I didn't go to visit Suwanda, nor did I go to the tapas bar. I got a call from Client #6, two calls about new projects and/or assignments, and a positive response to my email about that music theory book. Chanthaboune and I haven't entered any writing contests together in a while, so I think this will be the equivalent. We have an audition to do.We need to write 10 pages on some thorny topic in music theory in the style of a Head First book.

I think we can do this. Actually, there are much harder variations on that theme. It could be in the style of Ernest Hemingway or something.

"There are time signatures. Some are common time signatures. Some are cut time signatures. Some use other numbers. Common time signatures are good. Common time signatures are good and strong and manly."

Nope. Couldn't do that very well.

We have a music blog we can post it on if we don't succeed with the audition, so it won't be a waste either way.

Actually, it wasn't my fault that I didn't make that visit. I couldn't get hold of The Link, though I called twice. It is true that I had lots of work to do, and it was in some ways a good thing that I didn't go, but it wasn't my fault.

So I was there to hover vulture-like over the Amazon Vine offerings. I went ahead (see yesterday's Make Hay While the Sun Shines argument) and scrolled quickly down to the bottom of the choices, where they keep the expensive items that get snapped up right away.

I had given that up. The past couple of months I didn't hover, and I quite enjoyed the Emerald Cocoa Roast Almonds they sent me, too. This month, though, I was there on time and snapped up Microsoft's new accounting software and a fancy sonic toothbrush.

Accounting software? Does this mean that I have mentally committed myself to self-employment and will quit hunting for or wistfully thinking about salaried jobs?

No. I did, however, get a rejection letter for one of the other jobs I applied for back when I was unemployed. They never called or interviewed me, but I was glad to have to the letter instead of just wondering.

And I did add a potential Client #8 to my list.

A local jeweler was having an open house, and Janalisa invited me and #1 daughter. We went, along with several others. The jewelry was very beautiful -- click on the link to her web site if you want to have a look.

Janalisa had mentioned that she had a new web site, so I went and checked it out. I was able -- when asked -- to make some suggestions for her, and she asked for my contact information.

Did I have business cards? Do I have a web site or a professional email address? You know I don't. I wrote my contact information on a bit of paper, using the email address Client #2  gave me, even though I'm afraid that sort of makes me look as though I'm a member of the firm. It was all I could think of on the spur of the moment. So what am I doing requesting accounting software?

At the least, I'll be able to review it from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about accounting. I can say how it works for people who are entirely helpless about their business finances.

Not entirely helpless, though, because Blessing emailed me and asked who needed to be invoiced. I, thinking "What? You're kidding. We just invoiced people!" would not have thought of it on my own. I bet the software doesn't do that for you.

The open house was fun. #1 daughter told stories from Cowboy Land, and we all played with the jewelry and invaded the jeweler's studio (an exciting place, I assure you). There was the moment when I mistook a toaster oven for a kiln, but I didn't break anything, and I was able to give her some tips about approaching retail establishments.

It is not impossible that I could do all my marketing in this way: checking out local people's websites and giving them some helpful advice. They will then say, as this woman did, "Can you just move in?"

I declined that invitation, but did assure her that I'd be happy to work with her on her marketing. At that point I should have whipped out a business card, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Having eight clients would make it impossible for me to keep them straight by numbers. I would have to quit talking about them.

I've been continuing to make jewelry in the small open spaces.

Spaces of time, that would be.

As you see, I went ahead and added more to the excessive bracelet, and I like it very much. Whimsical, maybe. It makes me feel summery when I wear it.

I will definitely wear it today, since I have some summery plans. Today I am visiting Suwanda with The Link, and I have been invited to a tapas bar in the late afternoon, if I can fit in enough work before then. Since I was looking after things for Client #3 for the past couple of days, I owe Client #6 another 15 hours for this week.  I don't see this as a problem, since I have two days and must simply manage to fit in a couple of normal work days around my frenetic social schedule I would like to join the crowd at the tapas bar, though. I am rarely invited to do things like that, for some reason, and it would be exotic fun for me.

