By request, here's how to use hem facing, with pictures.

Here's a regular self-fabric facing (above). You know how you turn up the bottom edge and slipstitch it to the inside.

So you just sew the hem facing tape (the gray stuff) to the bottom edge of your skirt. Then press and pin it up, as you would a regular facing.

Slipstitch it, using the lace motifs as a guideline for totally even stitches. The flexibility of the lace means that you will not have to ease the fabric at all, and there is no turn-under to make a ridge on your skirt.

See how perfect your hem is? Even though the linen/Tencel blend clearly does wrinkle just like linen.

The moody studies of light and shadow are thanks to the sun through the rose-covered window.

You got it, Pokey!

 Since I was planning a day filled with lift that bale tote that barge physical labor, I decided to skip the gym yesterday and cut out my Easter skirt instead.

Here are the cut pieces. You can see the pattern (Simplicity3845) which is intended to make it into that sort of two piece dress cum suit where the top, while being a blouse that matches the skirt, can also be a jacket with other pieces if called upon to do so.

These are pieces #2 and #3 of the SWAP II plan.

You can also see the fabric of the finished jacket -- piece #1 -- which I will wear with this skirt if I do not complete #3 by Easter.

If it should happen that I do not complete #3, then I have the question of what to wear with pieces #1 and #2.

I have a dark blue blouse from SWAP mach I, which is the most likely answer to that question, though Blessing assures me that it won't look like Easter at all, with so little contrast.

However, there are some other possibilities.

Here is the green silk charmeuse I was telling you about.

When Blessing was suggesting a yellow shell, I thought of this, because I already own it.  It is a bit shiny for church, isn't it?

I also have these two prints from the fabrics for SWAPII.

On the left is a stretch sateen, and on the right a cotton batik.

I had planned a tunic from the batik print, and a shell from the paisley. Neither offers the level of contrast that would really make me look like I had upended an Easter basket over my head, and actually, neither is likely to be more quickly finished than the planned #3. I don't have enough TNT patterns to rely on them for the entire SWAP, as is recommended.

And finally, I offer you a cinnabar shade of linen.

It doesn't work with my SWAP, and it gives the suit fabrics a bit of an industrial flavor, doesn't it? Can't you see this color combination in a mid-80s office? Not a private office, but that central office where the plants were, and people waited, and all the accessories were Danish plastic by Ingrid?

Are you old enough to remember that look? Perhaps not.

#1 daughter was telling me that she was feeling old. She is 23, so you can all start laughing right now.

But there is more. She feels this way because she has it on good authority that an asteroid will crash into the earth in the year 2037. April, in case you want to mark it on your calendar. Since we have so little time, she figures, there is hardly any point in making plans.

I have to admit that when someone says that since it is 5:30 there is no point in beginning a project today, I have to bite my tongue. You can get a lot done in thirty minutes, or five minutes for that matter. I have no sympathy for the teachers who are already beginning to say that there is no point in trying to teach anything this year because the kids are on the downhill slope already -- I don't hear any kids saying that. So of course I can't be expected to enter very wholeheartedly into the idea that since we have only 30 years to live, we might as well not get going on anything big.

It may be too late to begin building a cathedral, but you can do an awful lot in 30 years if you set your mind to it.

Here's something you can do in 30 minutes. You can sew up a simple skirt. Here it is, with the machine sewing done, waiting for a press and the handwork.

This is the great thing about the TNT pattern -- that is, the "tried and true" pattern with any fitting alterations already made, which you already know how to put together. You can just sew it up, since all the time-consuming stuff like fitting and trial and error of construction has already been done. This is Simplicity 4950, and it is really easy. I made it before in a gray microfiber, and this is a lilac linen/Tencel blend which feels every bit as good as linen normally does, but is not supposed to wrinkle quite as aggressively as linen normally does.

  And, once I had sewn it up, it occurred to me that the Jasmine sweater I knitted last fall might have an evening shadows over the desert effect with the skirt, though I think it would clash horribly with jacket #1. So I will have something springlike to wear on my way to the choir room, even if I don't complete the top.

