Plans, Interrupted

I must apologize for my lack of posting in July. I knew July was going to be crazy (technically, the last week of June and the entire month of July). My teaching job was extra busy, and I not only tutored two students in reading for a summer clinic, but also took on a private student for the summer. Tutoring kids with dyslexia is fun and worthwhile. It is also creatively demanding (we have a very set curriculum...sort of: 6 section per session, 3 for decoding and 3 for encoding, that must be made interesting and fun). I also wrote two proposals and am nearing completion of a screenplay.

Of course, my daughter decided to come visit last week (I was in the home stretch of the long hard month, but tired and still a little behind). I might have been cranky with the inconvenient timing of her visit, except that something happened to remind me that life is not about plans, or smooth sailing. It is about adjusting to what the day holds, and finding a way to take joy wherever you can. So, just after my daughter arrived from San Francisco for her first visit home in two years, this happened:



In case the picture is too small to see, this is what used to be the outside wall of my mud porch. The guys came to fix the floor, which was rotted from some roof leakage. A day and a half job, tops. Until they saw the extent of the rot and had to rip out the floor, the joists, the beams...they're still not quite finished.

This is how it looked Friday (from the inside):

Work will be done today (or tomorrow...I hope). I'll have a brand new, non-rotted mudporch (for the bargain price of 3x what I was expecting to pay for the new floor). It will need my manual labor to give it: finished flooring, wall insulation, wallboard, paint and shelving.

When they took the mudporch down to...well, mud and three walls, I gave up on trying to be perfect for my hectic last week of July. I did my best. I spent time with my family (I was not the family champ of either Wii Sports or Big Brain Academy, but I still had fun). I waved buh-bye to the plan, and laughed about it (beats the heck out of crying).

When we took our eldest child back to the airport and sent her home, we still did not have a wall between the garage and the mudporch. But we knew we would, sooner or later.

And you know what? I've been struggling with revisions on a book, and I realized that -- just like my mud porch -- sometimes you need to bring the rotted floor down to the foundation, get rid of the rotted wall and support beams, and rebuild from scratch.

I can bounce with security on my new mud porch floor now. Sure, it still needs some paint and finishing, but the room itself is now, and the roof leaks have been discovered and will be fixed so they can't do any more silent damage.

Pretty soon I hope to be able to say the same about the book revisions!

Kelly