Month: October 2009

“I’m going to jump out of the car and then run ahead, but I’ll slow down and turn around. Then you catch up and we do the hug.” Says Gleek as we pull up to the school.

“Okay.” Answers Patch.

“The Hug of Power really helps me through the day. How about you?” Gleek asks.

“Yeah. I feel better and smarter all day.” Says Patch with a smile.

We pull up to the school and I watch as Gleek dashes toward the door, then turns to wait for Patch. He runs up, arms wide. They hug tight, then walk into the school together.

May the world have more Hugs of Power in it.

This is my first post created originally on my very own WordPress-based site, onecobble.com. I bought the domain name more than a month ago. Since then I have been slowly pulling it together so that it is the way I want it to be. It isn’t there yet. I still need to create custom image headers. Also my page links are all giving 404 errors despite the fact that I created pages. I figured out how to mirror posts over to Livejournal, but I have yet to get them to mirror to blogger and facebook. The idea behind this being that I post in one place and all my social media profiles get updated with no further effort from me.

Setting up the site has been a long slow adventure. I would get excited and get a pile of things done until I ran into a snag. Then I would lose all motivation and let the project sit idle for a week or two until I had the energy to problem solve again. Frequently I asked myself why I was bothering at all. Then I remember that I really do want to have blogging across social networks be simpler for me. I really do want my own domain name for the blogging I do.

So I’ve been plugging away and I’ll keep on pounding at it until it has a shape that I am happy with.

Today I hiked. Now I am tired. Of course the “hike” was more of an uphill walk along a paved trail, but it is still farther than I am accustomed to walking regularly. I suppose I can increase the difficulty modifier just a bit by adding the fact that I was also helping shepherd 12 girls ages 8-11 along the trail. The weather was perfect. There was just enough chill for people to be comfortable as long as they kept moving. The girls got a little cold after playing in the water, but no one was miserable. Gleek claimed she was miserable for awhile. She clung to my arm and moaned about her legs. But then we arrived at some interesting rocks and the climbing was more interesting than the moaning which was a relief for everyone.

Part of the hike was a scavenger hunt sheet that I put together. I walked the trail a few weeks ago and took pictures so the girls would have plants and landmarks to look for. It was interesting to see how the advent of Fall had begun to alter the landscape. The girls still managed to find everything, except we had to count sunflower stalks as flowers because the flowers themselves had all frozen and fallen off.

At the top end of the walk we saw Bridal Veil Falls. It is a spot full of memory for me, although these days it is a nostalgic memory rather than an active one. The base of the falls used to be groomed and tended. It was a well-trafficked public park with a tram that ran up a cable to a restaurant at the top. The tram was damaged by an avalanche in 1996 and the restaurant closed it’s doors so repairs could be made. The doors never opened again. The owners spent a decade wrangling funds and environmental preservation concerns until a forest fire came through two years ago and ended the discussion by burning everything. I remember the tram. I remember standing as a child on the grass near the base. I was too scared to ride that steep cable up to the top, but other family members went. I remember coming back when I was in college and having deja vu realizing that I had been there before. All that is left is falling down structures and the arch that used to frame the loading platform. It is like visiting a ghost town that you used to visit when it was thriving. The bustle is gone, what is left is empty. The emptiness has it’s own beauty, but it is not alive. The falls are still the same. They plummet hundreds of feet just as they used to do. There is still a steady stream of visitors because the path is a popular walking and biking route. But these days people come, look, then leave because there is nothing there that beckons them to stay.

The girls felt nothing of the nostalgia. The oldest of them was not even born when the tram stopped running. For them this place has always been as it is now. They were far more interested in wading than in contemplating rusted twists of metal on the cliff high above. Life moves on. So we looked for a while and then we left. It was a good walk. The girls found everything on their scavenger hunt pages. We made it back with no one lost or injured. We even got to pet a little dog on the trip back down. Now I just need to remember to stretch my legs before bed so that they won’t be sore tomorrow.

I am an organizer of things. I combine orders and inventory into packages. I sort piles of dirty laundry into piles of neatly folded clean clothes. I take an unending task list and make of it a schedule which has a chance of allowing the tasks to get done. I turn jumbled piles of papers into neat files. I transform masses of weeds into flower beds. I tally invoices and checks into accounts and tax forms. I take a room in which everything is topsy turvey and turn it into a livable space. I even organize stray thoughts into blog entries. All of this is as natural to me as breathing, but sometimes I am forced to face the fact that the tasks themselves are not easy. They are actually complex processes that I have performed so often that they have become routine to me.

