Month: October 2006

Included in today were:

Sleeping in
Making breakfast for 3 kids
Eating breakfast
90 minutes of peaceful driving while Gleek & Patches watched a movie (Link stayed home with Howard)
20 minutes of “When will we get there?” and “are we there yet?”
1 hour of visiting with my sister in law while Gleek, Patches, & Kiki played on a Mcdonald’s playground.
10 minutes of negotiation wherin Kiki tried to get me to promise to buy her a laptop for her next birthday. Or at least a portable dvd player. But she’d settle for an ipod or a Nintendo DS if she really has to. Her birthday isn’t until May and our budget is still tight, I made no promises.
40 minutes of peaceful driving while 3 kids watched a movie.
45 minutes of stressful driving in pouring rain while the cars in front of me sprayed up a mist so thick that visibility was uncomfortably short.
1 back seat squabble which included fruit snacks flying all over the car and two girls both howling as loud as they could.
45 minutes of driving with no rain, but lots of stop and go traffic because people in Utah don’t know how to drive in the rain. I personally passed one overturned truck with accompanying bulldozer to push debris off the freeway. I also passed at least 5 other fender bender type accidents. The radio traffic reports told me about at least two other overturned trucks blocking freeways.
Kiki declaring (5 blocks from home and as part of yet another squabble with Gleek) that she’d rather walk than stay in the car for another minute.
Me pulling over to let Kiki walk. Probably shouldn’t have done that.
Poop in pants which I had to clean up.
Kiki and I yelling at each other and both crying because we were both strung out, exhausted. We pushed each other’s buttons and hurt each other’s feelings. We are so much alike. Poor Howard had to put up with us both.
Snuggles with Kiki where we both apologized and made it all better.
More Kiki snuggles with a movie to watch.
Assorted crankiness from all the other kids for the duration of the afternoon. They were all sniping at each other deliberately attempting to annoy.
Too little patience from me.
The sudden death of the laser printer we’ve had for 13 years now and have used to print all of the Schlock Mercenary scripts. There was a power outage today which apparently killed it dead. It won’t turn on at all.
The purchase of a shiny new laser printer from Amazon.com. It’ll arrive on Thursday.

On the menu for tomorrow:
Preorders open.
Kids go back to school.
I run a church luncheon.
Kiki and Link have lessons in the afternoon.

Two weeks until Halloween and we haven’t even begun the costume negotiations. Kiki wants to be a white sorceress. That should be fairly easy. Link wants to be Metal Mario from Super Mario 64. I’m not at all sure whether we can manage that. Gleek and Patches haven’t expressed their Halloween intentions yet. Tomorrow I’ll haul the Big Bag O’ Costumes down from the top of the garage and the chaos will begin.

The timing on this actually works really well. I’m done tweaking the store and I’m not yet getting stressed about all the shipping and release party preparations. I have a couple of weeks to concentrate on giving the kids a happy Halloween. That is important because they haven’t had much of my attention for the last couple of weeks. I keep arriving at bedtime and realizing that I’ve taken care of the kid’s needs all through the day without really looking at any of them. My life has been moving so fast lately that I keep missing bits of it.

I have been vacationing these past few days.  I didn’t go anywhere, but I definitely broke routine and goofed off a lot.  It would be nice if I had something profound to say about it, but I don’t.  Now I need to get my act in gear again because there are things which need done.

Tomorrow:  Church, some work on a scrapbook, and preparing to welcome Kiki home from her visit with my sister.
Monday:  Little gym for Gleek & Patches, driving to get Kiki.
Tuesday:  School again, storage room clean out, trip to take a huge pile of things to the thrift store, pre-orders begin, and I have to run a church luncheon.
Wednesday:  Buy a cub scout Bear book for Link,  and… um something else.  I’m sure I’ll remember what it is before I actually get to Wednesday.

Those are highlights.  Dishes and laundry are among the unspoken minutia.  To bed with me so I can awake ready to be effective rather than a lump.

I’ve been pretty stressed this past week. I’ve had lots of important tasks looming over me. Most tasks are just things to be done. Tasks don’t start to loom until they should already have been done. The added layer of guilt/anxiety causes a normal task to loom. Once a task is looming, I start being afraid of it because it is so big. This week I had multiple sets of tasks all looming and I couldn’t think clearly enough to clear any of it away. Another side effect of having looming tasks is that in an effort to pretend that the looming tasks weren’t there, I would focus my stressful feelings on something else. The looming stress of not-quite-finished storefront had me cleaning out my file cabinet and fretting over the fact that the storage room is a mess. The file cabinet and storage room both need to be done, but the level of stress I was expending on them was out of proportion.

