Yesterday was a productive day.  I visited the farmers' market to buy plants, worked with The Chemist to get two file drawers of music into the database, planted at least part of the garden, worked on my resume, and finished the table runner.

The Chemist and I got our music-entry system going pretty smoothly. I stood at the file cabinet, sorting and counting and reading out the data, while she typed it into her laptop. There were moments of reminiscence and discussion -- were there really two different editors for Ave Verum? Do you remember when we sang that campy version of Blessed Assurance? Was there ever actually an occasion when we needed 150 copies of the Mozart piece, and if so, how did I miss it?

Home, then, with  my collection of plants, to do the garden.

You can tell that I planted the garden. My husband's plantings are beautiful. Even if he had only planted sticks, they would be beautiful.

My soil is not smooth. I went around like the Little Red Hen asking who would help me plant the plants, and #2 son came out and chopped away with the hoe.

The soil is heavy, and should have been amended, and raked smooth. My husband would have done those things. However, if I had left it to him, we wouldn't have the garden planted yet, so I think it is just as well that I did it.

We have nice little lettuces and cabbages, annual herbs, peppers, and tomatoes. I will still need to plant cucumbers, beans, melons, and squash, but they can wait till next week. I haven't done any annual flowers yet, either.

I then put together plans for my first SEO client, plus one for another business that expressed some interest. I plan to take the second one to my meeting with the SEO firm to show that I know what I'm doing; if I am not actually hired there, I will take the plan to the business owner and pitch it myself.

Having done the gardening, housework, computer work, and some housework, I intended to take the rest of the day off, but #2 daughter called and told me we were going to work on our resumes together.

 My thought about resumes is that you make one for each job you apply for. The employers want, let us say, a knight on a white charger with experience rescuing princesses. You make a resume that says you are a knight, see the white charger here, and this is a list of princesses I have rescued.

Making a general resume to strew around during a job search is another sort of thing, and one I haven't done in a long time. I have a lot of experience, and some of it will be relevant to some things and not to others. My fieldwork on the Pomo reservation is not always important. My certification as a state history teacher trainer is sometimes just picturesque. I've worked in an aquarium, in refugee resettlement, in a museum. I've been a model, a book warehouse worker, and a census taker. I've taught everybody from preschool to the elderly (my ESL class of Cambodian octogenarians didn't make much progress in English, but they enjoyed themselves). My inclination is to leave out half the things I've done, just to fit it on a page and keep it from being overwhelming. I'm having a lot of trouble making it seem coherent and planned, as opposed to a sort of colorful memoir.

What I have done my entire working life, it seems to me, is to gather, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate information for the purpose of helping others reach their goals. In lots and lots of different ways. Under "objective,"  if I were honest, I would put that I want a job that will allow me to continue doing that, in a pleasant working environment, toward some goal that strikes me as worthy.

You can see why I am having trouble.

But I did make some progress. Then I finished up the table runner, and I am very happy about that.

I have a solo this morning, with high Es. I am not going to the early service, so that I can get properly awake and warmed up before singing, and not disgrace myself. Also, I have a worship task force meeting this evening, and That Man has asked for a detailed report of all that I did for the website in the past year, so the day is full enough as it is.

First, oatmeal.

Here is the table runner with the binding half done. I like the print binding much better than I did the plain ready-made, so it is a blessing that I ended up a bit short on that and had to be a bit resourceful.

The Empress and I were doing inventory yesterday, and got to talking about jobs. We can both see that there are a few things about our present jobs that we will not miss. But it is hard to think of what we might do next.

I've been looking at the want ads, so I know that there are some interesting job titles out there.

For example, "Manifester 4." Wouldn't it be cool if, when people asked "What do you do?" you could answer, "I'm a Manifester 4"? Doesn't it sound like a robot or something?

But what, The Empress wanted to know, does a Manifester 4 actually do?

Naturally, I looked it up on Google. First I came up with this (it's a PDF file, but very cool -- I am thinking of adapting it for my daily to-do list ), but we discovered in short order that it is something to do with shipping. Like a ship's manifest, you know.

Not nearly so exciting.

That Man and The Empress suggested that I do freelance SEO/SEM for local businesses. I pointed out that, as an unemployed person with no liquid assets, I wasn't in a position to fool around with such things.

"You could do it at 4:00 a.m. Then you could go to your day job," That Man suggested. He was quite emphatic that I ought to be able to cash in on the skills I've learned this year, and I like that idea. However, I pointed out, I could not get into the SEO club. I am too old, I don't use all the jargon, my degrees are not in IT or engineering, the people who work in that field do not seek their new hires among motherly writers who are good at getting things to the top at Google ...