My primary confrontation with the complexity of these tasks is when I attempt to teach one of them to my children. When faced with a messy room, my kids will start to pick over the mess at random. They’ll pick up a few things, but if they don’t know where the things go, they shove them on shelves until the shelves are ready to topple. It is not enough for me to say “clean your room.” I must couple that command with teaching them how to go about sorting and organizing a room. I have to teach them about picking up large things first so you can see the small ones. I have to teach about scraping the mess out of the corners and into the middle. I have to teach that small things need to be put in containers, not shoved on shelves. Each of these things is a separate piece of knowledge all of which combine into knowing how to organize a room.

This weekend Kiki was feeling buried under things to do. For a week or more I’d been telling her to prioritize and do the most important things first. She kept ending up in a stalled panic rather like the rabbit staring frozen at the headlights of an oncoming car. I finally realized that while she knew the meaning of the word “prioritize” she did not actually have a clue how to go about doing it. So I gave her a piece of paper and made her write down every single To Do item in her head. I told her not to fret over the size of the list because we knew it would be far more things than she could accomplish in a single day. The idea was to pull all these fretful things out of her head and pin them to a page where she could see them. Then I took a second piece of paper and used the Franklin Covey square to help her sort her list. Suddenly she could really see what she needed to focus her time on and which things she had been stressing over that were neither important nor urgent. Using the paper helped her see what I meant by prioritize. Kiki still has a lot to learn about organizing her time, but this gives her a method to start learning.

A friend of mine is getting ready to start using Quickbooks for her small business. My first reaction was to tell her not to worry because it is easy. But then I remembered how scary it was to get started all those years ago. I remembered driving to Salt Lake for an 8 hour seminar on small business accounting. Accounting is not easy, but it can become easy with practice. I find this very encouraging because there are things in my life that are not easy, things that frighten me. I would really love to pull together a book and have it published by a large house. This task feels like an impossible pipe dream, but I’ve begun to see where to start and if I can just keep going the things that feel daunting will get easier. I will only stay daunted if I stand still. Practice makes difficult things become easy and that is a good thing to know.

Today I spent $25 which was not strictly necessary. This is not a major crime, except for the fact that we’re trying to live lean at the moment. We need to be careful about spending until we get the next Schlock book into print. This means I’m pulling out all those frugal habits I developed during the post-Novell years and dusting them off so I can use them again. I’m cooking from scratch, hanging some laundry to dry, reading sales fliers, and browsing through thrift shops. It is fortunate that I currently have time available to do these things. But packed away with all the good frugal habits were the fears about spending any money at all. Those fears were helpful and necessary when we could see ahead to the point when our money would run out. But the situation this Fall is different. We have a source of income. We are trying to manage a tight patch without increasing debt, not scraping to make the savings last. In one way the current situation is harder. We are allowed to spend on a few small wants as well as the needs, but we have to figure out which of the many wants is the best choice. We also have define “small” in terms of how much we are allowed to spend.

All of this brings me back to my spending today. I bought flower bulbs. Could I get by without them? Yes. They aren’t actually going to provide me with anything right now, except motivation to get outside and dig in the dirt. I can dig in the dirt for free. By the time these bulbs bloom, we’ll be through the tight patch. It would make sense to just buy flowers then, except for the fact that I have to plant them now if I want them to bloom at all. These little bulbs that I stick in the ground are a gift that I am giving to my future self. I don’t know exactly what her life will be like in February and March, but I am betting that flowers will be a positive addition. It makes me happy to know that the bulbs are out there in the dirt waiting to be beautiful. I can hold on to that thought in the doldrums of winter. Sometimes we need to realize that “not strictly necessary” purchases can be money well spent.

One of the odd things about keeping a blog and running a business is that my head is always full of things about which I can not blog. It is not that business is always full of hot secrets or major changes (although sometimes this is the case), but there are lots of little business deals and decisions which need to be settled in private before the details can be made public. Last February my head was full of the fact that Tracy Hickman wanted to work with us on a book, but until the ink was signed on a contract it was not wise to be going “squeee!” on the internet. The privacy saves everyone trouble. It saves fans from being excited about a project that never happens. It saves us from explaining repeatedly why the project won’t happen. Even more important is not having to discuss all the details of internal business decisions and argue with folks who want to armchair business manage. Energy spent explaining business decisions could much better be spent creating comics or writing blog entries.

So the fact that my head is full of business things I can not talk about is normal. Unfortunately sometimes those business thoughts jostle about and are so noisy that I can hardly find any other thoughts. The good news Howard and I both have the same problem and so conversations about business thoughts are a large percentage of all our communications. We pull these yammering thoughts out of our heads and toss them around until we find solutions. I can’t imagine running a business without a partner whom I trust completely and who I can depend upon to still like me even when I quash his shiny idea. Even better are the times when his shiny idea runs right over my doubt and proves that the shininess is actually golden, which is what happened with the ACEO sketch cards. At this point the balance is honed over years of practice in communication and in making business decisions. We always come to a consensus before moving forward.

