Swan Tower

When my parents moved out of my childhood home two years ago, I made my goodbyes to the neighborhood thinking there was no reason I would ever go back there.

Then I realized the path of totality this spring would pass right over my old house.

My best friend's father still lives here, so we got lodgings for the price of some batted eyelashes, a few chores done around the house, me talking to a granddaughter who apparently idolizes the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and some jam and brownies made by my husband. Plane tickets were still expensive, of course (especially since we were uhhhh not on the ball about buying them), but last week we flew down to Dallas in the hopes of seeing the eclipse.

Despite some dire uncertainty, the skies cooperated. Clouds started to drift through around the time the eclipse began and thickened as we approached totality, but just as that phase began, a clear patch opened up, and we saw the eclipse in its full glory.

. . . yeah. In the words of a recent xkcd comic, "A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like somebody broke the sky."

The light doesn't noticeably start to dim until about 50%, and up to maybe 97% or 98%, it still only looks like a thunderstorm is about to roll in. Then there's a sudden and -- if you were an ancient person who didn't know why this was happening -- catastrophic downward slide into darkness, your only illumination coming from the ghostly flare of the corona around the black hole that has eaten the sun. The sky becomes an alien place, twilight hovering overhead while the fringes of the horizon turn to ink. For a few minutes you can look directly upward, no protective glasses needed, watching the wisps of corona dance across distances our brains can't even fathom.

Then a diamond-bright flare piercing the heavens as the sun breaks around the trailing edge of the moon. Within a minute, you're back to a kind of cloudy-seeming day -- an astonishing demonstration of how bright the sun truly is, that even a tiny sliver of it can light our way.

Pictures of an eclipse don't really do it justice. Most of them are close-ups of the sun and moon, which fail to capture the overall effect. The way the world sinks into night for a few minutes out of the ordinary, the sky inverts and the air goes cold and the light becomes otherworldly. A close-up picture doesn't convey why ancient people had so many myths around what was happening, so many fears about why the gods had chosen to take the light away and what must be done to bring it back. Even knowing the orbital mechanics involved, even having a precise measurement of how long it would be before normalcy returned, it was an eerie experience.

I am really, really glad my friend's father took us in, the clouds held off, and I had a chance to witness this.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/P3Buns)

For the first time in my life, I had to report for jury duty recently.

Up until I was twenty-eight, I was excused on account of being a student. After that, I lucked out: on the occasions when I was sent a summons, I wound up not having to report in. But this year, the bullet I've been dodging for fifteen years finally hit me.

And oh, was it very nearly a doozy.

The case in question was a murder trial, and projected to run for seven weeks -- from now into early December. The judge kept optimistically saying they hoped to conclude it more quickly, but given that they also projected testimony to start today and in fact were still wrestling with jury selection when that date rolled around, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that hope.

So yeah: on Tuesday I reported in, sat around for a while, got sent up to a courtroom, filled out a form, and went home, for two and a half hours total. Thursday I was back in the afternoon for the start of voir dire, as the judge began questioning the initial pack of potential jurors. We didn't even get as far as the bit where the prosecuting and defending attorneys asked their questions until Friday, which was an all-day affair that saw eleven of the initial twenty-two dismissed and replaced by a new set who then had to go through the whole process again. Late this morning they finally swore in twelve seated jurors and then started on the alternates . . . and mine was the first name called.

Five minutes later, I was out the door.

Why? Because of my sleep schedule. Since I started writing full time, I've been free to shift to my natural schedule, which has me going to bed circa 3 a.m. and waking up at 11. I've been on that schedule for fifteen years now. If I want to go to sleep earlier, I have to drug myself, and then when I get up I am definitely not firing on all cylinders: if I have a morning flight and I'm trying to stay awake in the boarding area, I might have to read a paragraph several times before the words actually stick in my brain. I didn't even have to get to the part where I was planning to say "if I were on trial for murder, I would not want someone like me for a juror" before the judge dismissed me for reasons of hardship.

I honestly expected I'd meet with more resistance than that. It is entirely possible I am diagnosable with delayed sleep phase disorder, but since I haven't actually been diagnosed, I didn't know how much sympathy I'd get from the judge. And if I were empaneled, I would certainly have done my best -- god knows I am in other respects ideally suited to being stuck in a trial for seven weeks, because I have a life that can accommodate that kind of disruption. But a scenario where I have to sit quietly and pay attention to something, with no ability to talk or move around or be out in the sun or anything else that helps keep me alert when I'm up at a bad hour . . . yeah. I would not have felt great about my ability to pay attention to and evaluate evidence about whether the defendant murdered someone.

