Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 113

Restructuring and Life Balance Progress Report

Back in May I had something of an emotional crisis. I realized that for years I had been structuring our lives in ways that minimized or sidelined my wants and needs. I summarized this in a post called Sinkholes and Structures. Our family made good progress on re-structuring and then school got out. I dissolved into summer and was quite happy until a wake up call showed me that I had swung too far in the other direction. Me doing whatever I wanted all day long didn't work as a long-term family strategy either.

I'm pleased to report that during the month of July I've achieved a sort of balance. Most of each day is focused on the needs of others, but I get to do things that I want too. Most of what I am sacrificing right now is solitary time. I rarely get to be in spaces where other people are not nearby. I know this is temporary, and so I am fine. I also have WorldCon to look forward to. Having something to look forward to is an important happiness component for me. Another important component is project completion. July has had plenty of both. This is good.

I need to stock up on getting things I want because I have a strong feeling that September is going to be all about the kids. My things will be submerged, sidelined, neglected. This is fine, so long as I do not allow that pattern to continue into October and onward. Families have to sacrifice things for each other. I just need to remember that sometimes it means the kids and Howard sacrificing for me.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Warehouse Day

My teenage boy and two boys borrowed from a neighbor were my minions this morning. The four of us moved three and a half pallets of books from my garage to our storage unit. Each pallet held 56 boxes of books. Each box held 22 books. Each book weighed one pound. Doing the math, we come up with approximately 3800 pounds of books moved this morning. I rejoice that my van survived hauling all of that in only four loads. I drove slowly, particularly down the hill. All that mass made it hard to stop quickly. This is one of the final steps to finishing off a Schlock shipping.

This year I decided to take the warehousing even further. We hauled all the empty pallets and pallet tops back from the storage unit where they've been taking up space. We also hauled out several large bags of paper and plastic garbage. At the moment we have 6 spare pallets and 24 pallet tops. Hopefully some kind soul from the Provo freecycle community will be delighted to have them and will haul them away for me. Right now they're "decorating" a corner of our driveway and adding an air of class to the house.


The other warehousing I have to do in the wake of a shipping day is to find places for all the extra shipping supplies to belong. I also have to rearrange my storage room to make space for another book. Then there are the last few orders which required extra help to get out the door. Those are all done now. The storage room is mostly rearranged. I just have to find the energy to carry stacks of boxes and rolls of packing paper down the stairs. I'm hoping for a burst of energy later this evening. At the moment I just want to sit for awhile.

Not Feeling the Love for LiveJournal Today

Greetings LiveJournal readers.

It was my intention to continue importing my blog to LiveJournal, but unfortunately LJ has made some change which interferes with my automatic process. If I can get it figured out, I will. Unfortunately I've already devoted 4 hours to messing with this and I have no more time to spare for awhile. I will cut and paste entries into LJ, but this process often marks the entries as "Date Out of Order" and then they don't appear on your automated friends page.

I'm still updating almost daily over at onecobble.com. In theory you can import my <a href=http://www.onecobble.com/feed/>RSS feed</a> from there directly into your friends page. I spent forty minutes trying to track down a set of instructions for doing that. I did it once and the feed I set up is still running on my friends page without error. I can't figure out how I did it.

I'll continue to cut and paste blog entries, but my life gets busy and I can't guarantee I'll remember to do them all. I'm sorry for what ever inconvenience this causes to you my friends and readers.

Edited to add: I will still be reading my friends page here. I know that some of my friends use LJ as their primary blog-style communication and I don't want to lose track of you.

Arbors, Porch Swings, and My Gardening Summer

I should not be looking at arbors and gazebos online. There are so many more urgent and important purchases for us to make. We're in the fat part of our income cycle, but another lean time is ahead and our surviving it depends upon me being wise now. Buying an arbor does not count as wise, no matter how lovely it would look underneath my wisteria vines. It doesn't help that our wireless extends out into the garden so I can browse while surrounded by my green things and the scent of oriental lilies. I book mark the arbors and gazebos, knowing that two years from now I'll delete the bookmarks without having visited them in between. I can hope that by then I will already have an arbor, purchased locally on sale.

Porch swings are less expensive than arbors or gazebos. I look at those for awhile too. I would not place it on my porch, which is too narrow, but I could hang it from the swing set on those evenings when my kids do not want to swing. It would be lovely to have a place to sit outdoors. I have those plastic stackable chairs, but they never were comfortable and have developed a permanent layer of filth from residing outdoors, year round, for eight years. I bookmark a lovely wrought iron swing with a flower pattern.

