Life and Work in Snippets
Yesterday I got an email that managed to punch three anxiety buttons simultaneously. (the trifecta: Money, healthcare, loss of services my child needs.) In the end the email was actually giving me good news on all three of those fronts, but my mind catastrophized so quickly that I wasn’t able to parse the email correctly until after I’d spent several hours stressed and stewing. I ended up having to send a chaser email to append to my first stressed email which basically said “never mind, I re-read and like your plan after all.” Then I spent several hours stewing in the embarassment that I’d once again looked overwrought/ anxious to this particular group of people. I don’t like how a single email can throw me so badly off balance.
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I just spent an hour looking at industrial shelving options. This search was brought on because earlier today I stood in my warehouse space and did the mental calculations to figure out how many more shipments of books before we run out of floor space. Since the warehouse has thirty foot ceilings, going vertical is the obvious solution. I’m not thrilled at the idea of hefting boxes of books high up onto shelves, but we keep making books and I need to use the space I have more intelligently. I can add “shopping for industrial shelving” to the list of life experiences that I did not expect to have.
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I am still waiting on ship coins. They are now almost two months overdue. One of those months is on Howard and I. We simply didn’t get them done in time. The second month is because our delay landed the production time for the coins exactly across the Chinese New Year holiday when the factory closes down for ten days, but the US based office keeps taking orders. This results in a huge backlog. I don’t mind that there is a delay. I firmly believe in people getting holidays. The part that has annoyed me is that I’ve been told three different times “your coins should ship tomorrow.” Delay = fine. Inaccurate information about the extent of that delay which causes me to have to shuffle my plans multiple times over two weeks = time for me to escalate my annoyance from emails to phone calls. Result of phone call, “your coins should ship Monday.” But this time a boss-level person in the US talked to a boss-level person over in China, so (maybe, hopefully) the information will be accurate this time.
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I took my 18 year old on a campus tour this week. It was yet another milestone experience that wasn’t at all shaped how society expects it to be. I may never know what it is like to have a teenager who is chomping at the bit excited to launch into adulthood, thrilled at the experiences which are to come. Mine all face the future like it is a rabid animal ready to bite them. I know that for this particular generation, fear-of-the-future is more normal than it used to be, but that doesn’t mean I know how to navigate my role as parent of adult children who aren’t ready to launch. I’m still making this up as I go.
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My garage has cupboards in it. We’ve brought one inside to test sand and test stain. Once we’ve figured out exactly what process we want to take for turning these into finished cupboards, then the work will begin in earnest. It would also help if daytime temperatures stay above 50 so that the cupboards are warm enough to stain.