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All of my kids went to school on time. Bonus points for them being happy as they departed.

3 out of 4 kids ate breakfast.

We set Howard up to continue sketching in books.

Kiki and I teamed up to send out over 100 international packages. We made them and dropped them at the post office without incident.

All of my kids stayed at school for the entire school day and I got no phone calls from schools during those hours.

Gleek sat down with me to talk about a school assignment that is causing her major stress. It was a conversation she did not want to have, yet she stayed with me and talked with me, instead of picking a fight with me and stomping off. We now have a plan.

We put up the Christmas tree and it has lights on it. Ornaments can come later.

It was a good day, but one with very little time to rest. Up next: going to bed so that tomorrow can be another good day.

Today’s story could be about shipping. That was certainly my first focus for the day. Howard rallied the kids to help me prep the house. Some neighbor kids came and put calendars in packages. I ran errands, bought a ladder and other shipping supplies. The shipping schedule in the next two weeks is complex and wraps around the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully it does so in ways that will not impinge on the family celebrations.

I could also write a story about how I really wanted to get out of the house, so I packed up the kids at a moment’s notice and took them to see a movie. Being out was good for all of us.

Today also had the sadness of an important event for Patch which was missed, not because we were busy, but because we were distracted. I sat with him and shared in his sadness, because there wasn’t anything I could do to fix it. I couldn’t even suggest a substitute, because there really isn’t one.

Then there are the dozens of smaller stories. How the kids reacted when we told them the plan Howard and I have for some of our Christmas celebrations. The funny thing the cat did which made me laugh. The potted flowers I bought so that I’ll have flowers in the next couple of months.

One day. So many stories. And a brain too tired to tell any of them properly.

I keep paging ahead on my calendar. I’m looking ahead to the next few weeks. Sometimes I’m leaping ahead months to see the shape of things to come. I have to refresh the calendar information that I’m storing in my brain, because in order for all the pieces to fit, I have to know the shapes of the holes. It is an endlessly shifting puzzle.

Today I pulled out the invoices and began sorting them. Every time we do a complex shipping, I think that everything afterward will be easy. Then we think up new and exciting ways to make shipping even more complicated. This time we’ve got two sketched editions and two slipcases. I’m doing my best to take one step at a time. I’ve shifted things around at the warehouse to maximize floor space for the delivery. I haven’t yet begun to line up help, because I don’t have a defined schedule. It would be nicer if I did, but everything always shifts around. The calendars were supposed to arrive next Monday, but the printer mis-printed their hardcopy proof. I declined to accept it and they’re sending a new one. Not a big deal, except it delays the delivery. Instead of having calendars the week before we expect books, I suspect that both will hit at about the same time. Not what I’d hoped for, but I’ll deal with it.

I was glad to have a work day that was not impacted by urgent parenting tasks. It’s been a couple of weeks since that happened. I’m behind on most of my scheduled work.

Schlock Mercenary:

Prep for shipping (This includes sorting invoices, counting sketches, ordering boxes, etc.)
Warehouse reorganization (There is stuff that needs to be shifted around to make space for the incoming delivery of pallets.)
Schlock RPG preliminary layout
Challenge Coin PDF
Regular shipping
Schedule next XPC meeting

Household and parenting:

Diagnosis cycle for two kids. (This includes additional doctors’ appointments, emotional processing, etc.)
Helping two kids catch up on back work from absences
Not ignore the other two kids.
Rake leaves (make kids rake leaves.)
Basic home maintenance (Dishes, laundry, chores)
Shell two boxes of walnuts currently sitting on my back porch.

Writing / Creative:

Write about 6000 more words until I hit The End.
Begin the first cycle of revision.
Start drafting the next book.
Cover re-design for the Cobble Stones books.
Test Kindle’s new picture book platform, possibly put HH and SWH on there.
Do some picture book promotion for the coming holiday gift season.
Work on the 2014 family photo book.

Back Burner:

Finishing painting the front room and remodel that annoying coat closet.
Pay someone to re-roof the house.
Trim all the trees. (In March)
Finish writing the two picture books I have in mind.
More essay books.
Do something pretty with the dirt patch which is where our deck used to be.

In hindsight I can see that this was a heavy week. I didn’t realize earlier because none of the things in it were individually large. It was just one little thing after another until I was hunched over and exhausted from the weight of them all. Every time I finished a thing, there were three more things sitting and waiting. Or sometimes jumping up and down and screaming at me that I really ought to have done them last week. Then there were the things that lay in silent heaps making life feel cluttered. That last one is about laundry. I’ve felt quite a lot of laundry guilt this week. Laundry guilt is cumulative and I’ve accrued quite a lot of it.

I do want to get off of the “hope this works, nope, time to try something else” roller coaster that we’ve been on with Link’s homework and with Patch’s anxiety. Both are looking up today, like we may have actually identified solutions, but I’m a little afraid to believe in it yet. I’m also sad because my Kiki had a sad thing today and she called to talk to me about it. Now I wish I could hug her and make it all better. Sometimes there isn’t anything I can do except listen and that is hard.

On the happier side, Howard has finished drawing all the calendar pages. They’ll soon be colored and lettered. Then I’ll drop them into place and send the calendar off to print. That will be a nice piece to have complete.

Tomorrow is Halloween. I have an elementary school parade to attend in the morning. There are pumpkins to carve in the afternoon. And the evening will be Trick-or-Treating and answering the door. Hopefully in between those things, I’ll also be able to carve away at my list. It is shorter now than it was it the beginning of the week. I’m slowly making progress. Maybe I’ll finally have time to solve the laundry.

