More school visits yesterday.

I enjoyed it. Bucolic scenery, the Strut and Rut Outdoor Supply Store, the hardware store with "MUCK BOOTS" on its marquee, cattle ignoring the new developments popping up in the next field over, and lots of impressive clouds.

The Empress and I did the East Side together.

We have this whole East Side/ West Side rivalry thing going on in our county. I don't get it, myself, though it reminds me of a student from Rwanda I once had. He was from a really homogenous community -- one race, one religion, one political party. Did that mean there was no discrimination in his society, I asked him. No, he said, they just used clan membership. It was the next year that the clan issue in Rwanda made the international news.

It isn't that bad here. But The Empress and I, not being natives, don't fully understand the rivalry. We are aware of it and try to respect it or at least not to step on any toes about it. That's all we can do.

We had business strategy talks while we drove.

I wore my sunglasses. My optometrist told me at my last visit that I had a lot of sun damage to my eyes, so I got prescription sunglasses and am trying to wear them. I'm trying to wear sunscreen, too.

I feel bad about wearing sunglasses when speaking to people, though, so I apologized and explained to The Empress about wearing dark glasses while talking with her in the car.

"I looked at my hands," I said.

That was enough.

Young people will not know this, but the hands become old way before the rest of the body. Your bosom is still in a reasonable place, your face is not yet like a road map, the hair is not thinning, but your hands become aged.

It is sun. So let that be a reminder to wear sunscreen and sunglasses and give up tanning.

The Empress said she just tries not to look at her hands.

She doesn't think that it is sun exposure anyway. She thinks it is about how much water you drink.  

Chanthaboune hooked me up with some honey and salt hand treatment that prevents my hands from looking completely grotesque, but I still see The Empress's point. It might be better just not to look.

I had to come back and add this not-lovely picture of the Bijoux Blouse because, well, it proves that I am doing a little bit of knitting. This is .... I have lost track of how many skeins I've knitted of this stuff by now, but I was at the end of one when I took this picture. I am three inches from the neckline shaping.

Actually, if your hands have inexplicably gotten old-looking while you were busy doing something else, you should definitely knit. This will cause your hands to look venerable and wise, rather than merely spotty and sun-damaged. This doesn't work for any other part of the body, so take advantage of the opportunity.

   I have won a Thinking Blogger Award, from Kali Mama, and I feel honored. Click on the link to find the origin and rules of the meme. And here are five blogs I find thought-provoking, and on whom I would like to bestow this award:

• Chanthaboune
• Ozarque
• A Shrewdness of Apes
• Joeandrieu
• My Adventures in Simple Living

I notice now that there are no knitting blogs on my list. I am not sure why that should be the case. These are the first five I thought of; there are plenty more, but then there are also lots of people playing this game, so I guess everybody will get tagged eventually.

Anyway, if you are on the list, then you can now pick five more people to whom to give the award.

I have been thinking lately about my home office setup.

I brought home a computer from work, since it had all my workshops and press releases and product reviews and stuff in it, and have been trying to get it online for nearly a week. First we had it hooked up wrong, then we noticed that the wrong disc was in the box with it, then Arkenboy gave me the secret password that causes the computer to open a little window in the door to hear you say "Lefty sent me" and it still didn't work, and then #1 daughter pointed out that we had a wireless router but not wireless internet. The point being that each time our error was a "How could we have been so stupid? NOW it will work!" kind of thing, but I am still not online with the work computer.

Partygirl says I should go over to Cox and ask to talk to their Stupid Patrol.

These technical issues have overshadowed the question of the physical office space, but #2 son and I have worked on that a little.

Here it is, our shared space.

#2 son studies here. "Study" in this context appears to include "Watch TV" and "lift weights."

 You see the weights neatly lined up here, along with the Econ textbook and a flying monkey toy.

It seems to me that the desk is not essential to the boy's studying method, so my computer will not be in the way. There were not actually any books or papers or anything on the desk. All of those are on the floor.

It appears that studying is done on the floor, while lifting weights. We have 20-pounders for cost-benefit analysis, 15s for Keynesian theory, all the way down to a single 2.5 pound barbell which I assume we use to strengthen our wrists while struggling through supply-side economics.

We have a warrior watching over our undertakings.

We also have Silly Putty, a pocket knife, a Game Boy, and an assortment of TV accessories.

We have a weight-lifting chart on the wall for easy reference, along with a traffic signal and #1 son's pop art panels.

