"Are you nervous?" The Chemist asked me.

We were not just about to jump from a plane or anything. We were doing a section in a bell piece which had to be counted in that silly way bell ringers have: "A-one-ie and a-two-ie and a-three-ie and a-four-ie." I was supposed to ring on and in one measure and three in the next.

I thought I had been doing so.

I said as much and The Chemist said that I had gotten it right the past couple of times, but went on to say, "I think the dotted notes are making people nervous. They're right at the beginning there, and they look intimidating."

That was the first of the theories on what was going wrong last night.

Actually, my solo was fine. The flute was good, the piano was good, I was reasonably good, and while I did reject a microphone in a testy voice (9:00 p.m. and no dinner), I was able pretty quickly to add, "Of course, I'll use one if someone wants me to. But if you were asking whether I want one, no, thank you."

That is one piece of music. The choirlet will be joining in on it in the performance, and some of them have been doing some pretty aggressive scooping. At one point I said to S, "Do you think that the scooping is a stylistic choice, or a characteristic of those voices?" She paused a moment and responded, "I don't think we can do anything about it, if that's what you mean."

The children's piece was very cute, though there were I think fewer children than S, their director, had hoped. It doesn't really matter with children. They have the cuteness factor going for them. As long as they don't actually hit each other or remove their clothing during the "Hosanna"s, they'll be a hit.

There were more pieces of music. I was sitting in front of The Oldest Member, who is a sweetie, witty and debonair, but who also turns off his hearing aid for rehearsals, so it is hard to judge the sound of the choir when you sit right in front of him. My nearest neighbors and I were at least accurate, it seemed to me, and the sopranos sounded quite pretty.

The Chemist made several protests, though. The equivalent, maybe, of citizens' arrests.

I always say things like, "I am having some trouble with the entrance at 19" or "We're not all singing the same thing at 42" but The Chemist is not mealy-mouthed. She would turn right around and tell a bass that he had the wrong note, or announce that people were singing through the rest at the beginning of the Kyrie. My favorite of her antics was when she leaned her head back and sang the tenors' note to them in a booming foghorn of a voice. None of them smacked her over the head with a music folder, so I assume they found it helpful.

The organist thumped hard on notes in a reminding fashion. There were confused squawks about dynamics from different sections. And the director became more grim as we went along, and more cryptic in his hand motions. That very last note, there was quite a bit of speculation going on -- did he want us to close to the "n" and sustain it, or was he just wringing his hands in despair?

So, yes, there are gaps between our rendition of the pieces for the Tenebrae service and actual perfection.

And, as I say, there were various theories advanced for this. I had the simplest one: people haven't been coming to rehearsals. Easy for me to say, because I always go to rehearsals.

Other theories advanced included the people who had cut out tonight to see their new grandbaby, the allergies, rain, the fumes from the candles, the direction, the lack of lights, the length of the rehearsal, and an overall lack of soulfulness in the group.

I like The Chemist's original theory. I like to think of people being so intimidated by the sight of a dotted half note that they are practically struck dumb, and therefore can't be expected to get the entrances right or pay any attention to the dynamics.

No doubt you will be glad to know that my backlinks returned to the fold, wagging their tails behind them. Some of my competitors' did not. I will therefore be plying The Dark Art today. It is Maundy Thursday, and I have some singing to do as well (a noon service, and they say there will be jambalaya), and #1 daughter will be driving up tonight. As she is a government employee, she gets tomorrow off. I am thinking, therefore, that I may do some cooking and cleaning in her honor. It is also Swoop Day at Amazon Vine, always fun. And the dogwoods bloomed yesterday, so a walk would be nice - but thinking of allergies and all the singing I have going on between today and Sunday, I probably ought to go to the gym instead. I am tempted to go back to bed for a while before doing all these things, frankly, but I will probably resist the temptation.

Yesterday was a rough day for those of us who ply the Dark Art.

You see, there is this competitor who consistently ranks ahead of us for this one search term, and that particular search term is up by 700% in our Google analytics keyword list compared with last month, so naturally I wanted to smite them with my battleaxe improve my rankings. Accordingly, I did just what you would have done: I went to check out their source code and backlinks so I could snag their best ideas level the playing field.

