My main goal yesterday was to finish the first draft of the first book in the publishing project (they are small books -- 50 to 100 pages each) and get it sent off to The Empress and That Man for feedback. I did accomplish that, but not until nearly 6:00. This counts the repeated bouncing back of the file for being too large, and my having to divide it up and send it again. At that point, we had dinner and I cleaned up, and when a call came at 7:30 I was taken aback to see that I had forgotten to join Partygirl for our walk.

On Wednesday, I entirely forgot my book club meeting. That's only once a month, too, so I won't have another opportunity till September.

So I guess I am not entirely back on track.

Partygirl is a teacher, a roving teacher who subs for every grade at a local private school, and she had kindergartners yesterday. They cry. She's pretty good at keeping them from crying as much as they do in some classrooms, but still, it is an added layer of Back to School stress. She understands the difficulty of the annual transition.

So I raced over to her house and we strolled around her neighborhood and then back to her house, where her husband plied us with watermelon. We sat up late talking and when I came home I sat up even later with my kids.

It was nice, but distinctly summer.

Today I will be up at the store, and then we have a long weekend for Labor Day. A farewell to summer. The whole family will be home. Housework, unavoidably, and cooking, but also I hope to have some sewing and knitting and lolling about. Maybe my husband will get my car fixed.

I went ahead and signed up as a consultant. This was because I had, in the course of idly  discussing it with people, scheduled three shows. I therefore had to call Janalisa and say, "I seem to have scheduled three shows, so I had better sign up."

 In honor of this surprising event, I am posting some pictures  of Pampered Chef products. Really, they are pictures of food which happens to have Pampered Chef products under it, but it is still surprising how many pictures like these I have in my xanga files.

Naturally, these pictures do not include things like the amazing garlic press or the really cool seasoning mixes, because I did not foresee any need to illustrate something with such pictures.

And even as I type that, I see that I have indeed managed to catch a bit of the amazing garlic press, here being used to press fresh ginger.

 If you actually live near me, I will come to your house and cook things for you while you sip sangria  with your guests, and how cool is that?.

I was aware that I had all these pictures because I had been leafing through my photos for a publishing project I'm working on for the store.

Back when I first went to work there, That Man had the idea of publishing classroom materials. So often our customers want something that doesn't exist. We have always shared their requests with the publishers we work with, and often they go ahead and produce something -- but often they don't. There are some areas in which we have enough demand as a retailer but there's not enough national demand for it to be worth the investment for a national publisher. NCLB has changed the particular items people want, but it hasn't changed the fact that we are too small a state to get McGraw-Hill to make the stuff for us.

Plus, That Man has been an accountant all his adult life, but in his youth he wanted to be a writer. He had some very cool ideas about literature units. He was imagining being able to print them out for people on demand, as sheet music was being printed from a sort of jukebox in those days.  I don't know whether that is still done any more, but we admired it.

So now technology has caught up with us and we can publish this stuff ourselves. We are going through Lulu. I mention this because I know that there are several of you who are toying with the idea of writing books. I'll let you know how our experience of self-publishing with the new services goes, in case it turns out to be helpful.

So far, we have read their data and watched their online tutuorials and had a live chat with them, and they have been very helpful.

It looks to us as though it can be done profitably, so I am writing the stuff. I've always loved curriculum design, and I am enjoying myself enormously.

I expect to have the content finished this week, and I've been able to use photographs for some of the images, but next week I will be diving into the formatting part and finishing up the images and all. Which is to say that I am about to move from things I am good at into an area of incompetence.

As you know, I like that. 

We will have all our kids at home this weekend. #2 daughter is taking a guest conductor gig at our church to cover her travel costs and improve her resume. I will be following the advice  in my New Consultant kit and practicing the season's recipes.

The materials recommend practicing the recipes so you can make them smoothly while talking. They say you can pretend there are people listening, but I plan to make my kids listen, in return for my spending Labor Day weekend preparing Three Cheese Garden Pizza and French Silk Torte.

My kids are excellent critics, and will tell me all the things I am doing wrong.

The regular post-BTS schedule has reestablished itself. I went back to the gym yesterday, and I have the sore muscles to prove it (ah, those lat pulldowns). I prepared three wholesome meals. I also accepted a 2-inch square piece of The Princess's tiramisu, put butter on my popcorn when I watched Twelfth Night with the kids last night, and made this morning's banana nut muffins with white flour because I had run out of whole wheat.

