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It was the quiet part of the morning when I was the only one awake. The thoughts in my brain had finally shaken themselves into an order where I could commit them to words, so I sat down to write. I don’t have a private space where I can retreat to write. I share my bedroom with my husband Howard and due to some family shifts, my office is currently also my youngest son’s bedroom. So I sit on the couch in the front room, which works fine in the morning before everyone else is awake, or later in the day when everyone is occupied with their own things.

The words were flowing when my 18yo came to the top of the stairs across from me and sat down. They were hugging a teddy bear tight, which is a behavior that screams “I’m stressed.” Within a minute I’d coaxed them to sit across from me on the couch to talk. They were worried about their upcoming volunteer shift. The first one they had to do and it was triggering a massive anxiety attack. We’d only begun to tease apart the emotions when Howard wandered down as well. He volunteered to make a smoothie for our child. The child made a choice about how to handle the shift. They got off the couch and headed out into their day.

The space on the couch was vacant for only a few minutes before my older son plunked himself into it to talk to me. He was happy after having a discouraging day the day before. I was glad to hear about his happy things. While we were still talking, my oldest daughter wandered into the room to give me a hug. I suspect if the couch had not already been occupied, she would have taken the space and talked to me for a bit.

It was like a maypole dance. I could almost see the ribbons of connections as my people moved around each other and around me. Howard made smoothies and breakfast for more people. I occasionally typed some words in and around the conversations. I remembered how the day before my youngest son had planted himself on the same couch spot to talk to me. This is family when it is functioning well. It was so quiet and non-eventful. Yet beautiful.

Right now all of my children live under my roof. Including the son-in-law-to-be who spends 90% of his free time here. Things will change again in January when the young couple will move out into their own spaces. It is an important step in their lives, and it will be nice on our end to move my youngest out of my office and into the room that used to be hers. But for now we have this special space where everyone is together and enjoying each other’s company. It is nice to have that again after years of kids living away from home and mental health turmoil.

Several times in the past week I’ve opened up the page to post to One Cobble and not had enough brain to find words. There has been a lot to track between wedding preparations, running a Kickstarter, finishing off home improvements, and shifting kids further into adulthood. So this morning, I’m tackling blogging first before any of those other things uses up my brain. I’m also giving myself permission to talk about all the things in scattered pieces instead of expecting myself to pull it all together into some sort of narrative whole.

Wedding planning is alternating between “this isn’t so bad” and “wow this is a lot.” We’ve decided to solve a lot of the logistical problems by finding local family-run wedding businesses and handing them money. This means we won’t be scrambling on wedding day the manage decorations (the venue is pretty enough it doesn’t need them,) food, or photography. Even with hiring professionals and eliminating some of the time-consuming traditions that have no emotional resonance for us, there is still a lot to handle. Much of the “things to handle” have more to do with the physical and emotional readjustments to switch into being spouses. They’ve been remodeling spaces so they can move in together after the wedding, discussing bank accounts and finances, etc. I’m part of all the wedding logistics, but much of this more important foundational work takes place between them where I can’t see. Which is as it should be.

We launched our most recent Kickstarter earlier than we would have preferred. We like to have the book completely ready for print before the launch so that we can deliver to backers more quickly after the Kickstarter closes. Financially, we needed to run this Kickstarter in June or July. Instead we spent the summer in massive upheaval where all my time went into home improvement projects and Howard struggled to find enough normality to keep up with the daily comic. Then in October I did the math and realized that if we wanted our Kickstarter to conclude before the onset of the holidays, we had to launch right away. (The holiday season between Thanskgiving and New Years is a terrible time to run a Kickstarter. There is so much else going on that Kickstarters get lost and don’t fund as well.) Now we’re in the last week of the funding period, and I’ve been spending a lot of time making noise on social media to bring attention to the project.

I finally reached a point in home restoration where I can declare it done. I gathered all the receipts and photos then submitted them to the insurance company. A small additional amount of money will be coming our way. I’d hoped for more, but noticed a phrase in the contract “additional money available if incurred” I was pretty frugal in my approach to replacing things, so I don’t think we incurred enough expenses to get some of that additional money. Which is a wash anyway. If I got that money it would only mean that I’d pre-spent that money, not that I could use the money to fill our financial hole. I have pictures of the restoration on our stairs, but that is a post all by itself.

