Yesterday was not a peaceful or pleasant day. There were times, in fact, when I wished I had gone to the store so that I wouldn't have to deal with things.

I spent four hours at the computer, anyway, and didn't come close to getting that work finished. Pretty soon here I will either get back to being able to get all the computer work done, or will quit doing it, one or the other.

I will also get back to a normal schedule -- whatever that turns out to be. The first couple of weeks of school always involve transportation issues, and we have had car troubles compounding it this year.

You can see that I did get some sewing done. I made this lovely skirt. It was a TNT pattern, so I confidently sewed it up just as I had made the previous one, which I wear all the time.

However, there is an issue with bias skirts. I read about it recently -- some fabrics "lift" on the bias, and some "drag." So this skirt, which I previously made and loved in broadcloth, turns out in the beautiful rayon challis to be a slinky, clingy, narrow skirt. Not, as in its first incarnation, a graceful, swingy skirt.

It is still a pretty skirt, but not perhaps the best choice for me.

I'll think about it later.

Today is a day of big changes. #1 daugher has moved back in, a member of the so-called "Boomerang Generation." #2 son is starting college. #2 daughter has an interview for an important job. #2 son is going back to high school without his big brother.

As for me, I have a day off (after a bit of computer work). Since school begins today, we are sort of past BTS, though not quite. The uncertainties about my job should settle fairly soon; I had a promising talk with The Empress. I also picked up an application at Hancock Fabrics. My kids continue to urge me to do a proper job hunt for a job in our town which pays more than my current job, but if things work out with my current job as I hope they will, I could bring it back down to 40 hours a week and do 10 hours somewhere else and be fine. I am thinking I will probably do tutoring, actually, but the fabric store had a sign on the window so I asked. I could do that on weekends, it would be low stress, and I could perhaps make further progress toward my goal of learning to sew well this year.

I haven't heard anything on that other job I applied for. However, they said it would be within three weeks, and it hasn't yet been three weeks, so who knows?

I also leafed through an issue of Writer's Market yesterday, while returning a Wii game. They were having a special issue on making a living as a writer.

Writing has been part of my paid work for years (it's about a quarter of my current job, and that proportion should increase), and I do make a couple hundred a year on the side with it as well, so there is certainly a sense in which I am a professional writer. But I was wondering whether I could earn a couple hundred a month with it rather than a couple hundred a year.

The magazine didn't have enough that looked useful to cause me to buy it. I did read through the article on how to use a blog for promotion.

This is my personal blog. I don't promote it or use it to promote anything. Just wanted that to be clear.

But I do have two blogs for work. One is about six months old and I have been promoting it as shamelessly as I know how and have time for, and it gets about 1800 visits a week. The other is about two months old, and I haven't promoted it at all (it exists for a particular, limited purpose), and it gets about 10 visits a week.

Now a big, serious professional blog should get at least 500 visits a day, so neither of these work blogs is really a big deal, but the difference between the traffic at the two suggests to me that promotion makes a difference. Doing more with both of them is one of the things I plan to do once we get through BTS at the store.

But here's the thing: all of the suggestions in that article were old hat to me. You may recall (if you always read my blog and have total recall) that six months ago I knew nothing about online marketing or e-commerce, and indeed was unable either to find information on the subject or to understand it when that fellow #2 daughter dated pointed me to some of it. Now I am actually doing all the things the article says a person should. So I think that this shows that I have made real progress in this area.

I like real progress.

Yesterday I successfully spent being a couch potato, except for church and grocery shopping and cooking and helping #1 daughter unpack and a bit of housework. I even napped for about five minutes during an Audrey Hepburn movie. Today I may also spend lolling around, once I get my work done. But I am hoping that I will also get some sewing in. My kids think I should be out there jobhunting, but I have to rest up first. Seriously.

We were quite busy at the store yesterday, though not insanely busy. The numbers ended up looking good, but we had enough time at various points in the day to discuss why it was that we were not insanely busy.

