I had a busy weekend. There was a little reading and a little knitting (I'm almost through with the front of the Doctor's Bag, and it's not symmetrical. Did I fail to follow the directions on the left or on the right, or is it just another example of how badly written the pattern is? Not sure yet), but also a good deal of work and meetings and stuff.

One of the things I spent a lot of time on yesterday was preparation for a meeting I have this morning right after I teach my writing class. I also spent a lot of time getting ready for the class, but that's another story. I'm meeting with a new client, one of The Computer Guy's clients.

I thoroughly analyzed the website. I got some people to test the navigation. I tried out all the possible paths. I went through her Analytics for the past year and checked the paths people generally took. I ran diagnostics on it. I was totally prepared.

This morning I was writing a post about this at my marketing blog and went over to the website to check an example.

It was completely different.

The Computer Guy, who apparently never sleeps at all, changed the whole thing overnight.

It's vastly improved, of course. However, since he didn't give me a heads up on that, I could very easily have walked into that meeting with my recommendations and been told, "Yep, we already did that." Also, I have to go back over there now and re-analyze.

I'm confident that The Computer Guy didn't do this to me on purpose. I'm representing his firm here, he's the one who pays me, and there's no reason for him to want to sabotage me with his client. No doubt he was preparing for the meeting himself and noticed the same things I did.

However, if for some reason you wanted to make some SEO professional of your acquaintance look incompetent in a meeting, this would be a good way to do it. I realize that few of my readers will have the opportunity, and fewer still would want to do this, but you can file it away for future reference. Maybe you'll put it in a novel someday.

One of the free things I get is Lucky magazine, "the magazine about shopping and style." I'm not sure in what way it's about shopping. There aren't articles about shopping strategies or anything. It has lots of pictures of clothes in it, and I guess it's possible that you're supposed to look at the clothes and then go shopping and buy them. That may be how it's connected with shopping.

In any case, I look through it every month and then leave it at the gym. This month, it seems to be saying that spring fashions will be about mixing structured pieces (military or button-down office looks) with airy feminine things (whole lot of billowing going on). There's also a lot of yellow -- yellowed greens, ivories, golden beiges -- and metallics. A general shimmeriness more than the lurex and bangles effect.

In the middle of all these pictures there's always a little essay by Jean Godfrey-June, who is bright and witty and provides a paragraph or two of something interesting before describing products. This month, she said that she  doesn't relax while she's working and she doesn't get why people think she should. But when work is finished, then she will "look for ways to enhance and deepen my sloth."

She's got the right idea.

I did some work yesterday, and I've done some this morning, too. But I also hung out with Than Man and The Empress a bit, watched Numb3s with the boys, got a start of teh NYT crossword, and scoped out the new pattern books at the fabric store. I even bought a few in the 99 cent sale.

I'm not sure that I can defend having done this. I don't do a whole lot of sewing these days, though I have made a shirt and a skirt in recent months, so I guess I might make a jacket. I love shawl collars and curvy little jackets and I can imagine this one in a rose beige velvet. 

I can also imagine slouching around in this tunic. In the summer, I made myself several tops that looked basically like nightgowns, on the theory that I could wear them with jeans and be as comfortable as though I were working in my nightie but could still answer the door.

This kind of floaty thing is big for spring, if you believe Lucky magazine, but you should pair it with tailored trousers and ankle boots. Oh, and a menswear tailored vest in somethig like a charcoal gray pinstripe, topping the whole outfit off with a coppery scarf with a subtle gleam.

Just letting you know.

I got in all the billable hours I needed this week, and plan to have plenty for next week, too, plus some interesting meetings. I have to grade papers today. I also have that book proposal, which is beginning to haunt me.

But along here pretty soon I'm going to fit some sewing time in. And I may start with this tunic.

Another fun choice would be these Laura Ashley bags.

I have lots of bags, including a very serviceable briefcase with room for a laptop, should I ever get a laptop.

The laptop fantasy is part of the whole traveling about working from hotel balconies and in big city parks fantasy. I obviously have no need for a pattern for a laptop bag, expecially not one that involves complicated zipper work, because we all know I couldn't do something as three dimensional as that.

