In School

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We call it “throwing a wrench in” around here. It doesn’t happen often, although often enough that we have a dedicated expression when it does. A game changer. A sudden shift in the plan. Sometimes even an about-face. It throws us into chaos for a while, and then it all settles down into a new normal. I have to remind myself of that, that soon it will be normal. Not the same normal as before, but normal. Right now, well, right now I have only just remembered that it is Thursday,  because where did the week go?

Next week I start a new job. In the midst of a full load of grad school classes, children at two different schools on two different schedules, an ever growing list of afterschool activities that require the kind of ferrying I swore I wouldn’t ever take part in and a part time graduate teaching practicum gig, I am taking over a much neglected library at  a K-8 school. It’s crazy. Utterly crazy. And yet, I can't wait to start.

Our family balance has always been centered on the fact that I am here. Here for sick days and vacation days, late starts, field trips, midday concerts, afterschool conferences. It was a decision we made long ago, and one that has worked well for the 12 plus years that we have been parents.  And while it was always the plan for me to go back to work, that was supposed to be later. After school, after the trial run of this practicum, when we had all (myself included, myself especially!) had time to adjust to the idea of mom being more than just mom.

But fate has a way of throwing that wrench in. And this chance was too perfect to pass up. A library. My library. My own library.  So it’s back to school I go. Twice over. As a student and as a librarian. I have an excellent cheering section. They all seem to think I can do this crazy thing. This full time plus half time plus another half time plus all the other things that need to get done in a day thing.  They will pick up slack, I will let things go, someone will forget and event or an activity or a paper that’s due (it will most likely be me) life will be crazy. And then, after a little while, it will be our new normal. Until the next wrench comes along, of course. 

                                                                                                                       ~Gillian

in print

The new issue of Living Crafts Magazine is out with the official (and revised) Eliza Pattern inside.

Evelyn was pretty tickled to see her baby smiling up at her from the pages of a magazine, and I have to admit, I was too.
I also had an article in their fall issue but there was a mix up with my copy and so I'll have to share it when it lands in my mailbox in a week or so. While the Eliza pattern has a few of my photos (for the hair tutorial) most are by a professional photographer. The other article is all my photos which is pretty exciting. I can't wait for it to arrive so I can see it in person as well!

Full Circle

I've written before about how I sometimes feel I'm living my parents life again, at least the part when they were in their thirties. It's a good thing, this multi-generational de ja vu. My parents had a great time in their thirties. They still do. But I think that period, at least from the outside looking in, was probably one of the best. Like us they lived in a small town, had a child in elementary school and another in daycare/preschool. they didn't have a whole lot of money but they did have a whole lot of great friends. They were renovating a house, although their house was decked out in metallic gold wallpaper that didn't want to come down, a problem I'm really glad I don't have to deal with. And like me, my father was a writer. Except instead of writing for online blogs and magazines, he wrote for a newspaper.
I grew up in the newspaper. Literally and figuratively. Literally in that I spent a lot of time in the newspaper office, scrunched up under my dad's desk playing with line tape and those funny pencils that you sharpened by pulling a layer off of the tip, peeling the string down. I can't tell you how many of those started out new and ended up in ruins by the time I left. The dark room was magic, and a little mysterious, with it's two sided door. People would slip in, close the door and then disappear when I went to check. The cold room in the basement where they kept the heavy books full of back issues smelled faintly musty, but I loved to flip through the old volumes, seeing how the masthead and the typeface changed over time.

But also figuratively because my dad wrote a column about life, and part of that life was me. So everyone in town knew pretty much everything I did, and a lot of things I didn't know I'd done. The secretary at school would regularly find me in the halls and say "That was so cute what you did!" and I would wander off, wondering what it was my father had written about that time. Was it my horrible viola playing? My overactive imagniation? Most of my elementary school days can be tracked by reading those old columns.

In college I was a journalism major. It was what I knew and since I loved to write and didn't have anything else particular in mind, it seemed like a good choice. Plus it had no math requirement, which sealed the deal, I hated math. But I didn't want to work in newspapers. AT ALL. This was partly teenage angst and rebellion, after all, at 18 no one wants to be their parents. But it was also the fact that I knew I would never make a good reporter. I had grown up watching my dad go after stories. Hunting them down, talking to anyone and everyone and loving it. I didn't have that in me and I knew it even then. So I grumbled about how the journalism class load was print heavy. How those of us in other fields (I was in documentary film) were learning things we'd never use. NEVER. We shouldn't be forced to take classes for NEWSPAPER FOLK.

