Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 102

Assigning My Days

Amazing how much blogging clears my head. By the time I'd finished yesterday's post, I already felt better and more focused. I then proceeded to have a day in which I was able to complete tasks without interruption. Instead of having a head filled with little "must go back to" memory tags, I was able to finish thoughts and fold them away neatly. Space began to open up. I've decided that my first attack on keeping space open is to containerize. I have lots of jobs: Mother, Accountant, Book Keeper, Inventory Manager, Writer, Chauffeur, Cook, Laundress, Graphic Designer, Shipper, Business Manager, etc. I often refer to these jobs as hats that I wear. Most days I swap hats a dozen times or more. This is fine and will probably continue. However I've decided to assign days to all my business hats. On the assigned day that hat gets worn first. For example: On Mondays I am an accountant first. All non-urgent accounting tasks which come up on other days will be assigned to the following Monday. I write down the task and forget about it until I unfold my accounting thoughts on Monday morning. So here is my planned schedule:

Monday: Accounting

Tuesday: Mailing & Graphic Design

Wednesday: Inventory Management & Business Management

Thursday: Mailing & Writer

Friday: Mailing & Graphic Design

Saturday: House & Family

Sunday: Church

The schedule is graphic design heavy for the next few months. When I'm prepping for a shipping, then some of those Graphic Design slots will get re-assigned as shipper slots. When conventions are imminent then more slots will go to Business Management. The most important thing is that when I get a new task instead of just putting it on today's list, I can tell myself "I'll handle that on Wednesday."

The schedule is going to be messed up, of course. It already has been. A sick child at 4 am this morning means that today I'm wearing the Nurse hat instead of the Business Manager hat. But many of the Business Manager tasks I'd assigned for this week will not be hurt by waiting another week. The few that can't wait, I'll sneak around the edges of taking care of my child.

I like this plan. Hopefully it will help me keep my head clear.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Launching a New Year

It is the first working day of the new year. The kids are all off at school, which should feel like a relief. My house is quiet and will be for the next five hours. I like quiet. Instead some voice in the back of my brain is crying out "Incoming!" and expecting a blitz of both homework stress and emotional drama to come blowing in the door with the children. They will come home to me with attached chores. Not that my children themselves are chores. They are marvelous people. But any person who is facing a challenge will reach out for support. I must arrange myself to either be there for them or to firmly tell them that they can handle it themselves.

Before the children arrive home, there is work. The first week of January is always crazy. I have to tie off all the loose ends from last year while simultaneously launching this year's focus. Top of the list this morning are the loose ends of: accounting, royalty calculations, emails, costumes for a school play, the never-ending query process, and house cleaning. In the category of launching we have: tax accounting, emails, organizing Howard's art workload for the next weeks, planning for presentations, knocking out a wall in my office, and merchandise considerations for the coming year. At least five of these things are vying for the "first thing I do" slot.

My head is full. It has been full for more than a month. It is going to be full for at least another month more. Because my head is full, and because sleeping has been trickier of late, I've been making stupid mistakes. Not many. They're all small. I catch them before anyone else notices them. Mostly. I fix them and life moves onward. Yet the accumulation of mistakes worries me, because I look ahead at all the things I've got to do and I know there are going to be more mistakes. I'm going to mess up something, but I don't know which thing, so I can't plan ahead to allow for it. I never considered myself a perfectionist, but this state of brain proves otherwise. The thought of making some stupid mistake, and disappointing someone who counts on me, is enough to make me want to curl up and cry. Logically I know this is ridiculous, particularly since I often set the bar for "other people's disappointment" in places which are long before those other people would actually notice that I'd failed them.

In all the mess of swirling thoughts, a story keeps surfacing. It was told at church some time in the last three weeks, but I've lost any other context for it. There was a young woman who had to attend a church leadership meeting. She went begrudgingly, expecting to be told to work harder. Instead the man in charge said "You are all busy. Instead of improving your life by adding something, take something away. What thing can you eliminate from your life?" That last thought is what keeps coming back to me. What things in my life can I let go? I love clearing out and discarding physical objects, the process of clearing mental space ought to be similarly satisfying.