It is also Amazon Vine day. People are being rotated out of the program, so I may not get to continue in it much longer. There is a lot of distress out there over this, since we weren't told it would be temporary, but I say it's a gift horse and we have no business looking it in the mouth. Still, the other old saying that comes to mind is "Make hay while the sun shines." I will therefore be hovering vulture-like this month.

Speaking of Amazon, I got this week's second Summer Challenge book from them, and I love it. I have been underwhelemed by the fiction I'm reading lately. No Nest for the Wicket is my first book for the week, and it is okay. I enjoy the series overall, and this book doesn't veer off from witty and slightly wacky to completely absurd the way some of the books in the series do.

But my second book, Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML, is fantastic. True, the title is a bit daunting. And these books are expensive; it took me a while to convince myself to spend the money on it even though it's tax-deductible. However, I would say without hesitation that you should get a book from this series if you need to learn any software at all. The book is designed to work well with the way humans actually learn things, and to make the subject entertaining.

I've been doing a bit of HTML here and there for a long time, and have a book on the subject, and have done some online tutuorials, but I think I can safely say that I did not fully understand it. You may have noticed that my approach to computer skills is on a "need to know" basis. When I need a new application, language, or software package for a job or a job interview, I jump right to it and get a quick idea of what I'm doing (especially if I have claimed to be able to use it already) and then I learn more about it as I go along.

Partly that's because of time constraints, but partly I admit it is because I don't care much. I use HTML when I need it to make the page do what I want. I find it useful to be able to read people's code and see what they're doing, or gauge the quality of their SEO. It's not like I find it fun. In fact, to borrow a phrase from Head First, "the thought of writing a lot of code makes [me] feel bored and twitchy." But I am truly enjoying this book, and finding all the stuff about why HTML works the way it does quite fascinating. They're treating it as a language, and the book has exercises like a good foreign language book, rather than just having blocks of code you type into the computer and watch doing their stuff. I have only read the first four chapters, but already I find that I don't have to use my cheat sheet as much, because it makes sense and is therefore more memorable.

The series has books on physics and statistics, too. They even have an audition process for those who want to write for the series. I am thinking that I may try to persuade Chanthaboune to audition with me to do one on music theory. I thought of English grammar, too.

I'll be doing their C# next. The books are discounted at Amazon, but the website has a buy 2 get one free offer, and I am thinking that, while they have no book for any other software I currently need to learn, I might still take them up on their offer -- physics for #2 son, who will be taking it next year, and statistics because...

Oh, I don't know. I guess because statistics is another of those things that I use without ever having fully understood it. Yesterday I had an email from Client #6 requesting a phone call, and had to turn him down because I was looking after Client #3.

May I just say that one of the things I love about working for Computer Guys is that they email and ask before  they call you on the phone?

Anyway, since we deferred the call to this morning, I took some time last night after choir practice to come up with creative ideas about how to determine whether or nor my work for him is useful. It involved statistical analysis of the data. I was looking at it as though I had my historian hat on and was tracking events, rather than having my ROI hat on. I emailed it off to him, and he responded with talk of algorithms.

That's how us Computer Guys roll.

Oh, I crack myself up sometimes. Back to work.

The interview was interesting.  I had done some research to find out what software they were likely to use for distance learning and run through the online tutorials for it, and had also gone to Amazon and checked out current textbooks for freshman comp.

I do not consider this dishonest. I think that having the skills to research stuff is just as useful for an English teacher as actually having chosen a textbook recently, and there is no text-based authoring tool that can scare me nowadays, so I don't see why I shouldn't get credit for it.

Then I went down and got the store set for opening before the interview.

There were half a dozen people at the other end of the phone. They had six preselected questions for me to answer in 20 minutes. I did it in 18 minutes, they told me. There was really no interaction, but they all seemed nice enough and I was able to answer all the questions reasonably well, it seems to me. It is hard to tell, since they just moved on to the next question, but there were some involuntary agreeing noises going on over there, and I was able to fit in most of the talking points I had already decided on.

