Get with the Plan

Inspirational song: Lawyers, Guns, and Money (Warren Zevon)

Wasn't it the movie Robocop, that had those weird little commercial-esque insertions, with the people saying, "I'd buy that for a dollar!" It was either that or Running Man, but I feel like it was Robocop. We've been using that quote for so many years, I really had to work to remember what it was from. 

Tonight, as I was doing market research for all the towns around here, I poked around a little on the Colorado secretary of state page, where it says what to do for establishing an LLC. Before I had read the general overview, but hadn't clicked on any of the links to supporting documents. This time, after doing things like searching to see whether the name I want to use is available (yes), I clicked on the fee schedule. It took a bit of scrolling to find the exact relevant line, but when I did, I found good news. Thanks to recent action by the state legislature, instead of a $50 fee to register an LLC, it is currently a single dollar. Well. Isn't that nice for a change. Something costs less in 2023. I won't get used to it, don't worry.

I'm getting to crunch time to get this plan formulated. I need to present my projections to my managing broker in the next day or two, and see whether he wants to expand the conversation to the rest of the crew at the sales meeting on Wednesday. One way or another, I expect to be moving forward by Thursday, filing paperwork with the state and talking to banks and lawyers and whatnot. Gotta get real very quickly now.

The kid pictures are a little blurry today. Seems apropos. I feel like I'm vibrating with all of T's regular anxiety that he must have left behind when he moved and dropped this huge life change in my lap. 

In Bloom

Inspirational song: Let It Grow (Eric Clapton)

Sirius radio played that song twice for us, once as we approached the giant plant nursery just south of Fort Collins, and again on a different channel as we turned on the car to go home. Okay, I get the hint.

The photos are really the story today. We took the babies to Gulley's and got the first real load of flowers. Grandpa picked out a bumblebee planter for Valerie, and I put a tiny rhipsalis plug that I'd picked for me inside of it. We will swap it with something of her choosing later. Valerie was an excellent helper planting and cleaning up afterwards. Behold:

Order from Chaos

Inspirational song: Rolling in the Deep (Adele)

To-do lists have come in very handy in years past. I finally have started a few to help organize what I have going on now, such as prepping the house next door to rent. The list of what I have already cleaned and what is yet to be done is very detailed, and in outline form covers three pages. That is, until I got down to the outside, which will be Mr S-P's part, and I just wrote "yard debris" and "bagster." Let him sort out what needs to be done for that stuff.

I made one for the property management side too. I have been basically immobile on it while I figured out the order of operations. This list is not in order yet, but at least it is helping me see it all in a glance. I was so scattered that I couldn't figure out a single step forward. It's still hard to do around my babysitting schedule, but I do think about it day and night. I just need to organize my thoughts into a readable business plan. I wonder if it will be as easy to write as the blog posts, once I get the first sentence started. Doubtful, but maybe ten years of training myself to write rapidly will be good for something.

Now that I'm thinking about business details, I kind of don't want to stop. I'll just conclude with a few pictures of the little man, slightly out of order, because I want the one with the sneaky eyes to come up first as the thumbnail.

Salut

Inspirational song: Breakdown (Alan Parsons Project)

The song tonight is a little annoying, even though it's one I really like. Mr S-P read a text from our friend who said he has been listening to that band a lot lately, and without any other prompting, that song started up in my head and won't stop. Earworms are tricky things.

Other than a couple of hours wiping out closets and cleaning an oven, all next door, I accomplished nothing. I have been fighting a wet, irritating cough for a couple of days. It might have come through the kids, which is actually a relief, so I don't have to cancel babysitting this weekend. But it did mean I needed a little green juice to quiet the cough last night, and it gave me an antihistamine hangover today. I dozed through much of the morning. Then to quiet the same cough when I got home from next door, I had another dose. I have been mostly unconscious ever since, and now I am trapped under roughly 60 pounds of cat (combined). Two giant cats and one average cat who is very food motivated noticed that I was sitting mostly unmoving, with prime lap real estate available for homesteading. I'd like to get up and go to the bathroom and get a snack, but I guess I have to stay here until I die now.

