Yesterday was an eventful day. I spent the morning plying the Dark Art, so I won't bore you with that, but then I went up to The Next County for a faculty meeting. We had a norming session, where I was pleased to find myself pretty well in the norm on all the papers, a speech on excessive copier use and another on FERPA, and then us new guys went over for our computer center orientation.

The IT guy seemed prepared to be helpful. He was dressed in the official public Computer Guy uniform (polo shirt and khakis) and had us sit down at a computer and push control alt delete. This is probably a pretty good check for computer saviness. If you just use your computer for email and googling, then you might have to search around a bit for the right keys.

I had no trouble with this initial test. However, the next step was entering my user name and password. (Yeah -- I spell that "user name." You can do "username" too.) I don't have one.

"Go tell A-- you ain't in," said the IT guy to me.

So I embarked on another stroll through the mazelike building, in search of A--. I passed many signs informing me that I was in a severe weather shelter area, which I suppose is reassuring, but there were also lots of blank walls and halls that just ended, so it took me a while to find my way. When I relayed the message, though, A-- grabbed a couple of passing people.

"Here are some IT guys," she said. "They'll help you. They were in the official non-public Computer Guy uniform of rags which were at one time jeans and T-shirts. They walked ahead of me, chatting in doleful tones about how the entire computer lab would soon go down, all at once. They spoke in IT talk, of course. There was a time when I would have had no idea what they were saying. I well remember when Arkenboy would take a call during visits to our house and the only word I'd understand would be "nanosecond." I followed them into a room filled with stacks of computers.

This is one of the real signs of IT guys, I think, as distinct from other kinds of Computer Guys. I would never stack computers up as though they were books.

However, when in Rome... So I used one of the stacks of hardware as a table while writing down my personal information. One of the IT guys went into the hallway, where apparently all the important paperwork was kept. There would be no room in their actual office, of course.

"You track her," she called to her associate, "and I'll look in the paperwork."

She found my paperwork, and explained to me that they were falling behind because, if I grasped her meaning correctly, they unfortunately had to rely on humans for this particular task.

I then began the byzantine process involved in getting a parking permit. It would have been simpler if I had been able to figure out the geography better. There were only two buildings involved in the entire undertaking. Unfortunately, one of them appeared to have no doors.

Yes, well, I managed that and it only took me an hour, so I'm set.

On to the Wednesday afternoon marathon. I arrived in my Psalms class late and without the book (I didn't take it with me to the faculty meeting) and then had to leave after a few minutes for a rehearsal.

I'm working on Anonymous 4's "Like Noah's Weary Dove" with Luna. It has very close intertwining harmonies, and she kept being thrown off. I don't mind. She has the perfect voice for the song, and I can blend well with her, and she can sing a capella without changing keys. Given those benefits, I don't mind working a bit more on the melody. In fact, once I told her not to listen to herself, since she sounded fine, but to listen for the harmonies so they would sound right to her instead of making her think she was on the wrong note and trying to match, she did fine. But that did mean that I had been singing, with my still-hoarse voice, for a solid half hour.

Then worship study group, where I had to sing all the songs Elkhart and I had chosen for the committee. Sometimes more than once, since we had to debate the relative merits of "Blessed Be the Name of the Lord" and "Holy, Holy, Holy" in a couple of spots. After all, if you've sung "Bread of Heaven," can you then step down to "Blessed Be the Name"? But if you use "Bread of Heaven " (that's "Cwm Rhonda") for a processional hymn, and follow it right up with "Holy, Holy, Holy," where do you go to continue that arc-like progress the pastor wants? You'd have to be singing Mendelssohn for the anthem. And there was a bit of uncertainty about "Draw Us in the Spirit's Tether," which is gorgeous but unfamiliar.

"How dim do we think they are?" I asked.

And then came choir practice. Toward the end of the practice, after I'd been singing for about two hours, Bigsax pulled out "Send it Down," the fine gospel song for which he'd offered me the solo.

"This has a solo, but I didn't write anyone down for it."
"You offered it to me, actually," said I, "but if you want to take it back..."
"It's hers," said Suwanda. "We voted on it."

