Bill Bryson's Shakespeare is book one of the summer reading challenge.

I'm a fan of Bryson, and also of Shakespeare, so of course I am enjoying this book.

I hadn't realized how little actual data there was about Shakespeare. Bryson begins with a recap of that, and points out that all the things people say about him are based on his writings.

How much can you tell about people from what they write? Especially if it's plays? And/or if it's for money?

I mean, you can tell a lot about me, and maybe all the others xangans I read (except possibly Ronism; his xanga tells us essentially that he's a skilled writer with a bad case of pottymouth, and only those of us who know his former identity would know his personal info), from what I write here. But you can't tell any personal details from the things I write for pay.

So why do people attempt to divine from Shakespeare's plays what his love life was like or what he looked like? I guess just because we want to know.

That is all the time I have for idle thought.

I did take a little time yesterday for idle thought,and even for sleep, and then I got a plan for my website together , shot an email to the Computer Guy asking what format he wanted my stuff in, and went to bed around 11:00. This morning I found an email response, which means that he was working later than I, on a Sunday night.

I guess I'm in the right field.

This morning I have a client meeting, and tonight I have a further business meeting, and in between I have a new assignment, and must get the website stuff into the right form and sent off, and then there are all those other things -- hookworm, you know, and my other blogs, and music theory, and learning the new software. So I am off now.

I made this lavender and lemon cake yesterday, with whole wheat pastry flour and reduced amounts of butter and sugar.

If this doesn't sound appealing, then you might like the recipes Target included in their dorm life catalog.

One involves putting a bunch of candy bars and gum into a plastic bag and microwaving it. Roll it out flat and slice it up.

Then I suppose you are going to eat all that gum? Chew it till there is only gum left and spit it out? Not sure.

The other involves soaking Chex Mix (crackers and cereal and things), cheese, and beef jerky in diet soda, microwaving it, and serving it as a dip with crackers..

This is possibly the most disgusting thing I've ever heard.

#1 son thought it might be a joke.

I am supposed to be in church singing in half an hour, and I am neithr dressed nor fed. In fact, I feel hungover and miserable. Not from late-night carousing, either. Yesterday I worked on my web site and the book proposal, did some housework, lolled around knitting, and then rather late in the evening I had an inspiration about said website and went back to the computer for an hour or two before going to bed. So I am still sleep-deprived. Tonight there will be an early night.

The book audition is coming along well, it seems to me. We spent a couple of hours and got four pages onto the screen.We did this by emailing back and forth and talking on the phone simulatneously.

"See the icon on the left that looks like a finger clicking on something? Click that. Now you can select the object."
"No, I can't."
"Did you tell it that it was supposed to be a graphics box? It doesn't know if you don't tell it."
"Aaaargh! I hate Adobe!"

That's Chanthaboune, being dramatic.

"Okay. Now we need Sarcastic Girl. Hmm. I can't get her."
"I've got her."
"She claims to be unimportable."
"She's in that file you sent me."
"I know, but I can't Place her. She says she's unimportable. Never mind. I"ll just imagine her. I'm giving her a corner box."
"Click the black arrow."
"Hey! That's so much better than the Select!"

My husband wandered by and asked what we were talking about.

"Music," I said.

Okay. I have drunk my tea and now feel like a human being again.

A lightning shower, a slice of lavender and lemon cake, and I can stroll on over to church. Can I sing? Not yet sure, but it is possible.

The SEO blog published my post. I am once again childishly excited about this. It's about linguistics and SEO, and if such topics sound interesting to you (okay, I hear you snorting out there) you can click on that link and read it.

Formerprincess will recognize herself, with a bit of poetic license. I don't think the rest of the people I made stuff up about wrote about read this blog.

I got the hookworm assignment, too, I am thrilled to say.Now when people ask me what I've been writing about lately, I can say, SEO, linguistics, hookworm, music theory, conversion funnels, and dying at the feet of difficult customers out of spite.

I expect to be madly unpopular at cocktail parties.

 The past week has been fun and even exciting. I've had enjoyable meetings, which may seem like an oxymoron, but it wasn't. However, the meetings and deadlines and new assignments pushed my big client onto Friday, so that I had eight hours of link requests yesterday.