A month ago one of my kids made the hard decision to drop out of college and focus on their mental health instead. Today we’re going to the school to make that official. Depression is like that, it can take weeks to follow through on a decision because each step feels daunting or impossible. Around the same time my son decided to move back home and also drop out of college so he could focus on working and personal projects. So we’ve gone from two college students to zero. Me scrambling to help them try out college was the right thing. They both learned important things about themselves and about how college works. Now I’m helping with the paperwork clean up after the fact. The next time either of these kids wants to try college, they’ll get to own the process more fully. I will do less scrambling because I’m learning that scrambling on their behalf deprives them of the opportunity to rise to the challenge of scrambling for themselves.

On that note, my high school junior is no longer on track to graduate. He’s pared back his schedule to what he thinks he can handle without my help. So passing the few classes he has is all on him. I no longer track his grades or assignments. This is on the advice of his therapist who says he needs to learn how to track his own things. Instead of me coming at him with lists and schedules, I am standing back and having conversations about how if he wants to graduate, he needs to do the calculations to figure out how many packets he needs to do and how quickly. If this kid graduates it will be because he decided to scramble and work hard. Graduation will be his triumph, rather than because he was slid under the wire by well-meaning adults who don’t want him to fail. I have a whole series of thoughts on the public school system and the societal pressure to keep kids “on track.” Perhaps I’ll be able to collect those thoughts into a cohesive post sometime soon.

Later this week I’ll be heading out to California to visit my parents. The plan is to help them with some household projects that they don’t have the strength or energy to do by themselves. My daughter and son-in-law-to-be are both coming as well. We’ve frequently joked about how we’re taking a vacation from all the things-to-do and renovation by traveling 12 hours to do different things-to-do and renovation. We do plan to take a day off and go tidepooling. They may also run off and see Muir Woods. It is going to be a good trip, after which we’ll come back and dive into the holidays.

That hits the highlights for now. Hopefully the trip away will give me new thoughts and some time to process them in writing.

One of the last tasks remaining before we can declare ourselves done with disaster clean up was to replace the carpet in our family room. Only a small portion of the carpet got wet with flood water, but since it is attached to the rest of the carpet, the whole thing had to be replaced. Since the carpet was over twenty years old, it was past time anyway. Here is Milo displaying what needed to be removed.

The first thing we did was remove extra furniture and clutter. Most of it went into the garage with the remaining clutter from Howard’s office, an my office, and the bathroom. The garage will have to be it’s own project later. For now it is a hodge-podge of items shoved together randomly. The biggest challenge was that large sectional sofa. We didn’t want to have to carry it upstairs, so we opted for the “shove things to one side” approach.

Pulling up the carpet was fairly simple. It cut into strips and we made rolls. The padding came up quickly as well, except where it had been glued to the concrete. We took crowbars and hammers to pull up the tack strips around the edges of the room. Then we used scrapers to remove glued on bits of carpet pad. Some of the glue spots scraped away cleanly. Other bits were…goey. But we got it all clear.

That meant it was time to push all the furniture onto the cleared concrete so we could repeat the process on the other side. Callie was quite interested in the re-configured furniture. (She’s wearing a cone because she had a sore on her chin that she kept scratching open.)

It took a full day to pull out all the carpet and scrape the concrete clean. I had help for a few hours in the morning, but the rest of the time it was just me, so the work went slow. In the evening we put the couch back into position so we could watch TV.

The next day I began work laying down the luxury vinyl plank. This is click-and-lock flooring which is very easy to assemble.

After I got the room about half assembled, I notice a couple of problem spots. I went across everything I had done and marked the problems with pink tape flags. One spot wasn’t clicked together properly, another couple had strange lumps underneath them.

But the really nice thing about this type of flooring was I just took it apart, fixed the problems and lay it back down again.

Once side one was complete we were ready to put furniture on it and lay down the other side.

The floor went down in a single day because I had help from two teenagers and another adult. Once it was down and furniture re-positioned, everything looked lovely again.

After the above picture was taken, I still had to replace the trim, but the rest was complete. Honestly, the only complicated bits were around door frames where I had to custom cut pieces by hand to fit around the edges. The first try on this one, I didn’t cut right.

