenant would come with it and be very useful. I looked around and knew that it would end up being the warehouse that all the other ones I looked at were compared to. I asked a lot of questions, didn’t sign anything, and came home to look at my accounts. There are so many reasons that getting a warehouse makes sense. Yet it is a scary step because it ties us to additional monthly bills and there have been times when money was very tight. We’ve put it off in order to maintain as much financial flexibility as possible.

For the last month, every time I’ve contemplated renting a warehouse I felt calm. All my contemplations on the subject both at church or at home have made me feel like this is the right choice for our family and our business at this time. I came home feeling like I ought to be scared of the financial commitment, but not actually feeling it. Howard and I talked about the space and about taking this step for the business. He felt good about it too. To be absolutely sure, I went and prayed. The answer I got was You know it’s fine. It’s what I’ve been telling you to do for weeks. So after letting all the thoughts simmer for a few more hours, I called the owner of the warehouse and left a message saying we want it. He’ll probably call me back in the morning. I’m still not scared. Well, maybe a little bit. I’ll probably have some scared when I actually sign paperwork because that is a normal pattern for me.

Once everything is squared away with the lease and the facility, we’ll have quite a bit of work to do getting tons of merchandise shifted from their current homes and into the new space. It’ll be a new phase of our business. The next adventure.

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