We're doing it this Sunday. I was hoarse when I started.

"Let's take it from 29 without Gladys," said Bigsax.

Boys and girls, he was referring to Gladys Knight, who would do a terrific job on this song.

The choir part on that page is "Oooh" so I had to come back in again. By the end of the evening, my voice was just gone.

I apologized. "Are you sure you want to do this on this Sunday?"
"Yes," said Bigsax. "Just don't talk between now and then."
"You sound," said the Chemist, "as though you've been a smoker for 40 years."

I came home and found my husband and Spicer the dog outside waiting for me, which was nice. I asked whether there was dinner, a question which had become very interesting to me since I hadn't eaten for nine hours.

"Chicken pockeye. Chicken cockeye. Chicken popeye. What do you call it?"

This turned out to be chicken pot pie, from the freezer, which is not at all bad under those circumstances.

The plan for today involves driving #2 son to school, which I hate, and then answering the raft of emails that accumulated while I was away from the computer, checking analytics, doing blog posts, picking up the key for tomorrow's minding of a client's store, trying to set up my school stuff if my user name is ready, preparing the syllabus and maybe deciding what to say on the first day of class, and then taking off some time and doing a bit of sewing.

Little to no talking.

Here's the tunic, as a WIP. Are you thinking, gee what a deep neckline that has? You're right. This is one to wear, as the "What Not to Wear" people put it, with a cami.

I think maybe I always cut too large a size. This is turning out to be a nice swingy overblouse, but I don't think it was designed that way.

Nonetheless, it's pretty. And I succeeded with the buttonhole, and didn't do too badly with the topstitching either, so I'm happy. I need to make more buttonholes and then I'll just have hand stitching to do

This linen is wonderful. Linen is wonderful, in fact, isn't it?

I did this sewing last night while watching the Olympics with my husband. There was a bit on kites, and he told me about a kite-builder he knew back in his homeland who made an enormous kite and put bamboo whistles on the string, so that it sang when it flew. That is also quite wonderful.

Afterwards, I finished up Righting the Mother Tongue, a book that I'm reviewing for Amazon Vine. I started it a while back, but set it aside because it was dull. I'm not sure it's fair to hold dullness against a history of spelling. Not only is the history of spelling intrinsically dull, but I knew most of it already.

However, it has caused me to think about spelling, and in particular about those words for which there are acceptable variations.

Now, "acceptable" is a bit rough here. For example, I often check with clients to see whether they favor "ensure" or "insure," in the sense of "make sure," so that I can match whatever they might later add on their own. Same with "inquire" and "enquire."

And, having read about equal numbers of British and American books, I find that I use some British/American spellings in free variation -- not "flavour" or "gaol," of course, but "traveler" and "traveller" or "gray" and "grey." It was interesting to see how big a deal it was to the people who fought to make those changes.

In fact, the history of spelling reform was the part that was most interesting to me. I don't really get it. The examples of  reformed spelling that they offered were hard to read, for one thing. And, while I can see that the heady days when a person could write down anything they wanted to and call it English had some disadvantages, I really can't see how someone could get that het up over final Es.

We can see, right now, how the process of deciding on a settled spelling comes about. A client recently pointed out to me that I had used two different spellings of "ecommerce," and wondered whether I had done so for some reason relating to the Dark Art. Actually, I had been intending to write his preferred "e-commerce," but my preferred "ecommerce" (it's stronger for search) crept in.

This client also uses "e-mail" where I use "email" and "web site" where I use "website" (stronger for search). Since I spend about four hours a week writing on these subjects for this guy, I have found that I now write "web site" in my own stuff quite frequently.

"Website" is enough stronger for search than "web site" that I did suggest to him that he consider switching, at least in the invisible parts of his websites, but otherwise, I don't care. He offered me four different spellings of "ecommerce," and none was enough stronger for search to matter. Here they are:

• ecommerce
• eCommerce
• e-commerce
• E-commerce

Now, when you are writing things, you probably don't care what is stronger for search. But actually, that is a good modern way to discover what spelling decisions have always relied on: what's the most common way to do it?

