Have you been following the Obama religious language brouhaha? And if so, has it affected how you hear your own pastor?

This struck me last night. I was listening to a lecture on Matthew chapter 26, and the speaker was saying some things that I found a bit startling. Out of context, on YouTube, watched by people looking for political clues, some of her remarks would sound downright loony.

"We recoil from the idea of firing squads and stonings and lethal injections because our thinking is twisted."

How about that for something a political candidate would prefer not to have associated with his name?

The speaker continued. She likes to grab attention by saying something outrageous and then winding it into a more reasoned and defensible whole. I may not agree with her when she finishes, but I can appreciate her argument. Would I give up listening to her because she says outrageous things sometimes? Certainly not. As you may know, I like to hear outrageous things.

Good thing I'm not running for anything.

Partygirl said last night, when we were discussing this, that she thought the whole issue was doing harm to the Democratic party. She thought people might get disgusted and sick of the whole thing before the elections and just not vote at all, even though a large majority were saying not so long ago that we were okay with either candidate and why didn't they just get together on this and we'd vote for both. Partygirl is sadly predicting that we will end up with another Republican in the White House.

My favorite Republican, Mike Huckabee, has this to say about it (quoted by Ozarque in her Religious Language newsletter):

"As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, 'That's a terrible statement,' I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, 'You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus.' And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had ... more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."

Since I am halfway finished with the sleeves of Erin, I have naturally begun to think about what I might knit next.

Not that it will be any time in the next few days that I finish Erin. I have the sleeves to do, and there is actually a bit of the back left, for complex reasons that made perfect sense at the time, and then I have to sew things together and there are the button bands and the finishing. It will probably be the end of May before I finish it.

It is not to soon to start thinking about what I will make next, though. I enjoy ruminating on these things.

I have a large quantity of laceweight yarn which I had intended to use for a cardigan from Lacy Little Knits, but which turned out to be way too lightweight for the pattern. So last night -- after a frolicsome day of taking inventory -- I surfed around the knitting blogs looking for things people were making from laceweight yarn.

Shawls, that's what. And not very many of those. When some preliminary looking around turned up nothing, I went ahead and did a Google blog search and then went to Ravelry, and you can indeed find a few shawls around. Mostly, however, people who are writing about laceweight yarn -- and there are lots of them -- are just writing about the yarn. They are spinning it, selling it, buying it, and admiring it. They are not knitting with it. I'm not sure what to conclude from this.

I also have some Telemark wool, probably enough for a sweater, though June is not exactly prime time to start another wool sweater.

And I have some cotton, though not enough for a sweater.

I am not feeling very inspired, and my visit to the blogs didn't inspire me, either. However, I should have time to think about it today. I may have to go back up and do inventory some more today. I have some jobs to apply for, and plan to put my name on the sub list for the local school district. But if I am not doing inventory, I will be going to the gym and cleaning house. Either way, I should have time to contemplate shawls.

Yesterday included a small amount of housework, a couple more job applications, and a bit of knitting.

These are the sleeves of Erin, which sounds like some very arcane bit of folklore, but really it's just a cardigan. I like to do both sleeves at once on a long circular needle. Since I am not that good at following patterns precisely, this method allows me to be more certain that the sleeves will match.

Today Client #2 sent the requests for changes in the documents I had prepared, along with suggestions for further projects. I corrected and returned the documents, and I am looking forward to the further projects. 

I am spending the day up at the store today, helping with the burial closing. Then I have a meeting at the church. After that, I hope to do some more housework and gardening.

My husband worked in the garden yesterday. He put these PVC fixtures on top of the tomato cages. He  always worries that someone will bend over them without paying proper attention (that would be me, of course) and poke an eye out.

In previous years, he has attached artificial flowers to the tops of the cages, or tied them up with plastic bags, or made elaborate finials out of weird things.

This year's solution seems more elegant.

The plants came cheerfully through last night's cold front, so I hope to plant the remaining stuff this evening.

I have one more picture for you. After he had finished with the yardwork, my husband sat down for a well-deserved rest, and the dogs gathered around him.

They often do this. They gather around and gaze at him adoringly. They were distracted here by the photographer. In general, they just look at the Lord and Master.

He has a remarkable way with animals.

None of the rest of us can accomplish this.

#2 daughter can actually get this effect with humans by singing, but even she can't achieve it with animals.

