In case you didn't know what it meant to say that the lettuce bolted, you can see here that the lettuce corner of the garden is now filled with fantastic creatures.

This is the result of heat. Sometimes you can keep lettuce from bolting by catching it right away and cutting it right down to the ground, but once it has gotten too hot for lettuce, I figure I might as well benefit from the decorative effect.

If you don't grow lettuce, you might never see this.

Yesterday's solo went well. It turned out to be a duet, actually, because Bigsax showed up with his saxophone and played very smoothly indeed.

The sound guy came down and said, "I never thought I'd say this to you, but you need a microphone." I protested briefly, but gave in without too much of a fight.

Chanthaboune and I are writing our book audition on the subject of dynamics. and the experience made me think of more things we hadn't really considered. I have a big voice, but a saxophone is bigger. We also had a piano playing. It would have required extra skill on all our parts to stay balanced. The microphone allowed me to sing with the dynamics being about the song, which it seems to me really demands a wide range of dynamics, and Bigsax could just play as he felt, and we both just let the pianist get on with it. Since we hadn't actually rehearsed together, that was a more realistic option than any hope that we could work out the balance before the service began at 8:30.

Frankly, any solo that goes above a C very many times makes me a bit nervous, so there was an element of relief in how well it went.

I finished the second book for the summer reading challenge, Miranda Bliss's Murder on the Menu. It was okay. Not exciting. I have been finding the little mystery novels from Booksfree unexciting this summer, and even a bit disappointing. Booksfree is a service like Netflix, but for books. However, you don't have any control over what they send you, not even to the extent of putting things higher on your queue. So if you feel like you're not in the mood for little mysteries, Booksfree is not going to help change that.

This week, I'm starting off with Marne Davis Kellogg's Perfect, which seems to be a caper rather than a mystery, so we'll see.

I got the grocery shopping done, shelling out what seems to me like lots of money. The price of food just keeps going up, and the clerk told me that milk and all dairy products were scheduled to skyrocket tomorrow. She told me, further, that she doesn't buy groceries.

She didn't share how she avoided doing so. Maybe she just nibbles on things while she's at work.

My husband has the week off, so I'm expecting lots of interruptions in my work. However, I must get all my invoices out and keep to my schedule for Client #6 in spite of it. #2 son will be coming home for the holiday weekend, and Wednesday is Parents Day at Governor's School, so I need to have longer days today and tomorrow to make up for that. If I get started soon, I may be able to get quite a bit in while the other members of the household are still sleeping.

We're back from the Midwest.

The rehearsal was a great pleasure. It was held in a hall bearing our last name. This probably happens to you a lot if you have a name like "Johnson," but for me it was unusual enough to be interesting. #2 daughter wasn't happy about the fact because the room is very live -- the kind where forte passages massage all the bones of the inner ear. Harder to sing in, but nice to listen in.

But that fact, along with the fact that the choir watches the conductor, means that the music started and stopped like a box being opened and closed. A box which let out great swirls of color and gorgeous scents, if your imagination has trouble with a box of music. In a normal rehearsal such as this one, the choir sings a bit and the conductor stops them and they work on it and sing a bit more, but toward the end they either ran out of time or were singing so beautifully that the director let them work almost clear through, and it was as good as a concert.

They were doing a couple of favorite pieces of mine (Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus and Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine) and also some lovely things that were new to me. They sang an Agnus Dei during which I thought that I had to get a recording, it was so gorgeous, only to find that it is such a new piece that it hasn't been recorded yet.

We then had brunch at a wonderful cafe, where they had this funny sign on the door:

And then we went on to the museum. I've been to this museum a number of times, but I never tire of it. In fact, I don't think I've seen nearly all of it yet.

Usually we start at the major exhibit, whatever that might be at the time, but this time we began with the new building, which houses minimalist and conceptual art.