Wild Magic

Inspirational song: You Light Up My Life (Debby Boone)

Finally, after something like three months off, we got back into our D&D campaign. It took a good minute to remember what we had done last, but we got there and prepared for the evening. The first thing that happened was we started to explore caves behind a waterfall. Our unpredictable magic user, who lost his spellbook in the shipwreck that kicked off this campaign in the pre-pandemic days, has a tendency towards accidentally creating wild magic when he attempts to do things that should have been super easy (if only he had had his book). Tonight, he tried to create light, so we could see in the tunnel behind the waterfall. The first time, the light he made was sputtering and dim...and he barely noticed that he had gone from half his original height (previous wild magic chaos) to seven and a half feet tall, taller than my Amazonian woman Miriam. He tried again on the basic light spell, and got it. We then realized he had turned into a bizarre reptile man, with scaly black skin and a forked tongue. Best of all, the rest of us barely shrugged. We've seen Boone mess up in such spectacular ways, that this one just seemed somewhat helpful. He is now big and strong, so Miriam isn't the only tank in the group. I'm grateful for that, at least, and the fact that his alignment didn't change. Miriam the lawful good paladin wouldn't have been so sanguine if he had suddenly turned into an evil type character.

It took us two full hours to explore one tunnel that was a narrowing dead end, and another that lead to a hot room with a hissing steam device powered by a dozen or so large men. We figured out a way to sneak past them to the continuation of the passageway, which ended up being a staircase where each step was about a meter high. It's going to be a long trip up it, considering two of our group (the two who moved to Minnesota this month) are characters no taller than each stair. Miriam will have to lift them up each step, one at a time. 

It felt good to be back in the groove. I was worried that it had been so long I'd forget how to play. Okay, not really, but I did think it. We played at my kids' house, so when it was time for Dmitri to go to bed, they just carried his sleeping body into the bedroom and tucked him in. Valerie stayed up a bit past her bedtime, but she was having too much fun to quit. It was a huge day for her, having ridden the city bus for the first time to the library, also first time, where she saw model trains and got her first library card. She ate at a restaurant and stopped for an ice cream cone on the way home. To then have her parents' friends and her grandparents come over for dinner and games was the cherry on top. That kid is living a magical life right now, and I am 100% here for it.

Bottleneck

Inspirational song: Lucille (Kenny Rogers)

I don't want to go through the process of being evaluated for ADHD. I just want someone to wave a magic wand and make it where I can focus on just one thing, so I can complete tasks that need doing. I would rather that focus did not come out of a pill bottle. I have too many of those already. But man, if I could stay on task just for a few days. Think of what I could accomplish!

I put in effort today, I really did. I networked some more and scheduled a lunch with someone who would be a valuable partner for the business I want to launch. I read up on things I need to do to register my LLC and how much my fees should be, among other topics. I never put pen to paper to organize my thoughts, but I did leave a lot of open tabs on my iPad, so sort of the same thing.

I have to finish some of the big tasks, but I think I need to clear out a few easy ones first, to eliminate the mental bottleneck. I need to switch to high gear asap, because spring is here, and I want to be able to go out and do my planty things while the weather is still soft and cool. I can't start anything new though. First things first. Good thing we have put so much into perennials, so the color is there already without me doing anything new.

Puzzled

Inspirational song: Run to the Hills (Iron Maiden)

This house is a wreck. Holy cow, it is bad. I try to keep the swearing here to a minimum, compared to how I talk in real life, so you're gonna have to imagine when I say I look around and swear more foully than usual, just how bad this place looks. I've made a few stabs at washing dishes and doing laundry, but unbelievably that only seems to have set me back farther, based on the mountain of folded laundry just piled on the bench in room. 

I've obviously taken on too much lately. The regular babysitting schedule was already a full-time gig for me. Then cleaning other people's houses and trying to launch a business came along, and now I'm so overloaded that I can't do any one thing well. I'm barely keeping up with the kids at all, and I have no hope of keeping the house clean once they've been here. Somehow I doubt if I spend enough time to catch up in the three days "off" starting tomorrow, that I will be able to rest up enough to keep up with the little ones when they get back on Friday. My only hope is remembering that the school semester ends in a couple weeks, so the man will be here more often for three months.

Somewhere around 4 o'clock this afternoon, two-thirds of the way through my babysitting shift, I was in my chair, zoned out on a tablet jigsaw puzzle app. Valerie climbed into my lap and asked to help me play puzzle. I'd tried to explain to her how this one works before, and she didn't really seem to absorb it. Today she played like she knew what she was doing all along. I picked out the pieces from the row on the side of the screen and put them in the middle of the screen. She took over and found where they went with only a little assistance from me. (To clarify, I assemble the frame first, and then solve in concentric rings moving toward the center. 550 piece puzzles, pieces rotate, and I've memorized the shapes and the order they go in.) I only took a four second video of her placing a piece. I should have taken a photo to share here.