I had an argument with Kiki about organization yesterday. She feels like all of her things and space are jumbled. She would dearly love to have more space in which to spread out her things. I contended that learning to live inside the space you have is an important life skill. Then I tried to show her that perhaps she was holding on to too much. If she would just sort through, store, and discard then she would have the spaces she needed. Kiki argued back that she needs all her things. She needs six bottles of hand lotion because they all have different smells. She needs the clock and the ipod player, the nail files and the lip glosses, the seven pads of art paper and the thick files of reference art. Everything. She can't let any of them go. The only resolution we reached was to realize that we were arguing needlessly. Kiki knows how to sort and make use of space. She's done it before, she'll do it again when she is ready. Mostly we just needed to walk away from each other and deal with our own things. Today I can't help feeling like my mental/emotional space looks like Kiki's bedside shelf, stocked with six bottles of hand lotion and multiples of almost everything. Then I become the one who is saying "But I need all these things!"

Do I really? What can I take out of my life to create the space I need to handle everything else?

I don't have the right answer yet, but I'm fairly certain I've found the right question.

Answering this question will require me to re-think the things I am holding on to. I'll have to look at the items in my brain and realize that some of them are only still here because I haven't bothered to look at them in months. That will be like Kiki's bag of candy, none of which she wanted to eat, but which she'd kept because they were gifts from people she liked. Candy doesn't make a good keepsake. Some of the things in my brain have long outlived their purposes. Perhaps I could start letting other people decide when they are disappointed instead of me deciding that they are before they've had a chance to notice anything. I know that I want to get rid of all the useless anxiety, but it is so tangled up with everything else that I can't start there. It is also possible that I need to containerize. Twenty small things loose on a shelf are a mess. Those same twenty things placed in three containers are neat and handy. Just as Kiki is the only one who can make sense out of her spaces, I am the only one who can make space in my brain. I'm trying to keep too much.

Thus "Brain organization" becomes item one on the To Do list. It is the sort of item that makes a difference for everything else. Perhaps I can apply a rubric similar to the one I use when sorting through books. As I look at each item on my list I can think "Do I really need this? Does someone else really need this? Does this have to be done by me rather than someone else?" If the answer to all three is No, then it doesn't belong on my list.

What can I take out of my life to create the space I need? It is a question well worth answering.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Sunset

The sky gave me a lovely present today. I thought I'd share.



Hope everyone's day had some loveliness in it.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Why I Don't Respond on Facebook Anymore

I am not the typical facebook user. From the day of my registration I considered facebook to be a public space. This means that I accept friend requests from anyone who does not trigger my spammer detector. That policy has gathered me some real friends whom I would not otherwise have met. Unfortunately the continual changes Facebook keeps making result in the site being less and less useful to me. I enjoy reading the things that people are intentionally posting about their lives and their thoughts. Instead my stream is full of things my friends read, updates any time someone friends another person, updates on games played, and comments that one of my friends made to someone I have never met. These sorts of updates would actually help me feel connected if I were only trying to keep in touch with 20-50 people I've met in real life. That's not how I want to use facebook. Unfortunately every time I figure out how to filter my facebook stream, facebook changes again.

I still use facebook. I skim through my news stream once per day or so, but I miss a lot. Often I miss things that I would really like to know about while being bombarded with things about which I don't care. Many times I see happy news, or sad news, and I would like to respond briefly with congratulations or sympathies. I do want to use facebook for me to connect with people. Unfortunately facebook wants to use my response to connect my friends with advertisments. Some of the people with whom I am facebook friends are very private people. They are extremely selective about who they let see information online. If I respond to a private person's birth announcement, then that response is broadcast to all the writers, fans, and business contacts that I've also friended. Broadcasting a private announcement in this way would be extremely discourteous of me, even if I do it by accident. I know there is a setting to prevent this. I've toggled that setting. However facebook will change again and they may untoggle or change the way that settings are interpreted. The only way I can protect the privacy of my friends is not to answer them on facebook. This makes me sad. Because I'd dearly love to have these little conversational interactions which are the online equivalent of bumping into someone at the grocery store.

For the big things, with close friends, I use other means (like email) to respond to their announcements. For the little things, I just have to smile or sympathize silently. I do make good use of the facebook Thumbs Up button. It is a tiny way for me to cheer without also broadcasting that I've done so. Facebook still is useful to me, but I am always aware that to facebook I am a commodity, not a customer.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Event List for 2012

Naturally, the minute I admit to myself that I'm not quite ready to face next year's schedule, part of my brain does exactly that. So here is a listing of my currently scheduled public events. There are some additional events which may pop up, but they're tentative, so I'll not list them yet.