There were a few pieces in that gallery that I quite liked, and one in particular that I loved, but I have to admit that I am one of those who stands in front of the solid black canvas trying to look as though I appreciate it, when I actually don't.

I was better off in the sculpture garden.

But we also visited a lot of the smaller galleries that we usually miss, and it was interesting to pass so quickly through time and space.

We saw sculpture and beading from ancient Benin, and then French Impressionist paintings and then armor and effigies from Medieval Europe, and then rooms of furniture from Georgian England, and then Art Deco silver, and there were rooms in which I felt completely at home, and rooms in which I felt completely foreign.

We drove back over to #2 daughter's place. Along the way she pointed at things as we zipped past them: her favorite jazz club, her boyfriend's favorite music store, her favorite martini bar.

I don't live in a town in which we have the option of having a favorite martini bar.

I was looking at people sometimes when we were going around town, just because I have that habit. Not in curiosity or people watching, but because where I live, you often see people you know.

#1 daughter did the same, and thought she saw people she knew, and then realized they were strangers. I know what she means. I think it's because we have our minds set to scan for people we know. Especially since #1 daughter and I both have that limited visual  capacity that makes it easy to fail to recognize people, it's important to be watching in order to avoid the solecism of walking right past a friend.

#2 daughter scoffed at us a little, assuring us that her town is so big that she never just runs into people she knows.

Moments later, she ran into a friend, right there in the gallery full of 18th century Dutch paintings.

We made it to the Big City, and I am sitting on #2 daughter's sofa with her laptop. She is sitting on the floor with her other laptop, checking out the new offerings at i can haz cheezburgers. #1 daughter is drying her hair. We're going to #2's rehearsal and then to a museum. If you have a to-do list going for your life, you should add "Acquire daughters" to it.

We had some minor touristy adventures, and then last night #2 daughter and I knocked out the part of our book proposal that we needed face time for.

I think we can do most of it online or on  the phone if we need music. But this part is the design: what the pages are for and how they should look. There was a point in the discussion when #2 daughter, being a visual person, needed a marker board. She doesn't have one, so she went and got a big piece of paper.

Client #2 knows ahead of time that he'll need a marker board.

That's my small piece of paper in the forground. I drew out the plan for the pages. #2 daughter waved her arms around and made multcolored notes on her big paper. We had a computer as well. There was consulting of reference books and a bit of desultory singing. #1 daughter got sick of it and went out to find Frozen Chai Lattes.

We've got a plan.

Client #2's blog and newsletter went out on schedule and looking good, Client #6 sent a happy email response to this week's report, and of course I am nowhere near my house to do any housework or anything, so I intend just to have fun.

You have fun, too, okay?

Avian flu has turned up in the county where I live -- in chickens, not people. 15,000 birds were destroyed, and people are worrying about the economic rather than the health implications, but I was a little startled by it.

I remember reading in Wired that schoolteachers and shopkeepers would be the first to fall if there were a pandemic of avian flu. At the time I was a shopkeeper serving schoolteachers, so that naturally caught my attention. Now that I am a computer guy, my personal risk must be much lower. Hardly anyone catches things in cyberspace, where I now spend most of my time.

However, we are not talking here about HN51, the deadly strain of the virus that has killed some humans in other countries. That still hasn't been found in the U.S. at all, let alone in my neighborhood. This is just one of those little flu viruses that birds sometimes get. Frankly, the life of a factory chicken is so horrible that getting flu or being destroyed because someone else in the chicken house has it probably qualifies as a blessed release. This is an interesting part of our state's history, but I never dwell on it in workshops, because it is likely that 80% of the participants will be eating chicken at some point that day.

In completely unrelated news, we didn't leave for the midwest yesterday. We plan to leave today, around noon. When I am traveling, I always like to leave first thing in the morning. This is because of the anticipatory anxiety -- if you leave at 6:00 a.m., you hardly have time for it. However, I slept well last night and am quite calm this morning, so I may have just Overcome Agoraphobia enough that it doesn't matter.