I’d forgotten what pre-orders do to my brain. On the surface it looks simple. We open ordering and quietly collect orders until the time comes to ship books. Except I have to track and double check those orders. I have to print invoices and make sure that I pull out the regular orders so they don’t get stuck in limbo with the pre-orders. There is also customer support email for people who need help with their orders in some way. And the influx of income brings with it some accounting tasks. We’ve had bills piling up in the expectation of having that income and now is the time to pay those bills. The result is an influx of dozens of small tasks which flood into my brain and fill up all the available spaces.

Since last Monday I’ve barely had time to take breaks. Sometimes my brain would give out and I would end up watching a show for a while, but even then I was aware of the press of Things Which Need to be Done, but Which are Not Getting Done Right Now. I flow from business task to parenting task to household management task. It does not help that the household tasks have sprouted a bunch of fall deadlines. If I want flowers next spring, I have to plant bulbs before the weather gets too cold. If we want pear butter to eat over the next year, I have to cook those pears on the back porch before they rot. There is a tree branch that scrapes our roof in storms, we need to get out and trim it off before the weather gets cold. My mind catalogs and tracks all of these things. Some parenting things also have deadlines this week. The term ends on Friday and Link has some scrambling to do in order to make sure that he passes a couple of his classes. He is discovering the consequences of letting things slide earlier in the semester. I’m biting my tongue on “I told you so.” Even though I did. Repeatedly. Experience is a better teacher for this than any lecture I can give.

Some time on Saturday I realized that I’d passed a threshold. I started being actively resentful when I had to remind a kid of a chore more than once. I also resented any additional requests which I’d not already slotted into a space in my brain. Fortunately I recognized these resentments as a sign of overload. I went to Howard and let him know that I’d hit the overload point. This means it is time to adjust. In the next weeks I’ll be knocking things off my schedule. I’ll be bowing out of some responsibilities and warning people that between now and the end of December I become flaky. I have so many things going on that I will inevitably forget some of them. I feel less guilty about that if I warn people in advance that it will happen.

The good news is that some of this will settle out by the end of this week. The new term will reduce parenting and homework pressure. I processed several batches of pears over the weekend, eventually I’ll run out of pears to cook. Once the fall gardening tasks are complete I can ignore gardening until pruning season in March. So, hopefully I’ll have a brain-busy week followed by some lull time, followed by the crazy-busy of shipping in the early holiday season.

Sorry for the radio silence. Pre-orders for Massively Parallel opened for the Schlock Patreon supporters on Monday. Which meant I was answering a lot of email and doing a lot of accounting. That slowed down just in time for the full pre-order to open on Wednesday which meant even more email, accounting, and prepping for shipping. As things stand right now, we’ve paid for the print run. That is a good place to be on day 2 of pre-ordering. It is a huge relief for us, because this was the most expensive print run we have ever done. It cost as much as a new car.

I’ve also spent some time wandering around in my warehouse and trying to picture how everything will fit. Because this is the largest shipment we’ve ever received for volume. We’re expecting 32 pallets of books and slipcases. We’ll have to immediately re-stack things tall. In fact this shipment is so big that the shipping company called us to make sure that we had space enough to take delivery. Ultimately it will have to arrive in two trucks and I hope that we can have a couple hours between trucks so that we can do the stacking. I’m pretty sure the trucking company will cooperate with that.

Mixed in with all of those business things, I’ve also been trying to catch up with home things. I’ve got pears which will rot unless I preserve them, so I’ve been cooking pear butter. There are also grapes and walnuts. So my kitchen is a place of many projects. We’re coming up on the end of the term and I’ve got a kid who is scrambling to raise some grades before it is too late. I get to assist with that. Basically I’ve been running full-tilt all week long. It’s been a good week though.

The eagle scout garden shed project is complete. All that remains is lots of thank you notes and a pile of paperwork.

We found some people willing to get on the roof. I am extremely grateful for them.

At the end of the day the shed was complete. Though the last bits of painting were done in near dark, so daylight will probably show them to be less neat than we would have preferred. I’ll have to go get a picture of the finished shed when daylight returns. For now this is what I have.

I’m too tired to feel triumphant. Instead my brain is helpfully supplying a list of all the people we need to thank and all the tools we need to return. Fatigue can do that, make even triumphs feel like failures. For now we just need to rest.

I can’t always tell when I’m stressed. The physical and emotional consequences of being stressed interfere with my self awareness. Usually I figure out the extent of my stress when I come out from under it. Usually this manifests in my house becoming more organized and clean because I’m able to notice small tasks and accomplish them instead of filtering them out of my attention because I’m focused elsewhere. My house is cleaner today than it was this time last week.

It is possible that canning creates a sense of well being, or maybe I only make time to preserve food when I’m feeling calm enough. I suspect the answer is a bit of both. Either way, I’ve been cooking batches of grapes so that I can make Jelly. Pears are picked and sitting on my porch to ripen. Walnuts are beginning to fall from the tree and in a week or two I’ll send kids outside to gather them.

This is not to say that the past few days have been stress free. Quite the contrary. There were several anxiety spikes, particularly on Thursday. I can see all the causes of them. Some of them earned every bit of that anxiety. Others are far less rational and I wish I could explain to my body that they are undeserving of massive adrenaline surges. At least I have practice in recognizing when I’m being irrational and trying to make sure my irrationality does not impose on others.

The best part of today is that Howard has returned from the Writing Excuses Retreat. That makes many things better.