Four hours a day is about right. When I was an in-house SEO, I went up to the store on Tuesdays and did link requests there, where there were lots of interruptions. Now, I do four hours a day, and do other things for the rest of the work day. This is because it is hard on the body to spend eight solid hours at this task. You run applications and stare at forms bristling with data and sort and resort and click on things and quickly scan the sites to guage their usefulness and analyze their language and compose a letter from the one of your collection of email addresses that seems most likely to appeal, and fill out online forms, and type URLs over and over and over, and it gets wearing on the eyes, the wrists, and the hands.

So when I got to the end of my eight hours, I copied the cat.

I had a book, but that was roughly what I did and where I did it.

For the Summer Reading Challenge, we are supposed to read two books a week, blog about the books, and also show where we're reading. So that's where I was reading.

What I am reading: Brian Wiprud's hard-boiled yet humorous series about a taxidermist who gets into scrapes with the underworld. And not just gangsters, though that happens. He also gets involved with carnies, cults, and the paranormal.

Who would have thought that a taxidermist would have such an exciting life?

I think it's good to read these books all in a row. The first has an apologia for taxidermy, and by the time you're halfway through the second you're over your disgust. Booksfree has been kind enough to send them to me one after another so that I can do this.

In addition to lolling around (I didn't quite finish that last night, and must complete it today), I also have to do housework, minor furniture moving, and grocery shopping.

Chanthaboune and I are having a virtual meeting about our book audition, and I will have to capture some of the ideas we've had floating around and pin them to --- um, not paper, but the virtual page.

Also my website. I'm using a template that The Computer Guy already made, which will be a savings. I've got the HTML for the template, but the CSS is somewhere inaccessible to me, which means that I'm having to imagine that the text and images are in the places where they belong.

Speaking of which, thank you for the votes on yesterday's images. I particularly liked how evenly divided they were, though I have eliminated #1 from consideration.

How about these?

 I could just have one of them sitting in the logo spot on the template, with the words "fibermom, plyer of the dark art" neatly beside it.

More harmless-looking than the curly energy light one?

Though I do like that one a lot.

Alissa said it made her think of science. And that made me think of something a knitting designer wrote recently.

"Since my training is in the sciences," she said, "I tend to gravitate toward casual clothes." This was an explanation of why she had designed a gray hooded sweatshirt. If I were going to make a gray hooded thing, I'd make Rogue, rather than aiming for the look of a $12.95 gym clothes kind of garment, so I wasn't tempted by her design.

That's not fair, by the way. I didn't click on the thumbnail. It might be utterly gorgeous in a larger picture.

But I am wondering whether that can be my excuse for being ill-groomed and poorly dressed. Being a computer guy presupposes that I will be ill-dressed, ill-groomed, ill-fed, and ill-rested. I'm trying hard not to give in to that, with little success. But, since I don't look like a computer guy except in the sense of having worn the same pair of jeans all week and fished a wrinkled polo shirt out of the laundry basket (the clean laundry!), I might feel more justified if I claimed that is was my scientific training that caused me to look like a homeless person.

The exhaustion and pizza delivery boxes are strictly computer guy.

Today, however, though it certainly will involve a few hours at the computer working on the book audition and the website design, is not a day for giving int ot he computer guy ethos. It is a day for rising above that, for bringing civilization into the household in the form of groceries, cleanliness,coordinated throw pillows, and intentional food.

I may even finish that blue nightgown-like top.

Those of you who have been reading my tedious and repetitive ditherings about setting up a website will be glad to know that I met with a designer yesterday.

"Praise the Lord!" you'll be saying, or your local equivalent. "Now she'll stop talking about it!" And that is true, but today I am not only going to talk about it, but I am hoping for feedback.

It was not just any designer, but my Computer Guy, so I was able to lay my cards on the table.

"I don't have any clear goal for this website," I said. "As you know, my big contract will be ending, but I have too much other work to take a fulltime job, so I need to gather enough new clients to cover expenses -- or else drop my other clients and go back to the classroom."

"Your website can be like a salesperson for you," he said.

"Well, you know my clients won't find me through search," I pointed out. "They don't know the names of anything that I do for them. I just take care of them. But I can't walk into the local business with a website that needs me and hand them a business card with no website on it. Also, I can't tell people they need to get a professional site just because then they wouldn't drive me mad. As it is, they want to know about my website, and I have to admit that I just have a dozen free ones. So I guess the main thing is just for the website to exist."

"Those are the right reasons for you to have a web site," he said, "but the main thing is that you need to practice what you preach."

