Summer Scenes

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“Oh no! They paved the street.” Gleek was genuinely distressed to see the smooth black surface as we exited the house. I was surprised that this was a surprise to her, because the fact of street paving had required my attention for much of the week, including a grocery trip “so we won’t have to go out tomorrow” and then having to sneak out of the cul de sac just before the paving crews arrived because of another urgent errand. I put up with it all because I viewed new pavement as a good thing. Our cul de sac had become a web of cracks sealed with tar. What I did not know was the long and elaborate games that Gleek had around those tarred over cracks. The cracks had personalities and they played a role in her imaginative worlds. Only now all the cracks were invisible.
“I feel like my friends are suffocating.” Gleek said. “Why do things have to change? I don’t want things to change.” I put my arm around her shoulder and we walked past the still-warm tarry street to where my car was parked. I don’t think Gleek was just lamenting her cracks. This summer she is twelve, play has changed. In a few weeks she’ll be in junior high, that is change too. Kiki will be heading off to college, that is different. Gleek shed tears for all the changes, though she only thought she cried over pavement.

It has been several days since Gleek cried over the street. She’s noted that the texture of the cracks can still be seen now that the new layer has settled in. Her friends are changed, not gone. Hopefully that bodes well for the other things.

“This has been the worst summer of my life.” Link said. I’m not surprised at the declaration. Our schedule has been very sparse on fun outings, and his schedule has been heavy with requirements and doctor’s appointments. Add to that the fact that Link feels some separation from his friends. He’s struggling to find new ways to relate because many of the things which interest his friends do not interest him. One part of me thinks I should attempt to help solve these problems, that I should direct, nudge, encourage. Another part of me recognizes that ultimately Link is the one who has to learn and grow. I can’t give that to him as a gift. Mostly what I can do is make sure that the next four weeks have some happy things for him.

Part way through church I leaned over and put my head on Kiki’s shoulder for just a moment. I could do that because Kiki has graduated from the youth programs and now sits with me during the adult classes. She looked at me puzzled. I whispered to her,
“I just counted weeks in my head. There are four.” In four weeks she’ll be off to her next adventure and I’m glad for her to go, but she’ll be missed here.

“Patch went in the dunk tank!” Kiki told me with impressed tones. Indeed he did, as evidenced by his completely drenched grin. His clothes stuck close to is lanky frame, emphasizing how much taller he has gotten this summer. “It was scary, Mom, but I’m glad that I did it.” Patch said before he proceeded to tell me in detail every moment of his dunk tank experience. He walked tall on the way home, quite pleased with his bravery. Gleek braved the tank as well and felt similarly pleased. We’ve never had a dunk tank as part of a church party before, but this one was a huge success.

We bought a veggie tray late Saturday night and put it out first thing Sunday morning. It was an experiment in psychology and healthy eating. If healthy snacks were convenient, would we eat them instead of rummaging the cupboards for chips? By Sunday evening the tray was three quarters depleted, so the answer appears to be, yes. It is only a beginning. Hopefully it is a beginning that we will follow through on, because this summer the meals have been exceedingly haphazard. Getting up and going to bed have been pretty random as well. Half the time the kids are out of bed before I am and they’re on the computers already. At least we’re making token efforts toward pulling these aspects of our family life back together. Bedtimes and meals, they’re good for us. Really.

“Mom, will you play Minecraft with me?” I haven’t played video games in years. Well, except for Plants vs. Zombies, but that’s a little game on my computer. I used to play video games quite a lot back when our console was a Nintendo 64. The kids did not have the skills to play through difficult sections, and they wanted to see the whole Zelda story, so I played for them. It was a thing I could do to entertain the kids. Then somehow they took the controllers and didn’t need me anymore. I had other things to do, so I did those instead. Occasionally I became interested in a game that had a story, but it was always the story which interested me, not holding the controller, so I was happy to be the one to watch. Minecraft is the latest craze with my kids. They love it. I’m fine with it, but I never watch because it is a sandbox game. No story, just the ability to go anywhere and build anything. I wasn’t interested. But then Gleek looked at me with big eyes. She loves this game and she wanted to do something with me. This is how I came to spend two hours of my Sunday afternoon digging a big square hole in the ground and being generally clueless about things like torches, axes, and red rock. Gleek had a great time zipping around me, making sure I didn’t fall into holes or get lost. Sometimes I need to join them in their activities rather than pulling them out to do something I dictate.