Gardener

Inspirational song: Traveling Man (Ricky Nelson)

Our girl earned her gardening gloves today. Grandma is so proud. We had to run up to Walmart after they arrived, to grab several unrelated things, and while there, we went looking for child-sized gloves. Selection was limited. It was either purple Paw Patrol print or orange Paw Patrol print. We got both, but she likes the purple best.

While her brother and grandpa took a nap, she and I went out to pull weeds and move a few things around. I showed her the creeping bellflower and told her to rip it up anywhere she saw it. She actually did it for a good few minutes. Then she went to smooth her hands over a dirt pile, and that was fine. I pulled out dead petunias out of the last two coconut lined wire baskets, and left a lot of soil in them to hold their shape. I asked Valerie if she was able to lift the baskets to take them to the front porch. She couldn't quite do it, so we team-lifted them and carried them around. She was totally engaged, holding her side with both hands and not letting go, taking this yardwork incredibly seriously. Then, when we filled up a plastic planter with leaves and pulled weeds, we team-carried that back around to where the city compost bin sat. Even now, hours later, my heart still skips beats thinking about how wonderful this was. I'm so proud. 

Our boy is absolutely on track. I should never have wondered whether he was advancing fast enough on crawling. He has that down. He travels all over this house, and he crawls all over his grandparents. He's more than a handful. He thought it was hilarious to wrassle with me in my chair once he had eaten enough of his formula. He kept smiling at me as he realized he was winning.

Scrimmage

Inspirational song: Back in Black (AC/DC)

Last year I gave up my Sling subscription, and even earlier than that, I ditched the PAC-12 Network package on it. The football situation was grim, and there was no joy in keeping those things around for games I couldn't bear to watch. That was before my alma mater gave us fans a late Christmas present, and hired a new coach who generated a whole lot of buzz, and attracted the most of highly-rated talent in the transfer portal. Will starting over from scratch to create a dream team work? Hard to say. Sometimes it works to throw out all your cards and get dealt a new hand. 

For the first time (in I assume ever), the CU spring football game sold out its allotted tickets, and was broadcast on ESPN. Without the TV subscriptions, I suggested we take the kids out to lunch to a sports bar where we knew it would be on. We made a big production of it. We all dressed in CU gear, and chatted with fans at other tables. We got giddy when we saw Coach Prime escorting superfan Peggy to midfield, and helped the 90-something local treasure start the show with a ceremonial kickoff. We tried to hear the TV over the loud restaurant, but until things cleared out a little halfway through, that was tough.

The kids had a blast at the restaurant. Valerie is finally back to an age where she eats with gusto, and tries new things again. Dmitri did great switching between toddler yogurt bites and spoonfuls of grandpa's risotto. I would like to make it a regular thing next fall, going back to places like this on days when the game is on TV. They don't have to be huge football fans like I am, but I would like them to be conversant in the basics of the game and how to have fun in that kind of crowd. And just as soon as Valerie is ready, we want to take her to a game. Maybe it will be this fall, maybe next. She will let us know when it is worth her time to go.

One Thing at a Time

Inspirational song: Flowers on the Wall (The Statler Brothers)

I'm juggling a lot of things at once, and I'm not getting very far on any of them. I started my morning working on cleaning the house next door, and while I did a lot while I was there, I only had about an hour and a half of solid work before I had to come back and babysit. I still have to clean out the fridge, do both bathrooms, and fill nail holes for touch-up paint. I'll get there, I just need to focus.

Then tonight, after kids left and I had time to zone out while mindlessly eating popcorn, I started looking at stuff online that would help me launch a property management company. I think I know which software I want to use, as it is an all-in-one kind of thing, and that would help me out as a solo artist here. I thought I knew which bank I was going with, but their website left me confused. Maybe on Monday I can go talk to a human and see if it is the right place for me. I think I'll take a continuing education course on the basics, just to make sure I'm on the right track. I'll need CE credits anyway. Might as well make them relevant.

And not to be outdone, both of those kids are making giant leaps in their development. Dmitri ate like a farm hand today, which leads me to think he is going to add another brick to the bag of bricks he already is. Boy is solid. And he is practicing letting go when he stands all the time. He has about two and a half weeks to beat my prediction for when he takes his first unsupported steps, and I think he will make it. Valerie is ridiculously smart, even if she has a tendency to space out and not respond when you ask her to do something (gee, like just about everyone in her family). She is taking after grandma, memorizing all the plant names, and remembering her jokes about calling a snake plant a watermelon peperomia (she and I laugh every time). She helped grandpa water a tree he planted last year in a place where the hose doesn't reach (oops). And she absorbed fully when I explained to her that mommy, daddy, grandpa, and grandma all have names just like she and Dmitri do. It was pretty cute hearing her speak our names. I've been waiting to have that conversation with her, and it was finally the right time.

