Too Much Work

I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Masks is eating my brain and I don't want it to stop until every last cell is gobbled. I've got to get the water sealing problem fixed on the sliding door while the weather holds--when I have no idea because it'll be almost dark when I get home and I can't do it now because it needs to be cleaned up under there first. I have to work on House of Goats, I have to get two book covers done, and I haven't touched my Wyrd Goat website (I have the domain but I'm still working on the bones of the actual content.)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

I wish I could call in sick but I'm too ethical. Okay, that's totally untrue. The wishing part is untrue, not the ethical part, because wishing for it would be wishing that I was unethical, and I don't. Argh, I'm confusing myself! Help meeeeeeeee

There's only one cure. Soup for lunch. Soup for lunch makes it all better. I'll go pack some into my snapware container that I use for hot lunches and just focus on day job work.

Maybe I'll take my laptop with me to work and get something, anything done during my lunch hour. Yeah ....

What do you do to cope when you have too much to do and not enough time?

Bits

Just a quickie before I head back to work ...

I've been writing on Masks again. My writing process changes all the time, and sometimes that scares me. I think a lot of writers are afraid of doing it wrong. Change doesn't always mean you change for the better.

I have to keep writing and not judge myself. I'll let others judge me. It's better that way.

Also, I'm getting closer to putting House of Goats up for those who'd like to read the kind of stuff I write but aren't into fantasy/sf. I'll make a big announcement when it happens.

Lastly, the girl is working on finishing those critical senior year requirements before she graduates. The pressure is up but she's hanging in there. I'll try to get her to send out her graduation announcements soon. I think she's a little worried about jinxing herself, when she has time to worry!

Paperwork paperwork everywhere and not a page to read

I had an avalanche of work recently.  Sorry about the long and unannounced hiatus.

One of the more important things that's landed in my lap is the whole tax thing.  We have our taxes done.  For one thing, it's more than enough work just to gather the materials for our tax preparer.  For another thing, our taxes are pretty complicated.  For a third thing, having audit assistance gives me huge peace-of-mind.  And lastly, our income sources are very untidy.

We may have to defer part of our taxes this time around.  How do we do that?  I haven't a clue.  That would take research.  Why would we defer taxes?  Well, because if someone earns their income out of the USA under certain contracts for a certain amount of time, then they don't have pay taxes on a certain amount of income.   Well what if that certain amount of time out of the country within a year doesn't tidily fall within a given tax year?  If you're only in the USA 352 days out of 365, for example, but those 352 out of 365 days fall between April 2012 and May 2013, what's a tax preparer to do?  The gov'mint can't just take the tax payer's word for it that the rest of the time will in fact show up as being outside the USA the following year.  So, they do this thing.  And I'm not familiar with this thing they do.

So our already complicated taxes with two separate businesses plus two 'normal' incomes through regular hourly wage jobs has stepped up to a whole new level of weird.  I don't have to mess with it if I don't want to, so I won't.

And I get to write the prep fee off on next year's taxes, just like the prep fee from last year will come off this year's taxes.  It's sort of like that marble machine with the chutes and ramps and the arm that swings round and the little cable car and so forth.  (BTW, these are called gravitrams, and we have a beautiful one in Portland, OR at OMSI.)

Gardening sidenote:  We have daffodils!  Finally!  Just the miniature ones so far (they're about the size of crocuses) but the big ones are well on their way.  I'm hoping the first big ones will open sometime this week.

Birds, Plants, Catching Up and Poop

Today I began the process of catching up.  Hopefully I'll complete that process by the end of this weekend.

Why, Kami, what in the world would you have to catch up on?

Glad you asked.

(Dangit!  I know better than that!)  Please, go on.

Writing/Marketing

Laundry

Tiling

Gardening stuff

Vacuuming/dusting

Barn modifications (always a hoot)

Paperwork/filing

Notice, dishes are not on the list.  I'm all caught up.  Yay!