I wasn't able to pin him down about cost, but he did say that using a template he's already designed and doing all  the content myself would keep the cost down.

So I'm trying to think what would be the most useful effect for my website. I usually think in terms of search and traffic, but in this case it will probably be mainly direct traffic -- that is, people to whom I give my card. I am thinking that it might be best to have a non-techy look. The other local SEO folks look like Circuit City. I have no desire to compete with The Computer Guy, after all; I want him to be wildly successful so he can keep me fully  employed. I am specializing in those who would never go looking for an SEO firm because they don't know what that means.

Also, as he pointed out, I need to list the things I do so that people will stop asking me to do other things. I am in favor of variety, after all, but I would prefer to do the things I'm good at on a professional basis and let my hobbies be hobbies. Also, as we all know, I am not precise enough to want to spend most of my time writing code. "Your best bet," said the Computer Guy, "would be to partner with [his firm]."

Which is true. I'm setting up a site with him for one of my clients. I met with him and translated it all for her, and between his engineering and my words and Dark Art, she is one happy camper. And of course I do the content for him, and his clients are happy about that, too. As he put it, he does the invisible parts and I do the visible parts.

So I may want to emphasize the writing at my website for the benefit of any noncompeting SEO firms that happen by, as well as the taking-care-of part for the people I'll be marketing to.

There is one respectable local SEO writer, and she uses a pen and ink theme for her site, along with a portfolio. There are a few other, non-respectable writers for hire in the area, but they specialize in bad grammar and unwise links to their private blogs, so I am not using them as role models.

So I'm thinking about using images of the kind I have posted here -- abstract, not too techy-- and a list of the things I do. A list of clients. Maybe the option to download some examples of my writing.

Does it seem to you, dear readers, that this would say to a prospective client, "Don't be scared! This person will help you improve your web site and traffic without expecting you to know about alt tags"?

I have had so much stuff with other clients this week that I need to spend eight and half hours on my big client today, and he has already emailed to warn me let me know that he'll be calling me today. I need to have some numbers ready this time.

I had an email from someone yesterday asking if I'd be a researcher for hire for a book she's decided to write. As it happens, it is on a topic on which I am very well versed, so I said yes, but would she consider bringing me in as a coauthor? I also had, from the encyclopedia that I sometimes write for, a list of topics they need articles on. One is hookworm eradication, a topic on which you may be surprised to learn that I am quite knowledgeable, so I plan to put in a bid for that. And of course there is the book audition, which Chanthaboune and I must finish up now that she is safely returned to Hamburger-a-go-go-land. 

So all in all, it would be best if my big client would renew my contract, so that I can pursue all these interesting projects with confidence that I can pay my bills and feed my kids. I don't think I am on the kind of terms with him that would allow me to point that out during our conversation today. I better just get some excellent numbers together.

After breakfast.

I've had a request for pictures of the dogs. This is not a good picture, but they won't cooperate.

The boxes and furniture situation is getting better.

About an hour before my husband got home yesterday we all decided that we had better do something about the extra sofa before he got in.

As #1 daughter put it, "Daddy will freak."

So she and I and #1 son attempted to put it into his bedroom.

The key to envisioning this process is to remember that all three of us are auditory processors. You know those questions on IQ tests where you look at a shape and say which of the four other shapes is the back of it? Not our strong point. This means that there was a lot of talking.

"We should rotate it."
"What are you trying to do?"
"We should lay it down and try to put one end of it into the other bedroom and move it back and forth like tacking in a sailboat."

Then we would all grunt and lift and attempt to make the couch do things which would only have been possible if it had been flexible rather than a wood and metal sofa bed.

Then we would give up and discuss it some more.

Meanwhile, back at the computer, I was engaged in discussions about how many SKUs my client could have for her shopping cart, and at what price, and why I hadn't received payment, and whether or not another client could get her domain transferred.

I'd huff and puff and lift the sofa and move it around bootlessly for a while, and then Mick Jagger would say I'd got some letters and I'd sprint to the computer to continue whichever conversation it was in aid of, and then I'd go back and rejoin the sofa in the hallway.

My husband came home in the middle of this.

When he sees those shapes on IQ tests, he can readily tell which of the other shapes is the same. He can tell you exactly why each of the others is not the same.

He took the door off the bedroom and the feet off the sofa, had us get it into place, and rotated it right into the  room.

