Organization

Inventory Day at the Schlock Warehouse

By / October 3, 2012 / 1 Comment

When my front room looks like this:

Then I know it is time to have an inventory day. These packages are the returned merchandise from Chicon with a couple of boxes of books from the UVU Book Academy thrown in for good measure. The Chicon boxes only just arrived because the truck they were in had some cross country adventures on the way back to us. Fortunately the merchandise inside was all fine, just the boxes were battered by being shipped across the country and back again.

An inventory day is when I sort through boxes and put all the merchandise back on the shelves in my shipping room so that I can find it again when I need it. Sometimes an inventory day also requires me to re-arrange my storage arrangements as merchandise sells out and other merchandise is added. Today I’ll definitely be needing to rearrange because one of the things which arrived from Chicago were these:

We have 14 of them and I’ll be putting them into the store as soon as I get some proper product photos taken. That will happen after I’ve figured out where to store them that is not in my front room. The Schlock Mercenary shipping and warehousing department takes up an entire unfinished room in our basement.


There are also two storage units off site where we store large pallets full of boxes of books.
My shipping station is set up more or less in the middle of the room where I’ve got easy access to most of the merchandise.

You can see that I keep the most shipped inventory close along with various sizes of boxes and packing paper. I print invoices and postage in my office, but then I stand at the shipping station to pack the boxes. We usually average between five and ten orders per week during most of the year. November and December tend to average ten to twenty orders per week. During pre-orders we’ll get anywhere from a hundred to a thousand orders depending on what shiny thing we’ve put up for sale. The massive pre-orders are handled differently from the daily shipping.

One of the fun things about an inventory day is discovering that of the ten copies of Hold on to Your Horses that I sent to Chicon, only one came back. One is the perfect number of books to have after a convention, because I know that I sold as many as possible and there is only one left to ship home. Cobble Stones also only had a single copy return.

In addition to all of the Chicon packages, we had a single package from GenCon. The T-shirt collection we had in storage there had become somewhat random. We decided to ship them all home and re-stock completely next year. The box contained some shirt designs which we’ve discontinued.

I put them all into our store so that we can clear out the old inventory and make way for new things. Selling the old inventory makes physical space and provides the funds necessary to make new things.

Sorting through all the boxes showed me that it was time to upgrade one of our stacked pallets into a shelf. So that is my next task for today: assembling shelving. At the end of it all, I will have gone up and down the stairs countless numbers of times. I suppose I can call it exercise. Putting the storage and work space in the basement means that we end up carrying things up and down stairs regularly. Until we’re able to budget for an actual warehouse/office this is the best solution we’ve got.

Being Back at Home

By / October 1, 2012 / 1 Comment

One nice thing about being away from home for a week, it makes me glad to return to all the little tasks of the house. I’d completely forgotten that there is a satisfaction to dishes and laundry. Doing these things definitely becomes a burden over time, but being away from them for a week let me remember when I first started doing my own laundry and felt very grown up about it. This evening I enjoyed the process of planning and preparing dinner, even taking time for extra touches like putting a pitcher of water on the table so that everyone could remain seated instead of constantly bobbing out of their chairs to go get drinks or salt. I need to try to remember that these things are nice instead of always feeling burdened by them.

Kiki cried last night. At first it just seemed part of her head cold or perhaps just a cranky day. However it quickly became apparent that the real reason was that I had come home. She’d been strong and responsible all week long, with me home she could relax and confess how hard it had all been. Except, she told me, it wasn’t all hard. Lots of it was interesting and fun. She liked being grown up, but it was really nice to stop for awhile. I hugged her tight and reassured her that I want nothing more than several months of all of us staying home. It was what she needed to hear, not just that I would be here, but that I wanted to be here. She’d been picturing me off having a gloriously fun time only to return to the work of mothering. I did have fun, but I also spent a lot of time wishing that I were at home doing my regular things.

The other kids did not cry, but they were all quick to drop what they were doing and come hug me. Then they ran back to their things. None of them had tales of woe or worry. They were just glad to have me back.

So today I’ve been picking up where I left off. I’ve shipped out the orders which accumulated in my absence. I cycled many loads of laundry. I tackled the accounting. I slept in my own bed. All is well. Yet there are still reminders of my trip. I just picked a leaf out of my keyboard, remnant of sitting outside to type. I’ve also decided to aim for writing 500-1000 words per day. Those words can be blog posts or fiction. I’m not going to post word counts publicly, I’m just going to try to stretch a little and see where it takes me. If I don’t do something, then it would be all too easy for me to just dive into routine. I watched today how all those little tasks, which I was newly happy to do, each took a bite out of my day until it was consumed. If I want to write, I have to prioritize writing. So I shall.