I think it would not be bad, actually, if I ended up teaching there, apart from the commute. They are going to have to pay me an extra 10k to tempt me to do that commute. However, if my answer about distance learning was persuasive, they may just let me do that, and then I could telecommute at least part of the time, perhaps.

Of course, I don't know whether they plan to offer me the job at all, let alone what it pays. Client #6 didn't call and ask me to defend my existence (it's not Friday yet), Client #2 emailed about work for next week, and Client #7 had me stop in after closing the store and before rehearsal to fine-tune the site. Actually, I have to admit that I have, at this point, mixed up the numbers of some of the Clients. I think I have confused #s 5 and 7, since #5 hired me early on but was the last one to get set up. So it was #5 who called me, but I've been calling them #7. It doesn't matter, right?

When I dashed home between the store and the meeting, #1 daughter was here, with her dog.

Following the meeting, I went to the rehearsal of the choirlet. We worked on a bunch of old songs by people like Chas Gabriel and A. Brumley for the upcoming ice cream social. The hostess served us this remarkable dessert. You lay ice cream sandwiches in the bottom of a big baking dish, poke holes in them and pour fudge sauce over them. Spread Cool Whip over the top, pour caramel and fudge sauce over that, and sprinkle it with bits of toffee, which I understand you can buy in bags like chocolate chips. You put the whole thing in the freezer, not thinking much about what you are doing, and when you take it out later, you have a lavish dessert. If you don't tell people how you did it, they will never guess.

One of the other ladies said, "And you know, it really isn't fattening." Where she got this idea, I can't imagine. However, it was very festive, and I will probably make it sometime.

So after we finished singing, we sat around eating this stuff and I told them about when I first came here and had trouble sometimes understanding people. We went to a little country church where they had a boys' club that was, it seemed to me, called "Rolling Bastards."

There just wasn't any way for me to ask them why their boys' group was called the Rolling Bastards.

Later, when I became accustomed to the local accent, I realized that they were Royal Ambassadors.

So I am heading back to the store today. It's hard to fit the kind of employment where you have to go to a physical location into my current schedule, but I can do a little work there between customers. I am not thinking about the teaching job, which would be very hard to fit into my schedule, because I figure there will be further interviews and stuff, and no chance at all of a call today offering me the position. I can think about it when I have more time.

So what are your views on googling people? (Knitsteel is opposed to the use of "google" as a verb, and I think of her every time I do it.) It seems to me that all tech-savvy people should assume that everyone has access to everything about them on the internet, so no one should object to being googled.

That is, if you have a blog, you should assume unless it is proven otherwise that everyone you know can and may read it. If there are pictures of your drunken revels on Facebook, you should figure that everyone can see them.

People who are not tech-savvy imagine that there is such a thing as privacy on the internet. Yeah. And your neighbors, your coworkers, and the people at church have no idea what you do with your free time. There is no more privacy on the internet than IRL.

I don't believe in gossip, but I do believe in research. Chances are, if you have a blog, I read it. I probably don't go look at your pictures on Facebook, but someone else might have shown them to me and/or described them to me. And certainly, just as we used to tell students to hang out near the elevators when they were applying for jobs in order to see what the company's dress code was, you ought to google anyone you plan to work for. It is courteous to go to the trouble to find out about them.

The real question is this: is it courteous, if you know lots of extra stuff about people, to bring it up when you talk with them, or not?

I'm not sure about this. I think that I should not, when I talk with an acquaintance, make any reference to things I happen to know about that person because we live in a small town. If I happen to know about her son's arrest record and she knows funny stories about my husband, we can both serenely pretend not to know those things, because we haven't told them to each other.

However, when a fellow bookseller called me yesterday morning and mentioned in passing his experiences with discounting, I thought it completely proper to tell him that I had heard about that at the time. Being up to date on people's professional lives just shows that you're knowledgeable.