Having sewn up the skirt, I went off to work and put in 8 hours of hard physical labor. Today I will finish the skirt, cut the top, and get on with my knitting.

I am not concerned about the asteroid. If it is determined to crash  into the earth, it will have to do so without my help.

I read recently -- and I believe it -- that being consistent is key to stylishness. If you normally wear makeup, then on a day that you don't, your face has a bare, medieval look unlike the face people usually see. If you generally don't, then on the days you do, people will figure you are having an affair or at least a job interview. If you Dress for Success five days a week and throw on any old rag on the weekend -- which is what I did back in my hose-and-heels days -- it sends a signal about who in your life is worth dressing up for, or even who you are trying to fool. If every outfit is a costume and each event brings you out in a completely different look, you appear confused or even untrustworthy.

I thought about this as I got dressed for the trade show. It was taking place at a bank, and female bankers are pretty stylish, so I put on my pointy bronze shoes. Also my girliest trousers, striped shirt, and a dove gray linen jacket. I accessorized this ensemble with the earrings Mayflower made for me and this dragon:

I think that a dragon shoulder puppet is always good for those day-to-evening affairs, don't you?

So I stood for two and a half hours making sparkling conversation with total strangers, because that is what you do at a trade show. I lured them over with the shoulder puppet and then gestured in Vanna White style at the presentation board The Empress had made and asked them about their families and promised them goodies if they came to our website and stuff like that.

Then I had to go up for the door prize giving, and I took the opportunity to check out all the other stuff at the trade show. There were puppies, and barbeque, and cookies, and massages, so obviously we were up against stiff competition.

 But look at this. Can you see the tote bags?

I was trying to be discreet about taking the picture. I had already told The Empress sotto voce that they should have run the paper through the laminator before they sewed them up, and that they cost $60.00. In U.S. money. I didn't want it to be obvious that I was taking a picture for future reference so that I could easily make one myself and encourage other people to do so.

So maybe you cannot really see that these are tote bags made from magazine covers. They are sewn up just like any other basic grocery-bag shaped tote bag, and have grommets and a little chain handle. You could make these in 30 minutes, 40 if you laminated first, and your cost would be less than the sales tax on these ready-mades.

If you did so, you would then be worth $2 a minute. You would have an excuse never to do dishes again, because your time was so valuable.

Doesn't the square look good with the azaleas and all the trees blooming?

I have two little puny azaleas in my front garden with the phlox. They should probably be moved out into the sun or something instead of being left in full shade to struggle as though my garden were some kind of hospice for azaleas. The other flowers rally round and bloom lushly to make up for it, but I feel bad whenever I see a happy azalea.

Ah, yes, I was saying that being consistent is the key to stylishness.

And yet, when I do a show at a bank I put on pointy shoes, and when I do the homeschool curriculum fair I put on a skirt and sweater and take my knitting. I think that this is being appropriate, not inconsistent. If I put a bow in my hair and wore sneakers with my skirt at the curriculum fair, I would be trying to trick people. But dressing in something from my own closet that allows the visitors to feel comfortable with me seems right. I am a mom, I did homeschool my kids, they can trust me. I'm helping them know that fast enough that they will come over to my table, rather than shunning me the way they do the encyclopedia salesman.

Research on the subject shows that we trust other people more when they seem to be like us. On Wall Street, panhandlers in suits did better, in an experiment, than other panhandlers. You would not expect that, since a panhandler in a suit would presumably evoke less sympathy than one in rags. People seemed to assume, however, that "Got any change?" from a guy dressed like themselves was a reasonable request. The guy apparently knew where his towel was.

(If you do not read Douglas Adams, you can find an explanation of the towel as it relates to grooming at my post from 12/12/06. Use the little calendar thing  at bottom left to go there.)

Appropriateness of dress is about that. At its simplest, it can be looking like one another because we are all at the opera, so we should all look like we're going to the opera, not like we meant to end up at the boxing ring -- or vice versa. But sometimes I think it makes sense to consider the audience a bit. Not so much that we are making fun of them or wearing a costume.