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Updates on Progress and Other Things

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I am tentatively, and with fear of jinxing, declaring my desktop computer to be fixed. We replaced the motherboard almost two weeks ago and it has not crashed since then.

There are only 35 more coin orders to ship. They are all orders where the person who purchased the coins has not given me an address.

Pre-orders for The Body Politic have been progressing well. We’re almost two weeks in and almost sold out of sketch editions. The books were delivered yesterday and my garage smells like triumph. (Triumph is the smell of 5000 freshly printed books.)

Gleek was laid flat by a migraine today, the second she’s had in the past couple of weeks. Sadly this is likely a gift from my genes. I had periodic migraines for about a year when I was her age. I’m taking it as a sign that we need to pay more attention to healthy eating. Not that I think that will solve the problem, but it is a generally good idea.

I’ve finished up the edits on the Tub of Happiness reprint. There were over a hundred corrections to evaluate and apply. I’ve handed half a dozen image edits to Howard. Once those are done, I can upload files to the printer and call it done.

I got copies of the Jay Wake book back. I’m not entirely pleased with the print on demand cover, but the contents are exactly the way I intended. In a week I will get to deliver these copies and then work will begin on the final iteration.

Travel to the Cascade Writer’s Conference and Jay Wake has been arranged. I’m looking forward to attending a writer event and to supporting the efforts of those creating Jay Wake.

Monday will be my day for shipping things to GenCon. We need to send coins, hats, mugs, and The Body Politic. Also on the preparing for GenCon task list: Banners and flyers.

There is also a preparing for WorldCon task list. Howard has acquired new boots and the new tux will be showing up soonish. I still need to buy Howard’s plane tickets. There is math to do in order to figure out how much capitol we can spend on this event. I also need to do the math “guess how much product to send” dance. At least we’ve arranged for transportation of merchandise.

Salt Lake City ComicCon is in September. I keep forgetting about it because it is a newer addition to the schedule. I should make a list for this.

The Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins has done some basic collection, but we haven’t yet begun significant editorial work. Once Howard and I hammer out a process, I expect it to go fairly quickly.

We need a new dentist because I don’t trust either of the two we’ve worked with in the past month. Kiki’s wisdom teeth should probably come out before she heads off to college.

My new car still does not have a name. I’ve been noodling and trying to find one that fits. I’m not sure that I’m going to though. The closest I’ve come is realizing that this new car functions as our family’s sky bison, the friendly white thing that is willing to haul all of our people and our stuff, but it can’t be Appa and none of the other sky bison have names.

Howard has been writing prose regularly and making significant progress through his writing commitments. I’m happy about this. I’m working on writing as well.

My intended push toward healthier eating did not materialize in June. I’m going to have to expend some effort and do meal planning. Because it is time for us to be cooking more, eating healthier, and eating out less. Better for our budget and us.

Tonight I cooked a meal using thyme grown in my back garden. I’m quite happy about that.

Link’s doctor has said that no more follow up appointments are necessary. We just need to continue the home treatments we’ve been applying and everything should clear up.

I finally convinced Patch to let me trim the hair around his ears and neck. He looks less scraggly now.

And it has gotten late enough that I can’t remember the other things I intended to post updates about. Time to sleep.

