I’m going back down today to meet the people  in the basement. This has of course been the main thing on my mind since I discovered about 22 hours ago that I would be going.

During that time, I have taught a class, had a communication from someone who saw my website and wants to discuss a complete redesign of his, had #2 daughter arrive for a visit, sent reports to a couple of clients, and joined in a rehearsal. I am tryng to keep my mind on those things. I also have oDesk work to finish up before I leave.

#2 daughter’s jobhunt is being fun and successful so far. She’s sleeping on the sofa, so I’m trying to type quietly, but once I switch the oDesk (where they track the number of keystrokes) I will have to give that up.

I’m looking forward to meeting my potential colleagues, of course, and hoping for an opportunity to persuade the v-c that I don’t need to move to his town, but mainly it’s all about freeways. #2 daughter is reluctantly joining me. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The v-c emailed me yesterday that I was at the top of his list.

However, this morning I got a request to interview for an on-site SEO training job in Bangalore, so if I’m willing to do on-site I might not just want to move three hours away when I could go to India (I think that’s where Bangalore is) and displace some local worker there.

I was having an email conversation with my Australian client the other night. She was asking why, if our economy was in such trouble, the dollar remained strong. Or possibly why the economy was in trouble when the dollar remained strong.

I had to admit that I had no idea. I told her that the movement of the dollar didn’t seem to affect us unless we were traveling. It affected whose exports we bought, but the strength of the dollar never even gets brought up in our economic news. That is, nobody suggests that food prices have risen 30% because the dollar is slipping or that people are being laid off because of the rising yen or anything like that.

The Australian dollar bobs around like nobody’s business compared with the US dollar, it seems. Maybe it is the fact that things are compared with the US dollar that makes the strength of the dollar less of an issue for us.

In any case, once I had demonstrated my abysmal ignorance in that area, we moved on to globalization, another area in which I can get very confused.

Here are some things I know or believe about globalization:

• It’s good, for ecological reasons, to buy things locally.
• U.S. providers can’t compete on price with other countries, so we have to be willing to pay more for locally made or grown things, because they unavoidably cost more.
• Our communities need us to support local businesses.
• Local things may or may not be better than things from elsewhere, but in some cases — fresh produce, for example — they certainly are. If we only support a few local things, then our local providers will not be able to stay in business.
• The attitude among American consumers that we’ll accept anything in order to get the lowest possible price has caused a lot of problems, including serious issues of human rights and product safety.
• There are people on oDesk who will work for absolutely minuscule amounts of money. In my particular field, and in my limited experience, it’s clear that they are not offering the same quality that I am. This seems fair. Buyers who can only afford to pay minuscule amounts can get poor quality within their budgets. I think it would be wrong for me to work for low wages and compete with those providers, and I think it’s wrong for buyers who can pay more to hire those folks for such tiny amounts.
• It may be logical to conclude that the poor should in the same way be able to buy cheap goods made in countries where people earn tiny wages, while the more affluent should pay more to buy things made in wealthier countries, but I’ve never drawn that conclusion.
• I know lots of people who won’t buy anything made in China.
• When we decide not to buy goods made in China, or not to buy chocolate from Cote d’Ivoire, or other geographical decisions like this, the intention is to discourage the rich people making money from the exploitation of others, and to force them to treat their workers better. However, the result may be to take work from people who really need it, so badly that they will work under terribly exploitative conditions.
• When people doing poor quality work for low prices improve their skills — as, for example, with the linkbuilder whom I spent some time training on behalf of my Australians — then they can raise their prices at a marketplace like oDesk, or leave their countries entirely and go elsewhere in the world market. Even in the flat world, therefore, you get what you pay for. There may be just a small window of opportunity for exploitation before the good quality workers escape.
• It makes sense to me to buy things from other places which are special to those other places. I buy British tea, for example, because it’s better, and because the company I buy from (which of course doesn’t grow the tea there in Yorkshire) is responsible about human rights and the environment. I don’t think we should buy commodities from other places just to save pennies.