Spelling reformers don't rely on this sensible question. They go with "What's the best way to spell this word?"

So, if we were spelling reformers, this would be our chance. We could determine which of the possible spellings of "ecommerce" is the best, and jump in right now while it's still unsettled and root for that version. And there I think we'd be up against the whole problem of spelling reform: there really isn't a consistent way to determine which is best.

"Ecommerce" is the simplest, but it doesn't reflect the history of the word in the way that the hyphenated choices do. There is no pronunciation difference among the choices -- but when people try to reform English spelling according to pronunciation, they postpone the inevitable as our language changes and varies across time and space.

Do you ever yearn for those times when a man could spell his own name six different ways in a single document? Or do you hate the current uncertainty over how to spell electronic stuff, not to mention "k" and "bai"?

#2 son returned home from school even less excited than when he left, if that's possible. He ended up in a marketing class, which he tells me is not a desirable class. It's taught by a coach (he hastened to assure me that he didn't mean to overgeneralize) and two of his classmates were chatting about what they'd been doing since they got out of jail. I still told him to watch for some tips for me.

The story of the hookworm eradication movement has some lessons for us when it comes to marketing, it seems to me.

I finished writing that encyclopedia article up yesterday, but it's a bit over the word count, so I have to go back today and shear it of about 200 words. Minus however many words are in the bibliography. I am of course hoping that the bibliography will turn out to be about 200 words long, so that I can just send it off.

My new schedule worked out reasonably well. I got my morning exercise in, met both my deadlines and did my Dark Art Lite, and stopped working promptly at 5:00. Stopping working is not easy for me. So I have decided to walk the dog for transition. I put the computer to sleep and started dinner. Then came the difficult part.

You see, there are three dogs. They all want to go for walks. If I grab the leash, all three will come and swarm me, each explaining with high-pitched barks how he or she is the most deserving dog, the dog I really want to take for a walk.

In my mind, where I set up this schedule while driving on Saturday, I glossed over this part. I realized that having an end-of-workday ritual would help me actually end my workday. Both #2 son and my husband get home around 4:00, so I thought about quitting then and sitting down with them to discuss the day or something, but I don't think I can stop work at 4:00 and have things finished. So I decided I'd work till 5:00, and then walk the dog so I'd actually be away from the computer and doing something different. Then I could return from the walk and cook dinner. Doesn't that sound good? I think I might have imagined that my husband would also take a dog and we'd go for a walk together. This has never happened yet.

In fact, in order to take one dog for a walk, I usually have to subdue the others in some way, like shutting them up somewhere till I make it out  the house with one dog, and then I'm told the remaining dogs cry and carry on the whole time I'm gone.

Yesterday, I had just put chicken in the oven and rice in the rice machine, and I looked over and saw that Toby was lurking under the table, watching me. Toby is our stupid dog, but I tried to communicate with him anyway.

"Toby," I said to him with glances and gestures, "run into the laundry room right now before the other dogs see you, and we'll sneak out for a walk."

It worked. He darted into the laundry room, where the leash hangs. I shut the door. Toby remained silent while I leashed him up and we slipped out the back.

He may be smarter than he looks.

When I got back, I ignored the computer and made a couple of salads. After dinner, I did some sewing.

This is a pretty color of linen which is scheduled to become Vogue 8503.

I was imagining that this week, when I had only a little work scheduled, I would spend some time sewing and indeed take a bit of time off before starting classes and my new contract from Client #6, in the confident hope of which I am living.

That could still happen, though I got an email last night with a couple more assignments from Client #2. So I'm doing those today, and getting the hookworm wrapped up, and I also need to get my syllabus done and so forth.

Janalisa has offered to go shopping with me, too, when I finally gather up enough boldness to do that. She is very soignee, herself, so I think that between her assistance and squeezing in some sewing this week, I should be able to get to my classes and meetings fully clothed. I have a meeting up at the college tomorrow, in fact, and a meeting with Client #2's new client, whose website I'll be writing.

So, yep, everything is currently going according to plan.

It's the first day of school. It is, for us, the very last first day of school we'll have. #2 son, the fourth kid, is a senior this year.