I had to put up two more bird feeders to handle the overflow, and I'm glad I did because we had a beautiful visitor today.  We've seen him before (last year, and for some reason I didn't mention him in this blog,) just one visit but it was memorable.  I hope he sticks around this time and maybe brings his black-headed grosbeak friends.  Why they call them black-headed grosbeaks is beyond me, btw.  I mean c'mon, what's the first color that strikes you when you see this bird?  Is it his black head?  I think not.  How about flaming orange grosbeak?  Or maybe safety first grosbeak.  

If you read the cool facts portion of the link, you'll see that the female of this species is particularly sneaky.  I prefer a relationship based on honesty, but hey, if the guy grosbeak won't sit on the eggs, I guess a girl grobeak's gotta do what a girl grosbeak's gotta do.  

In the sad news category, my poopyhead camera which had healed itself has unhealed and once again won't focus on anything except when I resign myself to point and shoot.  This means no flower closeups and no bird zooms until either A. I can teach myself how to focus the camera by eye (not easy with the digital interface) B. the camera heals itself again C. I can figure out why the camera focus mechanism keeps going out and fix it myself D. get the camera repaired ($ouchie$) E. replace the camera ($$$ouchie$$$) or F. some extremely clever option that will come to me any day in which no time, money or cursing will be expended in the operation of this camera ever again.  I'm particularly annoyed that it decided to stop working because I've had so many great opportunities to snap some stunning pics of our many birdie visitors and the hundreds of flowers that are in bloom in the garden.  Poop, I say, poop.

Ain't It the Life?

Ain't it the life?  (With a nod to Foo Fighters)

This week I had all kinds of time off, which I used to get the boy arranged to go to prom and work on the EstrogenFest memory books, as well as spend some good ol' fashioned family time.  I even got to attend the aforementioned Fireside Writing Session.  I didn't explain the typer thing in that post.  The collective realized that few of us actually write as opposed to typing ... anyway.  I find calling myself a typer less oppressive than calling myself a writer.  The response is 'huh?' rather than 'Oh, what have you published?'

I'd planned to spend yesterday tiling, the thing I'd originally planned to do but didn't the whole rest of the week.  Well.  Come 5am Rory tells me that we have no water.  He's tried messing with the pressure regulator, which we've had to reset several times in the past couple of weeks.  I gear up (slippers, pjs and attitude) and head out to the garage.  There's the little pressure switch thingy with its arrangement of wires and nuts and the box that comes off of it with the red reset button.  I alternate between tapping the switch with various (non-metal handled) tools and pushing the reset button.  Usually this gets things going again, but we've got nothing going on.  Time to summon a professional.

Rory leaves early for work and brings along a towel so he can shower there.  The kids and I brush our teeth employing bottled water and proceed to stink our way through the day.

First I call and leave a message with a plumber that looks like a likely choice given a search through the yellow pages and on google in a pathetic hope that I could find reliable reviews on the businesses I'd hoped to employ.  (I didn't.  C'mon people, review review review!)  Then I wait.  Can't tile, need water for that.  And wait.  Can't wash dishes, need water for that.  And wait.  Can't do laundry, need water for that.  Finally I call them back around 9:30.  Even though I left my phone number twice, apparently she couldn't understand it on the message tape.  How does Friday sound?

Um, let me call around a bit and get back to you, says Kami, contemplating having no water until Friday and imagining trucking bottled water out to the goats, filling the washing machine with bottled water, and the toilet so we can flush, etc.  Friday doesn't work for me.  If possible I'd like to flush today, okay?

Plumbing company #2 gets a call.  She's in the middle of something and she'll call me back.  Forty five minutes later I call her back.  There's some sort of emergency and she apologizes.  She'll call me back--whoa there lady.  The last time we did this--she changes her mind and says since she's not making any headway with the emergency anyway, she'll take five minutes now to deal with me.  She'll call me back, really.  It takes a while for me to explain what's going on with my water system, which is discouraging but hey, she's just the receptionist, right?