When I first came here, you could buy beautiful handmade quilts from local quilters who were working out of a long tradition. A quilt would cost a couple hundred dollars, and they were works of art. They were not by any means overpriced, but they were expensive for people earning what we did around here — a bit of a luxury, but worth it. Then we began to see quilts coming in from China. They were hand-quilted very badly by people who were hurrying to get their twenty-nine cents an hour, and they cost $39.95. I have a couple of those, I have to admit. The quality is nothing like the local product, but I could afford them.

You can’t buy local quilts now at all. For a while, people tried to get their prices down to compete with the imports, but the fact is that we can never compete on price, because we just flat can’t live on $3.00 a day, however much we might want to. So there were for a while relatively poor-quality local quilts at relatively low prices, but they never could be the cheapest quilts, and I’m sure it was unsatisfying for the artists to produce them, too. So they just gave up. We still have local quilters, of course, but they keep their quilts, or sell them at auctions for a good cause. This is just about the only way you can get a local quilt nowadays. And I am sure that there are fewer quilters now than there used to be. The young girls probably don’t learn to do it any more.

I don’t know what all this means. My current strategy is to do my best to support local businesses, and not to support businesses which I know to use exploitative practices. I never make my buying decisions solely on price, though I can’t afford to ignore price entirely. A writer in the Wall Street Journal once wrote, “I’d buy laundry detergent from Satan if he had the lowest price.” I know that many people feel that way, and I think they are not only wrong, but harmful. However, I don’t know what the best solution is.

I work in the global marketplace myself. My Australian client just this morning asked if I knew someone who could help get my recommended updates to her website done, since her local webmaster is dragging his feet. I’m sorry that my price for her has gone up (it’s the dollar’s fault, not mine) and I understand that American providers may cost too much for her. Of course, I don’t know any designers in Bangalore who could help her with that. But if I did, would I be justified in sending the work to India because of the condition of the Australian dollar, when I know designers here in the US who are suffering – or at least worrying — because of our economic meltdown?

Yes, well, you can see why I’m confused.

Yesterday was another perfect workday. I went and taught my class. They had a review of the literature due, and only a handful of them had actually done it. The rest looked as though they were waiting to line up for the firing squad. I really thought we’d gone over it thoroughly in class. We’d looked at the example in their books. We’d made outlines for a couple of them based on their bibliographies. We’d practiced doing book reviews and summaries of articles. I’d told them it was a hard assignment and they should block out plenty of time for it.

They were at a loss.

We went through more examples. I emphasized that they would actually have to read the materials. I answered repeatedly that yes, it was actually a paper, and not the same as the annotated bibliography. I have a bunch more papers in my inbox this morning, so we’ll see.

So, when The Computer Guy asked, “How are the freshmen?” and I answered, “They’re great,” I had to take it back.

“Well, no, they’re probably miserable. But I’m enjoying the class.”

I stopped off to give him a book and to ask about the likely working conditions at the possible new job. He was an IT guy at Georgia Tech once, and knows quanitities of IT guys. He painted a vivid word picture for me of what it would be like to work in the basement with a bunch of IT guys.

“It’s cold, because of the servers. And there are usually computers lined up and lots of silence.”
“Clicking?”
“You don’t really notice the clicking. It’s more the sound of the fans.”

So whereas now I sit clicking at the computer for hours in a pleasant, comfortable house with tea readily available at all times and dogs, I would sit clicking at the computer for hours in a cold noisy room with silent computer guys.

I told him that I had tried to go meet the team while I was there, but that the v-c had been hesitant to spring me on the people in the basement.

The Computer Guy took on an odd expression, as though he were remembering something bitter. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “you can’t spring new people on the team while they’re clicking away or they might miss a semi-colon or something.”

#1 daughter said, “You can’t interrupt them while they’re running in their hamster cages.” She thinks I should apply for the admin job, so I can be in a warm office and tell the hamsters web team what to do.

So, yes, I am trying to imagine myself in that job in order to predict whether I would be happy in it. Daniel Gilbert tells us that this is not a successful way of making such a prediction.