My husband can catch fish this way. They swim up to him and he picks them up out of the water. You should see it.

This is what a handbell clinic looks like: the bells for our choir (or at least me and my neighbors) lined up on our table, behind the ringers from a university on the other side of the state.

You arrive and find your table and set up all your gear as shown here.

Then you go have breakfast. This was described as "a light breakfast," but it involved fruit, pastries, sausage, biscuits, doughnuts, fruit juices, and coffee. I suppose it was light in that it did not actually include steak and eggs.

Then the clinician comes in and begins the clinic. This particular clinician, Kevin McChesney, was very interesting and informative. He was a fantastc director, too, particularly since he assured us that we didn't need to count, but could simply watch him and play.

That is so much better than having to count grimly throughout, with people occasionally yelling "a-one-ie-and-a-two-ie" at you, I just can't even tell you.

When I mentioned this to Fine Soprano, she said, "It's just the bell-ringer way of saying 16th notes. How do you count when you sing?"

I informed her firmly that I don't count when I sing. I just look at the director and sing. If it's a solo, I don't even do that. I just sing.

No wonder I have so much trouble with bells.

See the scoreboard in the corner of the room? We were doing this in a gym. It seems to me that they could have flashed the measure numbers up there to keep us from getting lost.

Actually, I was able to find my place much better than usual, since there were hundreds of people there playing the right notes.

It even felt like playing music. It was fun.

This guy took us through the first piece, and then we recruited our strength with a snack of cheese, cracekrs, fruit, chips, and dip. We were also given cups full of chocolate in case we began to feel faint during the Processional Rondo or something.

We returned for the second piece, and then had barbecue, more fruit, baked beans, and cookies. After the third piece, there were door prizes, and then a further snack composed of all the things we hadn't eaten during the first few meals.

After that came the concert. I intended to play the first piece and then sit down and listen to the rest of the concert, since the first piece was the only one I could play at all competently, but I was forbidden to do so by Bigsax. I therefore rang all the way through the concert, laying out on the parts where I felt really sure that I would be wrong.

I learned lots of things yesterday. Oh, some stuff about bells, of course. However, I also learned the following things about bell-ringers:

• They eat on a hobbit-like schedule.
• They believe that they are the most uncool musicians in the world of music. I don't know whether this is the impression others have of bell-ringers as well. I am, as you know, ringing bells only because I am the Slave of Duty and they needed one more ringer or would never have been able to play anything at all. But they themselves believe that ringing handbells is a sort of goofy, geeky thing that none of the cool kids would ever do.
• The coming thing in the bellringer world is choreography. I now know how to look cool (or as cool as one can look while ringing handbells, the uncool instrument of the music world) while playing bells with mallets.

Here are some huge bells weighing 12 pounds. Guys who want to play these bells are advised to do weight-lifting with lights weights (like 12 pounds or less) for long periods of time to develop their stamina.

I don't think I have ever before heard a recommendation to any musician to lift weights in preparation for playing an instrument. However, this morning I can distinctly feel my latissimus dorsi, and my bells only weigh a pound and a half.

Perhaps you have never heard handbells. In that case, click here for some sound files. It is not perhaps something you would sit down and listen to on purpose, but it is an interesting and festive sound. I am seriously thinking about getting a handbell CD for next Christmas.

As soon as I got home from the handbell festival, I went over to do some tutoring, and then I came home, reheated leftovers, looked around the appalling mess that is my house, considered doing some housework, and went to bed with a very lightweight book.

I have a lot going on today, but I hope there will be some housework in there somewhere. My first task is to sing a little gospel quartet with the choirlet, then I will be introducing the ribbon sticks to the children, then we are singing "Great Joy in the Morning," a very fun anthem by John Parker, and then going out to lunch.

I also have squash to plant.

I'd better hurry.

Here I am after a week as an unemployed person.

I have a snazzy new resume, I've applied for enough things to have had one interview, and I've picked up a couple of little freelance jobs.

My goal for this weekend is to have a normal weekend off. For some value of normal. Basically, a weekend not spent scrolling obsessively through the want ads thinking "Assistant manager at The Gap... I could do that... Urban Forester... hmm.. I learn quickly. How hard could it be?"

I started off well last night. I turned in my freelance assignment (and the computer guy is especially great to work with because I can communicate with him via AIM rather than phone. I've actually never once had to call him) and then went right out and planted stuff. Refreshed by dabbling about in the mud, I got some knitting done.