Now, the place where I check backlinks automatically checks my main site whenever I go there to scope out the competition. I wasn't looking at mine, because there is widespread agreement in the industry that those who check their backlinks more than once a month are lame not making best use of their clients' time. But I couldn't help but notice that I had gotten smacked down by half by Yahoo.

My first thought was that I was sailing too near the wind with my recent exciting new methods. My heart sank, as you can imagine. Probably the blood also drained from my face. I was in the store at the time, and I tried to behave as though nothing was happening, just in case The Empress noticed and wanted a report.

A quick check of my competitors' histories showed that they had also all gotten smacked down.

Yahoo must have made some change in their architecture.

I was hanging around the virtual water cooler to see if I could tell what was going on. Really, of course, I was hoping to find something like, "Everyone who links to their business at Yahoo Answers will now be penalized to the tune of 20,000 points!" Then I would know what to stop. Instead, I found an article by an SEO guy saying, in essence, what if somebody actually needed some information?

Since all ranking nowadays is influenced by people who scurry around in the background faking things calling the attention of search engines to their sites, the top ranks are probably not going to be as useful as they would have been before people started doing that. The writer's example was medical information. What if you need to know how to manage a violent patient with geriatric dementia, and the top half of Google's first page is filled with people who have been plying the Dark Art to get their businesses up there?

For example, I was startled yesterday morning to find that our store was #1 on Google for "St. Patrick's Day [insert name of major party street here]." I don't live in New Orleans, but it is our equivalent of Bourbon Street. It is the street where people on the Trail of Tears stopped off for keg parties, and I am absolutely not making that up.

We were on the first page for most St. Patrick's Day party searches for our county, in fact. Many many surprising visits took place from Google images, and I don't get to see what they were looking for, so I am curious, but presumably it was something to do with St. Patrick's Day.

This was not because I had put "green beer" or "wet T-shirt contest" in the alt tags for my bulletin boards' links, either.

I did put St. Patrick's Day bulletin boards on the front page of the catalog. I posted some, with links, at the store blog. This is respectable white hat behavior. In my further defense, I want to say that the line at Google clearly said "St. Patrick's Day Bulletin Boards," and people clicked through anyway.

But for whatever reason, people with sincere desires to find the best Irish parties going on in our county were misdirected.

And I suppose some people looking for important and useful information get sent to some lowdown company with the ability to make good lolcats.

For example, it is almost pointless to search for any term actually used in SEO, because the first 100 places will be taken up by blackhats trying to get you to click through on a fake page and/or send them $179 for questionable purposes.

It's like testing. It is possible that, if classrooms didn't spend so much time practicing for tests, there might be some useful information provided by some tests. It is possible that, if the search engines didn't have to spend so much time staying one step ahead of SEO people, there might be a better chance of finding useful things online.

However, since it is now the norm to do aggressive SEO, there is hardly any chance of ranking merely by being useful, if your keywords are at all competitive.

Anyway, I now have to begin the long slog back up again. I guess it doesn't matter, since it happened to all of us. It's like devaluating currency or something. The links are still there. We're still at the top of the page. Our traffic is only down as much as you'd expect for Spring Break. But it's kind of depressing.

Yesterday's long long long long to-do list gave me a perfect opportunity to see whether David Allen's Getting Things Done system (GTD) would really be an improvement over the classic time management system I have known and loved lo these many years.

Because Allen does in fact claim that his approach is different and better. The thing that I had already taken up from his system (and I no longer remember where I encountered his system, but I am now reading the book rather than just other people's reviews of it) was the idea of Ubiquitous Capture: all the things that race around in your mind must be written down.

I was reviewing Microsoft Outlook 2007 for Amazon Vine, and found that you can type things into the to-do list willynilly and then later you can color-code them, which seems perfect for people like me who are usually at the computer. However, there are plenty of times when I am not at the computer, so I am also still using paper. Allen advocates an in-basket for papers, including sheets of paper on which you've written a thought, but I prefer to put thoughts in a planner and trash or file papers immediately, and an in-basket for me would just be mess. I don't know what I'll end up with, but it seems true to me that it is a great waste of time to think repeatedly "Oh, I need to get hold of Donna about that fund-raiser" or "I mustn't forget to pay the gas bill." As Allen puts it, "There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought."

