Yesterday I spent mostly working on Client #2's project. Yesterday was the deadline for the first section of it, and I never like to miss a deadline. I am waiting on things from someone else, so it is not entirely finished, but there is a good amount of material for Client #2 to work with. Today I have things to do for Clients 1 and 3, and I also have a job interview.

Again, this is good news but only a little bit good. The interview is with the university's temp agency. They called to offer me a week in the bookstore, which I would have done gladly, but they needed me on Saturday, when I will be doing a presentation on missionary hymns of the Victorian era. The woman who called was understanding, and asked me to come in and chat anyway.

The lady at the regular temp agency sent me away, as you may recall, and she was right. I can't afford to work for $8 an hour, so she really had nothing to offer me. The university temp agency is willing to talk to me, though, even though they have seen my resume, so I am hoping that they have some other options. In fact, on a fantasy level, I'm hoping that they will have plenty of work at some medium pay scale that would allow me to do my freelance work and yet not feel that the wolf was ever at the door.

Last night's speaker talked about pity parties. I don't use that term, though I admire it. She talked about how throwing yourself a pity party is a way of making much of yourself and little of God.

Now, as you know, I recently spent some time wallowing in misery. I think that's an appropriate response to bad news. We're human, after all, we're going to be upset by some things, and I think it's best to wallow wholeheartedly in misery for a brief, convenient period so you can get back to normal life as soon as possible.

The speaker actually used the term "wallow." However, she said "wallowing in self-pity," which sounds a lot less noble than "wallowing in misery." She said that throwing yourself a pity party says that you are not happy with God's choices, which is another way of saying that you think your choices are better than God's, and that you are in fact more important than God.

We are talking, here, about a God who allows all manner of horrible things to happen in the world. I know people who would agree with the speaker, on the grounds that they should be confident that God is going to do what's best for them, so they should know that there is a happy ending coming up. Some of these folks have pointed out to me that there are several plausible happy endings to my unemployment, all of which could see me in a much better position next year than I was in last year. They think that faith should cause me to believe that God has one of those plans in mind for me.

But God's plan might involve some horrible suffering on my part, for all I know. That doesn't mean it isn't a good plan, from a God-sized perspective. I could be random collateral damage in a grand scheme that just isn't even about me. I could be scheduled to be a bad example to someone: see, this woman always made job choices based on how fun they were, and look at her now! I could be part of God's happy ending for someone else. I could be slated for a happy ending, but only after some long ennobling suffering.

God does lots of things that I don't agree with. Fortunately, the position of God is filled, and there isn't any committee to oversee the works of God and approve them before they occur, so I can disagree all I want, secure in the knowledge that my disagreeing has no effect and will not mess up any grand schemes.

As it happens, I am through with my wallowing, whether in misery or in self-pity, so the question of whether or not one should have a pity party was strictly academic for me. If the wolf does indeed come to the door before I am once again steadily employed, though, I will be tempted to throw another pity party. Between now and then, I can contemplate whether it's a good thing to do or not.

And maybe it won't even come to that.

The weather yesterday was absolutely glorious.

I was inside working (the store website has over 9,000 links now, I sadly noticed, as I was doing link management for Clients 1 and 3). I went to the gym, in fact, rather than walking outside. And then I came home and worked on Client #2's project, thinking deeply on the question of keyword density. This is a matter of some controversy in the field, so I interrupted Client #2's vacation to ask his philosophy on it. He was up on my Buddy List, so it wasn't quite like calling him on the phone, was it? If you are on someone's Buddy List, then by showing yourself you are declaring yourself available to be asked questions regarding your philosophy on keyword density.

But at lunch time I went outside and sat in the sun with my ham and cheese.

Are you old enough to remember the days when we could bask in the sun like lizards? It was not, boys and girls, that we were immune to skin cancer, wrinkles, and sun spotting. We just didn't know about it. Those of us who didn't sunburn used to go around all the time with no sunscreen, and then we sunbathed as well. Vain girls oiled themselves and worked on their tans, and the rest of us thought nothing of lying in the sun while we studied. This is why people from previous generations are wrinkled and spotty.