So I guess I am back to normal.

The book I am reading right now (it's a forthcoming book from the Amazon review arrangement) is called Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, by Kerry Patterson and a whole bunch of other guys. It begins by suggesting that people who try to cope with things, or rely on the Serenity Prayer, or try to adapt to circumstances, are just flat wrong. You can, the authors claim, change things in your work, your nation, or your private life. Just follow their simple steps.

This book keeps making me think of Ozarque. First, because she has written extensively about the political problem we have right now of feeling that we cannot do anything about our nation's circumstances, and therefore we shouldn't even try. I know that a lot of us feel that way. I don't know whether that is a new feeling or not, but it does cause people not to vote and not to work for change.

Patterson, et al give examples of successful change in a variety of settings, from prisons to public health. I've only read the first few chapters, but they begin by saying that you have to pick a couple of behaviors -- not attitudes, not outcomes -- that you want people (including perhaps yourself) to change, and focus all your efforts on that.

I think that this could be a powerful concept for marketing. The Empress and I were not able to come up with an answer to "What one or two things do we want our customers to do?" but I bet that once we do, we will find that more useful than the question we've been working with: "What outcome do we want for the store?"

The next thing that reminds me of Ozarque is that the next step, according to Kerry and the gang, is to come up with a story that will accomplish two things: make the people involved believe that they can do the thing you want them to do, and make them believe that it will be worth it.

I have to say that by the time I read this claim, I was already pretty fed up with the stories in this book. I am not generally impressed by anecdotal evidence. I like a good story as much as the next woman, but for the conveying of information and concepts, or for persuasion, give me quantifiable data every time. Long passages of case studies make me suspicious. Like, maybe they simply don't have any reliable evidence, so they're going to throw in lots of stories instead.

Influencer, in particular, presents stories with a sort of teaser about what the stories are going to prove -- they say, "There, wasn't that a great story and wouldn't you like to be able to get great results like that? Well, we're going to tell you. Keep reading!"

I'm paraphrasing.

But their claim is that the story is the important part. It is supposed to provide a vicarious experience, a field trip, for the people whose behavior you are trying to change. And Ozarque has been writing off and on about the stories people use in political contexts in the United States, and how much better the right wing is at that than the left wing. She talks about the story of The Welfare Queen, or the WMD story which made a whole lot of people willing to invade a sovereign nation in spite of international law. It has seemed to me, in reading the discussions at her website, that one of the great advantages of these stories is that they don't have to be true. People don't expect stories to be strictly, factually true. That's part of the definition of a story -- that the details can be changed around and don't have to be accurate, because there is a higher truth in the story, which is the point.

And I suppose that that is why I don't find stories persuasive.

Though maybe I do. Most people believe that advertising has no effect on them, according to interviews, and yet the advertising industry can prove with hard data that we are indeed influenced by advertising. So maybe my impatience with stories is just me persuading myself that I am too rational for all that, while my subconscious says, "Hey! This might work!"

History is smelly.

When I teach about history, I always try to get across how different our relationship to the physical world is nowadays, and that is definitely one of the differences. I was reminded of it last night, at the first meeting of the community chorus.

It was the end of an August workday here in the subtropical south, and we were stuffed like sardines into a small closed room. The evening began with a lot of squealing and hugging and we warmed up and then we sang Hoiby's Psalm 92. Very nice piece. One of my favorite psalms. It began, by the end of that piece, to seem as though we were in a gym, and people were fanning themselves quite a bit.

We moved on to Giovanni Gabrieli's In Ecclesiis, a piece in which it is a bit of a challenge to find the correct line on the music, as there are sometimes two parts and sometimes eight, plus whole crowds of brass and organ. The heat rising off the sweaty people was palpable, and the director told us about cori spezzano and how it developed from the architecture of San Marco in Venice.

We listened to a recording of the Gabrieli, sung if not at St. Mark's, then in some other building of the kind that seems to be taking a descant of its own, and I thought about what it would have been like in 1615, crowded into a choir of people who neither bathed regularly nor washed their clothes. And yet the music would have been just as transcendent.

By the time we got to the new Rutter Winchester Te Deum, we were getting a bit shaky on our reading. I think that it was at least in part the result of the miasma we were standing in.

Those who know about my little mental disorder may have been wondering whether I drove by myself at night, and the answer is that I did, and I didn't even suffer over it, so I guess I have in fact Overcome Agoraphobia to a significant degree.