Back in my dancing days, it was not uncommon to hear me or a fellow dancer saying, "Oh, it's you! I didn't recognize you in your clothes!" It got us some funny looks from passersby, too. But we really don't want to get that reaction in our daily lives.

So we might strive for a balance of consistent style and appropriate dress. This is not as important or worthwhile as striving for humility, but we can still do it in our spare time.

The book I'm currently reading is a very lightweight detective novel. I just finished the lovely Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a badly underappreciated novelist -- all of us at book club agreed about that. If you haven't read her work, you should. But my current book is Chocolate-Dipped Death, one of the new group of mysteries in which the sleuth has a distinctive job and there are recipes in the back.

Anyway, in this book there is the following line: "I've got a town full of musicians... every last one of 'em looking for trouble."

This is not intentionally funny, any more than protestanterror.org was, but I find it pretty darned funny. Still, it kind of makes me think of choir practice last night.

I should say that yesterday was a very full day. I had menial tasks to do for The Empress in the morning, then after book club I spent a few hours on my link management campaign. This undertaking, it is widely agreed in the articles about it online, is tedious and time-consuming, but should still be given a couple of hours a day. There were customers and all, including cross ones and sad ones and even a couple of encouraging ones. Then, at 4:00, I began packing the books.

I had a plan. I had gotten everything ready so that the books could be packed expeditiously, and so that the boxes would then be handy to load on the truck and could be easily and tidily unpacked and put away at the other store. Someone else was in charge of the boxes, and there were fewer than half as many as I needed.

So when the buyer for the shelves arrived at 5:30, the shelves were not unloaded. I was putting together office supply boxes and stacking books on the empty toy shelves. The Man was moving the books about randomly and messing up my plans. The shelves were gone by 6:00, and I left a welter of books and general mess, which will be my greeting this morning.

The trade show is at 5:30, and I haven't decided whether to dress for it and leave the packing for tomorrow, or to dress for physical labor and carry my trade show costume to change into in the bathroom later...

In any case, I left work in a hurry and came home, made dinner, and zipped over to choir practice.

Where everyone was complaining.

Choirs do this. I might have been in a mood to notice it particularly last night, but there was also another factor. The director asked the altos to move down a chair, and the end alto refused. Directors move their choristers around at will, normally, but this singer didn't want to be that near the piano. Naturally, I hopped up and moved down to the disputed chair.

This put me in front of the basses.

There used to be a TV program called "The Muppet Show," and it had in it two old guys who heckled the other characters. Think of them as basses in the choir. They sat directly behind me, and they complained nonstop through the entire rehearsal.

The song was too high, too low, too fast ("We can't fit the words in!"), too slow ("It's dragging!"). They didn't want to rehearse any piece that they had sung in the past 25 years ("We know this one!"). They heckled choir members who asked for notes ("We don't want to hear our notes. Just K does."). They argued about the trumpet part.

If someone were able to show these nice men, perhaps through the use of secret camera, that they spend 50 minutes out of each 90-minute rehearsal causing trouble, I am sure that they would be surprised. They are not difficult out of malice. I think that they are difficult out of sheer habit.

Maybe I am, too, in some situation or sense that I don't know about. Hmmmm.....

Yesterday was a somewhat dismal day. At least in parts. For one thing, I squished all the books onto just a few shelves. We may talk about consolidating the stores and taking the stores virtual, but there is something about packing up books and answering customer questions about the last day that makes it feel like closing the store.

For another, I have reached the goal of making it possible for our customers to find us online. It has taken me four weeks, but now people who are looking for us can find the physical and the virtual stores and the store blog right at the top of their search engines. This is a worthwhile goal. However, I have been so fixed on this goal that its accomplishment has sort of hit me with a thud: I don't know what to do next. Arkenboy has clued me in to the next steps for SEO, but we are not actually planning to be Google's first choice for the search string "Carson-Dellosa pocket chart" any time soon. We just want our customers to shop with us online instead of continuing to be so mad about the closing that they would rather cut their own borders from Wal-mart construction paper.