Once you've gotten the habit of collecting things, you need to make them part of your planning. And in planning, Allen is unusual. Where the classic time management systems focus on determining your highest principles and your long-range plans, and then deciding how to get there from where you are, Allen goes in the opposite direction. He looks at actions.

You build time for processing the stuff you've captured into your day or week. Everything you think of -- mental stuff -- and every bit of paper or other physical stuff -- goes through a processing flow chart. First, do you need to do something about it? If not, you can file it for reference or throw it away. If it requires action, then you determine whether it takes more than two steps or not. If there are multiple steps required, it's a project. You make a list of projects. If there's just one step involved, you decide whether that single step will take longer than 2 minutes. If it can be done in 2 minutes or less, you do it right then and cross it off. If not, then you put it onto your calendar at the point at which it needs to be done, or onto the "next actions" list (what you and I might call a to-do list) or onto your "waiting for" list if it has to be delegated or is waiting for someone else's action. So that's the gas bill taken care of.

Then there are projects. Donna's fund-raiser (she doesn't want to think about it till after Spring Break) and Easter dinner and the Pentecost service and my unfinished table runner and the upcoming college visit road trip and the curriculum units I'm writing are all equally in that category. All should be listed as projects, and then all need to have their next physical action defined. So for the Easter meal, there is housework to be done, and deciding what to eat, and shopping for the food and cooking the food and planning the table setting and centerpiece, and I can put all that onto a mind map or project page or what have you, but I also have to come up with the very next physical action to be taken and put that on my to-do list.

So instead of "Easter dinner" on my to-do list, I have "look through cookbooks and choose recipes." Having decided to make these very cute little cakes, I then naturally have the next step "add ingredients to shopping list" which can be done in 2 minutes, so I just do it. Buying ingredients is obviously the next step after that, but I can put that on my calendar and not think about it any more.

This really is different. Instead of looking at my role as homemaker and determining that planning and preparing the Easter celebration is the highest priority goal in that area for the week and then writing down all the steps involved in doing that, I just have the next action.

For all projects, you have the next action. When you review your next action steps in the morning or on Monday or whenever works best for you, you just do them or put them on the calendar at the time when they are to be done. When you review your projects, you visualize what a wildly successful outcome would be and brainstorm all the things involved in that, but all you are dealing with on a daily basis is the next action step. If there's a deadline, the action steps are on your calendar at the times they need to be done.

As I read this section of the book, I wondered whether you don't lose sight of the big picture this way -- but in fact, that is just the point. You don't want to have the Big Picture in your mind all the time, unless you like to think about it. You don't need to think about the goal of moving into post-modern worship without distressing the congregation every day when actually all you need to do today is find someone to lead the processional.

Allen would say that if you have trouble with an action step, you should ask yourself why you're doing it. At that point, any difficulties with the Big Picture would come to light. "Why am I going to this meeting?" you will ask yourself, and you will answer, "Blessed if I know" and see that it doesn't fit your goals.

Well, I have read the "collection" and "processing" parts of the book, and I was indeed able to get through my to-do list yesterday -- with some items moving over to a Projects List with Next Action Steps on the calendar. Next comes the "Organizing" section. However, I am at the store today and in rehearsal tonight, so it may be that I will have to make do with just collecting and processing for today.

  The craft project I did yesterday has the disadvantage of looking like a rudimentary chemistry experiment. It doesn't look exciting at all

If you could smell and feel it, though, you would be happy to know about it, because what we have here is a very economical salt scrub (you may call it "skin polish" or "salt glow" where you live) which you can make in your own kitchen.