The Princess left, exhausted, after lunch. She will be working again today. The Poster Queen and I stayed on till the bitter end, which took place rather later than our official closing time. By then I had been working for fourteen hours, counting the computer time, with time out to take #2 son to Target for school supplies. I had made a couple of hopeful phone calls home on the subject of dinner, but no one was cooking at my place. I brought home a drive-through dinner.

"I have college, you know," #1 son reminded me. "Can we afford this?"

I assured him that it was coming out of the grocery money. I also pointed out that it was cheap and nasty. The boys like cheap, nasty food, and I have reached a point of fatigue at which I no longer care what we are eating.

However, I have today and tomorrow off (except for computer work, and I plan to keep that at a minimum). I will get some proper food into the house, carefully since I have already plundered the budget for carry-out, clean up a little bit, sing in church, and that is all. #1 daughter will be coming home today, and I hope to have some time with her. I also have a couple of Audrey Hepburn flicks that Netflix sent me, so sitting around like a couch potato knitting and watching old movies could very well happen.Tomorrow I will see the kids off to school, and spend time with #1 daughter unless she also heads off to school. I am not sure what her plans are.

So, last night, with a sense of week-end vegging out, I returned to reading A.J. Jacobs's book, The Year of Living Biblically, a record of his quest to follow all the rules in the Bible.

I have to say that I am a bit disappointed that he didn't provide a list. He began by going through the whole Bible and writing down all the hundreds of commands he found, but for some reason he did not append them to his book. This didn't matter at first, but by now I have realized that he is approaching the whole thing with the same attitude teachers take toward the state frameworks: he is trying to check all the commands off.

Now, I know a lot of people who strive for personal holiness, using the Bible as a standard. Striving for personal holiness is more common in my circle than striving to lose weight or increase income. This may be why I assumed that this would be what Jacobs was doing. Instead, he seeks out opportunities to do things on his list. He manufactures chances to stone an adulterer or to take an egg without also taking the mother bird. He eats grasshoppers just because they are not forbidden.

He does write about his struggles with lust, covetousness, pride, lying, and the impulse to speak unkindly.

Actually, speaking unkindly seems to be a huge problem for him. A reader cannot help but notice what a nice guy he is, but he lives in New York. He provides examples of conversations in which speaking unkindly is clearly his only choice. I, thinking of the multiplicity of other kinder things he could have said, find myself feeling very thankful that I don't live in New York.

Anyway, he does mention these larger issues, but he is mostly concerned with knocking items off his list. So, by halfway through the book, I am wishing that he had appended a list, so we could keep track and sort of cheer him on. I am fighting an impulse to go read Deuteronomy in order to see what might be coming up next in the book.

It may be that the ongoing effort to avoid lying would be boring to write about, or to read about, while rituals involving chickens keep the narrative thread going.

When I said that I wouldn't be able to buy anything but food and toilet paper till #1 son graduates, those who know me might have wondered where I plan to get my books.

I still have Booksfree and Frugalreader, both sources of books costing less than $2 apiece, and I have some informal book swap partners as well. I figure I can sneak my week's novels into the grocery bill by switching to generic tomato sauce and giving up the Schwan's man. Nonetheless, I was pleased when Amazon offered to send me free books if I would review them.

The first book they have sent me is The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs. I liked the writer immediately, and even felt as though I might know him from somewhere. A bit of reading on the back cover showed that this was probably because I had read his previous book, The Know-It-All, about the time he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

The Know-It-All really had no plot, and the information, since it was from the encyclopedia, was mostly stuff I already knew. The encyclopedia is not the place to go for exciting new developments. It is a book of things that you should already know. That's why you go look stuff up there. So that first book, though it had some amusing parts about the reactions people had to Jacobs's telling them these things, was not entirely enthralling.

The Year of Living Biblically is full of things I didn't know before. I had no knowledge of the dancing of Hasidic men on the last night of Sukkot. And, while I know quite a bit about the rules in the Bible and how it feels to strive to follow them, my own experience is limited to eschewing gossip, unkind speech, materialism, oppression of the poor, etc. I never pay any attention to dietary laws, rules about clothing, or any of the parts about ritual uncleanness.

