I got a phone call this evening informing me that my handy man is ready to make a house call, which means Phase Two of our tiny apartment renovation is about to begin.

Cue happy dance.

It is without much heartache at all that I bid adieu to my virtual classrooms, though it is with quite a bit of gratitude. I am fortunate to have been able to continue working throughout these twelve weeks of quarantine, even if the work hardly resembled my actual job.

I miss my students, I miss teaching in a physical classroom, I miss the energy of our campus. But, it’s Sunday night, and I am keenly aware of how much more relaxed I am than were I to be faced with an alarm clock and a rush to get everyone out the door in time for school tomorrow.

The chaos of a Monday morning is something I do not miss in the least.

Just four more days left before students are released for summer break and we teachers turn our attention to report writing and “planning” for next year. I use the term planning loosely, because who knows what’s going to happen next week let alone next September? Nevertheless, we are attempting to forge ahead with good intentions and lot of hope.

As I personally reflect on this crazy intense school year and contemplate what’s next, one thing is for certain – I love to make stuff with my hands.

It’s a little bit like racing to the finish line at the moment. Today has been a frenzy of shooting, editing, uploading, posting, then repeating the process for each of my classes and I’m still not quite through all of them. So. Close.

The irony, of course, is that now that I (sort of) have the hang of the whole thing, the school year is ending.

Six sleeps left!

For the past couple weeks, I have been planning to buy my mister a grill in honor of both Father’s Day, and the fact that we have settled into this tiny apartment palace of ours with the intention of remaining through the end of next June at minimum. Finishing off our outdoor space in time for the summer season seemed like an excellent way to commemorate these two important milestones.

But, when I saw fresh peaches for sale at the market yesterday, I knew there was no way I could wait almost three more weeks for our first outdoor dinner. The moment I got home from the market, I sent B out on a reconnaissance mission to determine the grill he’d like to own. A little more than two hours later, we were all on our way back home from the Home Depot with a shiny new grill stuffed into the trunk of our hybrid.

We’ll dine al fresco for the second time this evening, and I can assure you, it will not be the last. Also, if you’ve never grilled a fresh peach, then I just don’t know what you are waiting for. You will thank me later, I promise.

It quite possibly goes without saying that I’ve never done a photo project like this before. When I was thinking about how best to accomplish documenting a day in the life, I decided to break my day up into hours and to try and capture a few shots within each block of time. This seemed to work pretty well throughout most of the day, but I found that the night time hours kind of ran into one another. I was up for longer than the photos perhaps reflect, though I was essentially doing the same activity – shooting video tutorials and uploading them to my channel. And knitting.

Overall, I’m pleased with the images I ended up with. It took me a few days to figure out how to get them from my phone to my computer, and then a few more days still to work my way through them, editing when necessary, before bringing them into this space.

There are a lot of images, and while I thought about letting them speak for themselves, I chose to offer a bit of context to each.

6-7 AM

7-8 AM

8-9 AM

9-10 AM

10-11 AM

11-12 PM

1-2 PM

2-3 PM

3-4 PM

4-5 PM

5-6 PM

6-7 PM

7-8 PM

8-9 PM

9-10 PM

________________________________________________________

These images document Wednesday, 5/26/20. All photos were taken with my iPhone 8 Plus. Any processing was done through the editing tool directly in Microsoft Photo.

These images may not be used for any purposes without my express written consent. All rights reserved.

The best part of being the writer, editor, and publisher of this here chronicle is that only I can determine a deadline. The worst part of being the writer, editor, and publisher is that it’s a lot of work. Now that I’m adding photographer to my list of titles, the workload has increased dramatically.

After getting a little wound up about the fact that I couldn’t get some of the photos to upload, and then further wound up about how long the whole process was taking, I stepped back (and into that screaming hot bath), and realized that the deadline I had given myself was flexible, not fixed. It made little to no difference if I shared the post on Tuesday as I had planned, or on Friday when it is more likely to be ready. The point of this photo project is not to stress myself out about turnaround time, the point is to document my day with a camera and then share the images here.

All of which to say, I’m learning.

In unrelated news, I framed two pieces of art today that my handsome husband promptly helped me to hang. That might not sound like much of an accomplishment, but when each of the pictures were drawn when the artists were four years old, and the artists are now fourteen and nearly seventeen years old, and ever since these drawings were created you’ve been keeping them in a folder with the intention of framing them but never have? Talk about a momentous occasion, and on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday.

My little guy took a pretty respectable tumble during our walk to the mailbox this afternoon. He’s been tenderly nursing his road rash for the past few hours and I’m going to console him with an episode of Curious George, which is ordinarily considered weekday contraband.

I suppose it’s been an extraordinary day after all.

I spent a solid chunk of time this morning formatting the first installment of Project 26, and it’s still not ready. This is probably why there aren’t a lot of photos in this space to begin with; it’s a rather involved process that is cumbersome for me to navigate.

Which is exactly why I need to be doing this project. It’s not as much about the photos as it is about me getting uncomfortable and learning something new. Perhaps a few months from now, I’ll look back and laugh at the many days it took for me to get this first post ready. Right now, though, I’m not laughing.