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My Summer

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“So how is your summer going?” my neighbor asked as we sat on my front porch. She’s not a neighbor I visit with often, just about once a month when she comes over as my visiting teacher. It is one of the programs of my church where women of the congregation are assigned to visit each other. It is a good program, helping people make connections and build friendships where they otherwise might not. Like me and this neighbor. We’ve known each other for years, but not had much cause to sit down and just chat. This does leave me with a bit of a dilemma though, because to really clarify how my summer has been would require quite a lot of back story. I could spend hours explaining how our business goes, the various ailments and recoveries of my children, the transitions we have paused for the month of July, and dozens of other things big and small which all contribute to how I feel about my summer on this particular sunny afternoon.

I give all of that a wide miss and simply answer, “Good.” It is truth. Things are good, particularly on that porch with the air warm around me, but the sun veiled by the shade of a tree. I can look across the mowed lawn with it’s clumps of clipped grass that really ought to be raked, but it was so much effort to get my son to mow that I chose not to spend effort arguing about raking as well. There are also weeds aplenty in sight, but I look up instead to the pink blossoms of the mimosa tree. I can smell them as the breeze wafts toward me. Wasps fly languidly in the tall grass and my cat is stretched out on the warm pavement in the shade. On that hot porch I can immerse myself in the feel of a summer afternoon when nothing is particularly pressing. My to do list has been steadily shrinking. This surprises me because for so long things accumulated far faster than I could get them done. Now they are starting to be done.

The coins are shipped. The Body Politic has arrived en-masse. Link’s doctor says he does not need any more follow up appointments. Kiki has been to her orientation meeting. There are still business things to do, but it is a reasonable number, one that allows for me to sit on my front porch and visit with a neighbor. Of course she wants more detail than “Good.” So I try to focus down a little bit more on one small piece of life. Somehow life is easier to share in pieces. Since Kiki is on the porch with us, we end up talking about her orientation and her impending departure for college. It is a comprehensible challenge, easy to define and explain. Much simpler than talking about my writing, or my worries about the coming school year these things are complex and I feel many contradictory things in relation to them. It is nice to focus on an aspect of life rather than trying to hold all of it in my head at once, as I so often do.

Perhaps this is why I feel so calm during summer afternoons when I step outside. In those moments I let myself be fully present in that moment rather than on a computer with half a dozen windows open, trying to remember which thing should come next. I don’t have such a respite in the winter months and I miss it. My neighbor stayed only for a short visit before getting on her bike and pedaling home. I sat for a few minutes after she left, just feeling the fading heat of the day and knowing that this summer is good.

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Five More Weeks of Summer

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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.

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Prayers for the Coming School Year

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It is too early to be thinking about the coming school year. Yet taking Kiki to her college orientation filled my head with concerns and fervent prayers for what is coming.

May my college bound Kiki quickly adapt to her new habitat, let her find friends who are enough like her that she feels comfortable, and enough different that her horizons broaden. Let her learn her own limits and discover she is stronger than she expects. Let her miss home enough to call once in a while, but not so much that she can’t embrace the newness that college has to offer.

May high school bound Link learn how to navigate a new social environment which involves hanging out with girls and listening to what they have to say. Let him find friends and places where he feels fully himself, even if he is surprised to discover that he is different than he thought he was. Let him find ways to be kind and of service to others because that always makes him happier.

May junior high Gleek be stressed enough to bring out some of her anxiety so that we can help her learn strategies to manage it, but help her not be so stressed that those anxieties overwhelm her. Let her find friendships in unexpected places, but avoid the notice of insecure peers who are seeking targets. May she use her strength to defend others and help her school be a friendlier place.

May Patch learn to manage elementary school without an older sibling there as security. Let him find his own inner strength and self confidence. Help him know that making mistakes is not the end of anything and learn to change his plans when the world does not go as he expects.

May all of us here at home adapt to having Kiki gone, with the younger kids stepping up and learning new responsibility. Yet let us always be ready to make space for her to return.

Change is coming, there is no way for us to adapt to in in advance, so may we rest this summer and adapt quickly when the time comes.

