Fourth of July

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There is always a moment at the beginning of the festival of fireworks when I look around at the chaos of kids running and burning objects, sometimes kids running with burning objects, and I feel a strong desire to call a halt to the whole thing. But then it settles down. The kids become more content to watch from the curb as the daylight wanes. Either that, or they’ve vanished into the back yard with glow bracelets to play their own games. This leaves only a few people running out to the middle of the street to light the aerials that shoot into the sky to explode.

I always think of “the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air” when I am surrounded by booming and colorful bursts on all sides.


I was aware that I ought to spend some of the Fourth of July contemplating freedom. The first sight this morning was the view of a flag through my doorway window. Yet my mind slipped away from serious contemplation. I alternated between working and relaxing. We did not participate in any public events, choosing instead to contemplate a canopy of green leaves as seen from a hammock. This is an expression of freedom I suppose, to enjoy the luxuries that others sacrificed so that I could have. I was conscious of my privileges today because they are a gift. Other years we have attended balloon launches, parades, and festivals. This year it felt good to just be at home. In the evening we cooked food on the grill and enjoyed fireworks with neighbors.

Our cat was less pleased with the day.

We kept her indoors for the most explosive hours of the evening, but she was still skittish and obviously trying to make sense of a world gone crazy. This is always a hard day for pets.

Tomorrow we’ll be back to work, which makes me glad. We have good work to do.

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Backyard Critters

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There is a blue jay who frequents my yard. I watch him whenever I hit a pause in my day that allows me to spend a few minutes outdoors. He hops about, tapping his beak against things and peeking into all the holes he can find. I don’t feel bad about watching him, because he watches me too. He flaps from perch to perch, cocking his head to get a better look at the strange human who swings in a hammock from the trees. If our cat, Kikaa, makes an appearance, then the jay will talk to her. Sometimes Kikaa talks back and they have a strange half cry, half meowl conversation. After awhile the jay will fly away to take care of things elsewhere. I sway gently and close my eyes.

Our yard is also home to a garter snake. This is a new and exciting development of which I was informed this afternoon when I got home from grocery shopping. All the kids held the snake before letting it go. I never got to see it, but it is out there somewhere, catching small critters and generally living a snakey life. I told the kids that we’re glad to have a little snake in our yard, as they eat pests. So next time we see him, we can say hello and give him a name, but we probably shouldn’t pick him up. If he’s picked up too often he’ll likely decide to go live elsewhere. Also, I don’t really want my children in the habit of picking up snakes, but I didn’t say that part out loud.

There are nests in our spruce tree. I’ve no idea how many because the tree is too dense for me to see. I hear them though, little twittering sounds that change in volume depending upon if an adult bird has just showed up with dinner. I think they are mostly starling nests. The robins seem to prefer more open trees like the honey locusts. One year we had a little hummingbird nest in our apricot tree, but I’ve not seen any hummingbirds this year.

The apricots are ready to pick, I need to get out with a ladder and a bucket. If I don’t hurry the birds will taste all the fruit first. The grape vines are busy making a September harvest. Then I’ll have to maneuver around the bees and wasps who’ve discovered the split grapes. The walnut tree is heavy with forming nuts. At some point in the future a very happy squirrel is going to discover that tree and we’ll get far fewer of the nuts. Right now we only have to share with the occasional northern flicker. And the blue jay. He likes the nuts and often pokes around on the ground hoping to find one that was missed last fall.

I love the variety of creatures who have decided that sharing space with humans is just fine.

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Goodbye Kaspersky, I’m Going Back to Norton

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The tech folks at Best Buy told my that Kaspersky was the preferred anti virus protection for computers. It was rated much better than Norton they said. So when I bought my new desktop machine two years ago, I put Kaspersky on it. When I bought a laptop a year later, I put Kaspersky on that as well. Today I removed Kaspersky from both machines and paid to put Norton on them instead. I did this even though I only renewed Kaspersky a few months ago. In the past eight or more years of running Norton on various machines, the number of times I’ve had to troubleshoot is zero. The list of troubles with Kaspersky is below.

It installed easily and registered without trouble. Life was fine for 335 days. Then Kaspersky started popping open windows reminding me to renew. I followed the instructions to renew. Kaspersky continued to remind me over and over again that I should renew, not recognizing I’d already done it. Once the deadline passed, I had to call customer support and they walked me through a click-chain to get the program to recognize the renewal.

I bought the laptop and put Kaspersky on it, figuring the renewal problem was just a glitch.