She does call back after talking with one of their plumbers, but apparently they don't handle this sort of thing.  Huh.  I've just wasted a total of three hours and my early start on the problem is basically out the window.  I call our local appliance guy, who does fabulous work.  Well, the unions have convinced the legislature that if it involves water, they have to handle it.  He can't even touch a hot water heater anymore.  ??  Who does he recommend?  A local plumber.  I call said local plumber, who turns out to be a real champ and explains a critical detail to me.  Turns out plumbers don't work on this sort of thing either.  Well WTF?  I'm really glad I didn't wait until Friday to find out that pumps are a specialty and plumbers don't know what the heck to do with them.  There's one (ack!) contractor who handles this sort of thing in our area.  The good news is that it's a very good, reputable company.

I call them and explain.  I'm heartened because they appear to understand what I'm talking about at last.  Within an hour a truck pulls into the driveway, setting off the Doorbell of Unconditional Love (barking.)  I lead him to the source of the problem (or so I thought) and adopt the homeowner with a problem posture (hands on hips, puppy dog eyes.)  After some exploration he discovers the reset button isn't actually attached to anything.  The wiring has been bypassed.  !!??  Okay, I've been pressing an idiot button.  I feel so much better now.  More exploration.  The breaker for the pump is off and, when clicked back on, jumps off again.  So we go to the well head.  We dig out about ten gallons of mud and plastic bags and two live moles (so cute with their soft gray fur and little hands.)  Part of the wiring had been wrapped in electrician's tape, implying a previous issue, and it had been chewed through as had some of the copper wiring.  My mind goes into MST3K mode.  This arrow may have something to do with her pain! (aka gee, maybe a severed wire is the reason why we get only intermittent service from our pump.)  He wires it back together and we hit the breaker.  Power!  Pumpage!  Huzzah!  We have water.  Except.  The water tank's bladder has clearly burst, probably a long, long time ago.  It needs to be replaced, which will help to alleviate some of the water pressure bounciness we experience that I've learned to just live with and thought was normal.  Like I'd know!  Long-time city gal here, remember?  

The genius/rescuer promises to return tomorrow (today) with a nice new, bigger water tank.  The best part is that we have water while we wait.  Yay water!  Yay laundry!  If only I'd had enough energy to tile after we got water, but all I managed was a shower and I was done for the day.  I hit the sack early last night.  On the agenda today--late start for work, clear out a path for the tank through the garage, maybe tiling at last (doubtful) and a late start to work because the pump guys probably won't be done until noon-ish and my shift starts at 11:15.  But we have water!  Ain't it the life?

March of the Acronym People

Collectively at the store we had an interesting day yesterday.

The Barbie lady came in.  No, she didn't buy barbies.  She bought three 25 pound bags of cat food (among other sundries.)  Is this an uh oh moment?

I haven't mentioned the OCD (Obessive Compulsive Disorder) lady before (that I remember) because she's very nice and compared to a lot of our other customers, she simply doesn't stand out as much as, say, Mr. Boston with his lovely accent, gambling habit and the wonderful way he learns and uses all our names, or Pretty Lady man who comes to BiMart because of all the "pretty ladies" and goes around the store telling us all how we're the prettiest.  

Yesterday, OCD lady really stood out.  She got one of our best checkers, thank goodness, a young lady with the patience of a saint.  I've never seen OCD expressed through another person before, so I thought I'd mention it.  After the checker rang through the entire order, the debit card didn't work due to insufficient funds.  The OCD lady was convinced there were sufficient funds, there had to be.  So she instructed the checker to void one of the items, put it back on, and then the OCD lady would try the card again.  For half an hour.  The checker's break came and went.  This caused a service snafu (effectively leaving us with only one checker) but we handled that from the sidelines.  The trouble was how to finish the transaction with a minimum of trauma.  Finally I flagged down our RVP superhero guy (Red Vest Power) and sent him over to help.  No dice the first round.  RVP guy retreated, watched for a few minutes longer, then decided to take a chance.  He broke the cycle by convincing her to go home and call the bank.  She didn't want to until he assured her that we would keep all her selections in their current bags, in her chosen shopping cart, until she returned.  So that'll be waiting for me when I go in to work today.  I'll guard it with my, well, not my life, but every customer service bone in my body.

