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Some days it hits me. I have a moment when I can clearly see the vast array of my responsibilities to my kids, to Howard, to myself, to my communities, to the world at large and I can also clearly see my limited allotments of time and resources. There is no way that one can adequately cover the other. I simply can’t do everything. Every good thing I do comes at the cost of some other good thing that I could also be doing. Sometimes I can also see how very far my family has come while also seeing how much further there is to go. That moment is overwhelming, because I remember how hard it was to get from where we were to where we are. The thought of expending a similar quantity of effort again makes me want to sit down and give up for a while.

Even in “giving up for a while” I have no peace, no pause. My thoughts swirl around me whispering all the things I should be doing right this moment. How dare I rest when there are important tasks to be done. If I had not rested six months ago, a year ago, 3 years ago, perhaps I would not still have so much ahead of me. Therefore if I rest now, it is at the expense of some future goal not met.

My brain is a real jerk to me some days. Particularly on a day when I meet with my kid’s teachers and we can all clearly describe the problems my kid is having yet not one of us has a solution for any of it. And all of us are concerned about what will happen when he switches over to the high school campus next year. And the real solution is a transformation that has to take place in the kid’s brain where he decides that he wants something that education has to provide. He has to want connection with peers enough to speak to people. Right now what he wants most is to be left alone with comfortable things and to never have to do anything difficult.

Then, after I’ve paused long enough, the noise quiets down. That is when I remember that miracles do happen. What once seemed insurmountable becomes simple. Not quickly, but eventually. I remember the years when I wept over kids sleeping through the night. I used to have to sit in the hallway outside their rooms for hours waiting for them to fall asleep. Yet now I live in a world where the house gets quiet because they spontaneously put themselves to bed on time. I can’t tell you when the change happened, just that it did. This growth will also come. I just have to get up and do the next thing. I can’t do all the things, but I can do the next one.

This is my sad flowerbed in front of my house. It is messy with tall weeds that have gone to seed, flowering plants in sore need of being cut back, and dry patches where the plants didn’t get enough water and have simply died. Between Planet Mercenary fulfillment and the August travel I have done no gardening this year. For a time in early summer a pair of my kids were gardening once per week, but that fell apart in July.

The outside of my house is not the only thing to suffer from neglect. Everywhere I look there are maintenance and cleaning tasks which haven’t been done. This is because I’ve been choosing to do other things with my time. I’ve chosen to fulfill promises to Kickstarter backers. I’ve chosen to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I’ve chosen to use my non-working time on relaxation rather than on housework. Over all I think I’ve made the right time management choices, but whether or not they were correct I’m surrounded by the consequences of them.

I’m hoping to have all of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarter fulfillment complete by the end of September. We’re launching a new Kickstarter next week because work doesn’t stop and money must be earned to pay bills. However we’re being careful to structure this new one so that it won’t completely take over all of my creative time. And we plan to have it completely fulfilled by the end of February, so it is time-limited in a way that Planet Mercenary wasn’t. This means that in October I’m going to have space in my schedule and I can decided what to do with it.

Some of that space is already spoken for. I’m partially homeschooling one of my kids. I was last year as well, but this year I’m giving the process more focused attention. The most important thing this kid can learn is how to make himself do stuff that he doesn’t want to do. So I’m providing the framework inside which he can learn that. Intellectually, he’s totally on board and understands what I’m doing. Actually doing the hard things…is different. So he gets a regularly scheduled slice of my full attention.

A portion of that time will go toward household tasks. I hope. The truth is that I’m likely to find another big creative project to dive into. I’m also likely to drift for a bit because I’m now going on ten solid months of massive project push. My brain is tired.

No matter how I choose to spend my time, It is always good to remember that everything I choose to do is at the expense of some other thing I could also do. This is why I must occasionally step back and make sure that my daily usage of time matches my long-term priorities.

When I read the news of a big disaster, I am always sad for those who are affected. Yet sometimes the scale and distance make the event seem impersonal. I know that there are people in Texas who lost everything in Harvey, but I don’t feel a personal grief because I’ve never been to those places and I don’t have any friends who currently live there. This is why the news seeks out individual stories and photos because those personalize the disaster for people like me who don’t have a prior connection to the disaster area.

