Kiki and Howard are the ones working hard this week. Kiki is finishing up her Driver’s Ed class which includes two hours of range time and three hours of class time every day. On top of that she is taking an independent study science class and she is working on art projects. Howard is trying to work high-speed to build the buffer up in advance of the coming conventions. He wants to get 2-3 weeks of comics done for each week between now and August 1st. I’m working too. The majority of my hours are filled with necessary things. I run the business, manage the house, write, and care for the kids. Very little of my time is wasted, yet I feel like I’m moseying along. This week I’m completely lacking the must-go-fast vibe. I sometimes feel guilty about that when Howard comes home in a cloud of didn’t-work-hard-enough-today despair. Yet I think my relaxation is necessary in the short term. I need a few weeks of mosey so that when must-go-fast returns I will have the strength to do it. I expect it to return full-force one week from Monday when we open pre-orders.
Some of the moseying-along feeling in our house may be due to the fact that we exchanged Gleek for one of my nephews. She is having a rural-Idaho adventure at my brother’s house, while Nephew is here in suburbia with us. Nephew’s presence is new and interesting to my boys. He falls between them in age and the three of them play together for hours without conflict. My house has been quiet all week long, except for those times when the boys play a video game or watch a movie. Even when they are not quiet, it is not the sort of noisy which requires any intervention. It is lovely and I miss my Gleek. I miss her a lot. She called me today because she was sad and not feeling well. We only talked for a couple of minutes. It was enough for me to tell that mostly she’s having a great time. There are chickens! and Bunnies! and Cats! and dirt for digging! It made me realize how much my girl would love to live in a place with bigger boundaries and more independence. I’ll have to provide more of those for her when she gets back.
We need to figure out a way for Howard to have a lull. He needs a month when he can just work calmly and happily without feeling rushed. I’ve been scrambling to try to arrange it for almost two years now, it hasn’t quite happened yet. I have my eye on fall. He gets to go to a writer’s retreat then, and I really hope that it will be rejuvenating for him. I hope that my writing can begin to earn income, so that he doesn’t have to push so hard all the time.