Actually, the traffic sign is a defective Yakker Tracker. This is a thing that looks like a traffic signal. When the noise level gets too high (you can set it by decibel level), a yellow light comes on. If the noise level gets outrageous, a red light comes on and you can even set it to have a siren go off. They are used in schools.

They work very well, but this one was too sensitive for the tastes of the buyer, and she returned it, so I brought it home to my kids.

#2 son actually has two of these on his walls. And three warrior statues. I don't know whether they consitute a theme of protectiveness or what.

We also have a surplus neon "OPEN" sign and one that says "party."

We are prepared for every eventuality.

The gourds were painted by my mother.

Here's a better shot of them:

I have not actually done any work in this room yet. I am thinking that I will need to dust and vacuum and install some blinds. All those things must be done behind #2 son's back, of course. My sons are pretty strict about their bedrooms. Anything at all girly, like cleaning or decorating, is forbidden.

Once the Cox Stupid Patrol helps me hook up my computer to the internet, though, I think I will like this space.

This design photo is more like my mental image of the perfect home office, but you cannot fail to notice that they have no weights.

 Nor any Silly Putty. Nor a single warrior.

A moment, then, to be sorry for the occupant of this poorly outfitted room.

And now back to work.

This is, in theory, my second week of working from home. It is the second week that the store has been closed and I have not had to open and close and be there all day. However, I have spent much of most days since then on school visits or packing the old store, and one full day at the new store. The kids and my husband have had days off and been at home with me, and I have yet to get an office space set up.

Today may be the day. I have been having technological problems. I brought a computer home from work. This seemed essential because that computer has all my files of press releases, workshops, book reviews, and so forth, and is a Mac, so that just moving the files to my PC at home was not practical. Also, though right now my kids are gone for eight hours at school and I can just work while they're gone, if I am still doing this in the summer I will need a door to close. Even now, there are times when I would like to be able to check something or follow up on something after they have come home and begun playing World of Warcraft, so it would be good to have both computers online. We have not yet figured out how to get the Mac online.

However, I think I will like working from home a lot. I can be productive during all my work time. I can -- once I recuperate fully -- work from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and then go to the Pilates class before resuming work. I can put dinner together during a tea break. I can have some flexibility on time in general for the first time in years. I can, when I have to do things like fold flyers for three hours, sit on the sofa and watch Hamish Macbeth while I do it.

I like what I am doing, too. A lot of it is research and writing, which has always been a favorite set of work activities for me. I have sufficient human contact and sufficient manual labor. Even in my computer work, there is a high level of variety, and so far no sign that I will run out of things to do.

There is even feedback in my current work at home, in addition to paychecks. When I found yesterday that a Google search for "county X teacher resources" brought the store blog up as the #1 hit, I was quite thrilled. We do not yet have floods of online orders, but we are steadily moving up the search engines, so it is surely only a matter of time.

Hard to see the downside, even though I have found myself saying "Shut up, darling, I'm working" a few times. I keep thinking of a short story I read some years ago. It was the story of a writer who, irritated by continual interruptions, finally does away with some people who drop by. The last line was "After all, it's only them." Or something like that. But Miss Manners points out that people who work in offices love to be interrupted. So I am cultivating that attitude. And hooking up the computer that is in a room with a door ought to solve that small issue anyway.

Today I have school visits at some distance -- more country drives. And perhaps arranging my office. And possibly a visit to the cable provider with hardware questions. Certainly research and writing. A press release and some marketing pieces.

I plan  to enjoy it. I hope you enjoy your day, too.

The Easter feast was fun. My parents came, which made it a small Easter celebration for us -- just six people. #1 daughter had only herself and her husband, and they just went out to dinner and a movie. I may have conveyed to her my feeling that holidays need crowds for proper celebration.

#2 daughter went to an Easter picnic in the park, in the cold, with our glamorous aunt. My mother had asked about the cold in talking with this aunt, so we knew that they planned to light fires in the firemaking areas of the park and I guess to wear warm clothing and huddle around the fires.

This is the Devil's Food Easter/birthday cake.

#1 son, whose birthday it was, does not care for icing, so we made an un-iced cake in a sort of basket shape and a set of egg-shaped cupcakes. I iced the cupcakes and piled them in the "basket" with some green-dyed coconut for grass. Then we made shortbread rabbits, gave them coconut fur and cottontails made of halved mini marshmallows and attached them to the cake with dabs of icing.

