Almost school time

It’s two more weeks of rec center camp and then school, and I am so not ready for all that that means - mainly, the buying of supplies, the reams of paperwork, the urgency to get to bed sooner, the nagging to do homework. I keep checking the boys’ school websites for supply lists but none are forthcoming. At least Bobby has an orientation next Thursday that we’ll both go to. But I’d much rather be getting on top of this stuff now. 

The one positive about kids in school is I can return to my workout routines. I’ve pretty much given up on trying to get to any classes right now - they all start right when the kids are being dropped off at camp - and evening classes keep getting canceled. It’s also too hot to do afternoon walks (although this week might be doable), so my diet and exercise have taken a back seat, and I hate it. I’ll have to remember this next year - do not attempt to lose weight in July or August. I’m too stressed out and it’s just impossible.

While things are mostly under control with my event - as usual, I have a million plates spinning that are all waiting on people to respond to my emails - I have to admit I’m in a pretty dark place right now. My refund cut off date is in two days, so the refund requests are pouring in. All I do all day is hand people’s money back to them, which is absolutely soul crushing. And the price increase, also coming in two days, which used to guarantee hundreds of people right when I needed a boost, these days does little to nothing to boost sales. It’s completely baffling how much people’s behavior has changed since covid. The last two years I have gotten barely a dribble of people at the end, and this year is looking no different. I’ll be lucky to get 100 people in the next five weeks, and I’ve gotten about 60 refund requests with more coming, which pretty much cancels out the gains I’d be making. It just sucks, all around, and is extremely disincentivizing. It’s Monday and I’ve got a ton of work to do, but I really just want to go back to bed.

Crunch time

My, how many lifetimes we’ve lived in the last two weeks! Between an assassination attempt, an historic step down, and a new presumptive nominee, my head is whirling just like everyone else’s. The combination of anxiety over “will he or won’t he” last week plus lingering jet lag led to many sleepless nights and days ruined by long naps; it’s been hard to get back in the swing of things. I have been tackling the more complicated event tasks methodically day by day, but trying to make it to exercise classes has suffered (the timing is just off with the camp schedule) and I’m still procrastinating on certain things. But now that Kamala is the presumptive new Democratic nominee, I feel like I can breathe a big sigh of relief - the intense anxiety I’ve felt since that disastrous debate a month ago has subsided, and I feel like everything is going as it should. We had to see Biden for what he’d become - as painful as it was - and thankfully he was able to put ego aside and make way for a female POC presidential nominee. I’m pretty confident she’ll win. And I’m over the moon about it. 

Each day upon my return has been a struggle - getting out of bed is tough, making the kids breakfast is a drag (Bobby is fine with cereal, but Theo’s become impossibly picky and will only eat applesauce or egg and cheese quesadillas which are a whole multi-pan production to make), and just picking my way through each day has been exhausting and difficult. I’m hoping I rally soon, but also, this is the hard time of year whether I’m jet lagged or not. There’s work 24 hours a day right now, whether I choose to do it or not, and my stress level is now something that needs to be managed daily so it doesn’t get out of control. 

The kids are on week two of camp - in just a couple of weeks we have Bobby’s school orientation and then it’s all school stuff after that point. Supplies, clothes, shoes, backpacks, paperwork, figuring out pick ups and drop offs. It’s a whole thing.

Last night I took a chance and took the kids to see the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the local revival theater. It was definitely too scary for them, especially Theo, who alternated between hiding in his shirt and saying, “oh, I don’t like this”. But nobody cried or seemed especially distressed or asked to leave, so we stayed. Both boys thought it was a good movie - and both said it was really, really scary. I gave them some context about McCarthyism and the red scare of the 1950s which was the inspiration for the original film; we talked about how it was about the dangers of conformity and how people will never stop fighting for their right to humanity and individualism. Nobody had nightmares. But I do think I probably should have waited another year or two for this one! Next week we have Time Bandits and Rocky. Definitely not scary. 