Irma is different. I’m crying a bit about Irma before the images and stories even happen. Some of the reasons feel small and silly compared to the size of the coming disaster. (And compared to the disaster already created.) But even if they’re insignificant portions of the reasons to grieve, they are pieces of what I feel as I check in on the news to see whether Irma’s track has changed, where she’s going to hit land, how strong she will be.

Twenty four years ago I landed in Sarasota Florida for my honeymoon. Howard grew up there and his siblings still lived in the family home. (They’ve since moved to Utah.) Howard drove me around the neighborhoods where he used to live and the beach at Siesta Key where he spent so many of his summers. We stayed at his grandmother’s condo. As Howard showed me places, he talked about the threat of a hurricane as a fact of life. Some of the houses were built up on stilts in preparation for that event. I remember him telling me that a hurricane was inevitable at some point and that when it came all the buildings on the keys would be scoured away. People knew this. Builders knew this. They built on the keys anyway because the hurricane could be a hundred years away and in the meantime people wanted to enjoy the beauty of the gulf coast. And I can’t say they were wrong to do so. It was beautiful. I’m glad I got to go there. I hope many people got to see it. What the builders and home buyers can’t accurately say is “we didn’t know this would happen.” Because they knew. Everyone in Florida knew, hurricanes always come eventually.

Irma’s current track shows the eye of the storm rolling right over Sarasota or passing just to the west of it. Irma will likely be a Cat 3 hurricane when that happens.

I remember visiting at the house of one of Howard’s friends. It was a beautiful middle class home that would have fit right into the neighborhoods where I grew up, but the back yard did not end in a fence. It ended in a sea wall. I could walk straight out the back door, across 100 feet of lawn, and then jump off that wall into the ocean only about four feet below. It wasn’t open ocean, but a canal-like area with other neighbors across with way who also had a sea wall. And a dock. These houses all had a dock with a small or medium boat. Ten minutes of slow boating would take any one of these people out to open ocean spaces. It was beautiful for an adult, frighteningly fenceless for parenting a toddler. The house was six feet above the high tide line.

The expected storm surge with Irma will be 10-15 feet. That entire house will be underwater and probably scraped away entirely. These people we know will lose everything they didn’t take with them. I hope they evacuated. They had thirty years of living in this idyllic place, but this was always a possibility. I hope they prepared for it.

My brother evacuated from Tampa. He left on Friday morning when the storm track showed Irma rolling over Miami. We were glad that he was going even though at the time it looked like Tampa would probably be fine. Now Tampa will be hit hard and we’re glad he is elsewhere.

Last September, not quite a year ago, I went on a cruise in the Caribbean. We made port at Nassau, the Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Martin. All of these islands felt the force of Irma in the past few days. The places I visited and found beautiful are destroyed. It will be years before they are beautiful again.

For all of my life, the name Irma was just my Grandma’s name. It was a name I’d never heard anywhere else. I knew she didn’t like it much. It hadn’t been a fashionable name since before she was born. The name wasn’t passed on to any of her grandchildren or great grandchildren (though her middle name was). I felt a little sad for the name Irma, so unwanted. So I wrote notes for a picture book featuring a little girl named Irma whose name was old-fashioned and who liked old fashioned things. In the book she would doubt herself but learn about individuality. I hoped that the book might give the name Irma some charm. I knew most people would never have heard the name before. Now everyone has heard the name and has a very specific association for it. My little fictional Irma will probably never get her story.

All of this is in my head muddled up together with images of the storm track and of post-hurricane disaster scenes. And yet I don’t have as much cause to grieve as Howard whose childhood locations are about to be scoured away by wind and water. Nor as much cause as the people who currently live there and may lose everything they have. My grief is small, a piece of my experience of today. There is nothing I can do to alleviate the coming damage. So I check in with the storm track, and then I step away and try to appreciate the day and home that I have. I want to enjoy my sunshine, flowers, family. Because some day disaster may strike here instead of elsewhere, and when it does, I’d like to have stored up years of happy living first.

