Right now, #2 daughter should be in an airport in England. I am looking forward to hearing about her adventures.

I was able to speak to her a couple of times yesterday at work, but we were having a mad day. I walked in with my sewing machine, intending to complete the shopping carts, but it was not to be. Instead, I had an order of 178 items to find, gather, check off a list, scan, and pack.

This took me the entire day.

The reason it did is that, while I did this, I was also answering the phone, introducing the dog to children, helping people figure out alternatives to the Butterfly Garden (I do not understand why people think there are caterpillars in there already, since they would obviously be dead, but it is not possible to go from buying the butterfly gardens to seeing butterflies emerge in the three remaining weeks of school, so forget it), selling things, listening to tales of the amazing intellectual prowess of grandchildren, helping people choose a suitable border for a presentation board on the piranha, and responding to repeated pipings of “Sir! Sir! What do you do with this?” from a three-year-old who needed a lot of direction while playing with the train table.

Of course, I like doing all those things. But doing them while also searching through boxes for the sixth package of pink heart-shaped doilies so I could check that off the list requires fortitude. It is not considered good form to shout “Shut up, will you! Can’t you see that I’m counting?” at one’s customers.

That’s bad multi-tasking. Right now I am folding laundry and drinking tea while writing this, and waking up, which may not be a separate task, but feels like one sometimes. That is good multi-tasking.

Last night I watched Pride and Prejudice and got a good start on the Regal Orchid sleeve while waiting to pick #2 son up from a study date, which was another example of good multi-tasking. P&P is a great story, and they did a good job with the film, though I confess that I got distracted by lace sometimes.

#2 son and his classmate were making a video of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “It involved a lot of hitting,” he informed me.