I did have some trouble finding my car, or rather my husband's car, since he has still not released my car for duty. I had carefully noted down the number of my space in the parking structure --

And when I say "noted down," I mean it literally. I have trouble recognizing my husband's car. He has one of those keys that unlocks the doors by remote control, and I sometimes have to creep around the parking lot, furtively clicking the key at all the champagne-colored Japanese cars until one responds.

Anyway, I knew the number of my space, but couldn't figure out which floor it might be on. It would be dull to number the spaces on the third floor with numbers beginning with 3, wouldn't it? A kind couple -- a first alto and a bass, as it happened -- drove me around till we found it.

I even rather enjoyed driving home under the enormous yellow moon.

My solo went well, and the party was quite fun.

As always, the no-faces rule means that you are getting pictures of inanimate objects instead of people, as though the objects were the point of the party.

This is of course not the case. The people are always the point. We had a good time.

You can see why the party had to delay my re-entry into eating properly.

Eating right is not difficult or mysterious. Or at least it doesn't have to be. If you do not have special sensitivities or moral qualms, then eating a variety of foods that occur naturally and have been only minimally processed is all you have to do.

Our salad from yesterday is an excellent example. It had grilled chicken, romaine lettuce, snow peas, apples, blueberries, and pine nuts -- that is, a little bit of lean meat and a good variety of plant foods.

It was delicious, too. It isn't unpleasant to eat right, any more than it is difficult.

Here's the thing, though. On the same table, there was also The Empress's salmon dish, which had a layer of cream cheese and butter, as well as some wholesome pesto and salmon.

And there were all those cookies and little cakes which I made. They contained butter (saturated fat) and white flour and sugar (simple carbohydrates -- that is to say, those carbohydrates which have been processed to the point of containing neither fiber nor nutrients).

And there was Janalisa's punch, which had fruit juices and pureed strawberries, but which also had orange soda in it. There we are talking high-fructose corn syrup, which is a sugar source so highly processed that there is some suspicion that the body deals with it even less well than it deals with natural sugar.

That's what daily life in Hamburger-a-go-go-land is like. There are certainly plenty of wholesome choices. However, there are also plenty of unwholesome choices.

And often the unwholesome choices taste good.

I am returning to a normal school-year schedule today, in spite of the various issues hanging fire in my life. I am returning to healthy eating and 120 minutes a week of cardio and two strength sessions and 40 hours a week of work at my primary job and regular housework. I can expect whining from my kids and resistance from myself, at least the portion of myself that wakes me up at 4:00 a.m. with ideas that require me to run right to the computer, and logistical complications.

I am determined.

One of the things that has come up repeatedly in my conversations about this second job I am going to look for as soon as my car is fixed is the idea that I am overqualified, not only for the jobs I apply for or think about applying for, but also for the job I currently hold. If I would go back to teaching college, people say, I could make more money with one job than I would with two.

Now, when I was at the university, it was not uncommon for me to be called in on a Sunday afternoon to hold some kind of strategy discussion, I traveled one week out of four (and yes, there were fun elements to that, but most business travel time is spent in transit and working, and evenings in a hotel with coworkers are work, I promise you), and far more time went toward Byzantine campus politics than toward research.

My current job, with the exception of Back to School and Christmas, is mostly writing and research, with some teaching (workshops) and computer stuff (links management and SEO). I used to work at a museum where I did writing, research and teaching, and I loved it, except that my colleagues spend more time whining than working. However, it was clear to me then that a job involving writing and research and some teaching is what I would most like.

It is possible that the phone company has jobs like that, or that Proctor and Gamble does, or the local poultry plants, for that matter, and I just don't know about it.

But I don't believe that I am overqualified for my current job. I think I do it much better than someone less qualified would. In fact, why would anyone want someone less qualified if they could have someone more qualified, for any job?

It really comes down to snobbery.

Not just the people I am talking with, either. When my husband tells me that if I can sell books, I could sell cars, I look at him as though he has lost his mind. Me? Sell cars? As though there is something more genteel and honorable about selling books than about selling cars. And as though there is something more elegant about working at the university than about working for a poultry plant (there's a lot of poultry at our local university, let me tell you).

So yesterday I went to the Pampered Chef regional seasonal meeting. I was initially hampered by snobbery, but I saw fairly soon that these were serious businesswomen who made a better hourly wage than I did at the university (not that they calculated their hourly wage any more than we did at the university, but I pinned them down and did the math).

