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This last week before GenCon I had a to do list as long as my arm. I began whittling away at it on Monday morning. By afternoon I was ready to run out and get Prescription refills. Then this happened.

A semi shed giant pieces of tire across my lane and I didn’t see them until the car in front of me sent them flying at my car. No time to avoid, I drove over them. So all of Tuesday was spent talking to insurance people and the car repair shop. The good news is that I have insurance and a fairly low deductible. Unknown is whether this incident will raise my insurance rates. It is a possibility since I had an accident (my fault) only a couple of months ago. But more good news is that my local insurance agent and the car repair place conspired to give me a rental car at no charge even though my policy does not cover rental vehicles.

This is also happening in my house this week:

Home construction is not what I’d pick the week before a major convention, but that is how the schedule worked out. That nook used to be a fireplace that we never used except as a flat place to accumulate all the things which didn’t really have a place to belong. Now it will either be a game closet or the storage space for electronic devices. We’re gaining a significant amount of square footage and we like it already.

I also spent time on Tuesday preparing these. They’re the final invoices and postage for the Force Multiplication shipping.

I bought boxes for the orders to go into. They also arrived on Tuesday:

Wednesday morning I hauled two of my kids over to the warehouse and put them to work making packages.

Unfortunately the air conditioning at the warehouse is not working well, so we were hot, sweaty, and tired in short order. That’s when a truck pulled up. I’d been told “We’ll call Wednesday morning for a delivery appointment.” But they didn’t call, they just showed up. I guess it was fortunate we were spending a hot day at the warehouse.
The truck delivered these:

And these:

And these:

All of which are things we are going to need for shipping Planet Mercenary once we have the books done. Unfortunately the contract with the trucking company didn’t obligate him to wheel the pallets inside. He kindly did for the two lighter pallets. But the heavy pallet was too much to try to get over the small lip into our warehouse. Which left my son and I hefting heavy boxes in 90 degree heat. Had the company actually scheduled a delivery appointment, I’d have arranged for more lifting help. But we got it done.

Then we finished the shipping:

Today I had to scramble to assemble sheets for the Planet Mercenary games that will be run while we’re at GenCon. It was my plan to scramble something together. But when my book designer heard what I was up to, he said “would you like me to do that?” So instead of spending all day frantically attempting to lay out the sheet, I was able to spend 3/4 of the day making sure I’d collected all the relevant information and images. Then I put them into a format where the designer could plunk them into place. It took much longer than expected because I was pulling information from six different sources. I shudder to think how stressed I would have been had I also had to try to make it all attractive.
This was my first pass attempt. Note that some of the elements were borrowed from a prior design pass that my designer did. I don’t have the skill to make some of the decorative elements, but I can plunk them into place:

This is my layout designer’s first pass:

Seriously folks, be willing to pay money for good design. It makes all the difference.

Since my designer currently resides on the other side of the world, I was able to collect all the info while he was sleeping. Then he could work while I was sleeping. (Though I’m not actually sleeping at this moment. Hello 3am insomnia.) Tomorrow (Friday) I will collect the images and haul them to a printer.

Sprinkled throughout the week was customer support for the Writing Excuses cruise and for Schlock customers.

Thursday also contained taking my daughter shopping for the last wardrobe thing she needed in order to be a bridesmaid at a wedding on Friday. She also needed to get a painting framed because it is her gift to the couple.

Things on my list for Friday:
Accounting
Pre-pay hotel room for GenCon booth staff
Write a couple of emails related to the WX cruise
Call a doctor and remind him that he was supposed to send a prescription to the pharmacy
Final odds and ends for the Force Multiplication shipping
Update some store items in the wake of Force Multiplication shipping
Take Pre Gen sheets to printer
Make reference cards related to the Planet Mercenary GenCon games
Assemble player kits for the GenCon players
Assemble GM Kits for the kind folks who will be running our games
Prepare two solo presentations that I’ll be giving at GenCon
Help Kiki sort out some plot issues with a story she is working on so that she can continue to work while I’m fully occupied at GenCon
Go over the 70 Maxims book copy edits
Work on collecting the remaining handwritten notes for 70 Maxims book
Scan the handwriting
Assemble 70 maxims pages to check layout
Begin packing for GenCon
Move things around in my family room so that the workmen can paint ceiling and walls.
Attend a wedding reception

That is more things than I can reasonably do in a single day. Fortunately some of them can roll over onto Saturday and Monday. But right now I need to go see if writing up this blog post has now convinced my brain that it does not have to hold onto every single thought. We can let go and sleep. Really.

