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Kintsukuroi: To “repair with gold.” The art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

When I first ran across this definition, my heart sang a little bit. Because there are times when I am broken and it helps me when I realize that sometimes “broken” is part of the process.

Tesserae: an individual tile, usually formed in the shape of a cube, used in creating a mosaic.

What the definition does not say, is that in many mosaics the tesserae are made of broken pieces of something else. It puts me in mind of the early pioneers who smashed up their fine china to be used in the building of the Kirtland temple. Sometimes things must be broken so they can become something else.

Fernweh: Feeling homesick for a place far away that you have never been.

I don’t have a specific place I’m longing for right now, but frequently I find myself wishing for a peaceful retreat in a place of beauty. Rather than trying to resolve this by running off, I’m looking at the qualities that I desire: peace and retreat, restfulness. Then I’m seeking ways to include those into the days that I have here. I’m recognizing that my fernweh has more to do with being in need of rest than a desire to be someplace else.

I’ve heard people complain that they face an empty page, or an empty screen, and their minds go blank. What a strange experience that would be. I have felt blank on occasion, but most of the time my head is roiling with words. I stare at the emptiness and struggle, not for lack of things, but because there are too many of them. Lately many of the things I could write come with cautions for why I should not. New growth does not benefit from over exposure. Also the internet has seemed an unfriendly place of late. Yet writing is one of the means by which I sort my thoughts. So I put my hands to the keyboard and search my mind for a thread I can pull.

June is half gone. I would like to settle in and have slow, predictable days. But the weeks keep having events. I can’t help but click forward and look at the weeks to come. I count the weeks until Howard goes to LibertyCon, until Pioneer Trek, until Howard and I both go to GenCon. There are spaces in between, but I wish I could shoehorn some extra weeks in there. Because by the time I’m done counting to the end of GenCon, I’m right there next to the beginning of school again. The summer is too short.

I should be better about not checking the calendar so often. Time feels short because I keep counting and measuring it. But there are things it is important that I get right this summer. I have appointments I can’t miss and they are mixed up with all the things I can let slide.

One of the odder experiences I’ve had is being confronted that my adult life can now be measured in decades, plural. Today takes that and shoves it right in my face three different times. I’m not feeling old, I’m sitting here and wondering “how can it possibly be decades since that happened?”

First there was this: Andy Weir being interviewed by Adam Savage about his book The Martian. It is a strange crossing of streams in my brain because I’ve been a long-time Mythbusters fan, but most of my memories of Andy are from twenty-five-ish years ago when he was one of my brother’s best friends. Seeing Adam geek out at Andy’s book made me simultaneously really glad, and realize that people from my past don’t cease to exist simply because they’ve walked off camera in my life. Which I knew logically, but apparently some piece of my brain still needed the reminder. It needed the reminder even though it already had that particular reminder ten years ago when Andy previously came to my attention for being awesomely creative. Brains are weird. (Also, you should all go read The Martian and see the movie when it comes out. I loved the book every bit as much as Adam Savage did though I understood very little of the math. It is a great character story.)

Then Howard and I went to see Jurassic World. Twenty-two years ago I went to see Jurassic Park with my fiance, Howard. We came home thrilled and imagining dinosaurs everywhere. Lots has happened during those years, and I’m very pleased to say that the new movie did hit some of the right notes to let me recall that previous movie-going experience. I did walk out of the movie thinking about dinosaurs. This movie was delightful fun and it only increased my desire to see Chris Pratt in more films. Yet I have to say that the best part was holding Howard’s hand in the theater and realizing that he was laughing out loud at the same moment in the film that I was. I don’t often think about the passage of years that I’ve spent with Howard. We just keep moving forward together, focused on the work ahead of us. But today the Jurassic movie made me glance back and notice exactly how much shared experience we’ve accumulated. Yet it doesn’t feel that long really. It feels like we’ve just found our stride and are only getting started.

