Counting Down

We have ants in the kitchen. They're not looking for food. Not forming lines or swarming. I think they're just trying to get out of the heat.

My vacation starts in two weeks. I'm excited beyond all belief. But you knew that already. What's leading up to that?

More for Penny than for me, really. She was told that she could have a sleepover at Braz and Adin's new place this weekend, so I expect that'll happen. We have haircut appointments at 8:30 Saturday morning, though, so either she'll need to be ready to go by 8, or that'll have to be Saturday night.

Next week, I'll be talking to my boss about moving me to a part time schedule. Because I'd rather just take the pay cut than continually hemorrhage vacation time, and because if a day off every two weeks is built into my schedule, then I won't feel as guilty about using it to write.

And I have book club. For a book I haven't read yet. Oops. Guess I should look into that today...

Next Saturday, Penny will go to a friend's birthday party in the morning, then spend the afternoon having her own birthday celebration. (The current plan is for her and Adin and I to go get pedicures and then meet up with everyone else for a movie. None of that is solid yet, though.) Whatever the actual events, I expect she'll have a great day.

Nothing much is planned for the week after that, but I've told her she can choose whether she wants to go to daycare/summer camp on her birthday, or stay home with me. She's still pondering.

Two weeks...

Packing Panic

Still more than two weeks to go until my vacation starts, and I'm already starting in with the packing panic.

Okay, "panic" may be overstating things a bit, but I do get a little tense when I'm packing for a trip. I soothe my jitters by making lists, and lists of lists. It's what I do.

So I currently have a two-page-long list of things to pack for Cancun. It's organized by container -- things to go in my suitcase, things to go in Penny's suitcase, things to go in carryon, etc. And each item is categorized by its importance, where importance is determined by how big a hassle it would be if the item were forgotten or lost. For example, a comb is a 4 -- it is very easily and cheaply replaced by a quick trip to the resort's grocery store. As items go up in either expense/hassle to replace or necessity, they go up the scale from there, but most items got capped at a level 2. Even clothes (there's a freaking WalMart in downtown Cancun; replacing several days' worth of clothes would be slightly spendy, but perfectly do-able) and my camera. Category 1 is reserved for the stuff that we really can not afford to lose, for one reason or another: our passports, Penny's diabetes supplies, my credit card.

So I was feeling pretty cool about this whole packing thing (you know -- for me) until this morning, when I thought I'd plug the kids' phone into the solar recharger in the car so it could juice up a little on my drive to work. And I couldn't find the cable.

There's the car charger cable that plugs into the cigarette lighter. There's the cable that runs from the tapedeck to the iPhone so I can play music through the car's speakers. There's another cable that I don't even know WHAT it does... but not the cable that plugs into the solar recharger. Which is a proprietary cable and I can't just pick one up at Target. Which I don't think I've ever taken out of the car, so where the hell is it?

Boom. Panic.

Over a freaking cable? That if I can't find it just means I'll have to be a little more careful about device recharging while we're gone, and otherwise means I've wasted most of the $40 I spent on the recharger?

It's possible that I need to. You know. Get a grip. Just a bit.

Deep breath... In... Out...

Okay. I feel better now.

But I'm going to go look under the car seats just one more time.

Writing Wednesday

I'm trying to make an effort to stay on top of my (new) writing blog, so I'm going to try, for a while, to post to that blog every Wednesday, at a minimum. It cuts into my writing time over here, though -- there are only so many blog entries I can write in a day, after all -- so with apologies, I'll just link you over. Feel free to friend it or follow it or add it to your feeds or bookmark it or whatever is the current Thing To Do, since (I'm hoping) it will become a more active site!

Scatterbrained

Less than three weeks until the Cancun trip. It's kind of dominating my brain. You're going to hear about it a lot. Sorry about that.

***

Penny woke up with a blood sugar over 300. So much for that excellent run she had over the weekend.

***

Alex and Penny have both been all about the iPhone games lately. Alex is playing Monkey Preschool Lunchbox. Penny is playing Angry Birds.

I am spending a lot of time keeping various devices charged.

***

Scatterbrained? Me? ...Well, maybe just a bit.