There's a tiny part of me that regrets this. In the future I'll know that I can at least attempt to claim hardship on Day One -- I didn't try because the judge didn't list "you work a night shift" as a valid reason -- but while I wasn't super glad to spend multiple days in the courthouse listening to other prospective jurors be questioned, this was my first look at the actual process of selection and voir dire. Partly to keep myself awake, I took copious notes on procedure and what sorts of questions jurors were asked, and a part of me would have been fascinated to see a real-life murder trial (as opposed to the . . . less than accurate depictions we get from TV and movies).

But that fascination would not have been able to keep me focused for the first couple hours of testimony. And so, to the relief of all involved, I will not be spending the next seven weeks as Alternate Juror #1.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/q8Sptx)

Years ago I wrote an essay for my site called "Writer's Block(s)," wherein I said I don't find the term "writer's block" to be helpful.

I stand by that, even though I've now gone through a period where, if I were inclined to use that term, that's what I would have called it.

In 2020 I was hugely productive. Some writers found it very difficult to write last year, but I was in the camp that took refuge from the world by escaping into ones of my own creation. I wrote two novels (The Liar's Knot with Alyc, and Night Parade on my own), plus ten short stories, three flash, one fanfic, one short story for L5R, various short adventures for Sea of Legends, and my ongoing Patreon essays.

Given that, it wasn't surprising that after I rounded the corner into 2021, things slacked off. I'd been working really hard, after all, and you can't do that nonstop forever. I'd already decided to slow my roll on short fiction because I was writing it faster than I could sell it, so taking a break from that wasn't a problem. Besides, I had The Mask of Mirrors out in January and Night Parade two weeks later, so there was a stretch of literal months where I was doing promotional events every week, usually two or three of them. That eats brain and energy and I know it, so giving myself time off from producing something new was good self-care.

But.

Round about late February, I realized my ability to brain creatively was not regenerating. I'd taken two months off and I still had no more energy for writing than I had before; if anything, I had less. I'd written my final L5R story and a couple of pieces of flash, but for the former I had the benefit of all the existing story momentum and the latter were . . . not impressive. More importantly, I had a story due to an anthology, and I was having the worst time getting it done.

Well, there could be multiple reasons for that. And I knew perfectly well that I had a plot problem in the story which I hadn't yet solved -- so naturally I couldn't move forward on it. I made myself sit down and I figured out a way around that problem, which let me write a little more . . . but then I ran into a new problem, which slammed me into a second wall.

And then I reached a point where even trying to make myself think about the problem induced a flinch reaction in my brain: god, no, please don't make me.

This was . . . not good.

If you saw the day in mid-March where I asked on Twitter for cute cat pics and the like, that was the day I realized I wasn't simply tired, and I wasn't simply stuck on a bit of plot and everything would be fine once I sorted that out. Something had gone wrong in my head, that merely sitting back and waiting wasn't going to fix.

But the gist of that original essay is that calling the issue "writer's block" accomplishes nothing. It's a description of symptoms, not a diagnosis of cause, much less a cure. I had to figure out why my head had gone wrong, on a global level that went well beyond being in a plot corner with a single story.

I mean, pandemic. That was a pretty obvious culprit. But "pandemic" wasn't really an answer, either, because there was a pandemic before and I still wrote, and also what exactly about the pandemic was the bit stabbed into my brain? There's been discussions about the lack of novelty involved in being locked down, which can be particularly deadly to creative work; that seemed like a good angle to investigate. My first-line response was to spend a whole day doing things like working on a jigsaw puzzle, playing piano, and otherwise engaging in activities I hadn't done in ages, which definitely helped to lift my immediate mood, even if it didn't fix everything.

What about environmental factors? I figured winter had something to do with it -- I've known for decades that I don't respond well to a lack of sunlight -- but merely rounding the corner into daylight saving time hadn't brought the improvement I hoped for, so I got more aggressive about seeking out light. We recently got a swing for our back patio, and the weather was nice enough for me to sit out there, so I started making a point of doing that every day (light + a new place to sit, i.e. novelty). In fact, the trainer I see has a list of elements that play into good health -- things like nutrition, sleep, and so forth -- and sunlight is on that list, so my "homework" from him for a while was not to lift weights or anything like that, but to get at least twenty minutes on the patio each day.