Yesterday I took the evening off. I hauled raisinfish over to my house and completely ignored every single thing on my to do list. We made cookies and talked. Giving myself the space to goof off got me out from under all those looming tasks. Once I was out from under them I could see the strings that held them over my head. Little strings that I only had to snip and then the looming task would be gone. For example: There were a last few fixes left to do on the store, but I had poked around my administrative site for hours and been unable to figure out how to do them. This meant that I had to place a call to Volusion customer support. One phone call would remove a whole cloud of loom from over my head and yet I kept avoiding that phone call rather than getting it done. It turns out that at least 5 of my looming things could be solved with simple phone calls.

I started today on the phone. Snip snip snip. I cut those looming tasks down and they aren’t hanging over me anymore. The last “prepare for preorders” task that I have left to do is figuring out how to export information from my store into my quickbooks file. That task was looming, but one of those phone calls helped me see how I need to proceed. Now it is reduced to a set of smaller tasks that I can tackle singly. I can see how to do it. No more loom. Managing the quickbooks export is big on the list of things to do tomorrow morning. After this morning’s loom clearing, I deserve some afternoon time off for good behavior.

I figured out why my back was out of joint. I habitually carry Patches and Gleek on my right hip. This means the back muscles and arm muscles on that side are stronger than on the left. This muscle imbalance throws my spine out of alignment. When the chiropractor cracked all those vertebrae back into their correct locations, my muscles complained about this new order of events. They complained for 4 days until yesterday afternoon when I slung Patches onto my hip. Crack went the lower spine, and all the muscle pain went away. For me “back problem” = “causing me pain.” As far as I’m concerned I no longer have any sort of back problem. No amount of adjusting is going to make my back feel better until I correct the muscle imbalance. When my muscles are balanced, I suspect that back balance will reassert itself naturally.

Not having an achy back today was a big help since I had to bury myself in accounting work. It isn’t done yet. Tomorrow I get to run around all over the place for millions of errands. The few minutes I do get to spend at home will be spent on the phone with customer support people as I try to put the last tweaking touches onto the store so it is ready for the onslaught of preorders. Thursday will include even more accounting and then the complete reorganization of the storage room so that it is ready to hold thousands more books with accompanying shipping paraphernalia. I have so many things to do. BUT tomorrow evening I will deliberately ignore everything on the dolist and spend an evening socializing with raisinfish. The vacation will be short, but hopefully I’ll emerge less stressed.

I keep hoping life will slow down to a walking pace soon.

I had my very first visit to a chiropractor last Friday. I went because I had a sudden onset of neck pain and one shoulder being lower than the other. I’m pretty sure I did it to myself with a set of aptly named dumbells. For issues with bone and muscle alignment I believe that the chiropractor is exactly the right person to ask for treatment. Unfortunately every single chiropractor I’ve met or heard about claims to be able to cure all the ills of the human body with proper alignment and sometimes with homeopathy or herbal supplements. I’m leery of taking nutritional advice from a bone and muscle guy. But I had a bone/muscle problem, so I went.

The place I went is essentially a drive thru chiropractor. You walk in, within 5 minutes he’s cracked all the appropriate joints, then he lays you on a mechanical massaging table for 15 minutes. All done. Having my neck cracked was extremely unnerving. According to all the movies I’ve watched when a person has their neck torqued to the side and it goes CRACK, that means the person is now dead. I am not dead, but the back of my brain is convinced that it should have killed me. The neck crack completely solved the neck/shoulder/arm problem I was having. The chiropractor also aligned everything else down my spine. Apparently I’ve been living with one leg shorter than the other. Since that was a longer term tweakage my body was not so happy about the shift. My back has been stiff and sore ever since. The chiropractor warned me that this would be so. The very suspicious part of my brain says that he is smart enough to deliberately disalign my spine and cause me pain to ensure a return visit. A different part of my brain believes the explanation that I’ve grown accustomed to being off balance and the change to balance will hurt. A third part is just griping that I didn’t hurt last week and now I do. I’m still waiting and seeing if the aches and pains will go away. I like the idea of fixing a long term disalignment, but I’m nervous about going back again. I don’t want my neck cracked again. I really don’t.

On the theme of appointments, I took Link to the dentist today. Link has a serious case of shark mouth. Human teeth aren’t supposed to come in rows, but Link’s do because there isn’t enough room in his small jaw for those big grown up teeth. I went to the dentist expecting to be referred to an orthodontist for braces. I also expected to be scolded because Link hasn’t been wearing his dental device (an occlusigude) which is supposed to prevent his teeth from growing in crooked. I think the dentist expected to scold me too, but then he took a look at Link’s mouth. He hmmed. He looked some more. He agreed with me that wearing the occlusiguide would have made the problem worse because the out of place teeth would have been pushed further out of place rather than into place. He looked at Link’s teeth some more. He talked about extracting a few teeth to make more space. He took x-rays. After the x-rays (which showed a veritable pileup of teeth attempting to emerge into the same tiny spots) the dentist brought out a brochure for a company that makes spacing retainers. The theory is that since Link’s jaw is still growing, we can nudge it into growing large enough for his teeth by providing a subtle 24×7 pressure. I agreed that this made sense. The dentist said that this was the most logical next step because he really didn’t want to pull teeth unless it was absolutely necessary. Have I mentioned that I really like this dentist? I forgot that I did because it has been so long since I’ve taken the kids in. But I like that he believes in preventative care rather than teenage braces.