Ask people who work there, he says.We think we’re special and different, so we try to imagine what we think our own feelings would be, but really we’re mostly all alike. If other people are happy there, chances are we will be too.

This place prides itself on being a great place to work, and the forums where people can whine about their working conditions have only happy reports from workers there.

Also, as #1 daughter pointed out, The Computer Guy could at that point have said, “Don’t take that job — I’m planning to hire you myself in the next six months and I won’t make you work in a basement.” He didn’t say that. I should perhaps compare not my perfect workdays, but the possible days when I have no work and have to worry about paying my bills. That could make the basement more appealing.

After that conversation, I came home, slapped together a tuna sandwich, heard #2 daughter’s jobhunting stories for the day, and did a couple of hours for my Aussies. Then I accepted another assignment from Client #3, checked everybody’s analytics, and had a lengthy exchange of emails with the Aussies, before knocking off to go to my Tuesday class.

It was a good workday because there was variety, and fun, and challenging stuff to do, reasonable amounts of human contact, and billable hours. If all my workdays were like that, I wouldn’t need to consider moving to another city and working in a cold and noisy basement.

Even if I do want to get my hands on their new website.

Today also I have plenty of work to do, including blogs for my guy from Philadelphia and a news piece for The Computer Guy. I have my encyclopedia article to work on if I have extra time, and much blogging to do, and linkbuilding for Client #4, and Book Club, and the Wednesday evening marathon. Obviously, I won’t have extra time.

  “Girl, you’re perfect!” said the vice-chancellor.

I modestly agreed, and assured him that I was very excited about working on his website. Which I was, and possibly am.

“You ready to move here?”

I said that while I was very happy with the salary they had in mind, if I stayed where I was, it didn’t seem to me to be the kind of salary a person would be expected to move for.

He went into a practiced speech about the benefits, what a great place it was to work in, and how well I’d fit in. It sounds great, actually.

That’s the possible workplace, up there in the picture. The v-c’s office is about four feet square. He has two monitors side by side on his desk. He showed me the CMS; it’s as cute as a puppy. I love it. It would be such fun for me. What’s more, they have a new website they’ll be launching in January, and it is exactly what they’d have gotten if they had taken all the advice I had for them.

“You actually want physical presence?” I asked him. ”Why?” We were getting on like a house afire at that point — he’d recoved from his alarm when I had moved in and asked “Could I view your source?” — and I felt I could be direct.

At this point he said the he realized that wasn’t the norm, and that there wasn’t a single thing I could do there that I couldn’t do at home, but apparently they’d tried letting the web team work from home, and it seemed like discrimination to the other staff.

Yep, the administrative assistants and nurses and stuff felt that they should get to stay home if the writers did.

It’s very flat there .

They have an office up here. I suggested that if fairness was the issue, then I could go in every day to the local office.

It didn’t seem to the v-c that that would work.

“So,” I said, “would you say that it’s impossible?”

“Not impossible. Just improbable.”

Much depends on the new Web Center Director. He encouraged me to apply for that position. I told him incautiously that it didn’t look like as much fun, but he said it was better paying. And then of course I could allow the writers to work from home. Here’s the description of that job:

“The Web Center Director will supervise and participate in the development of software for the creation and maintenance of the official web site; supervise the development of page design and graphics for official web pages; supervise and participate in the development of policies and procedures. Develop and monitor tracking system to measure effectiveness of web site in acquiring patients and other targeted customers; continually update and improve the web site utilizing the content management system and new developments in applications of technology; develop, implement, and manage content management system. Supervise the development of training manuals and classes for content and management team members; act as webmaster/web team leader; assist co-chairs and facilitate the activities of the clinical web center operations committee and carry out committee recommendations. Develop implement and monitor annual budget for Web center; develop plan to ensure future funding; stay abreast of web-related technological, creative and media advances and trends in the advertising, communications, higher education and health care and modify departmental resources to best take advantage of those that help accomplish goals of institution.”

I mean, I can certainly do those things, but it doesn’t sound amusing, does it? And I bet that person never gets to work from home.