Back to School used to mean a new outift, a new backpack, a photograph of all the kids lined up in their new outifts, looking excited. #2 son, in particular, has always been very excited about the first day of school.

This year, he's not excited. "I'm just going to get through it," he says. He's looking forward to going back to gymnastics, he's shift leader at his job, he's getting ready to do his college applications, he's excited about having his driver's license, but he's not excited about school.

#1 son, #1 daughter, and I all start college next week. I looked up my class online last night to see what room I'd be in. I have a faculty meeting on Wednesday, and I need to get my syllabus done and plan what to say the first day. We all give the same first assignment, and it involves two readings, so I'll either need to make copies or to post the things online... I think I need to do my campus webpage, too.

I mostly have my schedule figured out. I've drawn spaces for the anticipated new contract from Client #6, for work from Client #2 assuming he continues to have the same amount he's had for me (I calculated the average of the past four months), for Client #4, for my Dark Art Lite clients, and for doing some marketing of my own. If all those spaces are indeed filled, then I'll be able to get my dental work done and pay #1 son's tuition, as well as #2 son's gymnastics lessons, and the bills. I was able to pay for #2 son's dental work, and that's a blessing right there.

I also have some other things out there in the ether -- Chanthaboune's and my book proposal, an online writing job out of Houston, stuff like that for which I've applied but about which I've heard nothing, And then of course life is always full of surprises, so I'm feeling pretty optimistic overall.

There are two little things to be nervous about. One is that some of what I'm anticipating won't turn up. I'm not going to make my dental appointment till I have Client #6's contract in hand, but we're kind of stuck with the tuition.  The other is that everything will turn up at once.

I'm letting Client #2 be my role model here. When I met with him last week about his new business venture, I said, "You initially told me that you wanted to add a client a week for this. Is that realistic? Could you actually serve a new client each week?"

"No," he said, "but that's still the goal."

I appreciated the clothes-shopping advice yesterday. We don't have any outlet stores around, but we do have a T.J. Maxx. That might be similar.

Well, then, I had better make that Back to School breakfast. Happy Monday to all!

Yesterday's orientation  included a PowerPoint presentation on the proud history of the college. I would normally, at this point, say something snarky about PowerPoint. However, the last time I said something snarky about Power Point was to The Computer Guy, who said quite sensibly that PowerPoint is the easiest multimedia program in the Office suite, which is all that most people have in the way of software. It's hard to get your graphics in the right spot in Word, lots of people don't use Excel at all out of fear, and many of us don't even have Publisher (including me), so any time a person wants to show a graph, they use Power Point.

Actually, PowerPoint is the right thing to use if you want to show graphs to a whole roomful of people. Following that, we went around the room stating our names and what we were teaching. Since there were about 60 of us, this seemed fairly pointless, and of course I sounded like Ernest Borgnine so I didn't like it. This stage of the proceedings was lightened when, after several rounds of "John Smith, macroeconomics. Robin Robinson, macroeceonomics. Suzy Brown, macroeconomics" the chair of the social sciences department said , "I'm Dr. So and So, and would anyone else like to teach macroeconomics? I have three more sections  to cover."

Then we trooped over to the English department and got our books, which you see above in my new briefcase.

I didn't take my new briefcase yesterday.

I bought it when I got a 60% off email on a day when I had had to drive up to The Computer Guy's office to drop off a file I had left out of a stack of files on the previous day.

The briefcase I had and loved the last time back before I worked for the store has vanished, somewhere through the years, and I obviously needed one. So I bought this one at an amazing discount.

It looks big in person. And new. And luggage-like. So yesterday I went to orientation with a large purse and stuffed all the folders and documents and books and things into it, so that I had to unpack it every time I needed a cough drop.

When I got home, I put all the stuff into my briefcase and was thankful for it.

Then we filled out our paperwork. This was when I discovered that they are paying me more than I thought. In fact, if I only count the classroom hours, it breaks down to just slightly less than my lowest hourly wage as a computer guy. Once you add the commute and grading time, of course, it comes to quite a bit less, but I was thinking of it as essentially volunteer, so this was good.