The second time I cut more carefully, and I put the trim piece on the top of the stairs.

We’re very happy with the new look for the room. And as soon as I finish the stairs, I can have the insurance adjuster come inspect and then we’ll get the final insurance payout. Slowly but surely we’re restoring my house to normal again.

One of the hugely important and joyful things of this past spring and summer was watching my daughter and her boyfriend grow close and figure out how they wanted to be together. There were ups and downs. Days where they cried (and I cried) and days where they spilled joy through the house. I couldn’t talk much about any of it because their story doesn’t belong to me. Now they’ve reached the point where they are making announcements and I can be happy for them out loud. Here is what they posted on social media last week:

I feel happy whenever I look at it. He fits so well into our family and even better with my daughter. They will take care of each other and balance each other for years to come. Now I’ve added “help plan and finance a wedding” into my tasks for the next few months, but I don’t mind. This is the happiest task on the list.

If you want to support Keliana with this project and her art, she has a patreon.

It was a summer of Many Things. I’ve known that since late June, but last Sunday I ended up on a two-and-half hour plane ride where the entertainment system was broken. I spent the entire time with my notebook simply writing down all the stray thoughts that went through my head. Earlier that same day I’d talked to a friend about how I’ve been in a very strange brain space for months. During all the writing I figured out why. I made a list of all the ongoing life experiences which require significant emotional processing. These are the kinds of things where they happen and I have to sort out how I feel about it over the next days or weeks. My list took up three pages of closely written text. There were thirty-eight distinct Things to Process. Some of them happy, some stressful, some grieving. Thirty-eight in the span of about twelve weeks. That averages about three per week. Except during those twelve weeks, I also had two week-long conventions and a fourteen-day-long writing workshop and retreat. I also had weeks of manual labor as I worked to restore our house to functionality. When I remember those facts, I realize that my list of thirty-eight things only included experiences that I’m still processing. Not on the list were things I processed and let go of. Or things that I boxed up in the back of my brain to consider later.

I frequently use blogging as a method of processing life experiences. I find it very telling that in the last twelve weeks I’ve barely blogged at all. So today I write this list of things I’d like to find time to blog about:

1. A description of a writer’s group that I currently attend which has a unique structure designed to help writers nurture each other and help each other grow instead of being focused on critique.

2. The things I am learning about helping non-neurotypical adults adapt to college, the resources available to them, and where I need to step back so I don’t interfere with their growth.

3. How I feel about having two adult children who are launching into adulthood and greater independence. I may yet get to experience an empty nest someday, though I’ve already adapted to the idea that my home might always be multi-generational in one way or another.

4. Detailed posts about all the summer construction. Including the carpet tear-out we plan to launch next week and the dishwasher that leaked and buckled hardwood flooring two days before we left on a twelve day trip. (We’ve been hand washing dishes for weeks now.)

5. The ways that social anxiety affects me and my ability to believe in friendships. I’ve had to put a lot of conscious practice into believing that I am wanted/loved/valued even when I am not visibly useful.

6. Details on a new professional focus which I may be launching. Several friends suggested that I take some of the presentations I give at conventions and turn them into online lectures that people can purchase. I know I need to be establishing additional sources of freelance income and this may be one of them.

7. The epiphany I had about my novel in progress which requires me to fundamentally shift it away from some of the original concept that prompted me to write it in the first place. Yet even as I let go of an idea, I recognize that the idea still informs what the novel will become and the novel will be better for it. It couldn’t become what it needs to be unless it first spent time being what it needs to stop being.

It seems that the Tayler clan is in a very transitional phase of life this year. Many joyful and beautiful moments have happened mixed in with all the physical renovation and stress. I want to unpack and share more of it than I have. I want to be able to show how the good and the hard are all mixed up together and how so much of the good is made possible by the hard.

Life is good, even with the financial stress and physical fatigue, and too many things scheduled.

We had some forced renovation this summer because of water damage. Here is our progress thus far.

Bathroom before:

Bathroom Deconstructed:

Bathroom restored:

Studio before:

Studio deconstructed:

Studio restored:

I remember on the day that we realized the scope of what needed to be done that one of the workers tried to cheer me up by pointing out that I’d be getting new flooring for free (because insurance would pay for it.) I politely didn’t respond, because these newly restored rooms are anything but free. We were (and still are) out of pocket for portions of the work since it wasn’t covered under insurance. I’m out hours of physical labor because the economics of insurance, my skill set, and our calendar dictated that the best way to get things done was for me to do them. Our entire household experienced major disruption across the largest part of the summer.