I am accustomed to being good at what I do. Now I am going from the one who knows books (and I really do) and curriculum design (yep, that too) to The One Who Knows the Most About E-commerce, But She Doesn't Know Much Either. The Empress and I are going to a trade show tomorrow night at which we will be showing off our new website, and our ignorance.

Fortunately, class last night included a discussion of humility.

C.S. Lewis said that humility is not a good architect pretending to be a bad architect. It is a good architect recognizing that talents are a gift of God and nothing to be proud about, and that they do not make the good architect better than people to whom God has given other gifts. A humble person can take as much pleasure in the gifts and successes of other people as in his or her own.

I work on humility pretty actively, but I need those opportunities to be incompetent and uncertain, to help me in my strivings for humility.

I realize that humility is not highly valued in Hamburger-a-go-go-land, but tolerance for other people's religious views is. If you are prepared to be tolerant about reincarnation, chanting, and feng shui, you might as well be tolerant about seeking humility.

We also had a brief mention of denominations. We do not, in that group, talk about denominations. Occasionally the speaker will remark on what a large number of different churches are represented in this class, but we are after knowledge, and do not allow the highly-emotional matter of denominations to distract us. Still, one of the women in our group felt moved to point out that Jesus did not establish all these different churches. Why, she asked, should there be so many different denominations?

After the meeting I discreetly shared with a couple of the ladies the answer Partygirl had given me to that question: because the Protestants are all wrong. If they (that is, we) were right, they wouldn't have so many churches. The Catholics have one, and this proves that they are right. I knew that these particular ladies would enjoy that answer. (Though the Catholic one pointed out the split between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, bringing up another interesting point to discuss in some less structured environment.)

It was only after the "We were just talking about you" moment with Partygirl that I realized -- with her help -- that she had not actually said that to me. In fact, she had given me a prayer card with a reference to the website protestanterror.org.

Let's take a moment to enjoy that URL. I like to think of the folks who designed the website discussing it.

"What name should we have for our website designed to show the Protestants the error of their ways? What search string might lead them to us?"
"Well, I guess we can't go wrong with Protestant error, can we? That should bring them in."
"Yes, and if we make it one word, it sort of has 'terror' in it, too, see? Good choice."

I tried to get back to that website this morning, and they have disappeared. Maybe they noticed the humor inherent in their name. Maybe they are still out there with some completely different name, listing the 154 errors Protestants make. It was actually quite interesting. I am sorry that I cannot direct you to it.

Anyway, they were the ones who said that. Partygirl is always kinder and gentler than that.

Today I have book club, and packing of the store, and perhaps I will have some breakthrough in my continued strivings for competence in e-commerce. If not, there is choir practice in the evening. Singing always cheers me up. No time for knitting or sewing today, I expect, but I will be getting to the gym and doing my scheduled housework. I am trying to Do All Things Decently and in Order, a Presbyterian practice which suits my current Methodist church membership just as well. Though, as a Methodist, I have to throw in a few more parties.

I have a cell phone. It is a work cell phone, so you probably won't have my number, because you probably aren't someone who wants to call me for work reasons.

I may be the last person in America to get a cell phone.

After I'd had it for, oh, six hours, I opened the box and took out the manual (not the phone -- that came later). I figured I would read it. It began with warnings not to cook the phone in a microwave, feed the parts to the baby, or clean the phone with benzene.

I concluded from this that the manual was written for very stupid people, and I would have no difficulty with it.

I was wrong.

I tried the online tutorial. #2 daughter called me while I was trying to figure out how to set a ringtone. "There's an online tutorial for your phone?" She asked in disbelief. "Mama, that's funny."

Actually, I found it at least slightly helpful. I was able to figure out how to scroll. I couldn't figure out how to push the "options" button. It says "options" on the screen, and pushing the screen had no effect. #1 son helped me with that. I have answered it successfully several times now, and am contemplating calling someone with it today. In time, I will figure out how to record a message.

Here is my SWAP Part II storyboard.

I am using some new shapes. I still don't have enough sewing experience to be able to follow the rule about using "tried and true" patterns for everything, but I am intending to make three pairs of pants from the same pattern. I should be good at it by the time I finish them. I am planning to use Tencel twill for them, though, so they will have a more feminine and possibly more formal air than the jeans and khakis I usually wear, and yet be washable so I can climb ladders if need be.