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Writing Thoughts

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My friends write books. They do this a lot. I watch them write. Not in person, that would be kind of creepy, but via their social media posts or when we get together then we talk about the book they are writing and how it is going. It is rarely the same book. My opening question is not “how is your book going?” but “which book are you working on now?” Because each friend writes books, plural. More than one book. They live in plot and story. I watch them mid conversation, when we’re talking about something else and just for a moment their brain shutters over, and I know that my friend has had a writing thought and filed it away for later. I’ve had that experience, had a story live in my brain and snatch bits and pieces of my day to be part of it. I’ve written more than one story. What I have failed to do is sit down and write regularly.

I’m quite able to point at my life and say, “but look how busy I was.” I will be telling the truth, no one will argue that I live my life in an insanely busy way. I keep trying to slow down and not doing that either. The thing is my writer friends are also busy, but they write fiction anyway. Lately I have been watching them more, as if that would help me figure out how it is done, but watching won’t reveal a secret. There isn’t one. People who write books, plural, are people who choose to sit down and write instead of sitting down and doing something else.

Then I have to ask myself the question, how important is it that I write? Because the world is full of things I can do. Some of them may be better uses of my time than writing fiction. What does my fiction matter when weighed on a scale of all the things I could have done with the hours I’m allotted daily? Sometimes our lives are measurably better if I spend time on laundry instead of typing. Yet the regular processing of laundry from dirty to clean does not feel like adding something of import to the universe, it is merely the front lines of beating back entropy. When I ponder the worth of my writing, knowing other writers hampers me some, because I know the hard stories. I know about the beloved books that did not sell. I know about the months, weeks, and years spent waiting for some kind of response from the glacially slow publishing process. In social media it is word counts, interviews, and book releases. Behind the scenes are two years of work put into a book that will never see print. I have one of those books. It reminds me that work does not always equal success. So I can’t dive into the work of writing with a rosy eyed dream that as soon as I’m done my book will be packaged and put into the hands of readers.

I sometimes envy writers who are able to dream. One of my friends said that she’s not sure she could write a book without believing it will be published. I wonder if that is why I have not been writing. Things have calmed down. July has gifted me with enough time to write and I have not been using that time for writing. I am sadly jaded before my first novel is even written. It makes turning away very attractive. There are so many things I could do. Good things. I should spend more time with the kids. I should organize the house. I should reconnect with my friends and communities. I should pull the weeds from my flowerbeds. I should look around and see who needs help. In comparison, writing feels selfish, a thing I do that takes me away from all of the other things rather than something that connects me to others. And that is sad, because the point of story is to travel between people. My finished stories don’t go very far. Ah, but there I’ve spotted a lie in my brain. Hold Onto Your Horses keeps filtering outward, making friends, bringing happiness. It is the reminder that sometimes a book doesn’t make a big splash, but it keeps going and existing for a very long time. I think of that and I find a little pocket of hope because I love my novel Amelia and her eponymous protagonist. I would love for her to go out in the world and make friends. I’m not sure I can believe in publishing success for me, but I can hope for it for her. Which is a weird mental trick, but I suppose if it lets me finish writing the book, I’ll take it.

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I Found Time to Garden

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The casual passerby out for a walk would not look at my flower beds and intuit that I am a person who enjoys weeding. Surely a person who enjoys pulling weeds would not let crab grass grow waist high until the flowering plants are nearly choked to death. Yet I do. The trouble is that I forget that weeding is an activity which makes me happy. I wait for the right conjunction of weather, available time, and energy instead of arranging so that those things will overlap.

This evening I rescued my baby butterfly bush from the grass. I am quite happy to see that it has not died. I planted it last fall, but I feared that the cold winter had killed it and then I worried that neglect would do the same. But now it stands in a space of bare earth, putting forth its first flowers. Perhaps next week I’ll be able to rescue the peonies and day lilies. In late August I hope to begin putting new plants into the ground. For once I would like to end the gardening season with the weeds in retreat. I hope for that most years, but perhaps this is the year that I will succeed. If I can just get the plants into the ground, then some of them will thrive despite my neglect. I like that about plants.

