This is the road between me and town.

I really like it. It looks a bit scruffy right now. It's sort of between summer and fall. In high summer it's an amazing canopy of green for us to drive through. In fall it's brilliantly colored, and opens to hills covered with color.

Quite nice, and good for a morning walk. I felt out of sorts and whiny for some reason yesterday, and I needed a good walk in the sweet autumn air.

Why was I whiny?

Hmmm.... I was supposed to have six hours of work, and then I finished it all in two hours. Since I'm paid by the hour, I lost quite a bit of income. I sent the stuff off with a note saying, essentially, you had already budgeted for six hours, so how about if I continue? No  response.

The good outcome would be that the client is so impressed with my efficiency that he hires me frequently and recommends me to all his friends. This could happen.

I had a couple of queries in the morning, and responded cheerfully to them, and heard nothing back. And in the afternoon, I had automated responses from oDesk saying that the jobs I'd applied for had said I was too expensive. This is fine. It's an outsourcing place. I'm competing with people in much cheaper neighborhoods, like Russia and Pakistan. But you know, I've see their work. And I'm fast and accurate. And had lost those billable hours, so I would have been happy to have the opportunity to proofread their letters or whatever it was.

Okay. Not much to whine about, admittedly.

See, here's where you go right under the trees.

Hmm.... Well, I plied the Dark Art a bit on behalf of various clients, and read part of a book I need to review, and #2 daughter told me I needed to take accounting classes. Thus inspired, I went and checked the invoices I'd sent and found that one was wrong -- was in fact undercharging by about $300 because the hours hadn't been  extended. It took me a good 3 minutes to get it fixed and communicate with the client. Okay, not much to whine about there, either.

I shudder at the thought of accounting classes. However, in my community we have this community adult education program where you can go spend three hours learning all the secrets of some piece of software or the historical implications of the Nuremberg trials or whatever, and I bet they have a class if not on accounting, at least on how to use my accounting software. This would be the time to get all the data in, before I have six months' worth of it and it becomes an overwhelming job. Then I'd have something to whine about.

Then #2 son got an invitation to apply for a $200,000 scholarship to Chapel Hill or Duke, his choice, and whined excessively about having to fill it out. He wouldn't be chosen, he said, it would be a waste of his time, he didn't have anything to say, it had to be 500 characters long. The whining went on. I suggested that, considering the number of characters I'd have to write in order to earn $200,000, it might be worth his time. He didn't agree. His brother supported him.

#1 son also needs a tuxedo in two weeks, and the rental place went out of business. Most inconvenient of them.

Oh, and if you walk down to take a picture of that road, you then have to walk back up this road here.

Not good enough? Okay. We then had rehearsal, and in addition to the gorgeous Faure Requiem we are also singing the rather oom-pa-pa pretty Brahms German Requiem. How about that? It has word's like "Schmerz" and "wig wird" in it, and a whole section that sounds like you're discussing Freud's earwig. We are scheduled to sing this piece in the spring, not just here but also in San Luis Obispo, those of us who can manage the time and money to get there.

And then when I got home, the menfolks had left all the dinner cleanup for me. Again.

My website has crept up to #11 for my name at Google. Amazon is #1. Throughout my time in SEO, I have always accepted, since I work for bookstores, that Amazon is #1 and I can't beat them. "Right after Amazon" has always been a cause for celebration. I suppose that I'll have to accept this position for my name as well. Since I'm not even on the front page yet, though, I can be a bit whiny about Amazon's getting #1 (and also #2, actually) for my own name, can't I?

Yeah. I don't know why I felt whiny. I just did.

I feel less whiny today, though I have to drive to The Next County. I expect I'll live.

Lace is taking place.

We all know that you can't tell anything at all about lace while it's on the needles, but I think this will be a nice tailored sort of lace pretty soon here. I'm going to end some of these lines in the next row so they'll be different lengths, not an overall design, and continue one row up the sides once I stop with the triangular bit and get to the rectangle part.

