Month: October 2012

Observations on a College Campus

By / October 12, 2012

I am old. Not old lady old, but mom old. Everywhere we went there were young people and they were all open and ready to engage, meet new friends, maybe find someone particularly special. …and I don’t fit with that anymore. I remember fitting. I remember belonging to the crazy energy of an apartment of girls baking cookies late at night because we had too much studying to do. Part of me misses it, and part of me is tired contemplating it. But I watched Kiki, and she is ready for it. She bounced as we looked at the library, the dorms, the art department. She is ready to launch into college and I am the mom who gets to send her off and go home. Just writing that sentence makes me feel boring.

(No need to make me feel better. I’m fine. I really like my current life stage and level of wisdom. It is just one of those How did I end up here? moments.)

When one tours a college campus in the rain, it is best to wear a coat with a hood. I wish I’d known that rain was in the plans when I walked out of my house without grabbing my jacket yesterday.

Up next: admissions forms, then an unending stream of scholarship forms and financial aid applications. But walking the campus let Kiki picture herself as a college student. It helped her to refine what she wants.

Onward

Linkage Before I Venture Off

By / October 11, 2012

Today I’m off to spend a couple of days visiting with relatives and helping Kiki tour college campuses. Naturally this means that I had a writing brainstorm late last night and no time today to write any of it down. However I did discover the lovely surprise that a piece I wrote months ago went live today. Over on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog I’m talking about My Favorite Bit of the Hold on to Your Horses project. Sometimes when I re-read posts I’ve written I want to edit. Other times I think they’re pretty good. Every once in a long while I re-read a post and it makes me cry because it is exactly what I meant. That post makes my eyes leak.

Reminders

By / October 10, 2012

Reminders I needed today:

Running is better than crying (exercise is the mood balancer)

Shut up and write the words (on writerly kvetching courtesy of Shanna Germain.)

My job is to love people, not fix them.

Words have value even if they only change the one who writes them.

Reminders I didn’t necessarily need today, but which are good to remember and list here for a day when I do need them:

Patterns matter more than incidents.

Courage is not the absence of fear, it is deciding to act despite the fear.

Education is not a race with limited prizes at the end.

Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. (courtesy of Janci Patterson)

Your physical spaces should reflect your priorities.

Emotions are not a problem to be solved. They are a powerful indicator that there is a problem to be addressed.

Some goals can not be reached without a leap of faith.

Find the places that fill your soul and visit them often.

Sick Day

By / October 8, 2012 / 1 Comment

I do not like having a head cold. I do not like it Sam I Am. That statement would be a lot more clever if I’d made it rhyme. Of course rhyming verse construction appears to be one of the functions shut down by having a head cold. Also shut down: prioritization, energy, and will to go do things. I not even feeling all that miserable. I keep doing mental assessments of my physical state and thinking that I should just shake it off and get stuff done. I did accomplish the important meeting of the day, take Link to check for strep (negative), and pick up all the kids from school on schedule. But right now I’m staring down the barrel of dinner, homework time, and Family Home Evening. All I want to do is crawl into bed and watch movies until time to sleep.

Tomorrow will be better. I know this. I’m not even intending to complain really. I just suspect that it will be nice to have recorded that some days are full of sloth and fatigue rather than organization and competence.

Swirls of Thoughts on Conference Sunday

By / October 7, 2012 / 1 Comment

My brain is full. Usually when my brain is full it feels like a chaotic muddle, a mess to be sorted. Today most of the fullness is the result of listening to four sessions of LDS General Conference. All the thoughts, impressions, and inspirations I gathered from the speakers are not a chaotic muddle. Instead they are like colors of paint swirling together and mixing as they are carried on a current. I feel no need to snatch or clean because I can trust that the things I need will stay with me while the rest will move onward.

I am thinking about a bird of prey tangled in a net. Rescue workers approach carefully, trying to cut the strands so that the bird can fly free, but knowing that the bird will not understand and will attack them for their efforts. Threads part and the bird does fly, but sadly a portion of the net is still tangled on the bird, possibly to get caught on something else and trap the bird again. I think of the be-netted bird when I can see that someone is trapped in a net of habits and compulsions that they can not even perceive. I see it. I want to cut them out, but unlike a bird that can be rescued, people treasure their entrapping nets and they dive back into them. I am left standing with my hands in my pockets knowing that all I can do is hope to help my friend see the net for the trap that it is and then to begin to cut threads for themselves.

I think about the cultural shifts and how so small a change as the minimum age for missionaries can have rippling effects. Suddenly a decision which seemed years off moves much closer. Will there be a missionary boom for a couple of years like the baby boom after the first world war? Will BYU be easier to get into next year as more high school graduates opt for mission before college? In a couple of years it will all settle out, but during the settling process some things will shift. It will be interesting to watch.