This morning, while I was dropping of packages, I listened to a pair of postal employees argue over who was right and who was wrong in a recent shooting case. As I listened, the following thought occurred to me. I’m still turning it over in my head to see if it rings true.
The thought:
As a private citizen it is not my job to judge individuals (unless I’m on a jury), but it is my job to pass judgement on the systems which judge those individuals and the laws that they are judged by. It is also my job to take action if I feel the systems or laws are broken or unfair.

In traveling to and from the post office, I pass by a giant flag that waves over a grocery store parking lot. It was at half mast. Again. And I tried to remember when I last saw it at full mast. Or when it last spent an appreciable length of time at full mast. I would like to have a couple of months where no national or international tragedies send flags half way down the pole. It has all started to blur a bit, is this the left over half mast from last week, or the new one from yesterday? I don’t want to be asking that question anymore.

I recently had someone say to me that the internet is in it’s “wild west” phase. That with the advent of social media we haven’t had enough time to build social rules and laws about appropriate behavior as digital citizens of the online community. This feels true to me. It also starts me thinking about history, because social upheaval is not a new phenomenon. I wonder how societies felt as they navigated from having a mostly illiterate populace into having a mostly literate one. That changed all the rules. It shifted the balances of power. It changed the world forever. Or what about the shifts from hunting and gathering to agriculture? Again all the structures changed and it must have felt like the world was falling apart.

I’m certain that there were battles and deaths over both literacy and agriculture. There still are on smaller scales. It is always terrifying when the solutions which used to work don’t anymore. It is frightening when a person is used to having a particular capability and that capability is removed. It is frightening to see power shift into new hands, because we don’t know what those hands will do with it. Fear makes people rash in their decisions and actions.

I can only hope that since one of the hallmarks of the digital revolution is the speed at which things alter, that this will also be reflected in the speed at which we settle into social structures which are more adaptive for the post-internet era.

My time has been much occupied with making and mailing packages. These days we do Schlock shipping in patches over a week or more. It is less stress on me and causes less trouble with the post office.

I’ve also been spending time with cruise administration and planning. We have many attendees who have never been on a cruise before, so I’ve been helping to answer questions and make sure that everything is handled on schedule. I’m the help desk and the interface with our cruise liaison, so it means email. I’ve also been prepping and planning for the things we’ll be doing with our kids while on the cruise. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to afford to bring them all again, so I’m making sure we get the chance to do interesting things on shore.

I’ve been working with the 70 Maxims files, prepping them to go to print. We’ve begun the process of creating all the handwritten notes. It is a slow process, but the result is beginning to look really cool.

I’ve been helping Kiki untangle some plot problems for a graphic novel project she is working on. I’ve also been an advisor for another of her projects which launched and then had to unlaunch because of a problem. There was an emotional ride involved, but all is at peace now. Particularly since some college friends have come to spend the weekend. Friends are a good thing.

I helped Gleek dye her hair bright blue. It is surprising to me how quickly seeing the blue began to feel normal.

All of these are good things. Less good are the anxiety attacks which lurk waiting to pounce when I’m trying to sleep. And then there are the random ebbs and flows of mental health which require management at times. And by “times” I mean “daily.” Rare is the day when none of us are off kilter. But the good news is that our established coping strategies usually fend off full meltdown mode.

Yet, when I take time to look at where we were this time last year, I am so glad to be in this year instead. We are all in better places than we were. I have large fears about what will come when school starts again, but I do my best to not let them run amok. When I look back at how far we’ve come, I can sometimes believe that we’ll manage to weather whatever comes next.

Another thing which uses hours is preparing for GenCon, which is only a few weeks away. I have many things I would like to do before it is time to depart. I have a couple of presentations to prepare, and hand outs to make. I’ve already sent packages to our team in Indiana. Exhibitor instructions are sitting in my mailbox so that we can properly set up the booth. When I get back from GenCon we’ll be right up against the beginning of school, but I’m trying hard not to think too much about that.