Here are the ingredients:

2 c. salt
3/4 c. oil
60 drops scent

I used pickling salt because I had some left over from last year's pickling, but you can use Epsom salts, or kosher salt, or Dead Sea Salts, or any combination of sodium chloride and its relatives. You could even use sugar, but it costs more and might draw ants. I used sweet almond oil, but you can also use coconut or olive oil, or any good quality vegetable oil. You could probably use baby oil, but do you want to use any more petroleum than you have to? I thought not. And you can use any essential oil or frangrance oil, or combination of oils. I used Heather and Hyacinth from Brambleberries, and it smells lovely. You can add color if you want to.

Measure it out, mix it up, and put it into a jar or jars.

Massage it into your skin and then have a hot bath or shower and you will have soft, glowing skin and a sense of well-being.

Chanthaboune can sell you a jar of salt scrub with amino acids for approximately 18 times the price, and it probably has a nicer jar, but I like mine for everyday use.

Actually, I have a jar of Chanthaboune's honey hand treatment, and it is very luxurious indeed. I remember once before when I was being appalled at the prices of spa products compared with the ingredients, Dweezy pointed out that you are not paying for the salt or the SLS or water or whatever, but for the experience of having something in a lovely package with a wonderful smell that someone else has made, and also possibly the feeling that the magic chemicals and amino acids therein might make you look or feel gorgeous.

But check out this recipe sometime when you don't need magic.

I could use some magic today. My to-do list is way too long and contains urgent, inconvenient things, like driving to another town to pick up my paycheck before my auto-payments hit the bank. My mother loaned me a copy of Getting Things Done, and our sermon in church yesterday was about the uselessness of worry, but I still woke up repeatedly last night fretting over how to shoehorn together all the things I need to do today. One of the main things the GTD system is supposed to accomplish is less stress over the to-do list, so I plan to try the system out. I like the bits of it that I had put in place already, based on reading bits and pieces on the web.

It's Spring Break, so this is the wrong attitude for the day. We only have one schoolkid in the house, so Spring Break really only means anything to him, but I can usually muster up a little lightheartedness for the week. Maybe I'll be able to, with a combination of GTD and salt scrub.

I spoke with all my kids yesterday, and it struck me that each of them has an exciting time going on in one life area: work, school, avocations, or relationships. At first, I thought a little sadly that among them they had a perfect life going on. But then I realized that if any of us had excitement in all those areas, the mixture would be too rich.

When things are very exciting at work or school, we don't have time for very exciting relationships. When things are very exciting with our avocations -- our art or our political involvement, or whatever we're passionate about but not paid for -- we need to skimp on other parts of our lives to make up for it.

Speaking of skimping, that's my kitchen above. Before.

Here's after. It's better, isn't it? I took the menfolks around to look in the drawers and cabinets and suggested that they notice how things were supposed to be, so they could help keep them closer to that ideal. They were patient yet scornful, and assured me that they never made messes of any kind.

I have a lot going on today, so once I had done my errands and cleaning and walking and writing and visiting with my kids yesterday, I decided to spend the rest of the day reading.

I gave up novels for Lent, and I had a stack of nonfiction, gathered in various ways and at various times, which I hadn't yet read. There is a biography of Napoleon in the stack. Otherwise, they have all turned out to involve quantum mechanics and/or global warming, in varying degrees.

I wasn't ignorant on either of those topics before I started, but now I feel as though I've been taking a course on the subject. When I finally get through Napoleon's biography, I expect it will turn out to have something to do with quantum mechanics and global warming, too.

Last week, I was thrilled to receive The Science of Discworld in the mail, and set right to reading it. It is about --- quantum mechanics and global warming.

Apparently, God wants me to be thinking about these topics.

Today is going to be a domestic day chez fibermom. I am going to clean my house and do the grocery shopping. In theory, I do this every Saturday, but recently I have either been too busy or too sick to do it properly.

Actually, grocery shopping is going to require some changes. First we have problems with cooking that lead to having people complaining about being out of food from Tuesday on, and then throwing out old vegetables on Saturday. Then we have rising prices that make it difficult not to be really out of food by Thursday, except for the wilted vegetables.