I survived the drive, since I wasn’t driving. I was talking to #1 daughter on the phone at one point, trying to work out a meet up, and I had to say,  “Oh, we’re driving on this horrible road–”

“Close your eyes and I’ll talk to you,” she said in a soothing voice, as of one accustomed to talking to crazy people. “You’re not driving, so you don’t have to look at it.”

Over lunch, she told us they’d had four murders last week. She has decided to go into environmental law, on the theory that there will be fewer photographs of mutilated children to look at in that field. She has all As in school, and we’re very proud of her.

She thinks I should go ahead and move. In fact, she thinks I should apply for the admin job. The v-c thought that I could work down there for six months and then probably be fine working at a distance. “Once the chancellor has confidence.” No one who has worked with me for a week would worry that I wouldn’t work just as steadily if I were at home, or in a tree house for that matter. Maybe I can move into the dorms for six months. No? A hotel? There’s one right there near the hospital. I could walk to work.

In some ways, this is simple: I’m happily but nervously self-employed and I’m up for a good job that I would really like. During an international economic meltdown. I should take it if it’s offered to me. I can still do my ten hours a week of freelance work, and I just won’t have to worry about searching for more than that.

Here’s Spicer in her sweater — like a wooly little armadillo, as Paige said. I don’t know. She’s pretty cute.

Below I offer you her picture in the sweater when #1 daughter got it for her last Christmas. I think she’s lost some weight since then.

In any case, the sweater keeps the bandage on, and it ought to help her wound heal.

I sang the girl group song in church, thinking of Brenda Lee. Or maybe it was Peggy Lee. I don’t know. I’m not up on girl groups. The pianist thought it would be cute to sing the word “teardrop” with a very short second syllable followed by a rest, to make it sound like a drop, but I thought I might laugh if I did that. It was hard enough for me to sing, “Take me, I’m yours” with a straight face. Actually, I think I did a good job, and it’s not a song I would ever have thought of myself, so it was a good opportunity to expand my repertoire.

Then CD and BigSax and I had a pleasant chat about vermiculite and high availability servers. This just goes to show. I’m not quite sure what it goes to show, exactly, but something about friendship.

I came home and continued searching around for data on the people I’m interviewing with today. I managed to find lists of the people I would presumably work with, if I’m guessing right about the department I’d be in, but somehow none of those people seems to be on facebook, linkedin, myspace, SEOmoz, or any of the other places you expect to run into people around here.

It seemed strange. One of the guys appears to play soccer, but that doesn’t exactly give us a bond, does it? I found hints that they might use Dreamweaver and MSOffice.

But don’t you expect to be able to find more than that about a person? I mean, I have their actual names and everything. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe they’re really cagy and always use secret aliases except on the school’s website.

Anyway, my hope of being able to say, “I think you know my friend So and So” or “Aren’t you a member of XYZ?” is dashed.

I went ahead and made the cookies for rehearsal. La Bella is pledged to come get them from #1 son if I don’t make it back in time.

My cookie press has a plate for making pumpkin shapes. When the press is well-behaved, you can make heaps of cookies in minutes, pressing them out at a rate of three seconds apiece in pretty rows.

The cookie press was not well-behaved. I made a few dozen cute little pumpkins, even though I frequently had to peel the cookies off the press by hand and form them into pumpkin shapes, with optional cursing.

I also ended up with a couple dozen grotesquely misshapen pumpkins, which you see on the plate at the front. This in spite of my trying two different recipes.

After a while, I was so maddened by the whole process that I stirred a cup or so of ground chocolate into the batter and rolled it out to cut cats and bats from it. Three kinds of Hallowe’en cookies for rehearsal and a plate of rejects to enjoy at home.

I then made a third recipe, and I can’t explain why I did such a thing, except that I guess it had become a quest by then. I still had trouble with the pmpkins, so I switched to an easier shape, added enouogh red food coloring to make the dough look red, and extruded a bunch of festive red cookies for the freezer. I now officially have Christmas goodies in the freezer. Hidden under the flax meal.