What about when the lines get blurred? Certainly, I know about my clients' awards and portfolios. However, do I officially know about their families or where they live? Does it make a difference whether they are male or female? Does it make a difference how adept they are with computers? If they will think I don't know whether they have kids merely because I was too lame to look it up, are the rules different for them than for someone who thinks her home page can only be seen by people with passwords?

I'm minding a bookstore today. I've also been asked about working a couple of days at a sale at another bookstore.  Maybe I can be a bookstore sitter. Actually, I had a call asking whether I would consider managing a store yesterday. It is too bad a commute for the going rate of pay, so I said no. #2 daughter couldn't believe that I had turned down a job. I have a phone interview this morning for a job with an even worse commute, but chances are it pays better. Janalisa said last night that I should make a sincere effort to add some more clients, whether I have time for them or not, just to see whether I am as dependent on my two big clients as I think I am. If I do that while under contract, then I will have sufficient income when the contract ends -- or else know that I should still be jobhunting. Or not turning down retail management positions.

In other news, #1 daughter called yesterday to ask whether she could move back in with us. After working through her budget, she has decided that she can't afford to go to school in Cowboy Land without working full time, and she is afraid that she won't be able to handle working full time and school at the same time. Her boss down there is going to try to help her find something part time while she's here, and she'll go back to school full time. They said they'll have a job for her when she finishes, if she wants to go be a cowgirl. She might miss it. We might be too sedate for her now that she's been in Cowboy Land for a while.

My two completed books for last week's Summer Reading Challenge were Mary Kruger's Knit Fast, Die Young and Dial M for Mischief by Kasey Michaels.

Michaels is always fun, though I sometimes find her inaccuracies jarring. This is probably pedantic of me, but I'll be reading along enjoying a story and then something off comes up and it distracts me. In this case, it was a line about the aristocratic hero of the story being able to trace his ancestry all the way back to the ancestor who got off the boat at Ellis Island. Later, we are treated to genealogical documents for this same gentleman which have lots of adopted folks on a standard family tree. It's not important the to the story, but it brings me up short when reading. I avoid her historical novels because they are stuffed with little anachronisms. It spoils the flow of the story for me.

Knit Fast, Die Young was not a memorable book for me. I didn't care enough about the characters, the plot was not clever enough, the writing was not wonderful.

I read a lot in the car yesterday, since my husband did all the driving. I'm not going to say that this made the trip enjoyable, but we do have some gorgeous scenery around here, and I was able to enjoy quite a bit of it. There were some exciting moments on the scenic route we took on the way down, because the road had washed away. This is is a paved road, but it is sort of cut into the hillside, and I guess the land under it had collapsed during the recent storms. We came back by another route.

#2 son is safely ensconced in his dorm, on a red brick and azalea campus with lots of very perky counselors. We've done the whole check in and orientation process so many times that we were pretty calm about it. There were a lot of us coming down from our town, and we ran into one another all over the campus. We clearly should have carpooled. However, we fed the boy and then believed his assurances that he didn't want us to stay for the evening events and left him there.

His roommate is from the state's biggest city, which isn't saying much, and they are doing the same program, so I hope they will get along well.

#1 son has not yet returned from his rock concert and isn't answering his phone, either. However, I think he was carryng ID, and there haven't been any calls from the police, so I am not worrying about him.

I'm minding the shop for a client for a couple of days this week, so I must get lots of billable hours in today. The absence of boys should help with that.

I ran into my former supervisor from the university at the farmers' market yesterday. Returning to her sweatshop department is not at the top of my list of preferred work options. However, it is many years since I worked there, and things might have improved, for all I know. We had one of those conversations where you say where everyone you know is now. This is usual for musicians and itinerant college teachers. I don't know whether insurance agents and nurses have this kind of conversation: "Oh, yeah, Kelly's over at Central now. Beau's at St. Mark's. He took Marsha's spot when she went to hospice. I think Tom went to Nashville, but his wife is at Memorial. Yeah, it's rough, but that's how it is in this business."