I'm doing some tunics, thinking that I can feel comfortable in them at the computer yet still answer the door with confidence. And I am planning an Easter suit in the lilac Tencel/linen blend in the upper right of the fabrics, which will coordinate well with my plum jacket and the gray pieces from SWAP Part I, so that I will have choices for my school visits.

Easter is coming up fast, of course, so I will make the skirt for this week's sewn object. I am using a TNT pattern for that, so I feel confident of it. Blessing suggested that I should make a yellow shell to go with the Easter suit. I notice, looking at my storyboard here, that it is still mostly gray in its overall effect. Yellow would jazz it up.

Blessing asked what shoes I would wear with it. Did I have any yellow shoes, she wanted to know.

Blessing hasn't known me very long. My old friends might be thinking about whether there was any kind way to tell me that I shouldn't wear loafers with this ensemble. Blessing has only known me since the fall, when I was well into my attempts to become a chic old lady (I am giving myself a couple of decades to work toward this goal). I surmise that I must have made some improvements, if she actually thought I might own yellow shoes.

Actually, I have a piece of green -- seriously green, not the grayish greens you can see on the storyboard -- silk charmeuse. I could make a shell of that to jazz up the Easter suit, and I actually do have a pair of beautiful green pumps I bought at the after-Christmas sales. I could look like someone in a new Easter suit all the way to the choir room, where I would cover it up with my robe and no one would know the difference.

The sewn FO of the week is this jacket, McCall's 4972, in a plum rayon/wool/linen blend.

The pattern seemed easy till I put the lining in wrong and then spent two weeks fiddling with it to get it right.

This was my muslin, but now that I have gotten it right, I love it, so it will be piece #1 for my SWAP Part II.

SWAP Part II is supposed to have 11 pieces -- 1 jacket, 4 pants or skirts, and 6 tops -- just like the original SWAP. The idea, though, is to have different shapes from the first part, and a different color emphasis, though not completely different colors.

The essence of the SWAP is to start with a three-piece suit. However, this fabric was a remnant, and I do not have enough of it to make a skirt and pants, even if I were the type to wear a plum-colored tweed suit, which I am not.

You can see, though, that this jacket works very well with pieces from the original SWAP, and I think I will wear it a lot.

I have the Part II planned now, and will put up my storyboard tomorrow.

Marji has a whole blog about her SWAP (she is actually participating in the contest and everything) over here. She is doing a very beautiful one, with lots of prints put together in interesting ways.

I'm keeping up pretty well with my plan of one sewn FO each week, but of course knitting is not like that.

This is what one skein's worth of the front of the Bijoux blouse looks like.

Yesterday was another perfect spring day, and I had already done my solo, so I felt free to be outside without fear of clogging my voice with allergies. I did not, however, feel moved to do any of the yard work or gardening.

Fortunately, #1 son did.

I was sitting on the porch with my feet on the railing, knitting and reading, and he mowed the lawn, dug the little vegetable garden, and tamed the roses.

It caused me to think of something that came to my mind back when Ozarque was having her discussion about "scutwork."

People who study these things say that one of the differences between the housework that women do and the housework that men do is that men tend to do things that can be done when they feel like it.

Yardwork, for example, which can wait until a gorgeous day when you feel like using your muscles.

Cleaning the kitchen cannot wait till you feel like it. Actually, #2 son and I have a disagreement on this point, but I am right.

And you certainly cannot just wait till you feel like cooking, if you are cooking for your family.

However, I was sufficiently grateful to #1 son for doing the yardwork -- and not mowing down all the daylilies, as my husband is wont to do -- that I gave in to his entreaties to make cookies.

Oatmeal with chocolate chip.

In recognition of the fact that I will be working at home from next week, I am getting back today to strictness about eating right, the housekeeping schedule, and the daily gym visit, so it is fortunate that the boys ate all these cookies yesterday.