Actually, I never heard of anyone having skin cancer in those days. They got old and leathery, certainly, but we didn't know the word "melanoma."

But you know, the sun feels wonderful. It was in the 70s, and I have a nice chair by the vegetable garden, and I luxuriated in the feel of it for a good fifteen minutes before the clamor of mental reminders about the dangers of the sun sent me inside.

I was talking about this with a friend, a fellow bookseller last night. Her mother was Cherokee. In her youth, having accepted the idea that fair skin was prettier, she always avoided the sun. When she became old, she sat with the sun on her face all the time, enjoying the warmth. People chased her around with sunblock, but she still grew as dark as a penny. That's how much she enjoyed the sun.

I say, if you're 90, you can do what you please. How much more wrinkled could you get, and why would you care? I like the thought of the old woman enjoying the sun.

I have more work at the computer today, but I believe I will also take a hike.

I will put on sunblock first. Of course.

#2 son brought me an ice cream cake from his work, and then he and #1 son provided the meals for the day -- carry out food, but it still counts.

I had a very lazy day hanging out with the family.

Before that came the church services, the very fancy and elaborate services for Pentecost and Mother's Day combined.

The liturgical dance had been eight little girls doing pas de basques and turns with ribbons on dowels, but the children didn't show, so we ended up with several grown women walkiing in waving ribbons.

Some of the people doing the multilingual Lord's Prayer showed up, and some did not. Of those who showed up,  some were prepared and some were not. Only two had shown up for the run-through.

This is clearly my fault. I overestimated the degree of commitment or something.

However, the flutes were great. I always think we ought to have woodwinds for Pentecost.

Here are the sleeves of Erin, nearly to the cuff.

I'm doing a workshop this evening and writing for Client #2 all day today. No new job openings have appeared over the weekend, but maybe I will hear from someone I've already applied to.

Happy Monday!

We had tornado warnings yesterday. No tornados, but huge hail, which was odd on such a warm day, and lots of rain and electricity. A good day for domestic pursuits.

My domestic pursuits included alternating bouts of athletic scrubbing with hanging about knitting. I went to the farmer's market and the grocery and the post office, worked in the garden a bit, and made bubble bath in a couple of different scents.

We also had a grown-up dinner since the boys were both at work: Chicken Diane, with a lemon and mustard sauce, baked potato, and salad. The potato has been smashed up and spread around, but I can still see that this plate needed more salad.

And I made Conga Bars. I copied this recipe out of an ancient magazine at the museum because I liked the name. You might call them blondies, but I like to think of people in a conga line, wiggling their hips and throwing their heads back laughing (hmm.. Gene Kelly seems to be in that conga line, along with a number of lush beauties in tight dresses... I have obviously never seen a conga line except in movies, but isn't it just the last word in innocent festivity?) and then returning to the table in the cocktail lounge for a Conga Bar and a Rum Punch with a little paper umbrella in it.

 Here's the recipe:

Conga Bars

2/3 c. butter
1.5 c. brown sugar
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla
2.75 c. self-rising flour
1 c. chocolate chips
1 c. chopped pecans

Mix it all up and spread it in a pan, and then bake it for 30 minutes at 325 degrees.

You should be wearing high heels and a tight dress while doing this, unless you are a man, in which case I think a barkcloth shirt and pants like Gene Kelly's are what you need.

Our vegetable garden was happy about all the rain. You can see my husband's special garden art in amongst the vegetables. The cucumbers have just poked their heads out of the dirt, but everyone else is thriving, and we even have a baby cayenne pepper, which will probably be in tonight's dinner.

Our flower garden is not really blooming much. We are supposed to have roses for Mother's Day, and we hardly even have columbine. There are rose buds, in spite of the caterpillars, but no blossoms.

This is  a little bit of my perrenials garden in the front, looking like a nice display of leaves. I added some snapdragons yesterday. I also planted some basil. We grow the Italian and the Thai kind, sin ce both are good for cooking, but the Thai basil smells very nice, and my husband likes to put it along the pathways so that it will release its scent as people walk along the path.

