Or what passes for mundania in my life.

The last few weekends our friend, Sky, came down to use my poster printer. After wasting several hours trying to figure out why the print quality was so bad, our friend Anthony, who was hanging out with us, showed Sky a dialog box on him computer to select print quality. A real Derpy moment for us all. Still, the posters are gorgeous.

Starting some time before that, Michael (my husband) had been asking what happened to the button maker. He wanted to use it for a project for an upcoming convention. I had vaguely remembered it being in the bedroom, but hadn’t been able to find it.

Our time to the convention was running down. Then last weekend when Sky came down to do more poster things (and hang around for an editorial board meeting in the evening), he brought his wife’s button maker. As he, Michael, and Jared were working on buttons, I did one last check through the closets for ours. No sign.

Michael suggested that maybe we had given it to Julie.

And then I remembered. The story begins back in the late 1980s. I was involved in a gazillion fan projects, just as now, as were all our friends. Pin-back buttons, the round kind that you can pin on your shirt or jacket with some cute saying, maybe a bit or artwork, were a big thing among sci fi and gaming con-goers. So we thought having a button maker or two among our group would be a good thing.

Julie and I bought button making kit. I think at least one other friend in our group did, as well. And we made a bunch of buttons promoting one fannish project or another. We passed them out at conventions, and it was a lot of fun.

When Julie and I split up, she took custody of the button maker for a number of years. Some time after, I think it happened one of the times I helped her move, she asked me if I wanted to take custody of the button maker. I’d almost forgotten it existed, truth be told.

There was one problem. One of the vital parts was cracked. It still worked, you just had to hold things just right to do it.

While a group of us was using it sometime shortly after to make buttons to pass out at another convention, at least one more part of the assembly cracked. We were able to make buttons, but about half of them popped apart again a short time after.

I had looked up the manufacturer to see if we could order replacement parts. It was a little disheartening that a replacement set of only a part of the maker cost exactly as much as a basic button maker kit, which included the set. So I kept putting off ordering the replacements.

And then a couple years ago, Julie asked if she could borrow the button maker. I warned her about the broken parts when I handed it over. I don’t remember if she told me later whether she’d actually used it.

For whatever reason, I’d forgotten about giving it back to Julie. So when those times I had thought about making buttons again, I would remember the cost of the replacement assembly pieces, and the fact that I could get a whole new maker for the same price, and have this irrational irritation that there was no efficiency in doing that and winding up with two of the squeezers but only one assembly set. So I hadn’t done anything about it.

Being reminded that the original set wasn’t in the house any more freed me to go ahead and order a new button maker for us. And I ordered a bunch of extra supplies, in part so we could replace the stuff we used last weekend for Michael’s project.

The maker and parts are here, now, and Michael has been cheerfully making buttons. Including a rather clever use of something that would otherwise be a throw-away item. But that’s his surprise to reveal at the convention.

We’ve been unsuccessfully fighting a cold between us for about a week. He was feeling rundown last Saturday, and then both of us were pretty miserable Sunday. I slept in. Napped. Napped again. And went to bed early. Woke up Monday feeling like it was just a moderately worse than usual hay fever day, and went in to work. Tuesday I was feeling a bit worse again, but it was a deadline day, and literally no one who could cover for me, so I went into work, again. Michael took a sick day. Wednesday I was feeling slightly less awful, and there were things to wrap up, so went in again. But by Wednesday night I had almost no energy left, and just wanted to curl up into a ball.

So Thursday, waking up and feeling like death warmed over, I took a partial sick day. I put in a few hours of work from home, but slept in and napped otherwise. Friday I felt marginally less awful, so I started my usual work from home day. But it was clear after a couple hours that I should go back to bed. So I knocked midday. Because of the deadlines, I’d put in extra hours on Monday and Tuesday, I didn’t have to use much sick time to fill out the week. That was nice.

I slept—other than waking up when Michael called to say he had left work early because he felt awful, and waking up for a couple hours in the evening to order pizza. I was up for a few hours late in the evening and got writing done.

Today I’m trying to stay inside. I’m a real wimp when it comes to warm weather. They’ve predicted that today will be the hottest day of the year so far, and last time I checked, we were only a few degrees shy of that. On the plus side, we haven’t had a real heat wave, yet, so “hottest day so far” isn’t going to be as bad as it could be.

But there’s a lot of August left.