Never say never.

I called my dad last week to tell him that I've been offered a chance to write a small monthly column in our local paper. Blogging has its similarities to writing for the news for sure. And blogging the way I blog is akin with the type of column my dad wrote, but writing for the paper still has a different significance, at least for a newsbrat like me, than chattering away online (although it will still be my first love) I guess it's just in the blood. So to all my journalism professors who had to put up with my "I will never be a newspaper girl" attitude, to my father who grinned and nodded and probably knew where I was headed all along, you win. I'm a newspaper girl after all.

Office Storage

When we made the big playroom to office switchover, we spent a lot of time thinking about how our work spaces would work, and not a lot of time planning out our storage. Why would we? There is a huge wall mounted shelf on one side of the room, plenty of space for all my craft supplies and Will's books, right?


I'd been reading a lot of Chez Larsson back then (still do) and I loved her white on white style so I bought a ton of white storage boxes from Ikea and loaded them up. It was nice to have everything in it's own box. Much easier to find, say, that spool of stretch magic thread or the packet of seed beads when there is a box for everything. But the white on white just didn't work. Partly because there was a lot of not white stuff up there. Lots of architectural book, lots of my antique kids books leftover from the playroom days. It's bugged me every day since.


Earlier this week I was doing some more work avoidance and sat in the office just staring at the wall o shelves. Yes, just staring. I'm sure a couple of neighbors walked by and saw me at it through the window. But between the half ripped off/painted house and the regular sounds of hammers at night, I think they just know I'm crazy by now. But while staring at the wall I decided what I needed was contrast on the back of the shelves. Not the whole shelves, just enough so that the white boxes popped instead of just looking blah. I didn't want to paint because it took A LOT of coats of white to cover the original nasty wood of the shelves in the first place and what if we hated it? So it had to be paper or fabric.




Yesterday I emptied the shelves one by one, culled, sorted and stored, moving the kids books to the living room and some of the uglier crafty things to the closet, and used spray glue to mount some dark gray felt to the back of each shelf.






The wood on the back is slatted and uneven so it was hard to get everything perfectly straight, but the overall effect is just what I wanted. Now that the boxes and books are in their new spots (some of the hard to reach stuff I used a lot while the little used things were easily accessible) I'm liking it a whole lot more. It feels clean and organized which is weird because before it was clean and organized(ish), but just not very stylish. At least I hope it's stylish now. What do we think? Better?

Felix vs. Oscar

Back when we started this whole working-at-home thing, I remember thinking that our desks would be like the Odd Couple had moved in. I'm Felix, if you hadn't guessed, and Will would be the Oscar. And I fully expected that to be the case. I like tidy. I like organized, at least to a point. And I have a hard time working when the house is cluttered. So it stands to reason that I'd want to keep my desk clean. I always have before.

But this morning I sat down at my desk and started working only to look around and notice, "Holy crap! It's me! I'm the Oscar!!"
But then I looked over and, no, Will is still the Oscar, or he's also the Oscar. Because, well, yeah. At least my mess is colorful :)
I wont even show you what's on the drafting table behind me. It looks like a trace paper storm collided with a cardboard box tornado and then a tweed coat flew into the mix. Although to be fair, most of the cardboard is from a bunch of packages that we rescued off of our neighbors stoop yesterday during the storm.

But I have to admit that this is often how my desk looks when I shut down for the day. Half finished swing projects waiting to be pinned. My next articles craft in pieces waiting for photographs, notebook and calender open, coffee and breakfast (or lunch, depending) next to the computer.

Part of it is that I'm not really happy with our storage set up. We have plenty of shelves in here, but only one is very tall, and it's taken up with larger items. My writing space is also my crafting space and it's not really quite big enough to accommodate both at the same time.

Surprisingly though, at least to me, I'm not really bothered by it. Sometimes I look around and feel a little claustrophobic with all this stuff pressing in around me. Most of the time, however, I'm OK with the mess. Not that I wouldn't love for it to be magically pristine, but for now, I'm good. I still have a hard time working when the sink is full of dirty dishes. But hey, one step at a time, right?