My thoughts drift to the many family members and friends who are suffering from lack of employment, under employment, and health issues. The amount I can do to help feels paltry in the face of their needs and I feel guilty for feeling stressed by my own financial strains which are so much less dire. Yet I remember years ago when I was pregnant with Gleek and it seemed that every female relative and friend was suffering from fertility issues. I was growing with blessings that they longed for. Within two years every single one of those women became pregnant. Their longed for children came on a schedule different than the one they wanted, but the children still came. I feel that this is the same, that employment and health are nearby and that the desired security will arrive by faith, not by frantic efforts to exert control. So I try to exercise faith on their behalf. Do what you can. Trust for the rest.

I think much about Simon Peter and Christ. I think even more on the command to pick up discipleship and never put it down again. I ponder what service I am to give in making the world a better place.

Then I close my eyes and think of nothing in particular because I’m still fighting a head cold and too much thinking makes me sleepy. The things I need to do will stay with me, brought back to me over and again by the whisperings of inspiration and divine guidance. For now, I rest.

Contemplating College for Kiki

By / October 6, 2012

Kiki filled out her first college application while I was away at the writer’s retreat. The first I knew about it was when the college emailed me saying that she’d applied and that all they needed were her ACT scores and a transcript. She took the ACT a month ago and her scores arrived last week. The transcript only required a five minute phone call to the school. Without any fanfare at all, we’ve shifted into the applying for colleges phase of Kiki’s high school year.

I can’t help thinking that it ought to be more stressful than this. There certainly is paperwork involved. There are dozens of little tasks to track and complete. But then tracking and completing dozens of small tasks is something we do around here daily. The fact that the tasks are related to college applications is only a tiny shift. Applying for scholarships is a similar deluge of paperwork tasks. Half the challenge is figuring out what is available so that the paperwork can be submitted. When I mentioned to a friend that I ought to be more stressed about paying for college, she pointed out that the dollar amount for a year of college is approximately equivalent to the dollar amount of paying for a book printing. Most people encounter sticker shock when looking at those numbers. I don’t because I’ve dealt with them every year for quite awhile. Covering the cost is a challenge, not something to fear.

Absent the deadline panics and financial terror which beset most families when contemplating college, we’re still left with the emotional ride of launching a child into adulthood. Kiki is taking all this in stride, as evidenced by her just filling out an online application when the link was mailed to her. We’ve scheduled some campus tours and she is very much focused on the possibilities rather than the possible roadblocks and troubles. My state is more complicated. I want to manage this all calmly, this is where we’ve always been aimed, but my emotions are unruly. When we arrived at the first day of school this fall, I cried for two days–grieving for the end of the era when all my kids live at home. It seemed silly to grieve then, we still had a year ahead, but that was when the grief arrived and I had to deal with it. Then it passed and we moved onward into the school year. Over the summer I watched my brother and sister as they planned big trips and fun events, trying to cram into a single summer all those things they meant to do earlier but somehow didn’t. My reactions spring from the same knowledge–that things are going to change–but my impulse is different. I want to hoard normality. I want to eschew all big events and disruptions so that we can have as many calm days as possible with all of us here.

Despite my desire for normal, change is in the air. Kiki is beginning to face outward from home, to plan and picture her future. We are beginning to set things up so that she can fly free. Each step is small, an application, a checking account, a college tour, but they accumulate. By next spring all these tiny steps will have changed us. Perhaps I was right to grieve a bit on that first day of school, my subconscious knew that the moments of change had already begun to arrive. Perhaps I grieved then so that I would be able to feel the joy inherent in this process. I watch Kiki, strong and so very obviously ready for all of this. She calmly fills out forms and writes paragraphs about the things she has done in her life. She is surprised to discover so many accumulated accomplishments. Some time in winter or spring she is going to look around and notice how far she has come in the past six months. She will be either happy or frighted by it. When she is, I will hug her tight and refrain from telling her how I saw it coming. Or perhaps I will tell her if hearing it is what she needs to regain some balance.

I know it will not be a launch and gone forever. We’ll always be part of each other’s lives even if we don’t live in the same house, but the change has begun. It is beautiful, joyous, and fascinating to watch.

Parent Teacher Conferences

By / October 4, 2012

I never know on walking in to a parent teacher conference how I will feel walking out. I’ve walked in feeling like all is fine and left with a pile of new worries. I’ve arrived with pressing concerns and departed feeling relieved. I’ve had conferences where the teacher and I had nothing much to do but smile and agree all is going well. Then there are the times where the teacher and I talk for a very long time discussing options and trying to define the shape of the challenges. Sometimes those long conversations result in a moment of inspiration when one of us suddenly sees an answer that makes everything else fall into a workable plan. Other times we run out of words and sit across the table wishing we had an answer to go along with our commiseration. I’ve had teachers who work with me as a coordinated team and others where every conversation felt like a missed catch, lots of words but no connection. Parent teacher conferences are fraught. I had three of them today. They each gave me insights into the child and the teachers. The new insights have given me new things to do for my kids and some new things not to do anymore. The impact to my workload is minimal, but shifting habit patterns is always a challenge. Contemplating the need to change habit patterns while tired and brain fried is exhausting. Time to sleep and think about it all again tomorrow.

