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The amount of insistence I place on my kids coming to the table quickly and eating politely is directly proportional to the amount of effort I put into making the meal. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. It is simply useful information. Low effort meals mean I’m less emotionally invested in the reaction to the meal. There is value in both the effort-ful family dinner and the fix-it-for-yourself free range evenings. Our family should probably work toward having more focused meals and less free range. Balance is good.

I would probably feel differently about this if the act of preparing meals and feeding children was inherently rewarding to me. My grandmother expresses love through cooking and feeding. In contrast, I would be quite happy if we could finally come up with those Jetson-style meal replacement pills so that I only had to fix food when I felt like it. This undoubtedly explains why I’m willing to stock the freezer with Hot Pockets, which are the closest thing I’ve found to those Jetson meals. There are times I enjoy cooking, but mostly it is a thing I have to do rather than something I want to do. I’m very glad that my kids are old enough to fix for themselves rather than always needing me to do it. I do harbor some guilt and worry that I’m letting them form terrible eating habits, but I suspect they’re happier free-ranging than they would be having a mother who provided three meals a day with a side-order of resentment.

When I get home, I plan to create a schedule where each of the kids is in charge of fixing the food one day per week. I suspect that it will suffer the fate of most of my similar plans. It will work for awhile and then fall apart. Then I’ll scrape up the pieces, add in knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, to create a new iteration of The Dinner Plan. After years of similar iterations we have a functioning dish washing schedule. We’re due for a new iteration of the chore schedule, so adding a dinner schedule already fits with established family patterns. There will be moaning and groaning when I unveil it. That too is according to established family patterns.

Another thing I’ve noticed about dinner, when the kids help fix it, they’re more likely to eat it. Also they’re less likely to spurn food when they’ve had the experience of cooking something and having a sibling complain about it. It will take parental effort to get the ball rolling, but it is likely to be effort well spent.

We’ve reached the point where I’m counting the days until I get to go home. It appears that eight days is my go-with-the-flow vacation limit. Last night my task brain switched on and I made lists. Today I’ve not done half the things I told myself I would do today. I visited with my friend and my Grandma instead. I don’t begrudge that. Yet with all the empty-seeming hours it seems like I could get more writing done. Or more things done in general. I miss my usual structures and patterns.

A Northern California beach is about cold water, waves, sand crabs, sea weed, chilly wind, and sun burns. When I took Florida-raised Howard to his first California beach, he was a bit dismayed. When he took me to my first Florida beach, I watched the gently rippling water and thought it was like a giant bath tub. They are each beautiful in their own ways. I can’t honestly say which I prefer, but I do know which one feels more like home.

I spent some time with my eyes closed just feeling the wind on my skin and listening to the sound of the waves. Oceans are loud, very little else can be heard with the surf right there. I like that some. With so much ocean noise there was less space for my own circling thoughts. This is good, because I’m tired of the tight little circles my thoughts have been taking lately. They wear a groove in my brain and I can’t tell if they make sense anymore.

I didn’t get all the way wet. The water was shockingly cold on my feet, and I measured that against the wind. I knew if I got immersed, I would be very cold for quite awhile afterward. I just recovered from being sick. In fact I’m not certain that I’m a hundred percent better yet. So I dabbled in the edges of the water. I watched the kids body surf. I got sandy and a little bit sunburned. I admired the haul of sand crabs. I ate sand with my lunch. And I closed my eyes to listen to the surf, feel the wind, and taste the salt in the air. Yet when time came to leave, I carried regret with me up the hill. My younger self jumped the waves and rode them to shore. Somewhere in the years, I became a person who counts the cost and makes “smart” choices. I wonder if this is something that comes with age, or if I’ve just become unable to dive in and participate without thinking so far ahead that I don’t fully commit my energy to the task at hand. I was wise to not chill myself, but there is something to be said for profligate joy in the moment.

It has been hours since I left the beach. If I close my eyes I can feel the wind pressing against me, as if my skin remembers having to resist all morning. I washed off the sand, but I can still feel it against my feet. It will be years again before I’m back at a beach. I wish I could store up the feel of the wind and the pounding of the surf. If I could just tuck it into some corner of memory and pull it out sometimes that would be lovely. Instead I have some pictures, which show my eyes what the beach was like, but don’t help me preserve the sound, feel, or smells. I brought home a little shell. It is a tiny, ordinary thing, but I can touch it. Perhaps in the touching, I will be able to remember. It will work for a time. Then I’ll have to arrange to have another beach day so that I can remember again all the various inconveniences and discomforts that are an essential part of a day at the beach. They’re all part of what I love about the beach.

We drove past little houses as we left. Perhaps some day I’ll rent a little beach house and spend several days out on the beaches. Of course, first I’ll have to learn how to leave my regular routines without anxiety, but that is a separate consideration. For now, I need to sleep and dream of beaches.

So I was sick and there was book shipping. Then I was still sick because of ear infections on top of flu. When my head cleared I was a little focused on my upcoming travel and on the anxiety related to that travel. Then I drove for 11 hours in one day. Now I’ve landed at the houses of my relatives and all the rooms are filled with people to talk to. So blogging has been sparse and it is likely to continue to be sparse until I have quiet spaces to process my thoughts and write them down. In theory I’m packing my head full of things to sort.

This is the sort of week where I find out on Friday that a beloved friend suffered through a major medical event on Monday. She left me a voice mail message about it on my home phone, which I never checked all week. I’d still not know except a mutual friend called to say “Did you know…” Fortunately the crisis is weathered, and recovery can happen at home instead of in the hospital. Truthfully there really wasn’t any more I could do if I’d known. I certainly would not have taken my sickness to go visit in the hospital. My friend is well cared for by those more closely related than I. She knew my lack of response was not for lack of caring. We had a good phone conversation today.