Understated elegance was not the goal.

In fact, with a cake of this kind, it seems to me that the fact that you went to so much trouble is the message. The recipient must be important, if someone is willing to cut mini marshmallows in half for him.

I am still not recovered from my monstrous cold. I have reached the stage at which this fact is making me very cross. However, I spent the entire afternoon -- after our guests left, of course -- ensconced in a recliner with a fleece throw and a stack of novels, calling hoarsely for tea at intervals. I am doing my part to vanquish this virus.

Yesterday was not a particularly restful day, and my cold lingers on. This is the seventh day. The rule for colds is that they last seven days if you treat them and a week if you don't, so this should be The End.

At the brunch yesterday I met some new people. At one point I was talking with two of these new people and one was telling a long story about how some people were knocking at her door and wouldn't give up even though she didn't answer and then she said , "And two of them were black." This, in case you can't tell without the tone of voice and expression, was intended to clinch the scariness of the entire experience.

I never let this sort of thing pass entirely, but I try to approach it with delicacy and kindness, asking questions perhaps to bring the offensive and false idea to light where it can be discussed politely.

In this case, the other new person in the conversation was herself African-American. Being polite about the first new person's bigoted remark would be offensive to the second new person, while bringing the first new person's comment to her attention would embarrass her.

A bit of a quandary. Partygirl is an excellent hostess, though. She joined us at that point and began talking about diversity in eduction in homogenous communities, allowing us all to discuss the issue in the abstract, and allowing me to speak quite firmly on the subject to my old friend Partygirl, in a way I would not have done with my new friends -- well, the bigot probably won't become a friend. Politicians who make racist comments like to say that they "misspoke" or something, but I think that comments of that kind do not come to people's minds unless they are in fact racist. Saying "Well, yes, I am a bigot, but I am a polite bigot and wouldn't say what I mean unless I were under stress" doesn't fix it for me. Neither did the woman's subsequent long story about the sweetest little nurse from Laos who took such good care of her in the hospital.

I can even make allowances for age on this kind of thing, for people who were brought up under very different circumstances, but this person was not more than 30.

I may not care for old ideas, but I do like old cookbooks. Following the brunch, the cookie baking for Son-in-Law's folks, gymnastics, the delivery of the cookies, a trip to the library for #2 son's study group, the grocery, and a trip to the old store to swap empty boxes for an empty file cabinet, I made this old-fashioned pineapple upside-down cake for today's Easter celebration.

I also made an old-fashioned Devil's Food cake, but I still must assemble and decorate it before I take its picture.

The interesting book Something from the Oven points out that most people from my generation and younger have never actually eaten a real homemade cake, and the taste of mix cakes has become the standard. Because of this, I like to use old recipes for cakes most of the time. They are better.

I like new recipes for vegetables, though, and am looking forward to doing some interesting things with carrots and cabbage and jicama this morning. #1 son is in charge of the corn, #2 son is in charge of the mashed potatoes, my husband is in charge of the rice. All is in place for the meal.

The other thing that I am in charge of is the table.

Once I gave up completely on the idea of making an Easter outfit, I pieced the table runner from Provencal fabrics. The red was #2 son's idea, and I think it jazzes the whole thing up in a way that leaving it just blue and yellow would not have done.

As you can see, this is not pressed or quilted or bound or in any way finished.

Many quilters, especially those to whom 2 and 7/8" is a meaningful measurement, feel that this is the real ta da! point. The backing, binding, and quilting is like the finishing on knitting to them -- something you can mess up and then you have spoiled the real work, but not an important part of the creative process. Some even hire that part out. Not I. I like the quilting best, and it is, to me, just as important as the piecing. Nonetheless, I may put this on the table today. It will be largely covered with dishes full of food, after all. It can have a bit of an audition before it is finished.

It goes with the pineapple upside-down cake's plate.

Having recently read some hints on entertaining elderly people, I was wondering whether those tips applied in any way to my parents, who are coming to lunch today. Not the bits about helping them keep alert or anything, but the parts maybe about having things warm and not making the food too spicy. Maybe you can fail to notice that your parents are getting old, just as you can fail to notice that your kids are growing up (#1 son is 18 today, as it happens). I asked #2 son while we were in the car.

"Do you think your grandparents are old? Like, elderly? Should we be taking better care of them?"
"They can take care of themselves. They're very sharp. I'd say they were wise, if it didn't sound weird."