I’m worried about money, but that’s no surprise to anyone who reads this. Sign ups are still slow as molasses and cancellations are flooding in. I’ve come to accept that my worst suspicions may be true - that the mediocre numbers I got last year were, in fact, an actual “bump” for the 25th, and what I’m looking at right now - being 300-400 people less than my best years before the pandemic - may be my new normal. Can I live with that? Yes, if I can manage to wipe out my mortgage, live frugally, and cancel plans to expand. But it’s certainly troubling that I could be back to my post-2008 crash numbers, especially when I’ve had two other long-term organizers tell me they had record turnouts this year. I shouldn’t be struggling to return after covid if no one else is. And yet. Is there a chance I’ll get a last minute bump? Well, I think it’s unlikely, based on the fact that I haven’t had anything like that the last two years; based on ‘22 and ‘23 at this time, I’ll be lucky to get *maybe* 100 more people dribbling in over the next six weeks, and that’s just not enough. Mostly it’s because there’s no cheap rooms at the hotel. I need to find a way to mitigate that; there has to be some strategy going forward so everyone doesn’t book all the rooms a year in advance and then cancel them all the day before when it’s too late to re-sell them, which disincentivizes any new people from signing up. I’m going to just have to lick my wounds this year and see what changes I can make next year to try to kick up my numbers again.

52

Today I am 52. Although, to be fair, I’ve been calling myself 52 for some weeks now, because why not. It’s funny, the thing I think about most for this age is menopause, but that’s not happening for me yet. Still having periods, although irregular now, and zero symptoms other than disrupted sleep and a general low level irritability which could better be attributed to living in Trump’s America. I’m well aware of the potential hell bearing down on me in the next few years, though, and I’m very much not looking forward to that. But for now? Still flowin’.

I returned from Korea yesterday, with lessons learned for the future (this event says they want us back). I was off my international travel game - forgot to bring snacks or a backup phone battery, both of which would have made my visit a lot more enjoyable. This trip was different from our last few in that the event was very different - on Jeju island, rather than in Seoul, and it was a festival with many other bands, not a small local event focused only on us. Because it was a festival set up, it was a lot like Munich back in February - lots of sitting around bored and then frantically setting up and breaking down multiple times a night. When you share a stage with other bands, it means your “gig time” is much longer than a night of three consecutive sets - say, five hours vs eight or ten. On Saturday we had an epic ten hour day with a very complicated and messy beach set up in the rain; I had diarrhea all day, and a shitty dinner of boiled spinach and white rice, and was just miserable. The weather didn’t cooperate, was cold and rainy, so despite being right on the beach I never got to enjoy it (I went for a little walk on the first day when it was sunny for a couple of hours, but that was it), and although the organizers were very kind and accommodating of my being a vegetarian, I mostly just ate rice and vegetables and sugary things, and had to endure meat juice from Korean bbq places splattering on my clothes pretty much every night. I’m not going to say it was a bad trip - a free trip to Korea is a free trip to Korea - but it was very physically demanding, and I was glad when it was over. 

I came home to some bad news and some very good news. The bad news is, I’m not doing well financially. My event sales have been slow, and the refund requests have gotten so out of hand that I’m considering a “no refund” policy going forward. Six weeks out, I can say with much chagrin that I will not have better attendance this year - in fact, I’ve fallen behind now. Which sucks, and puts a lot of things in jeopardy. I might try to cancel the expansion of a day, going forward. I just don’t think I can afford it. I haven’t announced it, and I’m pretty sure I could get the hotel to take it out of my contract if I asked. I’ll wait another month to see how things stand, but right now I’d be crazy to take on another $20,000 in expenses with no real way to recoup that money (I can’t realistically raise prices enough). I may, once again, find myself in a period of contraction, not expansion. But I won’t know for sure for about a month. 