Jacobs spent a year trying to follow all the rules of the Bible, including the ones he thinks might better have been cordoned off in a chapter headed "And Now for Some Crazy Rules." Being Jewish, he didn't toss things out on the grounds that Jesus Christ was fulfillment of the Law, nor did he pick and choose on the basis of how times have changed or what larger truth God might have had in mind. If the Bible said to put tassels on your clothes, he put tassels on his clothes. He did this without benefit of faith, too, which has to be harder.

I'll let you know how it comes out.

Today is normally the biggest day of the year, numbers-wise, at the store. I also have to run errands before going to the store, and have some computer work to finish before that. I assume that this is why I woke up at 4:00 a.m., so that I could complete all these tasks. I spent an hour trying to go back to sleep. Since I did not in fact get back to sleep, I now regret having wasted that time, when I could have been working. If I had been able to get back to sleep, I would have been pleased about it. It is now almost 5:30 (xanga thinks I live in a different time zone) and therefore time to get up anyway.Sigh.

I enjoyed the comments yesterday -- the nostalgic recollections of the whole Back to School shopping experience, especially.

As for the hatred of shopping remarks, I completely agree.

But how do you avoid it? The kids have to wear something. They have to have paper and binders and backpacks. People have to eat something. Yarn and tea and books and sheet music do not grow on trees.

There are people who shop recreationally. In fact, it is the second most popular leisure activity in America. I would prefer it if our nation's hobbies were things like rock climbing and amateur astronomy or something, frankly. Shopping seems pretty lightweight as a national pastime. But many people love it.

Those of us who hate it still have to do it, though, if only to the extent of the weekly grocery shopping and the annual Back to School shopping, holiday and birthday gifts. That's my limit, personally. I take full advantage of online shopping (slightly better than physical shopping) and of course there is the Schwan's man, who comes to my door and offers me berries and sorbet, but at some point you have to go to the store.

Of course, I work in a store. Today I will be at a trade show instead, but mostly I am at the store all the time now.

Yesterday, toward the end of the day -- which is to say that we had been closed for a while but people were still shopping anyway -- I handed a customer her receipt and said, "If you'll sign here, please." My brow furrowed slightly and I took it back. "I'm sorry. You don't have to sign that. Maybe ... I should ... go home."

The Princess turned around and said she would have a receipt for the customer in a moment. She stood watching the printer. Three or four minutes passed. The customer was beginning to look alarmed. She waved her receipt at us. The Princess and I woke up a bit and apologized.

"It's been a long day," I said in what was probably a dazed voice. I had been whipping around the store trying to clean up after the legions of shoppers, and was actually feeling a bit dizzy. The Princess had completely stopped moving. It had been a long day. We had run out of sacks.

Shortly after that, we were able to leave. I drove home and made dinner. And then, around 8:00, the oddest thing happened. I sat down at the computer to check my mail -- and started working. I uploaded pictures for the store blog, installed a site meter on one of our incidental websites... All the time I kept telling myself to stop, I was through working for the day, I had started 14 hours ago. It was as though I were a golem or something and just couldn't stop working.

I gathered up enough energy to remove myself from the computer and install myself on the couch instead with Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler. A sad book. I think that all of Tyler's books involve people whose lives have been messed up by chaos and fecklessness, and yet she is so sympathetic to it.

My kids start school Monday.  #1 son has taken a hiatus from work, beginning today, to rest up. He has offered to clean up the house before #1 daughter's anticipated arrival on Sunday. If he really does that, it will be wonderful. I will be at the store all weekend. I am trying to persuade The Empress and That Man to take Monday off, since I have had some partial days off and they have had none. After that, though, we will have to renegotiate about hours. If I am going to work 54 to 60 hours a week, I really need to do the extra hours for someone else, so that they will result in extra pay.

Okay, enough random persiflage. I have work to do.

I left the store yesterday around 2:00, and dashed home to pick up the boys for back to school shopping before choir.

The boys are efficient shoppers. We went to two stores and got all their clothes and backpacks. There is little point in getting school supplies beyond paper and pencils till they've been to their classes.