Yesterday's music was pretty bad, I have to say. The rest of the day was nice, though. I enjoyed visiting with #1 daughter, did some knitting and lolling, caught up on my French practice, and did a bit of work that was sitting around waiting to be done.

#1 daughter and I continued our discussions on whether the world is flat and how much it matters. I see that Friedman has a new book out, Flat, Hot and Crowded, that looks at global warming through the eyes of economics. If economics can be said to have eyes. I may have to read it without waiting for the paperback.

So far today I have had lots of fun with analytics (let's admit right now that I have always had a secret fondness for quantifying information) on behalf of my Dark Art Lite people, applied for some stuff at oDesk (and they are looking for experienced people to write hip-hop lyrics, in case you know anyone), responded to email queries from a housebuilder and a jeweler, and sent out my invoices. Since I usually don't get this done till the absolute last minute on the last day of the month, thus inconveniencing everyone, I am proud of myself for this.

I'm now going to talk a walk in the lovely cool fall air and then settle down to the day's jobs. I've got oDesk and a pro bono job, a few blogs, and just possibly a bit of SEO for my own site, which is still languishing on page two through neglect. Sigh. If you have a spot where you could harmlessly give me a link, you'd be doing a good deed.

I started on a new knitting project, a Christmas present scarf. I have Crazy Aunt Purl's speical filter enabled. It doesn't allow recipients to see their own gifts. You can therefore be sure that, if you can see it, it's not for you.

We had a gorgeous fall day yesterday. I spent much of it working, but I did get out into it a little bit, and I baked an apple pie, so there's some autumn feeling there at least.

#2 daughter was telling me why she thought that China would be the next superpower. India and the EU have also been popular contenders for this role. I found her arguments persuasive, but I wonder whether the whole concept of superpowers might not be obsolete.

It seems possible that physical location is no longer that big a deal.

 I had an oDesk assignment yesterday -- twelve hours to complete by Tuesday, so apart from the usual blogging and analytics and stuff, that was all I had scheduled for the day. Oh -- and that lunch date. And wine in the rose garden.

 Yes, well, the buyer neglected to change my work limit with his company. Over at oDesk, there's an arrangement where the buyer can specify the number of hours he or she will pay for. The provider (me, for example) can then work all she wants, but the buyer isn't responsible to pay for anything over the limit.

I'd previously had a three-hour limit with this guy. So I worked my three hours, sent in my stuff, and assured him that as soon as he changed the limit, I'd do the rest of the work.

I headed out for lunch.

When I left my house, things seemed normal.

A few cars on the road, nothing much. I was thinking about the issue of developing goals for my business, driving along, and then I turned onto a main road and was immediately reminded of the biker festival as I sat through three stoplights. It took me fifteen minutes to get through the intersection.

I was fifteen minutes late for my lunch date. Fortunately, Egypt was still there. There was a line for ordering lunch that went all the way to the door.

The staff, who had perhaps been mildly sedated for the occasion, were calm and courteous and eventually we all got our lunches. Egypt told me about her ill-fated early marriage and the challenges of caring for her mother, and I told her about my kids and my class.

We caught up on old friends and recent travels.

It was fun, but it was also odd to be doing this in the kind of crowd that was there.

Normally, you can have lunch in this restaurant and talk as though you were in your dining room at home. We had, however, been magically transported to a much larger town.

It is expected that in the next decade, this could really happen in our town. We'll have to get used to traffic and crowds.

I think it'll be different if it gradually happens over time.

 Next I went on a long walk.

Not that long a walk, actually, just a couple of miles. However, I've only been managing my thirty minutes of walking about two days a week, so it was a long walk by the standards I've sunk to.

I took some pictures for you.

It was beautiful. A gorgeous early fall day. The way the light falls at this time of year is completely different from how it is in summer. The things that had been feeling that it was just too hot to bother begin blooming again.

We have lots of peppers in the garden, and a few tomatoes as well.

It feels as though the world is relieved.