The very good news, however, is so good that I haven’t really been able to wrap my mind around what a relief it is. My covid grant is officially no longer “under review”. Right before getting on the plane, I got an email from the SBA saying I had an “action item” on the website, with instructions on how to upload documents. I couldn’t log on to see exactly what it was, but it didn’t look good. So I had to spend the entire 12 hour flight stressing out about it until I could get home and get on my computer. But, much to my delight, it was just a letter thanking me for sending the information they asked, and telling me I’m no longer under review. I cried. This has been hanging over me for, what, a year and a half? Five years, if you consider when I first applied and worried I might end up in a situation like this. I won’t really exhale until I do the closeout documents - it ain’t over yet - but I do think this means I’m officially off the hook. Happy birthday to me!!

Came home to the boys of course both looking like teenagers. They had a good time at their sleepaway camp, and the start of the rec center camp has gone well, although, as I suspected, they are the only older kids there. It makes me sad that these charming little local camps are now in our rear view mirror. I really enjoyed these summers of little city camps. I could still look into CIT programs for Bobby - he did say he was interested - although a year from now he may change his mind. Anyway, that’s a problem for another day.

Today I’m going to catch up on work and rest and enjoy the quiet of an empty house, later we’ll go to dinner, and then tomorrow my diet is back on. 

Leaving on a jet plane

Early tomorrow I leave for S Korea, and am gone for nearly a week, returning Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, despite my car being promised today, I never heard a word from the dealer. My message went unanswered, and now they’re closed. I had originally intended to return the loaner car no matter what, but decided, fuck it. They left me hanging with no communication, that’s on them. They know I’m out of the country for a week. So, screw it. The loaner sits in the garage and at least I have something to drive when I get home.

I dropped the kids at sleepaway camp on Sunday, officially ending our Summer of Sloth - other than weekends, there will be no more entire days spent playing video games in pyjamas with unbrushed teeth. They’ll be at camp until Sunday, then the H picks them up and takes them to the rec center camp Monday and Tuesday while I make my way home. Then they’re in camp until school starts in just four weeks. My how the summer has flown! I can’t believe it’s time to think about school already.

Bobby is required to do two book reports before starting 7th grade, and naturally it’s been challenging to get him to work on them. I had hoped he’d finish one before sleepaway camp; he got about 75% of the way there. He took the book for the second one with him; I hope he makes some headway. The last thing I wanted was him to frantically cram them both through in the final days before school when I’m also too busy with my event to follow up; hopefully we can avoid that. I guarantee every parent with a kid starting 7th at that school is having the same struggle. 

There’s an orientation coming up that we’ll go to together; hopefully that will help me get a grip on the big changes this year. I personally predict a certain learning curve for us both. Bobby is going to have to learn how to prioritize and organize, which he (and every other 12-year-old boy) is not great at. He’s going to have to learn that keeping track of your work is almost more important than the work itself. I’ll be damned if I’ll let him be one of those kids that “would do so well if he just applied himself”. Eff that. I don’t want to hear any nonsense about “I forgot to turn it in” or “I forgot it was due”. Try telling that to the IRS, buddy! This is where you learn consequences. 

For me, I got a lot of tasks done this week, but side stepped the big ones - organizing the class schedule and judging schedule - because they require information from people that I don’t have. I hate that these things aren’t done yet - they should have been completed weeks ago - but here we are. I’m hoping that at least with all the ordering of items and reserving rentals out of the way that when I return I can focus on just those things and customer service. When I’m back and have no more long trips looming ahead of me and the house to myself all day, I can finally truly focus. This, plus getting back to my diet and exercise which have had to be completely abandoned in light of all this travel. I have NOT met my weight loss goals for Korea and will not meet them for my event, either, and I’m pretty bummed about that. But I did a lot of good work before mid-June hit - lost 11 pounds - and know the path forward now; so, maybe I meet my goals by October or November instead. It’s not a sprint but a marathon, I guess. 

Last 4th in a free country…?

