Administrative Things

Administrivia took over this week. My time was eaten by unexpected small tasks relating to the following.

Home refinancing: The details of why this had to be done right now are personal and financial. Also with rates due to go up, sooner is better than later. Yet I’ve been providing paperwork, fielding phone calls to answer questions, and doing some household repairs so that the place shows well for an appraisal. I also had to call the county registrar because somehow they had our property address listed on the wrong street. The fix was simple, but it took me thirty minutes of time.

Shifting Link’s educational path: Because we were changing the plan, I had to communicate with the WIA Youth program and put the new plan down on paper. We also had to change the schedule for his tutoring appointments. There is still a website we need to go register on and some practice tests for him to take. None of it is difficult. All of it takes time.

Communicating with Patch’s teachers: We seem to have full-on panic attacks under control, but Patch is still frequently shutting down and not communicating well with his teachers. This means I have to communicate with them more. We have to make plans for how to handle his behavior and how to make sure that avoidance doesn’t get him out of doing work. He needs both sympathy and expectation. Because the teachers and classes are different, I have to communicate with every teacher who is having troubles. I also have to spend a lot of time talking with Patch. He has to be part of the process. He also needs to know what the concrete goals are for each classroom. I also talked with him about the efforts he needs to put out to make friends instead of passively waiting for friendships to find him.

Health insurance snafu: The good news here is that we’re covered, we’ve always been covered. The bad news is that over the past week two doctors appointments and five prescriptions were bounced because the system said we weren’t covered. I spent time on the phone talking to the insurance company and they are fully aware that this is an error. Unfortunately the fix will take a few days. Then I’ll have to call all the places again and have them re-run the insurance. Further details of this snafu may become a cautionary post later, but I want the story to be complete before I write it. The truly frustrating part is that nothing I did caused this problem. it was caused by other people and it has cost me at least three hours of time and associated stress.

Project Management: The acquisition of an outside editor has shifted my role in Planet Mercenary a bit. Right now my primary job seems to be making sure that everyone has work they can be doing. Ideally none of the creatives are sitting around and waiting for a piece so that they can be working on it. This means I have to track where everyone is and make sure they have work queued up. This includes me since some of my tasks on the project are also creative. And Planet Mercenary is not the only project I’ve got to manage. There is also a new site design for the Schlock page, the next Schlock book, the 70 maxims book, convention preparation for LTUE, and other things that I can’t think of off the top of my head, but inevitably pop up at inconvenient moments.

Email: There is no end to email. Ever. At least much of it has been nice email, but the quantity still nibbles at my brain.

I do not like administrative minutia, but if I don’t do it everything falls apart. Hopefully I’ll be able to have solid blocks of creative time next week before LTUE.