But even with frequent conversations with Howard, the business thoughts still linger. Sometimes they bounce around like hyper-active hamsters. Other times they loom like a storm cloud. There are even days when they just slump in untidy piles where I am likely to trip on them. Then there are the days where I’m watching looming, while dodging hamsters and trying not to trip. Those are stressful days, particularly if I have to handle parenting and household tasks simultaneous to all the watching and dodging. Those are the days when my life feels like too much to handle. The difficult days are balanced by the days when I am exhilarated by the cool things I get to do and the times when I am awed by the amount of support our business receives from fans. Sometimes my life feels overwhelming, but I chose all of these things and I wouldn’t want to give them up.

Back when the first sprouts of Spring poked out of the ground I made a decision.  I decided that this was not a year for me to stress over gardening.  There were too many other things in my life and so I did not even try.  I didn’t plant vegetables.  I handed off the lawn mowing to the two oldest kids.  I hardly even went outside.  This was critically necessary during the insane Springtime months.  It remained necessary during the busy summer.  It was the right choice.  I didn’t even miss it, or so I told myself.  True, I did not spend time looking longingly at the garden and wishing to weed, what I did instead was feel depressed.  Every time I walked past the weeds in my front yard, I felt a small twinge of failure.  This was greatly alleviated when my mother came to visit and gave my front garden a make-over.  That lifted my spirits immeasurably, which should have told me something.

I took the lifted spirits and went back to working a lot.  Even when business activities slowed down this Fall, I found myself emotionally tangled by parenting responsibilities.  I continued to ignore the lawn and garden.  But Kiki has also been having a rough time, which meant that the back lawn got longer and longer.  This morning I hauled out the mower.  I mowed the edges, then Link mowed the middle.  I thought it was just something that needed done, a chore.  But as I mowed past all the plants in my back garden, thoughts and plans rolled over me.  I have a relationship with all the green things which surround my house.  I have tended them.  Most of them, even the trees, I dug holes for and planted with my own hands.  They are all wrapped up with memories and plans and dreams.  I feel bad when I see them struggling.  I feel joy when I see them thriving.  Just being outside reminded me of all this.  When I handed over the mower, I stayed outside to pick up the pears that had fallen to the ground.  I looked up at the pear tree I planted with my own hands.  It dwarfs me now.

How is it that I keep forgetting gardening is solace to my soul?  I keep forgetting that time spent outside in my garden adds light and peace to my life.  There will be times when I am too busy, but when I am not busy, I need to get out there.  I need to be in the sunlight touching the plants, digging the dirt, breathing outside air.

The best thing about gardening is that the plants do not sit idle while I am too busy to tend them.  They grow and struggle and find ways to thrive.  Such is the case with the grapevine I planted 5 years ago.  I planted it, but never quite built the arbor I intended for it.  So it mounded and ran along the ground, then up a bush.  I’ve paid it some passing attention.  We picked the grapes we found last year, but many of them had been eaten by birds.  This is because the birds know a good thing when they find it.  These are delicious grapes.  Once I was done picking up pears (two boxes and more still on the tree), I sent Kiki out with a pair of scissors and instructions to pick all the grapes.  She kept coming back in for additional bowls.  In the end we had four big bowls full.

It was far more grapes than we can eat before they go bad.  So I pulled out my food dryer and arranged grapes to be dried into raisins.  All Fall I’ve been telling myself that I don’t have time for this kind of thing.  That canning and food drying are more trouble than they are worth to me.  From a financial standpoint this is true.  However I found immense satisfaction from washing and prepping grapes, even more so because I know these are grapes from a vine I planted with my own hands.  This kind of task connects me with my ground and with the generations of food-storing women who came before me.  It reminds me that all my blogging, and computing, and inventory keeping should only be part of who I am.  Computer time is all eyes and brain.  My life needs to contain activities with smells, tastes, and touches as well.  I need to spend time hot, cold, sticky, sweaty, dirty, all of which sound unpleasant in bare words, but all of which can contribute to a feeling of wholeness, of well being.

I know not everyone has the emotional connection with plants and gardening that I do.  Not everyone can find wholeness pulling weeds.  But I think everyone does have something that fills them up.  We just need to not forget it.  We need to make time for it, what ever “it” may be.   Because, as I rediscovered today, time spent in a wholeness activity adds energy to everything else.  Even while it uses up time, it makes accomplishing everything else more possible.