That back corner has something wrong with it. I keep planting tall things there, and they keep disappearing.

Every spring I plant something else. It rarely grows to be tall, and then by the following spring it's gone.

I haven't decided on this year's sacrifical victim yet.

And here are the sleeves of Erin, along with the body of Erin.

 I am very unsure about those sleeves, but we shall see.

I'm reading a book called Scratch Beginnings, by Adam Shepard, which tells the story of a young man in his twenties who decides to leave home with $25 and a gym bag and make his fortune.

So far, he is living in a homeless shelter and has found a job. Being a jobhunter myself, I was interested to read about his experience. He also found that his first options didn't pay enough to live on.

Statistically speaking, if you are a poor person in the United States and you take a job -- any job -- and keep it (for statistical purposes, you should also get married and stay married, but that is not relevant to this discussion), you will be out of poverty within three years. Shepard found that his first options for work simply weren't profitable, and he didn't want to wait around for three years.

This young man had willingly plunged himself into poverty, and was probably on some level aware that he always had the option of leaving it if he chose to, simply by calling his parents to come and get him. However, the changes in his attitude and behavior during his stay at the homeless shelter were very interesting. I remembered that Lostarts had stayed in a shelter briefly a couple of years ago while dealing with some odd landlords, and went back to read her experience. She found it unpleasant (as the author of Scratch Beginnings points out, that's intentional, to get people out as fast as possible) but not life-changing. Maybe she wasn't there as long, or as a mature person was less influenced. Maybe it's a guy thing.

In spite of the effects of shelter life, Shepard has found so far that by working hard and doing without he is moving inexorably toward his goal.

Today is Mother's Day, so I hope there isn't a whole lot of inexorable movement on your calendar for the day. Enjoy it!

I had a job interview yesterday. This was excellent news, because it was disheartening not to be called for any interviews. However, do not be thinking that there is a happy ending, because there isn't. They intend to offer me the job, pending the results of a background check. I am not interesting enough to worry about a background check. But I cannot afford to take this job. It is a pay cut of about $8,000 from my previous job, and I wasn't rolling in lucre before.

The key, then, is to make sure not to allow them to offer me the job, so that I will not have to admit to the unemployment office that I refused work.

I can hardly stand to admit to myself that I refused work. However, I had a pleasant chat with one of the guys from the unemployment office today in which he explained how I can do freelance work (at least some) without giving up my unemployment benefits (at least entirely), so I think they are realistic people, and would understand that I can't take a job that pays only slightly more than the unemployment benefits.

Or I could fail to take the employer's call.

This is an assistant manager position at a local bookstore. It is good to know what such positions pay. I had actually applied for the manager's position, but they promoted from within (and good for them) and then called me as second choice to interview for the assistant.

The interview was quite interesting. The manager was a spunky little woman with a high, tense voice. She seemed very sweet and very driven. She never stopped talking for the entire hour of the interview. I had prepared answers to all kinds of possible questions, but I don't think she ever asked me one. 

She had been at Victoria's Secret before she took up selling books and music, and she told me it wasn't very different. Bras and panties, books and music.

It was very different from my previous bookselling experience. Big-box corporate retail is just a whole nother thing. My kids worked at Abercrombie, so I had a taste of it through them, but really it was fascinating to hear about the whole system. The corporate office decides the work schedules (including twelve-hour shifts and late night merchandising marathons), the stock that will be sent to the store, where everything should be put, how much is to be sold each day, and what music is to be played loudly all day long.

"It's really easy," the manager assured me, and I believe her. You just follow the directions. The other worker who was there that day had worked for the corporation for twenty years, so I guess it must be reasonably pleasant.

I am disappointed that it didn't turn out to offer a living wage. I would have liked to have been safely employed again. If it had been even a little more, I could have done it as the safety net for my freelance work. But the safety net really has to cover basic living expenses, it seems to me.

Still, it was cheering to have an interview.