Particularly since it is going to involve some Back to School shopping.

It is several years since I was on the consumer side of the counter for Back to School shopping.

It used to be an August ritual. Since I have four kids, it meant simply cashing my mid-August paycheck. Before heading out, all the kids did an inventory of the clothes they owned, and got anything too small or too ratty to wear out of their rooms. We then counted up the gaps to make sure they had an outfit for each schoolday and made a list for each kid.

On the great shopping day, we went to the office supply store very early, picked up the supply lists for the relevant schools, and bought everything they required. Then we went to the bakery for breakfast and to recruit our strength for the second part of the journey. Next came clothes shopping, which we did very efficiently.

Then we went home and everyone unpacked all the gear and put it neatly away, with all the supplies properly arranged in their Trappers or backpacks or whatever it was that year.

In recent years, I haven't had to do that. My kids all work, they buy their own clothes, and of course current style says that for schoolboys there is no such thing as a garment too ratty to wear. I have merely had to fork over the spondulicks in large quantities: textbooks, graphing calculators, tuition, that stuff. I'll have to do that this year as well, of course.

However, I think that I will have to buy clothes for myself. We have a dress code.

I have already bought clothing three times this summer. I went to the mall with #2 daughter and bought two suits. I bought a couple of T-shirts at Target. And then I went to an actual clothing store, all by myself, and bought a twin set sort of thing for the tech workshop (I wore it to orientation, too).

This is some kind of record for me.

So I guess I should make an inventory and a list of what I need, and then go finish my Back to School shopping. Or maybe take some time next week, before classes start, to sew some things. I've already spent quite a bit of time in anticipatory anxiety over this, and will probably dither over it some more before I get around to it. Oh, well. You understand, I can't actually dither over this much IRL, because there just isn't any normal-sounding version of it.

That is, many people understand my fretting over having to commute to the Next County. Lots of us do, here, now that they are so prosperous up there, and most people who do so hate it. You can get sympathy for the commute even without mentioning the scary roads (it's half an hour on the surface roads and 20 minutes on the freeway, assuming no time spent getting lost or stuck in traffic, by the way, so I figure I can go by surface until I'm ready to try the freeway).

But you can't get any sympathy around here for having to spend your first paycheck on clothes. For many of the women I know, that's the whole point of having a paycheck: so you can go buy clothes.

I could go back to the shop I went to by myself. However, I'm told that they are very expensive. The Empress recommended them to me in the first place, and I don't shop enough to be able to identify an expensive store. They have very little in the way of natural fibers, so it shouldn't be an expensive shop. You are probably paying for the service there. I may actually have to got to the Mall.

Not today, however. Yesterday after orientation I made a kitchenware delivery and then came home and spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening in a drug-induced torpor with books and movies, broken only by  an email from The Computer Guy and a phone call from a church musician. That is what I plan to do today as well. I am skipping church, and the menfolks will have to feed themselves. I have deadlines tomorrow, and can't be coughing and whining when I'm supposed to be thinking about corporate branding and hookworm eradication.

I have a sore throat, a headache, a gravelly voice, and a seal-like cough. I have to drive up to the new faculty orientation in the next county. Do I go on surface roads and chance getting lost again, or take the freeway and chance dying of fear along the way?

Decisions, decisions...

A while back, Lostarts asked me whether I would have thought, four years ago, that I would be doing what I'm doing now. Today it is four months since I lost my job, so actually I wouldn't even have predicted it four months ago.

I've been indulging in some relatively deep thoughts. At least deep enough to think about how I want to structure my days this fall.

Client #6 emailed me yesterday and said that he thinks he will have another contract for me. In case you're keeping score, this means that I am securely self-employed for the fall. I figure by the spring I'll have sufficient momentum to continue whether the contract goes on from there or not. Client #2 sent me his next blog post topic, and it's a good one. I think I can get a post for my other xanga (which is dextr, for those who asked) from it, which will allow me to spend a bit more time on it without charging Client #2 more. The bulletin cover turned out well, and I learned a bit more about CorelDraw in the course of it.

And if there is anything -- anything at all -- that you want to know about hookworm eradication, you just ask me, you hear?

