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| I added another couple of jobs yesterday and so am very much not finished. #2 son arrived last night and I knocked off work then and there. I made beef stew and hot rolls for dinner, and we all watched "The Office" while catching up on his semester.
We don't hear from #2 son much. The other kids are Facebook friends with him, so we catch the high points, but not the details. It was good to talk with him. I also finished the back of his sweater and he gently urged me to speed it up.
I also went to the grocery. I'm making these two pies plus a French apple pie. That'll be today. Also I will make Jell-O. I'm going to make Sangria Jell-O and Ambrosia Mold, which Sighkey calls "Spanish Cream," a much better name. Tomorrow I'll do the vegetables.
It is possible that the house will be tidied. However, I have a whole lot of work to do, so it might not happen.
One thing I'm doing today is interviewing a surgeon who does Da Vinci surgery. This is robotic surgery. As far as I can tell, the surgeon doesn't touch the patient and perhaps isn't even in the same room. Our local university is big news in robotics, and this guy is a urologist and has, if I have accurate information, done this type of surgery on more penises than anybody else.
I'm also rewriting a website. And I have some more articles to do. I've also been asked to sing at a funeral. I would like to say no. I haven't answered the email yet. I'm not sure whether I can say no or not. I feel bad about wanting to say no. Let me know your views on this tricky point of etiquette and/or ethics and/or common human decency.
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| The holiday is beginning. My husband has the day off.
When my husband has days off, it often means that he doesn't get paid. His company likes to center layoffs around holidays, which I guess is relatively kind. That is, if you're going to be laid off temporarily, then it's nice to be able to think of it as a long holiday.
#2 son will be coming home this evening. #1 son will, I think, have classes today but then he's off.
He is working on a paper about Othello. He's been sitting by the fire reading Shakespeare, occasionally looking up to discuss some literary point. It's picturesque as all getout.
#2 daughter is coming down after work tomorrow.
#1 daughter is still up in the air. She may come tomorrow. She may bring a fellow with her. She may bring dogs. We'll see.
I also received a Thanksgiving food basket from a client whose website I wrote in the spring. It was in an enormous cardboard box. It contained cheese and crackers and cookies and candy and tea and stuff like that. It was very sweet of the client, and a complete surprise.
So I'm feeling fairly festive.
I have lots of papers to grade, including my peer feedback on a colleague's portfolio, and a half dozen articles to write, and ongoing clients, and the Artsedge stuff to do. All should be fun. I plan to put beef stew into the crockpot and hope that the menfolks will do everything else that needs to be done around the house.
My local grocery had "stew packs" for sale this week: two big potatoes, a bag of carrots, and an onion, shrink wrapped for your convenience. They also have stew beef, all cut up already. And I bought a carton of stock, all made already. Last week, I got a bag of bread mix at the mill, so I'll throw that into my bread machine. This stew plan will be so easy.
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|  Back in March I showed you my work stock and flow diagram.
I had at that point four sources of work -- I was, as it happens, trying to reduce the number of sources to the minimum and to restrict it only to people who would give me 1099s, in hopes of making my taxes simpler.
Ha!
The thing about stock and flow is that it doesn't respond immediately. If you are filling a bathtub and it gets higher than you want, you can turn off the taps and open the drain and the level of the bathwater will go down -- but not instantly. And that's a bathtub, which is a pretty simple system.
If you sell things, you can't make stuff or buy stuff from your supplier and then sell it, and after it's all gone, restock. You have to sell steadily and also restock steadily, or you end up with stock (and therefore sales) problems. If you have a service business, then in order to keep your workflow up, you have to accept work while you're still working at capacity, or you'll end up with slow times.
Thus it is that I've accepted a job from a Hungarian fellow. He has hired me for one series of articles, with a view to having it be ongoing if it works out well.
He approached me at oDesk. I've been pulling back at oDesk, on the path to switching from being a freelance to being a company, but as I recall, December and January were slow for me last year, and I still have tuition payments in those months, so some work with definite paydays will be a good thing.
Today I'll be finishing up the Influential Men articles, and getting started on the next round for Artsedge, and doing everybody's analytics. Oh, and there's class today. And rehearsal. That's it.
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| Here it is three o'clock in the afternoon, and I'm just getting around to blogging. Shocking.
I woke up to a request for changes in one of my articles on influential men -- it was from last night, but I had left the computer around 10:00 so I didn't see it in time. I also had a request-for-interview from a Hungarian fellow who needs half a dozen tech articles done, so I was typing till the last minute and then zoomed over to church.
Where I had to play bells. I am still horrible at this. When we started rehearsing today's piece three weeks ago I explained frankly but pleasantly that I couldn't learn a piece this hard in three weeks. I was the only one who said so, though actually a lot of people were still messing up pretty badly today. I was the only one upset about it, though.
The director assured me that no one would notice. I begged to differ.
"You think they're all deaf?" I said.
"Nope," he said. He's kind of like Mark Twain, or at least like Mark Twain impersonators. I want you to have a clear mental image of this. "They just don't notice."
I didn't want to be rude. I wanted to say that perhaps this was what he told himself to make himself feel better. As you can see, my two goals didn't mesh. I compromised with "What evidence do you have for this?"
"People come up and say how much they liked it." He seem to feel that this clinched it.
"They're being kind," I suggested.
Yes, well, it was horrible. I lost my place repeatedly. The woman next to me did, too, and it was probably my fault. I need to quit the bells.
I came home after that (um... yes, there were other events during the morning, but they didn't make as much of an impression on me) and did an interview with another Influential Man.
The editor asked for a snappy introduction saying what all these influential guys had in common.
"They're all Republicans" didn't seem like a good answer. I had to think and go back and look, actually. They were mostly pretty interesting to talk to. A couple were charming. A few seemed very smart and deep. One or two seemed a bit dim, frankly. Some were golfers or hunters in their spare time, but two were musicians. Most were rich -- either for sure because they showed up on the "richest families" listing or I'm guessing that Senior Vice Presidents of investment companies get paid well -- but there was also a policeman in the group, and a guy who heads up a nonprofit working with inner-city youth. There were different ages and religions; I don't know about ethnic backgrounds, since I've mostly just talked with them on the phone, but their names suggested various different heritages. They had majors in school ranging from biochemistry to P.E.
But, when I reviewed those I've spoken with so far, it seemed to me that all of them said stuff about "giving back to the community" and about service. All of them expressed gratitude a lot. All of them worked hard and put a lot of energy into a lot of different things. Overachievers, all of them. They tended to win prizes and work for organizations. The leadership awards came up over and over.
#2 son has that kind of resume, actually -- as much as anyone does at 18. He always says that he gets the leadership awards because he wasn't good enough to get the real scholarships. He's at a school that turned up on about a third of the bios. He's thankful for his opportunities and volunteers in order to "give back." If he ends up on the "40 Under 40" list, I'll know that he's headed for "influential man" status.
#1 son plans to live in his basement.
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