The Steps to Deciding on Merchandise and then Managing It

By / October 4, 2012

My inventory day yesterday required me to stare at all of the various merchandise that we’ve made over the last few years. Then I started thinking about the decision making process behind creating that merchandise and I thought it might be useful to outline how that works.

1. Cool idea! This is the fun part of creating merchandise, before any work is invested. We’re able to say wouldn’t it be cool if… we had miniatures, there were a t-shirt with a maxim on it, we had schlock patches. Howard and I come up with fun ideas all the time. Fans come up with them too and tell us about them. They have to pass the rest of the steps before they can exist.

2. Broad appeal? For every cool idea, Howard and I have a discussion of whether it will appeal to most Schlock fans or if it will only interest a few. No merchandise will interest everyone, but the more people we can interest the better. Other wise we have a basement full of stuff that no one is buying. Books and calendars interest many fans, water bottles and miniatures only interest a few. We can still make the lower interest items, but it affects pricing and quantities.

3. Costs. There are different kinds of costs involved in merchandise. Production costs are the most obvious. We have to find a supplier who manufactures the merchandise we want. We would dearly love a bowl-sized yellow mug printed with Tub of Happiness, but we’ve never found a supplier who can do it the way we imagine. Space is another cost. Bowl size mugs are physically large and I only have so much room to store things. Every inch of space I give to mug storage can not be used for book storage–and books sell better. There are costs in effort as well. T-shirts take lots of effort because I have to track sizes as well as styles. Merchandise also gets rejected because of shipping concerns. We tend to avoid things that break easily in transit. We also avoid things which require new packing methods. I’m already stocking eight different types of shipping containers. Storing those shipping supplies also takes up space.

4. Price point. We have to evaluate all the various costs of the item against the price we think people are willing to pay. Some really cool ideas are simply not profitable because they cost too much for the amount of money they can earn.

5. Budget evaluation. We only have so much money available to fund new merchandise. If we have to choose between printing a book and making goopy Schlock in a cup, the books are going to win every time. Every item of merchandise we choose means there are at least three others which we can’t fund.

6. Design. All of the above steps are discussion and research. We can do those in the space of an hour if things line up right. This one is when Howard commits art. We have to find space in Howard’s schedule to create whatever thing we’ve pictured. Many cool merchandise items stall in this stage for a very long time. Sometimes we even lose track of them because we’re too busy.

7. Production. This stage begins with sending files to a supplier. Usually there are a couple of rounds of merchandise approval, but mostly this stage is made of waiting.

8. Marketing. With merchandise in hand we have to sell it. Sometimes the marketing begins before the design and production phases. When we run a pre-order it is often to answer the questions of appeal and quantity. It also helps to build interest in the merchandise. Older merchandise still benefits from marketing attention. Most of our marketing plans are “Howard will announce it from the Schlock blog and tweet it.” This works great for Schlock merch. It did not work well when we put out Hold on to Your Horses and realized that Howard’s audience is not mine. For non-established businesses the marketing discussion needs to be up there around step 3, before any money is spent.

9. Inventory management. And now we’ve come full circle back to my inventory day. I have to keep track of all the merchandise so that I do not sell more than we have in stock. It is also critical that I be able to find merchandise and ship it within a day or so of when it is ordered. I have to manage both the physical inventory in my house and the inventory listed in the online store to make sure that they match each other.

Merchandise is a lot of work, but there are rewards that aren’t measured in money. We love the moment when someone walks up to our booth at a convention and lights up “Oh I have to have that t-shirt! It is perfect!” We agree. It’s why we made the shirt. I just wish that more of the cool ideas passed the rest of the steps into reality.

Inventory Day at the Schlock Warehouse

By / October 3, 2012 / 1 Comment

When my front room looks like this:

Then I know it is time to have an inventory day. These packages are the returned merchandise from Chicon with a couple of boxes of books from the UVU Book Academy thrown in for good measure. The Chicon boxes only just arrived because the truck they were in had some cross country adventures on the way back to us. Fortunately the merchandise inside was all fine, just the boxes were battered by being shipped across the country and back again.

