Today I had to do the insurance enrollment. This is not that big a deal. However, the episode began last night after rehearsal, when my husband said to me, "Do you want to have insurance?"

Now, it is entirely possible, when my husband says something like that, that he is intending to give up the insurance because someone has told him that we're going to switch to National Health soon, or that he is planning to quit his job and move to Montana or something, so I assured him quite firmly that I wanted insurance.

Nope. He was reminding me that I should do the annual enrollment for the insurance. In a "young lady, if you don't do your homework, you'll have only yourself to blame for the consequences" kind of voice. And words, for that matter.

When you've been married a long time, there are usually some auto response issues. For me, one of them is the fact that I am always the one to do all paperwork. This presents itself in my mind as I always have to do everything, but that isn't true. I don't usually have to change tires, kill spiders, stuff like that. Taxes, insurance, school issues, bill-paying, all that I have to do. It makes me cross to think of it. Sometimes I say things like, "What would you do if I died?" in a cross voice.

So I got all bristly last night when he brought this up, instead of saying -- as I should have, and would have, I'm sure, if he hadn't said it the way he did -- "Oh, thank you for reminding me. I'll do that right away."

This morning he said, "I'm not going to tell you about the insurance again." In a warning tone. Like, "Young lady, I'm not going to tell you again to clean that room."

"Good," I said.

"Good," he said.

I waited till he left the house before going online and filling out all  those little boxes.

Now that I've been childish and petty, I'm going to make buckwheat waffles with blueberries and then go teach my class. After that I'll write the website content for the day, and then it will be time to hover vulture-like for Amazon. I think I don't get offered the amazing cool stuff any more, actually -- other people get printers and sheets and video games; in fact, I was offered some software last month, requested it, and they canceled it. Nonetheless, this is the holiday list. So there may be wild gift items.

Don't think I'm complaining. I like the things I'm offered -- books, mainly. It's just that no one madly snaps up the books. You don't have to be there in the first few seconds to get the cool new books on math or Islam. But you never know. I still feel regretful when I think of the way I just barely missed the Bamboo Tablet. This magical and beautiful device allows you to use your computer as though it were --- paper! How cool is that?! Since I have ready access to paper, I have thus far resisted the temptation to buy one of those things with the grocery money. Actually, The Computer Guy recently showed me what Sukey had accomplished with one of these things in nine hours of work. Since these were printouts, they looked just about exactly as though she'd used a pen and paper. It didn't look like nine hours' worth of work, frankly. Still, I will be there at the F5 button at 2:00, I'm sure.

Just in case.

The sky looked pretty great at school.

We have only two more weeks of classes. The rough draft of the big research paper is due on Tuesday and the final draft on the following Tuesday, and there are just four actual instructional days left. I think that all of the students have improved. Those who came to class and did the work will be ready to write for their other classes successfully. The others won't.

After class, I met Blessing for lunch. We had a lot to catch up on. She has been in her corporate job for a couple of months now. It's boring, she says. They play Nerf basketball, but she doesn't join in.

She resents their playing while she works, but recognizes that it's her own choice. She just wouldn't enjoy leaving her work to play Nerf basketball. I think I'd feel the same way.

The corporate job is boring, it was a pay cut from what she did before, and her coworkers leave their tasks to play Nerf basketball in the middle of the day. She's planning to make some strong moves up through the company next year, though. I hope it turns out to be worth it.

I had another perfect workday, myself, but I didn't rub it in.

Blessing's kids are in middle school, so she spends much of her after-work life driving them to this place and that. The holidays are especially fraught. I remember that stage of life. That's what makes you pleased when they learn to drive, even though it's dangerous for them.

Blessing was amazed that I was driving on the interstate. As well she might be.

We were expecting some in-laws today, but they haven't yet called to say they were leaving California, so I'm no longer really expecting them. I figure I can take some time to clean house today, in which case they won't arrive, or I can let it go because I have a lot of work to do, in which case they will.