I got some good solid work in yesterday, practiced some CSS, made my Amazon choices (narrowly missing the Bamboo computer drawing pad, and now I have compassion for those in the program who whine each month about missing things), and made myself a schedule for July. I have some specific deadlines (July 10th at noon is my favorite; I don't know why, except that it just seems whimsical to have a noon deadline) and lots of daily stuff. I also updated my employment probability tree, and it looks better than it did before. I still kept the node for "permanent unemployment and abject poverty," but it doesn't seem as probable any more. If my big client doesn't renew my contract, and there's no real reason that they should, since it was a fixed time to begin with, then I will still have half the work I need. Surely I can come up with a measly halftime something or other.

Client #2's main competitor -- the one he admires -- is advertising a position today, full time, with a nice large salary. I was tempted to apply, though I am probably not enough of a computer guy to qualify. The fact that I quite like CSS and have mastered the flow probably wouldn't make me one of the "HTML/CSS guru's" they say they are looking for, and I don't do Javascript at all. I briefly considered pointing out that I could save them from those embarrassing apostrophe errors, but really my limited qualifications are saving me from the temptation to apply with one of my current clients' competitors. Next year, by which time I will be a proper guru, I'll be better able to judge the future prospects with the various web development firms in the area, not to mention being settled on the question of self-employment vs. salary. And I am in a growth field, after all. They'll be hiring again.

There have been no further teaching positions, or really anything suitable for me to apply to. The grant-writing position I applied for early on in this adventure closes on Monday. The job begins on Wednesday, so I think there must be a person chosen already. No committee really expects to get through all the candidates in a day. My letters of recommendation for that position were hot stuff, though, so I am still leaving it on the probability tree for a few days. It is half time, so it would work out very well for me, though it is in the next county up.

So is the web development job. So is the teaching job I interviewed for. Prospects in the county where I live aren't nearly so lush, even before the bird flu turned up.

I might ought to work on my ability to drive on the interstate for one county. Or plan to leave every day at 6:00 a.m.

Here it is: the first ripe tomato of the season.

This is an Arkansas Traveler, a really wonderful tomato. I have one plant of these in my garden, and one Roma, which still has only green tomatoes.

The smell is wonderful.

I put this, along with the lettuce, also from the garden, on a turkey sandwich yesterday, and it was delicious. There is enough left for a tomato and spinach omelette this morning., even though other people joined me in eating this tomato.

It escaped dinner last night because I didn't cook dinner. I joined the other members of the bell choir at a local restaurant to say goodbye to our youngest bell ringer, who is moving to the Eastern Shore.

She is a microbiologist, so she is worrying about getting a job. However, her husband has gotten quite a good job, so she doesn't have to worry about money, but just about boredom.

I ate chicken and mushroom ravioli. It had a marsala sauce which was mostly cream. I felt, since I don't normally eat anything so lavish, as though my mouth and throat were entirely coated with cream. This is not necessarily a terrible thing. If you are a cat, for example, or can go lie down and sleep like a cat, it is probably just a luxurious sensation.

However, I went directly to choir, where I was given the solo for "Send It On Down." I had been coveting that solo. I also worked on my solo for this Sunday, which is Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday." I think BigSax is going to play, but I am leaving the instruments up to the instrumentalists. (We may not sound exactly like that YouTube of Kathleen Battle and Wynton Marsalis.)

Neither of those pieces is at its absolute best when sung through cream. I walked home after choir practice, and it was a great pleasure.

The pictures here are from my walk earlier in the day.

I started the day with a walk through of the sites and stats of my Dark Art Lite people, with some updates and negotiations with webmasters, and then spent four hours begging links. I was mostly working with Christmas sites, so there was a lot of cheesy electronic music in my morning.

By afternoon I'd gotten the tech article figured out and sent it off to Client #2, so I went walking before the dinner.