LTUE Life the Universe and Everything Symposium at UVU (Orem, UT) February 9-11

This one is only about five weeks away. The LTUE crew had to switch venues at the last minute, so they're still scrambling to get everything arranged. However I have never been disappointed by LTUE as an event, and this year is going to be great. As soon as I know details on registration or panel scheduling, I'll pass them along.

LDStorymakers Conference (Provo, UT) May 4-5

I'll be teaching a class on Finances for Creative people and co-teaching a class on cover design. Howard will be teaching World building and Talent vs. Practice.

Deep South Con (Huntsville, AL) June 15-17

This is a relatively small and low-key convention, but I'm really looking forward to the chance to go and just hang out with Howard. He's a guest of honor and will be on programming. I'll probably just be hanging out and visiting. We can probably arrange for away from the convention lunches and meetups if there are folks interested. I also want to see some of the southern landscape. I've passed through Atlanta before, but all I saw was the airport.

Additional events to which I will NOT be going:

LunaCon March 16-18 –Howard is a Guest of Honor there. New York area folks don't want to miss him.

GenCon Indy August 16-19 –Howard will be running a booth there again.

And in the tentative category I have:

Chicon (WorldCon, Chicago) August 30-Sept 3 –This one I have mixed feelings about missing. I love attending WorldCons, but the timing on this one is bad. My kids will have just started school. I just have to get closer before deciding.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

The Calendar for Next Year

I've already got my wall calendar for next year. It is sitting rolled up in a corner of the living room. I had to order it off of the internet. Year-at-a-glance wall calendars have become a specialty item rather than being readily available at my local office supply store. I admit, this fact made me pause. Perhaps my decade-old system is out of date. I stopped using a paper planner last year and now rely instead on electronic tools. But I am not yet ready to abandon all my familiar methodologies merely for a sense of progress. It is useful sometimes to stand in front of the calendar and picture the sweep of events across weeks and months, all of it written out in colored ink.

So I have my calendar. Some time in the next five days I will pull it out and transfer information from the year past onto the year to come. Birthdays, anniversaries, schedules, and events must all be inked onto the new year.

But not yet.

I'm not ready yet.

For the next few days I only have those last 2011 odds and ends to finish up. Right now I can view and entire year's worth of completed tasks recorded in multi-colored ink. I suppose I should feel accomplished about that. Mostly I feel tired and not quite ready to put together the list of things-to-come for next year. I'll be ready soon, I think, but not today.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Making a Cascading Pillar Candle

The Holidays are a time for projects which aren't exactly necessary, but which make the days feel special. Many people express this by baking. My social networks are filled with people talking about cookies, pies, and other assorted delights. We've done our share of making special food for the holidays. Some of the special food was acquired through purchase rather than effort. This is fine too. However this holiday season I found myself with a slightly different holiday project. I've been playing with candles and melted wax.

See that pillar candle to the left, the one with the pretty drips? I made it. Once I made it, I spent an hour watching the wax drip through the holes and down the outside. I like candles as projects because they are like sand castles. No one expects them to last forever. Instead the materials are organized, destroyed, and reorganized as many times as one feels inspired to create. Left over wax from one candle can be the seed of the next candle. It is all about playing. How did I make the candle? Click on through for instructions and pictures

As you might expect, I began by melting wax.



The yellow wax was left over from a craft candle my daughter made with her Grandma over the summer. Incidentally, this is also where I got the instructions for making this sort of candle. I'm not sure where my mom learned it. The white wax is just Parowax Household Wax that I've had stored in the back of a cupboard since the last time I played with candle making about a decade ago. I like that wax doesn't go bad. I melted the wax in left over scented candle jars on candle warmers. It took about 12 hours for the wax to fully melt. There are probably much faster ways to melt wax, but this was low impact for me. I could set it up and walk away.

These are the other supplies I collected before beginning the project.



The Pringles can served as a mold. The red candle was put down the middle to provide structure and a wick. I deliberately chose a red taper because I thought that red would look lovely when melted through yellow and white.

The last supply was ice.



I used small cubes because it provides smaller holes, however I did end up using some larger cubes as well. When everything was prepped, the pouring could begin.

Step 1: Pour a small layer of wax into the bottom of the Pringles can. This provides a base for the candle. It is not strictly necessary, but I like the way it looks instead of having holes in the bottom of the candle.

Step 2: Once the thin layer has set until it is soft, but not runny, place the (unwrapped) red taper in the center of the can. Fill the space between the taper and the walls of the can with ice.