Yesterday's trip to the City Hall Basement to see the job postings took me past the local knitting shop, and they had pattern books from last season going for 50 cents apiece. So I was browsing through patterns and knitting and hardly ever thinking about being unemployed.

I am helped in my weekend goal by the fact that I have an extremely busy weekend coming up. First, the whole-day Handbell Clinic. I am going to this, rather than to all the extremely cool Earth Day events my town has going on (yes, we're a bit late, but we were waiting for the weekend), even though I am the world's worst handbell player. I have a sense of unreality about going to it. It is as though I were going to, I don't know, a firefighter's convention. I expect to be unmasked as an imposter. But I am going.

Directly after that I have tutoring to do, and if you think it is a little sad that I am spending Saturday night going over a French test, consider that my tutee is a teenage boy.

Tomorrow I am singing in two church services and then my family is going to lunch with my parents.

So I should have little time to brood.

In the course of what brooding I have done, though, I have thought about the fact that last year around this time my physical store -- the one in my town, which I managed -- closed, and I was worrying about it quite a bit. Rather than becoming unemployed right then, I learned new skills. Right now it is a bit stressful to be unemployed, but I could end up in a better position in the long run.

Before I tell you any stories, I have some unseemly gloating to do.

If you should happen to type my zip code in at Google, an admittedly unlikely eventuality, you would find my MyZip site at #3, right after the Google map and citydata.

This gloating is not only unseemly, but completely pointless. Ranking doesn't affect my MyZip income,  and as far as I know it doesn't affect MyZip -- I mean, obviously they want to be able to sell advertising, but I can't see them in those meetings saying "You know, one of our more obscure bloggers in the south ranks for her zip code. This proves that your ads will be seen by millions!"

The thing is, I have spent a year now anxiously watching numbers like these and gloating over them, and now I have nothing to gloat about. Gloating over the store's numbers is just sad. We've had record sales online this month and traffic is higher than ever before, and I am just waiting around for the website to be closed down, at which point I will I suppose delete all the blogs. No gloating there.

I do however have a couple of clients. Pretty soon I will be able to gloat over them. Until then, I will have to do my unseemly gloating here.

You see the worst of me, you know. If I am going to whine or gloat or be fractious, this is where I do it.

Yesterday did not include any whining.

I applied for four jobs, got my resume from The Resume Wizard (not in that order, but still...), did my various blog postings, met with the computer guy and did his news releases, snagged a couple of Vine items and reviewed the remainder of the previous set, finished Client #1's keyword analysis, did some tutoring, made a proper meal for my family, folded laundry, and made the ribbon sticks for the Pentecost liturgical dance, which you see here.

For an unemployed person, I am pretty busy.

Today I intend to do the computer guy's blog post and some necessary work for my cooking show business, and then go check out the basement of City Hall, armed with my resume. I hear that said basement is papered with job postings. I may finish buying vegetable garden plants, what with The Wall Street Journal saying that stockpiling food is now the best investment around. I will also get to the gym and to the grocery store since tomorrow I will be at a handbell clinic all day.

That is another story.

Returning to add that the basement of City Hall was a great place for people with a very different skill set from mine. I would like to be an Urban Forester, more even than a Manifester 4, but I just don't have the background for it.

I am singing the solo in "Down to the River to Pray" again. I think I have to point out -- just in fairness to myself -- that I didn't clamor for this solo. The director said, "Didn't you sing this solo last time?" and I allowed as how I had, and then said, "Is there anyone else who wants it?"

Considering how much I love this song, and how good it is for my voice, I really deserve some unselfishness points for that. And for waiting a good ten seconds for a response, too.

Fortunately for me, no one else admitted to wanting it.

I asked for prayer for my unemployment, and The Baritone told me about the basement of City Hall, which apparently is just papered with jobs. I plan to go there today.

I also told the ladies in my study groups about being thrown out of one place after another on the grounds of being excessively educated, and they were very comforting. They also assured me that an office of young computer guys needs a motherly lady such as myself, even if they don't realize it right off.

I will return to the computer office this morning, armed with penetrating questions. I have also done four job applications today. I am still waiting for The Resume Wizard to transform my shabby, old-fashioned resume into a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but there were closing dates involved. I also went ahead and applied for some things for which I am not necessarily entirely qualified. I have done a lot of hiring locally, and I know how it is: you start out looking for a knight on a white charger experienced in rescuing princesses, and after a few weeks you'd be content with the miller's son riding a donkey and actually coming in every day on time.

