Sandra Tayler

I sat in church today pondering my priorities. They have been skewed this past week. Perhaps they’ve been skewed longer than that. Today I sat and figured ways to put things aright. There need to be daily spaces of time where business concerns are not allowed to encroach upon paying attention to the children. I need to consolidate my leisure rather than grabbing it in snatches. The second method leads to much wasted time. Work should come before play.

Today I turned over the leaf. Every single moment of today was focused on things for the children. Some of them also happened to be things I wanted to do, but mostly it was all for the kids. I even did the full individual mommy attention bedtime. I look back on the day and I know it was right. The priorities were in order. I got lots of important things done. But I am weary.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

–Robert Frost

It is cold outside. Cold is normal for the end of October, but I’m just finding myself stunned that the end of October has already arrived. Summer is gone, Fall is on it’s way out, and Winter is close. I’m already missing the daylight hours. This is exacerbated by the many hours I’ve been spending in my windowless office.

I have been getting many things done. I still have many things yet to do. It is daunting how many things I have yet to do.

Today I am sorting books. In order to make space for the new Schlock books we have to get rid of a 6 foot tall 3 foot wide bookcase. This means we also have to get rid of that many books. Getting rid of books is not easy, because we love books. For each book I ask:

Will Howard read it again?
Will I read it again?
Do we want the kids to read it?
Does either Howard or I have an emotional connection to this particular book?

If the answer to any of those questions is “Yes,” then the book stays.

I am surprised at how many books received a “no” on all four counts. I have two or three boxes of books that we’ll be parting with. I haven’t yet determined where would be the best place to donate boxes of paperback science fiction books. I know of a scout who is collecting books for an Indian reservation library, but I think they’re looking for younger aged stuff. The thrift store takes anything. But I think I’m leaning toward dropping them all at the Orem Public Library, they’ll be put in the sale area and raise funds for the library.

It has been an interesting day. I wish I hadn’t been sick for most of it. The stomach bug interfered with my favorite preorder game. The game is called “click.” All I have to do is sit at my computer and hit refresh on my store info page to see how many orders came in since the last time I clicked. Click won’t be nearly as fun to play tomorrow when the orders have slowed down.

At least this time I wasn’t reduced to a useless pile of very tense Jello like I was on preorder day back in April. In April I was so tense that I couldn’t get anything done. Today had a little bit of tension, but mostly I’ve felt pretty relaxed as I fielded dozens of customer service emails. Fortunately none of the emails were outside my capabilities to solve. All of the requests were very polite, if occasionally frustrated. I think I was able to make everyone happy before the emailing was done.

It is a measure of my relaxation that I haven’t been frantically running numbers all day to figure out if we’ve brought in enough money yet. Howard keeps running numbers, but I’m content to wait a few days before I start doing my figuring. According to Howard’s numbers, we’ve paid the book production bills and about 2 months of Howard’s salary. Before preorders are over we need have enough money to pay out 8 months of salary. We don’t intend to wait 8 months before the next book, but financial margins make me happy.

My work is far from done. I have much organizing to do before we are ready to do a huge mass mailing. The storage room needs to be cleared out. Supplies need to be bought. Sorting of invoices must be done. And postage must be printed. But for today I can just relish the click.

Included in today were:

Sleeping in
Making breakfast for 3 kids
Eating breakfast
90 minutes of peaceful driving while Gleek & Patches watched a movie (Link stayed home with Howard)
20 minutes of “When will we get there?” and “are we there yet?”
1 hour of visiting with my sister in law while Gleek, Patches, & Kiki played on a Mcdonald’s playground.
10 minutes of negotiation wherin Kiki tried to get me to promise to buy her a laptop for her next birthday. Or at least a portable dvd player. But she’d settle for an ipod or a Nintendo DS if she really has to. Her birthday isn’t until May and our budget is still tight, I made no promises.
40 minutes of peaceful driving while 3 kids watched a movie.
45 minutes of stressful driving in pouring rain while the cars in front of me sprayed up a mist so thick that visibility was uncomfortably short.
1 back seat squabble which included fruit snacks flying all over the car and two girls both howling as loud as they could.
45 minutes of driving with no rain, but lots of stop and go traffic because people in Utah don’t know how to drive in the rain. I personally passed one overturned truck with accompanying bulldozer to push debris off the freeway. I also passed at least 5 other fender bender type accidents. The radio traffic reports told me about at least two other overturned trucks blocking freeways.
Kiki declaring (5 blocks from home and as part of yet another squabble with Gleek) that she’d rather walk than stay in the car for another minute.
Me pulling over to let Kiki walk. Probably shouldn’t have done that.
Poop in pants which I had to clean up.
Kiki and I yelling at each other and both crying because we were both strung out, exhausted. We pushed each other’s buttons and hurt each other’s feelings. We are so much alike. Poor Howard had to put up with us both.
Snuggles with Kiki where we both apologized and made it all better.
More Kiki snuggles with a movie to watch.
Assorted crankiness from all the other kids for the duration of the afternoon. They were all sniping at each other deliberately attempting to annoy.
Too little patience from me.
The sudden death of the laser printer we’ve had for 13 years now and have used to print all of the Schlock Mercenary scripts. There was a power outage today which apparently killed it dead. It won’t turn on at all.
The purchase of a shiny new laser printer from Amazon.com. It’ll arrive on Thursday.