In the end, we like the new flooring better. It is more durable and has a better feel under our feet. We still need to extend it across the family room where we’ll have to tear out twenty year old carpet. We still need to put Howard’s painting table back into place. But these two rooms are fully functional again, for which I am quite grateful.

Yesterday a friend stopped by with a head full of thoughts. After a few minutes of visiting, she apologized for jumping from topic to topic somewhat at random. I told her not to worry about it, she just had a lot of thoughts jumbled up in her head and I was there to help her sort. Sorting often begins with just pulling things out so you can see what you have. I know exactly how she feels. I’ve been packing thoughts, experiences, and emotions into my head for two months now. At this point it is all jumbled up rather like a bin full of multi-part toys or 3D puzzles. Emotions are separate from the experiences that triggered them. Thoughts are scattered so that I can barely tell what they are let alone how they fit together. It means that every shift in my life brings new things to the top of the heap, but no sense of order.

It all accumulated because there was no time to sort or assemble. No physical spaces in my house because offices resided in my front room and kitchen while I was making walls and floors in the places where they belonged. Every room was over full, while extra belongings overflowed into a storage pod occupying most of my driveway. No time to pause because the sooner I got physical spaces organized, the sooner offices could return to where they belonged. No time because several high-stakes tasks had very short deadlines to make sure that my two neurodivergent college freshman were set to start school. No space in my brain because every day I was slotting physical tasks like plastering walls in between administrative tasks like talking to the insurance company and in between emotional tasks like helping my loved ones sort all their emotions about the life disruption and the impending onset of school. Sometimes all the spare thoughts and emotions just have to be tossed into a bin to be sorted later.

Now I’ve reached a point where I’ve begun to have time and space. Yet I stare at that bin and wonder if I really want to dig into it all. Sorting can be so messy just when I got things cleared up. Except the bin will linger, shifting randomly, spilling, and making me unbalance until I take time to sort.

So then the question becomes how do I sort? I frequently sort by person putting all the thoughts and experiences relating to that person together. Yet it might also make sense to sort by category: Thoughts and experiences related to kids going back to school, or emotions about the ways life got expensive, or Thoughts and emotions about things which are finally happening that I waited a long time to see. It is very much like sorting puzzle pieces. I could sort by shape or color or texture. Except there is more than one puzzle, and the pieces are mixed together. So I make guesses about which pieces go where, knowing that I’ve almost certainly sorted some things into the piles where they won’t actually fit.

Sorting can be tiresome, but the results are good.

This weekend I’ll be at Gen Con. Most of my time will be at booth 1749 in the dealer’s hall, so that is likely the best place to find me. I do have a few other scheduled events:

Thursday
10 am Word Choice Matters Ballroom 2 of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium

3 pm The Many Forms of the First Draft: How Do You Get It on the Page? Austin/Boston in the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium

Friday
6 pm Worldbuilder’s Party Grand Ballroom 9-10 in the JW Marriott. Come play games with Howard and I for charity.

Saturday
1 pm Maintaining a Reader’s Sense of Wonder Ballroom 1 of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium.

If you’re at the event, please take time to stop by and say hello!

After months of saying he didn’t want to take classes, my son called me yesterday to say that he does want to take a college class after all. We had five days to get his application submitted and approved before the registration deadline. (This school has open enrollment.) Suddenly he is talking about taking more than one class, getting a job on campus, and maybe even moving into student housing. All things he has rejected in the past.

***

My other college kid (same school) did their registration early, but they discovered that one class they wanted was full. We found an alternate and then realized it took place in Heber instead of locally. Then we had weeks where I nudged them and said “you really should find a different class.” That finally happened yesterday. Additionally we took a trip on city buses so that they could learn the route to campus and back. This is how the school commute is expected to go for the semester. Student ID was acquired, classrooms were found. Then we returned home tired but triumphant.

***

The office walls have sheet rock and are sanded into smoothness. Thus far we’ve put in over thirty hours of work. Tomorrow I plan to spray texture on the walls. After that dries, we’re ready for paint. Flooring will arrive while I’m at Gen Con. I get to have adventures in floor installation once I return.