For now, I’ll be taking each day one at a time and trying to remember which day of the week it is. Pretty sure today is Thursday. Summer days blend into each other.

The days slipped into being July, not exactly when my back was turned. I saw it coming, yet somehow when it actually became July, I felt a moment of surprise. This weekend most of my country will be on holiday. The official day of celebration is on Monday, so it grants a three day weekend to most people. Holidays don’t have the same feel in our house, particularly not the holidays which fall during the summer when all the kids are out of school anyway. Sometimes I don’t even realize a holiday is happening until I try to do something like go to the bank. Of course this particular holiday announces its presence with flashes of light and loud sounds.

Today I had to devote my time to Planet Mercenary and to helping Kiki work out some plotting issues on a story she needs to complete for school. The Planet Mercenary work was a brain slog of making sure that all the ships we plan to include have stats that match their descriptions. Then we have to make sure that the stats don’t break anything else, like the financial system or the hit point system. It is one of those tasks that on the surface looks simple, but gets persnickety in the details.

Tomorrow I will be doing organization to prepare for shipping. We need to begin getting books out the door now that they are signed. I should also spend time with my weekly accounting and with some basic house organization and cleaning. All of which is a bunch of words to wrap around what is basically a To Do list.

It is pleasantly warm when I step outside after the sun has gone down. The air in my front garden is fragrant with lilies in bloom. My cat yells at me to make sure that I stop and pet her since I’m outside anyway. In the middle of all the things to do, I need to make time to stop and sit. Otherwise July will slip away just as easily as the month before it did.

At this moment I am sitting in my warehouse, waiting for a truck to deliver four pallets of Force Multiplication. I’m also wishing that the AC in the warehouse worked better, may need to call the landlord about that. The truck is due to come sometime between now and two hours from now. Hence me sitting and waiting at my warehouse. Fortunately I have an internet hot spot and a pile of computer work that I can be doing. It is good to get ahead on the computer work, because the arrival of books is the beginning of the physical work of shipping. After I’m done sitting here, I’ll need to go home and sort invoices. Howard and I will need to plan a signing day and order the stamp for sketch editions. Packages of unsigned books should start going out during the first half of next week.

Mixed in with the shipping work will be ongoing work for Planet Mercenary and the Seventy Maxims book. And then there is family stuff. And the days when my brain simply will not kick into gear to get things done. I don’t like those days. Some of them are required to emotionally process events. I had to sort through all the thoughts and feelings that were stirred up by helping clear my grandparents’ house. I also had to sort some emotions relating to the end of school and shifting roles in our house. The heightened level of ambient anxiety meant that some of it attached to pending business tasks and conversations. I had to detangle that. It gets pretty messy and noisy in my head

And with that quick update, I need to go find my contract brain so I can re-write for a contractor we want to hire.

We made it home. The drive we expected to take ten hours stretched to twelve. Most of the delay was because I-80 was turned into a parking lot outside of Elko while road crews doused and removed a burning semi from blocking both eastbound lanes. It was strange to stand outside of my car talking to others who were also outside their cars on a road where we all usually zip by at 80 mph.

The trip was long and I was already over stressed and anxious when it began. A fact Kiki noticed when she took a turn driving and I alerted to check the road every time she made a course correction that was a little sharper than expected. Her driving is fine, my brain was in hyper alert mode. It had been all weekend. (Events in the news did not reduce this anxiety. At all. Grief upon grief.)

We got home near midnight, and I shuffled my tired self through the garage into the kitchen. A waft of cool clean air enveloped me. “Oh it smells like home!” I said. Which is a nice parallel because the smell of my Grandma’s house was one of the first things I noticed when arriving there. Except now that Quincy smell is all tangled up with hard work, hyper alertness, and anxiety.

There was this moment, after all the coming-home chatter had died down. After all the hugs had been exchanged. I was looking at one of my blank, white walls. This house I live in is not quirky. It is not interesting. It is a cookie cutter home built in tandem with twenty or thirty other homes in my neighborhood. I have the exact same floor plan as many of my neighbors. In comparison to my grandparent’s house, my house is boring. In that moment, surrounded by the cool smell of home, I realized I like my house better. It is mine. The roof doesn’t leak. I have almost twenty years of accumulated living in my house. I’m about to embark on a process of remodeling sections of it so that I’ll like it even more.