For now, it is time to step away from the computer and complete the remaining small tasks of the day.

Preparing for Departure

By / September 23, 2012

Who will bring in the mail while I am gone? I don’t know. I know I mentioned to Howard that he could stack it in the bin at the end of the counter, but that was just one of a dozen small conversations where I gave Howard details of little household tasks that I track and he does not. Some of these small things will be forgotten. Some already have been, since I forgot to even think of them–tasks so invisible that I do them without conscious thought. Awareness of all these little tasks makes me feel that everything will fall apart if I go away. It won’t of course. All of the important tasks will get done. Howard and the kids will see what needs to be done and they will do it.

Yet I worry, not for the tasks themselves, but for the additional stress that my loved ones will feel as they perform last-minute scrambles to accomplish necessary tasks. They’ll scramble themselves over obstacles that I am usually here to make smooth. I’m doing as much smoothing as I can before I leave. Meal plans are in place. Everyone has a week’s worth of clean laundry. The van has a full tank of gas. These small preparations appease my guilt, help me feel like it is okay for me to go and that disaster will not result. It is not as if I’m the first mother to head out for a week-long business trip. I’m not even the first one to feel guilty about it.

Last week I felt very tense about all these little tasks, with the same sort of tension which spurred me to put together a binder full of instructions and supplies for my mother when she came to watch my baby and toddler for a week. These days I can trust my kids to know their own schedules and requirements. No binders required. Yet I still feel the pull of writing notes and plastering the walls with them. Trash on Tuesday! Monday is a minimal day! Youth meeting on Wednesday! Instead of writing a dozen notes, I’ll just write one or two really important reminders. The rest I have to let go. The closer I get to departure, the easier it is for me to let go. I begin to accept that things will be run differently in my absence and that this is fine. My ways are not the only good ways. They may even find better options than the ones I’ve been using for so long.

I went away for four days in April and again in May. I returned from both trips to discover that all my people had grown. They were smarter and more capable because they had figured things out for themselves. They were also glad to have me back. I was glad to be back. I know this will be the same despite the extended length of time. Believing that it will be good for them is the only way I can get myself to let go of the responsibility. I am excited, afraid, curious, looking forward, feeling guilty, hoping for rewards, and counting costs. Tomorrow I fly.

In Quest of an Edible Lunch

By / September 17, 2012

The volume of kvetching over school lunch offerings increased this fall. Though that sentence does not paint an accurate picture. My kids would state their complaints if asked, but mostly they engaged in silent protest. Two of them independently decided that they would rather go hungry than eat anything served at school, and a third began hauling salt and spices to school in order to doctor the meals. Adding up all the information makes clear that something has changed in our current kid and school lunch configuration. Paying for school lunch bought me a measure of stress relief, but this year the kids are not demanding as much from me in the way of homework support, so I have extra cycles to explore home lunch options.

I began by ordering some bynto boxes from Goodbyn. These are three-compartment containers with lids. I figure we have a better shot at getting the kids to actually eat lunches from home if I can make the presentation enjoyable. The boxes are due to arrive at the end of the week. Until then my kids will be bagging it. I fully expect there to be challenges in the form of lost boxes, boxes left at school, and boxes not rinsed out after school. My junior high and high school kid have both been subjected to the indignity of having to actually seek out their lockers and learn how to open them so that they will have a place to put their lunches. I guess they’ve just been carrying all their books all day long.

The biggest challenge for me is going to be coming up with variety while keeping the prep process as brainless as possible. Kiki does not like sandwiches, while Link does not like wraps. Patch does not like cheese very much and everyone else does. We’re going to have to do some experimentation to discover which foods best survive transportation to school and sitting at room temperature. In theory this should be familiar ground. I grew up bringing lunch to school and considered buying school lunch to be a treat. I know how to do this, but knowing theory is different from practiced knowledge. It is going to take us time to add this into the rhythm of our days. That process is going to be disrupted by my departure next Monday, or maybe it won’t. There is every chance that Howard and the kids will own this process in my absence and I’ll come home to discover that there is a working system.