I’m not unaware that my petty car problems pale in comparison to the massive upheaval currently occurring in our country right now. I just haven’t had space in my brain to really focus on any of it (especially when, other than voting and local grass roots stuff, there isn’t a goddamn thing I can personally do about it). Once again, we’re here on our country’s Independence Day, possibly facing the last one with an actual democratically elected President instead of a dictator. The level of anxiety among my leftist friends is at an all time high. 

This morning the H and I had a productive conversation about Biden stepping down. I still think it’s highly unlikely, however, he says, “let’s see how this plays out over the next couple of weeks”. Everyone’s watching the polls, and the polls, for Biden, are not good. Shockingly, Harris, the only realistic replacement, is actually doing better. I personally would love to see Harris take over, and I believe Biden could pass the wand to her with minimal loss of face. I find that idea very exciting. However…it may not happen. And I need to prepare for that. It’s hard to focus on celebrating today with all this swirling around.

I spent another ENTIRE DAY dealing with my car yesterday, only to be right back at square one - the car needs an $800 battery replacement, and the battery won’t be here until the day before I leave for Korea (I leave Wednesday). Thankfully I have a loaner car, which I’ll just return on Tuesday if the battery doesn’t arrive. The timing is terrible. I hope it all works out. 

Today is the first day I’ve been able to just relax in weeks. The kids are in the pool; the H is working. Later we’ll go check out some fireworks. Tomorrow we have to be out of the house all day for the cleaning lady, so I’ll sacrifice one more precious work day to take the kids to a water park as promised, then the kids go to summer camp on Sunday. Then I have two kid-free days to frantically get work done before I go to Korea for a week; when I get home, these long days of kids at home will be over - they’ll be at their rec center summer camp all day every day for four weeks, then school starts. I’m going to have to really hustle - I’ve never been so behind on tasks before. It fills me with anxiety - and yet, much like our political nightmare, I know there’s not much I can do other than continue to march forward.

When I took my friend to the Integratron a few weeks ago for a sound bath, the whole place smelled sweetly of Palo santo, which I love, so I bought some in New Mexico. I’ve been smelling the cedar-y, minty sticks every time I get anxious. It seems to be helping, if only for the placebo effect of stopping activity to take a minute to breathe deeply and quiet my mind. I told my head judge I’m going to keep giant logs of it on stage at my event and we can all just bury our faces in it all weekend. 

Memories are made of this, part 2

Our visit to the OG Meow Wolf was all I’d hoped - the kids loved it, and the creativity of the place was inspiring and delightful. I will admit, though, that after two hours I was well ready to get the hell out of there (the boomer reviews saying it was overstimulating weren’t wrong). 

We then drove down to Carlsbad to visit the caverns the next day. Upon arrival we found ourself in the position we often have been in on our trips - arriving to a place after all dinner options have closed, with not a stitch of food to be found anywhere nearby, and half the hotel’s promised amenities closed or not functional. That was Thursday, and the whole evening was overshadowed by the disastrous presidential debate - we watched it while eating chips and dip for dinner - and then spent the rest of the night obsessively texting friends and listening to post-debate analysis which was all impossibly grim. I’ll say right now that the debate has, and continues to, cast a pall over our remaining time on the trip. Thankfully we had the Carlsbad Caverns and bat flight from the caverns the next day to lose ourselves in, but it was difficult to forget the sight of our democracy crumbling right before our eyes.

After the caverns it was time for our multi-day trip back west, and here’s where things started to get disorganized and messy. On this leg of the journey, we dealt with extreme heat and giant electrical storms that knocked out entire cities’ power, so some of my plans had to be canceled, and we had many harrowing drives through lightning that had me absolutely terrified of our car getting hit (the H said he’d been through that and it was no big deal, but with my fear of sudden loud noises I was an absolute wreck). We only had a few minutes at White Sands National Park because it was too hot and lightning was on our back, and then an all day excursion to the Gila Cliff dwellings had to be scrapped entirely due to weather and just not having enough time (and being generally exhausted). 