She asked me whether I was interested in part-time work. I was noncommittal.  The thing is, I make two to four times as much plying The Dark Art as I do teaching. This means that I could spend half my time searching for clients and half on billable work, and still be ahead, compared with teaching. It's also very hard to limit part-time teaching to the hours for which you're actually paid. You may have ten hours in the classroom and really work thirty. And you have no security -- you have to be rehired every term, and even then, your class may not make and you'll be out of work again. This makes it hard to see part-time teaching as desirable, though fulltime teaching may still be a good choice for me.

It was good to see her. I like her, even if I didn't necessarily like working for her. I told her that I didn't know if contract work was the best choice for me, and she said she knew what I meant; she is always hunting the next grant. We stood in silent contemplation for a few minutes, looking solemnly over the bok choy and radishes as we thought about the essential uncertainty of our positions.

Life is essentially uncertain, though. You never know what may happen. The key is to see this as an adventure.

I closed the kitchen show at last, filled my kitchen with fine fruits and vegetables and whole grains, made chicken soup, put sliced banana bread (low fat, low sugar, high fiber) in the freezer for future breakfasts, cleaned house enough to make it tolerable, did a little work in the garden, made a bit more jewelry, knitted, and read.

It was a pleasant day.

It was not a relaxed day, I have to admit. I don't feel unemployed, but I also don't feel all that employed. A really relaxing day off is hard to accomplish if you still sort of feel like a jobhunter. That Man sent me an email not long ago saying that a small business person has to be prepared to work 24/7. I always tried to get him to take time off, actually, back when he was a small business person. I think people are more productive if they take time off. But not, I suppose, if you spend that time fretting over work.

And today is the day to take #2 son to Governor's School. This is a program for rising high school seniors. They get to spend six weeks on a college campus, doing college-level work. #2 daughter did this, and it was a wonderful experience for her. You do miss your kid, though. It will probably be easier, since we are by now old hands at sending our kids off.

It involves a day full of driving, and there are very scary roads between here and there, as I recall. I think I have been successful in persuading my husband to do all the driving. Really, it's a kindness. He's a terrible passenger. Fidgety, you know, and always wanting to tell the driver what to do. I intend to take my book and my knitting and ignore the scary roads as much as possible.

I don't think I've been too bad with the anticipatory anxiety this time, actually (I got that phrase from my Overcoming Agoraphobia book). Unless I've just been masking it by worrying about work instead.

I'd better rouse the other participants in today's undertaking.

"Geek," according to the 2007 Dictionary of American Slang, means "1. a sideshow freak, especially one who does revolting things...2. a snake charnmer, 3. a pervert or degenerate, especially one who will do disgusting things to slake deviant appetities, 4. a devotee, fan, freak, nerd." I knew there was a reason I didn't use that word. More variations on the term include words meaning "socially inept," "eccentric and repulsive," "weird, creepy." Wikipedia says "there is no longer a definitive meaning" and lists an assortment of meanings, ranging from "peculiar" to "adept with computers." They make no mention of slaking deviant appetites, at least.

For the record, the only definitions I could relate to were "adept with computers" and "relates academic subjects to the real world." My reaction to that -- namely, consternation at the idea that there were people who didn't do that -- does suggest a certain geekiness, I admit.

That's an update from yesterday.

Yesterday didn't turn out as I had planned. First, Janalisa came and swept me off to yard sales. This was good because I was dithering again, and also seriously needed a lamp and cloth napkins. I found both at tiny prices, and also bought a few books, because there were books being sold two for a quarter.

I also spent 50 cents on a T-shirt for my boys to fight over. It said "ICONOCLAST: picking on society." #2 son looked at it and said, "I'm not an iconoclast," but I think his brother might like it.