I feel badly for her.  At least she came to our store.  I doubt other places have the patience with her.  I'm worried that she's standing out now because she's either off meds or she never was under medical care and is getting worse.  Sigh.

Finally, at the end of the day, our RVP guy came up to the front with a customer and he seemed enthusiastically agitated.  ??  We'd locked the front doors and had turned out most of the lights trying to get all the customers up front and taken care of (no paint lady, thank goodness, just regular orders so it was going quick) so I seemed puzzled by how RVP guy was apparently trying to keep this customer up front.  RVP guy wasn't taking his time so much as going way above and beyond our normal spectacular customer service.  ??  And then I caught a critical part of the conversation.

"I don't know how this could be happening.  You guys see me come in here all the time," the customer said.  "And I write checks all the time.  I haven't heard anything about bounced checks from my bank."

Bing!  It's thousand dollars of check debt guy!!  TDoCD guy was standing right there within throttling distance of my super, but my super wasn't working that day.  Lucky for him.  I could imagine her launching herself, grabbing him by the throat while her weight powers him down, and shouting "Call the police!!"  RVP guy decided that he couldn't do that, it turned out, because all the bounced checks, (did I mention there was a thousand dollars worth of them?) had already been shipped off to loss prevention only three days ago.  He was certain that if we did call the police, we'd have no proof of wrongdoing.  Denied!  TDoCD guy was trying to make it sound like he was a victim of identity theft or something--I even suggested it and he got all coy with me.  Unfortunately for him, RVP guy and every other manager at the store had seen this guy's signature quite a few times by now on checks.  It was burned into their brains.  They'd also had to initial quite a few because some of them were for over $100, and they check ID on checks over $100, so most of them had looked him in the eye, looked at his ID ...  Yep, this was him.  The checker didn't recognize him, but TDoCD guy was trying to, guess what, write another check for over $100 and RVP guy went over to initial it--and then said he wasn't going to accept the check.  That's when the games began.

But we had no proof on site for fraud, so TDoCD guy walked out a free man.  For now.  Little does he know that the phone number RVP guy gave him was for loss prevention, not customer service.  Hopefully they'll convince him to come in to 'straighten things out' where he can land solidly into waiting handcuffs.

So I was late getting home, and sore, and drained.  It was kinda fun, but sad, and exciting, but annoying, and worrisome, and I guess just one of those days.

I got another rejection in the mail(form) and tomorrow is my deadline for getting another query out.  My pile of things to do is starting to look like a pig pile.  Here comes Radcon, and he's six foot seven and 350 pounds.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

The good news with Radcon is that I've been playing with my art mats (which were poorly cut thanks to my primitive mat cutter) and I developed a technique that bevels the edges, looks sharp, and gives me lots of opportunity for expression.  If you're wondering, since I've been working at my day job too, when I get a chance to write the answer is oh, between 11pm and 2:30am when I'm not spending that same window on art.  On mornings when I have to get up with the kids at a wee tad before 6am, this doesn't allow for much sleep (she said, yawning.)  Thank the status quo that I could sleep in this morning.  I still have to work, but I got about six hours of sleep--feels like heaven--and I work a short shift so I can work out at 24 Hr Fitness (maybe soak in the hot tub too,) get home in time to fix a semblance of dinner, finish messing with my last matting projects, and then write.  Oh, and see if I can put together a query.  If I can't, well, I'd rather pay INK a dollar for missing my deadline than turn out another package that will only earn me another rejection.  From the pattern I've seen so far, query letter and synopsis, sharp, opening is torpedoing me.

Lots Ahead

I've done a lot of critiquing over the past few days.  First pages, Lucky Lab manuscripts, cowriting.  I've also done some polishing on Masks, but not nearly as much as I'd like to.  It's wild, but the dreary kind of wild like when you've been camping for ages with no one else around and all you really want is a home-cooked meal, a hot shower and your own bed.  I'm slowly crawling out from under my backlog, keeping up on the new stuff coming in, and I hope by the time Wednesday rolls around (my guesstimate for when I'll be done with all this) I can sit down and write uninterrupted.