Maybe a really thorough scrubbing of the bathroom could count as the day's exercise and I could do it during gym time.

I thought you might enjoy some gratuitous late fall/early winter scenery. It's leftover from a photo shoot I did yesterday for a client's blog.

I'm not good at photography, as we all know, but I'm good at blogging, so I'm calling it a photo shoot in spite of how silly that sounds, given the quality of my photos.

Yesterday I added a new client, thanks to a fellow xangan's referral, for which I'm most grateful. I finished a website's working draft of the content (subject to changes required by the design as it emerges). I did my oDesk assignment, graded papers, did reasonably good blog posts for all my blogs, and tutored.

Then I skipped rehearsal to spend three hours getting my new software installed. Not that I intended to spend three hours on that. It just involved installing, reinstalling, uninstalling other stuff, reinstalling, uninstalling, copying to the desktop and reinstalling once again.

Oh, I left out the bits where I went to the Adobe support page and traveled around in circles there. And the parts where I went to Google and typed in the symptoms and ended up in forums where they communicated entirely in acronyms unknown to me. Though it was in  fact in one of those forums that I found the solution.

And when I finished, I discovered that I still couldn't get into my website, because I have the wrong password.

Having already missed rehearsal (and it's the Brahms; I'm not all that excited about the Brahms, to tell the truth), I just had the boys call out for pizza and read Bernard Lewis's new book, Islam: The Religion and the People. This is an Amazon Vine book. I hadn't expected to enjoy reading it, actually. I just felt that I ought to know more than I did. My information about Islam prior to reading this book came mainly from a) ordinary levels of knowledge picked up here and there and b) having had a number of Moslem students over the years.

Oh, and I guess the shocking experience of hearing, at an ESL conference in San Francisco, that "the Arabs should know what we think of them." For an ESL conference in San Francisco, this is the equivalent of a racial slur, which is why I still remember it to this day. It was met with shocked silence. Even though I think a lot of us would have said that our Arabic students' cultural beliefs were in many ways very incompatible with our own. If pressed to say something, I mean.

Lewis's book combines history, humor (not that he ever gets very hilarious, but he includes a smattering of Islamic jokes), and information from the Koran to explain where some of the incompatibilities arose, and how the other side of the question sees it. He maintains a neutral tone in discussions of the place of women in Islam, the notion of the jihad, the separation of church and state, and the Crusades. I once innocently stumbled into a discussion of the Crusades in a classroom evenly divided between African Catholics and Arabs, and I can therefore truly admire Lewis's ability to discuss these things calmly.

So, what with one thing and another, I feel as though I'm learning things. Always good.

I read Marcus Buckingham's The Truth About You over the weekend. It's directed toward 17-25 year olds who are getting ready to leave school and decide what to do with their lives, but since I've found myself at a starting-over point professionally, it was also quite relevant to me.

Buckingham says, instead of thinking of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of what you do well, think about what strengthens you -- makes you more effective, productive, creative, contented -- and what weakens you. You can learn to do things, he says, you can increase your skills, but you can't change these central things about yourself.

You spend a week scribbling down the things you're doing when you realize that you're in the zone and when you realize that you're totally out of the zone, and boil these reactions down to your primary strengths and weaknesses.

Then, Buckingham says, you don't do what you've always done with that information. That is, you don't decide to work on your weaknesses. Instead, you consistently play to your strengths, and you partner with people whose strengths complement your weaknesses, thus creating a well-rounded team. Forget about making yourself a well-rounded person.

Reading this made me think about the Medical School job (which I was not offered; they also haven't said they don't want me, but I figure by now they would have offered it if they were going to). There I was talking with the Web People and hearing that though the job involved doing repetitive tasks in a basement, it was a really friendly, jolly place where everyone worked together very closely and had lots of meetings, as though that were a good thing. I think we all know that hanging out with friendly coworkers isn't a big part of my perfect workday, however nice it may be in the abstract, or indeed on special occasions. Meetings and repetitive tasks also figure largely on my list of things I don't like.