I'm coughing and not sleeping well and generally suffering a bit. I went to see Partygirl, who has been sick for a month and also is a teacher and is therefore going through August Horror. We commiserated with one another. I also saw Luna and had a nice talk with one of the pastors, so I actually had more human contact than I normally would, on a day when I ought to have been holing up feeling sorry for myself.

Tomorrow is new faculty orientation, so I have to make that drive and fill out forms and stuff, and also to meet my new colleagues. I am therefore planning to take it easy today -- three or four blog posts (not counting this one) and otherwise I'll just read the books I have for review and get the hookworm, entry shaped up.

Actually, that is a full day's work, isn't it?

I'm seriously considering NyQuil.

I did get all three of my paid blog posts done yesterday, though one of them might have been late. I had to take #2 son to the dentist, and thence to get his driver's license. I am making that sound small, but it involved four places and two towns, plus dropping by the Computer Guy's office, where he was engaged in trilingual programming but still unlocked the door long enough to accept a copy of Geekspeak, which I had to give to him because I don't know anyone else who would enjoy it, and I just have to share books that I like. Can't help it.

So I got home around 3:30 in the afternoon, and checked the deadline for the blog post. It said that it was due "24 hours before the time when your blog is to be posted, which is Thursday at 12:00." Leaving aside questions of time zones, this is still ambiguous, because it could mean

"[24 hours before the time when your blog is to be posted], which is Thursday at 12:00." or

"24 hours before [the time when your when your blog is to be posted, which is Thursday at 12:00]."

It was either time to send it or high time to send it, so I sent it, even though it may be a bit controversial. Last month's could have been a bit harsh on teachers. This month's could have been a bit harsh on publishers. I need to think up something noncontroversial for September, that's all.

#2 son got his license. His sisters congratulated him over the phone. My husband admired the license itself.

"This is nice," he said judiciously. "When you open your eyes like this, you look very handsome."

#2 son rolled his eyes. "The lady in the dentist's office told me that today," he said. "It was weird."

His father had a suggestion. "You should say, 'Yes, I know. All the girls tell me that.'"

He gazed off into the distance. "When I first met your mother," he said, "she was beautiful. Beautiful like an angel."

#2 son didn't know where to look. Grownups can be so embarrassing.

I went off to my afternoon stuff. One little surprise was when, in the worship meeting, I was asked to design the cover of the bulletin. This is not the first time I've been asked for design assistance, oddly enough. I think of that as art, but I guess some people think of it as Computer Stuff. Since I often answer, "What do you do?" with "Computer stuff," they figure I can design things.

Actually, it's good, because I still have a Corel Graphics Suite to review. I was playing around with it a bit when I discovered Adobe InDesign, which I love. My trial period with InDesign as ended, though, so unless Chanthaboune and I get that book contract and I have to buy it, I am still in need of a design program, and had better go on and learn Corel. Maybe I will love it just as much once I learn it properly.

Now, what do you think of this "views" thing here at xanga? First of all, I'm not at all sure that it ought to be public. I mean, is it anyone's business how many views we get?

Second, I don't understand it. It can't be literally how many people have looked at a given post, because xanga can't tell whether your eyes are on this post or on another one on the page. So then I thought maybe it counted the times that people went and looked at the post on its own page, as though to make comments. However, my other xanga has a post this week with almost 2400 views, and it has I believe two comments. Are we to conclude that a couple thousand people thought they might comment, but changed their minds once they got there? Seems unlikely.

In fact, that xanga, though it has posts with hundreds and even thousands of views (I ply the Dark Art over there), only gets about two comments a week. So the views can't be about going to the comments page.

So maybe it's people who went there via search, not coming to the main page or reading on a feed? Again, I don't think so, because it doesn't match the footprints. The xanga you are now reading gets visitors from Google only rarely. Mostly they are lost, too. They're looking for "subtracand" or "panties" or something. The footprints tell em that I have two or three visitors from search a day. But I seem to have a dozen or so views a day.