The hard part was when we couldn't see him, because he never discusses these things. To him, it is so obvious how shapes fit into other shapes that he figures everyone can see it.

So the rest of us were on one side of the upended sofa and couldn't even see him on the other side and he would say "Push!" and we would say, "Push what? Where? In what direction?" and there would be complete silence.

He wouldn't dignify such a silly question with an answer.

And we would look at one another helplessly and start pushing randomly till Daddy yelled at us.

But it was all done pretty quickly. Then he got inspired and moved more furniture around. He brought a file cabinet out next to the work computer, and stuck the hope chest behind the recliner so the the recliner is now sitting next to the love seat as though it were in a store rather than a living room. The truth is, my husband likes furniture to be lined up neatly around the perimeter of a room. Like a bus waiting room.

I like it to be at angles.

He must have felt that this was his chance.

There are some things going on at my house. For one thing, #1 daughter's furniture and boxes arrived yesterday. It is pretty much all still in the living room. You take your life in your hands when you walk through our living room now, not that anyone much is going to attempt that.

Also, #1 son continues not to look for work, or indeed to do anything much at all. He is behaving as though this were his summer vacation. When I speak to him about it, he becomes angry. Quite naturally. Nobody likes having someone speak to him about things like that. My husband isn't speaking to our son about it. He is speaking to me about it. He gives me daily lectures on the subject. I don't like it at all.

My husband keeps having aches and pains. He won't see a doctor, but insists on sighing deeply and announcing that he is going to die soon. I should mention that he has been claiming he was going to die soon for the past couple of decades, so I ignore that part, but I would like to smack him when it comes to the sighing.

So I am working in a room entirely filled with furniture and boxes, with one guy playing video games and snapping at me and the other sighing theatrically. This is not the ideal.

I remind myself that people who work in offices are surrounded by irritations and interruptions, and they just soldier on. For some reason, I seem to think that I should be working in a nicely-appointed beach house with no interruptions all day, but maybe some people coming by in the evenings bringing me food and drink.

When I needed to think, I would go walk on the beach and swim. Somebody else would do all the housework.

Actually, I walk in the gym, because it is in the 90s and sauna-like where I really live, not to mention the furniture and humans, which I believe I already have. Nobody else does housework.

In any case, I have settled into a nice working schedule. I get up at the same ungodly hour I have for years and make my husband's coffee. I do my personal computer stuff while I drink my tea. I have breakfast and then check my analytics, write my paid blogs, and do four hours for my big client.

Somewhere in there I usually have some extra work things come up. I negotiate with clients' webmasters, spruce up their websites with things they send me, arrange some links for them, juggle rush assignments, meet with my local people, poke my distant people about getting their content to me.

I have set my mail announcement to Mick Jagger saying "You got some letters." Nearly all of said letters are work-related nowadays, and they are often interesting problems to solve or fun new things to do, so that is a nice punctuation to the day.

I have become very good about stopping work in time to make dinner, and about getting to the gym or out for a walk on most days. Several evenings a week I have rehearsals or something, and I only occasionally go back to the computer in the evenings.

I'm not job hunting any more. I still read the job alerts, and I would go on an interview if someone happened to call me for one, but mostly I am just being happy about being self-employed. I am meeting with Client #2 tomorrow and will ask him to set me up a website. I have a list of local businesses to approach, and have my marketing plan developing in the back of my mind as I work on other things. I'm getting money in the bank so I don't have to worry if there are slower spells or if (did I say "if"? Man, is that ever the wrong word!) people are slow to pay.

If things aren't too exciting today, I'll be able to get to the book proposal I should have been working on. If they are exciting, that will be fine with me.

Maybe xanga isn't so hungry this morning...

Yesterday I had new stuff from both my big clients and a deadline approaching from my middle-sized client and some communications from my small clients, so I was working happily all day long.

This has for some years been the beginning of Back to School madness for me, and this year I merely wrote about it, and am not actually participating, so that's cool.

I also submitted a new post to the SEO blog. They posted my first one, so I sent this one in with only about half the trepidation involved in sending the first one. I'll let you know what happens.

I have meetings with a couple of clients this week, and am also preparing to send out lures to a couple of other local businesses who would, I think, benefit from my assistance. The idea here is that when my contract with my biggest client is over, I should have some small clients to move into his place.