(Not my list of aversions. #1 daughter made the excellent point that agoraphobes like us can't decide not to do things because we find them unpleasant).

I thought specifically about meetings, too. My perfect workday does include client meetings. And yet I hate committee meetings most of the time. By using Buckingham's model, I can get past "I loathe meetings" to "One of my strengths is working with other people to meet goals." I'm just no good at hanging out with people talking about goals we're not actually working toward. It was this insight that made me take a different approach to yesterday's meeting, in fact. And yet, a meeting composed entirely of highly goal-directed, efficient people might rush into things unwisely, so having more thoughtful, ruminative types on the team as well can create a good balance.

So it seems to me that The Truth About You offers a more useful means of identifying strengths and weaknesses than most career-oriented books, and a much better approach to teambuilding. Buckingham is the author of First, Break All the Rules, a popular business book which I've not yet read, but plan to. He's also a very effective speaker. #2 son said the DVD that came with the book looked rehearsed, but I don't see how we can hold that against a DVD. I know what he means, because I thought when I started watching it that Buckingham was an actor portraying a corporate trainer in a drama of some kind. Nope. He's the actual speaker -- just more handsome than most.   The DVD is well done, the book is pithy and practical, and there is a cute little pad for writing down your "love it/loathe it" insights. I think this could be a good present for a young person facing those "whither?" decisions -- or for an older one, even.

Some sewing did indeed get done today.

I got the major pieces of the shirt put together, and the collar done up to the hand work. I get stuck on the sleeve plackets.

Staring, reading the directions repeatedly, and asking others to help didn't work. The cat, as you can see, pitched in wholeheartedly.

I tried looking at finished sleeve plackets, in hopes of getting some notion of the overall gestalt of sleeve plackets.

I had a meeting at church, so I gave up at that point and went to the meeting.

I took the handouts and notes from all the meetings of the year, reminded the group of our intitial goals, and reported that we had in fact met two of them.

Then I said, "I've been a little frustrated about it, because as you can see --" and I brandished the papers "-- we've had the same meeting over and over all year. So either we don't really want to do these things, and the meetings are just for fellowship, or we need to admit that our strategy isn't working and we need to change our approach."

I think they were so astonished that they couldn't rally immediately.

I smiled around the table. CD suggested that we had exactly the right size of group to accomplish real change. She's a counselor, so she knows these things.

"Well then," said I, "how about if each of us leaves tonight with action steps to accomplish, and we see if we can accomplish some more of these goals before the end of the year."

I went with a bracing tone of voice and a cheery smile.

We all left with assignments. We'll see what happens next.

Now I have dinner in the oven, and I may have another go at the sleeve placket. Perhaps I can sneak up on them and astonish them, and thus persuade them to cooperate with me.

We got #1 son's shirt cut out yesterday. #1 son and I are the "we" in that sentence. We made sincere efforts to match plaids and get all the pieces cut out. #1 son doesn't have mad spacial skillz. He said things like, "That's a sleeve? I thought that was the back! It's enormous!" and "I don't understand. What's the point of folding the cloth?" He also asked rather touchingly whether I was going to sew around the buttonholes the way they had on his store-bought shirts.

I didn't get to sewing. Nor to cleaning. I did some errands, and then I was ensconced on the sofa by the fire reading and couldn't persuade myself to change that.

I have to go to early church now, but I may come back and add a picture of the cut-out shirt.

Going for a walk is an excellent way to start a workday. It's good for thinking.

Yesterday was a good workday in many ways. I had interesting work to do and got it done and even sent out midmonth invoices, which I don't always get around to doing -- and in fact there've been months when I haven't had anything to invoice midmonth.

However, yesterday was a day filled with interruptions.