Happy Easter to all who are celebrating Easter. I wish you a good combination of good new ideas and wise old ideas, especially in the matter of recipes.

The Tennebrae service is the most dramatic and solemn service we have. The light is provided by black candles which are extinguished one after another as the readings and music progress, there is a cross which is draped in black at the end of the service, the choir is in black and keeps silence between the songs. The music includes the sad and gorgeous hymns "Saw Ye My Savior?" "O, Sacred Head Now Wounded," and "Were You There?" The readings tell of the betrayal and death of Jesus.

Last night, our acolytes were both Asian Americans, each with a fall of black hair over their black cassocks which added to the effect. We had a flute, piano, organ, tenor and soprano soloists. And that was me coughing during "What Wondrous Love" and sneezing in "It is Finished."

The choir was sympathetic.

Beforehand, those ladies of the choir who had arranged their light Easter ensembles were moaning about it, since Easter morning is expected to reach 20 degrees, so I am not feeling bad about having failed to sew up my linen top. I have a brunch this morning, and #2 son's gymnastics class. I need to make some cookies for Son-in-Law's family and deliver those, and to drop off a slew of empty boxes at the old store. I had done the grocery shopping yesterday morning to leave some time free today for sewing, but #2 son assures me that I have to do some further shopping.

"You should let me come grocery shopping with you," he said gravely but kindly, "so you won't make these errors."

The errors in question included failing to buy sugary cereal or things that teenage boys spray themselves with in lewd commercials. There were other things, I think, but I cannot remember them, which I suppose proves his point.

There also has to be baking and cleaning.

But I think I will also have to spend some part of the day resting. Drinking tea. Resting my voice.

 We were told we would have snow last night, so I took some pictures of the baby flowers.

And we did indeed have snow. There some is on the grill, and here is some on the grass.

This is my kind of snow. If it would confine itself to this sort of thing, I wouldn't object to snow at all.

Yes, it is still dark out. I think I would have better photographs if I could remember to wait till dawn for them.

My throat still hurts, and I still sound like a frog, but I don't feel feverish any more, and am hoping to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for Easter.

I am going to go to work at the new store today. Blessing emailed me a welcoming message, which was above and beyond the call of duty, but very nice of her. She lives in the town where the new store is, so she is simply working there instead. However, she does seem to be cleaning rather than accounting, so I am debating whether perhaps I should wear jeans and a sweatshirt rather than meeting and greeting clothes. I do have my usual beginning-of-the-month customer service things to do, though, and those are mainly clerical. I guess my standard zookeeper outfit would be the correct choice.

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day and I enjoyed my school visits. They involved some drives in the country, and the country is disappearing rapidly around here, so we have to enjoy those while we can. In fact, I drove through some nice wooded lanes yesterday and crossed the road that we used to go on often on our way to the campgrounds, and suddenly found myself in the midst of a whole bunch of buildings that hadn't been there last time I looked. My mouth dropped open and I stared around in wild surmise, and it is just as well that I was alone in my car.

I guess they thought, if they were going to build a new school, they might as well go ahead and do a housing development, gas station, video store, and boys' and girls' club while they were at it.

When I finished my school visits, I came home and made further helpless attempts to get my work computer online.

I called up my ISP and, with my squeaky laryngitis voice, read the nice tech guy the directions I was trying to follow. He couldn't help. Neither could Pokey.

However, I think the summer will be easier if I can do this. Then I can go to the back bedroom and shut the door and get online, rather than trying to work on my link campaign with a bunch of kids in the room and the TV going.

One thing I did discover, working at home.

You will have noticed that the baby flowers are sitting in a bunch of old leaves that we haven't gotten around to clearing out yet. I have been sick, but you know, if I had been well I would probably have sewn my Easter outift and cleaned my house, so it would probably still be this untidy in my front garden.

Sometimes I feel bad about the relative untidiness of our yard. The neighbors seem to keep up much better than we do. #2 son, when he was smaller, used to say that we would be the black sheep of the block if we didn't get to work, a pronouncement that usually inspired us to get to work.

The discovery? Our neighbors have gardeners! A whole fleet of them arrive on this block, right after I normally go to work.

It is Good Friday, and all my menfolks have the day off, so it is good that I am working away from home today. Having one person in the house trying to work would be dispiriting for me and spoil their fun. I did not make hot cross buns and do not intend to, I am sorry to say, but I think that they will all be asleep when I leave, anyway.