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Tipping Over the Midpoint of Summer

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Something shifted the last few days. The kids went from being happy to ignore me unless they were hungry to seeking me out to tell me things. Last night Kiki flopped herself on my bed and spent over an hour talking through college thoughts, growing up thoughts, future parenting thoughts, and what she is looking for in a future spouse thoughts. In the end I had to send her to bed because I could see that late night fatigue was starting to cause her to dwell on the negatives instead of the hopefuls. In Kiki’s case much of this was triggered by the overnight college orientation that she’ll be attending on Monday. It will be her first sampling of the year to come.

This morning Gleek came to me and told me every single detail about the dream she had. It was full of memory-fragments spun through a kaleidoscope and assembled into a sort-of narrative, which is much like most dreams. The details of her dream did not matter, my listening to it was really important. I was able to talk to her about dreams and help her pull out the relevant emotional content of this particular dream, which was that I was not in the dream and yet I was always there. She woke from the dream wanting to be with me.

At bedtime I lay down next to Patch and waited to see what he would talk to me about. He uses those quiet moments to unpack his brain before sleeping. Mostly it was about the current video game of choice. I listened, not because I care about the game, but because I care about the boy.

Link has not yet come to talk to me, but then he’s less likely to chat than the other kids. On the other hand, he’s more likely to seek me out to ask me things and request permission.

We’ve reached the midpoint of summer. The kids are shifting, ready for something more than just hanging around the house, but not yet ready to focus on school. I should probably schedule some family outings, times when we’ll get out of the house to go do things like swim. I’m starting to feel ready for these sorts of things. Though continuing to hide in work and electronic things also has its appeal. I do think it is time to venture forth more lest the summer get away from us completely.

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Being Social

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When I am under stress, I pull back from socializing. In March I pulled back from some social things I was in the habit of doing. Then in April I deliberately dropped several more. In May and June I didn’t notice their absence. I was far too busy managing things and then recovering from managing things. Then last week I realized that I missed my friends. This week I’m catching up with several. I’m still not committing to anything regular or ongoing. I need weather the coming school transitions before I can predict how much social energy I will have available. As I told a friend earlier this week, we may transition smoothly into school, but I rather expect some sort of emotional storm. The storm is not here yet and it is much better if I spend these weeks happy rather than fretting. So I am visiting friends.

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Computer Troubleshooting Again

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After my last post in which I talked about my computer crashing woes. I had a couple of really helpful responses suggesting that the problem might be bad RAM. This was quite useful because I’d been thinking that everything inside the box was cleared as good, when that was not the case. The symptoms pointed to a hardware issue. So this morning I took my crash log and my computer over to Mireya at JPL Computers. She opened it up and helped me test all the RAM inside individually. This mostly consisted of putting each piece of RAM in all by itself and then seeing if the machine would boot. We found one stick of questionable RAM and one slot that was dusty. We reassembled it and checked it twice. No troubles booting.

I brought it home, plugged it in, and it crashed. I pulled out all of the old RAM, leaving only the brand new RAM. It crashed. I tried to think what could possibly be different in my house from when it worked fine in the store. Then I tipped the computer over to lay on its side. We had done all the testing with the panel open and the computer on its side. I restarted the computer and it has run without crashing since 5pm.

I’m not done with the trouble shooting, but my current theory involves a short or loose part. This afternoon I hurried to get my accounting done. Every momentary pause in response made me fear another crash. So I plowed through, getting as much work done in the window of time while the computer had decided to work. I didn’t get through all of it. I ran out of brain, so hopefully the computer will also work tomorrow.

As a tangential note, this whole experience has taught me not to think of a computer as a magic box, but instead as a conglomeration of bits any of which might break. I feel more competent now, but I would like to move on to the part where my magic box just does the work I ask it to do without causing me stress.

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