Then my desktop machine started losing hard drive space. A hidden file was eating up all the space. WinDirStat showed me that Kaspersky was saving giant log files of doom. Some of them were over 50GB. I deleted the files and meant to call customer support about it, but got too busy. The problem was solved a year later when my hard drive died and I had to re-install from scratch. It is possible that the Kaspersky log files contributed to that crash.

Yet at this point I was still ready to defend Kaspersky as a good program. I don’t know why.

Some update taught Kaspersky to send me continual pop-ups telling me that a newer version was available. I didn’t want to upgrade at that time. No toggle would tell the program to stop doing it. So I lived with near constant pop-up notifications for over a year on two different machines.

The renewals for both Kaspersky installations came up again. They both reminded me endlessly to renew, even though I’d already done it. After the deadline, I went through the click chain to make the program recognize that it had been renewed. It did…for about three days. Then it claimed that my account was expired again. Repeat for several weeks. I tried upgrading in the hope that it would fix the renewal recognition and make the pop ups go away. Two birds, one stone. Then it complained of database mis-matching. I deleted and re-installed the old version. Then Kaspersky took to sending me a warning that I was unprotected every time the machine started up, only to realize that maybe I was protected after all.

I suppose I could have placed customer support calls on these issues, but I don’t think that I should have to place regular customer support calls to figure out how to make a program behave like it should.

Kaspersky on the laptop was broken in some way that seriously slowed down the machine’s restart process. Sometimes it took ten minutes for the computer to be ready to work. I timed it. With Norton installed and Kaspersky removed, the restart time is under a minute.

Last week my desktop machine crashed multiple times. Diagnostics show there is nothing wrong with the hardware. I suspect that the broken Kaspersky installation was conflicting with some other piece of software.

I don’t imagine that everyone has this much trouble with Kaspersky. It wouldn’t be so highly recommended if they did, but I’m done. Norton sends me a polite email telling me when to renew. Then it emails me a receipt. The program itself just runs and updates. I know it won’t be smooth sailing from here out, because for some reason my postage program won’t connect, and I’m going to have to solve that. (But that is a different customer support failure entirely. One that involves a tech on the phone continually asking me if my IT department has done something to my machine and telling me to give a list to my IT department, when I’ve repeatedly made clear, I AM the IT department.) Yet I’m hopeful that I won’t have to think about virus software for at least a year.

Now I just need to re-group and figure out how to re-work my schedule around the fact that I spent four hours of today dealing with computer issues instead of working on the Jay Wake book.

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My Phone at Church

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I had good reasons to be texting and checking twitter during church. Howard was out of town and somewhat stressed. I missed him and wanted to be in touch. On that day, it felt like a reasonable compromise to be in church, but reaching out to my husband. The next week I did not have that excuse, yet my phone was in my hand nearly as often. I thought about it and I thought about church as a place of worship. There are many social and habitual aspects to my church attendance, but I felt that my spiritual connection was sometimes neglected. The hours of meetings taught me, triggered new thoughts, fed my inspiration, and provided space to organize my brain. I responded to these as I usually do, by pulling out my phone and putting things on my task list. But the the phone was open, twitter and email were right there. I decided to spend a week phoneless, to try to focus my thoughts not just on seeking inspiration for my daily existence, but to reach for a sense of connection with the Divine. I wanted to spend time with my Father in Heaven without having an agenda of things to discuss.

I did bring my phone with me, but I left it in my purse. If I thought about an item for my to do list, I wrote it in my notebook. I could put it on my calendar after church. It was interesting to see which items ended up in my notebook compared to the ones on my electronic list. I was free to choose priorities for this week without reference to the priorities of weeks past. It let me realize that each week is a thing unto itself and some tasks don’t need to roll over onto the next week. They can be delayed or let go.

Without my phone I was far more aware of how crowded the meetings are and the heat of the room. I am an introvert, some of those phone checks were a way for me to gain a tiny mental break from the stress of being in a room full of people. I can check out and come back. Some weeks having my phone in hand is a means for me to stay in the meeting rather than fleeing from it. That is useful because there are inspirations which come as a direct result of the lessons and which I would miss if I spent the hour out in the hall where there were fewer people. I spent much time in the halls last summer. It fed me peace and solitude, but not learning.

Did I feel more connected to my Father in Heaven? Yes. It is clear that I should continue to make an effort to leave the phone off unless it is necessary. When I asked today what I should be doing for my family this summer, the answer was to rest. Our family has been granted this period of peace, a time for everything to be calm and normal before Kiki heads off to college. So this will not be an ambitious summer for family things. I have many business things to do, but those should not disrupt the general ease for our family. I also departed church with the sense that I’d had a nice visit with my Father in Heaven and that he hopes I’ll come visit again next week and leave my schedule at home.