It is strange having these gardening dreams. They sprang forth from dormancy like flower bulbs discovering the earth around them is not frozen anymore. I love letting them grow even though I know that it may make the coming winter, both literal and figurative, harder on me. I still have time, three months before outdoors becomes inhospitable and I have to look inside for projects to dream. Or perhaps the opposite will be true. Perhaps hours outdoors now are filling my reservoirs, giving me reserves through the cold and dark. That is a lovely thought. It encourages me to sit and soak up the feel of grass under my feet, to smell the lilies and mimosa, to push back the grape leaves and see how many bunches of baby grapes I can find.

My neighbors are gathered outside. It is not an official event, we all just wandered out into the pleasant evening and discovered each other there. I listen to them talk. Their summers are busy, filled with going places. We've been at home this summer instead of running around. Ours has been the busy-ness of at-home routine rather than events and adventures. I think we needed this. It let us grow in calm and quiet ways, like the plants in my garden.

We are now entering that portion of the summer which I thought would be crazy stressful. It is busy and there are definitely elements of stress. Then I step outside and wander or work in my garden. I clear out overgrowth or pull weeds. I feel the living air blow around my face and I feel the dirt with my fingers. Sometimes I get hot and sweaty with this work, that is part of it and I don't mind. Working with plants, my mind lets go of my lists and stresses. I stop clutching them so tightly and some of them slip away completely, not important after all. The garden is good for me and I seek more reasons to be outside in it, which is why I research arbors and porch swings even though I know I will not buy them today. It gives me hope that perhaps next summer will also be a season with gardening.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Shipping and Convention Prep Status Report

We are in the last run up to Emperor Pius Dei shipping. This is the season of our lives when the kids tend to themselves because I am busy. Fortunately for me, they are old enough to do so. Balancing the shipping work with family care used to be a lot harder. Shipping season has also been made tremendously easier by hiring a shipping assistant. She's been helping me for four shipping events now.

Today will be bundle assembly. We'll be putting together Emperor Bundles and shrink wrapping them. This will make our lives worlds easier on the shipping day because the volunteers will be able to grab a single wrapped bundle rather than 7 individual books. Bundle assembly involves hefting around boxes of books, rearranging the contents, and then hefting the boxes again. Next week I need to round up some strapping young men, hopefully with a truck, to help me shift three pallets of books from our garage over to the storage unit. Then Howard will be able to park in the garage again.

After all that is done, and the odds-and-ends of shipping is cleared away, I'll ship Howard off to GenCon and dig in to the serious preparations for WorldCon. We're going to be playing tetris with two vehicles, 8 passengers, luggage, and booth supplies. Fun.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Joy and Sadness on a Summer Morning

I stepped out on my front porch in search of my younger two children. I'd come up from a deep work focus with a vague awareness that they'd gone outside to play. It was time for me to ascertain their exact whereabouts. On my next door neighbor's lawn eight children had formed a band. A CD player provided the music. My son and his same-age friend were dancing about with pvc pipe constructions which yesterday had been swords, but were obviously now transformed into guitars. Two four-year-old boys swung pvc pipe drumsticks to pound on imaginary drums. One ten year old boy was the lead singer and everyone else rocked out as back up dancers. The pavement was cool against my feet as I watched the joyous energy from a distance. Later it would be much too hot for such vigorous energy outdoors, but in the morning sunlight they were beautiful.

My joy at watching them tipped over to sadness. In the background of their frolic was the For Sale sign. Half the children in the band would soon be living somewhere else. The parents of the other two neighbor kids are engaged in a country-wide job search. My mind's eye subtracted all those other kids, leaving mine alone. A tear trickled down my cheek. These are not my kids' only friends, they have many, but this game, played in this way, with this group, would soon vanish forever. I will miss it.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

My Car Thinks I Live in Canada

We're planning to drive to Reno for WorldCon. This means 9 hours, in my car, across a desert. A pre-road trip check up was definitely on the schedule. It became urgently on the schedule when the air conditioner stopped blowing cold and started blowing warm. Since I was taking my car in anyway, I decided to make a list off all the issues it has to see whether they could be fixed and how much it would cost. My list looked like this:

Air Conditioner!

oil change

tire rotation

tune up

windshield wipers too small

windshield wipers range of motion

sliding door jammed shut (for over a year now.)

back hatch handle broke off

Odometer showing kilometers instead of miles.

In the actual event, I forgot to mention the back hatch handle, so that isn't fixed. Everything else has been addressed. The wiper range of motion was addressed twice when I returned to make clear that having a five-inch-wide swath of unwiped windshield on the edges was exactly the problem I wanted fixed. I don't need extra blind spots. The sliding door now opens for the first time in over a year. This will make carpooling and loading much easier. I hope it stays fixed this time.