I have some excellent plans for Client #3. I am excited about my assignment with Client #2, as well, though I didn't get a chance to get to it yesterday. Fortunately, his assignment involves distilling the keyword development process down to a step-by-step process, and I have been doing that for my other clients, so I am still making progress on the research phase of his project.

I am going to take the weekend off. Housework, gardening, errands, music, lolling around. That's the plan.

I cut some irises and brought them in. Out with all the other scents, their fragrance gets lost, but inside, it is very sweet. Walking by them is a lovely experience.

The picture below shows one of their top backyard competitors: honeysuckle.

I got one of the shows closed yesterday, signed up a new client (that would be Client #3), got a new assignment from Client #2, and did some more tutoring. Today I meet with Client #3, work on my Monday night lecture and Thursday cooking show, and get going on that big assignment.

I am as happy as a couple of clams about this, as you can imagine. The bad news is that I have not heard back from any of the places I have applied to, and there was nothing new being advertised yesterday. I must now move on to unsolicited letters of application.

I shouldn't say that I have applied for everything there is, because that is not true. Where I live, there is no unemployment.

Actually we have 2% unemployment. The nice man at Human Services explained to me that it is normal to have 5% unemployment -- some people are not working because they have small children, or are in school, or don't need of want to work. Our local level of unemployment, 2%, means that there are people working who would rather not. They have been forced to by desperate employers.

So it isn't that there are no jobs to apply for. It is that there are no jobs that I want and could live on. I was expecting to have been out there applying for the manager positions at big box stores if I were still unemployed by now, but the things I've applied for haven't reached their closing dates yet. What if I agreed to be a manager at Taco Bueno or Toys R Us and then was called for the instructional design job?

On the other hand, what if I am not called by any of the places I've applied to, and can't pay my bills because I failed to apply for those managerial positions?

 CD, who is just finishing grad school and knows plenty of jobhunters, assures me that I should expect ten offers from what I've currently applied for, once they get the calling started. She was, however, trying to cheer me up.

Here you see the cabbages in our garden. I like cabbage very much, in stir-fries and in soups, in salads and slaws.

My boys are not fans. I also have squash out there, both green and yellow zucchini. It seems to me that zucchini is good at every meal.

And truly fresh vegetables are not available year-round in my neck of the woods, so it seems to me that we should really appreciate them while we have them.

 But the boys are not big fans of squash either.

They are happy about the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. I don't bother growing carrots; our soil is too to heavy for sand-loving carrots, and the boys like the store-bought ones well enough.

The roses are infested with caterpillars, and have only a few brave buds on their skeletal remains.

I sprayed the caterpillars with cleaning solution, the most toxic stuff I have in the house, and I did so with really vicious intent in my heart, but it didn't kill them.

Oh, well.

I'm being fairly good about keeping to a normal work schedule. I did have a new computer challenge yesterday (I'd never even heard of Subversion, let alone used it) which kept me fooling around with the computer a bit late, but I managed to get another pattern band done on the sleeves of Erin. It's not going to be proper Fair Isle, and I don't know that Fair Isle interspersed with blocks of plain color is really a good look, but I have invested too much knitting time in it even to consider frogging it, so this is what it will be.

Yesterday at the gym I was reading the Ladies Home Journal on the treadmill, and I saw this remarkable claim: of the 60,000 thoughts we have each day, 95% are the same every day.

I know from direct experience and observation that people think all the time. And I am even willing to accept that someone has come up with a means of measuring the number of thoughts, presumably by electrical output, though I don't agree that "a thought" is a uniform and measurable thing. It seems to me that some thoughts are bigger than others, and some might take longer to think, too. In fact, I think it possible that someone just roughly calculated one thought per second during waking hours and went with it.

Still, let that pass.

The part that really gets me is the "95% the same" bit. The claim is that 95% of our thoughts are things we think every day.

Some people, sure. I know a woman whose conversation is a sort of gentle dribble of health complaints and small details of her life, and I certainly had heard all of it by the time we'd met twice. And of course CNN news is like that. But I think that most of us have new thoughts. We learn things, after all, and hear new ideas. The input for our thoughts varies from day to day, and it would be quite a trick for us to hold the same thoughts in the face of all that input.

