Day: June 11, 2006

I haven’t been writing in here for the past few days. I’m not sure exactly why. I keep mentally composing entries, but none of them feel finished. All these partially composed entries sit in my brain cluttering up my thinking space and making it hard for me to concentrate on any of them. I’ve decided to solve this problem by throwing them all into one entry in a sort of mental clearing out.

Shall We Dance? is a movie I saw several weeks back. I’ve been meaning to write about how much I enjoyed it. There are lots of movies about “coming together” and lots of movies about “falling apart” but not very many about “staying together while growing as individuals.” I liked it alot.

Friday night I played hooky. I put the kids into bed (well, half of them) then left them in Howard’s care while I jumped into the car and drove to see X-men 3. I enjoyed the movie, but it felt too big. I think the reason it did was because none of the characters with the most screen time really had a character arc. The result was a movie full of static characters, big explosions, and too many subplots. I don’t connect with a movie unless there is a character who grows and changes. I wish they’d spent more time on the characters who did have arcs. When the movie was over I realized that it was midnight on a dark, stormy night and I needed to walk solo to my car. Provo is pretty safe and I’d deliberately parked in a well lit area, so I wasn’t scared, not really. But I still made sure that I paced a crowd of people leaving the theater and I was very aware of my surroundings as I walked to the van. The perils of being a small female were very apparent to me during that walk. Were I to be attacked my only real safety would be in summoning help.

I had to process a big batch of lost-in-the-mail and damaged books this weekend. I don’t like to have to do those because it means that something somewhere went wrong. Unfortunately odds are good that at least some of the errors were on our end. I did lots of manual manipulation of address lists and that creates lots of places for human error to creep in. Hopefully this will be the last batch and everyone who ordered a book will have recieved their schlocky goodness.

Now that the rush of pre-orders is over and regular ordering has settled down, I finally took the time to do a detailed financial analysis. We have enough money in hand to get us into October. By that time we need to be ready to take pre-orders on book 2. It makes me nervous not to have more pad than that. I’d like us to have money to take us through December so that if there are production delays we don’t have to panic or borrow money to live. So I’ll be redoubling my efforts to help our family live lean. I’m also going to start doing ebay auctions again. Auctions won’t make up all the difference, but every little bit helps.

Church today wasn’t very pleasant. Howard and I have been lax in appropriate behavior enforcement lately and the result is cranky and frustrating. The most frustrating part is that I want my kids to be able to love church the way that I love it. I know that sometimes the meetings are long and boring, but we all put up with those because equally as often the meetings are uplifting and inspiring. Being at church is a thing that we are supposed to be doing and I believe strongly that we are blessed as a family for going as a family. Mostly the kids don’t mind going, but today several of them wanted to be doing other things. I need to figure out ways to share my love of church with the kids so that they can build their own love of church and of the gospel and their own faith. It is possible that one or more of my kids will not love church the way that I do, that they’ll stop going once they’re old enough to be free of my dictates. That would hurt alot because I would fear that they were missing a great strength in their lives. If that ever does happen I don’t want it to be because I failed to try to share the wonder and joy that I feel because of my faith and church attendance.