I got a phone call yesterday from The Central Office telling me that I would be listed in the Top 50 corner for doing so well in my first month as a consultant. Although I know that The Central Office is one of those places that tells everyone how well they are doing all the time, I still was sort of chuffed.

You understand, at my fulltime job, folks were not even excited when I got us to #4 on Google (#3 in some countries). Central Office sent me a pan for doing much less than that. It is apparently part of the deal that they encourage us like preschool teachers. I am therefore allowing myself to be delighted about this.

Speaking of SEO, I am finding that exciting, too. (Go ahead, nod off, switch to another page, I won’t see you.) As long as we had the primary goal of getting people to come into the physical store, it was clear that the name of the store and regional variants on things like “teacher resource” and “teacher store” were what we wanted to rank with. I got us to #4 for our quite common store name, and with all the regional variants we own the page. I also have us seriously well ranked for all sorts of specifically relevant subject matter. I have been maintaining this for months without even telling you about it, I had gotten so complacent about it.

However, now that we want to encourage rather than discourage random Northerners and foreign strangers to shop with us, it is clear that we need a different strategy. My surveys here and in the physical world persuade me that people who want to buy a pocket chart online do not always look for a nice teacher store online, as they would if they wanted to physically buy their pocket chart in the physical world.

No, instead they cast out “pocket chart” into the ether, and hope that Google will serve something nice up to them. Our store gets served up, for most things, around page 4 or 5. Most people have given up by then.

And of course when we lure people into our physical store, they immediately see that it is a charming place filled with people who really care about their pocket charts and want to help them. A customer was in yesterday who mentioned “that new place” — the competitor who dared to open a shop here in the town where I live after ours closed. “That new place isn’t home,” she said. “Ftttt.”

I had never previously heard anyone say, “fttt,” but I knew what she meant.

“They’re not from here, you know,” The Empress confided.

“Oh, I know,” said the customer. “We could tell.”

This won’t get us anywhere in the flat world of the internet. We need something more. I spent some time yesterday spying on our competition to see how they were getting their spots (you can do this with the Dark Art of SEO).

You can see how thrilling this is. Which of our 15,000 SKUs should I try to rank us for? How shall I do it? Do we need more control over our content, or a highly creative link-seeking strategy? Should I go with “interactive pocket chart” or “classroom pocket chart”? How do I interpret the fact that we rank #1 for “soft foam skeleton dice”?

Yes,well. I’m having fun with it.

Following a thrilling day of this, I picked up Partygirl for the Tuesday class. After class (we discussed “Be thou therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect”), we went back to her place and picked up a box of books.

“I’m giving these to you,” she said, “on the condition that I never see them again.”

I accepted the terms. They are mostly romantic suspense, a genre with which I am largely unfamiliar. I’ll read some and pass the rest along to someone else. There was also in the box an old cookbook. I love old cookbooks, just as documents if not to cook from. This was The Meat Cook Book from 1965, an era when the photographs were printed in truly sickening colors. I am looking forward to reading it.

Partygirl also gave me a gorgeous Irish crystal pitcher, in recognition of my help with her daughter’s wedding, for which I didn’t do that much, and a Pampered Chef T-shirt. It is black with pink rhinestones. Even if you have never met me, you probably know that I do not already own several black T-shirts with pink rhinestones.

If I wear Partygirl’s T-shirt and read her books, I may become as perky as she is, or at least closer to the optimal perkiness level for a cooking show consultant. We’ll see tomorrow at my next show. Today I am spending with the Dark Art of SEO and the second grade book, neither of which requires any perkiness whatsoever.

Read Chanthaboune today. She’s more amusing than I am.

I did lots of computer work yesterday, breaking at one point to go to the gym to spend half an hour on the treadmill and lift weights. Someone had left the leg press machine in the position for lying down and pushing with padded blocks on the shoulders. I don’t know how to put it more clearly, though I bet there is a weightlifting term for it. I couldn’t figure out how to change it to the sitting position, so I have nasty bruises today. I should have asked someone.

I got back to the computer stuff. After eight hours of it I quit to make Hallowe’en cookies for the Master Chorale. I made iced ghosts with black eyes, ginger cats with Sweet Caramel Sprinkle, chocolate bats and witches, butterscotch pumpkins, and chocolate-dipped pretzels with orange and black sprinkles. I arranged them all in my striped dishes for Hallowe’en flair. I did not take a photograph. It looked good, though.