David Allen says that we need never think the same thing twice unless we want to. He may or may not be right ... I haven't achieved that myself... but it seems possible to me that we could spend some portion of our days happily contemplating the Trinity or the beauty of mathematical formulae or what we ought to knit next, and otherwise mostly go with new thoughts.

In school we learned that nearly every sentence we spoke was a brand new sentence no one had ever said before. This was something to marvel at (I've marveled at it before, but I went ahead and took a second to marvel again). To me, it implies that most of our thoughts -- at least for those of us who think in sentences -- are probably brand new, too.

But I am merely presenting the Argument From Personal Incredulity here. I want to see the raw data on that 95% claim. If people are having a thought every second then how did researchers isolate those thoughts and check their originality? I suppose you could give subjects a button, and have them press it every time a new thought came into their minds. However, there are some problems with that design. For one thing, it would greatly interfere with thought. There the subject would be, trying to decide whether that fleeting thought was new, new for the day, new for him or her, new for the world... You would be thinking so much about those questions that you would have no time for thinking anything to think those thoughts about. If you see what I mean.

If we ask subjects to think back on all their thoughts and estimate, then we are really being unscientific. I have only been up for an hour, and should therefore have a mere 3600 or so thoughts to sift through, but apart from the ones I have written here, I doubt that I could capture all the others. I got up, put away laundry, made coffee and tea, checked the want ads, and read my email, so I might guess that I had entertained a bunch of thoughts that I normally have while doing those tasks -- i.e., I could guess that I had some thoughts I've had on most days when I do those things and conclude that a lot of my thoughts during that time must have been the same ones I have every day at that time.

However, I am not sure that I would be right if I guessed that. Making coffee is pretty routine for me, after all, and I doubt that I think, "Now I will put coffee in the filter." In fact, it seems to me that while I was making coffee this morning, I was thinking about Storyville. Not in an organized way. I was reminded of Storyville by something I read, and I once saw a sort of opera about it, but I can't remember the composer, I think I just went because I was dating the clarinetist at the time, and maybe there was some benefit to that idea, sort of like having all the "adult" content on the web have its own extension so people wouldn't run into it by accident, and is it a bad thing to have so much pornography on the web, and is it really one of the main uses of the computer as some people claim, and whatever happened to that opera, it was quite good ...  Don't you think that's what a lot of our thoughts are like as we do tasks we do everyday?

The point of this highly suspect claim about the number of thoughts and the proportion of them that are the same was not, however, to say something about the human mind. It wasn't even to exhort us to take up GTD so that we wouldn't have to think "Where are my glasses?" every single day. It was to say that we tend to think a lot of negative things over and over. We ruminate on things we regret or worry that something bad might happen, or mentally scold ourselves for things. And we should give those things up, according to the Ladies Home Journal.

We should reject negative thoughts and think positive ones.

It seems to me that they could have said that without inventing those spurious numbers.

Today I have tutoring to do, and more attempts to get those cooking shows finished up, and more practice on my HTML. Janalisa was over for tea yesterday, and told me that I ought to send contracts off to the people who expressed an interest in my services, saying that I am looking forward to working with them, and will they please just sign and return this form... I may also see about cleaning up the manuscripts I had been doing for the store and uploading them to Lulu, since The Empress has bequeathed them to me. I don't think they will be very profitable without a store to sell them in and workshops to promote them, but they were a lot of work to put together, so I might as well do something with them.

But I think I may also take some time to clean house and garden, and possibly even to read and knit. I can't afford to be unemployed for long, but I might benefit from taking a little down time while I am.

Last night on the way back from rehearsal I gave my little description of what -- apart from teaching -- I do, and someone said, "Well, consider yourself hired." She is opening a private practice this summer and knows she will need a website.

My list of highly likely clients has grown to three. Added to my list of two actual clients, this makes five, which is probably half the number I need to be properly in business.

I also have three cooking shows out there that I need to get closed up.

