Back to Blogging

Yup, that last post was almost three years ago. I’ve just been busy. I don’t advertise this blog or do anything with it anymore. It’s always just been a place to speak my mind where I don’t have to argue with anybody much. A “little birdie” told me this morning that picking back up the habit would help with my current anxiety and stress issues. Today’s post is going to be a bit of a brain dump.

I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d been busy. Even before the last post, I hadn’t been posting much. In 2018, I opened Weavers of the Web, and I’ve been very busy running that ever since. I graduated from Woolston-Steen Theological Seminary in 2019 and almost immediately came back to teach; at the time, this was mostly to free up other teachers so the Masters program could start up again, but I find I do enjoy teaching and hope to continue.

Meanwhile, in 2018 we found out about Penrickton Center for Blind Children, and after six months of looking for loopholes and filling out paperwork, Kender started there in May of 2019. That added driving back and forth from Mason to Taylor as often as four days a week, plus me just stuck in Taylor while Kender was at Penrickton. I still had my other kids at home, although the triplets had started moving out. Liam and Cas were still in high school, and Jarod was still in junior high. Trying to supervise them while spending so much of my time on the road or across the state was difficult.

Fall of 2019, somebody talked me into taking up the job of Editor at Wicca Press. And of course that job has exploded as I try to do things right.

2020 came, COVID hit, and Weavers lost their physical home. I started pushing fundraising and outreach for Weavers in order to finance purchasing a new home. This definitely increased the amount of time I spent on Weavers activities.

For some reason…ok, I know why. I did this to support the church, which is literally my life’s mission and work. I decided to start a store. The idea is that the store income will help pay rent, and that will help pay for the property that the church is going to buy. I tried to start it debt-free, thinking that I could use a drop-shipping model while gradually building on-hand inventory. Nope; thanks to COVID primarily, most of the suppliers for things I wanted to sell couldn’t ship in a timely fashion. So I decided to open a physical store.

Last month, I found a beautiful space and signed a lease. I have some students now, and they are helping, but the store is mostly my baby and my responsibility. I’m still not making any money from the store or from the church, and only a token amount from the seminary. Right now, I’m trying to handle marketing for the store, purchasing inventory for the store, finding insurance for the store, setting up the store space while leaving room for church activities, planning/marketing/running the church activities (including weekly discussions/rituals, sabbat rituals, and social/fundraiser events), teaching at the seminary, teaching my personal students, preparing for Kender to go back to homeschooling in a couple of weeks as he ages out of Penrickton and we have no good local school options, supervising Jarod’s schoolwork, handling paying the bills and trying to clean the house, getting new books and games published through a more professional publishing system that I still haven’t quite learned yet, picking back up my personal exercise program (because it hurts too much NOT to do it), and trying to find time to relax and spend time alone and with my spouse amidst all of this. Because that “little birdie” also just busted my van to force me to take a vacation last weekend, and warned me that if I didn’t take it as a vacation, he would do something worse.

So I have to relax. I’ve been reserving an hour or two every night for just chilling, reading or playing games or knitting or whatever I feel like. I am making sure that whatever I do at this time is what I want to do, with absolutely no feeling of “should” or “need” or (gods forbid!) “productivity.” I haven’t been knitting much, which is slightly guilt-inducing because I’ve dropped out of Sock Madness, yet I have all this yarn from my friends at Stardust that I was showcasing. I’ll still knit the socks and show them off, but it’s gotta be for fun, not for competition.

It’s been harder to turn off my brain. I’ve had trouble sleeping through the night since we got back from our unexpected vacation. When my anxiety kicks up, my brain turns on before my alarm goes off and starts grinding through the lists and worries and checks. I got a little more sleep this morning by finding a dream I could fall back into. But I haven’t been getting enough good, solid sleep because of the anxiety, and that’s making my pain go up, and the hot-then-chilly Michigan spring weather isn’t helping.

He was right, though. Writing this down did help. I may keep it up. That will turn this back into more of a semi-public diary than a blog. Not a real diary, though; I’m not going to put everything out here. But working through these things that are spinning in my mind is helpful.

Thanks for listening.

Published by solinox

I am a Wiccan priestess, a libertarian mother of triplets plus three, a wife and homeschooling mom to blind and autistic children, a fiber artist, and a Jane of All Trades, always learning and seeking to help.

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