For the perfect jobs with later closing dates, I can wait for the grand new resume.

Yesterday there was a sudden French tutoring emergency, so I have two tutoring days this week, plus my freelance computer work, and I got my commission check as well. I think I may survive until someone hires me, with one thing and another.

The Resume Wizard told me that I should expect my job search to last 30 days for every $10,000 a year in salary. I can see this, though I've never had that experience myself. Most jobs for which I am obviously qualified have lengthy application processes and start dates in the new semester. It does seem a bit hard that someone who will only end up making $10,000 should be out of work for 30 days, though.

I'm going to write about Google Analytics today. This is not in the nature of an apology, since all the MyZippers use GA, and at least two of my readers have expressed an interest in the topic (way more than have expressed any interest in my views on most of the things I tell you about), but it is a warning. This way, if you don't want to know about GA, you can leave now and find someone who is talking about something less geeky.

Before you leave, though, I know that you want to know that M. Bassoon advanced to the semifinals in his audition with the Philharmonic. I believe this means that they pour Gatorade over his head and carry him around the hall on their shoulders.

Anyway, on to Google Analytics. GA, from now on. This is a very fancy kind of sitemeter. If you look at your xanga footprints or other sitemeter and your GA numbers, you will find that they don't match. That doesn't matter. What GA offers you is way more data, with the numbers crunched for you, and you can track it over time. So if it matters to you for some reason to know who goes to your site, you should have GA there.

Why would it matter? Well, if you have a monetized site of some kind, like you sell stuff (so I have it on the store website) or you are paid for your site for some other reason and want to do a good job (so we have it on our MyZip sites), or even if you just get a kick out of having a popular site for entirely personal reasons, then you should have GA.

You get it by putting a piece of code -- a string of letters and numbers -- onto the site. This is important, because it means that you can't get GA for other people's sites. If you do not have the power to put that string on your page, then you can't see the data, and that is as it should be. I have a xanga that is paid, so I put GA on that xanga. For the store, I had to send the code to the webmaster and ask that they insert it, but I had the authority to do that, so I can look at the data for the store. For our MyZip sites, we get reports of the information our bosses want us to look at, but we can't go look for ourselves.

Okay, now we know what it is. What kind of information does it give us?  Lots of things, but let's start with two big categories: visitors and traffic sources.

My MyZip reports tell me how many people come to visit that site every week. Now, you can just look at it and say, "Cool! 62 people came to see me!" but there is more information there. For one thing, you can see whether your traffic is increasing over time. I've had a couple of spikes -- one in my second week, when I told people about it, and another when I was on the front page. Being on the front page was fun, and having more visitors was pleasant, but actually, that will have been other MyZip bloggers coming to visit. Friendly, but not related to the purpose of the site. What I want is local traffic actually looking for information. So I can ignore that spike and see that I have a slight increase in traffic each week. That is good  news.

The earlier spike, the one where I told people about the site? I shouldn't ignore that one. It tells me that I ought to be telling people about the site.

The GA for the store shows that the traffic increases steadily -- good news -- but it also shows that we get dips when there are school holidays and during Spring Break. Makes sense. That means that -- if the site were not being closed -- we would be wise to email our customers before those times, run specials, or plan to spend those times dusting the shelves.

Our MyZip reports also tell us if our visitors are new or returning. Most of mine are returning. My paid xanga has mostly new visitors -- that's probably because people who read it regularly subscribe. I get lots of new subscribers and lots of people reading it on RSS feeds, but the largest number of visitors shown by the GA are new people coming from search engines. This is good, given the purpose of that site. But for the MyZip site, I want people coming back often to read it. The store has about 2/3 returning and 1/3 new visitors. This is a good thing for a store. You want new people coming in, but repeat customers are more valuable than new ones. If you don't have many returning visitors, then your content is probably not as good as it should be.

GA will also tell you where your readers are coming from. My paid xanga has had visitors from 93 countries this year, which is kind of cool, but I am glad to see that the store has a high proportion of local traffic. This means that it was doing its job of sending people to the physical store, and not getting us too many overseas orders, which the folks who did the shipping really hated.