I ran home then to see whether I'd been cleared for more hours, and I had not. Clearly, I couldn't do any work of any kind. I had no choice but to go on over to Partygirl's place, where there was a light and fruity red wine.

I very rarely drink. Maybe once a year.

But this is because of my triglycerides, and Partygirl assured me that red wine was good for triglycerides, and I was in the mood to believe her.

I haven't actually gotten around to having mine measured for a couple of years, so I don't know whether I should still be worrying about them or not, let alone whether red wine is good for them to a degree that cancels out the fact that alcohol is bad for them.

However, on a lovely Friday afternoon when through no fault of my own I simply couldn't do any work, sitting in Partygirl's gazebo admiring her roses, it hardly mattered.

Her husband, who grows these roses, came out and told me that the roses were looking terrible, that he had just denuded the entire garden for an exhibition taking place today, and that there just was nothing left to look at at all.

This is a regular feature of these visits. It isn't always an exhibition. Sometimes it's Japanese beetles or the weather. The central point is always that the rose garden isn't up to snuff and I should see it when it's looking good.

It looked good to me.

 When I arrived home at 5:30, the hours had been changed. Too bad. Regardless of what wine in the rose garden might do for a person's triglycerides, it definitely makes me feel like not doing any more work on Friday evening. The buyer changed the limit to six hours. I guess he figured twelve hours by Tuesday spread the time over two weeks. This means that I have to fit another three hours in today, or I won't be able to get the twelve hours done within the new time limit.

Possibly this buyer has had to contend in the past with highly zealous workers who just kept on working past their allowed time over and over, making him feel bad about not paying them for all that extra time.

I guess this could really happen, now that I think about it. For me, no. For a good client, I don't even charge anything that takes me less than fifteen minutes. And there's all kinds of stuff I don't consider billable. For my favorite clients, I don't even charge for meetings. I respect my clients' budgets, and I never charge more than I agree on.

But my oDesk job announcements today included one for placing classified ads at twenty cents apiece. True, it takes no particular skill and it isn't very arduous, but it's still got to take ten or fifteen minutes to fill out those online forms, right? There's the time finding it, and the time waiting for the machine to move on to the next screen or whatever. This has got to work out to less than two dollars an hour. If you worked for so little, wouldn't there be a temptation to keep going when you were on a roll? And wouldn't you hope the client would pay for all the time? How bad would you feel, refusing to pay an extra $2.50 for that diligent worker who kept going past the agreed-upon time? Perhaps he has encountered this before, and fears that someone as expensive as I am would just beggar him.

Anyway, #1 daughter is arriving today, and I intend to go down to the green jobs rally, and no doubt other fun stuff will occur, but I also have to shoehorn in three hours' worth of paid blogging. So maybe I should get to it.

Enjoy your weekend.

 Wednesday I had a meeting with The Computer Guy and clients, plied the Dark Art on behalf of a few clients, headed out for rehearsals, and then came home to grade papers. Yesterday I taught my class, had a client meeting, joined the vulturine hovering at Amazon Vine, and churned out blog posts for my various clients. Today I have an oDesk assignment, then lunch with Egypt and a drink in Partygirl's rose garden. I really love the variety.

 Here's what I'm not thrilled about: my lovely website is on page two at Google. Now, it's only been live for a week, and I've only had time to do the least little bit of SEO for myself, and I always tell clients it takes two weeks to see the effects of my work, so you may be wondering what I'm being all fussy about.

It's the fact that that site was #1 at Google for about a month while it was under construction, and then sank as soon as it went live. It's the fact that places like my clients and Amazon are above me. It's the fact that it made it up to the top of page two and sank back below the fold again. It's the fact that it's my name I'm looking at. Presumably no one is competing with me for this. I should just get the top spot just on principle.

There is an actress with the same name as me. I would understand if she had someone plying the Dark Art for her and we were competing for that top spot. But Amazon? It's not like I'm for sale over there. What do they want with my spot? It does them no good. And my client? My name isn't even on the site. It's on the anchor text that links to her site from the blog I write for a national professional organization she belongs to. I have the domain name, for crying out loud!

