Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 96

My Projects and Lists for Saturday

Last night I went to bed with a list of things I was excited to get done today. So I bounced out of bed at 9 am to get started. I began with a trip to Home Depot to buy some cobbles. I came home with cobble-ish pavers. I'll probably have to go to a stone company to get pretty cobbles. But with five cobbles I could do some practice photography. My sampler book is going to need a cover. So far this is what I've got:

Things I like about it:

The trowel implies a person. It also implies work. Both of these things are part of my book.
The cobbles in the background give depth and possibly imply a path or a journey. I would like my cover to imply a journey.
The sprouting tulips imply growth. Much of the content of the book is about growth. However there are no blooms yet, just the beginnings of growth. Blooms are finished, these plants are just getting started.
I kind of like the bare ground and winter grass as well.

Things I don't like:

I'm not sure how to blend this into a cover image. I don't really want to just bleed it off the edges of the cover.
There isn't a clear space for a title. The grassy spaces will tend to obscure the title.
This picture screams "gardening" and while I do mention gardening, my blog sampler is not about gardening.
The pavers are not really cobbles. They aren't natural stones and they aren't all that attractive.
My blog talks a lot about parenting and nothing in this image implies parenting. (Or business, which I also talk about. But I really don't want my cover to imply business.)

So, I'm not sure if I've got anything usable. Perhaps I'll make a trip to a stone company and spend twenty dollars getting some pretty rocks. However if I want to use the sprouting tulips I need to hurry. They could start blooming as soon as next week. I may try doing some "studio" shots of trowel and cobbles against a drop cloth to see what that yields. In the end I suspect that the cover will be something I pull together, am not completely happy with, but will deem "good enough" because I simply don't have the skills and expertise (nor the time) to make it better. This is one of the things I don't like about self publishing, knowing it could have been better if I had more training.

So I turned to the words of my sampler book. I'm gleaning through last year's blog entries and pulling the ones I think are entertaining / representative / useful. I've reached June and I've got 30 pages or 13,000 words. I'm hoping to make my sampler book slim. I figure it needs to be around 20,000 words. I'll grab more than that and then choose and rearrange. Two good friends have volunteered to help me critique and edit. I've got a lead on a really good copy editor as well. Time is short, but I'm fairly confident I can get this thing done. If I hurry. So I pulled entries until my eyes crossed.

Then I escaped my house and returned to the Beauty in Belief exhibit. I didn't go through it again. I just snagged a pair of ear rings from the gift shop that I've been thinking about ever since last Tuesday. They're filigree leaves with Arabic script on them saying "The best people are those who help other people." They are lovely and make my heart glad. While I was there I took a moment to close my eyes and listen to the chanting music again. It warmed my heart.

Now it is 5:30 pm. I discover that I'm not excited about the house cleaning aspects of last night's list. I'd love to have the house be clean, but the motivation to do the work has gone missing. Instead I'll probably delve my way through June looking for blog entries to pull. Hopefully tomorrow will bless me with energy and motivation to put my house in order.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Spring Day

My heart always lightens when I can step outside my front door and see flowers in bloom.

The crocus always comes first. I love crocus because it is the promise of spring to come. Hyacinths are next.

They fill the air with fragrance. Soon I will have daffodils. Then tulips. Then lilacs. I love spring. I love that the kids can finally get outdoors. To celebrate the outdoors weather, here is a picture of a young girl and a young cat stalking each other.

They are having a great time in the gentle spring wind.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

FTP Defeats Me Again

I have a pretty good basic understanding of computers and internet things. I don't run the back end stuff for my blog, but I do all the cosmetic changes myself. I email daily with attachments. No problem. I manage facebook, twitter, and Google+. I've even re-installed an operating system on a computer and then re-installed all my software. I'm not a computer expert, but I'm computer literate. However FTP appears to live in its own little pocket of ignorance in my brain. Howard has taught it to me multiple times. He's installed a client for me to use. I've used the thing a dozen times over the course of several years. I understand the theory of it, yet getting it to actually work must require some incantations of which I'm not aware. Something goes wrong every single time. I spent all day uploading a file to our book printer. Then I noticed that it would reach 100% uploaded and immediately state "connection dropped" and start over at around 80%. Email with the printer confirmed that the file was corrupted. They've deleted it. I'll get to start over tonight at bedtime, when I won't be tying up the internet for our whole family some of whom need the internet for homework. If I don't wake up to find that FTP has worked. I'll just FedEx a a disc instead.

The good news is that this whole thing is only mildly annoying to me. In the past, incidents like this would plunge me into terror that I'd done everything wrong, that all my book layout work was destroyed, that our business was therefore a complete bust and we were doomed forever. I would try to beat back those thoughts with a great big logic stick, but the battle was exhausting. I'm so very glad that I can scowl a little bit, shrug my shoulders, and just plan to mail things tomorrow if necessary. I'm really good at mailing things.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Life Moves Pretty Fast

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."