After spending all weekend with a base level grief that I have to participate in giving up my grandparent’s house, it was a relief to realize that the home I’m keeping is the one I’d rather have anyway.

Today I’m unpacking and trying to remember what business tasks I should be doing. I unpacked some of the things I brought home.
Before washing

After I removed the layer of grime and dust everything was much shinier.

This picture does not cat the way that the light shines through the colored glass. It is beautiful and makes me happy.

And there is a little space in my office given over to Grandma and Grandpa. Them together older and younger, vases from her, and a wood plane that I remember Grandpa teaching me how to use.

We took today off from hauling and sorting, but I still wandered about taking pictures and noticing things. Like these giant calipers that Grandpa acquired from somewhere. They weigh at least forty pounds. I’ve no idea what he planned to use them for.

This is a cabinet in Grandma’s kitchen. She may have covered it with contact paper herself. I’m not sure. But I find it strangely lovely if not typical for kitchen cupboards.

All over the property I see places where nature is attempting to reclaim structures. This ivy is climbing up the spiral stairs to the apartment above the garage.

I am not certain where these giant lamps came from, or why Grandpa has three of them. They’re the size of a human torso.

Grandma’s lilac bushes are thriving even without her here to water them.

Most of the doors in the house lock with hooks and eyes or with these sliding locks. This was a challenge when we were kids and accidentally locked ourselves into spaces.

Grandpa had at least two Oscilloscopes. My brother plugged one in, but it will require fixing to be functional. I’ve always been fascinated by the quantity of dials on this machine. So many things to adjust. I remember seeing it work.

This bowl was in Grandma’s kitchen. I usually got to see the wheat pattern when scooping out the last of the mashed potatoes. Even the chips remind me of the long years of use.

Grandpa wrote notes on many pieces of equipment.

It seems that Grandpa decided that the old means of turning on this electric stove weren’t good enough, so he re-rigged the entire thing with switches. Then he labeled it with big black marker so that other people would have a clue how it worked. Sometimes his solutions added greatly to the life of objects, other times they just gave him additional tinkering work as the thing constantly broke down. Not sure where this stove fit on that spectrum.

Grandpa often sorted his tools using blocks of wood with holes drilled into them. We found at least a dozen of these, all filled with assortments of duplicate tools. Most of the tools were obviously used when he acquired them.

Every now and then I pause to look up at the tall trees that grace the property. They are beautiful. This tiny community really is a lovely place to be.

Over forty whole televisions, many more pieces of televisions. Many of the televisions were in wooden cabinets.
Seven 8 track cassette players
Four reel to reel tape recorders
three hair dryers from the 1960s, the kind of hair dryers that came with a long hose and a vinyl hood to go over curlers
two oscilloscopes
twenty small motors of various types
A dozen stereos with radios and record players. Many in large wooden cabinets. (Though a few of these were actually in the house rather than the garage.)
Ten or more blocks of wood that had been drilled with holes so that they could be used as tool racks.
Tools, many many tools, vice grips, wrenches, screw drivers, drill bits, hammers, multiples of everything.
Pieces of tools, handles without hammers, saw blades without saws, etc.
Then there were the frankentools, where part of one tool had been attached to the handle of something else. Usually with an epoxy or silicone glue.
fifteen or twenty work lamps, most non-functioning.
Thirty or forty pounds of screws, bolts, nails, hinges, locks, door knobs, and other metal bits.
hundreds of fuses of any type you can imagine, ditto resistors, and radio tubes.
Three giant lamps that must have been removed from some stadium somewhere.
Thirteen pressure gauges
Four electric heaters
Three bicycles with no wheels. (We found the wheels outside fastened twenty feet up to living trees where they served as clothesline reels. The tree had grown around the bicycle parts so they appeared to be growing out of the tree.)
Random pieces of wood with things attached (voltmeters, circuits, light switches, and sometimes there were hand written notes on the wood saying things like “motor burned out, circuits good.”)
Eight linear feet of radio and TV repair manuals.
Fifteen linear feet of a radio repair magazines.
Twenty or thirty other small electronic devices.

All of this was hauled out and sorted. Some was delivered to recycling center, thrift store, or dump. The rest gets hauled off over the next week.

Estimated size of this garage is 600 square feet or less. It was packed.