***

Gen Con is next week. I hope that I’ve adequately prepared everything. This year I didn’t have a last minute scramble, which either means I prepared well earlier, or that I’ve been negligent and wasted time I could have been using getting things done. I’ll find out when I get there I guess. To be honest, I’ve been too muddled up with all the other things to focus on any individual thing very much.

***

My son, who usually spends the vast majority of his time attached to screens, has decided to run a D&D campaign for his friends. More than that, he’s creating it from scratch. So I’ve watched him spending hours pacing back and forth, thinking, reading manuals, and doing research. It is so good to see him engaged in an activity that stretches his brain and creativity. His friends seem to be on board with playing, so the game will happen sometime in the next couple of weeks.

***

Work progresses on preparing the next Schlock book for print. We need to pack for Gen Con. I’ve got a bathroom vanity sitting in the middle of my family room. There is a storage pod taking up half of my driveway. The only place we have to sit and eat is the kitchen counter. Howard and I are still trying out experiments with medicine to see if we can find a better mix for his good health. Everything feels cluttered and insufficiently clean. My daughter has a boyfriend and I’m learning to adapt to that. But at least I finally folded laundry yesterday.

Everything is happening all at once. It feels like half of the things which are happening are things I’ve been hoping for for years. The other half are things I would not have picked if I had the choice, and I certainly wouldn’t have picked them all at the same time. And yet this muddle of household and personal renovation will eventually settle out and then things will be new. In the new space I will be able to pause, breathe, then look around and figure out what comes next.

On Monday the recovery company came to claim their industrial fans and to declare that their job with our house was complete. They’d come, removed affected materials, washed everything, and then dried it all out. The result was two rooms stripped down to concrete floor with flood cuts in the dry wall, a third room with flooring partially removed, and a large room in need of carpet removal and replacement. In order to return our house to normal we would have to work with a different department of the company, hire our own contractor, or do the work ourselves.

Without the roar of fans and the disruption of people traipsing into and out of our house we finally had time to assess what needs done. The bathroom was the source of our woes, on the left is what it looked like before, the right is how it looks now.

Then there is the studio which houses Howard’s workspace:

And also Keliana’s workspace:

At the moment we have Howard set up to work in our front room and Keliana set up in the kitchen. The kitchen table is banished to a storage pod, so everyone has to eat either at the counter or holding their plates in their laps. No one wants this arrangement to last long. That was one of the first challenges we noticed. Working with the recovery company or a contractor would introduce delays. We’d be waiting on them and their schedules. The process could take months. On top of that was the expense. Our insurance company has given us money to cover the repairs, but they also depreciate for the age of the flooring, and they pull out their deductible. Our adjuster was very nice about getting us as much money as he could without being dishonest. Yet I knew there was likely to be a gap between the amount of money offered by the insurance company and the amount of money a contractor would need in order to get the job done.

I examined the insurance claim in detail and noticed that there is a dollar amount for “General Contractor Overhead” and for “General Contractor Profit” The adjuster said that if we acted as our own general contractors, those dollar amounts would come to us. Then I looked at the bid from the restoration company, and the vast majority of the expense was labor rather than materials.

The thing is, we’ve done this sort of work before. I’ve hung dry wall. I’ve painted. And the new vinyl plank flooring is super easy to lay down. If we do the work ourselves, we can put the insurance money toward paying for some of the mitigation expenses that weren’t covered by insurance. On top of that, we’ll probably get the work done faster because we’ll prioritize getting it done.

The thought was daunting. It’ll be a lot of physical labor over the next weeks. I’ll be drafting my teenagers and paying them an hourly wage.

Yet, I’ve already replaced the flooring in my office. It took half a day and now my office just needs its contents returned to it. I’ve got all the mudding and taping supplies. The sheets of drywall will arrive tonight and odds are good that I’ll have them in place by the end of the day tomorrow. The goal is to have the walls ready to go by the time we leave for Gen Con. The flooring will arrive while we’re at Gen Con and will be collected by the adults keeping track of the house. Then I can lay floor as soon as I get home.

My head is full of calculations for square footage, workflow, and time management. For the next few weeks I’ll be acting as a general contractor while I get our house back to normal.