My husband is on short hours. He'll have two four-day weeks and nothing else till the end of the year. I don't feel too bad about this, since they laid off 25 people entirely. Still, I went to the unemployment office with him yesterday and the place was full of people from his company. it's a big company, and employs so many people that they have quite a few who commute from the neighboring state -- that is, they can't usually fill all their jobs locally.  

And here they are filling up the unemployment office instead.

#2 daughter is still unemployed, too.

I'm feeling pretty optimistic about my business. I think people are generally becoming aware that they need a web presence, but many don't know how to accomplish that, or haven't been able to do so successfully. And online marketing is the cheapest kind, so it's a good field to be in during an economic downturn.

Also, many of the people currently doing this -- since you don't need a license or anything  -- are incompetent. The website I'm working on right now has been up for a couple of years, and still has as its meta-description "We need to put a description of our content here." The owners don't know how to look at the meta-language, so they had no idea that their web people hadn't taken care of that little detail. So it's a field in which actually doing a good job puts a person way ahead of the competition right off.

Yesterday I got five hours of work done. I was working for more hours than that, but there was a trip to the unemployment office, and people talking baby talk to the dogs and conversations and people wanting to know what there was to eat and whether the mail had come and what would be the best route from Fresno to Florida (I suggested heading east). And there was a walk in there, too.

If my husband's going to be home for most of the rest of 2008, we're going to have to come up with some plan that involves fewer interruptions. Or I'll have to admit that five hours of actual work is all people usually get done in offices and cope.

Either way, I did what I needed to do yesterday. I'm going to let the website I wrote percolate over the weekend and look over it again on Monday morning before I sent it in. Today I'm going to work on #1 son's shirt, clean house, run errands, and probably loll around on the couch. I did some lolling last night (I had set up "free time" in Outlook and I turned off the computer when the chimes went), but it wasn't good lolling. I watched "The Three Amigos" on TV, ate caramel corn, and knitted. The movie was harmless but stupid, the caramel corn was obviously not good for me, and the knitting was -- actually, nothing wrong with the knitting. It's lace, so it can't really be seen till it's blocked, but it is very soft and lovely, and it's getting longer, which is all it's supposed to do at this point.

Today's shirt will be more challenging. Matching plaids is involved. And it's being done for #1 son, who is very demanding. I have told him that he has to help with the pinning and cutting. #2 daughter would be a better choice, as she has mad spacial skillz. However, she is too far away. This way, if it's done badly, #1 son will be equally at fault and can't complain.

Last night the choirlet sang through all the special music from Advent to Epiphany. Highly productive, though after that one of the wild women from the Elks club told us she'd drink George Clooney's bathwater, and things sort of went downhill from there.

I was extremely relieved that the ladies didn't want to change all the music. I had a meeting on Wednesday with Bigsax and one of the Suwandas, about the Advent and Christmas music. She pulled out the list of special music for the early service, the only thing that has actually been decided so far regarding the Christmas music, even though HELLO it's two weeks from Advent, the list that was actually decided two months ago and has been in rehearsal all that time, and said, "Are you doing all pieces from the hymnal because of the cost, or what?"

Do I sound a little hysterical? I may have lost my temper during that meeting, actually. Not at that point, though. At that point I said gently that it wasn't all from the hymnal, that we'd made the list two months ago and had been rehearsing the music all that time, and that of course I was open to change if the ladies wanted it, but we were short on time if she wanted to order new pieces.

We then spent thirty minutes playing through various pieces, while I thought about what a waste of time these meetings are. I feel as though I've been at the same meeting twenty-five times this year.

I think I remained courteous throughout this portion of the meeting. Then Bigsax laughingly confirmed that he hasn't planned the second service music. He has a vague list of random pieces and people who might do something on Christmas Eve and who knows. Ha ha.

At this point, I was slightly late for the class I lead on Wednesdays, so I said that it was evident that we weren't actually going to plan anything, so they didn't need me, and they should just let me know what they wanted done.

