Link’s Cheevo Book

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“I definitely earned the cheevo for agony.” Link said as we drove away from the doctor’s office. It took me a moment to parse this statement and I only half succeeded when I remembered that cheevo is video gamer slang for achievement. It refers to badges one can earn by accomplishing things in video games. We had not been playing video games, we’d just exited the doctor’s office after having Link’s ingrown toenail removed.

“You earned a cheevo?” I said, trying to sound like I knew what he was talking about while gathering more information.

“Yup. I need to write it down in my notebook.”

“You have a notebook for cheevos?” I was an awesome conversationalist on this particular day.

“The one I got in my stocking for Christmas. I’m using it to keep track of all my cheevos.”

Further conversation clarified that when Link is faced with something challenging, he makes a cheevo for it in his book. When he accomplishes that difficult thing, he draws himself a little badge as a reward. It seems to me that a notebook full of cheevos is a good thing to have. I love that he made it for himself.

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Forty Year Old Eyes

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I’ve been looking forward to turning forty. I planned to reach my birthday and proclaim my age in defiance of cultural custom where women either dread their fortieth birthday or lie about their ages, or both. But lately my eyes have been harder to focus. What used to happen in an unnoticeable instant now takes an extra minute. It is like the lag on a slow internet connection. I have also been getting some headaches. So I trundled myself off to an eye doctor thinking that perhaps my glasses needed updating. I’ve had them for eight years. They’re due. I got there and described my troubles.
“How old are you?” asked the doctor
“Forty in two weeks.”
“Ah. The forties are not good to eyes.” He then described how I could expect things to get worse, advised that maybe I could look under my glasses when trying to focus close, and said that when it gets to the point that I’m holding books at arms length it’ll be time for bifocals. He also told me that once a person starts noticing vision differences, things deteriorate pretty quickly.
Why was I looking forward to forty again?

It is silly to be upset by a predictable body shift. I knew that eyes change as they get older. I knew that people have to get reading glasses and bifocals. Yet I am upset and I’m trying to untangle why. Perhaps it is the dissonance. Bifocals, having to hold books at a distance, and large print editions are all things I associate with being old. But I don’t feel old. Forty isn’t old. Yet forty is when these vision changes tend to begin.

The doctor ushered me out to the showroom area saying “If you’re interested in frames, these lovely ladies will be happy to help you.” The lovely ladies in question were completely absorbed by their computers, except for the one who was leaning against the wall and chatting with one of the computer ladies. I shuffled my way down the rows of frames, not really seeing them. Picking out something to wear on my face every day for the next several years felt too daunting. I dutifully looked at each frame in each row while the lovely ladies continued to ignore me. When I reached the last row I knew I was too occupied with the thoughts in my head to be able to decide on glasses, so I walked off into the larger store. Yes, I went to an optometrist inside a big box store. Eight years ago they were fine. This time the service was underwhelming. The only problem was that I’d walked off without paying for the exam, a fact I remembered later when I got home. Which meant I had to go back out into the cold and drive back to the store to pay. It was a forgetful/distracted act of the sort which usually causes me to spout profuse apologies. I couldn’t find the energy to apologize when they’d neglected to provide any sort of customer service at all. I do take a strange satisfaction in the fact that I arrived to pay just after they’d clocked out. So I did cause them some inconvenience, though I’m not sure if that is matched by me having to spend an additional 15 minutes driving in a sub-freezing vehicle.

While I was at the big box store I returned an item and went to go pick up one other thing that Howard asked me to get. I was also supposed to pick up a treat for the kids. Except I couldn’t remember what Howard asked me to get. I called him for help remembering. Then I paid and left only to remember that I was supposed to get a treat too. So I went back into the store and purchased the treats in a separate transaction. Yesterday was not a good day for focused attention to detail.