To keep myself from throwing my laptop against the wall in frustration, I’m stepping away from the screen and into a screaming hot bath, which is my answer to almost any problem. Nothing is as bad after a twenty minute soak, not even uncooperative computer code.

We made it to June!

Teachers and students alike look forward to this month, anticipate its arrival, and celebrate like mad once it’s finally here. June is when things get a little intense, but then they stop. Full stop. And it is glorious.

Yes, a little anticlimactic. Yes, terrible things are happening and it is important that you are talking to your loved ones about privilege and its many forms. Yes, we are beginning our twelfth week in quarantine.

AND.

It is the month we will officially finish this strange school year, and herald the kids each rising to a new grade, the littlest one for the very first time. We will exchange our alarm clocks in favor of late nights and long mornings. We will celebrate Father’s Day. We will officially welcome summer. We will (hopefully!) move our vegetable starts to their outdoor beds.

These things are a given. Other than the garden which I hope grows into an annual hobby, these are part in parcel with the passing of time, events that occur in accordance with the natural rhythm of the year. In any other case, I’d add the County Fair to the list of givens, but sadly, that has been postposed.

Beyond the stuff that will happen regardless, is the stuff I want to make happen. The stuff I want to work toward. The good stuff, the challenging stuff.

For me, this month is all about committing to taking care of myself, inside and out. Period, end of discussion.

I’m also going to:

-sew a skirt with serged seams

-ship out all open orders, and then

-relaunch my online shop

-keep writing

-take long walks after dinner

-read a fiction book

-ideally on the beach

-or at the park

-finish that sweater, already

-watch a movie with the big kids

-build a balance beam with Roux

A new month that begins on a Monday is always a little extra exciting, if you ask me. I’m ready, June. Let’s do this.

Eleven weeks down. And the month of May, which undoubtedly was a pivotal period for me, forever distinguished as the time I got my shit together.

The first phase of our tiny apartment renovation concluded just a little over two weeks ago, and since that time, I have gone on to complete a slew of other projects that had either lingered unfinished, or had never gotten started in the first place. I’ve got new ideas brewing and plans in place to revamp my little online shop.

My focus for the next two weeks is entirely on school and wrapping up the year as best we can given the unfortunate circumstances presented by distance learning. Ordinarily, I’d be counting down the days, celebrating this as the second to last Sunday of the school year, my gaze set firmly upon the long and lazy summer days ahead, but…it all seems so terribly anticlimactic.

I was exactly between Roux’s age and Jade’s age when the Rodney King riots took place. Growing up in Los Angeles, these were very significant events in my childhood. Not because I was anywhere near the riots – I only ever saw the televised footage – but because I was so close and yet so far away from them. I remember that so distinctly, and I wasn’t yet ten.

Nearly thirty years later, it seems not much has changed. I’m painfully aware of the privilege I have sitting here in my comfortable bedroom rambling on about my goals and my creative adventures. I have never been a “take it to the streets” kind of protestor, I have always been more of a practical activist. I do my best to raise my children to be kind, to be aware of themselves and others, and to do their part to help those in need. I strive to examine my own perspective and to actively seek out learning opportunities.

Tomorrow we step into a brand new month, an invitation to turn the calendar page and start fresh. I’ve got my priorities outlined, the very best of intentions, and a whole lot of hope for the future.

For about as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. I have wanted to be other things, too – a dancer, an actress, a teacher, a mother – and in many respects I have accomplished each of these ambitions. At one point or another, with one exception, I have earned money doing exactly those things I mentioned.

The exception, of course, is mother. I have yet to be paid for my work in this field.

Yes, I have been paid to write. Not anything spectacular, really, just web copy, but nonetheless it was a validating to add copywriter to my resume.

What makes a writer? This is a question I frequently ask myself. The only answer I can come up with is painfully simple – a writer is one who writes. A writer is not a person who is paid to write, and a writer is not someone who thinks about writing, or talks about writing, or fantasized about being a writer. A writer is someone who sits down and does the work of writing words.

Seems simple enough and yet almost every writer I know will say that the sitting down to write is often the hardest part. Personally, I know this to be a challenge. I also know, though, that writing is like a muscle. The more I write, the easier it is for me to write.

Perhaps it goes without saying that writing, as with any skill, requires consistent practice in order to develop. I suppose the trouble with writing is that it fundamentally requires something that is not often mentioned, something that has nothing to do with syntax or cadence.

Writing requires ideas. More than that, writing requires an ability to distill those ideas into clearly formed thoughts that can be translated into sentences. At its very core, writing is organized thinking.

In that case, I would argue that, for me, the hardest part about writing is not the sitting down to write. The hardest part about writing is generating the spark that transforms the tiny blips of incoherent nonsense in my brain into concepts I can then attempt to name. For me, the practice is far less about developing a relationship with words, and much more about cultivating a dialogue with my thoughts.

Over the past thirty days, I have managed to sit down every day and write something with the intention of publishing it here. This is not the first time I have issued myself this challenge and every time I do, I am always reminded of how valuable it is for me to maintain this daily habit. I plan to keep at it, with no real objective other than to remain dedicated to showing up and sharing something I have written.

Because, I want to be am a writer.