So yesterday I emailed the pastor, saying that I felt that we had hardly accomplished anything this year with me as the leader of the music ministry team, and that I thought we'd essentially just had the same meeting over and over. I pointed out that we had tried for a year to get the church website operable and since summer to get our Christmas music planned, and that we hadn't accomplished either of those things. I expressed my frustration over this, and suggested that someone who wouldn't mind this method of working would be a better choice to head up the worship team.

He got right back to me, saying that he was glad I'd decided to accept the position, and he knew my leadership would make a difference.

Yes, well.

I also taught my class yesterday. We moved on from plagiarism to supporting the thesis, with plenty of examples of how to paraphrase a source and how to use direct quotes. I hope this is sinking in with the students.

Having these discussions of plagiarism caused me to be hyper-vigilant, I guess. I got an odd feeling about the current text at the website I'm writing today, and checked a section, only to find that it had been lifted without attribution from a professional journal. I'm not quite sure what to do with that information, but it just goes to show that there is indeed a plague of plagiarism sweeping the globe.

I have lots of fun work to do today, but even so, it's definitely a TGIF kind of day. I'm seriously tired. I'm going to go to the gym before I start working or possibly take a nice long walk in the gray day, and that may help.

Coming back to say that the walk did indeed help, and so did finding that I am now on page 1 at Google for "marketing [my town]" and also for "[my town] marketing."

Not just page 1, but #3 in the local search results (that's the stuff with the map). This is somewhat thrilling, because I think that many of my clients wouldn't think of looking for "web marketing" or "internet marketing," for both of which I've been highly visible, but will type in "marketing."

Sighkey wrote about plagiarism:

"We continuously fight against plagiarism here as well. I always give a big scary lecture in the first class of each semester pointing out how much I hate plagiarism, that I'm not interested in other people's words, I'm interested in the students own words. At least my students usually accept that it is wrong. I caught one plagiarism case (copied from a previous year's assignment) in the first semester but the system is very frustrating. The university rules make a big deal about plagiarism and how being caught can lead to suspension or expulsion - but they never do it! We had all the evidence and all that happened was the student got 0 for that assignment. Some years ago I had one good tutor who gave up tutoring because of the university's lack of action over plagiarism. My suspicion is that the bigwigs don't want the publicity that goes with expelling people because of plagiarism - doesn't make the university look quite so good when they are trying to sell the university as a'top research institution'."

I think the most frustrating part for me is that so many of the students honestly don't seem to see any problem with copying. We did a project on reporting information, and I gave them a shared topic: a paragraph about an endangered species of mussel. Nearly all the papers came in with shared phrases -- "yellow-brown with green rays," for example.

"Well, how else would you say it?" the students asked.

"If you had all just looked at the picture, then what would you have said? Some might have said 'tan' or 'ochre' and some might have called those green lines 'stripes.'"

I gave them Stephen Jay Gould's example. There's a dinosaur which is almost always described as "roughly the size of a rat terrier." Gould points out that even Americans, who have mostly never seen a rat terrier, use this phrase.

"If we all went and looked at that dinosaur and then someone asked each of us separately how big it was, we wouldn't all say 'roughly the size of a rat terrier.' Some of us would say it was 24" or as big as a chicken or 'kind of little for a dinosaur.'"

We talked about how, if you really want to use someone's words, you can quote them, using quotation marks.

"And if when you finish writing, your whole paper practically is in quotation marks, what does that tell you?"

There was a long silence while they pondered this, and at last one girl suggested, "It's not your work?"

"Exactly!" I suggested to them that if they actually did their research and read a number of different things, and then sat down to write what they had learned, they would not have any problems with plagiarism. A few seemed to find this plausible.

I'm going back up today to work with them on the concept of supporting a claim. I'm contemplating a PowerPoint. I really am.