The next day things look brighter. They usually do. Which is why one of the optical purchases I’ll be making will be a pair of non-metaphorical sunglasses. I’m tired of having to squint will driving in the snow which continues to cover every available outdoor surface. As for growing older, I suspect I’m having the forty year old version of the upset Gleek had a couple of weeks ago when she curled into my lap and cried because she doesn’t want to grow up. All of my kids have had a similar cry right around the time that they turn twelve. I’m having my moment of “getting old” angst. This means it is time for me to get on with living my life so that forty is a good place to be.

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Renewing My Spaces

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Every so often we would look at our walls and say “We really need to repaint.” Sometimes the words were triggered by corners where the paint had completely chipped away, other times it was contemplating the way that dirt collected on the sections of walls in front of the studs, thus creating a grid pattern in dirt. The declaration of the need to paint was always a launching point for the conversation, because if we were going to improve why stop with paint. “These cupboard need to go. The drawer fronts are breaking off. While we’re at it we should move the pantry and knock out this wall to connect the kitchen and the front room. Then we can expand off the back to add a dining room.” Soon we’ve imagined spending enough money to double our mortgage and the whole project gets filed in the “when we can afford it” pile to get dusty.

The problem is that the state of the walls triggered this sort of conversation increasingly often. We began to feel like the house is falling apart and we were powerless to fix it. We weren’t. It just required me to think about it differently. I had to think of fixing the house in small pieces rather than in massive projects. I had to apply the “do a little every day” philosophy which does not come naturally to me, but which I’ve learned is amazingly effective at getting things done. I needed to see the need for paint and treat that as a project in itself rather than as a small piece of a larger project. I’ve been staring at ugly paint in the front room for the last ten years. Putting new paint on the walls took $80 and 15 hours of work. I spread out that work over a week and a half, moving furniture and washing walls, masking, and only on the final two days breaking out the drop cloths and paint. Now the walls of my front room make me feel accomplished instead of helpless. It leaves me excited to proceed with putting on baseboards and finally replacing that stupid plastic windowsill which we’ve hated since the day we moved into the house fifteen years ago. Each of these projects takes some time, but if I spread out the work it becomes and enjoyable project rather than a massive and disruptive effort.

How we arrange our physical spaces can have a major effect on our mental spaces. I noticed this when we remodeled my office last year. The moment when I realized it was possible to remove a wall and join a closet into the room let me imagine the room I wanted instead of the room I was stuck with. I don’t think it is coincidence that I’ve been finding mental energy for my writing and projects since I created a physical space for them. So now that the walls in my front room are a pleasure to look at, I’m also looking around the room and thinking “What do I need this space to be?” Our front room should be a home for our antique piano, a place where people can enter our house and sit down to visit, and a staging area for things entering and exiting the house. It’s done fairly well at two out of three, but I don’t know that it has every succeeded at being a pleasant place to sit and visit. We’re going to fix that. Fixing it will require me to once again knock down a closet wall. It’s not that I have a thing against closets. I like them a lot, but not when they’re plunked in the middle of floor space which could best be used for actual living.

Little by little this house is going to be customized for the way we live. It will be full of small thoughtful details because such things delight me, and making my home full of small happy details seems like a worthwhile pursuit. The process will be slow, because both money and time have to be carefully apportioned, but $80 and 15 hours is well worth being able to sit in my front room without hating the walls.

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Painting the Front Room

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January is a cold month with far too little daylight, so I try to fill it with fun projects. That way I blink and it is over.

This is our front room. It hasn’t been painted since before we moved into the house. We’ve found it fascinating that the dirt accumulates differently depending upon whether there is a stud behind the sheetrock or just an insulation filled space. At this point you can clearly see a complete grid of where all the studs are in the wall. It feels rather like a jail.

So I bought paint. It is called Castle Stone, but the castle in question must be a sand castle because I would call the color Sand. Over the past week I’ve been shoving things around and prepping for paint. Today I painted the first section.

It still needs a second coat and the rest of the room needs to match. We’ve also discovered another hazard of making home improvements. Now the kitchen looks even worse than it did before. I don’t think I can stop painting when the front room is done. But for today I can feel accomplished while the paint dries.