I didn't get around to wallowing in misery yesterday. The Empress and That Man came by for tea. I did three job applications, took a walk, spent some time on The Dark Art, practiced HTML (I'm trying to get more fluent, if not more accurate), met with my collaborators regarding this week's worship plan, tutored French, and went to rehearsal with the choirlet. There was only enough time to contemplate the worst case scenario (that would be the one in which I am never able to get a job and we all starve, or, since that isn't very plausible, the one in which I have to take a job that I hate and become bitter) briefly, and even then it was hard for me to keep my mind on it. I was walking along one of the city greenways at the time, and the woods were filled with honeysuckle, which I found distracting.

There was also a call about missionary hymns.

I think that I told you that I was invited to join a project on the subject of Victorian missionary hymns. This is the kind of topic which I find fascinating even though I realize that many people would use it as an example of stultifying dullness. And, since I am unemployed, I was able to take some time to track down the answer to the question.

As I was searching through old hymnals in the physical and virtual worlds, I thought of my own great-grandparents, who were missionaries in China. Here's my great-grandmother.

I like to think of them as enlightened people. I've read their journals, and they don't call people "heathens" as though it were a nationality. They did some strikingly enlightened-seeming things; my great-grandfather died trying to rescue Chinese passengers from a sinking ship when they had been left behind, and he was known for his studies of Chinese traditional farming methods.

But the hymns from that period are all stuffed with things like, "Shall we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high, shall we to men benighted the lamp of life deny?" "The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone." "O'er the pagan's night of care pour the living light of heav'n." "Thousands still are lying bound in the darksome prison house of sin.""In the dark domain where they have no knowledge of the Savior's name."

The basic message was that we, the American and English people singing these hymns, have a duty to share our greatly superior knowledge and virtue with the miserable benighted heathen living in darkness in their miserable countries, which included all the other countries in the world.

My great-grandmother, a Frenchwoman, actually began her missionary work among English dockhands, so I don't know how this applies to her. Perhaps there are French missionary hymns about the poor benighted Brits.

Is it possible that my great-grandfather, the child of slave owners, doubtless exposed to the missionary hymns, did not think of the people he worked with as benighted heathens? I like to think that the respectful tone of his writings shows that God, who has never been a racist, allowed him to rise above the undoubted racism of his day.

Last night we were practicing a modern missionary hymn for Sunday, which says, "may we be signs of mission, giving glory to God's name. Not to preach our creeds or customs, but to build a bridge of care, we join hands across the nations," which certainly has a different flavor. Our church supports missionaries in Tanzania who do things like working together with local people building water filters and establishing schools. I hope that they are respectful. We never hear them saying, "We built the heathens some water filters last week."

Both my daughters are struggling with having to listen to ethnic slurs from people with whom they work. Both have been brought up to bring these things to people's attention, on the assumption that they will apologize and cut it out. Instead, the people they are admonishing say things like, "You're just saying that because you're a minority" or "I have black friends and they use that word," or "Don't be so uptight."

Actually, thinking of  people of other ethnic heritage as heathens in need of rescue may be less offensive than saying "If we eat Chinese food again, our eyes will get slanty," as one of #2 daughter's colleagues did.

It is hard to believe that there is still this kind of casual bigotry around in the 21st century. Maybe we need to go sing modern missionary hymns to these people, and show them the error of their ways, the heathens. Or, since these are workplace cases, sue the pants off them.

One of the new things that is happening now that I am a jobhunter is that I am telling people what I do.

I haven't done that in a long time. People usually ask you what you do as part of a simple social interaction, and I have for many years just said, "I work at The Store." At which point the other person says, "Of course! I love that place! You helped me find the perfect toy for my son!" and the moment has passed. If I end up managing to subsist as a freelance plyer of The Dark Art, I think I will say, "I'm a writer" or "I'm in marketing" or something like that.

As a jobhunter, though, you are telling people what you do not in order to find something to talk about, but in hopes that they will say, "Boy howdy! I have just been wishing for someone who can do that! Meet me in my office tomorrow, and we'll discuss salary."

Actually, no one has said that yet. They have all said, after a telling pause, "I never thought of you as a computer geek."