Okay. Tantrum ended.

I had a kitchen show scheduled last night, and it was canceled. I had already said I wouldn't be going to rehearsal, and the pianist was going to be late, so it was also canceled. I therefore got an evening at home.

Perhaps I should have cleaned house. However, there were so many competing priorities that I picked some other things instead.

For example, I wound yarn. I dislike winding from skeins to balls, because it takes a long time and the yarn is inclined to tangle. It's easiest if you can get someone to hold the yarn for you while you wind -- then they can cooperate with you and it scarcely ever tangles. However, a chair will also work nearly as well. This is going to become Christmas present scarves. According to the HGP, I should have been spending an hour a day making Christmas gifts all this week. I also should have thoroughly cleaned my bedroom. Neither of these things took place.

In the picture of the yarn, you can almost see the laundry baskets. I did laundry, and folded it, too. Then the cat jumped into the empty basket, preventing me from putting it away.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I also made some soap, which you can see above. We had run out. Just shows that I'm not doing a good job of housekeeping. I just made a couple of bars to last us till I have time to devote to it.

I've just gotten a reminder from Blessing about invoices, too. Clearly, there are things I need to work on. The Computer Guy also recently told me that if my accountant hadn't already spoken to me about the advantages of incorporating, I should ask her about it. He then threw around some words and acronyms which I can't even remember. I think there were Ss and Ls in them.

Yes, I have things to work on. On the other hand, I also get to schedule workdays with ladies' lunch and a drink in a rose garden, and I sure didn't do that last year.

It's the weekend of the biker festival in our town. We have about 70,000 inhabitants, counting the students, and this weekend we will have 300,000 bikers visiting us. We will be severely outnumbered.

As a town, we're ambivalent about this festival. Like all towns that rely on tourism as a part of our economy, we have developed a widespread awareness that it's about money. There will be debates in the letters to the editor section of the local newspapers about whether the bikers really bring much money into the economy, and whether it counts if it's all spent in the entertainment district, but I worked in retail here, and we always had lots of bikers coming in to shop for their grandchildren.

That is the demographic. Most of the bikers are older. It is possible that this lessens the chance that there will be a sudden uprising in which the bikers take over the town, declare a king, and establish themselves as the permanent residents. The crime rate doesn't even go up much; probably not as much as it would if we became a town of 370,000. It just gets nosiy, that's all.

My husband loves the festival. It's a big public party. What's not to like? But there are plenty of people who leave town for the weekend. It's part of their annual plans: get out of town for the biker festival.

I'm fairly neutral. I don't like the noise level, and of course I give up all thoughts of getting across town between now and Monday, but I like to see people enjoying themselves.

Yesterday I was reading a client's forthcoming book in pdf. It is about gratitude and abundance and expecting miracles and stuff like that, and really quite a lovely book. Then in class last night we were talking about living in confident hope, knowing that God is in charge.

Our speaker takes the position --which is not the only one available to Christians, but completely defensible -- that faith is a gift from God, which is tested by God with difficulties so that we can know its strength. That is, God doesn't test us for His own information, because what with being omniscient and all he doesn't have to run experiments. It's for us. Our faith gives us the assurance that, God being our sovereign Father, we really have nothing to worry about. Therefore, knowing that God has it all planned out, we should make our own plans with confidence, and take appropriate actions, based on that assurance. Faith, the speaker told us, was a combination of assurance and action.

Both these positions, it seems to me, are versions of what Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss used to say: "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

The alternative is the old Russian saying, "Life is terrible, and then you die." There is quite a bit of support for this claim, if you look around you in the world.

I've been thinking about this viewpoint quite a bit in recent months. As you may know because I haven't shut up about it for months, I lost my job and found myself more or less propelled into self-employment. While I was unemployed,  many people told me that everything would work out for the best. Sometimes they were saying that God was in control and had a special plan for me, and sometimes that things would work out because of some rational set of factors they had observed, and only occasionally because the universe gives you what you draw to yourself with your happy thoughts or something (I mostly don't move in those circles), but there was just lots of optimistic talk going on.