When I returned from the dinner and choir practice, I had feedback from Client #2, saying that my article for him was too exciting, and he needed a short preliminary version he could offer to the punters without leading to stampedes.

I was a bit concerned about that article, as I may have mentioned. Even though I think I now pretty much understand the technology involved, it is always easy to strike a false note linguistically when you write about things outside your own field.

You know how you'll be reading a novel into which someone has stuck some knitting because it's trendy, and some phrase jumps out at you and makes you think, "That person doesn't know how to knit"? Sometimes they have the supposed knitter using a hook, or something.

I didn't want that to happen with my article. I did read it out to my dad, a hardware guy, so he could alert me to any girly phrases or odd structures. On his recommendation, I got rid of the suggestion that clustered servers were demanding on the IT staff. Computer guys don't concern themselves with such things.

So I was pleased to hear that my article had to be kept under wraps because it would just be too thrilling, and also that it had too much technical detail. It is being sent out in a couple of weeks. I wrote something else for the earlier deadline and sent it off.

#1 daughter and I did some chatting, and then I returned to this week's first Summer Challenge book: Making Money by Terry Pratchett.

I'm a big fan of his, and it is always a great pleasure to read his books.

This one is about the introduction of paper currency.

Paper currency might have been just as important, in terms of technological change, as the internet, agriculture, or weaving.

I took my first computer class in 1976, and have been using computers steadily ever since. There wasn't any point at which I thought to myself, "Now this is really going to change things."

Like the end of Windows, which will take place on June 30th -- no more new computers will be made with Windows. I have a Windows machine and a Vista machine. Yawn. So what?

What if it turns out that this matters a lot? Or if the revolutionary new server I wrote about matters a lot? It'll be like the internet -- we'll look back at it and say, "Wow! That really changed things." You don't see it coming.

Amazon swag arrived yesterday. One of the items was a magic sonic toothbrush, specifically the Phillips Sonic 732 Healthy White toothbrush. It cleans your teeth with sound waves, it seems. Also vibration. It goes automatically for two minutes, and you are to pay attention and make sure that you are in each quadrant of your mouth for 30 seconds. If you get the angle wrong, it changes pitch to alert you.

I first used it last night, and it seemed efficient enough. An observer might have noticed some sudden leaping about on my part while using it. This is because I incautiously allowed it to touch my skin. You totally do not want this thing vibrating away on your gums. I can't even describe the sensation; not painful, but very unpleasant. Just keep the thing on your teeth. My mouth felt clean when I had finished, and it was quite an interesting experience.

First thing in the morning was a different story.

I'm a morning person. I don't need a whole lot of time to wake up. But being pummeled with sound waves from the inside of your head when first arising is a bit much.

The instructions for this item, after they explain how to avoid electrocution and burns, tell what to do if you feel you need to take a break during the two minute toothbrushing experience. I think the people who write these warnings have lurid imaginations, so I didn't think much about why a person would want to take a break, but I could see it at 5:30 a.m. It was like a jackhammer.

I changed the setting to "sensitive."

There is also a whitening setting. I don't know what it does. I don't even know what the "sensitive" setting does, frankly. It my be that the effort of concentration required to change the settings woke me up enough to be able to handle the sonic goings-on better, or it may be that the sensitive setting  is actually less ferocious, but I survived the remaining seconds.

I needed a new toothbrush, but I am not sure that I needed quite such an exciting one. Perhaps I will get used to it.

The other item was the Microsoft Office accounting software.

Accounting is not one of my skills. Indeed, counting is not something I do frequently or well. Paperwork gives me the willies.

And yet I was able to set up the software and do some rudimentary stuff with it without difficulty. My recollections of That Man talking about applying payments to invoices came back to me when I needed them, and the drop-down menus did the rest.

I can imagine someone really enjoying filling out all the little boxes in this software, and getting a sense of satisfaction from the tidiness of the thing. Not someone like me, of course.