Tin Anniversary

Inspirational song: Happy Anniversary (Little River Band)

This blog started on April 20, 2013. I had had a miserable time the night before, partly of my own making, partly not, and I had big emotions to work through. I decided to write for my own benefit. I had no idea then just how much benefit I would actually see. 

A week after I started it, Mr S-P left for what ended up being a year and a half in Pakistan, while I stayed home, overwhelmed by our quarter acre "park" in Charleston, SC. Although my heart wanted to be a master gardener there, my body was not up to the task. In some ways, the blog was to keep in touch with the Mr, who has as much amateur gardening ambition as I, with slightly more formal training in botany. In some ways, it was to condition myself to write daily, still believing that it would lead to me finally complete a long form fiction manuscript. I used it to document stories from my life that I thought were interesting, in the hopes that my daughters would have access to their family history. I used it to work out those big emotions I mentioned above. And importantly, I needed to have someone to talk to during that long year and a half I was completely alone. 

Turns out, this diary became my best friend. I enjoyed talking to it casually, openly. I stopped worrying whether I was oversharing. I know I have been, and it doesn't bother me. There have been a lot of times over the last ten years when I really wanted to stop writing forever. Sometimes I told myself it wouldn't be so bad to cut it down to once a week. But, as my stepmother recognized in me when I suggested taking a semester off of college when I was young, if I stopped doing it I would never go back. So I keep writing, day in and day out. A lot of times it is just a record of my day, and I tell myself that is okay. The world of literature and drama is full of soap operas and small vignettes. Somebody keeps reading and watching that stuff. I might as well be one of the producers of the escapism.

Maybe someday I will hit that point that Forrest Gump did, running across the country for the umpteenth time, when he knew he was done. "I think I'll go home now." When I get there, I will let you know. Until then, I will keep on as I began, with stories of my life, my animals, my family, and as always, my flowers.

Wimpout

Inspirational song: Maybelline (v. Hoyt Axton)

Botox has been a game changer for my migraines for years. That is not in dispute. It takes away a remarkable amount of pain. However, I am coming to appreciate how much more there is to migraine than head pain. There are components of nausea, fatigue, and unusual nerve sensations, among other things. Those three have been getting me the last two days. My head is fine, as long as I don't lean it back against my chair where it makes my scalp feel pinched. But I am groggy and sleepy and nearly all of my nerves feel tingly. For the second day in a row, I slept away the afternoon. What a relief that I had the flexibility to do that twice in a week. If I am lucky, the extra rest will resolve the issue and I can be up and at 'em when the kids come on Friday.

I'm pretty sure while I was sleeping today, my doorbell rang twice. The first time could have been a dream. I did go back to sleep almost immediately, so I have no idea if there was actually anyone there. I wasn't going to get up to check. The second time I was slightly more awake, so I am almost certain it was real. I still didn't answer it. A friend would have texted first, before showing up, and if a solicitor ignored the sign on the door, that's on them. Now I am stuck wondering who the heck came by...twice?

After the second ringing, I was a bit more awake. I showered and dressed for game night, and felt significantly better than I had most of the day. Games were at my foster daughter's place again, and we finished the massive game of Wingspan we started last week. I wasn't even close to winning, but I have finally started getting the hang of strategy for it. After that we brought out our classic from college days, Cosmic Wimpout. We had so much fun sharing it with the younger generation that it seems like this one may be in regular rotation from here on out. We used to have a large homemade board for it. A new one is under discussion, to be made of much nicer materials than the posterboard from the 1980s.

Science and Math

Inspirational song: The Galaxy Song (Monty Python)

My brain is full. Granted, I didn't have a whole lot of available data storage space in it when this day started, but I think I learned everything I possibly can, and it's time to stop. 

The program at Rotary was riveting. A Nobel laureate particle physicist from CU Boulder came to give a non-physicist level lesson to us about fossils from the Big Bang, as in what was left over after the initial burst of matter and antimatter canceled each other out. I couldn't repeat the entire lecture, but I did absorb that it dealt with an asymmetry at the subatomic level. It was cool and the scientist was a fantastic presenter.

I should have come home afterwards and gotten to work, but apparently my head needed to run some updates first. I sat down, turned on a little cable news, and went straight to sleep. Two hours later I woke in a fog to the cats telling me that dinner was due. Don't tell me cats can't tell time. It was precisely 4:30 when they woke me, their regular dinner hour.