It was a good rehearsal, too, it seemed to me, though perhaps not quite good enough, given that the concert is on Friday. I will miss the dress rehearsal. You know I never miss rehearsals, but I am working, so there it is.

Here’s Ivy, beginning to take on a semblance of sweaterliness.

This is Elsebeth Lavold’s “Ivy,” from her Summer Breeze Collection. I’m making it in Knitpicks Essentials, with numbers 1 and 3 needles.

After rehearsal (to which I carpooled with La Bella and La Russe, who with great delicacy and without saying anything unkind filled me in on the current mess at the church we used to attend together), I continued reading Shirley Abbot’s The Bookmaker’s Daughter. This is our book for Book Club on Thursday, so I am reading it even though I also should be reading that fourth scary book for the R.I.P. challenge.

The Bookmaker’s Daughter is a memoir of life in the gangster glory days of Hot Springs, Arkansas. It is filled with all sorts of detail. Ronism said something over at his xanga recently on the difference between books in which the story arises from the details compared with those in which the details arise from the story, and this is one of the former. It causes me to want to go look things up — Al Capone and Sid McMath and early attitudes toward Jell-O.

I’ve been to Hot Springs. Steam rises up in the streets. Building a town on top of geothermal pools gives you something a bit special.

I don’t know anyone who has ever gone there to take the waters, but my husband came home with stories of Amazing Microwater. His crowd believes in magic. Not, as I always feel I have to add, in any sort of fashionable neo-pagan Magik. They believe in magic the way that I believe in germs. I think this causes them to be more vulnerable to charlatans than most of us are. My husband’s own father was impervious to bullets, and their last king was able to make himself the size of a fly, so they don’t have the level of difficulty in believing in Amazing Microwater that I do.

It cures cancer, he said, and high blood pressure, and it improves your vision. He had me look it up on the internet. To me, there is an irony to looking up something as ancient as snake oil on something as modern as the internet.

We read about how the Amazing water cures everything (except in the disclaimer, which says that they make no claims that it cures diseases) and how you can buy your own Amazing water machine which will put ions into your water, thus giving you, for only $719, the benefits of the Amazing water without the inconvenience of having to buy it in bottles. I suggested, having read about it, that a tablespoon of baking soda in tap water ought to have the same effect, and offered to fix him some. He declined. Not magic enough.

And thus ended the day. Today I must go up to the store and thence to class. It is probably that no knitting will again take place today.

Are you scared?

How about now?

We took advantage of the last-minute Hallowe’en sales and added a creepy creature to our holiday decorating.

I was also able to get my disposable Christmas basics — cards, paper goods for the Christmas Eve buffet, and Christmas crackers — at impressively low prices at T. J. Maxx, so I got some things crossed off my HGP list.

I also got Ivy put together and the sleeve bands nearly completed. I will have a picture for you at some point. I don’t think it would scare you, though.

Yesterday morning at church there was a little contretemps. I had finished with the little children and had a few minutes till the meeting in the choir room, so I joined a friend for coffee in the fellowship hall. We were chatting comfortably about political issues. One person and another appeared, and we continued our desultory discussion about the environment. Then a Republican arrived.

“Oh,” said I, “We had better quit talking politics.” I tried to steer the conversation toward the influence of science on daily life, or some other relatively harmless topic.

The political discussion got more heated. “At ease!” the Republican kept saying. I’m not quite sure what he meant by that, but it sounded alarming.

I tried to talk over it, suggesting the Renaissance Faire as a topic. I asked another person at the table about the music at other services. I said things like, “It’s hard to talk about these things calmly if you don’t already agree.”

The political discussion deteriorated into vulgar abuse. 

The Republican stomped off.

It is hard to talk about these things calmly if you don’t already agree.

Later, the Poster Queen and I were having an email exchange about oversight of homeschoolers.

She and JJ had been at the store on Saturday and a homeschool parent came in. She had, it appeared, been taking a break from school. Here it is October and her family hadn’t gotten back into lessons from the summer break yet. Now she was needing math materials to try to catch the child up.

JJ and the Poster Queen both teach in public schools, and both are good teachers. They felt that there should be a system in place to catch people who weren’t conducting school, and make the children go into public schools.

Now, I have been a homeschooler. I am familiar with the philosophical position favoring unschooling. I wouldn’t do that, myself. I have also been the parent of four children in public schools, and I have seen whole semesters go by while they didn’t learn anything new. I wouldn’t do that, either.