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Not Quite the end of a Very Long Week

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There is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 called Life Serial. In it the villains place a device on Buffy which messes with time. She’s walking into class then blinks and class is over. She takes a few steps toward her next class and then she’s missed that one too. My whole day has felt like that. I look up from my computer and realize that 90 minutes have passed and I still haven’t done the thing I sat down to do. In my case I don’t have a device or villains to blame, just lack of sleep. It feels weak to claim that. I’ve managed on less. I used to do it on a regular basis when my kids were still waking me up in the middle of the night every single night. Of course Patch did wake me up this week because he was sick. And then I never napped to make up for it, because this was the first work week of a new year, the first full week back at school, the last week of the term for my two teenagers, and so many things were more pressing than sleep. Which landed me in today when my brain just stopped functioning properly.

The printer ran out of toner. This is a normal complication in a work day. Except in the holiday rush I forgot to place an order for toner cartridges. I had to go to an office supply store. Thus instead of spending five minutes printing postage, putting out packages for the mailman, and taking a nap; I drove to the store and back, returned to see the mail truck driving away from my house, printed the postage, drove the packages down to the post office, and then got back just in time to begin the after school pick ups. With extra trips out to conference with Link’s English teacher because the term ends tomorrow and there is last minute work to do tonight. The whole package thing wouldn’t have been today’s problem at all if I’d had my act together any time in the last four days when I knew those packages had to be sent before today. But the last four days had their own urgencies, their own lists of things which must be done today to prevent future crisis.

My whole week has been like that Google app Martin Van Buren commercial. The one where the kid shows up to breakfast saying “It is dress like a president day. I’m supposed to be Martin Van Buren.” So the mom slaps together an amazing costume in ten minutes. I have rescued and salvaged so many things this week. Little things which never had a chance to turn into big things. Little things which probably I should not have rescued, but I was in super-rescue mode and didn’t pause to think whether the little thing needed my time and attention. I could have let a lot more slide. I could have rearranged sleep higher on the priority list. Instead I find myself at the end of Thursday, wishing it was Friday, knowing I had a super productive week, but feeling like I failed.

At least today I’m thinking about dinner before it is already 6 pm. That’s a first for this week.

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School Projects

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The teacher assigns a project to my child who then explains it to me. The communication chain seems simple, particularly when it is also facilitated by a note directly from the teacher to parents. I am very grateful for those notes, because projects tend to transform inside my children’s heads. Patch is supposed to research and present on traditional clothing for one of the Utah Native American tribes. The teacher pictures him using class time to make clothing out of butcher paper. Patch pictures me making two buckskin dresses, three pairs of leggings, several loincloths, six pairs of moccasins, a vest, and a top hat. Beaded. When I express reluctance to do all of this sewing, Patch’s eyes get wide with panic because his assignment will be wrong. Talking with the teacher clears everything up and Patch begins to happily plan and cut butcher paper clothes.

Gleek tells me intensely that she has to pick a science fair project that will make the world a better place. It has to be meaningful and helpful. I know that the point is to learn and practice scientific method, so we settle on and experiment to test the effect of fertilizer on algal growth in pond water. It is an experiment that has been done a bazillion times before, which is fine. We don’t need to change the whole world with one project. We just need to change one child by helping her learn. That in turn will help change the world eventually.

I both love and hate school projects, but most of the reasons I dislike them are due to translation errors as the instructions pass through the brains of my kids.

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Orem Writes

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The Orem Public Library is running a series for writers during the month of January. They’ve even made a handy flier for you to peruse.

See my name there on January 30 for the blogging panel? I do and it makes me really happy. You don’t want to miss any of the other evenings either. It is a great line up and it starts tomorrow.

