An Accounting of My Past Week
A week ago Monday: Travel day for the first half, followed by unpacking, house assessing, business task triage, and hugging children. Had to do all the triaging, assessing, and unpacking while I still had a bit of momentum. Experience tells me that if I don’t get them done before I burn through the last of the convention energy, I will not get them done for a week.
A week ago Today (Tuesday): Crash day. Only not completely crash, because I had to go over to the school and talk to the counselor about my two teens’ schedules. On one hand it is really nice that she instantly knew me an was super ready to set things up for my senior girl. On the other hand, it might be nice to not have the school counselor know my kids because they didn’t need any extra attention. I also got to sit down and say “Now let me tell you about my kid whom you haven’t met yet.” I happened to be there at the time when the new school principal was also in her office. The same principal who used to be over the Junior High and who sat through meetings about my son. So when I asked for accommodations requiring administrative approval, he granted them instantly. Nice to be known and listened to. Maybe someday we won’t need that anymore and that would also be nice.
So super important meeting followed by brain sludge. I did manage to mail store orders that had been waiting a week for me to return from GenCon. I also began transcribing some of my GenCon notes. Or maybe I did that on Wednesday.
Wednesday: Had a business meeting with a friend I don’t see often enough. Then I printed out packing lists for shirt orders and sorted them. I think there might have been grocery shopping, but that might have been Tuesday. These days blur together a bit.
Thursday: Had a social event for much of the day. Spent the afternoon/evening printing postage for shirt orders.
Friday: Shipping day. Me and my helper went through about 100 packages. Currently the average temperature in the warehouse is around 80 degrees, so I always end up hot, sweaty, and tired by the time I’m done.
Saturday: 80 more packages into the mail. Then I came home to administrative tasks. I was still working through my post-GenCon to do assignments. I feel like I did some other admin tasks.
Sunday: Church, family gathering.
Monday: The morning was all about getting Howard and daughter out the door to attend Worldcon. They traveled over early because Howard has recording sessions for Writing Excuses. In the afternoon I prepared packing lists and postage for yet more shipping.
Tuesday: 90 packages into the mail. There are a few more lingering at the warehouse, but the remaining shirt packages are all ones that have problems of some sort. Mostly these problems are because the shirt company shorted me on shirts of several types. But some of them are error on my part. Others are a miss communication between me and the shirt company about which size/color combinations actually exist and which don’t. Sorting this all out is requiring a lot of organization and thinking on my part. I’ve reached the point where I have to physically set aside each order so that I can see what shirts I have left. That way I can work in batches and figure out which substitutions I can offer. For some of the shirts I’m waiting for the shirt company to give me their Fill Order which supposedly will give me all the shirts I’m missing. I still expect to have to do print on demand for some shirts in order to fulfill my promises to customers.
Thinking about shirts has filled my head up for more than a week. I’m hoping that by the end of this week I will not have to think about them as much, though I’m certain I’ll still have odds and ends that I’ll have to ship. I think it will be September before I’m done dealing with shirts.
What I want to be spending my brain on is new projects. I have things I’m supposed to be writing and things I want to be writing. I have Schlock books that I need to get complete and sent off to the printer. I’m not sorry to have done the shirts, but I will be glad when I can reclaim the brain space that they’ve been occupying. And I’ll be even more glad when we can set up Print on Demand shirts so that Schlock fans can have their shirts and I don’t have to touch them.
I guess an alternate title for the past week could be Post Convention Brain Mush Combined with Back-To-School, Convention Packing, and Shirts, Shirts, Shirts. An unwieldy title, but accurate.