Let the quest for edible lunches commence.

Organizing the To Do List

By / September 10, 2012

Yesterday I sorted all my thoughts for the week to come and I compiled a big To Do list. It was a list full of small tasks, most of which would only take me a couple of minutes to complete. The hard part was that these tasks were scattered across eight or nine different life roles. I had tasks for mother, business manager, shipper, writer, publicist, chauffeur, housekeeper, cook, gardener, exterminator, and a host of other roles. Sadly the process of switching from mother brain to marketing brain requires me to fold away one set of thoughts and pull out a different one. This means that even though I have to make quick phone calls in both roles, I have trouble grouping them together without getting distracted in the middle. One a good day, I can. Today was less focused than good. However I’ve accomplished enough so that tomorrow does not feel quite so overwhelming. I much prefer several large tasks to dozens of small ones.

Life Begins to Settle

By / August 28, 2012

Something important happened last night and I almost missed noticing it. Howard and I were both pretty stressed about packing him for WorldCon, so I summoned pizza for dinner. The kids descended like locusts once the magical circles of goodness appeared. They were all right there, so I did a quick survey of each child, asking about homework.

Kiki didn’t tell me details, just enough to let me know she had it handled. “I got this mom.”

Link had only one math paper “I did most of it at school. It is pretty easy.”

Gleek had several assignments, but she knew exactly what they all were. She negotiated to do some of it that night and the rest in the morning. I said yes because I didn’t have energy to enforce anything else.

Patch also had several assignments. He told me what they are and laid out a plan to do some that evening and the rest in the hour before school. Again, I didn’t argue with the plan.

The pizza vanished, and so did the kids. They went and did their school work. Then they played until bedtime. This morning both Patch and Gleek completed their work, without drama, in plenty of time to play before school.

Last night and this morning my kids demonstrated that they are settled and happy in their new routines. They’ve got the right amount of work and are getting it done. I know not every night will go this smoothly, but it gives me hope that this year we all may reap some benefit from the groundwork laid last year.

Responsibility Fatigue

By / August 24, 2012

I stayed up too late last night because I ran out of responsibility. All yesterday, indeed all week, I have been the organizer of schedule. In theory, the job should not be onerous because we are merely reinstating a slight variation of a long-familiar schedule. No one is rebelling, everyone is glad to fall into a routine, yet I ended up sitting on the couch at 10:30 pm with tears leaking out of my eyes. None of my responsibilities were hard: nudge kids awake, remind them of homework, check to make sure gym clothes were cleaned, post-convention accounting, pick kids up from school, provide snacks, defend quiet space for work, declare time to make dinner, assist in making dinner, oversee homework. None of it was herculean considered alone, but anyone who has exercised with low weights and high repetitions can attest to the increasing difficulty of each lift. The fatigue builds incrementally, particularly when one is out of practice. Thus I ended a day, which had run very smoothly, feeling like I’d failed and was doomed to fail forever.

When I began remodeling my office, I realized that I wanted to take the process slow. I wanted to change something, like taking out the wall, and then consider how to proceed from there. It was very instructive to notice that making one change would open up new avenues of possibility. Dwelling in the changed space let me see which step was obviously next. I haven’t reached the “obviously next” part of this new schedule. I can see what is working; morning schedule, chores, homework times. I’ve identified what isn’t; something needs to be done to give me time off. Yet, I’m still wandering around in this space waiting for my back brain to mull it all over and show me what needs to be changed.

One of the things that absorbed my thoughts last night was thinking ahead to the writer’s retreat I’m attending at the end of September. I always thought it would fall into the category of dream come true, instead I appear to be approaching it like a fearful chore, something that needs to be done because it will force us all to grow. Truthfully, the primary value of the retreat may be that having it loom in my future is forcing me to be conscious of how I set the family patterns during this transition period. Instead of excusing kids from chores, I’m insisting on them. Instead of solving problems by assigning them to me, I’m stopping to think to whom the problems really belong. Instead of setting up a system that is like spinning thirty plates on sticks and I have to run around to make sure nothing falls down, I’m trying to create a functioning engine that only needs some oversight and a little grease in spots. Even if the retreat produces nothing else, the system it is encouraging will give me more creative space all year long. Hopefully between now and the end of September that increased creative space will allow me to remember why I dreamed of going to a writers retreat in the first place.