Enough idle persiflage. I will leave them a note suggesting that they had better rake that flower bed so we won't be the black sheep of the neighborhood.

Yesterday began with computer work, and then some school visits.

In between schools, I dropped by the store my kids used to call "the Evil Palace of Books" and so we now just call it the Evil Palace. I wanted to find a good a book on internet marketing. I had told Arkenboy that I wanted a book on the subject, and he assured me that there were lots, though he couldn't actually think of any at that moment.

There are books for people who know about computers, which essentially say, "Hey, you're spending all that time making web pages, so why not sell something?" There are also books for people who know about business, which mostly say, "Hey, you're selling something, so here are some things you can hire people to do." Clearly, the best thing would be for the readers of these two groups of books to meet up.

Marketing handbooks do nowadays include a few notes on the online aspect of marketing, and I was glad to see that I am mostly doing what they suggest. This is not what I wanted, though. I wanted a book to tell me what to do next, preferably with a glossary, charts to show what kind of numbers I should be getting and when, and a phone number to call when I get confused.

While I was there, I took a real quick look at the newest knitting books.

The good thing about the current trendiness of knitting is that there are always new knitting books to look at. The bad thing is that so few of them are worthwhile. I won't mention any names, but there is a whole series with murky sepia pictures that give no hint of what the garment might look like when finished. Are there so many knitters who don't knit, but merely collect knitting books and yarn in a SABLE (Stash Enhancement Beyond Life Expectancy) frenzy that actually knitting from the patterns has become a moot point?

I will mention the name of one book that I looked at yesterday: Naughty Needles by Nikol Lohr. If you read the knitting blogs at all, you've read about this book, and you may have been thinking that it would be tacky and vulgar. Those are actually its good points. A photo of a bunch of middle-aged babes in yarn pasties is downright saucy and charming compared with the act of spending two pages of a knitting book on a "pattern" for said pasties. I am beginning to feel that all "patterns" which are basic geometric shapes should have to use those quotation marks. That way, we would see clearly that a book contained 22 "patterns" plus the same old sock with a fun fur edging (or, in this case, a mermaid tail), and not waste our time on it.

Not that I wasted a lot of time. I got out of the Evil Palace quickly and back to my school visits till I ran out of flyers. Then I got back to the computer and did a couple of marketing pieces and some link management, till the word came that That Man was coming down to the old store with empty boxes and more flyers. I hied myself over there and got the boxes packed, then came home to fold flyers till time for choir practice.

If you think that sounds like more than eight hours of work, you are right. I am going to take some time today to sew, or possibly to lie in bed moaning, depending how I feel after today's round of school visits.

The rehearsal last night was particularly bad. I went to bed right after work on Monday and Tuesday, but we have the Tennebrae service coming up tomorrow, so I had to go to practice. Chanthaboune said just to listen, and I mostly took her advice. The sopranos passed Kleenexes back to me as I croaked feebly through the pieces.

I might still have had a bad effect on the group. At one point, the organist mentioned that the pitch was sagging. I've sung with these guys for two years and have scarcely heard the organist say so much as "hello," so I must assume that he was just goaded beyond endurance by the sagginess of the pitch.

This is all the further I've gotten with the baby sweater, so I probably shouldn't be talking about other people's knitting. And I certainly can't say a word about other people's singing. I am hoping to have my voice back for tomorrow night, that's all.

It is Maundy Thursday. "Maundy" is a corruption of "mandatum," which means "command." That's where we get our word "mandate," and in this case it refers to the commandment of Jesus to "love one another as I have loved you," which is a pleasant thing to contemplate.

On this day, your local churches might have foot-washing ceremonies, dramas of the Last Supper, blessings of oils, or other rituals that call to mind the Last Supper. I may skip these things and go to bed early again. I am feeling better, but it is not good to have laryngitis during Holy Week.

No doubt you dropped by my xanga today hoping to hear more about my monstrous cold, my odd concatenation of professional duties, and my bootless attempts to upload a site map into the highest directory to which I have access.

However, I had an email from my Cousin Tx containing pictures of new shoe styles which I had to share with you.

Cousin Tx and I share a great-grandfather, which would normally make us second cousins. However, our grandfathers were half-brothers, so I am not sure what kind of cousin she is to me. I have written about this great-grandfather before -- he was the one who had to escape from a rioting mob in China after extortionists buried a child in his backyard. The sort of thing that might happen to anyone, of course, but I have only ever heard of it happening to my great-grandfather and his roommate, who was I believe the brother of Cousin Tx's great-grandmother, in which case she would be one of the few people who could claim to have two relatives with this unusual experience.