#1 son made sure #2 son made stylish choices, and I helped #1 son with his choice of argyle socks vs. socks with intarsia sharks on them. Argyle, of course, in burgundy. He plans to wear them with his white sneakers for a touch of vintage-style irony. They are intended to say, "I may look like just another guitar-playing freshman, but I have unplumbed depths."

#2 doesn't want his clothes to say anything. He is 15. Being just like all the others is basically what you want at 15.

We were reminiscing a bit about previous years' back to school shopping. It used to involve an early trip to the office supply store with our collection of school supply lists, then breakfast out, and then the mall for clothing. #1 son took the part of his sister, squeaking, "I'm a girl. I have to try things on!"

Nope, the boys never try things on. They hold the garments up somewhere near their bodies and figure that's close enough.

Nor do they go to multiple stores to see all the options before deciding and going back to buy things. Bless them.

I was remembering the year that we stopped off to check Seventeen Magazine because I didn't want to buy the ugly, clunky shoes the girls were asking for. They had to show me that those shoes were indeed the style for that year, so that I would give in and buy the hideous things. The clerk said they looked like nuns' shoes, and I guess she would know.

The boys looked at me as though I had said something unusually daft.

"You mean girls have a book that tells them what to wear every year?" #1 son asked.

"Boys don't?" I responded.

I made it to choir with 30 seconds to spare.

 Illgrindmyownthankyou said "so are you just leaving us hanging about the job prospect or are you saying there isn't one?  and how long is it going to take the irs to fix their mess?   arrrgh...answers girl, I need answers!" and with good reason.

Specifically with relation to the job prospect, I am waiting for someone in another town to contact me about my online application. I don't know whether I will be considered or not -- I may be too expensive, if the woman in the tiny office is the current occupant of the position. This I say not based on the woman herself, but on the apparent fact that this is a one-person office. There definitely wasn't room for a secretary or a bookkeeper to be hiding in there, and there was no inner office, so this may not be the size of or type of operation that I thought it was. We'll see.

Yesterday at the store, I told a secondary-level science teacher that he might want to check our catalog or our website, because there would be more for him there, and he said, "I take it you're a franchise then?"

"No," said I, "we're an independent store owned by a local family."

"Then how do you have a catalog and a website with more things?"

"It's the modern world, sir," I explained sweetly.

So it might be that the tiny office I saw is the command center of a great operation.

As for the IRS, who knows? I am relieved to know that I don't really owe them the money, and prepared to fight about it for as long as it takes. When I told the IRS agent that it seemed that this part of their jobs might be kind of fun, in a puzzle-like way, she said, "Sure, if it weren't biting your chair."

But in real life, resolutions do not happen so quickly. On TV, you can usually count on the problems being resolved within the 30 or 60 minutes of the program. This is one of the few ways in which TV is superior to real life.

They also have better props and costumes (British TV) and better make-up and physiques (American TV).

In real life, these things are more like Works in Progress, as we say in the knitting blogs.

But that's the thing. Normally, I have a couple of books to read and a couple of knitting projects underway.

Look how many books I have right now. One is currently being read, and the rest have not yet been read. Very unusual.

And look how many knitting WIPs I have.

Erin, Ivy, the Doctor's Bag, the baby sweater.

As for life circumstance WIPs, I normally have a couple of things going on in my life at any given time. But they are usually things like a writing assignment and a solo to prepare, or maybe a holiday and a new craft technique. In fairness, they are also sometimes like Back to School and a broken refrigerator, but still there are usually just a couple.

Right now, I have all the following in a state of unresolvedness:

• a car accident
• a dispute with the IRS
• a divorce (not my own)
• a family health problem
• a bridal shower I'm hosting
• a financial issue
• job uncertainties
• Back to School
• car trouble

So --- answers? Yes, that would be nice. But at the moment, I am just continuing with all these WIPs. Today I will be at the store, leaving with any luck in time to get to the choir rehearsal that I direct, Bible study, Bell Camp, and my own choir rehearsal, which is my afternoon lineup for Wednesdays.