I took us to the world’s largest pistachio in Alamogordo which no one gave a shit about but me, we spent a very hot and unpleasant afternoon in Tombstone as an unplanned stop which I kind of wish we’d skipped (again, everything was closing, nothing to eat but shitty nachos which gave me diarrhea just as all the places with bathrooms were shutting their doors, and the H pressured us into doing this gun show slash tour which was so loud I immediately ran away and cowered blocks away by myself in the heat for nearly an hour until the stupid thing was over, and he was frustrated with me for hemming and hawing about committing to doing it because I knew it was going to be my worst nightmare and it was), then spent one final night at a hipster hotel in Tucson (the McCoy) which ended up being tons of fun with a DJ’d pool party and some of the best vegan sushi I’ve ever had. Then Monday we had a seven hour drive home, and then it was over. 

So how was the trip? Again, mostly good, memorable, and whatever mistakes I made in the planning couldn’t have been helped - things like weather can’t really be planned for. All of our lodgings worked out; we even finally got some fun on the water slides at the place by the caverns, once they were open; and the sight of hundreds of thousands of bats careening out of the cavern as we all sat silently in awe is not something I’ll soon forget. I wish the last few days hadn’t fallen apart the way they did, but I think we were all pretty over it by then anyway. We never went hungry due to the ridiculous amount of food we brought, and I spent *about* what I expected on restaurants and gas. Getting two high energy boys to bed each night in one hotel room was a bit brutal. Lots of jumping on beds and pillow fights and pulling the whole room apart and not listening. As always, I had to think for everyone, making sure we had what we needed for each thing we were doing, packing up hotel rooms every one or two days, planning ahead for not being able to get directions due to no cell service - it was extremely mentally draining. But there’s no helping it - I want to do these complicated trips, and only I can make them happen. So I really have no business complaining.

One of the sweetest moments was, at one point when conditions in our hotel room were especially chaotic, I joked that when we get home we should continue to all sleep in one bedroom. Everyone yelled out “noooo!” except Theo, who said, “yeah! That’d be nice!” How cute is that? 

Whenever I leave the house overnight I’m convinced a) the cat will die and/or b) someone will break in. Thankfully neither of those things happened, but I was left with a huge mess that ruined my day today and probably will ruin several more - despite having a neighbor start my car every few days so it wouldn’t die, the car was dead. I called AAA to jump it this morning so I could run errands, and he mentioned my battery was on its last legs and if I turned off the car it probably wouldn’t start again. This lead to a five hour odyssey which included, but was not limited to: calling a battery place the AAA guy recommended only to be told I’d have to get the battery through my dealer since my car’s a hybrid, calling the dealer to order the battery and being told it would cost $900 and wouldn’t be here for a week, then being told I’d have to personally come into the dealership to order it, getting to the dealer and having to run around and loudly demand somebody get someone in the service department to help me since nobody was available anywhere in the entire dealership (I guess everyone goes to lunch at the same time?), then being told by the service guy (who did not test anything) that no, I probably didn’t need the whole hybrid battery replaced but just the regular battery and anyone could do that, and I’d have to leave the car all day to get the battery replaced and so should just take it to some battery guy to get it done quickly and cheaply, then trying to leave but discovering I’d been blocked in and having to run around and ask everyone if that was their truck, half of whom completely ignored me and wouldn’t answer me until I started yelling, “hello???” in their faces, until finally it got moved, then going to the original battery guy I’d called who proceeded to COMPLETELY DISMANTLE MY CAR looking for the battery but couldn’t find it and then after an hour of this told me again I’d just have to go to the dealer, waiting for my car to be completely reassembled while calling the dealer multiple times and never even getting to voicemail but just being told nobody can take my call and to call back later, calling the H and sending him multiple pictures of my engine only to be told he can’t figure out where the battery is, either, then deciding I’m so goddamned hungry I have to grab something to eat and might as well take my chances and get groceries like I was supposed to even though I may not have a running car when I get back with bags of melting groceries, then deciding to check on the kids since they’ve been left alone now four hours and haven’t eaten anything, only to have Bobby not answer any calls or texts to the watch I had him put on before I left just in case, then deciding to use the tracking device on the watch and being shown that he’s inexplicably blocks away which got my heart pumping (thankfully I called Theo’s watch which he was not wearing and Bobby answered - he had his watch on silent mode (why???) - and everything was fine, no explanation as to why the watch’s tracking was so off, which it’s never ever been before), then trying two locations to return some red box videos we’d rented on the road only to find them both gone, then leaving multiple messages at multiple car dealers and repair places only to have none of the calls returned, and finally getting home to cook dinner and do three loads of laundry and all of my backed up event work and having to leave a window open on my car all night in case it dies and needs to be jumped again but we can’t get in to pop the hood to be jumped because someone broke the lock, and being convinced someone is going to steal it or sleep in it all night and ruin it because now anyone can break in or take it with the window open, and finally after multiple calls getting an appointment at 8 AM tomorrow, and now there’s this issue of leaking oil and that plus the weirdness of this battery issue means I may have no car for many days and I leave for Korea early next week. And have a gig an hour and a half away tomorrow, and dropping the kids at summer camp two and a half hours away on Sunday and then I immediately have to go sing at Knott’s and will barely make it if I make it on time at all. 