Over lunch, though, I looked for local SEO firms. There is one. I checked out their portfolio, ran their clients through some SEO tools to make sure that my numbers were just as good as theirs, and emailed them. I pointed out that there were lots of local businesses who would benefit from their help, but would never be able to find them on Google, or to understand the page where they list their services.  

Before getting back to work, I tracked down the people of the firm. Their website is very cagey about their identities. This is interesting in and of itself. At the store's website, we have pictures of all our people and the dog and down-home stuff about where we're from and all our names -- this is normal. It inspires trust in potential customers. The SEO firm behaves as though there are no humans working there at all.

Fortunately, as a plyer of The Dark Art, I am able to find these things out. The firm appears to be a one-man band, just one of several online ventures by a young man who not so long ago was winning prizes at the business school. Conjure up your mental image of a computer genius, and you probably have this guy.

A firm like that could definitely use someone as reassuring and harmless-seeming as me. A motherly person who can clearly explain what the firm can do for local business owners in normal English. I'm also better at blogging, frankly, and that is one of the services they offer. A firm that offers blogging to people who don't know what a blog is or how it could help their business needs someone who can show them examples of how it has helped people.  But does a firm like that offer secure employment to someone who has children to feed?

We shall see. He has invited me to meet with him next week. I also have had an offer to help with my resume, and I have five jobs that I plan to apply for. One of them (an instructional design position) sounds very good to me, but I had been thinking I wasn't really qualified. However, a friend who works at that place emailed it to me yesterday, saying that she thought I should apply for it.

So I may be unemployed, but I have some jobhunting adventures planned.

This weekend, though, I intend to finish my table runner, buy groceries, plant the garden, and clean house. I also have meetings and -- quite soon now, actually -- a date to get the church's music into a database.

And there is the email I got last night sayng that, although I had arranged a male soloist for Sunday's 8:45 service, the bulletin reached the pianist with the choirlet listed instead. I don't know what I will do about that, but I clearly have to do someting.

I had the day off yesterday. I went for a hike around the lake.

I am fortunate to live in such a beautiful place. This particular lake is right in the middle of town. There is a research and education center there, and a whole bunch of trails, and it lies between the two major north-south roads. You can be driving along the highway and never know it's right there by the mall, and you can be walking there and never notice that the highway is there.

There are a bunch of trails there to choose from, so that you can walk a couple of miles or five and a half miles, as you prefer. I walked for an hour and a half. It was very invigorating.

Later, I watched Numb3rs, an extremely cool program. It's visually stylish, and while it does have some weird academic characters, I think that may be a language problem.

That is, if you are making a program in which people are supposed to be mathematicians chatting about stuff the way mathematicians really do, but you are showing it to people who aren't mathematicians, how do you make the characters sound recognizably like mathematicians?

In this program, they say things like, "If I'm sitting in a black hole, what do I see?"
"Everything -- and nothing!"
"Ah, but is it a charged black hole?"

And everyone laughs and quaffs beer.

This is not realistic. People talking about their own field do not make show-offy remarks about common things that everyone already knows.

That would be like having people who are supposed to be knitters say, "So I decided to knit socks with double pointed needles!"
"Ah, but do you use four or five?"

And they laugh and quaff beer.

It makes no sense.

I think they should have done it the way the writers of Oceans 13 did. Remember when George Clooney and Brad Pitt had personal conversations? They said things like, "So I said, 'What do I look like? A pancake eater?' and it just sat there on the floor."

People are not bothered by incomprehensible stuff as long as it is background music. 

Anyway, while I watched this cool program, I cut and pieced the bias binding for my table runner, and made a nice lemon cake for dinner. Here you see the lemon cake, with lemon glaze and a sprig of lemon balm.

Below you see a clearer picture of my binding.

I put a pork roast in before I went to my tutoring gig, and it was ready when I got back, filling the air with lovely herbal smells.

It felt like such a nice normal day.

Indeed, I got so engaged in my nice normal day that I missed the moment for Amazon Vine.

Amazon Vine is the splendid program by which people like me get to pick free stuff to review. When I have been sent things to review before the Vine program, it has generally not been the kind of thing where you pick. Either someone sends you something, or there are big tables at a booksellers conference where you take as much as you feel you can without looking way too greedy. There is something a little bizarre about the Vine system, though. Each month, there are items posted and we can choose a couple to review. The list goes up at a precise time, and it is the custom to hover over the computer like a vulture, hitting your refresh button every few seconds to get the list at the first possible moment. Then you race through it madly, clicking on things in hopes of getting something before it is taken.