It was also fun. We had seminars on host coaching and how to plan your income, but we also had a buffet of all the new season's recipes.

One was this chicken nachos dish which I came home and made for dinner for my family.

They were delighted with it. #2 son even asked what the special spices were, allowing me to inform him about the secret ingredient, a Jamaican seasoning mix which I would never have thought of adding to nachos.

The chocolate cookies in the picture also have a secret ingredient: powdered Earl Grey tea. This sounded as though it would make a wonderfully elegant cookie, but in fact I cannot taste it at all.

These are the things I baked yesterday for the bridal shower I am co-hosting today. We are going for an autumnal theme, but mine may be too strong an orange. The Empress is doing a salmon mousse, though, and Janalisa (they are my co-hostesses) called me last night asking me to bring white tulle, so I am hoping that my bright-orange stuff will be toned down by the other elements of the decor. Those iced cookies are ginger with a lime glaze, and then there are apricot jam-filled Wedding Bells and Caramel Walnut cakes in flower shapes.

After I baked all that stuff and fed the troops, I settled down with a witty bit of chick lit and listened to the cicadas and watched the darkness fall amid the cedars.

Very nice.

Today, speaking of Christmas, is the first day of the HGP. That is the Holiday Grand Plan, which I do every year. If you do what they tell you, you will calmly find yourself ready for all the holidays. This week we are to clean our front porches thoroughly (and mine really needs it) and make lists. All the gifts we intend to give, all the people we will send Christmas cards to, all the meals we can freeze ahead for our families, all the baking we plan to do for the holidays.

I might make those Wedding Bells be Christmas Bells, but I am not going to waste any more tea by pulverizing it into chocolate cookies.

I had this plan to catch up on my sleep last night so I could quit walking around like a zombie. It didn't happen. I went to bed early, but then a great cracking thunderstorm arose. I couldn't sleep through it, but it was pleasant to lie in bed listening to the rain for a while. I gave up at 5:00 and got up.

Nevermind. Tomorrow is the beginning of the HGP. Master Chorale begins on Monday. The boys survived their first week back in school. I have a normal work schedule and once my car is drivable I'll get back to the gym and settle the second job question.

# 2 daughter made the second cut on the big symphony job she applied for, and will be one of three being reinterviewed on Monday. This is a success for her, as far as I'm concerned, whether she gets the job or not.

I am going today to the seasonal kick-off for Pampered Chef, because it might be interesting, even if I can't really imagine myself doing that as my second job.

I must also get back to eating correctly, for the sake of my lipid profile. Not today, since I will be at the Pampered Chef affair through lunch and then must bake numerous lovely things for tomorrow's bridal shower. Not tomorrow, since I will be at the bridal shower in question.

But Monday, saturated fats and simple carbohydrates will mostly disappear from my plate. I say mostly because I am not a vegetarian and I know that it is very hard to avoid simple carbohydrates completely.

They sneak up on you from around corners.

There has been some knitting taking place chez fibermom; the gray rectangle is becoming a larger gray rectangle, growing by a couple of rows a day.

This, for the random knitter who might happen by, though any such person would probably have given up coming here by now, considering how little knitting content there has been recently, Ivy by Elsebeth Lavold, in Knitpicks Essentials.

I thought last night that I might want to put a little dart into it, like the ones in Cherry Bomb. I am almost to the point of doing that if I am going to.

My husband has been doing a little bit of domestic stuff, too. Here are his peppers, drying.

We grow a lot of peppers,and use them fresh all summer.

I pick some while they're young, to can in various ways. He leaves some on the bushes, where they dry into the kind which he roasts and pulverizes to make our basic hot pepper powder. And he dries some at this freshly mature stage for throwing whole into stir fries or soups.

I like to cut them up if I cook with them, so that they make the whole dish a little spicy, but my husband enjoys eating them whole.

We've gotten a few more cukes lately, but mostly the garden is over. I will be harvesting the herbs for drying pretty soon here.

My husband is also still fiddling around with my car. He made me listen for a long time last night while he told me about thermostats and coolant level sensors. I try to keep my end of the conversation up, but I wouldn't know a coolant level sensor if it bit me.

I haven't been able to go to the gym or do my second-job hunting. It is a great savings compared with taking it to a mechanic, but perhaps not so great a savings that it makes up for not having found more work this week. On the other hand, that does mean that I have Saturday off, and could clean my house or work on my SWAP.