The sermon yesterday was actually about daily discipline and schedules. Being methodical, appropriate in a Methodist church, I suppose. I know that having those disciplines and schedules is best for me, especially now when I am still occasionally suffering from excessive excitement in my life.

I'm not telling you about the exciting parts. Just the nice, calm, methodical parts.

We got up at 4:00 to see #2 daughter off. She is a music minister, so it was a choice between 4:00 yesterday to get home at a reasonable hour, or 4:00 this morning to get to the church in time for the service.

I'm glad she stayed over. We made barbecue yesterday, with salads and home fries and homemade applesauce cake, and then all the young people went to see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie and my husband went to a Lao party, and I had the house to myself.

It was a perfect spring day, with a perfect temperature. There are only a few days like that each year, and it seems to me that they are like swimming. The air feels so nice that you can enjoy being in it the way you enjoy being in the water.

If you do, of course.

So I sat on the porch, admiring all the blooming things, reading and knitting and enjoying the quiet.

When the young people returned, we had dinner and then played cards.

It was a pleasant, normal day.

The computer is back from the computer hospital, and I intend to catch up on all your xangas and indeed on all non-work-related computer stuff. Then I have a quartet to sing in church, so I will be going to two services.

I hope today will also be a pleasant, normal day.

#2 daughter arrived safely last night and we had pizza and watched Flushed Away, which is really quite funny, and not as fixated on scatalogical humor as I had feared. Then we got to see the DVD of her choir's British tour from last year. The acoustics in those cathedrals are every bit as amazing as everyone says. You can't really imagine it. You have to hear it. We also got to hear her solo.

People (well, okay, her siblings) sometimes complain that #2 daughter is immodest about her singing, but you know, if you sound like that, you can hardly help noticing. I think it is impressive that she is able to maintain any vestiges of humility at all.

Anyway, the DVD was not artistic at all. It was just a bunch of kids in red choir robes standing in one place and singing, and after watching it for a bit, I looked down at my knitting and gasped in horror.

A large crescent of white had appeared right in the middle of my apricot sweater!

I had run into the kitchen for a minute to whip up some soap, using a new scent from Brambleberry called "Ancient Sedona." I leapt to the conclusion that some lingering traces of this scent had bleached the yarn.

Sedona is in Arizona. I have been in Arizona a time or two, and I don't really find that "Ancient Sedona" evokes Arizona at all. It actually reminds me of Arab men's perfumes. I used to teach English as a Second language, and found that Arab students, depending on the country they were from, preferred to smell like a rhinoceros or like a mysterious garden of spices and exotic fruits. It takes a great deal of self-discipline, as an ESL teacher, neither to back off from those who show their manhood by encouraging those ripening sweaty smells nor to edge closer to those who favor the mysterious garden approach, nostrils flaring, to ask what that wonderful scent is.

But I digress.

#2 daughter immediately assured me that the apparent bleaching of my lovely yarn was only an aftereffect of having been staring with rapt attention at the bright red crescent of choir robes on the screen.

But #2 son said, "No, it's bleached! Look! It's all white!" in tones of horror.

It was not bleached. It was the red crescent. All is well.

I owe #2 son a cruel trick, though.

Kali Mama asked where I find my books. I manage a bookstore, actually, so finding books is part of my job. Kali Mama has been to my store, but had kids with her, and so was probably distracted by the toys and didn't even notice the books. Or at least not enough to consider how they got there. And, nowadays, most bookstores don't have a human being whose job it is to suss out the coolest books, but have a computer do it based on things like the size of the town, so I shouldn't be sassy about that question, should I? The answer is that I get all kinds of book-related information in the mail and online and from humans and spend several hours each week finding cool books for myself and for the store.

The book I am reading now, though, is an odd one indeed. It is Amy Sedaris's I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. Some of us consider hospitality a commandment from God and some of us dread it, but Amy Sedaris probably has surprises for us all.

The first thing that strikes one about this book is that the photographs are all that weird 1950s coloration. I have an old Farm Journal cookbook that has photos like that, often of things like ground beef in aspic. I have always figured that it was something about photo processing in those days that caused this look, and it always makes me queasy to look at food photographed in that way. Sedaris has recreated this look.