This is very bossy software. You have met bossy software before, I'm sure. It springs up with little pinging and beeping noises and yellow achtung! signs to warn you that you haven't been properly introduced to the website you're visiting or that you haven't added the person to the contact list or that a window is trying to close or something.

I get exasperated with bossy software, usually. So often it is merely that it doesn't fully understand about restrictive relative clauses or has the attention span of a gnat and can't recall that you have used Spyglass every work day for a month now for heaven's sake. I tend to wonder what kind of ninny that stuff is written for.

Ninnies like me, thank you.

Did you know that you are supposed to create the invoice before you put in the payment? And that "June" is not, from the point of view of proper accounting, a good thing to bill someone for?

This software, if it had thumbs, could do everything for you.

It sets up PayPal accounts and remembers to bill your clients and would directly deposit my employees' paychecks if I hadn't already admitted that I don't have any employees. If I ever wanted to sell anything on eBay, it would guide me through the process and keep track of it for me. In fact, it includes Point of Sale and Inventory Management elements, so if I wanted to sell things IRL, I could. Except for "June." It really doesn't want me to sell June.

It claims that it'll do my taxes for me. It may actually just be promising to gather up the data and send it to my accountant, or perhaps to some other member of the Microsoft Office family. The instructions that came with the software are big on integrating it with other Office products. I have quite a lot of other Office products, so I am letting it integrate all it likes, but I think there may be other things it is offering to me. Like it said it would make me a website, but so far I don't see it whipping out any code. The instructions may just be getting my hopes up, so that when I ask it about making that website or doing the taxes, it can say, "Oh, no, that's my big brother that does that. Available at Amazon.com!"

I haven't yet found where it will keep track of my billable hours, but I bet it will.

I also got my new assignment from Client #2. This is more difficult than previous projects, because I don't fully understand what the thing is that I'm writing about. It is a new and revolutionary type of managed hosting solution, for what that's worth.

It involved boxes on the marker board, but everything involves boxes on the marker board for Client #2. I kept asking whether we were talking about a physical object or just speaking metaphorically. When clouds were added to the marker board, he paused for a moment to explain that they were metaphorical clouds.

Once I fully understood the functioning of the thing, and had pressured him mercilessly to change the name of it, I came home and learned that the name is in fact the generic term for the thing. I no longer understand what is new and revolutionary about it. I have until tomorrow to figure that out and write a press release on the subject.

I also have my regular four or five hours for Client #6 and some reviews to write for Amazon, followed by dinner with the bells and then choir. At some point I will need to go acquire money for the bell dinner, and I think I will hit the gym at that time. Somewhere in there I have blog posts to write and must check on all the web sites in my purview.

#1 daughter is thinking of going up to visit #2 daughter tomorrow, and I am thinking of going with her. The thing that makes me hesitate is that I also have to go down and get #2 son a week from today, and then of course take him back after the weekend. I don't know about spending that much time in a car.

What a wimp I am! Unsettling toothbrushes, fear of accounting, hesitations about taking road trips when I am in a business that allows me to work anywhere at all as long as there is a computer there -- I sound downright neurotic this morning, don't I?

Clearly, I need another cup of tea.

I did some weights yesterday, after having been a weight-training slacker for a while, and I have the sore muscles today to remind me of it.

I'm heading out early to the farmers' market with Fine Soprano, and then I have a meeting with Client #2 before I settle down with Client #6's work.

I downloaded the pianist's choice of arrangements for Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday" for my solo this Sunday, and I have to get it over to her.  It is quite high, so I may have to throw in some actual practice time somewhere, too.

I also have some website fooling around to do.

As those who keep track of my ridiculous dithering will remember, I have yet to commit myself sufficiently to self-employment to order business cards. I can't call on potential clients without something to give them. I have to make a web site before I can make business cards, since us computer guys can't have cards without a web site. I can't even email potential clients and ask for a meeting without a web site. And I am reaching the point at which I will need more contract work or a salaried job, one or the other.