I have always thought that the word "geek" was insulting, and something to do with biting heads off of chickens, so I don't use it.

If I did use it, though, I would certainly have to agree that I am not one of those.

When Client #2 writes code, for example, his final step is to run it through the validator to make sure that there are absolutely no errors. When I write code, I use "transitional" and check to see if it works. If it doesn't, I go back and find the bracket I failed to close.

If that meant nothing to you, just remember what the triangles in my pieced quilts look like. I am of the school that holds that having pointy triangles is optional, and having all the pieces meet is just showing off.

Not only do I not fit the accuracy/obsessiveness profile of the computer geek, I also do not fit any aspects of the stereotype. I do not play computer games, watch sci-fi TV or movies with special interest, or have trouble relating to the opposite sex. The stereotype which best fits me is Someone's Mom. Not the geek's mom, either. I'm the one with the homemade cookies and Family Game Night.

So I was interested to see an article describing the characteristics to look for in an SEO worker. An analytical mindset. Mad research skilz. Writing ability. Excitement at the prospect of problem solving. Good communication skills. Ethics. Creativity.

See? I may not be a 25 year old boy with horn rims, but I am just exactly what you would expect in an SEO person.

Plus homemade cookies.

There are no cookies in these pictures. I am just showing last night's dinner in order to taunt Chanthaboune.

Oh, and last night I had an email from a businessperson who is interested in having me blog for her store, just as soon as she finishes with her son's graduation. I am adding her to my list of potential clients. And Fine Soprano had a long list of places she thought I should send resumes to for teaching jobs. She also has an out of state teaching certificate, and teaches at a local private school.

So before I move on to today's scheduled Wallowing in Misery, I will send off my resume to all those folks and see what happens. Thus far, Nothing is what has happened in response to my job applications. I know, intellectually, that this is because they haven't so much as made it to the desks of the search committees, but it is possible that I could use that fact to encourage a proper Wallow. Actually, I'm feeling pretty cheerful and I have work to do, so I may not get around to it.

Food.

Tuscan turkey burgers, strawberries, melon.

Below there is a lemon mousse torte with white chocolate shavings.

That's really all I did yesterday: church, cooking and baking, hanging out with my family.

It was worth doing.

I sang a solo in church, but also raced about helping the little girls with their liturgical dance, organizing a practice of the multilingual Lord's Prayer, and running through the anthem for next week's early service.

I have a whole bunch of things to do today.

Freelance work.

When you hear that word, do you think of a shabby knight wandering around with his lance, seeking his next meal?

I've always done a bit of freelance work on the side along with my fulltime paid jobs. It often keeps the wolf from the door, or at least increases the fun and variety of my work. But I like it to be extra, in addition to the steady amount that makes me sure I can pay the bills.

When Client #2 said he wasn't in a position to hire someone, but if he were, then he would absolutely hire me, and would I like to some freelance work till then, I was quite pleased. Not quite as pleased as if he had hired me, but pleased.

I'm still looking for fulltime work, obviously, and picking up as many other freelance things as I can. They are being fun, and no more uncertain than job applications. It is exciting to have prospects on the horizon.

I was planning on going around applying in desparation to all the local low-paying jobs today in hopes of having something, anything... However, unemployment insurance pays as much as counter help at Radio Shack are likely to make, and I can spend my time applying, submitting, and pitching for more profitable things. So my scheduled Desperate Acts of Application are canceled for today. I still have Wallowing in Misery scheduled for tomorrow, but I am not in the mood for that today, and maybe I won't be tomorrow either.

A purple iris has unfurled itself.

As we all know, I don't have photography skilz, so you have to imagine it having been photographed by someone who does. Or, indeed, imagine it as it is in real life.

Our little garden is too small for all the things I wanted to plant, but it has cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers of various kinds, herbs, squash of various kinds, cucumbers, and lemon grass. I haven't bought any annuals for the front garden, since that would be frivolous when I am in such a  precarious position, so maybe I could plant beans out there.

Shade-tolerant beans of some kind. Peas, maybe. In amongst the columbine and salvia. Watermelons with the azaleas.