Snippets from the past few days

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This has been a week where I danced to the tune of someone else’s piping. There were a few items that I got to schedule, but my choices were limited by the many things where I had to adhere to someone else’s schedule. On top of that were the last minute occurrences which required shifting to accommodate. All that and I’ve only reached Tuesday evening. It has been a busy two days in which I did not have time to think long and luxurious thoughts. I could only grab snippets.

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The trees we planted 12 year ago when we moved in to this house are now mature. We finally have shady canopy over most of the yard. At this season of the year our yard is completely carpeted with fallen leaves. When we rake, we will have some truly epic leaf pile jumping. Hopefully we’ll get a couple of nice mild days to dry the leaves out and make them crackle again. Thanksgiving is a great time for raking and jumping. First I’ll need to re-locate all of the rake handles which were pressed into service as staves and walking sticks during the summer.

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Dear Doctor,
You are a responsible medical professional and I don’t think you meant the words the way that I heard them, but no I do not want to pick a medication for my daughter based on what will “calm her down.” I like her energetic. I love the way that her brain fizzles with ideas and she learns a mile a minute. What I want is a medicine which will give her the ability to steer so that she can direct her life toward whichever bright future she chooses. It is possible that none of the medicines will provide that, in which case we will do without. The point is to help her grow strong and healthy in mind and body, not to make my life easier.

***

Had my first church Activities Committee meeting tonight. Came away from it with a new list of things to do and a list of things that I don’t have to worry about anymore because other people are going to do them. I also realized that one of the primary purposes of a church party is not the party itself, but the group effort and cooperation required to make the party work. Working together builds connections and friendships. This is what I failed to do with the Halloween party. The Christmas party is on the right track.

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During the committee meeting, Gleek and Patch were sent upstairs with instructions to “find something quiet to do.” Before the meeting was over they came sneaking back downstairs to show me how they had made their very own worry dolls using bits of wood, feathers, string, and tissue that they rummaged from odd corners of the house. I’m not sure what prompted this action since it has been years since we lost the little bag of worry dolls given to us by their Grandma. Now Gleek has a worry doll tucked into her backpack, specifically for school. Another is tucked under her pillow. The rest are in a little pouch on her neck that she made from a scrap of fabric. Patch only made one doll, but it has its own pouch too. Gleek gave one to me. I shall have to find a special place for it to live and carry my worries away. I could use more of that.

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Even before the gifted worry doll, I don’t have as many worries this week as I did last week. People have been buying boxed sets of Schlock Mercenary. This is wonderful because now I have the financial resources I need to manage upcoming expenses. It is one of the miracles I needed which has arrived.

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Link had some friends over the other day. They were using a camera to make silly movies. I listened to the rowdiness and realized that my son was the instigator. He had the plan. He called his friends and made it happen. Somehow in the social lives of these boys (there are about five of them) Link is the one who organizes and calls everyone together. This is not the person I expected when I worried about my non-verbal, socially-awkward son 6 years ago. I’m happy to see how far he has come.

***

Kiki, Howard, and Gleek all make time in their day to sit in the garage and pet the cat. Then they come into the house and lint roll thoroughly to remove allergens. I love that the cat came to us. I love that we get to keep her. I love that allergic reactions have not prevented this.

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This week the live action version of Inspector Gadget is Link’s very favorite movie. Showings have been almost daily. It may be a while before Netflix gets it back. Link deserves to have a fun movie this week. He has been working really hard on multiple scouting merit badges which have been full of character building experiences. He is feeding his brain and learning a lot, but not always in the ways that he would prefer.

***

Howard is home. He was gone for five days, but he is home now. This makes me happy. His luggage is not home yet. It decided to take a trip to New York without him and stay over for an extra day. Perhaps it took in a show or two. In theory it will arrive in Salt Lake tonight and be delivered to us. The adventures of Howard’s luggage have had no impact on our well being or happiness. He has plenty of clothes here. It’ll show up eventually. I’m too busy being happy that Howard is home to spare any of my brain for worrying about luggage.