I also started taking a vitamin D supplement, on the theory that a deficiency in that nutrient has caused sluggishness in multiple people of my acquaintance, and overdosing on the stuff basically requires you to down a whole bottle in one go, so why not supplement for a while and see if that helped.

And that story I was stuck on? Well, I had a deadline, so I did have to push through, rather than just shelving it until I felt better. But I talked to Alyc, who not only helped me work out the problem I'd been stuck on, but made a suggestion for another detail that wound up fixing a problem I hadn't even gotten to yet. Which unclogged the brain ducts enough for me to get the story done, with a small extension from the editor that gave me time enough away to revise the draft as it needed. So yes, "fix the story" was part of the solution, along with other things. (Full disclosure: I held off on making this post until I heard back from the editor with revisions, because a part of me was afraid that I'd turned in something visibly sub-par. But he's delighted with it, so I feel much more comfortable publicly discussing the problems I had along the way.)

So here we are, roughly two months after I started trying to figure out what was off in my head and how to fix it. How are things going? Well, in April I finally rewrote a story I'd drafted in 2019 and had meant to redo ever since then (the idea was solid, but the execution was meh at best). And I also popped out a piece of flash I'm quite pleased with. And I started revising another story whose polishing I've been putting off. More pertinently, one evening recently I decided I'd done plenty of work during the day and sat down to read . . . only to wind up scribbling notes and even writing material for a side project I've got going on. In other words, I was excited enough about that project to spontaneously generate ideas for it when I wasn't trying to extract them.

That's what my brain looks like when it's working right.

Now, I will be the first in line to say that I'm lucky: this problem wound up being relatively quick to resolve. I do not appear to have developed major depressive disorder or anything else that would require medical intervention to fix. My home remedies sufficed, at least for now, and they sufficed in a fairly short time -- call it a few weeks before I started feeling like I was on my way out of the pit, and a bit over a month before I felt like I was back on my feet. Not everybody has that easy a time of it.

But I stand by what I said before. If I were to rewrite "Writer's Block(s)" today (which I may do), it would be to change the presentation of the points there, not the points themselves. I had to dig past the surface of "I'm having trouble writing" and even the surface of "well, pandemic" to get to the potential causes and the changes that might help mitigate them. My first attempted solution (taking time off) didn't work; okay, what should I try next? If it isn't just low-grade burnout, if it isn't all the promotional stuff taking my time and energy, then what is it? What path might get me back to where I want to be?

We have to ask ourselves these questions. Simply waiting and hoping the problem will go away on its own will only fix a minor subset of the possible causes; some of the others may get worse, as the failure to produce exacerbates the stress. Sometimes you need to crack the whip over your own head, and sometimes that will only drive you deeper into the hole. Sometimes you won't know what works and what doesn't until you try.

But you can try, and eventually -- hopefully -- find your way back out again.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/E1Yarp)

I am resurfacing to let you know that “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review” finally has an audio version! Brought to you by the lovely folks at Cast of Wonders, including the inestimable Alasdair Stuart, who does a splendid turn as Mr. Benjamin Talbot, F.P.C.

In the meanwhile . . . yeah, it’s been dead around here, hasn’t it? In early February I went to Seattle to teach a one-day workshop at Clarion West on writing fight scenes, and while I was there I seem to have picked up a cold that knocked me flat for a solid week. When I picked myself up from that, I found out a hacker had apparently compromised my laptop, necessitating a complete re-OS for security. I’m still in the process of getting everything set up again after that. And then — because February was a month, let me tell you — somebody attempted to steal the catalytic converter out of our Prius while my husband and I were at the dojo. They didn’t succeed, possibly because they got scared off . . . but they sawed through a hose and partway through the exhaust pipe. So now we’re waiting to hear from insurance whether the repair bill would be high enough to warrant just totaling the car.

Yeah.

Now, I should make it clear that this is not an apocalyptic problem for us. We’re annoyed, because the Prius has been trundling along pretty well for going on thirteen years now; it’s long since paid off, and life without making regular car payments has been nice. We can afford to make new car payments, though, and I think my husband’s irritation is tempered by the possibility that we might go from having a hybrid to a fully electric car (something he’s been keeping his eye on for a while, though we weren’t intending to buy any time soon). Still — it isn’t fun.