And, of course, there is the fact that today marks the 15th anniversary of Schlock Mercenary. Since I’ve been doing layout on book twelve, you’d think that my brain would be more attuned to the fact that we’ve been at this for a while, yet somehow it still surprises me. Fifteen years is a long time to devote to a project. This thing has been in our lives for longer than half of our children. For the last nine of those years it has been our primary source of income. I’ve had a front row seat to watch Howard create this thing, and I have to tell you, I’m not sure how he does it either. I don’t know how he holds these big stories in his head and makes up the next piece day after day. Then he pulls threads back in and makes it all come together. I’ve been there when Howard wrestles with self-doubt and I’ve had doubts myself. Schlock Mercenary is amazing and the more that accumulates, the more I’m able to see how amazing it is. I’m glad to be part of it. And has it really been that long?

Time passes whether I stop and notice it or not. I think I would be benefited if I paid more attention and made sure that my days include small creative efforts that will accumulate, because accumulation is a powerful thing.

It was a highly productive day at my house, which was a surprise since I had insomnia last night and only got 2 hours of sleep. But then I got Gleek off to girl’s camp. I answered a pile of customer support email. I liked today’s pile of customer support better than yesterday’s. Clear lesson: People are irritable when they are confused and faced with unexpected decisions. But people are kind and agreeable when you apologize for confusing them and clear up the confusion. I wrote contracts for the artists we hope to work with for the Planet Mercenary book. I got a quote from our book printer. And I pulled together a sample deck of cards for some play testing. Side note: creating cards is surprisingly complicated and nit-picky. We have a lot of work to do before these are ready for prime time.

Howard had a fairly productive day as well, though his would have been better if I hadn’t had some last-minute card design requests. Patch had an exceedingly productive day. He spent all day creating an amazing castle in Minecraft. That might sound like wasted time, but he was using a digital tool to make something he imagined. I’ll take that over endless hours of watching YouTube. To balance out the productivity, Kiki and Link took the day easy.

Now we’re all tired and ready for bed. Hopefully this time my brain will do a better job of letting me sleep.

It is almost ten o’clock and outside my open window I can still hear the rain falling. It began hours ago with a few drips while we were at a dinner picnic in the park. Soon the children were running, laughing, spinning in the rain. I watched Kiki whirl around with her younger cousins. Kiki’s long braided hair whipping around like a rope attached to her head. Patch chased after her for a bit and they both laughed. The spinning and running was Link’s idea. “You should make yourselves dizzy and play tag.” So they did, and he stood and watched, protected from the rain by his hat. Gleek found an open section of lawn and sat. She was still while the rain landed on her, communing with the sky. I watched all this from the pavilion where most of the grown ups and half of the kids had retreated when the rain began to fall. Howard stepped out into the rain to flip the last of the burgers.

Rain didn’t ruin the picnic. It just added a new layer. Though the temperature dropping probably did send people home sooner than they otherwise would have gone.

I like listening to the rain. I like that we got to be outdoors in it for a time.

We are two days into the school-free summer schedule and I’m still trying to figure out how it goes. I’m certain that this summer has more scheduled things for the kids than I’m accustomed to and I’m trying to figure out how that fits with all the hours where I need to be able to ignore the kids and get work done. So I dove into my blog archive to see how I managed other Junes. Turns out it has been five years since June wasn’t impacted by a major shipping event. It has been three years since June didn’t have a big trip in it. My archive trawl showed me that the only pattern I have for June is to intend to do lots of good parenting things and then to let them slide because I have to balance against the work I need to get done. Thus the kids play far more video games than I should probably allow.

For the first time in years I have June as a month to establish summer patterns. I’m not going to make ambitious plans. I’m just going to try to help us all to settle in. We need routine and relaxation. We need work and rest in appropriate proportions. We need to set up Link’s summer independent study program. We need to establish therapeutic cello practice for Patch. We need to visit the barn where Gleek rides horses and plays with kittens. I have to remember that I’m only two days into the summer. It is okay that we don’t have established patterns yet. It is okay to feel our way through this first week and figure out how things need to go. June has 30 days and I don’t have to get all of them perfectly right.

Not that today or yesterday were wrong, they just weren’t routine. Yet. Because nothing can be a routine when you’ve only done it once. We need some more summer Mondays and Tuesdays before I can know if they’re working. Only then can I see what needs to be tweaked. For now I can hear my kids laughing out loud because they’re playing a game together. The fan is in the window drawing cool evening air into the house. And I’m sorting my thoughts into words. These are all good things.