–Ferris Bueller

The last couple of days have been all about life moving fast. I keep getting pitched curve balls which I have to hit, or field, or something. Hopefully the something will not include a baseball metaphor since I'm obviously not good at those. The point is that I've been inundated with small urgencies, none of which turned quite turned into crises. It is possible that my quick thinking actions averted crises. It is also possible that I was just taking too much responsibility for the outcomes. But somehow making cookies to ease the homework crunch seemed really important, as did making pies for Pi Day. Then of course there is the as yet incomplete packing for Howard's departure to Lunacon tomorrow. I've also got to ship a package to the printer because we've just completed the final round of edits on SEOS. The kids have had friendship crises, missing homework, squabbles, allergic reactions, and general crankiness.

And yet. It has been a good couple of days. Really. I hardly have a moment to sit down and think, but all these things coming at me are my life. It is a good life.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Beauty in Belief

Kiki needed to visit an art exhibit for a class, so we went down to the BYU Museum of Art and wandered our way through the Beauty in Belief exhibit. The art was all Islamic. We saw illustrated Qur'an pages, book covers, carved prayers as pieces of architecture, prayer rugs, etc. I was fascinated by the items themselves, but even more by the textual explanations which were posted on the wall. Whoever curated that exhibit did an excellent job of pinpointing exactly the aspects of art and culture which would be most interesting to me. I found myself writing down whole sections of text to ponder upon later. I have new thoughts on the ways that words can sanctify things, how to deliberately create a sacred space, how repetition and pattern can represent the infinite, and how the deliberate inscription of thoughts can change both the inscriber and the reader.

As I looked at a prayer rug, the sign next to it helped me to understand that unrolling such a rug creates a sacred and clean place in which a person can pray. This is why so many prayer rug designs are in the shape of an arch or prayer nook. I love the idea of having a transportable sacred space.

I looked at a Qur'an board, which was used as a memorization tool. Words were written onto the board, then once memorized, they were washed off and new words were written. I could see faded layers of script underneath the fresh writing. It was as if the scripture was soaking into the board. The curator's notes told me that the more often a board was used, the more sacred it was considered.

There were calligraphic art pieces where the arabesques of the script were arranged into large and pleasing shapes. The notes told me that they quotes scripture or blessings upon the house and its inhabitants. I looked at the calligraphy and thought about how in modern Utah it has become very popular to put up vinyl lettering on the walls with "sayings". I'd always thought dismissively of this particular trend, but now I see how the deliberate inscription of words can be considered a benediction upon the space and the people inside it. In fact another plaque told me that much Islamic architecture has inscriptions where they can't even be read. I am intrigued by the declaration of purpose written upon walls.

As I moved through the exhibit, I entered the realm of pattern. Infinitely repeating patterns, too detailed for a person to ever comprehend it whole. This is much as life itself and deity are incomprehensible. Suddenly instead of being too busy, these patterns become emblems of life itself. In one room a chant played softly. A curator plaque explained that sound patterns in chants were the heartbeat of Islamic culture. The chant repeated a thousand times permeates both the space in which it occurs and the people who participate.

All of the exhibit were reflections of a deliberate creation of meaning out of mere things. It was also about the power of words. I like this. I would like to take some of these thoughts and incorporate them into my spaces. I'm not sure how I will do this yet. I need to let the ideas mix with the things which are already in my mind and heart. Then I'll be able to find the expressions which are most beautiful and meaningful to me.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

End of Day Musings

My oldest child sits with a cat in her lap pondering the pile of homework she needs to complete in the next week on the final run up to end-of-term. She also has worried thoughts about art, money, and validation. My second oldest sits down stairs on a couch, snickering as he reads through the Schlock Mercenary books. He's finally gotten old enough to realize that they are funny. Third child is reading Girl Genius in her bed. Youngest is reading Full Metal Alchemist. I could play "one of these things is not like the others" except that at any hour of any day the obviously different child would change. They are four unique individuals and I constantly have to alter my parenting strategies to accommodate their different needs.

I can feel the gears of my life shifting. We're changing from book crunch into the lull before shipping. Hopefully we'll fill that lull with bonus story creation for the next book. We're also shifting from winter into spring. Gardening work must begin soon. Fortunately it looks like we've cleared away enough tasks that I'll have space for it. I'm shifting into project mode and out of heavy parenting mode. This actually follows a pattern that I identified last year. I'd forgotten that I identified it, except that one of the things I was working on today was layout for my book of blog entries from last year. Seeing the patterns from year to year is interesting. I feel quite glad that this year we've finished the book crunch a full six weeks earlier than last year.

Now we just need to adapt to daylight savings time.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Sunshine and Projects Completed.

Sitting on my porch with warm sunshine warming my bare toes, I begin to believe in springtime. The belief is reinforced by the smell of wet earth and the green leaves of spring flowers which poke from between the dead grasses in my flower bed. I close my eyes and tip my head so that I can feel the sun radiating through my hair. I'm on the porch because I am waiting for the last few pieces I need for SEOS layout. Four little pieces and then the whole project is ready for a test print. Test printing is the last stage, the final look for mistakes before I send it all to the printer and say "print it". Completion feels so much better than the muddle in the middle.

