Weekly Mileage #273 and a College Graduation

Monday I slept in a bit since I was still recovering from the convention, then I started reorganizing the shipping container. It’s been on my to-do list for months, but I just haven’t had the time and energy. It was a super hot and humid day, so it really wasn’t the best time to do it, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. The wood floor boards are retaining moisture and I saw a mouse in the container Thursday when I was getting stuff for the convention- both of which had to be addressed asap.

While I was out there, I put together a shelf unit I bought a year ago for the container. It now holds all my boxes of plastic bags of various sizes. I re-the stacked boxes of toolkits and stitching ponies and my bins with various items in them. Some of the boxes had grease and moisture on the outside from the floorboards, but it hadn’t seeped through to the inner boxes, thankfully. I put plastic dropcloths down before putting the boxes and bins on them, which will hopefully reduce the moisture and grease issue. I also cleaned up mouse droppings and set some traps. Now all my business materials are on one long side of the container, instead of both sides. Household storage items are on the other side and still need to be organized, but it was my business materials I was most concerned about, so at least that’s done.

The organization work was split into two sessions because I had to pause, shower, and change part way through to take Sunshine and River to the orthodontist. Sunshine for a retainer mold, River to get his rubber bands. After we returned, I changed back into gross sweaty clothes and finished the job. I had to shower again before I took Sunshine to Scouts that evening.

Tuesday we had music lessons and then I rested. Moving all those heavy boxes in high heat and humidity was not good for my body and I was still feeling wiped out. After resting a bit I prepped some orders for shipping before we went to karate class.

Wednesday I had my accountability call, caught up on emails, etc. I also spent way too long figuring out how to retrieve contact info for people who’d entered my giveaways at the convention. Saturday I realized that I’d set the form to double opt-in (they have to go to their email and click again) and had changed it to single opt-in, but the issue affected the vast majority of the people who entered my giveaways. I knew I could see at least some of the contact info, but I wasn’t sure how to actually access it. After a lot of combing through the help pages of my email provider, I finally found someone else who’d had the same issue and the solution that helped them worked for me as well.

Thursday Sunshine had to go back to the orthodontist to get her final retainer, then I did some pdf editing for email newsletter freebies and researched replacement skylights for our RV shower. We had a branch fall on it a few months ago and it’s past time to replace the patched-with-a-plastic-trash-bag-broken-skylight.

I took Sunshine to karate that evening. She’s going as often as she can so she can get her attendance stripes by the end of the month. We went as a family Tuesday, Jeremy took her to class Wednesday night, I took her Thursday, and we’ll all go as a family Friday. It’s a lot, but it’ll keep us all on track to still graduate this cycle. We thought about skipping the cycle, but decided to try to complete it anyway.

Friday Jeremy’s brother arrived super early (3am, I think) to stay for a week or so. His college graduation is this weekend in DC.

That morning I hopped on a webinar that my accountability partner was doing. She shared some interesting marketing info that I need to incorporate into my business.

I did a bit more research on RV skylights- I hadn’t measured the one in our RV when I was looking at skylights on Thursday, and none of the ones I had found would actually fit our RV. Naturally. Rather frustrating.

I did find a site that makes skylights to a wide variety of specifications, so I ended up ordering from them. Hopefully they don’t take too long to arrive. I had to buy two- an inner and an outer, since both were cracked when the branch hit it. When I was up on the roof measuring the skylight, I could tell that despite our patch efforts, there is some water damage around the skylight. And a stick that was leaning on the roof at the front of the RV wasn’t just leaning, but had punctured the roof. Joy. One of these days we’ll have to peel off the roofing and fix all the water damage as best we can before putting a new roofing layer on. Need to figure out where to buy it and how much it’ll cost….

I paid bills and ran the numbers for the next month or so- I’m just not sure how we’re going to come up with an extra 3 grand to pay for gas for a roadtrip to Idaho and back in July. Gas prices have skyrocketed in the last couple months and they probably won’t go down anytime soon. We’d already decided to not tow the Camry, which will improve the gas mileage a little, but it’ll still be at least 3 grand just for the gas. We just don’t have that kind of wiggle room in the budget right now, so we may not make it out west this year. We’d miss seeing everyone, but we’d have a less frantic schedule this summer, so it wouldn’t all be bad. Sunshine would have more time to finish her coursework for karate (she’d still need to pass everything off early, but would have two more weeks to do everything) and we wouldn’t have three very long days of driving to get home in time for her to go to FSY. She’s still finishing her schoolwork for the year, so two more weeks to do that also wouldn’t be bad.

Friday evening we all went to karate, which made it Sunshine’s fourth day in a row of karate. She’d hurt her foot Tuesday practicing something with Jeremy and four days of karate did not help her foot heal faster. Thankfully she’s got almost 4 days off before the next class, so we’ll do some low-impact practicing and try to let her foot rest.

I had the beginnings of a migraine start midafternoon- nausea and slight dizziness- and laying down didn’t help unfortunately. The spinning back fists we learned and practiced in karate class also didn’t help. I went to bed early to lay on the BioMat to try to relax my neck muscles and keep the migraine from becoming full blown.

Saturday I slept in because I hadn’t slept well this week, and while I’d planned to get up and cut some leather to finish stocking up on course materials, I opted to stay in bed instead. I needed the sleep and rest more than I needed to get other things done.

Around noon we went to DC for Jeremy’s brother’s college graduation. It was held in the ballroom of a large hotel/convention center and was the first time they’d held it in person since 2019. He attended an online university, so not much was held in person anyway- just graduation ceremonies (Jeremy’s college graduation was similar, though his was in Iowa or Illinois, I think, and we were unemployed in Colorado, so we didn’t go to his). Since Jeremy’s brother lives near Boston and we’re only a couple hours from DC, it was doable for him to attend his graduation. Nothing super exciting, but it was good to support him in his achievement.

While the ballroom was quite large and filled with people, it didn’t feel crowded. However, as we left after the ceremony there was a huge traffic jam in the hallway and we were all crammed together like sardines. Totally claustrophobic and a bit unnerving when we haven’t been in such a concentrated crowd in a couple years.