I still have some employment fantasies. One involves Client #6 keeping me on quarter time on a permanent basis. The weekly calls in which I must justify my existence have made this seem unlikely. Another employment fantasy involves Client #2 hiring me on a steady basis. Quarter time would do there, too. He can't afford this, though, so that also seems unlikely. I have turned down several management job offers by now, and I haven't actually received any teaching offers, so I  may be inching closer to actual self-employment.

I have reached the point at which my inner debates on the subject are boring for me, so I won't continue boring you with them here.

Maybe Fine Soprano will have some hints for me about high notes.

My summer Sunday School class actually met for the first time yesterday morning. We examined the question of whether science and religion were in conflict. One young man said "They cancel each other out," but I was not able to get a real handle on what he meant by that.

The consensus, to begin with, was that science and religion couldn't coexist. You had to pick one or the other.

I had a book to read to them from that took that position. It explained that there were two possible worldviews: Christian and atheistic. If you were a Christian, it said, then you believed that God had a special plan for you and that it mattered that you lived when and where you did. If you were atheistic, then you believed that everything was meaningless and you had no personal responsibility. This had to do with science because it included evolution and the idea that the world is very old in the atheistic worldview, and belief in the Bible as a reliable historical document in the Christian worldview.

The kids said the atheistic worldview was depressing. 

We considered whether science was completely at odds with religion. Gravity, for example. Could you believe in gravity and still believe in God?

The kids thought you could. In fact, they felt that gravity was noncontroversial. They were okay with chemistry, too. It was when you got to creation, evolution, and global warming that you had a problem. We read through the first few pages of the Bible to find the conflicts.

Here was the thing that was striking for me: these kids were bright kids in a good school system, from seventh to eleventh grades, and none of them had any clear idea what scientists would say about the beginnings of the world, let alone the universe. They had heard the term "The Big Bang." They had heard of evolution, though some of them found it an alarming thought. Several thought that evolution explained how the world began and was a competing creation story.

They were all pretty clear on photosynthesis.

I don't get why global warming -- or we should perhaps say climate change, since that is less confusing -- is a political and religious controversy. I may find out in the course of this Sunday School class.

The other thing I did yesterday morning, besides the usual singing in church bit, was to chat with one of the group that is Client #5 about their language choices. They have given me a statement for their website which appears to be written toward potential patients, since it talks about working with "you." However, it is written in such dense counselor-ese that it is hard to believe that any potential patient would even wade through it.

I would like to say to these folks, "The second you decided to use the word 'persons' in that paragraph, you excluded everyone who might actually need you." Instead I said things like, "It depends on your goal. If you want people to read this and come see you, it's not going to do that. If it's a statement of your position for other therapists, that's fine."

"Lots of websites are written that way," she told me.

"Lots of websites are very badly written from a marketing point of view," I agreed.

In Sunday School, we read how in the beginning everything was formless and void. We considered whether, if there had been a collection of elements prior to the Big Bang, it would make sense to say that it was formless and void. We considered whether describing whatever happened to trigger the beginning of life as "a Singularity" was more specific than saying that God said stuff and it took place.

For the project Chanthaboune and I are working on, we are going to do our audition on dynamics. I thought we should specify that we just meant ppp to fff, not sforzandos and things, and Chanthaboune informed me that those weren't dynamics, but just things that shaped the dynamics.

Which reminded me of how HTML is about the structure and CSS about the style, even though both can make your letters bigger.

And if you say things about how persons confronting life issues may experience an out of balance state, it doesn't make you sound as though you could help anyone.