I have a few possible solutions:

• Plan meals for the slow cooker and Power Cooking for the freezer, and just let the menfolks complain. At least they would have balanced meals to eat while they complained.
• Take a proper lunch break from work (or before I go to the store on the days when I do that) and cook then, leaving things ready to go into the oven. Latecomers can warm it back up in the microwave. This is Janalisa's suggestion, and she is also out most nights of the week at dinnertime.
• Buy lots of sandwich ingredients and fruits and veggies to be eaten fresh, and give up on the idea of having proper cooked meals together.

I am going to use a menu from Saving Dinner today. It has a couple of crockpot meals, a couple that could be made ahead and left ready for the oven, and a couple of quick ones. Then I'll add sandwich ingredients and cold cereal.

As for paying for all that, I am going to divide up the shopping. I refilled my bulk grains and beans and all last week at the Co-op, so I can get the perishables (meat and veg) at the grocery and then go to Target for the dairy products and packaged things like mustard and cereal, on the theory that those things will be cheaper there.

If anyone complains, I'll smack 'em in the puff.

That's my plan.

A while back I had a birthday, and my mother gave me a credit to Amazon. I used to disapprove of Amazon on principle, for good reasons which have now become moot, since there no longer exist any small, independent bookstores for Amazon to endanger.

Amazon had available all the books of the Science of the Discworld series. I was able to get the second book last year, but the first and third could not be had in the U.S., but could only be ordered at ruinous shipping costs from the UK. I used my birthday present to do that, and the books arrived yesterday -- from Germany, for some reason.

This made me very happy, especially since I cannot read novels and am down to the very serious bits of my nonfiction stack.

 I went to visit a physicist yesterday. Here's the physics department at our local university, and just for perspective, here's the engineering center across the street.

It's not that bad. There is a whole physics building, though it is small and old. The sign must be a leftover, since the physics department is celebrating its centennial this year.

However, I still think the contrast between the two buildings says something about our commitment to theoretical vs. applied sciences.

The person whom I asked for directions to the office of the particular physicist I was looking for said to me, "This is the physics building," in a slow, kind voice.

People often speak to me in a slow, kind voice. I really don't think I am a slow-witted person. I guess I must look slow-witted, though.

The physicist and I had a good chat about the challenges of teaching science in elementary school nowadays. I can get pretty emotional about this subject.

Then I went to try out a new walking trail. The weather is lovely now, and there are a few flowers blooming but mostly it is still ugly winter. I am therefore offering you another picture of waterfowl.

As soon as the local world wakes up into its spring beauty, I'll quit leaving you with pictures of waterfowl instead of proper scenery.

Last night's task of organizing the church's music library was postponed, and I admit that I was relieved. I visited Partygirl briefly and then spent the evening with my family, reading and quilting while #1 son played piano and a thunderstorm raged.

It was very nice.

Housework? What housework? Today I have a workshop to do, and a day at the store. I am all excited about the new SEO technique I have mastered, and will have to discipline myself not to bore my colleagues senseless with it. Housework is on the schedule for tomorrow.

Really.

I made barm brack for breakfast yesterday, and #1 son requested that I do so again today. This is tasty stuff.

Unfortunately, the presence of baked goods does not indicate that the housekeeping has improved chez fibermom. I put rice in the rice machine and steak in a Pyrex pan in the oven last night as I was getting ready to leave for my Wednesday evening musical marathon, thinking that there would be dinner even if it was cold by the time most of us got to it. Then a customer came to finish up her show, and we sat there at the computer for another half hour beyond the time I would normally have left. Having gotten into the habit of being sort of laissez faire about oven times from using baking stones (an extra half hour is no big deal with baking stones), I just sat there at the computer with her as the steak blackened. And then of course I was late, so I did not do any vegetables. I can hardly say that I made dinner last night.

Tonight it will be the slow cooker. I will cook a proper meal (I'm thinking tortellini soup and hot bread) at 5:00 so I can eat before I leave for my adventures in the music library, and then I will put it into the slow cooker to keep warm for the menfolks. If they don't like it, it will still be better than cold blackened steak and no vegetables.