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One reason e-books cost more than you think they should

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Books are electronic files before they are ever printed on paper. Publishers can just reformat the files and voila, e-book. It seems so simple, but unfortunately it is not. Each type of e-reader has a different proprietary format to which files are required to conform. It is as if each bookstore chain had different requirements before they would put the books on their shelves.

Say for example that Barnes & Noble required that all books be printed on 10 lb paper, but that the book be no more than an inch thick so that they fit on the shelves. So the layout designer drops the font size and makes the book paperback in order to meet requirements. Amazon says that books can be as thick as you want, but they must be less than 9 inches tall and the font can be no smaller than 12 points. This requires layout re-adjustment although it is theoretically possible that one layout would match both. Then the independent sellers declare that they will only carry hardback books printed on high quality paper with blue ink. The layout designers work must be done again.

Each of the e-book formats must be learned and adjusted for. In theory you could pay to have an automated system to take a file and transform it into all of the formats. Automated systems save piles of time and effort, except when they do the opposite. The simple find-and-replace feature in a word processing program can easily change the name Ben to the name Lyle throughout a document. It will also change the word benefit into lylefit. A human has to scan through for errors and fix them by hand. Add in time and effort spent on the times when automated programs fail to work catastrophically for reasons unknown. If the book in question has any graphic elements, increase by 10x the level of difficulty in getting a readable result.

In order to put out a book into 5 different e-readable formats, a human must be employed to check the e-book five different times across five platforms. That human then has to tweak and correct introduced errors before the book is sold. An employed human must be paid. Until an e-book is sold in sufficient quantities to spread out the preparation cost across millions of copies, that e-book will have a price point similar to the cost of a paper book.

The printing, binding, shipping, and warehousing of paper are really the smallest part of the cost of a book.

Edited to add: I’ve had enough reasoned counter arguments posted to convince me that I am not an expert in the field of e-books. I’m going to let this post stand because it was what I thought when I wrote it.

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Writer fugue and calling meetings

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Writer fugue is when the worlds inside my head obscure my ability to see/respond to the things surrounding me. It would be nice if every occurrence of writer fugue resulted in pages of amazing prose, but sadly this is not the case. I did some note taking, a little bit of drafting, and lots of thinking. Sadly, the other things in my day did not get sufficient attention.

Primary among these things is arranging for an activities committee meeting so I can assemble a team for the church Christmas party. I simply can’t pull that one off solo. And yet I keep procrastinating calling the meeting. I would not mind attending the meeting. I think I’ll actually enjoy being in charge of the meeting. I know the meeting is critical, but I don’t like arranging for the meeting to exist. At this point, I’ll have to schedule it for Tuesday instead of tomorrow in order to give people enough notice.

I need some more focus and prioritization. It’s good that tomorrow is Sunday and such things are much more likely to be found there.

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Scattered thoughts

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Some days I stare at this white box on my screen and describing the day is hard. This is not because the day was full of exciting events, usually the opposite. My day was full of small busy things which completely filled my brain and left very little space for arranging thoughts into a pretty pattern. I had many thoughts today. My mind was much occupied while my hands and arms assembled 50 boxed sets and put them in packages. It was similarly occupied while I loaded those packages into our van and then unloaded them at the post office.

I thought much about several internet brouhahas which stirred up my circles of acquaintance. I though gratefully about the arrival of necessary miracles. I looked at the countries on the shipping forms and was amazed once again that people thousands of miles away will buy things from us. I thought about my kids, their needs and the things I need to keep track of on their behalf. I thought about Doctor Who. This last, primarily because I re-watched some episodes while packing boxes. Packing while watching was a little slower but much more enjoyable.

I intended to write when the work was all done, but my thoughts are scattered everywhere and I think I am too tired to collect them. Also, typing reminds me that my fingers are sore from building boxes. So I will do my project writing on a more collected day.