So lots of people are going to like the book right off just for that.

It also has lots of curious little bits to read, about things like how to get bad smells out of mattresses and how to amuse the elderly, as well as recipes. I have not tried any of the recipes (see queasiness, above) but I will let you know how they are if I ever do.

This morning #1 son and I are going to have haircuts, and then we hope to get the computer back from the computer hospital, and then we expect Arkenboy for lunch. I will check and see whether Sedaris has any hospitality tips for normal situations like this. All I can remember is the idea of pinning a rubber lobster to the door and labeling it "Pinch me!" which will not, I fear, meet the case.

There is something about spell-checking, or indeed lingering over the entry in any way, that causes the ancient computer I am currently using to lose heart and die, or at least disconnect from the internet. I therefore apologize for all the typos there probably are in this entry, and wish you a fun weekend.

It's time to do some planning. I've been taking things day by day, focussing on the immediate task more than the future. Even as frivolous a thing as my SWAP has been on hold until I knew more about what I would be doing.

Well, I can't say that I know what I will be doing. But in one week I will be working from my home, so I am thinking that I had better begin making some plans.

Working from home has some clear benefits. As #2 son pointed out right away, it means that I can greet him with cookies when he comes home from school.

This remark shows also the clear drawbacks.

Sometimes, when I am trying to do the parts of my job that are not about customer service, it is frustrating to have continual interruptions from customers and coworkers. Mostly not, though, because they are part of my job, and I can be philosophical about it. In fact, since I work in retail, the interruptions are the main part of my job, and the other things are what I do in between. Having had to look after people is always an acceptable reason for not getting other things finished, and that is just part of the territory.

That will not be true when the people I have to take care of are my kids.

We will have a couple of months when the boys are at school most of the day, and I can probably match my work time to the eight hours they spend out of the house. I will have to establish during that time some way to avoid continual interruptions and unreasonable noise levels, so that I will still be able to work in the summer without sacrificing familial harmony.

In order to hook the work computer up, I will have to put it either in my bedroom, or in #2 son's. We have cable hookups in those two rooms, and in the living room where the family computer lives. #2 son has agreed to allow it in his room, but that means that we will need to work out the level of mess we can both tolerate, and I will have to figure out how to arrange my work space so that is does not interfere with his play space -- or his schoolwork space, for that matter, since we will share a desk. Fortunately, the work computer is a Mac, so there will be no great temptation for him to play games there.

There will be school visits and conferences and workshops, and there will also be days when I have to go to the other store. Which will, after next week, be the only store. Apart, that is, from the virtual store where I will be hanging out most of the time. I may have to drive a lot more than usual. I may have to get used to working in a store where I am not the manager. I had better clean out my car and get the oil changed.

Some people find that, when they work at home, it is hard for them to get work done. The Pilates break stretches out, coffee breaks turn into TV breaks, lunch becomes a chance to catch up on housework...

I have worked from my home before, and I know that I have the opposite problem. One of the great things about my current job, as opposed to the work I did before that (teaching), is that I lock the door when I leave and I am finished. I don't have to think about it again till I unlock the door the next morning. Already, with so much of what I am doing now being online, I find myself sneaking in a bit of work time at home. Once I am working from home, I know that it will be hard to quit working at the end of the day.

The excessively interesting life I've been leading lately has already interfered with healthy eating and proper housekeeping, and I can see that working from home could make things worse. Sitting most of the day (now, I sit only at lunch) and being always in reach of a kitchen could be bad for my lipids profile if I don't watch out. Papers and other work things can creep out and take over the house, too. It is easy to look at work-related stuff and think "Oh, I'm working with that," and mentally excuse it instead of putting it away. Since my home computer is a PC, there are always going to be work things that are easier on it than on the Mac, so there will always be a temptation to bring work stuff out to the living room, even if I make the effort to prepare a nice "office" space for myself in my unfortunate son's bedroom.

In general, forewarned is forearmed, and making a plan to deal with potential problems is the best way to avoid having to deal with them. But in this case, I still don't really know what I'm going to be doing, so it is hard to plan. I am going to give it a try, though.