An inventory day is when I sort through boxes and put all the merchandise back on the shelves in my shipping room so that I can find it again when I need it. Sometimes an inventory day also requires me to re-arrange my storage arrangements as merchandise sells out and other merchandise is added. Today I’ll definitely be needing to rearrange because one of the things which arrived from Chicago were these:

We have 14 of them and I’ll be putting them into the store as soon as I get some proper product photos taken. That will happen after I’ve figured out where to store them that is not in my front room. The Schlock Mercenary shipping and warehousing department takes up an entire unfinished room in our basement.


There are also two storage units off site where we store large pallets full of boxes of books.
My shipping station is set up more or less in the middle of the room where I’ve got easy access to most of the merchandise.

You can see that I keep the most shipped inventory close along with various sizes of boxes and packing paper. I print invoices and postage in my office, but then I stand at the shipping station to pack the boxes. We usually average between five and ten orders per week during most of the year. November and December tend to average ten to twenty orders per week. During pre-orders we’ll get anywhere from a hundred to a thousand orders depending on what shiny thing we’ve put up for sale. The massive pre-orders are handled differently from the daily shipping.

One of the fun things about an inventory day is discovering that of the ten copies of Hold on to Your Horses that I sent to Chicon, only one came back. One is the perfect number of books to have after a convention, because I know that I sold as many as possible and there is only one left to ship home. Cobble Stones also only had a single copy return.

In addition to all of the Chicon packages, we had a single package from GenCon. The T-shirt collection we had in storage there had become somewhat random. We decided to ship them all home and re-stock completely next year. The box contained some shirt designs which we’ve discontinued.

I put them all into our store so that we can clear out the old inventory and make way for new things. Selling the old inventory makes physical space and provides the funds necessary to make new things.

Sorting through all the boxes showed me that it was time to upgrade one of our stacked pallets into a shelf. So that is my next task for today: assembling shelving. At the end of it all, I will have gone up and down the stairs countless numbers of times. I suppose I can call it exercise. Putting the storage and work space in the basement means that we end up carrying things up and down stairs regularly. Until we’re able to budget for an actual warehouse/office this is the best solution we’ve got.

Unconscious Doing

By / October 2, 2012 / 1 Comment

“Can you hand me the sour cream?”
“My backpack is in the front room will you go get it for me?”
“I need a spoon.”

Until I went away I didn’t notice the barrage of small requests my kids make of me just because I am in the room. I notice them now because last week I was not here and they got their sour cream, backpacks, and spoons for themselves. I also notice the requests which are not made because I anticipate them and get them done before the child thinks to ask. I pour milk for the child who is chattering, spoon in hand, but hasn’t yet looked at the bowl in front of her. I put sharpened pencils next to the homework binder to minimize interruptions to the study process. Anticipating the next necessary task is something I do constantly. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is one of the good gifts of anxiety, which carries over into relaxed tasks as well as worrisome ones. Perhaps I just learned to do this in the years when I was managing babies, toddlers, and preschoolers all of whom really did need someone to pour milk, hand out spoons, and find lost items. Maybe I learned it then and just never stopped.

My children don’t think about it either. They make these requests even when they are physically closer to the requested item than I am. If I’m paying attention and point this out, we all laugh together and they get it themselves. Yet the next time I’ll likely be distracted and just fulfill the request even if it makes far more sense for the child to do so. The thing is, I like anticipating needs and answering them. I like smoothing the obstacles so that important work can get done. Efficiency is pleasing to me and so I put forth the effort to create it whenever possible. This is why my attempts to re-train us all to let the kids do more are like emptying a bathtub with a spoon. Probably a spoon I fetched for a child because they asked for it.

“I think you had to leave because you’re so big. You fill the house.” Howard said as we were discussing my absence and trying to sort out why we all had to do this hard thing. This statement led to much teasing as I pointed out that perhaps different phrasing might be appropriate from a husband who is trying to welcome his wife home and make her feel loved. But after the jokes about wording were complete, I had to acknowledge that Howard is right. This is my house, arranged in the ways that I’ve selected, the schedule is primarily my design. Everyone else flows along with these things because I do a good job organizing. I do such a good job that until I’m not there to do it, no one stops to think if there could be another way. I’m pervasive and we could only see it by removing me from the picture for a week. A really hard week during which the folks at home sometimes despaired that they could keep it all together. In contrast I wrestled, not with guilt exactly, but with a deep part of myself which was convinced that leaving was a major dereliction and would cause harm. Logically I knew it was not true, but that deep place inside me believes that one of my primary jobs in life is to reduce stress for everyone else, particularly for Howard and the kids. I couldn’t even see this driving need until I put myself into a place where I couldn’t perform that function. Now I see it. Now I see how it has me fetching spoons and back packs every single day.

I think seeing it is half the battle. I can’t unknow this and I don’t want to. Seeing it will cause a hundred little shifts in my responses to these unthinking requests. All those tiny changes are likely to result in large pattern shifts over time. It will be interesting to see how much things are different in six months.