Month: November 2007

Today has the feel of November. The sky is cloudy gray and sprinkling rain have made the multicolor leaves damp and wet. Even though they are limp, those colored leaves remind me that we are in November and not January. The warmth and glow of the holidays lies ahead of me and so I’m willing to forgive a little gloomy weather. In fact the gloom seems more an excuse to curl up inside and drink cocoa than cause for mourning. November is filled with promise of things that are yet to come.

I like November. I particularly like this November because I was ready to be done with October about a week before it was ready to be done with me. I fully expect to find stress again before November is over. Book shipping is imminent and there are holiday preparations to be made. But I’m not going to let tomorrow’s potential stresses squash the joy out of the space I have today. Tomorrow has enough time for the business tasks to be done. Today is for calm and quiet. It is for curling up and napping. It is for snuggling children and finding things to giggle over. Today is for joy.

I’m posting this from a laptop computer because a very kind friend chose to loan me his old one. I’m still in the getting-things-configured stage, but the machine is already far better than what I had. Yay for laptop!

Today was mostly spent in a marathon roleplaying session at my house. Everyone wanted to complete things because we know that this group will be unable to meet again until after the book shipping in early December. It has been fun roleplaying again. It has also been exhausting. I’m just not used to spending long quantities of time with focused social concentration. By the end of the session I could barely add numbers anymore. The game is fun. The story being told is fun. The group is a good one. They’re even really nice about letting Kiki play with us.

The other kids have all be surprisingly good during the day. Howard is out buying ice cream for them to thank them for being so good while mom and dad play. We’ll eat the ice cream tomorrow after church.

Since November 1st, when I had my perspective shift, the heart palpitations have disappeared completely. This lends much credence to the idea that they were stress induced. I was apparently inflicting them on myself.

I finished the first pass on Teraport Wars layout. I now have the strips in place. This gives us a firm page count (224.) Next week I start prepping images of bonus art so that I can put them all into place. Next week I also do more work on sorting invoices and printing labels for the upcoming mass mailing.

Things are well in Taylerland.

I feel as if my life has changed since November first. I am happy and relaxed in ways that I haven’t been for months. But when I really examine what I do in a given day, nothing has changed. I still get up and get kids to school and work hard on business things and work hard on household things and manage tantrums and handle bedtimes. The difference is in how I am perceiving my daily tasks. Instead of viewing my tasks as things I have to do, I am remembering why I put them on my task list in the first place. I’m remembering why I want them done.

The entire month of October “Mow Lawn” was on my task list. It was a thing I needed to do. It lurked there. Every time I had to move it to the next day’s list, the task would whisper “failure” at me. Wednesday I mowed the lawn, not because I had to in order to avoid feeling like a failure, but because I remembered how much more I enjoy my yard when the lawn is neat. I’ve noticed the messy kitchen and realized that I want the kitchen to be clean, so I made it that way. I helped the kids with their homework because I want them to grow up educated and because I like to spend time with them. I worked really hard on business things because I want more empty spaces in my schedule next week.

For the past week I’ve spent all day, every day, doing only things that I want to do. Amazingly they are exactly the same things that I had to do the week before. I want to keep doing things this way because I am happier and because I’ve promised myself a frivolous sewing project if I can get all the book and shipping work done on schedule.

I’ve been beating myself with a stick to make me move faster when I should have been using carrots instead.

When I was a child I had a hamster for a pet. It was a somewhat frustrating experience for both of us. You see I wanted the Hamster to play when it wanted to be asleep and vice versa. We usually had some overlap in the evenings though. That was when I would watch in fascination as the critter would scurry around the cage on hamsterly errands. I loved it when my hamster would run on the wheel. I never tired of watching those tiny legs move so fast that they were a blur. The hamster ran and ran, trying to climb up the side of a constantly rotating wheel, but the hamster never really went anywhere.

My thoughts have been like a hamster lately. Right around bedtime they start to run overtime. I find myself spinning scenarios and replaying events. Songs linger in my head repetitively. I re-hash the day just gone. I make plans for the next day’s activity. Mostly the thoughts just run and run and run without really going anywhere.

I’m not sorry for the brain hamster. It is happening this week because I am totally and happily absorbed in the Teraport Wars layout project. I’m very pleased at how quickly and smoothly the work is going. By the end of the day I am physically and mentally exhausted, but I can’t wait to get up and do some more. When I reach the point where I physically have to rest, then my enthusiasm turns into a brain hamster who runs and runs and runs.

Did I mention that sometimes my childhood pet kept me awake at night? Yeah, hamsters are like that. Brain hamsters too. My best defense is to find a nice no-stress train of thought and let the hamster run on that. So I’ve been planning an amazing costume that I’m going to sew. I’ve always wanted a beautiful costume dress, so now in my moments of down time I’m beginning to leisurely collect the supplies for it. I acquired a pattern today. In fact I acquired 7 patterns today because the fabric store was selling them for $.99 each. Since a single full-price pattern costs $15, I figure I came out ahead.