Today is the road trip and interview. I’m torn between not getting my hopes up too high in order to avoid disappointment, and being completely confident that this is the best thing for them and for me, and that therefore it must be what God was planning when I lost my job and then had the opportunity to work with so many different people and circumstances during my freelance stage that I am now quite expert. Nothing like a little all-or-nothing thinking to start the day.

I’m well prepared, at least. They should be quite impressed at how much I know about their website, or at least at how much I bothered to find out. I printed out the map to the place, I know where to park, I’ve packed up books and knitting to distract myself from the freeways. I’m going to make a hearty breakfast — my husband, apparently in agreement with #2 son regarding preparation for big events, has requested bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, and toast — and make a really early start so we can get lost without being late if it comes to that.

#1 daughter can’t join us for lunch after all. However, she did call and give me a pep talk and tell me about a couple of clients she’s sending my way. That’s good. I have enough stuff in the wings that, if this doesn’t turn out to be right for me or for them, then I should have plenty of work to do anyway.

I lost track of the HGP this year, sad to say. Not to worry! There’s a second chance. The Christmas Countdown starts today. This plan is shorter and simpler than the HGP. It starts this week with getting your holiday planner organized and making lists for cards, gifts, and areas of your home that need cleaning or repairs before holiday entertaining begins.

I’ll be making cookies today for tomorrow’s rehearsal (we have a cookie rota), and I plan to make a couple of batches and put half of each into the freezer for Christmas. I’m going to use my cookie press, so it’s just a matter of coloring half orange and extruding pumpkins, and making the other half green and pushing out wreaths.

#2 son went to the grocery to get provisions for his pre-ACT breakfast. As you can see, he’s testing the hypothesis that enormous quantities of saturated fat and simple carbohydrate improve test performance.

He said it seemed easy, but that he’d heard that people always thought it was easy and then were shocked by their low scores.

I’ve never heard anyone say they thought the ACT was easy, so we’ll see. There are schools in our state that have a simple chart: this number on the ACT, this percentage of your tuition paid.

If I get the job I’m interviewing for tomorrow, I’ll get an automatic 50% discount on my kids’ tuition at any state institution.

Yesterday I got the grocery shopping done, scrubbed the kitchen, and worked on the brown scarf. I also helped #2 daughter plan her job hunt and did a thorough site analysis of the website I’m interviewing for tomorrow. I always enjoy that. It’s an enormous site with a PR of 6, but they don’t appear to have had any professional SEO hitherto, so I’ve been practicing diplomatic ways to phrase my suggestions for their site.

My husband shaved the fur around Spicer’s owie, put on antibiotic ointment, and bandaged it. She didn’t like the bandage much. She behaves like an inanimate object so much of the time that I was surprised she’d object, but she did scratch at it and rub on furniture to get it off, so we put her sweater on her. That worked, but we didn’t take her picture. We didn’t want to humiliate her. It makes her look like a pink and white striped sausage.

#2 daughter was laid off yesterday — no notice, but a little bit of severance pay in lieu of it. This happened to me not so long ago, and that has worked out pretty well, and she was working in a cave where they yelled and swore at each other all the time (I know you’re envisioning trolls; me too), so it will all turn out well in the end.

Even so. Not great.

My husband’s response to this was not good. I walked in from coping with Client #3′s crisis to be greeted with, “Your daughter got fired.” He then entertained us with his speech on why he too would soon be laid off. Then he gave #1 son a speech about how he ought to get a job (very true, by the way) which ended with #1 son saying he’d move out and my husband saying he should do it soon and not come back.

I still owed my Philadelphian 20 minutes for the week, but for some reason was unable to get that last blog post finished in the midst of all the drama. I also began last night what Rampaige calls Special Lady Days, which is no big deal except that day after tomorrow is eight hours of driving with an interview in the middle of it, so not perhaps the absolute best timing.

Spicer the dog has a wound on her back, we don’t know whence it came, and will have to go to the vet, where they charge vast sums of money and don’t accept insurance.