Or I could go with my friend Janalisa to the seasonal kickoff of Pampered Chef. This is some stuff that people sell at parties, like Tupperware. If indeed, there still is such a thing as Tupperware. Janalisa has been telling me that I can easily make the amount of extra that I need by joining her in this endeavor, rather than going to work for someone else on the weekends.

Partygirl assures me that she did so. Ten to twenty hours a week, she says, and she made about a thousand a month until her husband objected to her being out so much. I can't really feature myself doing it, though. I'm not a salesperson. The showing people stuff and cooking part would be little different from any other workshop, I expect, and Janalisa claims that I could do the rest on the computer, which is comfortable enough, but Partygirl says you have to plan to spend Sunday evening calling people and asking them to have shows.

Versus spending Sunday afternoon helping kids withe their homework or cutting fabric for people, the two other things I've thought of for weekend work.

#1 daughter is going to drive me up to the store today, so that I can sell things to people there. She has also been helping out with the cooking -- that is one of her meals in the picture. It's nice to have her home.

We're on the cusp of normalcy here. The house is still rather chaotic, both from the usual summer accumulation and from this year's special transitional chaos. I'm still needing to adjust my workspace and schedule. We had dinner at 8:30 last night, and there is still a catch as catch can aspect to the food. I haven't gotten back to the gym yet and my car is still on the sick list, so I won't make it to the gym today, either. All the various issues I listed a while back are still percolating.

But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Master Chorale is singing Rutter and Messiah this fall, so I think I will probably join them. I intend to return to the Tuesday class -- it's beginning in a couple of weeks. We are still in discussion about the Wednesday afternoon marathon -- that is, whether to continue the youth music or not, whether I'll continue in Bible study, whether #1 daughter will come to choir with me, stuff like that.

The kids' schedules are up in the air, and they are still working out transportation and parking and that sort of issue.

But September is on the horizon. The HGP begins August 26th. The heat should break soon. Hope springs eternal.

The Empress and I talked yesterday about my upcoming schedule, and it is all good news. I'll go back to two days a week at the store, we have an exciting publishing project coming up, I'm back to the workshop and conference round, and the future looks reasonably bright. I will now be able to begin seeking out a little supplemental work, since my schedule is settled.

I actually made it to my scheduled walk with Partygirl last night. She and I were able to commiserate with one another about our kids and finances. Not that I have much to complain about with my kids, but there is one big issue, and the overall level of teen angst is too high chez fibermom.

Here's something about teenagers: you cannot expect them to be appreciative.

For one thing, we have kids for our own reasons. They do not apply to be our kids. When they are small, we never think about why we are caring for them and doing things for them, or what sacrifices we make for them. They need our care. It's a basic human relationship. We love them. We don't consider that they might be more trouble than they are worth. As they get older, we still love them, but it begins to feel as though we are doing things for another big person, and on some level we expect them to notice that and appreciate it. But they usually haven't noticed the change. We are their parents, and we always have taken care of them, so what's different? Except that now they would like us to continue taking care of them without interfering in their lives at all, because they feel like they are big people in completely different ways.

For another, they are thinking only of themselves. This is developmentally appropriate. Adolescents are hardly even aware that other people exist at all, except as potential audience members.

So #1 son has yet to do the things he is supposed to do for his scholarships. With our currently parlous financial situation, we really need him to take the five minutes involved, face the conceivably embarrassing moment of walking into an office to sign papers, and just get it done for heaven's sake. I compare that effort with my having to take a second job and not buy anything till he graduates, and it seems ludicrous that he is hesitating.

But of course #1 son is busy with freshman angst. He is having his new college student identity crisis, and doesn't want to bothered with paperwork while he is deciding whether he really wants to be in college, or considers changing his major, or suffers over having to live at home where people feed him and clothe him and nag him about his paperwork all the time, or worries about whether he will have friends and why he still feels like a high school student and whatever else freshmen suffer over the first few days.

#1 daughter is very sympathetic. She remembers being 18 and feeling as though every word your parents say is intolerable. She can laugh about it.

I think that if he would just go sign the blasted papers, I would happily leave him strictly alone till he is through with his teen angst.

After all, I have some angst of my own to pay attention to. I don't need his.

Partygirl is 32 days away from her daughter's wedding. She is counting down the days. There has been eye-rolling and suggestions that the parents are being stingy as they shell out more money for the wedding than they spent on their first house.

She thinks that maybe her daughter should be appreciative.

But I told her, it's not going to happen. Not for several more years.