Heatwave

We spent a goodly chunk of the weekend helping Braz and Adin move into their new place. Or more precisely, Matt helped them move stuff, and I kept an eye on all the kids so they wouldn't be underfoot. The house is fantastic; I totally have house envy, now. Penny and Alex agree; Penny spent the weekend raving about how awesome the house is, and every time Alex turned around, he was demanding to know when we were going to go visit "the new house".

It was a bad weekend for moving, though. The weather has been not just hot lately, but stupidhot, with highs in the upper 90s and heat indexes well over 105.

***

I didn't get a single lick of writing done, but I did manage to do some administrative/publicity stuff done. And one of my favorite authors mentioned on the mailing list that she'd read Safe Harbor and loved it and (teasingly) demanded to know when there would be sequels. Which made me squeal like a little girl with excitement. And also to start trying to think more seriously about the few sequel ideas I'd had!

***

There was a huge storm last night that passed right over top of us; the thunder crashed so hard that it kept setting off Penny's little bedroom doorbell from the vibrations in the walls. And then, hours after it had finally passed and we were asleep, the power went out. I know because at about 1:30, the smoke detectors started chirping at me about their low batteries. I stumbled downstairs and found my cell phone and used it as a flashlight to find the power bill and call the customer service number so I could report the outage. That done, I went back to bed and tried to sleep, but my brain wouldn't shut up. I finally dozed off and woke back up around 3, when the power came back on. I'm a little groggy this morning.

***

Lest there be any doubt whatsoever about Penny's feeling for our Cancun trip -- I offered last night to show her a few pictures from my previous trip, because I'd been trying to describe the resort and the beach to her, and words just weren't cutting it. Now, I know looking at someone else's vacation pictures can be pretty danged tedious, so I really planned to just show her a handful of pictures so she could have a mental image to work from -- but I'll be damned if she wasn't completely fascinated. She sat with me while I scrolled through each of something like 300 photos, asking questions and exclaiming with excitement.

Eighteen days and counting.

***

Her blood sugar leveled off over the weekend, too. After running high for most of the last month and us having to fight tooth and nail to get her back down into range any time we ate out -- we ate out three times this weekend, and she only had one high blood sugar, which was probably the result of my underestimating the carbs. It was fantastic, and her mood was noticeably improved, too.

Warm Break

In the category of things that are both heart-warming and heart-breaking, Penny and I had this conversation a couple of days ago:

"Mom? Remember when I got diabetes?"

"Yes, I remember. What about it?"

"When that happened, I thought I was the only one! I didn't know any other kids who had it!"

"That's true."

"And camp was so awesome because all the kids had it!"

She's talking about the weekend family camp we went to at the very end of April, more than two and a half months ago. And it was completely out of the blue. We hadn't been talking about camp before that, or even about diabetes, that I recall.

It's hard, sometimes, to really keep in mind that she's not quite eight years old. It's hard to remember what it was like, being eight, but if I really stop and think about it, think hard, I can remember pondering and processing and considering things for months and months like this. I can remember having blinding realizations weeks and months and even years after the events that prompted them. Penny still doesn't grok what diabetes means for her, down the road -- Matt and I are deliberately withholding some of the more gruesome possibilities, because she's not old enough to deal with that kind of fear. But we don't always comprehend that she's still working on processing what she does know. It took her a couple of weeks to get from the camp's "give yourself a shot" class to actually being ready to give herself shots. How much more processing would it take, then, to encompass something so much bigger as sharing this disease with other kids -- and not just a few kids, but a lot of them? It's huge, and it's beautiful, and I'm profoundly grateful once again that she had that experience and that she continues to remember it as something wondrous and wonderful.

On the flip side, I can remember, all too easily, feeling left out at school because there was something that set me apart from the other kids. I didn't even know what it was, because no one talked about "introversion" in the '70s. Penny has several good friends at school and seems generally well-accepted by most of her classmates. She has a few good friends at daycare. She's much less introverted than I was, much more socially stable, so it's hard for us to remember that being "different" is a terrible social burden for kids, and that even the ones who seem popular and well-adjusted may be feeling stressed about the inability to conform. These little conversations, random as they seem, reveal a little bit of that stress in her. I don't think it's a terrible pressure yet, but it is absolutely something I need to try to keep in mind, because it's going to inform a lot of the next decade or so. We may even need to try to make some extra allowances on the "fitting in" front, in order to make up for what diabetes takes away. And we'll keep going to camp, too, because it's going to be very important that once in a while, even if only for a few days a year, she be can be with people who really understand what she lives with, in a way that Matt and I never will. Somewhere she can check her blood sugar and give herself shots without feeling judged or self-conscious.