Words are probably the answer to what comes next. Writing gives me more than it takes from me. I’ve even begun to open up writer thoughts, which is also an effect of the scheduled retreat. I can’t waste the opportunity to focus on writing without doing some preparatory work. I’m slowing reading and processing a book about rhetoric and writing construction. I’m not racing through because I want to absorb and incorporate rather than cause my writing brain to seize up trying to do it all at once. I suppose I’m renovating my writing using the same method as I used for my office. Change a little and wait for it to settle. Unfortunately I keep battling waves of worry that my words are simply not as good as they ought to be. “I can do better than this,” is a frequent thought in my mind while hitting publish on yet another blog post which I know could use more polish if only I were not so tired. Or lazy. It is very human to simultaneously want to create something glorious and at the same time to not want to work too hard at it. I need to take more time to work at writing, trusting that the focused practice will make my work better even if it does not seem any better to me. Even if the words are not better, writing them makes me happier. I need to remember that.

I finally dragged myself off the couch and proceeded to stay up too late. I knew that my responsibility was to go straight to bed so that I could rise on time and launch the next day properly. That last responsible act was too heavy, too depressing. It felt as though all year would be an unrelenting onslaught of “I must be responsible.” Instead I fixed myself a frozen pizza and watched a tv show for an hour. At the end of it I felt much better. I’d taken time to do something just because I felt like it and the process restored my ability to hope again. I’m short on sleep today, but the morning went smoothly anyway, because the patterns don’t all depend on me to keep them running. This morning I’m writing first instead of trying to discipline my brain into doing accounting. I’ll do the accounting next, because it is important, but this morning writing was obviously next. After a work out it is important to rest. A study of weigh training makes clear that rest is when the muscles actually form, making the next lifting session easier. I think that this evening will be better.

Organizing the House

By / August 21, 2012

In the past six months my house has grown steadily more organized, clean, and attractive. I still have a lot of work to do, but improvement is visible in almost every room. I’m glad for this. The push toward organization and beautification began last fall when I sat in my messy office and pictured what it would be like if I broke down a wall. I was deliberately shaking up my thought processes at around that time, forcing myself out of old patterns without being sure what the new patterns would look like. I stared around at the jumble in my office and started picturing what my ideal office would be like, how it could be arranged to provide space for the things which make me happy. My office was a box, and I was able to see how to break the bounds of that box to create something new. I gave myself permission to really own the space and turn it into whatever I wanted. The vision was exciting and all the other organization flowed from there.

July was the month of extended family in my house and the family reunion of 35 people in one cabin. I found it fascinating that I responded to the over crowding by organizing, cleaning, and getting rid of stuff. There were days when it was really compulsive, I had to keep picking up, scrubbing, imposing order on my surroundings. As compulsions go, I’ll pick cleaning over piling any day, but it did trigger a concern for me. As my house gets more organized, I notice the small messes more. I couldn’t have noticed them before, because they were buried in the large messes, but now I see them and they bother me. I need to clean them up, make my surroundings more lovely. Then I remember the old adage “a clean desk is a sign of a sick mind.” I’m not sure that being compulsively clean is mentally healthier than being disorganized and jumbled all the time. I guess time will tell if my recent push toward organization is me becoming healthier or just a different manifestation of my particular neuroses. I strongly suspect that the influx of school things impinging on my time will test my intention to make my surroundings lovely.

One of the hardest parts of my new-found organization is keeping my hands off of the spaces and things which belong to my kids. I want to organize all the things, however if I swoop in and clean up their messes, they will never learn how to do it for themselves. I’ve found a lot of growth in examining how I relate to spaces and things. If I clean up after them constantly, they will never have the chance to learn those lessons. This is why I spent an afternoon sorting with Gleek. We began with a trash bag, a donate box, and a bribe. She could have a small new toy she has been wanting if we could clear the floor, fill the garbage bag, and put some stuff into the donate box. I was pleasantly surprised with how willing she was to get rid of stuff. Even better, I learned a lot about her and what she values. Things which seemed like junk to me felt like treasures to her, and once she explained why they mattered, I could see the value. Because I let her make all the decisions, she was willing to listen when I asked her if she really needed to keep some of the items. The end result was a room where I can now clean the carpet. I need to go through the same process with Patch next. Hopefully listening to how he relates to his things will help us create an organizational scheme that lets him keep his things organized for more than three days. This approach to helping my kids I learned from watching Hoarding: Buried Alive. I can’t watch very much of the show, too depressing, but a few episodes were instructional.