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Courageous Link

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Imagine that you have a child with sensory issues. These issues aren’t really an elephant in the room, they’re more like the coffee table you always have to sidestep in order to cross the room. Yes it is an obstacle, but you get so used to stepping around it that you hardly notice anymore. Link is that child. I used to have to cut his fingernails while he slept because attempting it when he was awake was either a two-adults-pin-the-child-down ordeal or a multi-hour long negotiation. Haircuts were similarly traumatic to the point that he spent most of his early childhood in various stages of buzz cut to completely shaggy because then we only had to have a confrontation about it very six months or so. I was so very grateful when Link took charge of his own fingernails. The arguments vanished and I stopped thinking about sensory things as an issue at all. It stopped affecting my daily life because Link was managing for himself. That let me forget that Link still deals with this stuff every day.

Now imagine this child with sensory issues gets an infected ingrown toenail. To prevent catastrophic infection, a minor surgical procedure is necessary. Link is now 15 and outweighs me. There is no way I could hold him down anymore. Fortunately I did not have to. We sat together and talked, noticing how it is one thing to logically agree that yes this needs to be done, but a different thing completely to sit still while someone sticks a needle into your toe. Link was marvelous. He was anxious, nervous, and jumpy, but he held still when it mattered. The procedure also demonstrated that he has super powered nerves in his toes or perhaps heightened perceptions of sensory input in his brain. It took half again as many deadening shots as are usually necessary and Link could still feel some pain. I watched my son and knew what courage looks like. It looks like holding still when every instinct tells you to flee.

It is done. The healing can begin, and hopefully we’ll not have to do this again ever.

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Adventures in Social Media

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I want to fund a picture book, The Strength of Wild Horses, and the obvious choice for that is to run a Kickstarter drive. However those who are wise in the ways of Kickstarter have advised me that the project has a better chance to fund if I do some community building first. This makes sense to me.

Completely separate from my Kickstarter project I have been thinking about ways to build community and about some ways I’d like to do that which are difficult to do from this blog. Or rather, I could do them from the blog, but I am interested in seeing how it would feel to run a different sort of place on the internet. I want to run a series of posts talking about different picture books, how they show character traits which are common in high energy ADHD or Autistic kids, and how parents can use those books to help kids and their siblings to come to terms with these traits. It was to accomplish exactly this that I wrote Hold on to Your Horses in the first place. I’ve had a growing list of books for years and would love to find a useful way to share that list.

I’ve also been thinking about stages of parenting. I’m in the middle of parenting headed for the endgame. Several times I’ve had parents who are just starting out come to my blog hoping to find posts about the early years of parenting. There are some. Patch was only a year old when I began blogging, but I’ve grown as writer since then. I’ve grown as a parent since then. My perspectives have changed and I have new thoughts about old topics. I thought it would be interesting to run a series where I link to an old post and then provide commentary from my current perspective. It isn’t the same as me going through being a young parent myself, but it would help me delve into those topics. It is certainly a worthy experiment.

I’ve also been thinking about cross promotion. Many times people find Howard because of Writing Excuses (or some other project) then they find me because of Howard. Having multiple creative pursuits reaches into different groups of people. For a long time I’ve been dependent on Howard’s internet stature as the primary promotional tool for my creative work. Except we have different audiences and I’ve been feeling like it is time for me to strike out on my own to build my own community which is not annexed to his. In the long run I must do this if I want to be able to afford to create the things I want to create. I need to believe that Hold Horses and One Cobble are works strong enough to be the foundation of a community.

All of these thoughts connected with the advice to build community in advance of running a Kickstarter and the result is an experiment that I intend to run for the next several months. I’m going to extend myself a little bit further online to see what I can accomplish. I’ve picked venues where I’m already comfortable and have been for awhile: Facebook, G+, and Twitter. These are places I like to play already and so I’m just introducing a new game into those spaces.

On Twitter I’ve just set up an account @OneCobble. It will be a simple feed of links back to this blog. This provides a simple way for those on Twitter to follow the blog without me feeling like I’m spamming everyone with links to blog entries. People who want to see every single blog entry will follow @OneCobble. Others will be able to blissfully ignore it.

On G+ I’ve used the new communities feature to set up a One Cobble at a Time community. This is where I’ll post those blog links with commentary. I’ll also post links to articles of interest. I’m sure I’ll come up with other things as well. I’ll be deliberately trying to encourage conversation about these topics.

