We enjoyed yesterday's movie.

When I was young, we used to go to the movies because there was air conditioning there.

I mentioned this to my kids as we were leaving the cool theater for the sweltering outdoors, and they laughed at me. Apparently, any story beginning with, "When I was a child..." is automatically very funny.

#1 son began saying, "When I was your age..." in a high quavery voice.

Today someone will be taking #2 son back to Governor's School (which you can see in the picture), but I hope I won't be involved in it at all. I have two church services, and in one I have to play the dreaded handbells. I have that top cut out (from royal blue cotton interlock) and I want to sew it together. And I also have to clean up from the long weekend.

These pictures are of the college where Governor's School takes place. It is quite a nice college. It began as a boys' school in 1825 or so (I'd have to look it up to be accuate, and I'm too lazy to do that right now) and has grown into one of those little private liberal arts colleges that wins awards. I'd like to see #2 go there, or to the similar school that #2 daugher went to.

#1 daughter starts next month at the local university, where both she and #1 son wasted some time attempting to be students. She is more prepared this time, and I am sure she will do fine. And of course it wasn't the school's fault that they didn't do well to begin with. But it does seem to me that both of them would have had a better chance at success if they had been at a smaller school where someone was paying some attention.

Both #2 son and #2 daughter went to Governor's School and similar programs. It seems to me that #2 daughter felt more at ease at college, and less ready to give up when she got homesick, perhaps because she had already had the experience of living in the dorms and going to class, in a setting with lots of extra support.

I heard from #2 daughter, by the way. She emailed saying "We reached Italy. Having a wonderful time!" I envision a situation in which all the singers were lined up waiting their turns at the computer.

We had very Fourth of July fare yesterday. The weather cooperated enough for us  to grill things (my husband) and to have a walk in the park (me) and #1 son even went out with friends to the swimming hole.

The rest of us were total slackers, reading and watching movies and playing video games, as our assorted preferences took us.

I went and bought a couple of sewing patterns. Hancock Fabrics has been having patterns at 99 cents, rotating the brands, for a month, and I haven't gone and bought any because a) I have plenty of patterns and b) I haven't sewn a thing in months.

I am thinking, however, that I might make this top today, if I find that I have done enough lolling around.

I'd been working on my dressmaking skills for a couple of years, and had really gotten to the point where I could do quite a lot of things successfully. Then my life got complicated, insanely busy, and uncertain, in that order, and I gained 10 pounds. Somehow, it began to seem that actually taking the sewing machine out and setting it up was too much of a commitment.

I'm inclined to dither when I sew, anyway.

I said something about dithering at a party recently and an acquaintance looked at me oddly and said "Are you a ditherer?" with patent disbelief. It is true that all my dithering is internal, so that only the readers of my blog and my closest friends and family know about it, but I think I am a bit dithery about sewing. Should I attempt this pattern, and if so, should I chance it with that lovely fabric? That kind of thing.

I'm still a bit sad about that unsuccessful skirt I made last year out of a gorgeous rayon which is no longer available. Sigh.

So my recent dithering about sewing has been about whether I should go ahead and make clothes when I don't actually know what kind of work I'll be doing or what size I'll be when I get around to it.

I even went, with #2 daughter's help, and bought a job interview suit, since I was dithering about the possibility of being called for an interview and having only home-made jackets to wear, and were they really nicely made or was I deceiving myself? Not to mention the fear of being at client meetings in gear that was too tight.

With one thing and another, then, I've only sewn a couple of things in the past year, and nothing at all in 2008. But I am still on the mailing lists, which is how I was tempted by that tunic pattern.

And even though I am not fashionable, I do like to see what the fashion trends are for the coming season. So I was interested to see that the fashion people are once again offering jumpers, wide-legged pants, dressy shorts and culottes, tunics, and swingy jackets for fall.

Didn't they suggest those things last year, and weren't they mostly ignored?

It seems to me that the pattern above includes a jumper which could only be worn by young women, and a jacket and vest which would only be worn by elderly women, so I don't know who they're pitching it to. I didn't buy it.

Isn't the basic rule that you shouldn't wear any style, if you wore it the last time it was in style?

However, I did buy the pattern on the right, though I am too old for the jumper and too easily amused for the bolero and gaucho look, because I really like the jacket.

I am amassing a nice collection of jacket patterns, I am sorry to say. I also have a nice collection of jacket fabrics. Whether I will get the two collections together at some point and make the jackets I don't yet know.

But it is possible that I will make that top today. It seems like the sort of thing that I could wear with jeans at the computer all day, and still be able to answer the door to a client and rush out to a meeting with one, both of which happen sometimes.

I have been knitting.

The insanely pink prayer shawl has grown some inches, but it doesn't look different enough to warrant a photo.