This hyper awareness of vocabulary may be just the right state of mind for today's big assignment, which is to return to those high authority sites (us computer guys talk like that -- never mind what it means, because it isn't interesting anyway) which haven't yet linked to Client #6 and poke them a bit about giving us that link. Not easy to do, that. It's like following up on job applications, which I also have not done. You're saying, "You appear to have rejected me, but I'm not sure. Could you please reject me more firmly?" Or maybe, "I know you're part of a government which doesn't even respond to disasters in time to keep people from dying, but I want you to get that link up right now, since I asked you two weeks ago. Chop chop."

Some high level wordsmithing may be required there.

Then I have tutoring, and a workshop on preparing kids for kindergarten. I am not expecting anyone to come to that workshop, frankly, so I haven't prepared at all. It is a leftover from back when I did these things in order to promote the store. I couldn't quite bring myself to say, "I just pretended to do these things as a public service, you know, and now that no one is paying me for it, I'm canceling." But I also didn't do any publicity, because, you know, no one was paying me for it. So I guess I'll drop by the place after my tutoring gig and see whether there is anyone there, and at some point today I'll have to come up with something to say, just in case.

My day is cut out for me.

Here's Erin, with another high-contrast band as I finish up the back.

Yesterday, #1 daughter and I got haircuts and went to the farmer's market for blueberries and vegetables, and thence to the local French antique store.

I was charmed by the little plates with "Cadet Roussel" printed on them, and the bigger majolica plates with eery green asparagus, but #1 daughter felt that charging $100 for a plate was morally repugnant.

Most of what they had in there, she said, could be had at flea markets.

True, said I, but I know the owners, and they happen to go to flea markets in France. This is expensive for them, what with all the restaurants and wine and so forth, and people are paying them for making the arduous journey.

We ran into an old friend who had gone to the market in search of tomatoes. Not yet.

I have one tomato that is almost red by now.

The market is always fun. You see old friends, there are always lots of cute dogs, there's music, there are tables of people with petitions and pamphlets and things for an assortment of interesting causes.

Yesterday, we passed by the anti-evolution table, the Slow Food Movement table, the Peace table, the Humane Society, the table recruiting host families for foreign students, and several political candidates. The Legalize Marijuana guy was not there. He is an old man. I hope he hasn't fallen ill or gotten tired and given up.

Not that I favor legalizing marijuana. It is not good for you, especially if you smoke it. But he seems like a nice old guy, and this is his only topic. I've met him socially. It doesn't matter what you start talking about, it ends up with him talking about marijuana. So I figure that he wouldn't have given up unless he were ill or disheartened or something.

Here is a Montezuma rose peering out of the jungle. Usually by now Montezuma is covered with blossoms. I thought he wasn't going to bloom at all till I noticed this lone flower hiding in the undergrowth.

I really need to get out and weed that garden.

All the gardens.

But roses in particular aren't supposed to have undergrowth.

I didn't do any weeding at all yesterday.

After we got back with our shorter hair and our purchases (no $100 plates), I did the remaining grocery shopping, did a very little bit of housework, and worked on my CSS for a while.

You can see that the caterpillars made lacework of the outer leaves of this poor cabbage, but it is still heading up nicely, and I think they will leave some for us.

In the evening, we watched Rebecca, which has not grown any less creepy over the years, and I worked on Erin.

My knitting has suffered a lot from my being rather busy.

So I was working on that page design that suddenly swam into my ken on Friday or whenever it was. This involved looking at a lot of code from other pages.

Let me just say that I really like CSS.

The book makes quite a strong case for people (especially people like me who don't have lots of old pages of HTML they're responsible for) to go strict right now.

It's hard to get over the feeling that writing strict code, rather than the transitional that I do, is somehow a claim. Like saying that you do something well, rather than merely saying that you don't do those old-fashioned inelegant HTML style tags.

And -- here's the thing -- you are supposed to announce at the top of your pages whether you are strict or transitional.

It's as though, when you wrote your blog, you had to announce at the top whether you were going to write it in standard academic English or whether you planned to allow yourself a few errors. Except that the book claims it's more like announcing that your page is going to be in English, rather than in Chinese. Which of course you also do.