It just underlines how I’ve only handled the bare minimum of what needed to be done this week. Voice mail unchecked, email not answered, several social things cancelled. Sometimes my brain wants to start fretting about all of it. Because at my current energy levels catching up will be impossible. Instead I just need to rest and trust that in a day or two I will have more capability than I have today.

My standard weekday schedule shorts me an hour or two of sleep per night. I sleep later on the weekends to restore balance, but the sleep deprivation still accumulates and about every other week I have a day where I send the kids off to school and go back to sleep for three to four hours. It seems like a waste to spend work hours on sleeping, but I can’t deny that I need it. I always feel better afterward. Today was an extra sleep day.

The effects of sleep deprivation on me are subtle. I’m more easily distracted, I write less, and I’m more prone to anxiety. Last night and this morning I felt that I was failing at everything. I was obviously in a downward spiral of failing-ness that would make everything in my life crash and burn. After the long nap my life feels possible again, although I do cringe when I think of opening my task list, because I know it will be full of the things I meant to accomplish today.

The good news is that in two weeks I will no longer have school-schedule-induced sleep deprivation. The bad news is that I won’t have a school schedule to encourage me to get up at a reasonable hour in the mornings. Sleeping til 10am is lovely for lazy vacation days and very counter productive for work days, because no matter when I start my work day, my brain quits around 5pm. So once again I find myself in late May, staring at the summer ahead and thinking “How does this work again?” This year has the additional wrinkle that I’ll be out of town for half of June, which will seriously impact my ability to establish routines.

As always, I’m thinking ahead more than I need to. It will all work out when I get there.

I run my fingers across the calendar squares, counting the days. Twelve more mornings when I have to shepherd the kids off to school. Seventeen days until I reach that final school morning. I try not to count. I want to dwell in the days I have rather than living in expectation of something else, but it is hard. I know that change is coming. I know what I need to do for it, but I can’t know exactly how it will all work until it arrives. So I wait.

I’m not idle while I wait. Each day is filled with a full slate of things to do. Some of them I spend focused on a single large project. More often the day is fractured and pieces spread out over multiple projects. Sometimes it is my task list that reminds me to jump from one thing to another. Other times one task flows logically into the next, as when my work on the challenge coin pdf reminded me that I intended to design a “minion coin” to give out to those people who have helped me with shipping events. Learning the traditions as made me want to participate in them more.

This morning I had the following conversation with Howard over twitter.

Me: May is always a month of many things.
Howard: Name a month that is not, at least for us, a Month of Many Things. Go ahead. TRY.
Me: I think June of 2005 was pretty empty.

Of course I’m only guessing about June 2005. I just know that it fell after Howard quit Novell and before we printed our first book. I was spending my time making the pennies last by shopping garage sales. So I guess I was still busy, just differently busy.

Looking ahead, the calendar for June, July, and August appear emptier. There are fewer appointments, but just as many things to accomplish.

I finished the Strength of Wild Horses shipping except for a few odds and ends. I expected to spend today clearing those away and preparing for Kiki to come home tomorrow. Instead my brain declared a jellyfish day and I’ve accomplished very little. Or rather, I’ve done some important things, but not in any sort of a focused way. That four hour nap was crucial to my ability to drive safely tomorrow. So I meandered my way through the day, getting the most important things done. Everything else will sit until Friday.

It turns out that after a sufficient period of focused drive, my brain just stops and I drift for a bit. If I embrace the drift and let it happen, then I can get moving again on a different day. Excuse me, there’s a hammock there outside my window and it needs someone to sit in it for awhile.

One day of laying down and watching shows all day with breaks only for eating and sleeping. A second day of slow-paced work where I’m not particularly efficient, but things get done. Then on the third day I feel normal again. Thus does the regular pattern of our lives reassert itself after the massive strain of FanX. News reports put the attendance at the show as over 100,000 people. This means it is the largest show that Utah has ever seen and it begins to rival San Diego Comic con for size. We only saw the portions of the crowd that made their way past our booth. Since the aisles were wider than last year, it actually felt less crowded. The show went much better, but we’re still not convinced that a massive show like this is a good return on investment for us. When I finished all the math on hours and dollars, we made around $10 per hour. That’s much improved over last year’s $0 per hour, but still not great money. We may give this one more shot with yet another experimental configuration of booth and people.

But that is not my focus for this week. I’m just trying to re-establish normal patterns, because we haven’t had them for two weeks between spring break and massive convention. I’m also fighting the spring impulse to just let everything slump because we only have five weeks left in the school year. Instead I’m trying to re-establish healthy eating, homework, and chores for all of us. I’m also looking at the plants growing in my yard and remembering that I should really get out there with some tools to beat back the weeds.

I’m also looking at fulfilling Kickstarter promises. I’ve got Strength of Wild Horses to ship. (It arrived last Wednesday while I was in Salt Lake setting up the booth. So I didn’t get to greet the truck or write a lovely post about happiness and triumph. Hopefully those words will come to me when I’m doing the shipping days.) I’ve got challenge coin stories to sort.

The third thing on my plate this week is prepping for Kiki to come home. Nine days and she’s here for the summer. This makes all of us glad, as evidenced by the fact that when I’m on a skype video call with her, all the other kids come flocking. Kiki and Link got nostalgic for our old Nintendo 64 during their portion of the conversation, so now Link wants to pull it out and see if he can make it work. I recall that it was flaky because it had been accidentally pulled off the cabinet a few too many times back in the days when all controllers had cords.

So that’s how things are here.