One of the Booksfree books turned out to be not a novel but a sort of collection of essays, If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother, by Anita Renfroe. I don't really find clean catches and hissy fits all that amusing, but I did find this comment about TV moms pretty clever: "#1 lesson of the June Cleaver school of motherhood: freshly baked cookies and well-vacuumed carpets make you dress better."

I had the chance to read it because the weather was so gorgeous yesterday that I took a lunch break and went out and sat on the porch and read for half an hour. It was very nice. It didn't do anything for my untidy house, but it was good for me.

So I was half an hour late for the study group, but it is not as bad to be late to study group as to be late to bells, and I was on time for that. If you don't show up for bell practice, the other players have to imagine your notes. I have reached the point of doing reasonably well with Level 1 and Level 2 pieces, and I think the experience is helping me improve my ability to read music.

Following bells and choir, I stayed at the church offending people.

It hadn't been my intention to offend anyone. I had been planning to check with Bigsax about his preferences regarding the organizing of the music, a project which is scheduled to begin tonight. It is possible that he would rather no one messed with his music, and that nothing would have made that particular conversation any better than it was. However, I managed, in the course of trying to be diplomatic and helpful about the music, to suggest that his filing system was idosyncratic, his hardware obsolete, his ideas on hardware outdated, and his skills at alphabetizing limited. The kids' choir leader joined us after a bit, and I probably insulted her, too.

Here's how it went:

"For example, 'A Mighty Fortress is Our God' is filed under A."
"Where else would it be? That's the name of the song."
"Someone else would probably look under M. That's the usual way to file that song."
"Who else needs to look in the files?"
"We have four musical groups in the church now. I hope we'll have more in the future. It would be good if everyone could use the music the church owns, instead of making illegal copies."
"Even with a databse, I would just leaf through the drawers of music till I found something."
"Then you won't mind if we reorganize it."

It probably should have gone like this:

"For example, 'A Mighty Fortress is Our God' is filed under A."
"Where else would it be? That's the name of the song."
"Ah, I see. I use a different system. I'll leave it the way you have it."
"Good. If you clean it up, it'll just encourage other people to come in and mess with my stuff."

By the time I finished, he was saying that records were the coming thing in music technology and I was saying that the church tech guy wasn't as hip as he thought he was.

I blame this on lack of sleep and not having dinner till 9:30, shortly after the conversation with Bigsax.

It's Brain Awareness Week. It is almost over. We have only from now till the 16th. My hope is that I will catch up on my sleep before it ends, so my brain will be more functional.

Check the Musicians' Excuses! I like mine better, though.

I always have a lot of trouble with the time changes. I can't get to sleep until what was, last week, the normal time, and I'm getting up early, and the resultant sleep deprivation is catching up with me.

Yesterday morning, I went out for a dawn walk in order to wake up properly (and of course dawn was late), and saw these handsome birds.

Then I went on up to the store. I rearranged books, a soothing activity, and worked with customers, and found (in the course of intermittent SEO) a local $2.75 million grant, and spent some time strategizing about how we might help that school meet their needs. I read about a guy in our industry in Chicago who decided to "go where the money is" and now focuses almost exclusively on helping people spend their grant money. Having worked on a number of grants in the past, I know that it truly can be burdensome to get all those funds spent, and I think we could be useful and profitable in that area. I also found a cool new SEO idea I'm looking forward to trying out.

Then came the rehearsal of the choirlet. We worked on our music for Holy Week and then tried out some Pentecost hymns written by women. If for some odd reason (say, the confluence this year of Mother's Day and Pentecost; that did it for us) you are looking for such things, I am happy to say that there is some beautiful stuff out there.

We also drank tea and chatted, and that was fun. 

We're having trouble with our domestic arrangements chez fibermom. With my extreme schedule (have you noticed that I am having an extreme schedule here?), I am out every night this week and many other weeks, too. The boys work shifts like 2:30-7:00 or 4:00 to 11:00, so they often aren't home for dinner. Then, at 9:30 or 10:00, when we all are in the same place, we are all hungry. It seems pointless to have dinner at that time. Not to mention the poor straggler coming in after the late shift.