I have plenty more work to do, of course. Clearing out this project merely makes way for a dozen more. Yet completing one thing helps me believe I can complete other things. It is rain after a drought during which all my projects languished in various stages of waiting and incompletion. Like the water I sprayed on my flower bed, it will help new things grow stronger and more beautiful. On Monday I will survey what comes next. For today I can let things feel completed and sunny.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Things That Were Nice Today

Realizing that the reason my spinning rainbow crystals were not spinning was because the tiny solar panel was dusty. Quick wipe and it was all fixed.

Seeing Link come home from school happy.

Realizing that when my teenager had four errands to run, I could just hand her the keys and stay home while she took care of the errands herself. Also, insuring a teenage girl, with good grades, onto an accident free policy, is not as expensive as I expected. Totally worth an extra $30 per month.

The sky is sunny and bright.

My meeting this morning proved once again that my co-teacher and I get along great. We hammered out an outline in less than an hour. Now we have assignments and sections to work on. One more meeting mid-April and we'll be ready to teach.

Some of the cut flowers I bought two weeks ago are still pretty.

This was yesterday, but it was so nice I'm still going to list it today: Going out on a lunch date with Howard.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Getting Through

I've been here before, holding my young son tight while he grieves for a friend moved away. I've done it for both of my sons. The parallels are hard to ignore. They each gained a friend as a toddler. Both friends were red-headed. Both friends lived only a house or two away from ours. Then around the time the boys turned 9 or 10, the friend moved away. If I had a third son, I might be inclined to be wary. The pattern is illusory, a coincidence. This week it is Patch's turn to grieve. The grief is compounded because this close friend is the third of Patch's friends to move away recently. All I can do is hold him and agree that this is hard. I'll also make arrangements for the friend to come visit, but it is not the same as when he lived next door. Patch needs to grieve. I just have to hold on to him while he does.

We rearranged Link's class schedule yesterday. He had reached the point of despair. He'd done fine in debate class while the focus was on public speaking practice, but the class was poised to squash him with practiced orations, impromptu speeches, and competitive debates. The first section was good for him, but it was time to get him out. Fortunately we have a good advocate at the school who made this process simple for us. Link feels tons lighter and is ready to pull up all his grades which had been slipping due to stress. I have my own sorting to do. I was the one who put him into the debate class. It really felt like the right decision at the time. I told Link that I think putting him in was right and that now taking him out is right. But there is a quiet voice in my head which wonders if I'm telling this story because it casts my decisions in a good light. It is possible that I was just wrong. I'm afraid of that possibility because so many of the parenting decisions I make are based on informed instinct. I guess I just have to get it wrong and move on.

The book isn't done yet. I intended for it to be done by now. My mind can trace back to decisions a week ago, two weeks ago, when I did not work as hard as I could have. I was not pushing then. Then all sorts of urgencies converged into the same two weeks: the last mad scramble to prepare everything for LunaCon, Howard's birthday sale and accompanying shipping days, the final stages of book editing, the final stages of art for the Schlock board game, two family birthdays, and three out of four kids having valid emotional issues which needed immediate attention in order to avoid crisis. Events descended on me in a pack. I still haven't sorted it all out and most of it is in various stages of incompleteness. Then threaded through it all is the feeling that there are other things which I was supposed to be starting right now. There are creative tasks which I should have already begun in order to have them done before the time runs out.

I'm doing what I can. I haven't actually failed at any of it yet. But it feels like I have and that is murking up my thinking spaces. The way out is through, so I'm focusing on the things right in front of me. I do quick checks to make sure that I don't get ambushed by deadlines, but mostly I just do the work at hand. If I keep doing that, then sometime next week I'll discover that I've emerged into my life with more quiet spaces in it.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Split

What I want and need to do this week is ignore everything but the work I have to do on book layout. I want to dive in, hyper focus, and only come up for air when the project is done. That is not going to happen. Instead I have an endless stream of small but important interruptions. There are social appointments which must be kept, laundry I must do, dinners to make, etc. My time is more consolidated now than when the kids were little, but still interrupted. If Howard's schedule were free, he would step in to do all these things, but he's scrambling as hard to meet his deadlines as I am to meet mine. But I'd hoped to clear away everything but the bare minimum of obligations. I'd hoped that most everything could coast along on routine and I could pick up the pieces next week. Instead I'm headed over to my son's school this afternoon to talk with a teacher about something she said to him. Her words, combined with some missed assignments, plunged him into feeling like a complete failure. I can't let a child in crisis coast for a week while I work. This has to be sorted now. I need to help him pull the right lesson out of the emotional mess and learn how to work his way through. He will, because he is far more amazing than he realizes. The crisis is going to teach him good lessons and he will grow. I just wish we could help him grow next week instead of this one.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.