The open question is whether I’ll continue to have emotional and physical energy for organization beyond maintenance now that school has begun. Time will tell I suppose.

Being Between

By / August 17, 2012 / 2 Comments

For the first time all summer, I find myself between. There is no more work I can do for GenCon and I can’t yet begin post-GenCon accounting. I’ve mailed all the things to ChiCon, but have to wait for Howard to get home before the final preparations. I’ve finished off the house organization projects which got shuffled aside during the crush of other things, and I’ve not yet decided what house project to tackle next. I’ve let go of my summer plans, but won’t embark on school schedule until next Tuesday. I am between. In some ways it is a lovely space, but staying here too long would not be good for me. I like moving forward.

Yesterday I read a letter from a friend where she lamented that every year she intends to plan and prepare better for the beginning of school. Then every year she ends up dealing with the same frantic scramble to get everything done. I read her words and realized that one of my focuses over the past six months is that I’m trying to be less prepared. I live much of my life planning for the future. I’m paying attention to thing I need to do today in order to prepare for events a week, a month, a year in the future. I’ve slowly become aware that the world is full of people who do not do this. I regularly see something coming, stress about it, plan ahead for it, and then move onward; only to find that others hit this same emotional process weeks or months later than I do. Several times I’ve had to straighten out a financial misunderstanding because I’ve paid a bill so early that the recipient mis-filed the payment. I plan ahead. Much of this is my job. I am the one to reserve a hotel room in February so that Howard has a place to stay at GenCon in August. I make sure that merchandise arrives where it is supposed to and when it is supposed to. I create schedules out of nothingness and then remind everyone to adhere to them. I intend to keep doing my job, accomplishing concrete tasks on a think-ahead timeline, but I want to shed all the needless stewing over possibilities.

My kids start school on Tuesday. Beyond reminding myself what the wake-up, drop-off, and pick-up schedule needs to be, I am trying not to think about it. Entering school will expose my kids to new information and people. They will shift and grow in response. Some of that growth will be painful and difficult. Tantrums and meltdowns are coming. I know it. If I sit down to think about it, I could predict what those crises would be, but then I would begin planning how I could respond to these hypothetical crises. After that I can imagine that the child does not like my response and reacts poorly. I could stage an entire melodrama in my head with branching possibility trees, a choose-your-own-adventure of parental stress. Except when school really does start, odds are that my kids will depart from the script in the first five minutes. All my fretting, planning, preparing would then be discarded because we’re going somewhere else. Instead of trying to improve my predictive abilities so I can better plan, I’m trying to trust that I’ll be able to deal with whatever comes when it arrives. Some things are concrete and life will be better if I plan ahead for them. Other things are in flux and I need to leave them alone until they are concrete. Living in flux is where I have to exercise my faith; faith in myself, faith in God, faith in the family members around me. Faith is often hard, I want to be able to predict and plan, as if I could plan life into calmness. Controlling something that is in flux is like trying to grab a fist full of water. I need to learn how to open my fingers, let the water flow past, and wait for something solid to grab.

So I am between, and will be until Monday. I will do the few small concrete tasks which are nearby and then I will endeavor to fill the remaining space with something enjoyable. Perhaps I can make something lovely out of these last few days of summer.

Shirts take over my life

By / August 8, 2012

My day has been all about t-shirts and making five dozen little judgement calls about what to ship, how to ship it, and when to ship it. The fried brain situation is not helped by the fact that I’m actually managing four different t shirt priority streams. There are the shirts which have been pre-ordered and need to go into the mail as soon as possible. Then there are the shirts which need to go to GenCon. Similar quantities of shirts need to ship to WorldCon. I also have to sort stock for my storage room so that we have ongoing inventory. This means that I need to reorganize my storage room so that I have room for the shirts, water bottles, and shopping bags. New shelving may be required, but I have to finish clearing out mess first. Each of these different priority streams vies for my attention and as a result I often feel a bit frozen. I keep having to walk away from all of it to clear my head. So I go eat, or read, or watch fifteen minutes of a show until my brain pops up with: Do This Next. Then I get up and do that thing. Hopefully it leads smoothly into the next thing and I can keep going. If not, I’m stopped again. I’m watching Captain America in very small pieces.

I think I’ve finally got all the shirts sorted and arranged. This is good, because tomorrow the next shipment of t-shirts arrives.