That she had a fantastic, positive experience at that camp -- that she had a fun time and made friends and still remembers it as a blur of giggling and silliness and excitement -- fills me with joy and makes it worth every little frustration and lost hour of sleep I suffered.

That she needed that experience, that something in her subconscious had apparently been desperately craving the company of true peers... can only make me ache.

Day Off

I took another "no work to do" day off yesterday. (I've been taking at least one of those every two weeks for the last several months, and sometimes more, and if I have to be honest, a lot of the time that I did work could probably have been compressed. I'm beginning to wonder if I should try to negotiate going part-time. I'd be okay taking a 10% pay cut if I could plan on having a day off every two weeks and still keep my benefits. It's keeping the benefits that makes this a bit of a sticky wicket, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I shouldn't at least ask. The worst they could do is tell me it's not allowed.)

Anyway, I'd been planning on taking the afternoon off anyway, to go see the last Harry Potter movie with Matt. So really, the only unexpected time off was in the morning. I'd been assuming I'd spend it loafing around the house until a friend at work suggested I go to a coffee house and write.

I started to laugh at the cliche, but it was a lightbulb moment, to be honest: if I got out of the house to write, then I was less likely to fall prey to all the distractions that make writing at home a problem for me. I didn't go to an actual coffeehouse, but I did wind up in one of the comfy chairs at Panera. I bought a scone and a cup of coffee (the kind where you can refill it for free) and loaded up Pages on my iPad. I'd made sure the story I'm working on was loaded before I left the house. (I swear, Pages would be so much awesomer if it didn't make saving a document back down to your hard drive when you sync a complete headache -- seriously, I've given up trying to really sync and just email myself the document and copy/paste the changes into the master document in my Dropbox folder.)

I sat in that chair from about 8:30 until probably 11:30 or so, and I wrote. I got up a few times to refill my coffee, and once for a bathroom break. I stopped writing for maybe twenty minutes to talk to a lady at a table near mine who had a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book amongst a pile of library books. It was the sort of amazing and spontaneous conversation that I see in movies and wish was real, and it made me wish I could do that every day.

I wrote about 2000 words -- four or five pages -- and at around 11:30, I suddenly thought to check my email (on my iPhone, because I hadn't turned on the iPad's WiFi, in order to minimize distractions) and Matt had sent me the list of times for the movie. We'd agreed to meet at the Barnes and Noble that's across from the movie theater, so I went over there and wrote maybe another hundred words or so while I was waiting for him.

And then we decided that we weren't all that hungry yet, so we went to the earlier showing of Harry Potter and loved it. (When did Neville turn into a badass?! I loved it! LOVED. And all the nods to characters we haven't seen for ages, and -- I could do a whole blog post on the movie, seriously, but it would sum up to: LOVE.) When it was done, it was after three and my stomach was growling, so we went over to the Corner Pocket for a heavy snack/late lunch (I may always and forever order their "grit cakes" which is basically baked grits with butter and cheese and was perfect). And then I went home (strolling slowly through the Barnes and Noble on my way and almost buying a bunch of stuff).

And then after the kids were in bed, I took the iPad upstairs and wrote another 1000 or 1200 words -- which is a good evening's work for me by any measure. Even though I have to two-finger type on the iPad, which is slower. But the distractions are gone. No kitchen to troll for snacks I shouldn't be eating anyway. No little blue twitterbird in the menu bar telling me that someone has said something. No email icon. Not even the temporary distraction of having the online thesaurus to consult when I can't think of the word I want. I just use a word that's close enough and promise to fix it in the edits. And I just. Keep. Writing.

It was a fantastic day. And even though I adored the movie -- I cried at least three separate times and there was only one bit that I thought was possibly just the littlest bit cheesy and over the top -- I think the day still would've been almost as wonderful (or maybe even just as wonderful) if I'd gone back to writing (either at the Panera or in one of the B&N's comfy chairs) once Matt and I had met for lunch.

This is why you hear about writers going to coffee shops, I guess. This is why Lynn does her best writing at the freaking laundromat. Because you do whatever you have to do, whatever works, to force yourself to put away the distractions and Just. Keep. Writing. Because there's nothing like writer's high.