It should not have surprised me that after nearly a week of highly focused schedule keeping, I had two days where I let everything slip.  None of us broke any rules, but I let the schedule slump into an untidy heap and there was lots of wiggle room without technically breaking any rules.  We still more or less got to bed on time.  Homework got more or less done.  Chores were skipped.  And both Howard and I played instead of working.  This kind of a day is good to have every once in awhile.  The fact that I’m now working on my second day of slumpiness indicates some things.

I need more exercise.
I need to get out of my house more, especially when the weather is nice.
I need to be getting more sleep. (Staying up too late makes tomorrow worse without making today any better.)
I need to put things into my schedule that I look forward to doing.
I need to be cautious about time slurping games.

I have a three day weekend.  Hopefully I can use it to recharge.

In adventure/drama movies there is often a scene where Character X is desperate/overwrought/frantic and Character Z must attempt to restrain  X from an action that would be detrimental.  Sometimes it is one person stopping another from running into a burning building.  Sometimes it is one person stopping another from diving into a fight.  The key is that Z restrains while X struggles, flails, and beats upon Z in an effort to escape restraint.  The crisis passes and the scene moves on.  We frequently get to watch how X regains composure, but it is not often that the film shows the effect of this moment on Z.   Character Z had to stand there and be pummeled.  Z had to hold tight and not get pulled off balance.  Z frequently has no clue whether thanks or blame will be coming later.  When all is said and done, Z must be tired, bruised, sore, and emotionally wrung.

I have a lot of sympathy for Z.  I’ve been Z.  I have never had a dramatic moment such as those in film, but I can not count the number of times that I have physically restrained a flailing child, often for the child’s safety.  It isn’t always physical either.  Of late the battleground has been homework and Link has been playing the part of X.  He twists, and mopes, and throws pencils, and deliberately provokes others, and breaks pencils, and yells, and whines.  It is all flailing in an effort to escape restriction.  My job is to hold tight and require him to do the work.  Unsurprisingly, once he stops fighting it, the work goes quickly and fairly easily.  Then Link skips away, free to squabble with siblings over games instead.  I am left feeling pummeled, bruised, sore, and emotionally wrung.

This will not last forever.  I know it won’t.  Kiki had a similarly bad patch when she was in 5th and 6th grades.  It passed.  I’ve got the Kiki experience to draw upon, so I’m better equipped to handle it.  At the moment things are bad because I had a meeting with his teacher on Monday and we figured out how to require him to get work done.  Link has been educationally cornered, thus the flailing.  Each evening the flailing is less.  Each conflict gives me clues about how to manage better.  How to anticipate, prepare, prevent.  But there is so much to manage all at once.  Link is not the only child with homework.  I may have to move the Link homework battles into the after school hours to leave space for the Gleek/Kiki/Patch homework battles in the after dinner hour.  Last Spring the post-dinner hour was a very pleasant time of day.  At the moment it is the most grueling.  It uses up my patience so the kids have a cranky mommy at bedtime.  I need to shuffle so that Nice Mommy gets to do bedtime instead.

It is hard to stand firm and not be pulled off balance.  It is particularly hard when the other person is simultaneously trying to flail their way free and really hoping that you stay strong.  Kids want to know that parents will stay calm and firm for the things that are right.  Link would love to escape his writing homework, but he would also feel bad about not doing it.  He needs me to take the pummeling calmly.  He needs me to stand firm.  Later, when the battle is over it is okay for him to see that standing firm wore me out, but in the moment he needs to see calm assurance.  I just wish it didn’t make me so tired.

I’ve been dealing with some tiring stuff this past week.  None of it is difficult or drama laden.  I just get worn down by the one-thing-after-another with few breaks in between.  I am worn down by the end of most days.  Often I feel like crying.  The parenting load is particularly heavy because of the time I spend worrying about long term repercussions of the day’s decisions.

My tiredness does not change the fact that I am much happier this Fall than I was last Summer or Spring.  I am still buried under things to do, things which wear me out, things which tax my capabilities, but last Spring I kept sacrificing important things to manage urgent things.  Now I am spending most of my days on the things which have long term importance to me. The difference is huge.  Even when I am so tired I want to sit and cry, I feel calm.  At peace.  Life is not easy, but it is good.

The good news is that things are going to get even better.  The kids have already settled in to the school year, but as we keep going they’ll get practiced at interpreting the desires of their teachers.  They’ll internalize the expectations and make meeting them habitual.  All of that will take time.  Some days are going to be harder than others, but on the whole I think we’ll see slow improvement in the next few months.  Status quo through Thanksgiving sounds really good to me.  After that we’ll be headed for Holiday shipping and the finishing touches on a book.  December is always busy.