All of us at the store have seen home and school educators who impressed us with their dedication and intelligence, and we have seen home and school educators who dismayed us with their apparent incompetence.

But I remember talking once with a fellow homeschooler about just this question of oversight, and she said, “Who is going to do it?” The Department of Education is supposed to do it now, and clearly they do not. Probably, with the numbers involved, they cannot.

Local schools are not necessarily doing such a good job themselves that they could oversee homeschoolers with authority. If nothing else, the homeschool families wouldn’t be homeschooling if they were persuaded of the authority of the public schools.

I said this in a couple of emails. Having just come from the Fight in the Fellowship Hall, I wondered about the Poster Queen’s response.

Here I was, assuming that we basically agreed, since both of us are firmly persuaded of the importance of education and the value of free public schools, and thinking that we were having one of those discussions of small differences and details and further considerations that had been the pleasant part of the political discussion over coffee at the church.

But really, it could be that the Poster Queen doesn’t think people should be allowed to homeschool at all. There are those who don’t. Or she might take my response as a disrespectful attitude toward the trained teachers in public schools.

Since the discussion was conducted by email, I didn’t see her face or hear her tone of voice, so I don’t know.

I do know that the combatants in the political discussion did not enjoy their quarrel. Each was offended by the other. Neither was persuaded, even slightly, by the other’s point of view. Their minds were not opened, they did not gain new perspectives.

I always enjoy discussing things with people who disagree with me — or I think that I do. But maybe there has to be an underlying layer of agreement for it to be pleasurable.

I have posted about  the Muffin Formula over at my other website. I will now munch on a Cranberry Bran Muffin while contemplating what degree of agreement is required for a pleasant discussion of controversial topics. Your views are solicited.

  We had a good time at the Renaissance Faire.

#2 son was bothered quite a bit by the fact that the archery area was labeled “Primatave Archery.” I tried to convince him that they had done it on purpose to emphasize the primitive nature of the thing, but he was having none of it.

We enjoyed the fire eater. He juggled machetes and things as well.

We also liked the fighting. We missed the jousting, unfortunately, but there were plenty of little battles going on at various stages.

Snappy repartee and clanging were the order of the day, and there were Romans fighting barbarians and then a Renaissance gentleman would jump in, all using their own ideas of Olde Englishe accents, so the whole thing had a nice surreal flair. #2 son said it was supposed to be a panoply of heroes throughout the ages, and he might be right.

We could have stepped in and tried it ourselves, too.

This barbarian would let people bat at each other with foam cudgels and swords.

He kept saying gently to these little boys, “Come on, I need for someone to win.”

The last time I went to a Renaissance Faire with my boys, I bought #2 son a wooden sword. He was way too old for that this time.

We admired the metal swords, but did not consider buying them.

We did try to think of some use for the goods being offered by the leatherworker, but we cannot see Daddy in a sporran or even wearing a pouch on his belt, and the rest of us are even less inclined toward barbaric accessories.

 My own clothing style could probably best be described as “absent-minded,” but I still can’t imagine throwing a pelt carelessly across my shoulder or tying on a pair of dragon-bedecked gauntlets.

Oh, well. #2 son particularly liked the tanned fur pieces, and of them he particularly liked the masks, but we were unable to come up with any use for them, and moved on.

I would have like to have bought something from the spinner, if only to encourage him. He had roving and spindles, mostly, but he did have a bit of handspun yarn. It was very nice, stuff, too, but as is so often the case at Faires, he had about 1.75 ounces each of a whole bunch of different colors and weights. Presumably he doesn’t realize  that there isn’t really anything you can make from that kind of quantity. I already have a RenFaire scarf — that is, a very openwork little bit of a neckpiece knitted from a tiny hank of homespun, so I regretfully passed by.

Just as well, really, since I am not supposed to buy anything till #1 son graduates.

Actually, this is the week to begin addressing Christmas cards on the HGP, and I haven’t bought those. I may see this afternoon whether I have the materials to make them.

Oh, back to the Faire. I liked this bear quite a bit. He never got into a bait, but was instead very friendly with the children and attentive to all the shows.

  There were many people in costume, but this group definitely had the best outfits.

They also worked hard to remain in character throughout.

The music was disappointing.