 If you always read my xanga and have total recall, then you know that there is a certain up-in-the-airness about my job. I've been doing the same job for 13 years or so (I forget exactly how many, but it's a long time). However, over the past year the business has had some issues and changes, and one of the results was the closing of the store that I managed. I spent a couple of months doing workshops and conferences and online stuff, and then Back to School arrived. The store that the owners' daughter manages has remained open, and I have been up there four or five days a week for the past couple of months.

I really liked being the online and outside person, and indeed I still am doing that, but I also am doing a lot of driving, and working about 54 hours a week. I am not at all sure what my boss has in mind for when everyone is back in school next week, but I know that my current schedule is only okay with me as a temporary measure.

There have also been some increases in my cost of living lately, not least of which is #2 son's college tuition. I have always been one to choose a job I like over one that pays well, but financial worries definitely affect the fun quotient of my life. So when a suitable job appeared in my town recently, I applied for it. Yesterday, having done four hours of online work and a store delivery on what was theoretically a day off, I decided to drop by to visit the place.

 It is a 10x10 office, a single room. The classes are held at the local university, which is sensible. The person in the office, a pleasant-looking woman surrounded by clutter, was on the phone when I arrived. She covered the phone with her hand and informed me that she wasn't the person I wanted to talk to. Someone else from some other town would call me, she said. She did not introduce herself, or give me the option of waiting till she finished her phone call. I smiled and left.

Next stop was the IRS office, where I spent another hour. This time I got two agents, both peeking into stuff they shouldn't have peeked into, apparently. They kept reassuring one another that it would be okay for them to look  as long as they didn't tell me. I assured them that they didn't have to tell me anything except how to fix the error.

I cordially thanked them at the end of the visit, and expressed a hope that I would never see them again.

So when I got home after this carnival of a morning, I was happy to see the catalog from Keepsake Quilting. I have no intention of buying anything from them. I have two quilts waiting to be finished, plus a half-quilted table runner, and the fabric for a couple more quilting projects. And of course I can't buy anything but food and toilet paper till #2 son graduates.

 But I have this weakness for Hallowe'en quilts. And this is the issue of Keepsake Quilting's catalog that contains all the Hallowe'en quilts.

I have no idea why I like Hallowe'en quilts so much. What an odd thing to like, after all. Poison green, purple, and orange are not colors I normally choose, and the overall goofiness of the designs isn't my usual style, either. I don't do a whole lot of celebrating of Hallowe'en, and I already have three little quilts for that season. But there is something about Hallowe'en quilts...  I can't explain it. I just really like them.

So I took some time off to admire all the Hallowe'en quilt patterns that I will not be making, and that's why I have put a bunch of them on this post.

I have been away from the ladies' Sunday School class for some time. I taught the Senior High class last year, and then when I finished that, I started the busy summer and have had special music things going on and all, so I have been back only occasionally this summer.

So when I went in yesterday, I was surprised to see a man in the group.

The class isn't really called "the ladies' Sunday School class," but as long as I have been there it has been all women, and mostly old women. I have always enjoyed hearing about their adventurous lives and their raucous cackling laughs have brightened my Sunday mornings.

The gentleman who joined us had an interesting effect on the group. The women would be talking about something and getting into the discussion, and the man would join in with something like, "The thread that I notice in all these stories is that all of them reflect individual attempts to embrace The Holy, and it is through these individual attempts that we create a community of faith that has the power to provide a channel of God's love to a hungry world. I will now read Isaiah 5:8." Throughout these perorations, the group would nod solemnly, and then at the end there would be a sort of respectful silence. The leader of the group would then read the next question for discussion and it would start again.

Later, at home, my husband was working on my car, and kept trying to involve me in it. I appreciate the fact that he is able to fix the cars. In this case, my "low coolant level" light had come on, and I figured that he could put in some coolant for me, and that would be the end of it.

No. He kept making me go out in the triple digit heat and listen to the motor. Sometimes he made me look at the belts. The lettering was red, he pointed out. What I was supposed to glean from this fact I do not know.

He had me read the car repair instruction manual. I do not recall what it said, except that the word "splines" came into it. I do not know what splines are, but I admire the word. You are supposed to clean them, if you are wondering about the context.