On the menu for tomorrow:
Preorders open.
Kids go back to school.
I run a church luncheon.
Kiki and Link have lessons in the afternoon.

Two weeks until Halloween and we haven’t even begun the costume negotiations. Kiki wants to be a white sorceress. That should be fairly easy. Link wants to be Metal Mario from Super Mario 64. I’m not at all sure whether we can manage that. Gleek and Patches haven’t expressed their Halloween intentions yet. Tomorrow I’ll haul the Big Bag O’ Costumes down from the top of the garage and the chaos will begin.

The timing on this actually works really well. I’m done tweaking the store and I’m not yet getting stressed about all the shipping and release party preparations. I have a couple of weeks to concentrate on giving the kids a happy Halloween. That is important because they haven’t had much of my attention for the last couple of weeks. I keep arriving at bedtime and realizing that I’ve taken care of the kid’s needs all through the day without really looking at any of them. My life has been moving so fast lately that I keep missing bits of it.

I have been vacationing these past few days.  I didn’t go anywhere, but I definitely broke routine and goofed off a lot.  It would be nice if I had something profound to say about it, but I don’t.  Now I need to get my act in gear again because there are things which need done.

Tomorrow:  Church, some work on a scrapbook, and preparing to welcome Kiki home from her visit with my sister.
Monday:  Little gym for Gleek & Patches, driving to get Kiki.
Tuesday:  School again, storage room clean out, trip to take a huge pile of things to the thrift store, pre-orders begin, and I have to run a church luncheon.
Wednesday:  Buy a cub scout Bear book for Link,  and… um something else.  I’m sure I’ll remember what it is before I actually get to Wednesday.

Those are highlights.  Dishes and laundry are among the unspoken minutia.  To bed with me so I can awake ready to be effective rather than a lump.

I’ve been pretty stressed this past week. I’ve had lots of important tasks looming over me. Most tasks are just things to be done. Tasks don’t start to loom until they should already have been done. The added layer of guilt/anxiety causes a normal task to loom. Once a task is looming, I start being afraid of it because it is so big. This week I had multiple sets of tasks all looming and I couldn’t think clearly enough to clear any of it away. Another side effect of having looming tasks is that in an effort to pretend that the looming tasks weren’t there, I would focus my stressful feelings on something else. The looming stress of not-quite-finished storefront had me cleaning out my file cabinet and fretting over the fact that the storage room is a mess. The file cabinet and storage room both need to be done, but the level of stress I was expending on them was out of proportion.

Yesterday I took the evening off. I hauled raisinfish over to my house and completely ignored every single thing on my to do list. We made cookies and talked. Giving myself the space to goof off got me out from under all those looming tasks. Once I was out from under them I could see the strings that held them over my head. Little strings that I only had to snip and then the looming task would be gone. For example: There were a last few fixes left to do on the store, but I had poked around my administrative site for hours and been unable to figure out how to do them. This meant that I had to place a call to Volusion customer support. One phone call would remove a whole cloud of loom from over my head and yet I kept avoiding that phone call rather than getting it done. It turns out that at least 5 of my looming things could be solved with simple phone calls.

I started today on the phone. Snip snip snip. I cut those looming tasks down and they aren’t hanging over me anymore. The last “prepare for preorders” task that I have left to do is figuring out how to export information from my store into my quickbooks file. That task was looming, but one of those phone calls helped me see how I need to proceed. Now it is reduced to a set of smaller tasks that I can tackle singly. I can see how to do it. No more loom. Managing the quickbooks export is big on the list of things to do tomorrow morning. After this morning’s loom clearing, I deserve some afternoon time off for good behavior.

I figured out why my back was out of joint. I habitually carry Patches and Gleek on my right hip. This means the back muscles and arm muscles on that side are stronger than on the left. This muscle imbalance throws my spine out of alignment. When the chiropractor cracked all those vertebrae back into their correct locations, my muscles complained about this new order of events. They complained for 4 days until yesterday afternoon when I slung Patches onto my hip. Crack went the lower spine, and all the muscle pain went away. For me “back problem” = “causing me pain.” As far as I’m concerned I no longer have any sort of back problem. No amount of adjusting is going to make my back feel better until I correct the muscle imbalance. When my muscles are balanced, I suspect that back balance will reassert itself naturally.

Not having an achy back today was a big help since I had to bury myself in accounting work. It isn’t done yet. Tomorrow I get to run around all over the place for millions of errands. The few minutes I do get to spend at home will be spent on the phone with customer support people as I try to put the last tweaking touches onto the store so it is ready for the onslaught of preorders. Thursday will include even more accounting and then the complete reorganization of the storage room so that it is ready to hold thousands more books with accompanying shipping paraphernalia. I have so many things to do. BUT tomorrow evening I will deliberately ignore everything on the dolist and spend an evening socializing with raisinfish. The vacation will be short, but hopefully I’ll emerge less stressed.

I keep hoping life will slow down to a walking pace soon.