The electronic things are always snaffled by the people with really fast computers who don't bother looking at the books at the top of the list. Then the member forum is filled with laments on the parts of those with less high-powered computers who ended up with free Gatorade. These are immediately followed by posts from people pointing out, correctly if sanctimoniously, that we are all getting this Gatorade for free and shouldn't complain. I don't do either of those things, of course.

Actually, I sort of liked it better when it was all books. We didn't have feeding frenzies over books, and I always like free books. Now, we have fewer choices for books, and only the truly saintly can help thinking, "Oh, man! I didn't get here in the first few nano-seconds so I missed out on the [insert extremely expensive electronic device here]!"

Yes, well, I missed not just the first seconds, but the first twenty minutes of the feeding frenzy this month, but I am still going to have a couple of fun things to review.

I have bought more of two of the items I've reviewed because I liked them so well. I will tell you which ones: the Venus razor and the 7th Generation Laundry Soap. I love the one expensive electronic item I snagged, and I could never have bought it for myself, nor could I have bought the expensive software. Apart from the dismal case of the Vista software (I still haven't come up with an enemy who will allow me to install it on his or her computer for testing purposes), I think I have been able to provide useful reviews of all the items. And it is just flat-out fun to have things arrive in your mail like presents. Even Gatorade. Which, by the way, is disgusting.

I know I'm privileged. My kids are, too, even though they sure know how much the heating bills are and we've never gone on a cruise. My husband, on the other hand, would say yes only to #24, and the family built that home with their own hands. Most of the questions would strike him as ludicrous.

On the other hand, they did have water buffaloes and elephants on their farm. How many of us can say the same?

What really struck me about this is that the person from whom I lifted it bolded nearly all the statements -- and then argued that she wasn't privileged.

At the very least, those of us who are privileged should appreciate it and be thankful for it. We may not be able to ensure that wealth is distributed evenly, but for us to take it so lightly that we don't even acknowledge and value our good fortune seems pretty disrespectful.

I saw a comedian not long ago (Daniel Tosh, and what an obnoxious jerk he seems to be! Maybe it's just his character, though) who was talking about the TV program Survivor. I don't watch this program, but I thought that it involved people being put into a deserted wilderness. Apparently, it is actually about people being put in inhabited places -- places where people are already living -- and then folks watch them having to manage to survive. I find this bizarre. Maybe there's more to it. If not, then it is a testament to how spoiled and unappreciative we are.

Try out the meme, and marvel at your good fortune!

I have stolen Universehall's reading list:

READING LIST: HIGH SCHOOL

Fiction

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre

Bronte, Emily. WutheringHeights

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass

Cather, Willa. My Antonia or Death Comes to the Archbishop

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Some Sherlock Holmes stories

Eliot, George. Silas Marner

Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun

Harte, Bret. "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Tennessee's Partner"

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, "The Minister's Black Veil"

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World

Irving, Washington. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle"

London, Jack. The Call of the Wild

Maugham, Somerset. Of Human Bondage

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Benito Cereno

Orwell, George. Animal Farm

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Purloined Letter," "The Cask of Amontillado"

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye

Scott, Sir Walter. A novel (Waverly, Rob Roy), Ivanhoe

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men or The Pearl

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island, Kidnapped or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer or The Prince and the Pauper

Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds or The Time Machine

Wright, Richard. Black Boy

Poetry

Arnold, Matthew. "DoverBeach"

Browning, Robert. "My Last Duchess"

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

de la Mare, Walter. "The Listeners"

Dickinson, Emily. "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "I Like to See It Lap the Miles"

FitzGerald, Edward. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Frost, Robert. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "The Road Not Taken," "Birches"

Gray, Thomas. "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Housman, A.E. "To an Athlete Dying Young," "When I Was One and Twenty"

Hunt, Leigh. "Abou Ben Adhem"

Keats, John. "Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "To Autumn"

Kipling, Rudyard. "A Ballad of East and West," "Mandalay"

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. "The Village Blacksmith," "Paul Revere's Ride," The Song of Hiawatha

Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress"

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Raven," "The Bells," "Annabel Lee," "To Helen"

Sandburg, Carl. "Chicago," "Grass"

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"

Tennyson, Alfred. "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Crossing the Bar"

Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"

Wordsworth, William. "My Heart Leaps Up," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

I have crossed out everything I've read. I have, in some sense, read "The Song of Hiawatha," but I can't keep my mind on it at all, so I can't say I've ever really read it. The underlinings are Universehall's. You could copy this, too, and add a code of your own.