Which I am telling you because now we can all see this information all over the place. And that brings me back to the public nature of the information. I mean, did anybody ask you whether you wanted people to see your number of views? Nobody asked me whether I wanted to see my own number of views. I have to look at that stuff for all my clients every day. I don't want to bother with it here at my private diary.

And the new xanga "themes" system doesn't even seem to allow us to put in our Analytics codes (if you know how to do so, please tell me), so we have to rely on the public info even for our own sites.

So, yeah, I guess I don't get the views thing. Maybe I should go look it up.

I'm planning to take it a bit easy today. My allergy symptoms have not improved, I sound like Ernest Borgnine, and I have a rehearsal this afternoon. I also have Orientation on Saturday. However, I have no deadlines till Monday, so I may rest up a bit today, in case I am actually getting sick rather than just having an allergy attack. It's hard to tell.

#1 daughter called me yesterday.

"I read your blog," she said. She continued kindly, "Are you feeling a little whiny today?"

I was. Though I considered going to bed for the day, instead I did my blogs, went and got a filling (I was whiny there, too. I'm not usually. I am usually stoical. Oh well),  plied the Dark Art a bit, and plunged right into hookworms.

Metaphorically speaking.

At right you see a photo of a hookworm. "Note the teeth," said the caption of this picture. Seems a bit unnecessary, really.

I'm actually writing about the eradication of hookworm from the American South, where it was a real problem. The Rockefeller Foundation got going on this at the beginning of the 20th century.

Reading about their process, you have to be impressed with how organized and thorough these people were. You want to get rid of hookworm? Okay. We know how people get it. We know that there will be some challenges. So let's attack this on a number of fronts. We'll map the creeks, use some new technology (motion pictures), change some customs, build new privies, test everyone, medicate everyone who'll cooperate, require shoes for school children. At the same time, we'll do door-to-door education for the people, using a wide range of tactics.

Hookworm was gone within a surprisingly short time. Alongside the end of hookworm came a rise in school attendance and in income across the South.

Where did the people who could accomplish that go? Where were they when Katrina came about? Where were they when we were working on AIDS, illiteracy, smoking? Why do we just get inept prats?

This is what I asked #1 daughter when she called. I don't think it's possible to read about hookworm eradication without comparing the efficiency of that process with things commissions do now. Obesity among children? We'll cut out all PE, put vending machines into the schools, and weigh the kids every year. High gas prices? We'll make speeches. Global warming? Hey, let's just pretend it's not happening. That'll work.

#1 daughter said it was economics. There was a clear economic benefit to getting rid of hookworm. One of the main symptoms of hookworm is lassitude and in severe cases mental deficiency. The industrialists of a century ago figured they'd get better workers if they could get rid of hookworm. There was no hookworm industry supporting the parasite, and no ineffective privy industry fighting against the building of sanitary outhouses.

I also had a call yesterday from the college in the Next County, offering me a Tuesday/Thursday class, so I'll be doing that. I have orientation on Saturday, and my first class two weeks from yesterday. I think I'll have to buy some clothes. Possibly even shoes. We'll see. I still have to pay for various family members' dental work and my website.

I'm a bit excited about my website. I saw the Photoshop mock-up on Monday and it looked good, and I sent in the content last Friday. Yesterday, I typed my name in at Google and my website came up as number one.

Last week, a client site came up as #1 for my name, which isn't really supposed to happen. My own site's being up there now means that the Computer Guy has programmed the site from the mock-up. I checked and found that he had also gotten it indexed with all three major search engines.

It is his position that really good design will do your SEO for you. It is my position that it requires marketing, too. SEO and SEM go hand in hand, I say. His new site has some challenges when it comes to search and I just plain told him that design wouldn't be enough when we discussed his content. I delivered really good content, mind you, but I was convinced that he couldn't expect the results he wants without IRL marketing and linkbuilding and publicity and maybe a little online social marketing as well.

I could be wrong. I may just have underestimated him. Getting to number one before even having the site go live is pretty impressive.

I think part of this is that I generally work with sites that don't have very good design. I can still get them up there for search. Proper SEO design together with proper SEO content and SEM?

We might be as good as the hookworm eradication people.