Erin is coming along nicely, though. The latest band of knotwork seems to me to have a nicely knot-like appearance, and I now have just a few more bands to do on the back before I can sew the whole thing together and begin the button and neck bands. Or, considering how hot it would be to work on a great wooly object like this in July, to set it aside again for cooler weather.

In any case, today we are planning to go to the movies, all the kids and I. My husband has already informed us that he doesn't like to go to the movies, and doesn't intend to come along just in order to make a family outing of it, either. I go to the movies so rarely (possibly because my husband doesn't like it) that it is a special treat for me, and I am looking forward to it. I may take along the prayer shawl.

I like Uncle Sam dancing around amid the fireworks in this picture.

I got all my hours in for the week for my hourly people, and got InDesign happily set up, and so I can take the long weekend with a clear conscience.

We have a big bag of charcoal and an assortment of things to grill, but it is raining steadily. Fiona, our scaredy-cat dog, is distressed by the thunder, but I like it and the garden likes it.

When we went to Parents' Day at Governor's School, we had the chance to hear some presentations from the teachers. I was impessed by most of them. They come from all over the state to teach at the summer program, and give up six weeks of their lives to do it, so it makes sense that they would be dedicated and good at what they do. We heard the teachers for sociology, political science, economics, and psychology.

One of the things they were talking about was the Myers-Briggs inventory. This is a system, based on the personality theories of Carl Jung, which divides people into types according to whether they are more extravert or introvert, sensing or intuiting, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. For each of those pairs, you get a letter, so that you can end up being an ENTJ like me, or an ISFP, or any other of the sixteen possible combinations.

As it happened, we had been discussing statistics on the drive down. Both #1 daughter and #1 son agree with Jung in their disdain for statistics. They, like him, find anecdotal evidence and their own impressions based on their personal reactions, more convincing. I say, look at the raw data before you decide, but I like to see some evidence.

The Myers-Briggs inventory is based entirely on anecdotal evidence and the developers' internal peceptions. There is no controlled research supporting it. It was designed to help people figure out what jobs they might be good at, and it probably works better than astrology.

You just have to accept it as fun.

So I turn up as an ENTJ ("The Chief") on these tests quite consistently, even though I would say that I gain energy as much from being alone as from being with people. But my kids were absolutely scornful of the idea that I was a Judger rather than a Perceiver. They said I was an INTP ("The Thinker") and I suppose they are as likely to be right about it as I am.

I made the ice cream sandwich dessert proposed by the ladies of the Elks Club yesterday and put it in the freezer, and I will soon be making my mother's cabbage salad. There will be fruit and baked beans. I might make something with Jell-O, because it is a holiday and therefore there ought to be some Jell-O around to set the color scheme of the table. The kids bought chips, since I don't do that. What we are eating today has nothing to do with the Sonoma Diet or indeed with any ideas of proper nutrition.

On the other hand, we will continue to be ecologically responsible.

Apart from my responsibility to feed people, I intend to take the day off and do nothing much.

Did you catch the article on "green noise" in the New York Times? The claim is that there is so much information about environmentally responsible living out there that people get overwhelmed and do nothing. Unable to decide between despoiling forests for paper bags and choosing plastic bags with the attendant disposal problems, they say "What they heck!" and take up driving SUVs.

There are two things going on here, I think. The first is the old "The experts can't agree, so I'll do what I want" argument that we so often see applied to nutrition. Some experts say that potatoes are a healthy source of complex carbohydrates and others say that they have a high glycemic index, so you might as well eat french fries. If you can't be sure whether cloth or disposable diapers are worse for the environment, then you might as well give up and use styrofoam tableware.

These arguments are terrible, if we're looking at it from the point of view of logic. On the other hand, they're great if we're looking for an excuse to do what we wanted to do in the first place. And lots of us are. 

#1 daughter told us about being at a bonfire with a group of people in Cowboy Land who were putting their styrofoam tableware into the fire. She offered to take the stuff into the house and throw it away instead, which may not make an enormous difference, but it would have made her feel better. People groaned at the suggestion that they should think at all about the environment.

One of the cowboys spoke up for her. "The world would be a better place if more people thought like her," he said, tossing a stack of styrofoam cups into the fire.

That seems more honest than claiming that you're paralyzed by the rival claims about burning Styrofoam vs. putting it in landfills.

On the offchance that you're feeling paralyzed about it, let me remind you of a book I've mentioned here before: The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choice: Practical Advice From the Union of Concerned Scientists. Or, if you're not up for a book, try Healthy and Green Living, a collection of blogs from the well-established environmental activist site, Care2.com.

The other issue here is the problem of information overload. The argument is that we in the modern world are so buffeted by information on every side that we can scarcely think straight, and we shut down our attention to much of it just in self-defence.