So we made impressions of Link’s teeth. He thought that was pretty cool. Then I made the delightful discovery that we have enough of a credit at the dentist’s office left over from fully insured Novell days, that we didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket for this set of retainers. Now I just need to train Link not to lost them or break them while he is at school.

For 10 years I was a stay at home mom. I was most comfortable with other moms and could talk endlessly about my kids, children in general, and parenting. It was fascinating, stimulating, and invigorating. I was happy and fulfilled. Oh some things were hard. I sometimes felt trapped or housebound. I sometimes longed for sleep or more freedom from infant care. But I felt it was the best my life had ever been.

For the past 9 months I have been a work from home mom. The shift is subtle, but it is sending ripples through my life and changing how I feel about many things. I’m no longer content to sit with other moms and just talk about kids. I also want to talk about them. I want to know what they do when they aren’t being Mom. Perhaps I am seeking validation. Perhaps I just need to know that it is okay for me to want things that aren’t related to parenting. Perhaps I’m wanting to provoke these other moms to stretch in ways that I have recently stretched.

I remember being completely happy as a stay at home mom. I remember when that completely fulfilled me. Now the thought of going back to just parenting makes me feel mildly claustrophobic. This does not mean that I was foolish or deluded or oppressed when my only job was household and child care. This only means that I have changed and that role does not fit me the way that it used to.

This shift in my interests and self perceptions has created something of a social disconnect. Most of the women with whom I share social contacts are stay at home mothers. They are happy and fulfilled taking care of kids, decorating their houses, cooking, cleaning, canning, making crafts. I still do many of those things, but they fit differently. I feel differently about them. And I have these other things about which I care a great deal. My sahm friends will listen as I ramble on about online stores and book mailings, but they don’t understand it. They understand when I ramble about potty training or braces, but not the business stuff. I tend to not ramble about the writing that I do. I’m not sure why I don’t talk about writing.

I just thought of a visual representation of what I am trying to describe. It’s a venn diagram. My personal circle used to completely overlap the circle of the typical sahm. But my circle has shifted sideways. I still do sahm stuff, but I also do these other things. I like that image, because the thought that somehow I’d “grown up” and being a sahm was too small for me feels offensive. Who knows, perhaps in the future I’ll shift back to being a full sahm. Perhaps I’ll shift to something completely new.

I guess the short version of this long ramble is that I’m in a new place and while I like it, it isn’t entirely comfortable.

Processing the second batch of orders for shipping went much more smoothly than the first batch because I already had a system. I’m starting to feel like I know how I’ll manage it all for the huge pre-order shipment. I have yet to attempt to export information from the store to Quickbooks. That would be a nice feature to have working, but I can maintain the manual system I have right now if need be.

We’re now able to accept credit cards which was a complicated process full of hoops to jump through and verifications to be made. Those credit card companies have to decide they trust us. Apparently they do, because we accepted money from people all day long. Now I need to work my way through the lesser bugs and quirks to make sure the store is streamlined. I have a little more than a week to do all of it before the preorder for Blackness Between begins.

Someday we’ll be selling enough schlock books that we can pay someone else to do all the distributing for us. That will be nice.

For now I’ve turned off the light over my shipping center and closed the window with the storefront. I’m not going to do any more business mucking until after I get kids off to school tomorrow. Then I need to have my very first chiropractic visit to untweak my neck which I tweaked yesterday. Also I have to mail all those packages that are sitting in bins waiting to go out.

Until then, sleep.

It should not surprise me that there have been bugs in our new storefront. Fortunately everyone has been most kind in trying to help us sort them all out. Some were critical failures that we believe we have already fixed. Some were urgent issues that were easy to fix. Some were urgent issues that are going to require me to make a customer support phone call. Some are minor glitches that we haven’t even begun to address because we’re still managing urgent issues. In the midst of all this bug eradication I’m also printing invoices and labels then packing books for shipping. In fact I should be packing right now, but I promised myself a brief break.

An interesting observation: The longer it has been since I’ve eaten, the more stressed I feel about all the bugs, glitches, and looming book mailing. I noticed this most clearly at lunch. I bought fast food because I wasn’t capable of enough coherence to figure out that there were other options. As I began eating I was regaling Howard with the litany of bugs that I need to track down and stomp upon. I felt exactly when the energy from my food, carried by my blood, hit my brain. Everything in my head and body relaxed. What had been overwhelming was instantly manageable. This means when I’m in a high stress state I should eat often. Unfortunately when I’m in a high stress state I’m much less likely to remember to eat at all.

Back to book packing with me.