The exception was the people who said, "Oh, that's going to be hard at your age" and "In this economy, you should try to hold onto the job you have." I'm not going to hang out with those people next time I have difficulties.

And now people are saying how good it was that things happened as they did. I even sometimes think about myself in the spring, and the people with whom my life is newly entwined and what they were doing in the previous spring, back when we didn't have any idea we were due for some entwining. If God or Destiny was at that point -- or indeed, at other points back in the past -- bustling cheerfully around saying, "Well, well, it looks like it's time to alert Fibermom to the existence of HTML so she'll be ready for the future I've got planned for her, and that one over there needs to start vaguely thinking about contracting someone if he could find just the right person... oh and the board member had better get some happy news so he'll agree to the budget, but I guess that can wait till next year... Ah, there's just the right susceptible computer guy to introduce to #2 daughter so he'll be on hand to utter the magic word 'SEO' and incidentally have a pleasant spring break romance that will cause him to start dressing better in time for the plans I have for him in the future" -- well, that's a striking thought, isn't it?

Here's the thing: I kept wondering what difference it would make if these things were true or not.

That is, I mostly just went on ahead this summer and did stuff and everything worked out, and I did fret sometimes and occasionally waste some time on hedging my bets, but after the initial trauma I mostly didn't allow my actions to be affected by worry. This was the correct thing to do if everything was going to work out. If it was part of a grand plan that I should be successful at self-employment, then going ahead and working toward that goal was the correct action. If I had taken that retail management job because I was scared about failure, or if I had given up in despair and gone to bed for a couple of months, then I would have been slowing down the whole grand plan.

What if there is no grand plan? Then what would have been the right thing to do? Would spending the money it cost to get prepared for self-employment then have been stupid, and the right thing would have been to save all those funds and live very frugally and worry a lot more?

I don't know. Considering that things appear to be working out well, it seems as though I must have mostly made the right choices.

But there were certainly times when I felt like, "What if God doesn't have any plan here, and I'm entirely on my own, and it isn't the best of all possible worlds? Then what should I do?" The thing is, I couldn't come up with any useful plans based on that assumption. Or at least I couldn't come up with any different plans from what I was already doing.

Are there circumstances in which continuing with our lives as though everything were going to work out for the best is the wrong choice?

If philosophical issues are not to your taste this morning, then consider instead that it is fall, and time for Readers Imbibing Peril. This is the third year of the challenge, and the third year in which I've participated in it, though all that I do is read the books. There are others who have contests and stuff, but fall is always a busy time for me, so I just read the books.

The challenge this year is to read 5, or 3, or even just one spooky, creepy, gothic book.

I am currently reading The Body in the Ivy, an homage to Agatha Christie's immortal  And Then There Were None. It might get creepy enough to be included. However, I am also partway through Twilight, a YA vampire romance novel that my students were all excited about. I think vampire novels are goth enough by definition to be included in RIP. So I'm well started on the imbibing of peril. We do all know that "imbibe" means "drink," and so I guess we're drinking in these creepy books.

Let me know if you have a favorite creepy book that I ought to read.

Yesterday had a stressful moment.

I was working hard all day, though most of the work wasn't billable. I know that I need to set goals for my business, but I'm not sure whether they should include having a higher proportion of billable hours, or just recognizing that the reason my hourly rate is high is that so much of my work isn't billable. That is, time spent promoting my business, doing paperwork so I'll get paid, setting up meetings, and answering questions would be a normal part of my salaried work, so I should just do it and watch the bottom line. Or not. I don't know what the rule is among businesspeople.

I do know that when I went to bed last night I saw captchas before my eyes, so I can say with confidence that I spent enough time on linkbuilding.