Yesterday's meetings went well, and I met my deadlines and made the optometrist's appointment (as well as getting an emergency pair of contacts). I had a mysterious request to interview for a writing assignment. I sent off an email to the individual with my rates and links to samples of my work and so forth, and got an instant response, "Do you want a new project?"

"Yes, I am interested in a new project," I answered. It didn't seem like the kind of situation in which a brilliant response was called for. However, I haven't heard back. Still, my calendar is full for the rest of this week and I have things on the horizon. It's also two weeks to Thanksgiving, and I have some in-laws from France visiting in the next week or so.

What I need is a cleaning service that would barter for a site analysis...

Yesterday I went to the gym. I came home and did a blog post. I went up and taught my class -- they are having a really hard time with the concept of plagiarism. Many of them claim to believe that there are very few ways to say anything, and that copying is a natural and reasonable thing to do. We practiced explaining things in our own words. I told them I hoped that gradually they would begin to feel bad when they copied things, but that right now fear of expulsion should discourage them.

Next was a meeting with a new client. He contacted me, having been on the search for a web designer. "Now you're officially a web designer," said The Computer Guy.

"Is that all it takes? Rumor?" said I.

I'm taking him up today to meet The Computer Guy, since he actually does need a web designer. I'll be doing the content. Right after meeting with him, we'll be meeting with another new person for whom we're doing a shared website with SEO followup. If the new fellow signs the contract, his will be our tenth joint website.

My initial meeting with this gentleman took place in a coffee house with his laptop. This was excellent. I meet people at my house sometimes, or at their places of business, but I'm thinking that a laptop would be a good investment once it'll fit the budget. I had printed sheets out from his website, but having the computer there is better.

Then I came on home and finished another blog post before going to the American Association of University Women meeting.

There we had a speaker who told us about women's political power. She did this by reading statistics to us. 6% of governors are women, 17% of both the house and the senate are women, though only 2% of congresspeople have been female if we count from the beginning.... It went on for an hour.

She was dressed in black and charcoal gray from head to foot, not even the relief of bright red shoes that so many of the women wore, and she did the twist occasionally.

Yep. She stood there like an elegant sort of wraith in black and gray, reading long long lists of numbers to us, and when she came to one she liked, she'd bend her arms and legs and do the twist.

I found it interesting, but I like numbers. And dancing

Onward to Tuesday class. We were exhorted to speak up when we saw wrong being done.

I saw another prospective client there. I've already met with her, and she's deciding between having me fix up her current site and starting over with a new one with The Computer Guy. Her current website is with the phone company, and they are charging her $100 a month for hosting. This is four times what The Computer Guy charges, so I'd like to rescue her. Last night she told me that she'd called the phone company and been told that she had just renewed for a year.

"Do you feel that you're stuck with that contract, then?" I asked sympathetically.

"No," came the answer. "What will they do if I just don't pay?"

I quite liked that attitude.

Home again, to respond to client emails and talk with #1 daughter. Her English teacher is a martinet who docked her 50 points (of 200) on a paper for being late to class, 15 points for using the word "you," and 20 points for each comma she didn't care for. One of the other students in the class told the teacher during class, "If all of us are failing, don't you think that says something about your teaching?" And of course he was quite right. Having just heard about the importance of speaking up when wrong is done, I encouraged #1 to make a nice list of the issues and to pay a visit to the department chair. She could explain what's going on in the class and point out that she is going to have to pay to retake the class and have her GPA lowered, even though she has done all the required work and missed no class meetings, just for the sake of a bunch of rather arbitrary point docking.

Today I have those two meetings I mentioned, plus a music meeting, the church study group, bells, and choir. I have blog posts to do, an oDesk hour, and work for several clients, plus papers to grade. I am determined to get exercise in as well, but it seems to me that I will need some fluidity with time if I am to fit all of this stuff in. Like, time should stretch out during the parts when I'm writing the post with the deadline and grading the papers.

Oh -- and I still have to make that optometrist's appointment.