This is one of those things that we hear so often and from so many sources that it begins to be part of our worldview, but I don't know whether it's true or not. I have never seen any actual evidence for the claim; it's just supposed to be self-evidently true.

I guess I can imagine that our pioneer foremothers dealt with much less information than we do. There they'd be, standing over the washtub all day on a Monday, and perhaps no one at all came and told them anything. They had nothing new to read, no electronic media, and met no one all day. When a letter came, it was a cause for excitement, and going to town was at least in part an opportunity to get a bit of news. There were many more newspapers in those days than we have now, but people would have access to fewer than we have, since they'd only get the ones from their own towns.

But if we're talking about the 20th century rather than the 19th century, it seems less plausible. For the past  hundred years, most of us have had access to new information from one source or another during all of our waking moments, haven't we? Widespread literacy, affordable books and papers, the radio, television, and rapid travel all made the exchange of information easy long before the internet.

And many of us still haven't caught on to the major scientific developments of the 19th and 20th centuries anyway, in spite of being bombarded with information. We seem to be able to pick and choose our information.

In fact, the internet has allowed us to filter and narrow our news sources in impressive new ways. Bloglines, Crayon, and similar services let us choose exactly what news we want to pay attention to and ignore everything else. You might be amazed at the amount of celebrity gossip I don't know.

#2 son is home for the long weekend. The bell choir is suggesting, with apparent seriousness, that we should do a medley of cowboy songs, with the swinging of bells over our heads as though they were lassos and the wearing of cowboy hats. I find the whole handbell experience humiliating enough without that. Last night, having apparently forgotten what it is like to play handbells with me since we have been on hiatus for a while, the director and all the members were sort of crowding around me trying to figure out what was wrong with me and how to get me to play the flipping notes at the right time now and then.

Sigh.

We have to leave at an ungodly hour to pick #2 son up for the long weekend from Governor's School, so I will just offer a few highlights from yesterday:

• Client #5's site went down again - the second time since I set it up for them. Since I had advised professional hosting, I don't feel at fault. Still, not good.
• I downloaded InDesign, but my new computer won't allow it to run. It gives me dire warnings all the time, and by the time I click all the "allow" and "yes, I know but really, allow" buttons, InDesign is nothing but error messages.
• My husband dropped me off a couple of miles from home so I could have a walk and he could have the car. I spent most of those two miles scrambling down into the ditch and back up, since there are no sidewalks and lots of traffic on that road. I knew there was a good reason that I went to the walking trails.

Maybe those are lowlights, rather than highlights.

At last night's rehearsal, we sang "Awakening Chorus" in preparation for the ice cream social. That's got to be the highlight.

Yesterday was just about a perfect work day. I had satisfying long spells of work for my big clients and refreshing little bits of work for my small clients. I had just enough contact with clients, time with my family, and a nice little break when That Man and The Empress came by.

I got all my invoices out --

I don't want to give you a false impression here. Getting the invoices out means that Blessing did them and emailed them to me, all in separate files. I merely had to attach each invoice to the correct email and send them to the right addresses. As far as I know, I did so. This is about the speed of my accounting skills.

-- and totted up my income for the month of June with a sense of  gratitude and surprise.

I mapped out my work schedule for July and had some new ideas. Always nice. I saw one of my websites shoot up to the top of Google, also always nice.

My husband is on vacation, so there was a spell when he was watching Nashville Star at top volume, and my brain couldn't come up with the URLs at the speed I need them while making link requests, but I was able to keep my hourly average up by throwing in some blog directories. Not much writing yesterday, but I did work on some websites, so my brain didn't completely self-destruct from too much repetition of long strings of code.

My husband warns me about that sometimes. He claims that working too intensely for too long causes your brain to overheat and possibly just to leak out through the ears. Watch out for that.

I was able to take the time during the day to help #1 daughter get registered for her classes, so she will be starting school next month, and to talk with #2 son on the phone.

And then I stopped working at a reasonable time, put dinner in the oven, and took the dog for a walk. #1 daughter came too. She was going to bring her dog as well, but my husband wouldn't allow it. Spicer couldn't go for fear that she would learn bad habits, he said. He would take her for a walk himself later. Toby didn't get to go because he was acting like an idiot, leaping and barking and carrying on. Fiona is smarter than Toby. She sat down with her "I'm a good dog" face, and got to go for a walk.

It was a bit sad that only one dog got to go for a walk.

We got back in time for a healthy dinner, and then we watched a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, following which I went to bed to read for a bit.

You will notice that no knitting took place. Nonetheless, it made me feel that self-employment might suit me after all.

I have more link requesting to do today. Also a couple of for-hire blog posts, on varying subjects. I enjoy that a lot. Some fine-tuning of websites. And then rehearsal this evening.