The most amusing fix was the odometer. At some point, (a year ago? two years ago?) it started showing kilometers instead of miles. I'm really not sure anymore when it happened or what pre-dated the change. It may have been the same disastrous cracked windshield replacement which caused the problems with the wipers and during which the glass company put in the wrong window, then put in the right window but didn't seal it, then finally got the window right but broke the wipers. Yes, I think I'll blame them.

Having the odometer proclaim kilometers is a mild annoyance. It means that I can't use the odometer to count miles during road trips without also doing math. It means that any time I take the car in to be serviced it appears to have traveled twice as far as it really has. The mechanics at the dealership looked at it and told me that there must be a short in the control block which is setting the defaults to Canadian. I think this is tech speak for "I have no clue, but if we replace this really expensive part I bet the problem will go away." Then they showed me a magic method for inducing the car to show mileage when the engine is turned off. I say magic because the mechanic demonstrated and it looked simple, but I've been completely unable to reproduce the feat at home.

So my car thinks we're in Canada, but I don't mind because it blows cold, has a squeaky-clean windshield, and the side door now opens.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

The Final Essays

I had four essays left to revise. These were the ones I skipped over when I was doing my beginning-to-end revision of the whole book. I skipped them because they were hard and my brain just couldn't figure out the right way to wrap the words around what I meant. In one case I wasn't even sure what I meant, which made the word wrapping particularly hard. I finished the big revision push at the end of June, then these essays sat. They sat on my desk printed on paper where I could see them. Out of sight truly is out of mind with as busy as I have been. I needed the occasional stab of guilt when I cleared away whatever was on top of them and found them again. I was feeling the guilt about every third day, but not finding the time to solve the problem.

I have writing projects waiting for me. I'm going to dive into plotting for two books. I have references to read and post it notes ready. I also have a text to read about sentence level construction. Then there are one or two mood books which are in the same genre or have the same feel. I want to read them to feed my writer brain. All of these things are on hold pending the completion of the four essays. If I move on before finishing up, then I'll lose track of the essay thoughts. I'll have essays scattered over my work space both physically and in my brain. But if I put them away incomplete, I will never finish them.

Today I sat down for a writer's hangout on google+. There were four of us writing for 45 minutes and then visiting for 15. Having other people there was more helpful and less distracting than I expected. I stayed in my chair because it felt rude to wander away and not come back. Since I was stuck in my chair anyway, I forced my brain to stop avoiding the essays. I got two done. The two harder ones remain, but I've looked them over and am hopeful that my back brain will stew on them and present me with a lovely solution.

For the past week or more, I've not spent much time actively being a writer. My focus has been on family and house things with a side order of business tasks. It is interesting to note that rather than feeling like I was suppressing my writing self, I've been feeling freed from it. There is a lot of stress associated with seeking publication, and excusing myself from that has been very good. Besides, I have a garden to tend and a dress to sew. The garden will wait, but the dress needs to be complete before August 15 when I leave for WorldCon. Today's stint with writing also showed me that some of the "freed from" feeling is associated with simple avoidance of effort. I was procrastinating. Having expended the effort and untangled the knots, I feel happy. And my desk guilt has been halved. Tomorrow I'll do the other half.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Pioneer Parade

Pioneers are kind of a big deal here in Utah. We have a holiday devoted to them. Since half of the pioneer story is about traveling across the plains, most of the holiday celebrations are about parades. This morning was a children's pioneer parade and Gleek has been excited about it for a week. Her best friend's mother made skirts for both the girls and we pulled out our pioneer bonnets. Then we transformed our wagon into a covered wagon. It was the recipe for Saturday morning happiness.

It didn't hurt any that at the end of the parade, a firetruck provided a huge spray of water so that everyone could get wet. Life is good for my pioneer girl this morning.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.

Evening on My Porch

Gleek dashes across my field of view in the darkening twilight. She is pulling our plastic wagon which has been transformed into a pioneer covered wagon using branches clipped from our pear tree, a piece of white knit fabric, and duct tape. Historically accurate it is not, but it is enough that Gleek can imagine the rest. She's ditched the long pioneer skirt and bonnet in favor of clothes which let her do tricks on her bike. The bike is parked in front of a house across the cul de sac and the wagon is the vehicle of the moment.

I am seated in a camp chair on our front porch. It is not the most attractive of porch decor, but I love having a place to sit. The house felt too close, too full of noise and people. I needed to be outside, so I came here with my laptop. I sit typing, and witnessing the evening pass. Most of the neighbor children have been called indoors, Gleek still ambles her way through her games. The house is too small for her most days. I notice that the street light has become the primary illumination. My laptop screen is bright in my face.

"Are you ready to come in?" I call to Gleek.

"Ten more minutes mom! Please?" She does not wait to hear my answer. She dashes on past with the empty wagon clattering along behind her. Go ahead and run for a bit more child. I'm not ready to go in either.

Mirrored from onecobble.com.