Today was unbelievably stressful and one of those rare days where you just feel like you’re going to lose it all day and I turned into the kind of person who gets in people’s faces and demands things and is not polite or friendly which is not like me at all. But right now everything is very uncertain - I would say maybe I’ll just take the car to the dealer and they’ll switch out the battery and it’ll be no big deal…but now is the perfect time to address the massive pool of oil under my car that I initially thought was from the H’s old car but as of today I know isn’t, and has to be fixed immediately. So I most likely will be without a car for a while. I don’t know what I’m going to do, tbh. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m just going to take it one minute at a time. See, this is why I used to trade cars in every three years. Not a very happy homecoming. 

Memories are made of this, Pt 1

We returned from our epic road trip to New Mexico yesterday. As with all trips, it was full of highs and lows (mostly highs) and right now all feels like a blur. Here are some highlights:

We started the trip with a visit to the Grand Canyon west rim, which means we’ve now seen the south and west. We did the skywalk, which is the main attraction there (unlike the south rim, that was kind of the only thing to do). 

The next day we drove to Gallup, NM, and stayed in the epically cool El Rancho hotel, full of old Hollywood charm and history. 

I wasn’t sure if I’d go through with the most off-road and sketchy of my plans - visiting the Bisti badlands - but with the help of a paid subscription to All Trails for a downloadable map, and decent weather, we decided to go for it. It was a harrowing drive through muddy dirt roads, but we got there, had a little lunch from our cooler, loaded up our camelbacks with water, and set out. The place did not disappoint - fascinating and beautiful, and the map kept us from getting impossibly lost - but I have to admit the 2 miles-ish hike back to the car almost did us in. We were all completely wrecked by the time we got back to air conditioned car. And to think I almost didn’t bring the camelbacks-! That would have been a fatal mistake. I’m glad tales of tourists getting lost on trails on the Greek islands in the last few weeks had me on notice that we needed to take every precaution. 

The next day we took another in a series of long drives, this time to Taos, where we stayed in an earth ship that’s been in my Airbnb wish list for ages (and the only non-hotel of the trip). 

After some doing, we found some hot springs and hung out with the kind of characters you find in these places (naked, and talking about their energy healing practices).

The next day we set out for what was probably my favorite excursion, Bandelier National Monument, which involved long hikes and occasionally scary ladder climbs into ancient cliff dwellings. Super cool, and once again glad we had camel backs full of water and ice.

 

The next day we headed to Santa Fe, where we had a horrid dinner at a tourist trap restaurant recommended by the hotel (note to self to never listen to hotel recommendations) and the following day visited Meow Wolf Santa Fe - pictures in part 2!