And my February was really not as full of productivity as it probably needed to be. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to go attempt to make March better on that count.

Quince is one of those things I’d seen referenced in historical literature, but had never encountered in person. Although Wikipedia tells me it’s eaten fairly regularly in some parts of Europe, and there’s absolutely nothing preventing it being grown in the U.S., you’re not going to find it at your average supermarket here.

I suspect that’s in part because you mostly can’t snack on it raw, the way you can with apples and pears and oranges and bananas and all the other things commonly found in the produce section. You either have to cook it, or you have to wait for it to blet — that is, to go overripe and sort of (but not exactly) rotten. The same is true of medlars, another fruit we’ve largely forgotten. Also some varieties of persimmons; I suspect the one time I tried to eat ripe persimmon I may have been eating the wrong kind, as I found it unpleasantly astringent. But those I’m seeing around more these days — though still not at the supermarket. Persimmon trees aren’t uncommon in northern California, so not only the farmers’ market but possibly one’s neighbors may have their fruit on offer.

But if waiting for fruit to sort of but not exactly rot isn’t your idea of an appetizing approach, there’s always cooking. Which is why quince has come into my life: one stall at our farmers’ market sells it, and last year my husband (who makes jam) ventured to make quince paste. It’s very strong-tasting stuff — but if you pair it with manchego cheese (itself quite strong-tasting), a strange alchemy happens and you wind up with something amazing.

All well and good. But this year he wound up with a few extra quinces, not quite enough to make another batch of paste. So instead he decided to make quince-and-apple pie for Thanksgiving. It’s quite nice! Quinces are related to apples anyway, and they combine well. Which is good when your husband decides he’s got too much quince for one pie, but enough apple to fill it out and make two pies.

. . . during the Thanksgiving when your sister-in-law already has a store-bought apple pie and a small cherry pie, and is making a pumpkin pie. O_O Five pies (well, four and a half) for nine people. Um.

There are, of course, other things one can do with quince. Like poach them in sugar water with some spices. One might possibly suggest to one’s husband that this would have been more sensible than making a second quince-and-apple pie. One might not quite buy one’s husband’s argument that you really want larger chunks of quince for that, and he’d already sliced it all thin, so there was nothing to be done but make a second pie.

But hey. There’s always next year. And maybe I’ll find some medlars for him to poach instead.

I’ve spent the last two days holed up in our den, which the lowest part of our split-level house and rather cavelike — therefore the coolest room we’ve got. Our thermostat caps out at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, so I can’t say for sure what temperature it’s been in our dining room, but whatever the answer is, the top floor — which holds both my office and the bedroom — was hotter. Much hotter.

I grew up in Dallas. Highs in the high 90s were a totally normal feature of my childhood summers. But that was a place where nearly everybody has air conditioning. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area? Not so much. And living in a house without A/C means that when our temperatures spike, the experience is very, very different.

The extent of that difference got hammered home to me yesterday, when I’d been at the (air-conditioned) chiropractor’s office. When I walked outside in the late afternoon, it felt . . . not nice, exactly. But familiar. And pleasant enough. Yes, it was very warm, but my subconscious said “that’s okay.” Which was very different from how I’d felt leaving my house an hour and a half earlier; then I was going from a sweltering indoors to a sweltering outdoors, barely any contrast at all, and vastly more unpleasant. I know I’ve lost soem of my heat tolerance (I used to do marching band in Texas, navy blue wool uniform and all), but a lot of it is also just the artificial environment. Give me A/C, and I still don’t mind the heat all that much. Without it, though . . .

Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about low-tech measures against the heat, from keeping blinds closed that we normally open for light (and angling them upwards to reduce the amount of direct sunlight that enters the room), to occupying myself with books instead of heat-emitting laptops, to the dance of opening windows and turning on fans once the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside.

I've lost my ability to concentrate.

I think a lot of us have. We live with countless electronic devices that are constantly demanding our attention, beeping alerts and notifications and even without that there's a little niggling part of our minds that wonders if we have any new email or anybody has posted something to that forum or surely we ought to take a look at Twitter, don't pay attention to that thing, pay attention to me. But only in bite-size doses, because there are a hundred other things you could be checking and probably should.