Janalisa also spoke to me bracingly. Her topics included not being such a wimp about the few measly business skills I need to master, committing to my plan and outlining the steps needed for success, and probably also quitting whining so much in my blog.

I did whine further, however, since I had her trapped in a moving vehicle. I suggested that I could perhaps go to Client #2 and offer to share all my other clients in return for not having to do any business things, as opposed to work things.

"Oh, why don't you come and work for me?" said Janalisa. "You can clean my house, and I'll pay you what and when I feel like paying you."

She had, at that point, descended to sarcasm. She is successfully self-employed, a fact which gives her a differerent perspective on my persistent whining about wanting a salary.

Actually, she was nice and encouraging, and also right. Going to yard sales was also fun. We saw pachinko games and elegant little dessert dishes and also met up with lots of people we knew as we randomly wheeled around the town visiting yard sales. It's a small town.

Next I had a call from Client #6, discussing how we could prove to the board that I wasn't a waste of money. I offered increased rank for likely search terms. This was not impressive to him. He brought up some ranking tool on his computer as we spoke, and read off to me how the site had gone up and down between February and April for particular search terms.

Okay, well how about the number of links requested? "That's just activity," he pointed out, "not results."

I tried to express the possibility that masters of Halloween websites (it's a long story) might not be dashing off in droves to update their links within a few days of my requests, even if my requests were really good. It is challenging not to make that sound like an excuse. But it is my experience that it takes a couple of weeks to see responses.

I am not usually up against a board that meets for the express purpose of contemplating whether I am a waste of money.

However, he finished up the call by conceding that he thought we would be okay for the next week. May I just say that salaried jobs do not include weekly decisions on whether or not to keep you on? Some salaried jobs give you a couple of weeks just to figure out where everything is.

I went to lunch with Blessing next, and she spoke to me bracingly about tax deductions. I told her that Client #2 had said "I need to get you squared away," and she assured me that this was a term for paying people among those in the know, not a threat to take out a hit on me.

Then I visited Client #3, who wrote me a check. We did a bit of business, and I got back to my computer and started coming up with a report for Client #6 and his board, whereupon one of his minions sent me an email asking me to sign and fax something to her straightaway so she could pay me. I printed it out, signed it, ran back to Client#3's place of business and begged the use of her fax machine, and then got back to the report.

It was rather late when I finished it, but thanks to a favorable time difference, it was not actually late reaching the client, so I am good.

You may have noticed -- I certainly did -- that quite a few of my interactions yesterday involved the prospect of being paid. I'm having a good time with the work, and haven't even begun yet to do any marketing, so if I can actually get the hang of arranging to get paid, I will feel pretty confident. This is cheering.

I have a domestic day planned. I intend to try really hard not to think about Hallowe'en, or therapy, or sustainability, or bookstores, or construction, or The Dark Art at all. Not about driving, either. House and garden, that's the order of the day.

I also need to read more, because I am having trouble keeping up with the Summer Reading Challenge, even though it is only two books a week. I'm currently reading Knit Fast, Die Young, an extremely lightweight mystery about which I really have nothing to say, and The Case for Faith, which is sort of the opposite of irreligion. I never actually finished discussing the arguments for God, though I was asked to do so. I may get around to it yet.

The lettuce is bolting. I chipped a tooth, and the dentist has a space for me in July. #2 son didn't pass his driving test, though we spent three hours in the attempt. #1 son has been fired by the sandwich shop. I've had some link rejections. My website set-ups are all waiting for their people to get back to me.

Client #2 has mentioned this before. He calls it "waiting for content." Sometimes, he says, you have to go wrestle it out of them. When he made these complaints, I used to think -- basing it on my own experience -- that he should just make stuff up and send an invoice. People, I figured, would leap to correct anything that wasn't okay. However, I find that I don't know enough about construction or about rehabilitative therapy to make up stuff on the subject in anything like a reasonable amount of time. And you really don't want to make up domain names, or Photoshop fake pictures of the business. (Actually, Chanthaboune's snazzy website has some made-up stuff on it, since she didn't provide any products for the catalog pages, and it's pretty funny). So I won't think that any more.