Cousin Tx lives in Texas, and while I have never actually met her, I think of her as having a more exciting life than I do, because she has both grandchildren and tattoos. I have neither. Also, she drinks 7 & 7, whereas the occasional mimosa is about it for me. I do not know for a fact that she puts on her cowboy boots in the evenings and goes out and does the two-step, but I like to think she does.

I am sure she would not dance in shoes like these.

They make me think of foot-binding.  Or maybe, considering the two bottom pictures, horseshoes.

They are grotesque. I understand that they are from recent Italian and Japanese fashion collections, and they are perhaps not intended to be worn except briefly by women who are paid to put them on, but it still seems to me that it says something about fashion designers.

Speaking of which, I wrote in my frivolous way about clothes sizing the other day. Sewing Blogger Dress a Day has written more seriously about it. Apparently, there was a government effort to standardize clothing sizes back in the 1940s, taking into account cup sizes and bottom sizes and the distance between waist and hip and height and all that stuff.

It was voluntary for the manufacturers, and they mostly chose to skip it. In the 1950s and '60s, the article quoted says, women tried "using corsets and girdles to mold their bodies to the shapes of the clothing produced ." How many steps is that away from foot-binding?

Now, we all know that different clothing companies use different sizes and shapes. I had always figured that it was an attempt to force brand loyalty. That is, once a woman finds that she is a perfect size 14 at Eddie Bauer or a perfect size 0 at Banana Republic, she will be inclined to shop at those places consistently for the convenience of it.

We see this in my industry, where manufacturers make their bulletin board trimmers just an inch different in size from their competition's, so that their borders will fit only on their rack. The idea here is that retailers will choose to fill a rack with the borders that fit that rack, and forego the competition's stuff.

But there may be a more sinister intention behind the sizing of the clothing manufacturers. Perhaps they are so misogynistic that they would like to see women force their feet into these grotesque shoes or their bodies into the stylized shapes the designers choose.

Yes, well, maybe I am still a little bit snappish.

Thank you all for your sympathy and good suggestions.

Yesterday's packing of the store ran into problems -- namely, a lack of boxes to pack in. I packed all the available boxes, then went home, got the site map generator going (I finally verified my site with Google, so I am trying that again), put The Joy Luck Club in the DVD player, and folded flyers for a few hours. Then I had a call from The Empress suggesting that I bring a carful of packed boxes up to the other store and unpack them, as there was no other way I was going to get any more boxes.

This I did.

I have to say that I am surprised that I am the only one packing up the old store. I just don't think of it as a one-person job. However, I can pack up a carload of boxes in a couple of hours, drive it up and unpack it and put the stuff away and load the car with empty boxes and drive back down in another couple of hours, and still have time to repeat the process.

Today, I will also have to do school visits and fold the flyers for tomorrow's round of school visits, and will need to change clothes in between that and the moving, and I am obviously not getting the time to do my link management. Nor my e-mail newsletter. Nor the things I normally do at work at the beginning of the month.

It will all work out.

This is an intersection near my house, and also therefore near the old store.

Broken nails from all this manual labor also in photo, though not the main point.

This is an intersection twelve miles away near the new store.

There is a big difference in traffic, distance, and the level of charm in the two locations. In theory, I will be there on Fridays, but in fact I have been there both days I have worked since my store closed.

I am having some trouble maintaining a positive attitude, in spite of the very strong cold medicine I bought myself yesterday.

We did get the FAFSA corrected, we hope, and I will send it in today and hope that it is not too late.

I am also snapping at my children. Is there a kinder way to say, "I'm sick, you are lucky you're getting anything for breakfast, leave me alone"?

Oh, and the site map. It took 9 hours. Then it disappeared. I don't know what to do next. But see "It will all work out" above. Transitions are always challenging.

Now, just in case you were hoping for knitting content, here is a link to a typical 1950s outfit knitted entirely from plastic grocery bags. You can tell that this is art, rather than craft, because it cannot be worn or used in any way, and is not even particularly attractive, but rather is a complete waste of many hours of good knitting. If it had been knitted up in some nice cotton or silk, it would have been useful and pretty, and would therefore have fallen out of the category of art.

I already admitted I was feeling snappish.