Once I shook off the lethargy of a long afternoon nap, I tried again to make inroads on my business research. I accidentally dropped a hint in a blog post in the last day or two about my minor career course correction. I'm not getting out of real estate per se, but now I am working on a proposal to venture back into property management. I was so happy when we sold our last rental a year ago, thinking I was done with that whole business. Now here I am looking to do it for other people. I know I must be nuts, but I believe it is my true calling. I did it for 20 years, and I guess that wasn't enough. To make a living at it, I have to jump through a lot more hoops. For example I have to keep my real estate license, set up separate trust and business bank accounts, acquire a bunch of additional insurance, and establish an LLC or S-Corp (the latter of which I know nothing about yet). I read about an hour, in bits and pieces, about the requirements for this, and I'm not sure I'm more informed than when I left the meeting with my managing broker last week. Not sure yet whether I will be doing this under the umbrella of my current brokerage or going independent. There are pros and cons each way. Until I'm actually writing the business plan and reviewing the numbers the boss crunched, I won't speculate.

The lights on timers are out. Time for me and the fluffy girls to retire and work out our time and space issues horizontally.

How Does That Work

Inspirational song: Gimme Some Money (Spinal Tap)

One of the ways I convinced Mr S-P to go along with getting a plug-in hybrid car was to show him the tax incentives available to us. At the time of purchase, between the IRS and Colorado web pages, it said we would qualify for a grand total of $9087. Yesterday when he was filling out TurboTax (which I know has its own issues, but it is what is familiar to him so we keep using it), once everything was in, it said our rebate/credit/whatever was $1400, not $6587. Can someone smarter than me explain where the other 5 grand went? And as for Colorado, to get the $2500 there, we have to submit registration and a copy of our purchase contract. So for two days I have been sorting through every box or stack of papers I have. I have copies of every bill, bank statement, veterinary receipt, and medical report that has encountered my hands in the last 4-5 years, but I don't have the receipt from my most prized vehicle purchase ever? Geez, I still have repair receipts and tire change paperwork from my Ford Focus that we sold to get this PHEV. But no Hyundai bill of sale yet. Peachy. 

The silver lining was that in tearing my house apart, I actually cleaned up as I went along. I still have miles to go, but it doesn't look like kidville in here like it did over the weekend. I will have some latitude this week to get to things I really want to be doing, like fiddling with plants and prepping the front porch for plants and plants and plants and plants. For some reason, one of my goofier pottery pieces from New Mexico ended up on one of the counters, and I immediately jumped on it and said oh, I can put air plants in this! (I had asked for a suggestion of what to make in pottery class, and he sarcastically said "a turnip." So I made one. Photo below.) Then this afternoon, he presented me with a small concrete planter that he brought home after ditching the abandoned dead plant in it. I don't know what will go in it long term, but for now, I set in a string of pearls propagation I'm working on. 

I have lots of other important things I need to be doing besides encouraging photosynthesis. I need to do a ton of business research, and I have to do another round of cleaning next door. That will all come in time.

 

Workout

Inspirational song: Electric Avenue (Eddy Grant)

At various points in my life, I could justifiably have been accused of being sedentary. These days, even with chronic illnesses that make me tire easily, plus a lack of interest in being in crowds, there is no way anyone could say I'm insufficiently active. Four days a week I engage in weight lifting and Greco-Roman wrestling. Don't tell me that's not what we do here. I've tried to hold that wild boar when he wants to twist and lunge at whatever he isn't allowed to have. I've picked up the girl from every awkward angle imaginable. They are a workout.

Today was even worse than usual. Mr S-P put off doing taxes until the very last minute, so he was as cuddly as an angry porcupine all day. I did everything I could to keep the kids occupied and away from him, but they can sense tension. They know and they become extra needy when adults are at their weakest. I tried taking Valerie outside while Dmitri was napping, and we did garden chores. We cleaned up leaves, pruned roses, and removed other dead flowers from last year. But grandma's endurance didn't last long, so we came back in, and she went right back to grandpa seeking attention. I did everything I could think of to distract her, but she didn't focus on anything more than a few minutes. When Dmitri was awake, he wanted to be held all the time (as usual), and he is dense as a bag of bricks. They went home almost four hours ago, and my upper arms are still sore. I hope he does indeed learn to walk soon, so we can just go places hand in hand, rather than babe in arms.

I have lots of physical work to do tomorrow. I hope one whole night of sleep is enough to recover and get at it.