I thought the slow cooker would be the perfect solution, since people could just eat whenever they happened to get home, but all my menfolks are opposed to the slow cooker.  My sister, last time we talked about this, didn't cook at all, but just let her kids find some cheese and crackers or something. It has been a long time since we talked about this, I must say, but that approach hasn't been popular here either.

It's a quandary. We are also sinking down on the housekeeping front. I'm also getting no needlework done. And the mail yesterday brought this stack of tempting novels from Booksfree.

When you are having an extreme schedule and the browsing and sluicing are a bit sketchy and there is a rising tide of clutter and detritus throughout the house, it is more difficult to face temptations and continue reading about the end of the world, or at least the species, instead of curling up with a good murder mystery.

I'm not complaining. I am as happy as a somewhat sleep-deprived clam. But I need to readjust my schedule a bit.

It started with a piece of advice posted by the store's webmaster. This is not an individual working for the store like me, but a hosting company. They suggested submitting your URL to the directories every month, a piece of advice that struck me as very stupid. In order to make sure that this wasn't just my ignorance, I asked around among the SEO people. They explained kindly, in short sentences with easy words, that my webmaster was stupid. I had a little correspondence with the webmaster about this, and he assured me that he went to seminars on best SEO practices every month and was making sure our catalog was following those best practices. He also told me that he had typed in "Arizona teacher store" at Google and hadn't found us. I did mention in my response that we were not in Arizona, but didn't point out that our catalog had been a PR 2 with 3 visitors a day when I met it, so he might as well give up claiming "best practices."

Then I wrote about the local bakery for myzip, and had to ask five people before I got permission to take a picture. It was the handsome baker who gave permission, and he was also the first one who had understood the concept of local search. I had barely been able to restrain myself from crying out, "I'm offering you a link!" If someone walked into our store (and I have been trying to think which faithful customer I could direct toward myzip in that zip code, let me tell you) and offered us a link, I'd have let them take pictures, no question. I'd have brought the dog out to meet them and given them a cup of coffee.

At that point, I realized that there was something odd going on.

You know those quiz-like lists "You know you play too much WoW when... you fail at something IRL and blame it on lag." There could be one for people who spend so much time plying The Dark Art that they begin to think that links are objects of actual value in the real world, or that everyone should know about SEO if they work with computers.

It reminded me of a conversation in the bell choir, when we were discussing the fact that we no longer know what people do in their jobs. Miss B does sequencing. I use the word "sequencing" in my work, too. It means things like this:

When Miss B does sequencing, it looks like a line graph; a boring but multicolored line graph, in fact. She sequences DNA. And then prints it out on papers. I still don't know why, but she did some for The Chemist who works, I believe, with spinach.

Obviously, I don't really know what The Chemist does, either.

And they don't know what I do, except for the parts that are easily conceptualized. And of course that is what I tend to mention: curriculum design, workshops, and then I finish up with "and I take care of the online store."

Last night I went to observe one of Janalisa's cooking shows. She has been doing them for 13 years, and I was able to pick up some useful gen by being her observer. Naturally, a number of the guests knew me from the store. My store, the one where I had a physical presence, has been closed for almost a full year now, and I still can't leave my house without being identified by it. Janalisa was surprised. "It's like you're some kind of celebrity," she said.

She was meeting people whose pool parties and bridal showers she had done, so we were even.

But one of the guests asked, as people often do, if I minded the commute to the new store. "I'm not usually there," I said. "I mostly take care of the online store." And she immediately thought about packing and shipping orders. I don't do that at all. I didn't go on to explain that I create content, troll for links, and submit my URL. There is no point to it. It made more sense to leave her with the mental image of me showing her picture books that conveyed the concept of opportunity cost. I still do that, but not for individuals in the real world. Just for spiders, in search of link juice and traffic.

Today, having gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to see #2 son off to the Fed challenge, I will be going up to the store to dabble in real world activity. I am doing a workshop, and then have a rehearsal with the choirlet tonight. Somewhere along in here I need to clean house and plan what to cook for Easter.

It is good that I do cooking shows and knit and feed my family. It keeps me from disappearing entirely into the virtual world.