Not a single madrigal. There were people playing 18th and 19th century folksongs and some 20th century songs as well, not with any great skill. They did all play with great enthusiasm, though, and that counts for something.

There were a couple of men singing “Whiskey in the Jar” with inside jokes, and I liked the insouciant way that one of them carried his instruments bundled together higgledy-piggledy in a leather pouch.

The hat of the rightmost gentleman is a knitted hat. He looked pretty silly in it, and I don’t think anyone else would have looked less humorous. I think they were going for a humorous effect, actually, but I liked the way the hat held its rather ambitious shape.

We checked in with fellow booksellers (lots of Harry Potter on the tables) and noted the table of Lao Hmong crafts. They have probably been making them about the same way since the Renaissance, so I have no quarrel with that.

There were some nice crafts that I quite liked. There were gourds cleverly painted like dragons, and fairies made of silk flowers that would make very good  Christmas tree ornaments. Of course I respected the rule against taking pictures of such things in order to copy them faithfully later, but I think it is okay to copy them for your own use, as long as you do it from memory.

There were also belly dancers, and a climbing wall, and a camel. My boys are too old for camel rides, so we just admired the camel.

I hope that the Faire went well and becomes an annual event. It was held in the Equine Pavilion across the street from the experimental cotton field, which is very close to home. We have always previously had to drive a long way to attend Renaissance Faires, but this one was just a little afternoon outing.

We came home, having done our grocery shopping, and practiced our pretzel-dipping skills. We’re doing pretty well at it. I really don’t have the hang of the dipping tool, but can do it by hand with a good flick of the wrist.

These are Hallowe’en wreaths, which may be a silly concept, but it is better than going ahead and making Christmas ones, and I am beginning my Christmas wreath-making parties next week, so I clearly need a bit of practice.

#2 son prefers his completely coated with chocolate, which necessitates getting your hands pretty well completely covered in chocolate too. I won’t do that at parties, but we’ll do it for our own home use.

I also got Ivy sewn up and began the sleeve bands. I should have some pictures of Ivy for you tomorrow.

And then we lolled around eating nachos and watching British comedies.

 I am now supposed to go play guitar for the little children in Sunday School.

I tried to persuade #1 son to come and play for me, but he refused. The rotten kid. I have brought up children who feel completely free to refuse requests, and that is clearly a good thing, but it also means that I have to play guitar in public, when I haven’t played even in private in a decade or more.

The children are studying about David, who played before Saul on his lyre. I am the closest thing they can find to David. I intend to sing a song about David.

I suppose I had better get dressed first.

I have just discovered that there is a Renaissance Faire going on in my town today. This is astonishing to me. I mean, is it some kind of private Faire, or are they just bad at publicity, or what? In any case, I am going to try to persuade my kids to join me in attending it. I’ll clean and grocery shop first, of course, but then we’ll be off to see the jousting. If they will not come with me, I may even go on my own.

I realize, since I am back here, that there is another topic I told someone I would post about and didn’t. Not that I think you are checking back hourly, cursing under your breath when you see that I haven’t written about it yet, but since I have the day off and all this leisure…

It is the question of using hymnals in church. Church is where most people who use hymnals at all use them, but many churches nowadays do not. The church I currently attend is one of those. There is a PowerPoint, and the words to the hymns are projected there. People look at the screen and sing.

Now, this custom first began for the sake of praise choruses, those little snippets of song which are designed to be sung over and over, in a sort of meditative fashion. They weren’t in the hymnals at the time, and also people wanted to be able to clap or raise their hands or dance or whatever, unhindered by hymnals.

Once folks got all the equipment and someone to make the PowerPoint and all, it was just a small step to putting the hymns up as well. However, the copyright issues involved in this ended up making it much more expensive to put up the music as well as the words, so it is normally just the words that are displayed.

People quit opening their hymnals. They also, since the music wasn’t visible, quit singing parts. They often quit trying to sing new and unfamiliar songs. With everyone singing melody, the mainstream hymnals lowered the starting pitches of most of the songs. This lowered the other parts as well, of course. Supposedly alto harmonies in current hymnals are often best suited to first tenors. Other hymnals have just rewritten the alto parts, so that they are comprised of an E with the occasional thrilling jump up or down one note.

The once beautiful congregational music of the church is frequently now just a bunch of people singing the same few songs over and over, in unison.

Where’s the fun in that?