I’ve also set up a One Cobble community on Facebook. At first I expect it to be nearly identical to the posts on G+, but I’m quite curious to see how the two communities develop differently. If they don’t become different, it will be because I’m talking to myself and I’m pretty sure I’ll get tired of that in a hurry.

Facebook also has a Hold on to Your Horses page. This is where I’ll post about those picture books. It is also the measure I’ll use to figure out when I have enough community support for a Kickstarter to be successful.

A month from now I’ll evaluate to figure out which of these ventures is adding happiness to my life and which is adding only stress. I’ll see whether I can feel an increase of interest in the things I write and do. Perhaps at the end of that month I’ll pull back inward. I don’t know for sure. I just know that this feels like the right experiment.

I haven’t yet sent out invitations to these new feeds and communities. I’m still debating whether I should or if that feels spammy to me. (It is pretty important to me that I not annoy people by misusing social media tools.) If I do, it won’t be for at least a week. I want to make sure that I’ve already got interesting things in the spaces before inviting everyone. However if any of you blog readers want front row seats while I figure this stuff out, I’d love for you to join me. You’ll be like the guest who arrives early and helps set out the snacks for everyone who will come later. If none of those things sounds interesting, feel free to hang out here. I’ll be keeping this place the same.

Let the social media experiments begin.

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In Which My Brain Skitters Across Many Topics

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At 6 pm I couldn’t figure out what to make for dinner. I had a cupboard full of food ingredients and a row of cook books, but every time I tried to put my mind to solving the problem of dinner, my mind went somewhere else instead. Mostly it mused through some social media outreach I’m planning for Hold Horses and Cobble Stones. I’m both excited by the possibilities and a little worried that I’ll get worn out by it. However when I yanked my mind firmly back to planning dinner, it then galloped off in the other direction to consider the beginning of the year accounting. It is how I spent most of my work day and I’ve gotten it mostly complete. Yet those last few tasks are like a book laying open in the middle of my brain and I keep checking to make sure I remember where I stopped. Then of course I can also consider which step comes next in the project of repainting the front room. My brain also has thoughts about that, but nary a coherent thought about dinner. Fortunately we had frozen meatballs, which the kids did not appreciate nor eat, and left over sloppy joes, which they snarfled down joyfully.

My big conclusion is that I wish the thought of making pretty websites was as exciting to me as the thought of making a pretty dress, but it just sounds drudgerous. Drudgerous really ought to be a word. Wait, that conclusion didn’t match anything that came before? That means it is a fairly accurate representation of how my brain is running this evening. At least we made it through dinner, played a game as a family in which no one had a temper tantrum, finally convinced Link that his ingrown toenail really does need a minor surgical procedure to fix it, and then got 50% of the children into bed.

Did I not mention Link’s toenail before? We’ve been dealing with the thing for a couple of months. I hauled him to the doctor last Friday, but the very idea of letting someone else poke at his feet was unnerving. So we came home with antibiotics and care instructions. They didn’t work. So we’re headed back on Wednesday morning. It is just one in a long line of odd ball doctor visits which means I’m once again good friends with all the office staff. We’ve had a scratched cornea, an abdominal strain, chronic heartburn, and now this toe. We’re not at the end either, coming up is a case of minor eczema which we really ought to get checked, Gleek probably needs braces, and Kiki tells me she’s got wisdom teeth coming in. I dub this the school year of endless minor medical expenses which all add up.

So tomorrow I have a work day. Wednesday will be eaten up by toe treatment. Then Saturday will be entirely consumed by academic testing for Gleek and Patch. I really hope Patch feels better by then. He’s been running a low fever off and on for two days. This test determines whether he’ll be able to stay in the school program that I feel is right for him. I’m trying not to stress about it, or at least to hide my stress so that Patch does not pick up any of it. Fortunately my brain is highly distractable this evening. If I wander into the front room, it will probably start thinking about paint again.

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