We had a glorious spring day yesterday. I took Spicer (that's the bolster-like Corgi) on a walk through the fields and she positively romped.

This is news, because when Spicer first came to us, she waddled along and could really only get to the corner before beginning to look as though she thought someone should pick her up and carry her the rest of the way.

My fitness level is not improving like Spicer's, but she gives me inspiration. If a sedentary girl like that can progress to romping through the fields, I can probably stave off decrepitude a bit longer.

The weather has been so odd that we haven't planted anything yet, but we have had our first harvest anyway.

My husband brought this bunch of thyme in and hung it up to dry, and also cut a whole bunch of lavender branches. No flowers yet, of course, but at least we have some green things in the house.

 I had thought I would go to the Farmer's Market today for some plants, but the weather is still too unsettled to be planting things.

Indeed, my life is unsettled. I have a variety of unsettlednesses which I haven't mentioned here, and probably won't until they get settled.

But I looked this morning at my goals for the year, and I have to say that I am not making much progress on any of them.

It is possible to move the target, of course, so that our random sallies look as though they are getting closer. I could decide that my goals for this year were things like "Work lots of extra hours with no discernible benefit to anyone" or "Gain many new skills which may or may not be of any use in the future" or "Do many things no one else wants to do." Then I would be right on track.

 I did finish the quilting of the table runner last night. This picture doesn't show you the quilting, or the completed runner, because I have not bound it. I haven't bound it because, as you can see, I am several inches short of having enough binding.

I tried to find a suitable fabric from which to cut new binding, without success. So I will have to buy another package of binding for the few remaining inches.

To assuage my disappointment at Still Not Finishing Anything This Year, I photographed the runner with the pitcher of lavender branches on it to show how perfect it will be in this room when and if I ever finish it. 

I sound a little bad-tempered today, don't I? I'll be up at the store all day. I have a lot to do before I leave, and then I go immediately to class. Maybe Thrilling Adventures will take place along the way.

Maybe I just need another cup of tea.

Xanga has the collywobbles this morning, so I am not going to chance a long post.

Yesterday was very busy, and in fact there is nothing but Very Busy around here as far as the eye can see, so there is no need to talk about it.

#1 son got back safely from his rock concert, having seen the Mississippi flooding, which he says was pretty cool and not at all dangerous, and also having missed a bunch of things because of people who were so slow getting ready that they couldn't get out of the dorms where they were staying.

They were at Rhodes, my great-grandfather's alma mater. He roomed there with the boy who would later become President Wilson. They had gone to prep school together.

I bet they always got ready promptly.

I understand what #1 son is talking about, because I am married to know someone just like that. You plan to go someplace, put your shoes on, and then stand there waiting while they have a cigarette, change their shirt, fix their hair, do some luandry, change the oil...The best plan is never to go anywhere with people like that, unless you are one too.

If you always read my xanga and have perfect recall, you may remember that the store I managed closed last year, and that shortly thereafter, a competitor opened a store here. You may even remember that we were somewhat bitter about it.

At the fair yesterday, I sat right next to the manager of that store. We had lots of opportunities to talk, especially since my colleague never showed up, and she became quite chatty. She's a nice girl, who went to school with my daughters, and had always loved our store. That was in fact why she had wanted to manage our competition -- all those happy memories of playing in our store as a child.

I was successful in what I had planned on doing. I left early, though, and was in time to go have my picture taken for the new church directory. It was an experience that really brought to mind a funny bit I once heard a woman about my age do -- you can look in the mirror and feel that things are not that bad, she said, and then be shocked by your photograph. This is because we delude ourselves.

It was funnier the way she said it.

While I waited, I chatted with the church secretary. She told me that her live-in boyfriend is a Wiccan, while her family is Pentecostal Holiness. They are thinking of marrying, but if they do, then she thinks the most important thing will be a huge reception with lots of liquor. "I can't stand these receptions where you just eat your cake and leave," she confided. "If everyone is still at mine getting drunk at 2:00 am, I'll feel like it was a successful wedding."

I get the feeling that being a church secretary has not always been her career goal.

When I got home, my husband was using my soldering iron to repair the lawn mower. Since it was out, I thought  I'd make some charms. I particularly wanted to try making smaller ones.

You will not be surprised to know that not doing this at all for a year or so has not caused my skill to improve.

I resolved, at that time, to spend more time working on my soldering skills, but in the light of morning it is hard to see where that time might come from.