I missed a critique meeting on Saturday.  It started to snow, and snow, and snow.  It was one of those snow storms that dumps several inches in a few hours.  If it had snowed steadily all day and night at that rate we might have seen accumulation that could be measured in feet rather than inches.  As it stood it was very off and on and had mostly stopped by 8pm.  Just a few minutes ago it started raining, which will take our three inches of slush and melt it all away in short order.  I'm surprised that we still have snow--it's about 40 degrees F out there.  The ground is really cold, though.  

Anyway, I'd already missed one Lucky Labs meeting because of work and I was really looking forward to making a meeting for once.  I find critiques so valuable, not just for the feedback but the inspiration.  I try to change locations when I write periodically.  When I write in my office I tend to write writing-in-my-office prose.  The prose freshens immensely when I hand write at work, or tap away on a laptop somewhere, etc.  I haven't had a chance to jostle myself out of this physical comfort zone for quite a while, so it makes critique groups even more valuable.  When I come back from one I feel as if I've been run through a wash and dry cycle.  My mind has had all the dingy grime washed away and the tangles have been brushed out.

Coming up, Radcon.  I've had a chance to pitch informally to coworkers (though I doubt they knew that was what I was doing) and although I'm still not very good at it, I'm starting to find my feet.  I don't think I'll be pitching Masks at Radcon, but you never know.  If an opportunity presents itself I think I'll go for it.  Chances are high that Masks will come back with a 'thanks for your sub but this doesn't fit our needs' note.  It's out of the slush pile, which is really fabulous, but now it's competing with nothing but promising novel concepts.  It feels wonderful to have gotten this far.  I have to be careful, though, not to let my subconscious settle me into a 'far enough' mode.  I'm outside my comfort zone and I'm sure all kinds of little status-quo demons will be busy at work trying to either stuff the worms back into the can or at least building a new, bigger can to keep the worms in.  Heh.  Out of the can and into the compost bin?  

There's lots ahead of me right now.  My life has turned into a page-turner.  I can't wait to see what's going to happen in the next chapter.

Gah!  Weather update.  It looks like this right now (4:36pm):

I was just getting ready to head out to the Olive Garden for a birthday party, too.  Denied!!  The temp was 40 degrees only a half hour ago, and it was raining, like I mentioned earlier in this post.  Now it's at 36 degrees and dropping.  I shouldn't have said anything about the snow melting away.  I have only myself to blame.

Time management issues

Kami swipes the key reader and opens the door to her blog. She turns on a light, revealing a warm color on one wall. Somewhere a prism is creating a rainbow. Everything looks too tidy, except for a fine film of dust. The bed hasn't been slept in for days. The newspaper on her nightstand is from last week. Moonlight glows on the diaphanous curtains. It's late night out in the world. She wants to stay, to snuggle in and write about her day, her week, her life. She's exhausted and willing, but there are Things to Do. OryCon 29 is closing in. Nanowrimo will begin in a few days. Mundane things about the house demand attention, like put away the pork roast before bed and don't forget to give the dog her pill. And she has to get to bed, the real one in the world outside her blog, because she has to get up early in the morning and stay up to go to work. Never mind writing, never mind a few minutes working on art or setting up a mat, and unfortunately, never mind getting deep into a blog entry.

She sets down her stuff on the kitchen nook table--thoughts about a coworker that wanted kittens in her life and then crumbles when she gets slapped with real responsibility, the decision to go ahead and Nano "Mayhem," urges to whine about the difficulties of juggling information with other volunteer jugglers who are definitely out of sync with her rhythm. She gets out her portfolio of images from the sleepy garden, glorious sunrises viewed from the deck, animal portraits, and fans them out on the table. For a moment she lingers, thinking maybe she could spare a few moments--and then reality knocks on the door.

Kami sighs and checks her purse, making sure she has the key reader to her blog before she answers the door. Sure enough, she has to go. She turns out the light. It's just moonlight in the room now, turning everything silver-blue. She walks out, the door shuts, and once again the blog becomes a ghost behind her.