I hope there are madrigals at the Renaissance Faire. #1 son got up, and has grudgingly agreed to go with me if #2 son can also be persuaded and if his dad will furnish the spondulicks.

I was scheduled to work at the store today, but that is cancelled. Since I was scheduled to work there all day, I obviously didn’t schedule anything else for today, beyond plans to clean and get to the grocery.

In time management terms, this is the equivalent of a snow day: I don’t have to do anything (apart, of course, from the usual housework). I can lie on the couch and read, take the dogs for a walk, knit, nap, solder, work on that writing contest, declare a PSD, go pick all those peppers and herbs before the first frost which must be coming along soon…

Unfortunately, since I was expecting to work, I woke up early with my head full of work-related ideas. I am resisting them.

It is also HGP Pantry and Closet Week, and I have only today and tomorrow to empty, clean, and reorganize my pantry and linen closet. I guess I could also do the broom closet. And the house is a bit of a tip at the moment, so some extra time for general cleaning would not come amiss.

The weekend is sounding more frolicsome by the minute, isn’t it?

You see Ivy above, with the main pieces all knitted and the shoulders joined. As far as I can tell, the surgery went well and it will go from being a bunch of rolled stockinette to a lovely vest any day now.

Many thanks to those who answered my survey! It was very helpful, and I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for answering my survey yesterday! (If you didn’t you can go do it now. I’ll wait for you.)

The first topic for today is Southern names. Southern names are no odder than those found in any other place (really — you’re just used to yours), but we do have some special things.

First, a whole lot of girls are named after their daddies. This results not only in all those Sammy Jos, but also in the Ronettes and Carlynns. If you want to meet girls, or even grown women, with names that sound like back-up singers in Motown bands, this is the place to be.

Second, a lot of boys are given romantic names, like Bayard and Meredith.

Then, having saddled their offspring with names like Oswaldene and Lancelot, parents can’t bring themselves to use those names for such sweet little munchkins. This is why you meet so many people around here who are called things like Bootsie and Tay-Tay.

Now, on the subject of favors. Ozarque has been talking about the grammar of favors — that is, the rules in our language for asking and for responding to favors. There have been some startling comments over there, and at the linked discussions, so I would encourage you to go check it out.

In our study group on Wednesday, we were reading this little parable. A man is asked by God to take three rocks in a wagon up a hill. On the way, various people ask him to take along other rocks they need to get up the hill. He agrees, but finds this burdensome. Near the top of the hill, God comes and unloads all the extra rocks and leaves them by the side of the road, saying, “I didn’t ask you to do all that. I only asked you to take those first three.”

Everyone else in the group got from this parable what the author intended. We do things, they said, because no one else will do them. We are burdened by other people’s responsibilities, and we should remove their rocks from our wagons!

I disagreed. It seems to me that the man with the rocks shouldn’t have agreed if he couldn’t do it. Once he had agreed, however, he had to finish it, even if it meant making two trips. I don’t believe that God would have encouraged him to desert those rocks by the side of the road without so much as telling the people that their rocks didn’t get up the hill.

As I say, I had been reading Ozarque’s discussion right before that, so it might have influenced my reaction, but it seems to me that the parable says something instead about favors. Why didn’t the guy just say, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t take those rocks”?

And yet how frequently we take things on grudgingly and fail to follow through! Or take them on grudgingly and do follow through and then resent the asker, when we could simply have declined.

In fact, in the course of the discussion, it became clear that we take on things people don’t even want us to take on. Many of the examples the women mentioned that evening were things that they had not only not been asked to do, but which the rock-givers probably didn’t even want them to do. The mom who took on her son’s smoking, the wife who takes responsibility for her husband’s communication with his parents, the woman who always makes casseroles for the bereaved and resents it even as she gives the impression that it is her job and she would be hurt if someone else did it — these are not people who are overburdened by others.

It is true that I feel overburdened sometimes by the housekeeping, and disagree with my kids’ position that, since I am the only one who wants it done, I should be the only one who has to do it. But apart from this, I think I will be very certain not to take on other people burdens when they don’t ask me to, not to accept offered burdens (requests for favors) when I am not really willing to do them, and not to hold others responsibler for my own inability to say no.

Last night’s final hymn class ended with a bit of revolutionary fervor on the part of the participants. They are ready to bring the hymnal back into use in the church. My work with them has opened their eyes to the value of using the hymnal over the Power Point, and they are going to start a movement. One of them is also thinking of joining the choir. Another asked me to repeat the hymn class once the new hymnals come out.