Then there is the driving this weekend.

Oh, yes, I was going to quit whining, wasn't I?

Today I have five hours of link-building, and then I am meeting my accountant for lunch. She has been sending me suggestions about the things I should keep track of for my taxes, and she has done invoices for me. People haven't paid the invoices I sent out at the first of the month, and Client #6 pays on the 16th, so I probably will have to email or fax his or he won't pay me either. I also need to collect for and turn in my latest cooking show. Oh, and get a work agreement to Client #7, so I can invoice them.

I think that will be the work day for today.

I have about thirty hours of work a week, so if I intend to work fulltime, that leaves me ten hours in which to improve my web design knowledge, learn about the aspects of business which I have always left to the people in the back room (that's my problem! I don't have any people in the back room!), and run the business. It sounds possible.

Tomorrow I am going to have to clean my house. The number of people who have been coming here is startling. There were Navy recruiters here the other day. I've had clients in looking at their websites, and doubtless biting their tongues not to say, "Gee, you Computer Guys like to live in squalor, don't you?"

Actually, and this is going to be the end of these random spikes of thought, one of the group that is Client #7 said to me the other day, "I think I'm getting kind of a geekiness vibe," and went on to guess that in college I had always had my nose in my projects and not really participated in the social life. She is a therapist, and I guess it is just natural if you are a therapist to want to come up with insights into the lives of the people you meet.  Since I spent my college years dating the entire Anthropology and Philosophy departments and dancing, I couldn't really agree with her completely. I tried a noncommittal air. But it is good that I managed to make at least one person imagine a geekiness vibe, isn't it? I had better find out just what "geekiness" means, maybe. Apart from biting heads off of live chickens in carnivals, an archaic usage.

The end.

I got way too much sympathy yesterday. Not that I don't like sympathy, but it seems to me that I must have misrepresented the situation. Shorn of all the dithering, what happened was this:

• I was called to interview for a fulltime teaching job.
• Three people chose me to design their websites, rather than someone I know to be more qualified.

I don't deserve much sympathy for that.

#1 son is off to Tennessee for a rock concert. In fact, he ought to be there by now. This is an annual roadtrip. #2 son is planning to take his driving test today. That means I have to drive him to the testing place. Then on Sunday we have to drive him to Governor's School, and there are Scary Roads involved. I will accept sympathy for this, even though I probably don't deserve any.

#1 daughter, who has some design skills, has offered to help me out with my web design issues. I sent her some software to learn. She needs a hobby, living in Cowboy Land as she does.

I got a little cross in choir practice last night. This is not good. I was having trouble with the rhythm of a particular line.

Our choir director, Bigsax, likes to practice music by beginning at the beginning and barreling straight through, allowing people to fall by the wayside if they must. If people have trouble, he starts over and does it again. He will entertain questions, though he often responds with things like, "Just sing what's written on the page."

Last night, I was singing the line wrong. I was not the only one singing the line wrong, so I couldn't just stay quiet during one of the repetitions and listen to it being sung correctly. In fact, there were only two altos present and neither of us was singing the line correctly.

"It's different from the first time," Bigsax informed me. "See? 'Samaria' is shorter. That's why you're getting off."

I hate when people tell me "see." I am the one who can't recognize her own car in the parking lot. If I could look at the line and sing it right, I'd have done that.

"Yes," I agreed. "I have grasped that I'm doing it wrong. I just need some clues about how to do it right. Could I hear it, maybe? Just the alto line?"

Now, there are choirs in which it is bad form to ask for a note, let alone a whole line. You are supposed to learn your music first in those choirs, and come in to work on it for things like expression and stuff. You know, music. Ours is not one of those choirs. I don't know why Bigsax has such a rooted objection to running through a single line. He will argue about having to do so for far longer than it would take just to do it.