Also, I should review my emergency preparedness supplies. That is also a good use of the day. Because when disaster strikes Utah, it will likely be in the form of an earthquake and we won’t get to see it coming for us. I’m not sure which is better, watching it come slowly and having to make choices about what to lose or having it hit fast and just having to try to salvage. No matter where we live, there is a disaster which could happen and which preparedness could make more survivable.

Stay as safe as you can Florida. Please.

The second week of school is complete and we’re beginning to see the patterns which are settling into place. It will take several more weeks before the patterns are fully set, but I like the shape of things so far.

High school girl has been stepping up and managing all her things despite (or perhaps because of) a last minute decision to discontinue one of her medicines. She loves most of her classes and hates none of them, which is a very nice change from last year.

Junior High boy isn’t stepping up, but he’s willingly admitting when he doesn’t engage with class. This gives me the chance to communicate with teachers and build structures that require/encourage him to participate instead of hide in a book all day. The home school portions of his schedule are also under way. He’s going to be work all year long, but that is the story of 14 years old. At least this year we’re working with a smart kid who doesn’t want to do “boring” and “pointless” school work. That is much preferable to massive anxiety disorder that reduces boy to minimal functioning and depression.

College girl is discovering that her semester is lining up in exceedingly convenient ways, so that she will be able to be done on campus by December. Also her life is made much better by the fact that one of her roommates is an apartment-complex-approved cat who functions as an emotional support animal to one of the human roommates. Fortunately the cat is quite happy to spread the emotional support to humans beyond his owner.

Post-high-school-non-college boy is living at home and intends to begin applying for jobs since he isn’t ready for college at this point in his life. In the interim, he’s been working for me as a shipping assistant and working on some projects of his own. He’s begun to take charge of things in his own life and has been adulting around the house more. He’s on his own path for launching into independent adulthood and we’re going to give him the space to grow up more for a couple of years.

Howard is home from his month-long travels and has immediately found an exciting new project about which we can’t currently disclose any details. He’s no less busy than he was in the first half of this year, but is far more relaxed and happy with the things he is doing.

I’m spending the month of September shipping packages and finishing off the last details of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarters. I’m also setting up for the products and releases that we’ll need to handle between now and the end of the year. I’m putting more attention and effort into tracking the kids’ educational stuff. I’m finally able to be the back-up to their teachers and provide necessary structure so that the kids can’t get away with not doing their work. By beginning to mid October my schedule is going to open up. I’m going to have spaces like I haven’t had for a year or more. I’m not sure yet what will flow into those spaces.

It all feels …nice. Normal. Not chaotic. Without a foreboding sense that everything is imminently falling apart. All my people seem to have stabilized, which is a really nice change from the past four years. I haven’t had everyone stable simultaneously since late 2012. It feels like that state is going to continue for a while, but whether it does or not, I still get to have this space where things are calm, so I’m going to make sure I take time to pause and notice that things are good.

The school year started barely twenty four hours after I returned from GenCon, so there wasn’t much time for me to re-calibrate my brain in between. Fortunately some portion of my brain just remembered how everything needed to go, so we got up on time and got kids out the door on schedule. They’ve now been in school two days, which means they’ve had the first iteration of all of their classes. I’m pleased to report that my high school junior is excited by most of her classes instead of feeling oppressed by them. This is a huge improvement over last year. My 9th grader isn’t actively excited by classes, but he’s not dreading school either. I’ll take that. The college girl departs for school on Friday. Come Monday I need to help the post-high-school non-college kid apply for jobs. Also I need to sign up the 9th grader for some independent study classes. The best part is the complete lack of foreboding. I feel like this year is going to go well instead of being terrified that it won’t.