I was talking to my daughter at the time via IM. The boys were both here, too, and we were discussing comedy: the difference between wit and humor, I think it was. My daughter was telling me about her weekend. These were low-key conversations. The insertion of the auto repair motif did not improve them.

Both these examples seem to me to typify the problem of conversational agendas. When there is a conversational flow already in place, it is not possible to divert it. You can only stop it.

I used to work at a museum. It was the custom for all the workers to stop and eat lunch together. You may be thinking that this is kind of sweet, but it always seemed to me that it showed how unimportant our work was, that we could all stop working at the same time to eat together.

Anyway, the main topic at the table was always television.

You know that I am not knowledgeable on this topic even now, and that was in the days when I lived in the country and did not have cable TV. I knew nothing. People would say, "Did you watch 'The Practice' last night?" and I would think, "Oh, good, we're talking about something else. Is it sports or music?"

I was incapable of joining in those conversations. I am also incapable of joining in any auto repair conversations. The only way I could honestly join the the discussion of The Holy that the man in Sunday School seemed to be trying to propagate would be by saying, "What exactly are you talking about?"

I'm inclined to say that the solution is just to follow the conversational flow as established (knitting directions say to follow the pattern as established, for the non-knitters who don't recognize the reference). Or change groups and get your own conversation going.

I think it is a little sad that none of the kids turned out to be someone that my husband can discuss cars with. But the man in the Sunday School class is, I think, out of line.

I completed one of the fronts of the little kimono jacket I'm making for a forthcoming baby while watching Hot Fuzz. 

The boys put that movie on our Netflix list, and I wasn't expecting to find it amusing. I didn't even plan to watch it. But after a busy day at the store yesterday, it seemed like just the thing.

It was very funny. There is a lot of gore and violence, which gives a person good opportunities to do any complex shaping on the knitting or get up and make a cup of tea. But it is not realistic violence. It is spoof violence. And I just found the whole movie very funny. Perhaps my favorite line was, "You just can't commit that kind of carnage and mayhem without incurring considerable paperwork."

My favorite part of the baby sweater so far is the edging.

It's an all-K selvedge, with YOs on the front, surrounded by paired decreases so that you get a gently sloping edge and a row of beading. I don't know if something will eventually be threaded through this or not, but I think I'll be using it in future for a neckline with a ribbon.Very pretty.

The sweater itself is tiny. The piece you see is not blocked, so the sides are rolling in and the shape is lost, but I can tell you it is very small. Chanthaboune thinks you can whip out a baby sweater in an afternoon, and she is wrong, but it seems likely that this one will be finished in time for the baby, if not in time for the shower.

I don't go back to the store till Tuesday, so that will help.

I am a goal-oriented person. My major life goals have been dominated for the past couple of decades by the great big one of producing four terrific human beings, but I still like to have smaller goals to work on.

In the month of August, I normally have as my primary goal "get everyone back to school without losing my sanity." All other goals for August have to be small and desultory. This year, I am also working on SWAP Part III, though not at any great speed. Last year, the Summer Reading Challenge went through the month of August. The year before that, I had the goal of reading all the blogs in the Knitting Bloggers Ring, of which I was a member at the time. I linked to the best ones I found.

So some mornings I have clicked back a couple of years on my xanga to see what great knitting blogs I should have been reading. I have rediscovered some that I will enjoy reading again when I have time. I have seen a lot of pictures of yarn, which seems to be what has taken over the knitting blogs recently. But I have been surprised by how many of them are just -- gone.

These were not sites where someone once wrote about her visit to the mall and then never came back. These were good blogs. Now abandoned.

I read at Sphinn that 79% of all the blogs on the net are inactive. You read about why people blog -- there have been studies on it -- but I haven't read about why people stop blogging.

I write one blog because I am paid to (last week that blog had more visitors than this one), and I suppose I would quit doing it if it stopped being part of my job, but I think I would miss it.

This blog is my daily journal. I've always had one, at least since I was 10 or so. I used to do it on paper instead of on the computer. It is a habit, but it is also a discipline. If I didn't have a computer, I would just go back to paper.