Lack of leisure was one of the things in my life that was broken. Leisure time is not the same as “down time.” For me down time implies that I have no energy to do anything. I want to zone out. Leisure time is when I use my energy on something simply because I want to do it. I’d stopped allowing that and now I’m giving it back to myself. Since last Thursday, every day has had some leisure time in it. I’ve surprised myself by discovering that many of my leisure choices are actually task list items, but they are things that I never get around to doing because the priority is low. Yesterday I mowed the lawn with my leisure time because I wanted it done and I felt like doing it. I’ve reclaimed writing as a leisure activity rather than an assignment. I’m glad to have writing back as a joy rather than a stress. Most importantly, leisure activities have no deadlines. I might finish this costume before Christmas, or it might be in two years. I might finish a story this month or maybe it will take three. Either way is fine because I’ll only work on it when I choose. It is more important to get it right than to get it done. (This is unlike other areas of my life where both “done” and “right” matter enormously.)

The brain hamster also often runs upon Christmas thoughts. Fortunately I now have plenty of budget for this. The auctions did well and then Howard’s sister contributed a large donation despite our protests. But I think I may declare Thanksgiving weekend a “no work” zone and sew some things for Christmas. Just because I want to. Or maybe I won’t. We’ll see.

The layout is going well. I have only four more Chapters to lay in. This is good because next comes all the bonus art which I have to select and photoshop and lay in. Then there are the copy edits and the bonus story that have to go in. Interspersed with that stuff is all of the mailing preparation that I need to do. But I have enough time. I just need to work steadily (4-6 hours each week day) and it will all be fine. And I will have some time to do things that I don’t need to do, but just want to do.

Now if my hamsters will just let me fall asleep quickly. Fortunately brain hamsters are amenable to rituals of appeasement such as taking a bath or reading a book.

Happiness is coming home from writer’s group after a fun conversation to discover that Howard got home first and did the dishes. The kids are all abed except Kiki, who had to stay up because she was babysitting. Now I have a fun hour to talk with Howard who is also cheerful because he had a productive day too.

I am fond of the phrase “Getting your ducks in a row.” It is something of a violent metaphor, because the implication is that you want the ducks lined up so that you can pull out a gun and shoot them all at once. It must reference shooting galleries, because no one who has been around real ducks would even try to make them line up for anything. I had two pet ducks during childhood, so I know this from sad experience. They were far more interested in quacking and eating bugs, than in participating as performers in a back yard circus.

The metaphor extols the virtues of advance preparation. There are some things in life for which advance preparation works really well. Shipping out Schlock books is one. I spend hours preparing so that we can mail 1500 books in two days. There are other times where “lining up the ducks” doesn’t work because the “ducks” keep moving. Putting kids to bed is like that. I can prepare snack and lay out pajamas and turn down the covers, but when I call the kids to come they have other ideas. While I tuck in one, another has wandered (or sneaked) out of bed to go play with toys, or for a drink, or to get a bandaid for an invisible wound.

The whole month of October was like trying to herd a pack of hyperactive ducks, some of which had the ability to teleport. I ran myself ragged trying to get those ducks to all stand in a line. It was futile. What I did not realize is that I should have been dispatching ducks as I caught them. A task that is completely done will not come unraveled while my back is turned for a moment. And some tasks, once done, change the shape of everything that comes after them. Rather like shooting the first duck in line and realizing that all the rest of the ducks were the wrong ones, so you must start over with the herding.

I was trying to impose organization. I wanted to see what all the next steps would be. I was going crazy trying to picture all the millions of possibilities down all the branching lines of the possibility tree. I need to not do that. I need to take care of the “duck” that is in front of me now and worry about catching the others later. I need to trust that I will be given the resources I need to manage each task as it comes to me. A little planning is wise. Obsessive fretting accomplishes nothing.

Fortunately November is not plagued by a hundred little ducks. It has only two giant ducks. It is still going to take a concerted effort to take these ducks down, but at least I’m not going to lose them.

My goal for today was to relax and enjoy my life. I put away my “To do” list and did whatever I felt like doing. I did do some of the things that were on the list, but only because I felt like it.

I raked leaves so the kids could jump in them. I went to a fabric store and looked at costume dress patterns. I took the kids to Walmart to buy new leaf rakes. (ours had attacked trees so often that they had no prongs left.) I watched a DVD. I answered some email. I shipped a couple of orders. I made pancakes for dinner. And now I am blogging. I am calmer, happier, and more relaxed today than I have been for a very long time.