GenCon was good. I struggled with anxiety and brain noise a lot more than usual. It made some things harder than they needed to be. Planet Mercenary was well received and had a solid start at making its way out into the world. We had some important business conversations which may lead to fun projects. I got to spend time with my booth crew, who is like family. One of my favorite events every year is the crew dinner that we have on Sunday evening after all the work is complete. Then we can just enjoy being together. Maybe it was because of the 50th anniversary, but this dinner was full of reminiscing and stories of GenCons past. It was fun to hear about things I hadn’t been present for, and to relive things that I had. I also got to hang out with writer friends, which is also a joy.

The post GenCon accounting is mostly complete. There are a few more things I must do before I can put away the GenCon folders until sometime in January. I’ve also begun wrapping my brain around the piles of shipping which need to be done. I ordered more shipping supplies so that come Monday I can begin plowing through work. I also began reaching out to potential bonus story artists, which is a task I really should have done before I left for Europe, but which fell through the cracks. The Adventure PDF, the GC secrets PDF, and the half sheet inserts for the handbrains are also on my To Do list. I’m hoping to wrap up all of these things by the end of September so that I’m available for new projects after that.

Tomorrow I post Kickstarter updates and help my college girl pack up her life for what is (hopefully) her final semester of college.

Here is the thing about history, society and individuals are always choosing what to pass down to our children and what not to pass along. Every time someone creates a history textbook they have to choose what goes in and what has to be left out because there isn’t space for everything, so the book from which children learn is a small subset of history. Every time a teacher uses that textbook they have to choose where to focus their teaching time, because there aren’t enough hours to teach everything that is in the book, so the portion of history that enters common knowledge for a generation is further reduced. Any time a historical movie gets made details are pruned away or rearranged for narrative purposes. Sometimes that makes people upset, so they make another movie where different details are pruned and rearranged. It gets even more complicated when we’re interpreting history, when we’re explaining what a battle or event means. Events, places, dates, names are fairly fixed, but the meanings we assign to those fixed historical points are always in flux. There is no One True Version for history.

I’ve been thinking about that this week as I’ve seen news of protests and counter protests surrounding confederate monuments. The meaning of these symbols to individual persons depends on which interpretation of history that person chooses to accept. Cities have begun to remove these monuments because the majority has come to believe the interpretation that symbols of the confederacy are harmful. All of it: the decision to remove them, the protests about it, the counter-protests, the videos of people using trucks to topple statues without city consent, these are all a vigorous argument that our society is having about who we want to be and which versions of history get to thrive while other versions get relegated to pockets where they are specifically discussed as ugly instead of glorious.

Also this week, I watched a movie I haven’t seen in a decade. It is a Western comedy film called Hallelujah Trail that my mother loved and we recorded it off TV to VHS and then I re-watched it dozens of times to the point where every line was familiar. It was delightfully ridiculous with mass covered wagon chases and gun fights where no one died because there was a sand storm and no one could see anyone else. It used all the props of a western, but the spirit was screwball comedy. It had come to mind lately and I wanted to see it again. I considered tracking down a copy (It was only on DVD once and has been out of print for a very long time) and watching it with my kids. But I knew it was a western from the era when Native Americans were treated as villains or as caricatures. I knew it would have things in it that are offensive. Instead I found it on YouTube and watched it by myself.

The opening bars of music made me so nostalgically happy. I still remembered every line of dialogue. The fun mix of western and comedy genres was still there. However there was also a veritable bingo-card of offensive stereotypes. Some of them were half-conscious: Native American Indians deliberately played as drunks for comedy purposes; some of them were unconscious products of the time the movie was made: strong-minded, independent woman’s plot resolution is to get married and give up being a suffragette and temperance marcher. And the whole movie centers around a shipment of whiskey with a wagoneer wanting to deliver cargo, a militia wanting to make sure it gets to them safely, US Cavalry trying to keep order, temperance marchers wanting to destroy it, and the Indians wanting to steal it. The whole movie is about being drunk, wanting to be drunk, or trying to prevent drunkenness but then getting drunk because of “emotional distress.” All of which (in hindsight) seems like a strange choice as a beloved movie for a family of Mormons.