I feel as though I succeeded there.

We are also singing “‘Tis the Time of Yuletide Glee” in choir. I love that song. I bullied the choir into singing it last year over the most strident objections. I was thinking of getting up a sextet for it this year. I am thrilled that the director is actually having us sing it.

And I woke up this morning with the rudiments of a new SEO plan. I’ve been on maintenance with the Dark Art for so long that I had forgotten how thrilling it can be as a hunt, quest, or highly sophisticated computer game.

Fortunately, I have decided to use my power for good and not for evil.

Will you do me a favor and take a little survey I have devised?

1. When shopping online, you

a. go to a favorite online store, chosen for much the same reasons you use to choose stores in the physical world.
b. search for the exact item you want to buy and comparison shop for the best deal among the front-page results.
c. mostly shop impulsively when you find something irresistible in your online travels.

2. When you are happy with an online experience, you

a. make that store the default option for that kind of shopping.
b. might bookmark it, but it doesn’t affect your subsequent shopping behavior.
c. don’t slam the store in your blog. A happy shopping experience is the least we should expect, and doesn’t deserve special notice. An unhappy shopping experience deserves vengeance.

I will be very grateful for your responses. If you happen to be a teacher, I would be especially grateful if you would check out this store and give me your honest feedback. Non-teachers, too, for that matter, if you have a little time this morning.

Last night’s study group had a interesting conversation about, more or less, favors. I mostly saw it as a discussion about favors because Ozarque has been having a conversation on the subject over at her place. It goes back a long way, most of it is in the comment section, and there is a lot of other stuff on the page to scan through, but it’s quite interesting. I’ll get back to that topic tomorrow, when perhaps some of you will have read and thought about it as well. And Southern names, too, since you asked.

Today, however, I have a really long list, so I had better get cracking. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it, which I do not have time to do.

The Empress announced yesterday that we are ready to move ahead with the website.

If you remember all about the website, or do not care, you can skip this paragraph. The store I work for has a website, and I have been in charge of it since last March. I was initially in charge of making sure that our customers found it. When I succeeded with that, we also began getting orders from people in other states and countries, and were overwhelmed by fulfilment issues. The Empress, my boss, had me figure out how to make the website lead our own customers to us without encouraging actual online orders. Now, we have figured out the logistics sufficiently that she is ready to make it work like an actual online store, where complete strangers can shop, regardless of where they live.

Accordingly, I did some keyword study to get my seed list together for this exciting new venture.

I laughed when the machine calculated that “naughty teachers” would be a good choice. I even went and told The Empress so she could laugh about it too.

Then I went and dug in the site meter. Our website, as I am sure is the case with most commercial websites, has its own tracking page, like the xanga footprints. It shows where the visitors were before they came to our page — usually the store blog or a search engine with a fairly predictable search string in the window. I was determining whether people are more likely to search for specific products, for a store, or for a topic. If I couldn’t tell immediately, I would click through to check.

I was not amused to find that one of the referrers was a porn site. There I was, little children piping “Mommy, I want this!” all around me, and I was face to — um — face with an unclothed woman on the screen. I hit the back button without examining it further, but I am fairly sure that I would have noticed a menu offering a choice between “XXX Coeds” and “Interactive Pocket Charts.”

The next few results were the store blog or ordinary searches. A few lines later came another non-obvious one, so I went to examine it further — and met groups of unclothed individuals.

There was a general pinkness to the page that kept me from grasping immediately what was going on, but I hit the back button again as fast as possible, and emailed Arkenboy.

What, I asked him, should I deduce from this result?

Were there links to our page hidden there someplace amid the limbs and whatnot?

Arkenboy suggests that all we can deduce is that some teachers are taking breaks from work at porn sites and then thinking, “Well, I guess I’d better go order some nursery rhyme posters” and typing us in to their browsers from that page.

He thought it unlikely that two different people would go right from porn sites to educational posters. He does not recommend banner ads at those sites.

I’m going to ignore those odd results and forge ahead.

In addition to my flat world ventures, I will be working on the second grade book. The coalescing part. And I have the last meeting of the hymn class. We will be discussing hymns as music, but I hope to remember to tell them about something funny from Monday’s rehearsal.

We are singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” the song with the mystic line, “Here I raise my Ebeneezer,” and someone had asked what an Ebeneezer might be. It means “stone of help,” and we had a bit of a discussion about that, and then the pianist chimed in.