I got a good bit of work done on my sock yesterday. I got a good bit done on the table runner last night. Today I will be at church from 8:15 ( for handbells) to noon, and then will go back for a meeting in the afternoon. I hope there will be some housework in between. I also have to call all the people I met yesterday and put all their information into my database. Then maybe in the evening I can continue with my needlework. I'd really like to finish something. I think #1 son's headband is the only needlework project I have actually finished this year.

I did also learn yesterday (from an out-of-town vendor who has been attending those NSSEA roundtable sessions which I have not but probably should have been attending) that our online store is, by industry standards, wildly successful. I can't decide whether this is a good news or not.

Today -- indeed, any minute now -- I will be doing exhibitor work at the Early Childhood fair.

I don't know whether you've ever done this. It involves sitting at a table for eight hours. Most of the time, there is no one there and you will be bored. Then there will be a great influx of people, all needing your attention at once and messing up your table. This alternation continues all day.

During the great influxes, your goal is to be deeply concerned about every single person you see, and to get your attention away from one and on to the next very fast, but without making the first one feel rejected.

During the boring stretches, your goal is to appear welcoming and interested in your table. After all, if you are bored, why would any of the punters bother coming over?

I have the customary lures: candy and prize drawing slips. And I have someone coming in the afternoon to hang out with me. This will help a lot.

I don't know this woman at all well, but I like her, so this will be an opportunity to get to know her better.

I am also taking my knitting. Socks are ideal for this kind of venture.They are little and you can pick them up and put them down easily. You can turn the heel during the dull parts.

There's the sock in question.

I did the grocery shopping last night, at the time when I should have been having my picture taken for the church directory. I completely forgot, and I did not look at my calendar, because it was Friday night, my official Night Off when I officially don't have to do anything.

Except, in this case, grocery shopping and packing up of the goods for the table, and having a picture taken, which of course I did not do at all. I feel bad about that, but there is nothing to be done about it now.

Off to the salt mines!

I made some pretty cinnamon cookies with my magic cookie press last night. I hope you find them charming, but I have to admit that I am a piker in the decorative cookie department compared with the Evil Mad Scientist. Click on that link and prepare to be astounded.

The sudden serendipitous appearance of fractal cookies in my life is all the more thrilling because I had just been talking about fractals in my Wednesday study group. We are reading a book called The Shack together, and in it there is a scene in which a man's soul is described as "a mess," at which God disagrees and says it is, rather, "a beautiful fractal." (God is a character, or three characters, in the book.)

After a hurried online consultation with the people in Chanthaboune's office (I have no people in my office, unless you count the ones resident in my computer), I determined that I had better take a picture of a fractal, in case my fellow readers weren't familiar with them. Sure enough, they weren't. But after we had looked at the picture, we were able to have quite interesting discussions of whether fractals are a good metaphor for our lives or our souls, or not.

I also had a little discussion of higher mathematics last night with Fine Soprano's husband. She had called me to ask if I would tutor her kids for the end of the school year and the summer, and I agreed. So I was over there unravelling the mysteries of the futur proche for the eleventh grader. I really enjoy helping people make sense of things. That's the part of my work at the physical store that I like best, too. But her husband, who is a physicist, came in as we finished up the French homework, and the conversation turned to non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension.

I've read a good deal about that this year, but neither fractals nor non-Euclidean geometry is really a staple of conversation for me. Maybe a few times a year it'll come up. And this week I've happened upon the topic repeatedly, even in cookies.

Of course, it is only my human passion for seeing patterns that even causes me to notice this.

I've been working on my HTML skills, too. So far, the book that I am using, Donna Baker's Complete Course, is not much on organizing the data. We are told to type in certain things, and then we look at the page and see that, behold, things have happened. This describes my previous experience with HTML, too. It feels random. Fine Soprano was frustrated that her kid's French teacher was throwing things randomly at the kids (and I would be inclined to agree, since they are just now, in April, getting to the futur proche), so I am going to help organize the data into something that makes sense. There is, to me, a great deal of beauty in that. I hope that, as I proceed with my HTML studies, the random stuff I have hitherto picked up will coalesce into a beautiful crystalline pattern.

Just so, if our lives, which can often seem like a mess, can be perceived as something with a beautiful, organized pattern, even if we cannot see it yet, it may be that we can be more contented with them, whether it is true or not. For, as they say, a certain value of true. There are already too many commas in this paragraph, but that happens when you are thinking about higher mathematics, truth, and beauty.

Go look at those cookies.