Even without that, we've got a society that encourages multi-tasking -- despite the mounting pile of evidence that it isn't good. Multi-tasking does not, contrary to what we've been told, make us more productive. It makes us less so, because we're devoting less of our attention to each thing, and we pay a cognitive cost every time we switch our focus. And part of that cognitive cost is that not switching gets harder, even as it drains us.

(True fact: just now, my phone rang a soft little alert. It's taking effort not to look and see what that was for.)

I can tell this is taking a toll on me because I can feel it in my work. Writing is not, in its ideal conditions, something you do for five minutes here and ten minutes there. It benefits from sustained attention, from getting myself into the state psychologists refer to as "flow," where I stop thinking about the world around me and instead sink into the zone for an extended period of time. I can't get there if I'm tabbing over to look at my email every time I pause to consider my next sentence, if I'm keeping a portion of my mind attached to the discussion I'm having on a forum or whatever and breaking away to update that. It's an exaggeration to say I've lost my ability to concentrate . . . but I know it has declined, and substantially so.

That's why I'm taking steps to fix it.

My steps are twofold, at least so far. The first is to get back to meditating: I got into the habit of doing that for a while in 2015 (true fact again: I made myself just drop some square brackets there and check the year after I finished typing this post, because I needed to check my email to find out which year it was, and that threatened to distract me from this), but I fell out of it after a while, and now I'm working to make it regular practice again. Meditation, mindfulness, learning to let go of all the little dancing monkey thoughts that want my attention NOW NOW NOW -- that helps.

The other, weirdly, is to watch TV.

TV as a tool of concentration? Yes -- when you put it in the context of what I was doing before. See, I've gotten into the bad habit of only really listening to TV, while I play solitaire or sudoku or something on my tablet. The result is that I only give the show maybe half my attention.

But when I started watching the Chinese drama Nirvana in Fire, the combination of subtitles + intricate politics meant I couldn't get away with that. If I tried to focus on something else at the same time, glancing up to catch the subtitles as they skittered past, I wound up not even knowing who half the people were and what was going on. The only way to understand that show, let alone appreciate it, was to put things down and devote my full attention to the screen.

Subtitled shows are great for this, but I'm managing to extend that habit to English-language TV, as well. And you know what?

I'm enjoying it more.

And it's getting easier to leave the tablet closed.

What other tricks do you all have for encouraging yourself to pay attention to one thing at a time? What helps you keep your ability to concentrate? I know some people shut down their internet connection entirely while writing, and there are lots of programs out there which exist to block other programs so you can work, but I'm also interested in the non-technological tricks -- the things that are just about structuring your life in ways that help you focus.

I’ll be having surgery on my wrist tomorrow, which means I won’t be typing large quantities for a little while — not sure how long. I’ve got a couple of posts scheduled already, but apart from that, I may be scarce around here until I’m able to use that hand again.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

A while back the artist Robin Scott, a friend of mine, released a project called The Urban Tarot.

I want to talk about how awesome this deck is — and I especially want to address those of you for whom the “tarot” part isn’t much of an attraction, but the “urban” part might be. Let’s start by quoting from Robin’s introduction in the guidebook:

Too often we are told that magic and wisdom belong only to the forgotten forests, the places untouched by human hands, and to ages long lost to memory.

I reject this idea. I look around my world, and I see the beauty, the wonder, the magic in the metropolis, the power under the pavement.

“The metropolis” there isn’t generic. It’s New York City, where Robin lives — and that’s exactly what draws me to the Urban Tarot. I’ve been meaning to make a post about the way urban fantasy has the potential to inscribe the landscape around you with an additional layer of meaning: it’s something I tried to do in the Changeling game I ran, and it showed up in the Onyx Court books, too, which were inspired by that game. The urban fantasy novels I like often do this kind of thing, not just taking place in Generica City or the Hollywood version of San Francisco or wherever, but making use of place on a more detailed, meaningful level. It isn’t just an urban fantasy thing — it isn’t even a new thing; Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places talks about the link between Western Apache folklore and the landscape around their communities — but it works especially well there because the world the story describes is ours, or at least closely adjacent enough to ours that we can feel the resonance.