When I was walking the dog last night after my lengthy work day, I was castigating myself for not having been very impressive in our phone meeting. I have a fantasy in which he extends my contract, you see, and what are the chances if I say things like, "Nothing very exciting is going on"? I should be saying things like, "I've had a thirty percent response rate, which is as you know better than the industry average, and that does include the most recent requests, which shouldn't be counted, so yes, I'm doing marvelous things for you here."

I had been busy writing about conversion funnels right up to his call, so my mind wasn't on Impressing the Client. I probably still have a couple more chances.

There were also a number of emails about the church music. I haven't actually had a chance to think about the church music for Sunday, but it reminded me of one of the things I had wanted to say yesterday. A clinician said once that church musicians don't pay attention in the service, because we are always thinking about what is coming up next, and there is certainly some truth to that. You can't get too caught up in the prayers if you're the ones singing the "amen."

But I do always listen to the sermon. The anthem is over by then anyway. And the pastor on Sunday was talking about the parable in which a whole bunch of men are hired, at different times of the day, and paid the same amount. The guys who started working at 6:00 a.m. are cheesed off that the guys who started working at 5:00 p.m. get the same amount that they do. They think they should have more, even though they didn't get less than they expected. They just resented the fellows who got more, and decided that it wasn't fair.

The pastor said this was about envy. It was, he said, a good recipe for a miserable life, comparing yourself with others.

I had just read How to Be a Complete and Utter Failure, in which the author writes about how failures think that success is like a cake: if other people get some, then there is less to go around. In order to avoid being a complete and utter failure, you have to give up that idea.

I don't think that I have that idea, actually. I really like to help people reach their goals, and am always happy to see other people succeed. But I do think that the store as an entity had that idea. And some of my clients currently have that idea. The Dominate the Competition idea. And that's in print. In the privacy of their minds and conversations it is more like Smash the Competition. With vorpal blades or something.

And of course I spend a large proportion of my time playing the computer game that is The Dark Art, exulting over my clients' clambering up the search engines.

Can there be happy, gamelike competition? Is it completely different from the resentful "You got my cake!" of the private competition so many of us have with others, in which their good fortune robs us of something?

In fact, I think a lot of the cake attitude is directed toward people who aren't in competition with us at all. The satisfaction many people felt when Martha Stewart went to jail, the schadenfreude you hear over Britney Spears's mental illness, the eye-rolling when someone else's kid gets yet another award or something -- these things don't affect us at all. But the responses to them are about "Rats! They got more of the cake, so there will be even less for me" or "Yay! They aren't getting any of the cake now, so there will be more for me!"

As I say, I am not in that cake competition. But I am not at all sure that there is a big gap between that and the business attitudes that make competitors into orcs to be vanquished.

Xanga has already eaten two posts this morning. I had things to say on taxidermy, cake, success, and why church musicians don't pay attention in the service.

There will be no effort expended this time, though, I can tell you that. I'll just show you my sewing.

As you can see, the top looks like a nightgown. I made the view that gathers onto the yoke, and I didn't gather it very successfully. I blame this on the fact that it is a knit fabric. Not that there's anything wrong with knit fabrics; I think they may just require skills I don't have.

The upside is that it also feels like a nightgown. I can wear it on those days when I feel like staying in my nightie.

Since it already looked like a nightgown, I attempted to hem one of the sleeves by machine, and I regret it. But can I justify going to all the trouble of using hem tape when it looks like a nightgown?

I know there are more skillful seamstresses out there, and I hope you'll have wise words for me.

Since I have my sewing machine out, though, I think I'll make another in a smaller size and see if that helps.

The books for this week's Summer Reading Challenge were Marne Davis Kellogg's Perfect, which was quite fun, and Steve McDermott's How to be a Complete and Utter Failure at Life, Work, and Everything. The second is a book for review from Amazon Vine. While it has a bunch of jokes about Yorkshiremen which were rather lost on me (maybe Pink Hebe can fill us in on the stereotype of Yorkshire on knowledge of which these jokes relied), there also were plenty of witty bits. It got slightly confusing, since it was written as "Don't develop any goals" and so on, but then had segments where McDermott dropped that affected gimmick and wrote sincerely. I didn't actually lose track, of course, but as a reviewer I noticed the requirement of mental shifting.

I read the funniest and most interesting bits of this book aloud in the car to my family until they forced me to stop.

It almost caused me to commit boldly to self-employment.