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Kids Staying Home Solo

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I pinned the list of meals to our bulletin board. The matching ingredients were stocked in the fridge and the freezer. The list did not matter so much, because I knew that my two oldest children would likely ignore it once I was gone from the house, but requiring them to help me make the list accomplished two things. It forced them to think through the process of feeding themselves for four days while mom was not around to make food appear and it calmed that portion of my brain that worried about leaving them. They were old enough. Kiki was recently turned eighteen and thus a legal adult able to move out on her own. Link was fifteen, plenty capable to take care of himself under the supervision of his adult sister. The younger two children would be elsewhere, under the care of adults who were accustomed to managing kids. So I pinned the list and let go, wondering what my two oldest would discover about themselves and adulthood in my absence.

Kiki wrote me nightly emails with titles like “day one of solitary” in which she reported on how they were managing. By day three their sleep schedules had done the expected shift toward staying up very late and sleeping late. They also spent their time absorbed in separate electronic worlds, playing games and interacting very little. On the third day Kiki called me. “This is hard.” She said. I listened to the ways in which it was hard, none of which were actually dangerous or life threatening. I knew that all of my children were safe, but they were having age appropriate experiences with being away from parents. I found myself doing the opposite of the cliché and urging my kids to invite friends over while I was gone. Because I know my kids and I know their friends. There was greater risk in them feeling isolated and depressed than there was in teenage boys coming over to play video games for half a day. So Link’s friends came over and just having people and noise in the house was comforting to them both.

I returned home on Saturday evening. Both Gleek and Patch had returned home before me, so the house was re-populated even before I arrived. They were playing video games and my arrival was met with them glancing up and saying “Oh, hi Mom” then returning to the games. Kiki did put hers down long enough to give me a hug. I stood in the kitchen surveying the backs of their heads, feeling both glad that my absence had not been traumatic and a little under appreciated. It meant I’d done my job well. They were far more ready for their separate adventures than they’d anticipated.

I’ve reached the part of parenting where my job is not to hold tight and keep safe, but to slowly release. We still have at least eight years before they’re all launched, but the process has begun. And they are ready for it, because I can step out of their lives for a few days and they manage just fine.

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Summer Heats Up and Slows Down

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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.

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Gaining Ground

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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.

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Full of Things

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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.

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Of New Cars and Liquid Nitrogen

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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.

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Making the Leap to Creative Work Without Damaging a Marriage

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During one of the classes at the Writing Excuses Retreat, Howard and I told the story of when he quit his managerial job at Novell so that he could become a cartoonist. This represented a significant financial shift for our family and resulted in lots of frugal living for several years. After the class was over, one of the attendees came up to us and asked how we’d approached that shift in a way that did not destroy our marriage. We answered her, but since then I’ve thought of additional factors which contributed. So here are the reasons that our marriage survived a major lifestyle shift. They are in no particular order.

*It was our decision and a mutual dream. I was not just the spouse along for the ride, I was always a partner and facilitator. If I had not been, the experiment would have failed and Howard would have returned to a corporate job. In fact, I was the one who first said “I think it is time for you to quit.” This did not prevent it from being scary later, but I knew I’d signed up for it, not been dragged along.

*Our marriage was in good shape before we made the leap. By that time we’d been together for ten years. We’d built solid communication and learned how to work together. There wasn’t any underlying tension to be increased by stress.

*Howard always made clear that our marriage and supporting our family came first. He did not just pay lip service to this idea, by the time he quit Novell I’d seen him make sacrifices for me and the kids. To emphasize the importance of paying for our family, we picked a failure point after which we would give up on cartooning and Howard would seek another corporate job. Then we worked as hard as we could to never reach that failure point. It was close more than once.

*The leap to cartooning was not a surprise. It was always our shared dream that Howard be able to make a living at a creative career. I knew this from very early in our dating. All of our financial decisions were based on the hope that someday we would make the leap the creative work.

*We are both believers in prayer and divine inspiration. Both of us felt strongly that this was the path God was asking us to take. We proceeded with much faith and a measure of fear.

*We don’t fight mean. We are able to be angry with a situation or even with our spouse, and still approach the discussion of that anger without name calling or other destructive coping mechanisms. We walk away, cool down, and then return to discuss.

There are other factors I’m sure. Making the switch definitely added strain to our lives. Yet we stood together and our marriage has grown stronger through it.

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