Anyway, there was that point in the day -- 4:00 pm to be precise -- when the menfolks arrive home. The dogs begin barking frantically. The TV goes on. People begin to talk to me. Whining about dinner commences. No, really, it's pleasant questions about what's for dinner. We have little volleys of "I'm on the clock" "Well, I just need help with my college application" "Okay let me turn off my Toggl" and stuff like that.

During which I dashed back and forth between the kitchen and the living room doing a hasty rewrite of a homepage,with chaos all around me and an awareness that I would be picked up for rehearsal very soon, and completed this task just as dinner was ready.

There was a moment of consternation as I realized that I had never turned my Toggl back on and therefore had no idea what to charge for the task. However, since some portions of the time involved had actually been spent chopping cucumbers and discovering that the yogurt had gone south, I figured I shouldn't charge for it anyway.

I mentally wrote it off to good will, sat down for a hasty dinner with my family, and headed off to rehearsal.

Where we spent the evening count singing. Robert Shaw, the great choral conductor, was famous for this. You sing, instead of the words of the song, idiotic things like "one-ee-and-a-two-ee-and-a-tee-ee" over and over on the notes. It is supposed to give great precision and loveliness to choral singing. I bet it does. Shaw had amazing results. Every time the time signature changes, the patten changes, so you find yourself singing"one and two and tee and one ee and a two ee and a tee ee and a one and two and tee and four" and such gibberish.

I'm not complaining, really. I just have to say that, while that's a useful technique, it's wearing when you do it for a few hours at a go.

Arriving home, I started doing some linkbuilding for my own site, which was at #1 on Google for my name a couple of weeks ago, but slipped to page three as I suppose Google decided that it was going to be under construction for the rest of its life.

My daughter called me, and I talked with her at great length while I worked. I love my daughter, and I love talking to her, but I hate the telephone. My other daughter came on the computer with instant messaging. The computer decided to call a go-slow right as I was in the midst of one of those lengthy linking maneuvers that are designed to make sure you're a human. My husband sat down next to me and asked me what #1 daughter was saying on the phone and began arguing with her to me and asking all kinds of details.

And right then -- about 10:30, I think it was -- I got a very civilized message saying, "Just for clarification, were there no changes on the three inside pages of that rewrite?"

I'm sure you have forgotten by now about the website rewrite. I had thought at the time that there really didn't seem to be enough information, and had even shot off an IM saying "there doesn't seem to be anything describing this program." However, I'd been told that the margin on this project was very small so I shouldn't bother with SEO or elegance, but just edit for clarity. And some things are a matter of preference. And probably the meat was beginning to burn at that point. So when the response was approximately "huh?" I let it go.

I let it go so thoroughly that I just rewrote the first page, completely failing to notice that there were three more pages to edit. And sent it in.

So at 10:30 at night, after a nonstop day that began at 5:00, I suddenly had a major error to rectify. And of course the barking dogs and the slow computer and my husband trying to talk to me and -- I swear -- Steve Erkel screeching loudly on the TV.

It was a stressful moment.

I'm feeling better now.

We met my parents for lunch after church yesterday, always fun. I think I did more than my share of the talking, and was particularly boring on the subject of my new website. Following that, and some recovery from said lunch, we had  the candles and singing and birthday cake.

My mother said she was proud of my having transitioned to self-employment so smoothly, considering how resistant I was to the idea.

Let's face it: I'm still resistant to the idea. I continue to harbor fantasies of being offered a steady job by one of my bigger clients, any one of them, really.

Fortunately, I don't let this stand in my way.

At this point -- five months after I first went to the unemployment office -- I have things pretty much in place. I still have a couple of software purchases I need to make, but I have the computer, website, business cards, Toggl, appropriate clothing, file folders, workspace, accountant, reference books, basic schedule, and marketing plan. I also have work, the main thing.

My dad told me you can get last year's software at eBay for a pittance. I probably looked as though he had given me tips on where to get a great price on past-sell-date milk. I always think that outdated software makes it hard to work with others. You can't read their files and have to email and ask them to send it to you in 2003, which adds that whole time traveler air to the transaction. On the other hand, cheap old software might be better than none at all.