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

I have a few projects up at Factory Direct Crafts Blog this week and this one is my favorite. I wish I'd thought of it sooner, I love the way it looks on the dining room table and freezer paper stencils are quickly becoming one of my favorite craft techniques. I've still got some leftover burlap and I'm thinking about making some placemats for the outdoor table with a similar look. Although I haven't decided on what they will say this time. Maybe I'll opt for a shape instead of words. Hummm.

Shuffle

I almost called this Truffle Shuffle, just for kicks, but then I thought if your not a Goonies Kid, that might fly right past you. :)

So my house is in Chaos. No, really. I'm not talking about post weekend, rainy day with the kids inside chaos. This place is - piles of stuff in every room waiting to be sorted, unfolded laundry in heaps (not at all helped by the still broken washing machine) nothing is where is should be- messy. There's a good reason for all of this of course, but that doesn't make it easier that my house looks like a tornado ripped through it.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the reason for all this upheaval is that Will and I have been making some big decisions around here, the biggest of which is that he is leaving his job to venture off on his own. Well, on his own with another guy, and also on his own with me for some smaller projects.

Will having his own design firm has been a forgone conclusion since the day he stepped off the plane from Texas to visit me in Oregon almost 14 years ago. Actually, if I'd payed more attention to what he was saying back when we first met years before that, instead of batting my little 13 year old eyes at the cute boy with the questionable hair cut (head shaved except for his bangs..hummm...) I probably would have known even earlier. He's always been a man on a mission. So it's always been in the cards, it's just been a question of when. And I guess when is now.

The funny thing about it is that rather than being worried about the normal stuff, like income and health insurance or the sheer fact that we will all be home all the time this summer, the thing that has been preying on my mind is that, in order for this whole thing to work, Will and I both need a space to work in. And while the mudroom has been my "office" for the past couple of months, it wasn't really big enough for the both of us. Which left the playroom. Not my favorite idea.

I don't know what my problem is but somehow the idea of the kids not having a playroom has really been bugging me. It seems like I've spent half of my adult life trying to convince other people that kids don't need a lot of room, that some of our happiest days was in our teeny little Dublin flat. But I'm still having a hard time getting over the loss of the playroom. The kids, funnily enough, are totally thrilled to have all their toys in their room. It's like a little wonderland up there. And probably once we get done turning the totally useless closet into a playhouse, I'll feel better about the whole thing.

I think part of it stems from the knowledge that it's time to let go of the way we've been doing things. For the past eight years I've been the mom. I've known the doctors phone number and the hours they are open, how much Tylenol to give, who has art lessons when, who needs to be signed up for swimming. I've planned the meals and the groceries and done the dishes and the laundry and the sick kids and the back to school shopping. And I loved it. All of it. Yeah, I've been tired and I've had bad days. But by and large, I've loved being a full time mom. It's not that Will doesn't know how to do all that stuff, it's just that that has been my job, the thing I do, for a long time now.

It wasn't that long ago that just thinking about working again brought on little bouts of panic attack. But as Evelyn's first year of preschool creeps closer, I've been sort of amazed to find that I'm looking forward to working again. Working from home this time, yes, and in a totally different field, but working none the less. It still seems odd to take calls and have meetings to go to, deadlines to meet. But not bad odd.

Part of the deal with Will's new gig is that I'll work some, he'll work some, and we'll both parent a lot. He's missed out on a lot of the day to day stuff, just because he's at work, and I'm not. So I think he's looking forward to being the one who does that stuff too. And I have to let him do that. I also have to let go of the playroom thing.

I'm sure once it's all in order I'll love having a nice big office without crumbling carpet on the floor or coats and boots to trip over every time I get out of my chair. And, truth be told, I've never really liked the color of the playroom, we kind of choose it in a hurry, so giving it a new coat of paint hasn't been all that bad either. I'm just not particularly patient when it comes to transitions. When I was pregnant I wanted it to be over in a snap. Once I was ready to be a parent, I wanted to get started NOW. During our multitude of moves I've never been very good at taking it slowly when it comes to unpacking. I want it done, the new life started, AT ONCE. And I can't even tell you how much I wanted to pour our counter tops in place even though I KNEW it wouldn't turn out the way we wanted just because it would be ready a little bit faster. So these piles of papers to be filed, toys to be moved, desks to be installed and supplies to be organized are making things, like the whole playroom issue, seem like a bigger deal than they really are.

I guess there's not much to do except continue the shuffle. Move to toys, put in the office, carve out a little niche in the world that's ours along. Let's just hope we don't have another series of snow storms with no roomy playroom this winter. That might get a little harry.