He’s one of those boys whose name is also the name of a tree, not because his parents were hippies, but because they were southerners.

“What’s a fetter?” he asked. He went on to say that he thought it must be like a ferret, except that didn’t make sense in the line. The line in question is, “Let thy goodness like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee.” Not, perhaps, a readily comprehensible line, but the presence of a mental image of a ferret can’t have made it easier to comprehend.

I started the day yesterday with earthquake lesson plans, then picked up my bar pan on the way to the gym, where I was reminded about Daniel Gilbert and Carl Linnaeus, a couple of interesting guys with important things to say. I’ve written about both of them before, so I will try to resist the temptation today.

After the gym, I got back to the computer. #1 son assisted me with the blues lesson for first grade, which has been giving me fits. The whole requirement to make it something that can be done without access to musicians makes it way harder. Then I got out numerous containers and chopsticks to develop experiments with percussion instruments which would also have connections with Caddoan, Siouan, or Southern Iroquois linguistic-cultural groups.

My children are very patient. They tolerated quite a long spell of “Is that different?” “Okay, listen to this: number 1, number 2, number 3. Were those different?” “Well, then, what exactly was the difference?” Then, once the difference was established and a connection with the Cherokee crafted, we had a good long spell of determining whether the difference was caused by increased mass or a decreased air column, and how to convey this to first graders anyway.

If they don’t want to spend their time this way, they should leave for work earlier. This does not apply to #2 daughter, who participated via IM from her office in a neighboring state.

Actually, #1 son quit his job. I do not admire this, but he has work study available, and I guess he will go back to work when he runs out of pocket money. Since I am working two jobs to pay for his tuition, the amount of time he spends sitting around playing his guitar rankles a bit, even when he plays blues progressions for analysis and inspiration.

Not that my jobs aren’t more fun than his was. I think his last assignment — removing possums from the dumpster — was the last straw for him. Apparently, the possums turned mean and chased him. He might have felt that he just couldn’t return.

Anyway, I did finally get the music subunit finished up and dispatched electronically to The Empress. Then I sat down with the state frameworks to plan out the second grade book. The state history requirements for second grade include finding the county they live in and the capital, comparing their culture to that of people in other places, knowing the state gem, mineral, rock, mammal, and anthem, knowing about the historic Native Americans of the state, and comparing technologies of the past with those of the present. I am contemplating the various ways in which these things might coalesce into three subunits.

And then the UPS man arrived with my latest item for review from amazon.com. They send me free things on the condition that I review them. “Things” has hitherto meant “books,” plus one DVD. But yesterday they sent me a Homedics Shiatsu Massaging Seat.

I am not allowed to give these things to people. When I began thinking of all the people I knew who would love to have one of these things, I went and looked up the price, and I am sorry to say that no one will be receiving this item from me for Christmas.

However, if anyone ever offers you one of these things, you should accept. You have to remove a screw from the base of it before you turn it on. That was the most difficult part of it. Especially since, instead of reading the little notice saying to use “the enclosed allen wrench,” I hared off to find something from my husband’s tool box that might work. But once that little thing is done, the Shiatsu Seat is very easy to use. You plop it into a chair and sit on it. It has a remote control with lots of buttons which will be fun for people who like buttons. Also for people who have specific ideas about massage, because they can have complete control over the massage.

I pushed the “demo” button, which is a choice completely in character for me, so I am glad they offered it. Then of course, since I will be going over to review the thing, I also tried out all the other buttons.

Whatever button you push, the thing begins pummeling you. This is not a gentle vibrations kind of massaging chair. This is a “Take that!” kind of massage. It was kind of painful on the bonier parts of my back. It was very nice for the parts that get tense and kinked while the owner of the back concentrates deeply on things like earthquakes and the blues. And when it was finished, those lat pulldowns were a thing of the past, not a thing that continually obtruded on my notice while I tried to think about the physics of sound on a first grade level.

I was well prepared for last night’s rehearsal. It went well, too. I don’t think the Shiatsu Seat can take credit for that. I just mention it. If you live in my neighborhood (and you know it if you do), let me know and I’ll give you the concert info.

Today is Tuesday, and therefore I will be at the store and then go directly to pick up Partygirl for class. First I must go do the essential daily computer stuff for the store. I wonder whether the Shiatsu Massaging Seat will fit office chairs?