I'm not feeling well today. For one thing, my foot hurts. Yesterday went approximately as planned, with completed blog posts and site analysis and client meeting, followed by content for said web site and a quick site analysis for another site, requested as the client walked into a meeting, fortunately carrying a laptop.

Both my daughters happened to call or IM when I couldn't talk because of the meeting, so both asked about said meeting. It went well, in the sense of being pleasant, but I didn't end up with the linkbuilding campaign assignment I was hoping for. You would think that, since I am on hiatus from Client #6's linkbuilding and I have a long list of other stuff that needs doing, I would welcome a break from linkbuilding, but apparently not. I seem to miss it.

When I came out of the meeting, intending to cross the street and walk around the lake, my foot hurt. Enough to discourage me from walking around the lake. It's a five mile walk, and once you get well into a walk of that length, there's really nothing to do but walk back. I have no idea what was, or is, wrong with my foot, but it hurts to walk on it. I felt like limping. I didn't, because I would rather be in pain than limp, but it hurt badly all day. I have an Ace wrap on it now.

I probably got more work done than I would have had I taken time for a five mile walk, but I'm not happy about it. It was down in the 80s yesterday, for the first time in weeks, and I meant to take advantage of it.

And also my throat hurts, and I have a headache. I think this is because, since it was cooler yesterday, we opened up the house and let in the fresh air, which is full of allergens. So I'm pretty miserable today.

In several groups at church, there is a time when all the people in the room go around and ask for prayers. Sometimes they're asking for prayers of praise about a new baby or for prayers that our leaders will make good decisions, but mostly it's about health problems. These people always have something wrong with them. Of course, I pray for them and am sympathetic, but it also always makes me vow not to have that happen to me.

I don't claim that I have a good plan for this. After all, sometimes the things that are wrong are stuff like heart valve problems and diabetes and cancer and broken bones and stuff I can't even remember because I had never heard of such a thing. Chances are, you can't ward all those things off with positive thinking and exercise.

I have switched from carry-out pizza to salads chez fibermom, BTW, and that is my sons' complaining you can hear, but they'll thank me when they're old and healthy.

So here I am today, suffering and whining, and fearing that this is the beginning of old age, when I will be like the wonderful ladies at church who bravely bear continual physical ills, with just the occasional request for prayer.

Am I overreacting? Possibly, possibly.

I may be in just the right mood to work on the hookworm article at last. I do need to read through my NSSEA blog post again. I wasn't able to get hold of the client for this, to make sure that it wasn't too controversial. She's getting traffic from the first one, which was about dying at the feet of difficult customers out of spite, so she may be okay with it. It's about why classroom technology is so bad. A little controversy can be good for your rankings, but too much can be bad for business, so I left it till today to read it again and see if it's offensive before I send it off.

It took me two hours to write. All of my professional blog posts take me two hours to write, except for the brief update type, which uniformly take me twenty minutes. I used to think that it was more just that I kept my eye on the clock and only spent two hours on a post because it seemed like that was about the right amount of time. But now I use Toggl. I push the button and get to work, and lo and behold, when I finish and look at my Toggl again, it has been one hour and fifty-six minutes or two hours and one minute or something like that. Whether I am writing about classroom technology, or death by retail, or "The Frog Prince," or conversion funnels. Something odd about that.

In other news, there is a new online knitting magazine, sort of, called Twist. I'm saying "sort of" because it is actually a catalog of patterns at $7 apiece. There are some nice patterns there. But $7 for one pattern, and downloaded at that, sounds steep to me. I think that $7 would cover the cost of a knitting magazine, which very likely would contain several patterns you might care to make, plus bunches of others which perhaps you could pass along to friends. $7 could be a third of the price of a book of knitting patterns, or even the whole price if you found it used.

The Twist Collective wants to see knitting designers paid fairly for their designs, which I applaud, and of course that's a hard sell online, where we are accustomed to getting so many patterns for free. What's fair payment for a design, anyway? Will the designers end up making more this way -- when of course they could end up with nothing at all if no one chooses to buy it -- than if they sold it to a magazine for the going rate? It will be interesting to see.

I have an 8:00 appointment, so I'd better make like a banana and split.