Just a few days ago I had a day where I didn’t feel like I was failing. Today that feelings of failure returned, so I took the opportunity to consider the differences in the two days to try to figure out where this sense of failure is coming from. The answer is: Dozens of tiny places. It is in the phone calls I have to make to schools or church youth group leaders to explain why my kid won’t be meeting their minimal expectations. Again. It is in the household tasks that I see still aren’t done though I intended to do them weeks ago. It is in my to do list which has spent two days growing in size instead of shrinking or at least staying steady. It is also in the fact that the things I’ve been succeeding at are big and nebulous where as the failures are small and concrete.

Also, the successes are often attached to some large emotional thing which I really wish wasn’t a thing in our lives at all. It is a huge success to spend four hours talking to my son, assisting him in managing an unstable emotional state. It was absolutely the right use for those hours. Yet at the end of them I have no way to know if anything I said will stick in his brain and make a long term difference. I don’t know if we made progress or if it was just a holding action. I do know exactly what things I would have accomplished in those four hours if I hadn’t spent them with my son. I can measure the failures. The successes are intangible.

The good news is that the ending of the school year gives me a clean slate from a pile of failures. We get two and a half months to re-set, stabilize, grow strong. My son needs that as much as I do. He needs to be out from under the many small-but-measurable failures of the past few months.

Usually the last week of school is a playground with all the stresses lifted. That has not been the case these past two days. Tomorrow and Friday look to be better. Then we are free to make of our days what we choose. One of the things I hope to do is take away the pencil from that one piece of my brain that wants to make tally marks on a parenting scorecard. Keeping score of failures and successes doesn’t help.

I’ve reached the end of the day and I don’t feel like I failed at anything. This is a new and unusual experience, since I’ve spent most of the last few months with this constant looming sense of failure. Today has been lovely. I got some things done. I procrastinated others. I took a nap. I look at my To Do list for tomorrow and it feels like I can do that too. Hopefully this will continue, but for now I’m just going to sit here and enjoy the cool evening breeze. It is nice to feel content.

Memorial day is almost, but not quite, summer. Some years I attempt to practice my intended schedule for the summer months. Other years we just play and stay up late. Then with a mental screech, we remember that we have to do four more days of school schedule.

Only it isn’t really a school schedule. The high school kids have finals, and given that Link is only attending a few classes, he’s pretty much done with school by 10am tomorrow morning. He’ll wander back to retrieve his yearbook on Thursday, but that’s it for him. Gleek has locker clean out, turning in text books, getting her yearbook, and general housekeeping that culminate in a very short day on Friday. Patch has a smorgasboard of events. Graduation/BBQ, Dance Festival, Field day, and the final day on Friday. It is to Patch’s events that I’ll be making daily trips out of the house. By Friday I can close the door on this school year. I don’t have to interface with teachers or school systems again until August. I can close off a host of worries and not think about them until then. This thought makes me very happy.

The summer ahead is far from empty. Cello and horseback riding lessons continue. Link has some classes that he is taking as part of the WIA youth program. Link will also continue to work on his independent study courses. Both Link and Patch have therapy appointments weekly. All of us need to be walking more in preparation for our coming pioneer trek. Yet even with all of these things, my days will open up tremendously. I felt that this morning when I was able to let the kids sleep late and putter around doing things of their choice. I got to focus on my priorities. It was lovely. Business tasks that have been lingering for far too long, got completed. I was able to give them morning brain instead of the brain I have left after making a dozen judgement calls about kids and school.

All of this bodes well for the coming summer.

Every time I think I’ve done the most complicated shipping project I’ll ever do, Howard and I manage to come up with something new. The Planet Mercenary RPG currently has over 4300 backers. And it doesn’t close until Monday. Each individual package will be simpler to assemble than the challenge coin packages were, but there will be more of them. Fortunately I have some time to plan. Shipping won’t begin until sometime next year. Also fortunately I have a loyal crew of people whom I can ask for help, because this is going to take many shipping days to get done.

And shipping is not the first big job. We’ve got to make the books amazing first. I am excited and daunted by this project. I’m honored that so many people trust us to get it done.

My first task will be to set up the pledge manager and get all of the backers into that system. I figure that will take most of the two weeks between the close of the Kickstarter and when we receive funds. The other project for those first two weeks will be to plan work schedules and assign deadlines. We’ll start commissioning some of the art and Howard will work on building the buffer. This is going to be a busy year and I’m excited to get started.