So he finally gave in and allowed the piano player to play the one phrase, and even allowed us altos to sing through it with the piano.

I wasn't cross yet.

Here's what made me cross: the back row talked loudly and incessantly through the whole process. It is hard to hear the exact rhythm of "Samaria" when someone is jabbering away in your ear. The back row never shuts up.

In this case, I actually shushed them. Suwanda asked them to keep it down so we could hear the line. It's hard to get the line played in the first place; you can't get it played again.

"What are we supposed to do back here?" growled a belligerent bass. "Suck our thumbs till you're finished?"

"Yes," I answered.

They did not stop carrying on.

I've got the line now. It just didn't seem as though I should have had to work that hard for it.

However, it also seems as though I was unnecessarily cross about it. And unnecessarily whiny about my work situation, which is an adventure if looked at properly.

I think I had better snap out of it.

There was a point yesterday when I needed a brief distraction from my intensive directory submitting, so I went and took the 1930s wife test, and came out pretty well. I did lose some points for wearing pajamas, but at least I don't have frequent crooked stocking seams. There is one for husbands, too. Probably for maximum accuracy, I should have had my husband answer the questions about me and I should have answered the questions about him. I provide the link in case you need to waste some time today yourself.

90 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Superior Take the test!

I had a call from one of the local colleges. Not the one that is in my town; the one in the next county. They have a corporate learning center and a regional technology center in my town, and they do distance learning, but their main campus is thirty miles from me. I applied for the job -- teaching English, and they specify that their staff must spend 40 hours a week on campus -- shortly after becoming unemployed. I have passed through the initial screening. They want to interview me by phone.

I am not articulate over the phone.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily want the job, either. Time enough to think about that if and when they offer it to me, of course. If I work 40 hours on campus and have over an hour of commuting each day -- in fact, given how I feel about freeways, I'd probably have to take the back roads and have a couple of hours of commuting -- they might have to offer me a lot of money for the job to be worth it.

On the other hand, they might let me teach business English at their corporate learning center. I could let them all in on the secrets of The Dark Art.

It just adds a little layer of stress. Also adding a slight layer of stress is the fact that my clients who are needing new web sites want me to make them. I show them the sites done by Client #2, clearly superior to mine, and they say that's okay, they want one of mine. On a free web host.

Here's the thing: my web sites are done with things I know how to do. I just pick from the range of things I know. I don't start from what's needed and then do those things. The sites look good, it's true, but I am kind of like the girl who learns to cook a couple of awesome dinners. You may have her lasagna and her Steak Bearnaise and conclude from those meals that she can cook, but that doesn't mean she can stir-fry.

I must spend more time with my recipe book.

Now, this is okay from the point of view of providing the service. I'm a content provider and SEO, not a web designer. I have offered these people a referral to a really good web designer and they don't want him, so it is not my fault if they end up with a site that is not the best they could possibly have.

But it's a bit of a quandary when I think about what to charge them. If I have to look things up in my cookbook, so to speak, and learn how to make cascading style sheets instead of just recognizing them, do I charge them for that learning time, or just feel happy that they've provided me with a good project for my study? Do I stop the clock while I look things up, or just go ahead and make them Steak Bearnaise even if that isn't exactly what they wanted?

If I got to pick my future employment, I would cast my lot in with Client #2, so that all our combined clients would get my content and his design. I'd say, "Can you do me a stylesheet with graduated shades of sage green and the breadcrumbs on the side, please?" and he'd say, "Can you make this pharmaceutical page sound exciting?" and we'd be irresistible.

That's one of the possible branches on my probability tree. Another is that Client #6, who is supporting the family at the moment, will not keep me on past the initial contract, Client #2 won't include me in his future business plans, and I will commute to the next county to teach Freshman Comp all day and then come home and see to Clients #s 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 in the evenings.

I'm glad to have that as a possibility, of course, because there is also the branch that ends with me not having even enough freelance work to eke out a meager living and no real job at all, and having to become a waitress.