#2 son has the ACT this morning, and left his calculator in a friend’s car. The friend was out on an “anniversary” date with his girlfriend, so #2 son wouldn’t call him to ask for the return of the calculator. I suggested that #2 son’s scholarships might be more important than the possibility of embarrassment, but #2 son didn’t agree.

Right up to that point, things were going well.

My favorite giant tea cup (it’s in the picture of me up there on the left) cracked and now leaks, and I’d been having to drink tea in small cups, so I ordered these pink polka dot cups, which are nice and big. They’re only available in October, only online, and only from Pampered Chef, with whom I am about to end my relationship, so I needed to get them — if at all — while I still had that relationship. I also stocked up on their seasoning mixes. I don’t know that I exactly needed pink polka dot dishes, but as you can see, I had lots of excuses for buying them.

They arrived while I was blogging for the Philadelphian. I do his posts by the dozen, which is much faster than the usual way. When I’m writing the kind of post that is supposed to rank well at Google and draw traffic for years, I find that it takes about two hours. But when you do a dozen at a time, you get ideas from one and see resources for another as you go along. I end up averaging two posts an hour for him. Then he sticks them into his blog whenever he needs them. I’d been to the gym and was having quite a good time, writing one post after another on subjects like reluctant learners, teaching science with a Biblical worldview, and loneliness among homeschoolers

Then I went to visit the lady I’m writing my encyclopedia entry about. She’s in a nursing home. I called her niece for permission, announced myself to a nurse and was told I could just go right to her room, went in to speak with her, and was asked by another nurse to leave.

I went to the nursing station, wending my way through clots of people in wheelchairs and down halls of people crying and wailing, and waited for quite a long time for someone to be free to talk with me. I told her my whole story and she was quite nice about it, and brought my lady into a little salon so we didn’t have to talk in her bedroom.

This lady is 82, and I was expecting her to be sort of like my mother, who is about a decade younger than that. My mother doesn’t live in a nursing home. This lady would be telling me about her experiences as a young black woman working against segregation in the churches in the 1950s, and then she’d say, “Some days the water just streams down the windows here.”

“Rain?” I’d say, and she’d agree. Then we’d talk about her book, though she couldn’t remember if she’d written any more than the one I’d found, and about her travels, and about her namesake who wants to be an astronaut.

Then she’d say, “Sometimes when I come in here the young lady asks me about these pictures and says, ‘I guess you’ve seen these before’ and I say, ‘Yes, I have.’”

The second time she talked about water, I went and got a cup of water for her.

I wasn’t able to get all the information I needed, and there isn’t much published about this lady. Her niece came to visit, along with her great-niece and her great-great-niece, and I left. I asked whether I could come to see her again, and she said no. “I won’t entirely close you out,” she said, “but sometimes I get too much attention.” I can’t actually tell from that whether I can go back to see her or not. I may need to go to census records for the names and dates I couldn’t get, but I do have some great quotes.

Then I moved on to Client #3′s workplace, where we tracked down the problem of the lady from Paragould, went over the method of adding items to the catalog, and came up with a solution which we think will work if The Computer Guy can do it.

Driving home, I thought about stopping off to do the grocery shopping, but decided that it was the kind of day that called for pizza delivery. This always makes my husband angry, and I know that it isn’t the best choice nutritionally, but I made that decision anyway, and told the kids to call for it as soon as I got in the door, before my husband came to tell me the news of the day.

And that’s where this post began.

Craftymommavt has been posting some really beautiful pictures of her local scenery.

Yesterday was a fairly perfect workday for me, as long as I count lugging a dozen books from the parking lot to the third floor and back as exercise. No? How about standing for an hour and a half while teaching? Oh, well. I got another six hours for the week and an hour a week longterm, taught my class, had interesting questions from three of my clients and a slight crisis with another of them, and stopped working for meals.