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Performance Review

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In the stress of packing Howard for his latest away-from-home convention, he and I had some cross-communication come to light. Unfortunately due to the packing stress it manifested in unpleasant ways. In some ways it was like accidentally elbowing someone in the gut when you really meant to vent frustration on an inanimate object instead. Everyone was sorry, but recovery still has to occur. As I sorted and settled things in my brain, I started thinking about all the roles I fill and wondering how I would evaluate my performance in them. I figured it was a useful mental exercise, and might even result in some enlightenment on my part.

I sat down and listed all the roles I fill. There were a lot of them. Then I pretended that I was my own boss and rated my performance in each role: Brilliant, Excellent, Good, Adequate, Poor, Bad, Abysmal. Occasionally I made notes like: Could be better at this if I spent more time on it. The most interesting realization I gained from the process was seeing that my personal enjoyment of a process did not directly correlate to how well I did at it. For example I feel like I’m an adequate-to-good layout designer, but a good-to-excellent shipping manager and given my choice I would hand off the shipping work to someone else while keeping the layout work. Other than that, the scores were about what I would expect. Which should not surprise me since I was giving them to myself.

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Grocery Shopping and Observation

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Sometime in the past month I followed a link labeled “A good reminder” to read a story about a father and son in the grocery store. This father repeatedly scowled and reprimanded his son for small things and the observer, who later blogged, talked about how sad it was that the father was killing his son’s confidence and native curiosity. Many comments to the blog post agreed how sad it was. Some even went on to share further stories about parents who displayed similar callousness toward their children in public places. I read it all and I could see the horrible uncaring parent the blogger saw. I could see the need of a reminder to all parents to remember what treasures children are and how we should value them. That reminder is always good. Then I tip my head to the side and I see things differently. I wonder what happened between that father and son before they came to the store. I wonder what the father’s day has been like, what his life has been like. I wonder why he is at the store with his child instead of coming alone.

Today I was the callous parent at the store. Gleek danced in the aisles, her glance landing with delight on multitudinous shiny things. I pushed the cart and repeated an unending litany of “No. Slow down. Watch out. Stop it. Come back here. Stay with me.” Some days I love the way she fizzles with energy and ideas. Other days it is all I can do not to scream with frustration. We arrived at the store with my frustration level high. She wandered off this afternoon. Again. I had to locate her. Again. She was with friends, perfectly safe, not even technically out of bounds. Except that she was not where I’d given her permission to go. So then she had to stay in the house and the backyard, which made her grouchy. She shared her grouchiness and would not settle down for homework. Then I found her out front, or rather at the side of the house, which she insisted she didn’t realize counted as the front yard. Then I had to restrict her to the house.

Hoping to inject something positive into the evening, I offered to take her to the store if she did her homework without complaints. She did the work, but complained, stomped, and was angry. I had to weigh the unpleasantness of leaving without her against the guilt of bending my word to take her anyway. A strict approach might teach a lesson about work or it might send her off into a fit of self loathing wherein she declares she can do nothing right. A lenient approach might provide a positive relationship building experience, or it might reinforce the fact that she can get away with bending the requirements. The answers would be clearer if I knew she was intentionally pushing limits, defying me. But she isn’t. She isn’t conniving or malicious. If she were, she would go much farther afield. As it is she remains tethered by a desire to be good.

So I was conflicted when we arrived at the store, and her skipping, dancing, ninja-sneaking traverse through the store wore my nerves thin. To an observer I may very well have looked like a heartless parent. Some of my consequences and decisions may have seemed out of proportion with the offenses. There are times when I know that the right parenting path will appear wrong to those who don’t know the full story. Because a grocery trip does not happen in isolation. It is a piece of a day, part of a larger pattern. Sadly, today’s pattern was frazzled and unfocused.

As she darted through the parking lot in the dark, wearing black clothes, despite my admonition to stay close, I thought, again, that it might be time for me to write the sequel to Hold on to Your Horses. I don’t know that another story will help, but the last one did. It is worth a try.