Step 3: Pour liquid wax over the ice cubes. For this candle I poured white wax until the can was half full, gave it about a minute to set, then poured the yellow wax on top. It looks something like this when you're done.



You can see that the wax is already hardening around the ice cubes and the taper.

Step 4: Wait. The wax needs to harden completely. This process can be sped up by putting the can in a cold place. I waited an hour just to be certain, but it was probably ready in 20 minutes or less.

Step 5: Tear off the Pringles can. Do this over a sink because most of that ice has turned to water now. Be careful, some of the wax constructions are thin and can be crushed if you push on them too hard.

Step 6: Set the candle in a bowl or sink to allow the remaining ice to melt away.



You can see that the taper is taller than the can. It looks a little silly sticking up like that. But once it burns down to the level of the other wax, the candle starts to dribble and be beautiful.

Step 7: Light your candle and watch.

This was not my only candle project over Christmas. I had lots of fun melting wax.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Christmas Day 2011

1am on Christmas Day is too late to fix any of the Christmas planning errors I may have made during the preceding weeks. All those might-have-been trimmings and trappings circle in my brain instead of the visions of sugar plums which Clement Clark Moore assures me are what should be dancing about in there. Of course I have trouble visualizing sugar plums anyway, having never seen one. (Except that, of course, now I have, since I googled it the moment I finished typing that sentence. So now I know. I still don't expect to be dreaming of them any time soon.)

The truth is that the best possible preparation I can make to ensure a happy Christmas day is to love and teach my children all year long. This means that whatever joys or disappointments arrive with the festivities, we've already got the tools and the sturdy relationships to manage. If the lack of a particular item on Christmas morning is truly traumatizing, then something far more fundamental is wrong. I know this. I believe this. I know my kids are fantastic people and that they are as much focused on the things they are giving as on the things they hope to receive. Everything is set up to be a lovely day. This does not stop me from slipping out of bed and sneaking a little bit of cash into each stocking. It is a small gesture which will bring joy tomorrow. It is worth doing even if the impulse behind it is my guilty conscience. As I said to Howard "How can it possibly be enough if I didn't spend a month fretting over it?"

But it can. And it is. This is the secret of Christmas. It exists no matter how much time I spend creating it or trying to ignore it. This year our usual round of Christmas festivities was paused for an hour-long excursion to church. I love it when Christmas falls on Sunday for this very reason. However it does present a challenge for the youngest of my family. He did his mighty best to sit still and listen to songs about Jesus while his mind and heart were back home poking packages under the Christmas tree.

In the end my fretting was unnecessary. Each of us received pretty much exactly what the poem states:

Something you want

Something you need

Something to wear

Something to read

It is the recipe for a lovely Christmas day.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Process and Apologies

This is the postcard I send in packages when I'm having to re-send them. Sometimes I'm re-sending because the package somehow went on an extra-long trip to nowhere. Other times I'm re-sending because I've made a mistake while packing. I can't hand deliver all packages. I don't have a teraport. I'm human and will inevitably make stupid errors like forgetting to include an item or including the wrong item. I can't be perfect, but I can apologize and try to make it better. It feels like I've been sending out too many of these postcards lately. I know that this is the natural result of me having sent out more packages. The error percentage has not increased. But I still have some notes for next year:

1. Get next year's calendar released and shipped before Thanksgiving. This will reduce stress in December and increase the odds that calendars will not get lost in the holiday package traffic-jam that postal services become in December.

2. Budget my time so that I have space to be shipping packages daily from Dec 1st-20th. The remainder of the day will be completely consumed by family/parenting things. All other projects will fall by the wayside. Plan for this.

3. Breathe deep and try not to make any major business decisions in December, because the temptation to run away (screaming) from anything that looks like more work will be strong. You'll feel differently in another month or so.

4. Remember that on the whole, Schlock fans are really nice people. They are not as frustrated with you as you fear that they are. The evidence for this is in all the responses you get to your apologetic emails.

So that is how business is going. Since shipping slowed down last Tuesday, I'm beginning to emerge from the "must get it done right now" haze. I'm starting to organize my house and my brain for January. Hopefully this will result in lovely blogging thoughts sometime soon. For now, I need to go sweep the kitchen floor.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Luminaries

They are just paper bags, but filled with light and placed outside on a cold dark night, they are beautiful. This is my small happy thing at the end of a long day.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.