In class, we discussed the assignment due on Tuesday, which is a review of the literature. I was doing my best to help them all come up with sources, and to understand what constitutes a reliable source. One of the students plans to write about hangover remedies. He mentioned his “normals.” I did tell him that I thought it was alarming that he had “normal” hangover remedies, but it seemed like a good opportunity to discuss how experimental research could be used as a source in a paper. We talked about why just asking a lot of people about their thoughts on hangovers wouldn’t do it. I talked with them about controlling variables, and they looked at me with the expression our dogs get when you talk to them: “I don’t understand anything you say, but see? I’m looking at you!” Eventually, they came up with the idea of conducting a controlled experiment with nondrinkers (to avoid the issue of tolerance) and identical quantities of rotgut whiskey in a classroom slumber party on Monday night, keeping careful records, and then administering an assortment of hangover remedies during class on Tuesday and measuring the results.

“You’d get fired,” one girl observed. I hope they got the concept of controlled studies.

Then it was Amazon Vine leftover day. #2 son reminded me just in time and we were there before everything was snapped up. There were about six different printers, and all of them were already gone, so I was a bit sad about that. #2 son saw that the game “Apples to Apples” was available, but I had already clicked on software for making movies, and when I got back to the page to request the game, it was gone. #2 was deeply disappointed. I’ll have to buy that for him for Christmas. I thought he’d be excited about the movie-making software, but no such luck. It completes my Corel collection, though.

In the evening, CD came over. The choirlet rehearses on Thursday evening, but they changed venues last night and neither of us knew where they were, so we just played through a song for me to sing on Sunday morning in case it was needed (a ’60′s girl-group type of song about Jesus, and that would surely be a new singing experience for me), and then had a cup of tea.

One of the Suwandas called me later that night from the rehearsal, so I guess it wasn’t that they were intentionally excluding us.

In fact, it was more that I had emailed people saying, “I know we won’t be at our usual place, but where will we be rehearsing?” and hadn’t gotten answers. I had seen some of these people in the flesh during the week and failed to ask them, and I have Suwanda’s phone number, so I could have called, but I didn’t. CD and I didn’t even call anyone while we were standing there wondering why no one had told us where the rehearsal was. So it is possible that I just wanted to stay home.

Today I have four hours of blogging, plus my usual blogging, preparation for Monday’s interview, an interview with Theressa Hoover, and a visit with Client #3 regarding her crisis. The Computer Guy and I have both spent much of the past two weekends on her website without extra compensation, so I am sort of hoping that this will be an easy little crisis to solve.

What do self-employed people do all day?

Here’s what I did yesterday, in excruciating detail.

I got up and made coffee and tea, and got to the computer around 6:00 to answer emails, blog, and apply for jobs that came via alerts. During the application process, I wondered whether this was a waste of my time, but I currently have three interviews, including the physical interview for the large plum job, a conversation with someone in the United Arab Emirates who wants to skype, and a website owner whom I can definitely help. I sent him some suggestions, in fact. It didn’t take much longer than a normal cover letter would, and it ought to show that I can be helpful. I also corresponded with three people who have expressed an interest in my services. I spend at least an hour a day doing this kind of stuff.

At 8:00 I put on a DVD and did a weights workout for half an hour. I have only slightly sore muscles today, but I plan to stretch well so I won’t be too sore tomorrow. I like a little muscle soreness, though. One of my new Amazon review books advocates making yourself a little card that says “NO CHOICE” to remind you that you are determined to exercise, not just deciding it based on how you feel at that moment. I haven’t made a card, but I’m going to try taking that position with myself and see how it works.

At 8:36 I checked my Analytics, alerted everyone who had anything interesting going on with their stats, and responded to the assignments my students had sent me. My rule is, if they get the assignment in my email before midnight on the day it’s due, it’s on time, so I always get a little rash of papers like that. The ones who send it in Word get it marked up and returned, a process which I like a lot.

I did my work blogs and spent some time trying to guess what software the prospective New Big Client might want me to use and running through tutorials. I also had my special Dark Art software rebuild the Aussie’s link profile. Then someone arrived for a meeting.

This person is writing a book on a subject about which I’m quite knowledgable. She asked what I’d charge to help with research and I suggested that I collaborate with her instead. Yesterday was our preliminary meeting. I had lentil soup in the slow cooker, and we sat down with paper to block out a structure for the book.