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Beating back the lurking illness

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It has been a very low productivity day. I think this is because all of my spare energy has been siphoned into beating back the cold that is trying to make me sick. I’ve kept the thing at bay like Dr. Van Helsing hanging garlic and crosses in Lucy’s bedroom to keep Count Dracula out. Unfortunately I fear that like Lucy I will eventually succumb and be walking dead. Or at least sniffling miserable. I have a much better chance of recovery than Lucy, so all is not lost. For now I will keep to my regimen of vitamin C and rest.

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No answers, just observations on napping and being on duty

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I took a nap this afternoon. It was interrupted twice in quick succession by Link who was asking permission to play a video game and then to play a different video game. I don’t remember the words of my response, but apparently they were sufficiently affirmative that he went away happy. My half-asleep brain pondered the occurrence with a grumpy tone of voice. Does no one respect my need for sleep? The kids will see Dad asleep and tip toe out of the room, but have no compunction at all about waking me from a sound sleep to ask their questions. This is true even when their Dad is around. Our kids have been known to walk out of the room where Howard is in order to wake me up and ask a question.

The simple solution would be for me to lock the door. Faced with a locked door, the kids would go find their Dad to get their problems solved. I don’t lock the door when I lay down for a nap. Half the time I don’t even close the door. To close and lock the door would be a declaration that the next period of time is designated for a nap. Somehow in my mind I’m only sneaking a nap. I still feel on-duty, so I leave the door open so I can still hear and respond to crises. It is silly, because unconscious people are not very watchful. When the kids were little I was clearly on duty and I didn’t sleep unless they were also sleeping or someone else was specifically assigned to watch them. Somewhere the lines got blurred.

After the interruptions I got a solid hour of sleep, so my nap was far from ruined. This is usually the case, which is part of why I’ve never taken steps to train the kids not to wake me. It is important for me to be available to them as much as I can, because sometimes I have to work.

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The creation of ephemeral art (also known as pumpkin carving)

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The sun shone brightly across the shallow concrete slab that serves as our front porch. The brightness only imparted a mild warmth, just enough to make being outside pleasant in the sixty degree air. Wielding a serrated knife, I surveyed the project at hand. Two forty pound pumpkins had adorned our porch slab for the last month, given us by my uncle who had a bounteous harvest of giant pumpkins. During their sojourn on our porch they had been sat upon, poked, shifted, and photographed. This last being the most frequent occurance as both my daughters felt it was imperative to get a Halloween picture of our mostly-black cat posed nicely in front of (or on top of) the pumpkins. The cat was not thrilled by this project, being much more interested in sitting on the lap of the photographer. Persistence did finally win and the cat and the pumpkins were made to be in the same photograph.

Now it was time for the pumpkins to become something cooler. I ran my hand over the pocked surface, marred by dozens of children discovering that the skin could be pierced without very much effort. The pumpkins had taken up a sideways position, which is common for weighty melons as one side flattens while they grow. I determined a top and a bottom, then began to cut.

When I asked the kids who wanted to carve pumpkins, Kiki and Link declared their indifference. This left the two big pumpkins for the two kids to whom jack-o-lanterns are still very important. I pried the tops open so the kids could peer inside. Rot was beginning to show on the insides, which did not surprise me. One way or another these huge gourds were headed for the compost heap. Much more interesting to arrive there with a face. Lighter too. The kids scooped out pounds of seeds and strings. Complaining about the grossness of the project only briefly before embracing the melon mess. I helped with the scraping, but we did not try to make the insides completely clean, just clear enough for a candle to sit.