As I watched I had a sort of cognitive dissonance as part of my brain loved each scene for its deep, personal nostalgia and another part of my brain viewed with a modern eye analyzing all the ways this movie gives offense to a swathe of people. I finished the film and knew two things: I still love this movie and I can’t in good conscience share it with anyone else or teach them to love it. I will quietly not show it to my children and they will have no grief that it fades into unwatched obscurity.

This is the choice all adults must sometimes make. Sometimes a movie, or statue, or ideology, or way of living, no longer fits the shifts of society. Sometimes we have to let the past go in order to have a better future. This can be hard when we love these past things. In my case, with this movie, it is only a mild wistfulness that my kids will never love a thing that I loved. The decision becomes heart wrenching if the thing that must be allowed to pass is a core part of your identity. I see that the rage and violence surrounding confederate monuments comes from a place of grief and fear, but the decision to relocate them is the one that helps us build a society where we’re trying to redress the wrongs of the past and a society where everyone is treated equally regardless of ethnicity or skin color.

It feels like such a short hop, only four hours in a plane, so much shorter than the trip I just took with multiple hops and full days of travel. Hop, and I’m in Indianapolis. It is familiar here. I’ve been this place before. This exact Hotel. I will soon see people that I get to see only once per year. The prior trip was a venture into new places, foreign lands. This trip is more like a family reunion.

I’ve arrived late in the evening, though back home it is less late, so I am awake. Howard met me here, but he came from far to the east. He is sleeping now, still working to re-set his internal clock to the day/night rhythms of this place. He has two more days in which to adapt before the show begins in earnest. I’m glad to see him. He is even more glad to see me. We’ve only been apart for a week, but he’s been away from home for over three.

One of my worries in advance of his month-long travel was that breaking his patterns for so long would break him somehow. I forgot that brains are significantly location dependent. I remembered it again when I got home and discovered that all the shipping thoughts which I’d set down for weeks were apparently stored in the driver’s seat of my car. They were right there waiting for me when I climbed in for a quick errand. Howard will be able to slip back in to his home thoughts and work again. Yet when he returns he’ll have new thoughts and experiences, just as I did. Travel caused me to see familiar things in new ways. I would have liked time to explore that experience, but the turn around to this trip was filled with urgent tasks.

Now I am here. GenCon begins on Thursday.

We have an internet package on the ship, but it has a strictly limited MB ration. I may be able to continue to blog words, but no pictures. I possibly won’t be able to do many words either, in which case, I’ll still write things up, hopefully to post when I return to the world of internet. We’ll see.

It has been a full week since I last had enough space to think writer thoughts. Shipping has consumed most of my hours for the past three weeks. There is one week more before I switch over into travel mode. In between shipping, I’ve had two doctor’s appointments and one medical test in the past week. Swallowing is harder for me than it should be. This is probably an after effect of radiation therapy I had twenty years ago. The difficulty was minimal and static for decades, so I adapted. It has felt a little worse lately, hence seeing my primary care doctor, an ENT, and going in for a fun test where I swallow barium sludge so they can x-ray while it goes down. Yesterday was a more specific test where they will ruin food by mixing it with barium and then took x-rays while I chewed and attempted to swallow. The most sadly terrible one was the oreo cookie with barium filling. I walked out of the test with a diagnosis of “dismotility of the swallow mechanism” some instructions for eating carefully and a referral to a speech therapist who will give me a set of exercises designed to strengthen throat muscles.

This is one way where life is not like fiction. Fiction is organized with narratives unfolding neatly, usually in chronological order. Plots and sub plots are clearly delineated. Life muddles everything together, tangled and overlapping. Pretty much everyone I know is caught up in a web of things that keep them busy, things they need to get out of the way so they can do other things that they want to do. I have to remind myself that the tangle is my life. This July my life is about shipping, swallowing, hauling my kids to work in the warehouse, watching them work, and preparations for my upcoming trip. It is also about fixing food, taking out the trash, going grocery shopping, negotiating for use of the big TV in the family room, replacing worn out clothing, and hundreds of other little tasks. What I have to remind myself is that all of the To Do items are in support of this life I’m living, and in the moments when I can clear away the stress of the To Do list, I recognize that the lifestyle I’m supporting is one I’m happy to occupy.