Since I want my traffic to increase (basically, you always want your traffic to increase), I also want to look at the traffic sources. GA will tell you something like "All traffic sources sent 4,860 visits via 36 sources and mediums." Another of the sites I monitor has "3,662 visits via 98 sources and mediums." Sources and mediums are things like sites that link to yours, search engines, and people emailing the link to somebody.

At my MyZip site, I see that I get traffic from directories I have submitted my site to, and from people emailing links, and from search engines like Google and Yahoo. At the store, I can see that hardly anybody comes from the vendor sites -- that is, not many people go to the website for a publisher and then come to our store from the stores list. So, although I certainly want those links, I am not getting much traffic from them, and won't make them a big part of my marketing strategy.

I can also see the "keywords" they used to find my MyZip site: that is, the things they typed in at Google or wherever. Since this is a new little site, I can look through all the keywords easily. I don't have too many visitors for that (yet). I see that some of the people who visit are lost -- that is, they are looking for information about a town with the same name, but in another state. I could help filter those guys out by including the name of my state in my posts, or by linking my site in places that are just about my state. If I could look at the GA for my MyZip site, I could also see where the people are coming from. I would want it to be mostly people from here, but if I saw that many of the visitors were from other places, I would know that I should include more tourist information, or interesting things for armchair travelers.

I can also see that a lot of the visitors who found me with search engines were looking for outdoor stuff like hiking and climbing, so I know that I should keep doing posts like that. At the store website, I can see that the visitors are either looking for the store in particular, or for specific things they want to buy. Sure, we have the occasional person looking for "hot teachers," but there is an overall clear pattern in the keywords. This gives me useful information for my marketing ventures. There are so many visitors, though, and so many keywords, that I can't see that pattern by just looking (or I could, I guess, but I don't have that kind of tolerance for boredom). GA calculates it for me and shows me the most common stuff at the top of the list.

This is a very small taste of what GA does. If you are just starting out with it, it makes sense to look at a couple of factors at a time, and then to branch out once you have a handle on those. GA allows you to see whether your site is behaving the way you want it to, and gives you information that will allow you to improve your results.

Now you know.

Last night I did a GTD presentation. I was offering the basics: collection, processing, and action. I was speaking to a group of businesswomen, so I began with the observation that they had jobs, businesses, children, pregnancies, elderly parents, community involvement, and more to juggle. Even if you get everything done, I said, there are still days when you feel like you're running around like a chicken with its head cut off. And when you feel like that and you don't get everything done, it's even more stressful.

The women were completely with me there.

I explained about Ubiquitous Capture. Then we moved on to processing.

I had brought a bunch of Stuff for them. I had gathered up random papers, and then I'd had them write down things that occurred to them while we were working on Ubiquitous Capture, so each woman had an in-box full of Stuff.

Here was the thing that really struck me: how stressed these ladies were by the piles of Stuff. There they were with my kid's Governor's School papers, my Free Panty coupons, my sheet music and junk mail and CAPS appointment reminders, and each of them had the tight back and shoulders, the dismayed expression, the squirming that goes with being confronted by piles of Stuff to Deal With.

It made the discussion much more effective.

I was happy to be able to shovel up all those papers and things at the end of the presentation and relieve their minds.

What a beautiful day it was yesterday! This picture shows how nice it was to be a dog sitting out in the sun enjoying the spring.

It was pretty good for humans, too.

I have been working on the report for That Man, essentially a description of what I've been up to for the past year, plying The Dark Art for the store. I think I will use the data which I organized for that report to write an article or two on my experience.

Today I will also begin plying The Dark Art for my new client. This is quite exciting. I have yet to learn her name or address, but that is how we roll in the modern flat world. I have big plans for her anyway.

I sent my resume off to the Resume Wizard yesterday, and am trying to decide whether I ought to wait to hear back from her before I apply to the few jobs I have gathered up, or if perhaps I should leap ahead with my imperfect resume.

I will be going to the unemployment office first. I do not have much faith in their ability to help me, but I could be wrong.

The other thing I did yesterday was to work some more on Erin. This is a sleeve, with the colorwork beginning. I think I will do bands of this simple pattern for the sleeves. I may finish this by the time it gets cold again.

We're having another lovely spring day. I'll be taking a walk, and I think I had better get a haircut before my meeting with the SEO firm. I'm already going to look old for such work. There is no reason to look slovenly as well.