I picked up the spoons and carried them inside to trade for the kid-safe pumpkin carving tools, leaving the kids designing faces on paper. Once the designs were transferred, the kids began cutting. I seated myself on the stairs, ready to help when they got tired. They didn’t. Patch carefully cut out the pieces of a classic scary Jack-o-lantern face. He leaned in close, carefully sawing along the lines we’d drawn. Gleek’s design was more fanciful. She drew a cat contemplating peace (as represented by a thought bubble filled with a peace symbol.)
“Everyone is going to love your design.” Gleek said to Patch.
“Thanks.” Patch said, then leaned over to see her working on carving out an ear. “I think most people will like yours.”
Gleek nodded. “Mine is more complicated. Not everybody will get it.”
Both heads bent back to their work.

I closed my eyes and savored the feel of the day. Our family has had Halloweens hectic and calm, warm and snowy, with pumpkin carving and without. It was nice to be an observer of pumpkin carving rather than the motivating force. There is joy in ephemeral art. The kids can let their pumpkins be whatever they wish, because no matter how it looks today, next week it will be withered and flat. The process matters more than the result, so I sat and savored the process.

The pumpkin carvers wound down to a finish just as gray clouds drifted across the sun. It was not a storm, just a sneaky shift from beautiful afternoon into rainy evening. We timed our efforts perfectly. Tonight we will light candles and enjoy our pair of giant jack-o-lanterns.

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The various dramas of costuming

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Our October costuming began in September when Kiki informed me that she needed a full costume by October 9th when she and her friends planned to attend an Anime convention. So I sacrificed three days on the altar of costuming. The result was worn and much appreciated. Unfortunately the outfit still left Kiki feeling a bit exposed (like wearing pajamas in public) and failed to be stunningly cool. So that costume was shelved and will probably only be worn again if the outfit appeals to Gleek in a few years.

At that point, my costuming energy was all used up, which is not a great state for the beginning of October. However I did realize that had I not sacrificed my time and money, Kiki would have applied her own creativity and probably found a costume she liked much better. So I took a laissez faire approach to costuming. When Link said he wanted to be Master Chief from Halo. I said “Great! Make it yourself or save up the money.” In the end he decided to buy the costume for next year and just wear his Legend of Zelda Link costume for another year.

I expected to be assailed by Gleek and/or Patch at some point during the month. I thought for sure that they would have a grand idea and be begging me to make it. Instead, they raided our copious supply of costume bits and put together their own outfits.

Patch did so methodically. His first conception was a Master Chief outfit and he started with some olive green shin guards and a helmet left over from a costume Link wore several years ago. We wore that for a few days, then added some bright blue knee pads. He discovered the belt from last year’s ninja outfit and used it to hold his toy guns. This outfit was fairly standard for a couple of days, but then he decided to add the shoulder piece from his ninja costume while ditching the guns and the helmet. He was completely satisfied with the result. He wore it all over his regular clothes to both the Halloween Carnival last week and today’s school parties.

Gleek was much more haphazard. She conceived the idea at the beginning of the month as an excuse to wear a flowing red cloak. Her ideas shifted and changed as she discussed the possibility of matching costumes with Bestfriend. When it finally came time to dress for the carnival, she grabbed the cloak and Kiki painted her eyes for her. Kiki did not attend the carnival because she didn’t know what to wear.

This morning was the big costume day at school. Link did not wear a costume at all. Gleek decided she wanted streaks of color in her hair which resulted in globs of red and black hair gel, tangles, tears, and a declaration that this was the worst Halloween ever. We combed through it and made it work. Gleek discovered to her delight that bright red lipgloss can also be applied as fake blood to the corners of her mouth. So she got ever more creepy as her black eyeshadow smeared and the glossy blood trails lengthened.

Kiki found a good costume compromise by dressing goth, which is not at all her usual style. The last minute costuming required me to make a quick run for hairspray so we could do something spiky with her hair, but a 15 minute run to the grocery store is a much more acceptable donation of my time than three days of sewing. Kiki claims she intends to make a Samus suit for next year’s costume. I’ve told her if she wants to do the research and effort, I will support her, but it is her project not mine.

In the end they are all happy with what they put together. All of the costumes had compromises, but since the kids made all the decisions, they were happy with the results. I need to remember this for next year.

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