Anyway, I need to move on to the next layer. I need a form for site analysis, instead of starting over every time. I need a template for my reports so they'll look snazzy. I need data collection systems that aren't entirely online, just in case. I need a better way to keep track of my business expenses and pro bono work, so I won't have any horrid surprises at tax time. #2 daughter says I need a better filing system, and she's probably right. I know I need a better filing system on my computers. The search function allows me to imagine that it's okay to dump everything into "documents" or "Client #," and to have multiple files of the same name on the two different computers and to email things from one machine to the other and behave as though that means I have backup, but I think we all know that's not going to work over the long run. I also have to fax a couple of W9s before getting paid, so I foresee some time spent wandering around the town in search of a fax machine I can borrow.

I would like to be able to go to the Small Business Development Center and say, "Here's where I am right now. What have I missed?"

Today I have about five billable hours, plus a couple of pro bono jobs to work on. I need to make some soap, too, and get to the gym, and at least look at what's on the HGP for this week, and of course I have a rehearsal. But I think that I can also get a couple of hours of office time in. I need to do SEO/SEM for my own site this week, but if I also do a couple of hours a day of Taking Care of Business, I should get that back-office stuff figured out.

Back office? I have no back office.  I have no minions. My first thought, naturally, is that I need a book. However, I know from experience that books for small business focus on things like payroll taxes and setting up things with letters and numbers on them. None are about How to Set Up Your Files So You Won't Regret It Later or What You Should Do With Your Accounting Software Besides Invoices.

Two very large projects reached completion yesterday.

First, here's Erin, unblocked and with just one button. This is Erin, by Alice Starmore, from The Celtic Collection. More or less. I changed from a drop-sleeve to a modified set-in sleeve, simplified the colorwork on the sleeves and the shoulders, changed to a V-neck, and did a different sort of neck and button band. Also different colors.

I knitted this on #3 needles in Peruvian Wool and Wool of the Andes.

It is a boxy sweater with horizontal stripes, so we know it's not going to be flattering, and my boys say it looks like an old lady sweater (actually, #2 son said the colors make his eyes bleed, but we'll overlook that) but I think I'll love it anyway.

The other project is my website, which went live this morning, I believe. If you are engaged in web design or are otherwise a computer guy, you should just go and admire it. Appreciate the beauty of the code. Except disregard the fact that I haven't done the meta language yet. I may do that this afternoon.

I may also go play with the blog, which The Computer Guy styled for me to match the rest of the website. However, I must first eat and dress and go sing in church. My partner in this morning's duet emailed me last night, saying what was the music this morning because she was thinking of coming to the early service.

There is no way to respond to this with, "You and I are singing a duet for the offertory" without having it sound a little as though you think she might have forgotten.

We are singing, "Saranam," a Pakistani hymn to the traditional tune "Punjab." I couldn't find any recordings of it for you, I'm afraid. We sang through this once, last week. At the time, my duet partner suggested cutting some of the verses.

She and I choose the congregational music for the early service, and every week we go through this. She wants to have just one or two verses of the hymns, and I want all of them. I came from a church where we always sang  them all. We sing them all in the 11:00 service. You can hardly find a single hymn nowadays that takes longer than three minutes to sing, and I find it hard to believe that people get bored of them and want to move on that fast. Some folks are only just catching the tune along about the fourth verse.

I always say, "You decide. I would sing them all, myself."

But when we were practicing the duet and she proposed shortening it, I said, "Do you really think people will be wishing we'd shut up and let the sermon begin?" I was just wondering, you know.

If people are in so much of a hurry to get on the golf course that shaving thirty seconds off the church service makes a difference to them, then they really need to be singing longer, in order to allow the calming effects of the music to work.

After church, we are meeting my parents for a celebration of #2 son's birthday, and then I think I'll need to do something interesting with these apples from a local orchard. People haven't been simply eating them, as I had anticipated they would.