I don't know. It still feels like bragging.

There were exciting moments yesterday.

There weren't any exciting moments scheduled. I was supposed to do some routine maintenance for my smaller clients, drop off Client #3's key, spend another seven hours on Client #6's linking campaign,  and then have a relaxing evening with my family.

So I sent off the Google Analytics code to Client #4's webmaster, checked everybody's stats, did a few blog entries, and put my shoes on to run my errand before beginning that seven hours.

There was a phone call. #2 son, off at summer school, couldn't get his ATM card to work. I gathered up the papers to show the bank. I drove down to Client #3's place of business, went in and greeted her --and hadn't brought her key. I drove back for the key, came back, and she had made me a cup of coffee. I sat down and enjoyed the coffee with her, of course. We had a good chat about social media marketing, something which I don't do much but which I certainly encourage my clients to do.

An hour was gone.

I drove to the bank, thinking it would be simple to solve the little ATM card problem. The woman helping me was completely on top of things. Unfortunately, the person at the other end of the phone from her was not.

"Look in the right hand corner," my helper would say. "No? Okay, try pulling it up again -- What do you mean it doesn't pull up? You had it a minute ago, because you were checking activity. Oh. No. The number is ---. Look, where's Tamara?"

This went on for another hour.

I returned home with the problem solved, ready to jump into that seven hours. I found an email from Client #4's webmaster. She had told them that I would be designing the page for her, so they had no page to install the analytics code into. Did I want them to add a re-design to the schedule? No, no, I'd do it. I put it on my to-do list.

And I had an email from my computer guy asking for DNS codes for the domains I needed him to register. Naturally, I had to find out what DNS codes were, but fortunately it wasn't very hard. I looked them up -- and found that the construction company, which I had already moved twice, couldn't use their domain name at the place where I had them. So I had to move her again -- to a host who would let her register her name elsewhere, since I just know that she is not going to be happy with those ads for long and will want to move to professional hosting.

If I am going to continue to set people up at free hosts, I am going to have to begin charging them for the time involved in tracking down one that will do what they need, as well as the time involved in setting them up. Although it could be argued that I, if I am going to do something as crazy as setting people up at free hosts, should know all their characteristics, and I should count that as training.

I sent #1 daughter out to forage for lunch for the household and got to my seven hours of linkbuilding, followed by an hour of listening to the download the potential music book publishers sent me and a further hour of vetting web hosts and rebuilding a site, and thus it was that I was still at the computer when #2 daughter called.

She was in O'Hare airport, which is quite a big place, rather late in the evening, with no sight of the fellow who was supposed to pick her up and no way to reach him.

It wasn't that she thought I could come and pick her up or anything. It was that the fellow in question had dropped his cell phone into the river, and she wanted me to email him and remind him to pick her up.

I assured her that, though she could not call him, there were phones in the universe that he could use and he would be able to call her.

She reminded me that, since he did not have his cell phone, he would not have her phone number.

Further questioning elicited the fact that she didn't know the name or phone number of the person from whom he was subletting an apartment, nor an address so that she could take a taxi there, that they hadn't set up a meeting place but she was just supposed to look for him (that works where I live, by the way), and that there was no way to reach his employers or his mother or anybody who might be supposed to have any further information about him.

The moms out there know that at this point I was struggling not to say things like, "You flew to another state without any plans or any information? Are you out of your mind?" I don't think I said that.

She called back several times in increasing distress, and I tried to think of creative solutions, or at least to get her to calm down, but she did finally call me and say that the fellow in question had paged her and she had broken into tears at the baggage claim, but -- and here the fellow's voice took over -- everything was fine.

I took that as my cue to quit fooling with people's websites and go to bed.

#1 daughter and I are going to get haircuts today. I have a website to design, of course, and housework to do, but I also have some down time scheduled. A nap is quite likely.