There followed two hours of vague thought and random discussion. I have some students in my writing class who are having trouble coming up with a topic. I sit with them and ask questions designed to help them marshal their thoughts and clarify their goals, and that’s what I did in the meeting, too. In this case, though, I couldn’t say, “You have to make a decision by Thursday. Next!” I can see that collaboration may be difficult.

However, Chanthaboune and I collaborated quite well on our book proposal and got it in by the time they’d specified, and have heard nothing about it for months. I even wrote saying, “Did you decide against it?” and had no response. So the meeting and the collaboration may both be fruitless.

After two hours of that, punctuated by lunch and the arrival of my Amazon review books for the month, I got back to the computer by about 1:30. I did the week’s stint of linkbuilding for Client #4. I got a small assignment from Client #2 and did it, called the niece of the subject of my latest encyclopedia assignment to arrange a visit with her, and responded to an email from the encyclopedia’s editor saying an archaeologist wanted a revision in a piece I wrote last year. Fine with me, said I. The editor mentioned that he had really enjoyed my hookworm article and hoped I’d continue writing for them, which made me think that maybe some people respond huffily to suggestions about revising their stuff.

Along about then my family came home, and once that happens it’s all downhill where work is concerned. They want to talk to me. I tried to be pleasantly responsive while also getting in some link requests. By then it was nearing 5:00, so I headed off to the church, where I copied some music for the choirlet, had a pleasant conversation with the IT guy, led the class, played the bells, and sang in the choir. Then I came home, made omelets for dinner (my menfolks had not made dinner. They had decided instead to wait for three hours for me to come home), answered some more emails, and went to bed with a book.

So basically I worked all day, and got in about three billable hours. I think this is normal. I think that I have to spend quite a bit of time working on future projects and following up with past ones. I want to spend more time improving my skills so I’ll stay up to date. If I don’t land the plum job, then I want to increase the billable time to maybe 50%.

Yes, well, this post is for my future self. I keep looking back to last year when I was learning about SEO and trying to see what issues were frustrating to me so I can write about them at my marketing blog, and I never specified anything. So I’m hoping that next year I can look back at this and see how much progress I’ve made and what I ought to do next.

Yesterday I made it to the gym, posted my blogs, taught my class, came home to a couple of prospective client nibbles and a small new assignment, and then did some work on my own websites (my main site is up in PR, too, I’m happy to say). As I was doing some linkbuilding and idly debating with The Computer Guy whether or not design is the center of the universe, I got a call from the medical school asking me for an interview.

The med school is one of those web content jobs I applied for. It, along with Google and Rosetta Stone, which were always long shots, would offer me the kind of steady income I had with The Big Client. It is fun to talk to new people and to think of new ways to solve new problems, but for me it is more fun to do this when I have steady work in the background.

So I set up the interview, staunchly ignoring the voice in the agoraphobic portion of my brain (#2 son calls it the “old dumb brain” by which he may mean the hippocampus) that was reminding me shrilly of the scary roads between here and the med school.

My husband is taking a vacation day to drive me down there on Monday. He suggested that the fact that they wanted a physical world interview might imply that they wanted a physically present worker.

Naturally, I scoffed at this. No one wants a web content provider cluttering up their offices.

But he could be right.

So the probability tree for this undertaking involves a branch wherein they don’t hire me, one where they do hire me and it gives perfection to my work situation (and conceivably a break on tuition), and one where they hire me but expect me to move to the city where their main campus resides.

My current plan is to dazzle them in the interview so they’ll hire me and either allow me to be a telecommuter or to work at their satellite campus up here three miles from my home.

Plan B is to contemplate moving there, since no other aspect of my work involves physical presence. I really like the town where I live, though.

Since the interview is on Monday and I have a bit of time this week, I figure I’ll brush up on whatever programs they’re likely to want me to use. Their website has some pages in HTML 4.0 and some in transitional, so I think I’m good with that, and they have PowerPoints and and PDF files, so I’m good there, but they may use a content management system. O IT guys, do you have any sense of what the most likely CMS is? Would WordPress do, or must I get to know dotnetnuke or Visual Basic or something?