The Urban Tarot does this beautifully. It ties the cards in with the landscape and the people and events of New York City — the public library, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge during Hurricane Sandy — and it pushes back against the idea that cities aren’t magic, that the kind of meaning we read into the world around us back when that world was rural can’t be retained in the modern day. It rethinks the old archetypes of the tarot into a context you and I can recognize: the Empress is feeding a baby in a high chair, the Eight of Wands shows a cyclist delivering a pizza, the Prince of Swords is a hacker. Even if you don’t have any interest in the tarot as such, you could do worse than to feed your urban fantasy brain with these cards and their associated writeups.

And the artwork is, in my opinion, gorgeous. Each card is built out of a kind of textural collage, abstracting the image without losing its recognizable form. I have the Princess of Swords (aka The Activist) on my wall. I liked the art enough that when I backed the Kickstarter, I chose to go for the level where I could model for one of the cards — no, I’m not telling you which; you’ll have to find out for yourself. 😉 Robin and I struck a deal wherein I wrote a piece of flash fiction for the guidebook, riffing off a location in the city she wasn’t able to work into the deck; that’s how much I wanted to support this project.

You can buy the Urban Tarot itself, or prints of any of the cards. I strongly encourage you all to at least go take a look, and appreciate what Robin has put together.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

So as many of you know, my husband had ankle surgery recently. He’s on crutches, putting no weight on the affected foot . . . for 8-10 weeks.

That’s a long time.

And while I can’t rightly compare my own difficulties to his, it’s going to be a long time for both of us. All of a sudden, I’m carrying most of the household on my own shoulders, because he can’t. Many tasks that I’m used to sharing with him (laundry, taking out the trash, etc) are now mine alone. Things that didn’t use to be tasks suddenly are: I have to be available when he goes to bed, because while it’s possible for him to drag his crutches and the pillow we’re using for his leg up the stairs as he slides up them — they’re too narrow for him to crutch up — it’s a pain in the neck, and much easier if I carry those for him. Some tasks that I would normally let slide for a little while now have to be kept 100% up-to-date; the ant infestation plaguing this entire city isn’t related to his surgery, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have to wash the dishes right away or risk finding a conga line of ants making their way across our kitchen to whatever I left out, and I have to keep the living room constantly tidy or he won’t be able to cross it safely on crutches.

But. My friends, I had a stroke of genius, and it already promises to do wonders for my sanity.

We’ve been making extensive use of stools and folding chairs in various places so he can kneel on them(1) while he showers or washes his hands or whatever. I found myself wondering whether it would help to put one of those in the kitchen, too — and then I thought, no. What we want in the kitchen is one of these.

It arrived this afternoon. Today, for the first time since his surgery, my husband scrubbed some dishes. He loaded the dishwasher and emptied it, too; he put dinner into the oven and took it out again. He can’t do everything; kneeling for too long is uncomfortable, and he has to be careful that it doesn’t roll out from under him and drop him into an unexpected split. But he can function. He can probably manage to bake some brownies if he wants to — and if you know my husband, you know how much that means to him.

And me? I was giddy with delight. The sheer fact of knowing that I don’t have to do everything kitchen-related is a relief all out of proportion to its actual size. Sure, I’m still facing another two months of having to carry his plate to him and then carry it back when he’s done, because you can’t really do that on crutches and the stool doesn’t transition well to carpet. But he can make his own sandwich for lunch without having to balance on one foot while he does it, even if I’m the one who carries it to the couch. He can wash dishes, which is a task that normally falls about 70-80% in his bailiwick instead of mine. He can prepare simple dinners. All of these are things I expected to have to do myself for weeks to come and now . . . now I know that he can help.

I’m well aware that the situation I have with him is business as usual for a lot of people. If you’re a single mother with a toddler, you’ve got to carry every bit as much weight, without the compensation of a charge who continually thanks you and can at least accomplish tasks that don’t require standing. And they don’t sell products on Amazon that will magically turn your toddler into more of a functioning adult. But if you ever find yourself dealing with a similar situation, remember the merits of a simple, flat-topped, caster-mounted stool. It can work wonders.

(1) Some of you will now be thinking of those kneeling scooters you’ve been seeing around lately. We rented one, but they don’t corner well at all, and our place is too small for him to easily navigate indoors on that thing. It’s useful only for when he leaves the house; the rest of the time, it’s crutches, which are far more maneuverable.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.