But don't you love the one with the gussetted pockets? And the floral one, though for the meetings I attend, it would be wildly inappropriate.

For hanging out an a hotel balcony, though, it would be fine. I could sip champagne while writing blog posts on the subject of paperless billing and green entrepreneurship. Then I could pack it up and carry it with me to a museum, where I would continue in the sculpture garden, polishing up content for a website or a report on linkbuilding strategies.

I could actually do that now. I could snitch my son's laptop and go do that today. And I might. I could go grade papers in the Arts Center rose garden, or in the park, where I could enhance and deepen my sloth when I finished by taking a nap under some nice tree, if there are any left after the storm.

One Christmas, an aunt and uncle sent my family a gift, saying that they didn't intend to start a regular gift exchange with us and we shouldn't feel we needed to reciprocate, but we'd had so many exciting things going on that year... something like that. #2 son, who was little at the time, said, "I guess we have had a lot of victorious accomplishments this year."

I thought about that yesterday, because we had some victorious accomplishments, and it was a good thing, since they came in a sea of nonvictorious non-accomplishments.

This is where I'm teaching this term. Not as picturesque as last term, but also not nearly as far away. I don't have to drive on the freeway, although I do sometimes anyway in order to keep from backsliding on the old coping with agoraphobia.

One of the students in my class there came up to me yesterday and said "I know who your husband is." He works at the same company, though not in the same time or place. "His name comes up the most," he said, "as someone with an amazing work ethic. He's worth three other workers." He sounded awestruck, actually having met the wife of the legendary worker. He did also mention that the people who work under my husband say it's better not to be around him when he's angry.

I don't think my husband knew that his name came up at all, let alone frequently. Someone should have told him. I did, of course, when I saw him last night.

Then #2 daughter was removed from probation at her job two months early, and one of my new clients wrote that the first draft of his website was "absolutely brilliant." He didn't even ask for any changes, which I found especially pleasing since I had written so much of it while conducting multiple IM and email conversations with other people. I hadn't been at all sanguine about it. However, I had used my ultra-snazzy new Word template to prepare it, so that might have helped.

These victorious accomplishments only partly make up for the unvictorious bits. For example, this workspace, which is so desperately in need of GTD processing that I am on the verge of feeling completely overwhelmed.

My husband's paycheck arrived for the week of the ice storm -- they might almost just as well not have bothered to mail it, really. I don't get paid for my teaching job till midmonth, though of course I've been working on it since right after Christmas and teaching since mid-January. And of course most of the current projects have to be finished before they get paid for.

So we're both working about 50 hours a week and still feeling a bit pinched financially because of the lag.

I'm getting in all the billable hours I wanted. I'm also doing a lot of unbillable hours right now, but they're meetings and interviews and research for upcoming jobs, so that's good. Once I catch up from the ice storm, I should be fine with that goal.

Setting up my business systems and learning all my software properly? Who has time? Getting to the gym regularly and eating right? Who has time?

I'm also behind on my grading. Again, the ice storm affected this -- instead of getting the papers in on the right schedule, I got them all at once when everybody got their power back. Thursday night I stayed up till nearly midnight getting all the papers for my face to face class graded, and then I got to class without them. I stared stupidly into my briefcase and said, "No, they're not here. I'm sorry. I haven't been sleeping."

Around 5:00 last night, I just had to stop working even though I wasn't finished. I had to go buy some groceries, and also Outlook had just beeped at me that it was time to quit: TGIF. I went out into springlike weather and drove off thinking that I felt quite relaxed and not even tired any more. As I dreamily sailed across the parking lot, it struck me that I was confusing complete exhaustion with calm relaxation, and should probably try to get a little adrenaline going before I fell asleep and killed myself.

So today, I have promised #2 son that I'll try to form some guesses about our taxes in spite of not having received all my 1099s yet, and then he'll want help with the FAFSA. I also have several things I'm supposed to do for music and church. I have a couple of hours of work left over from last week that I really feel I ought to do (the client said, "I know I'm not your only client," which always makes me feel as though I'm cheating on them or something) and prep for a Monday morning meeting, and of course a whole bunch more papers to grade. I've got to do the aforementioned GTD processing before fear that I'm forgetting something becomes a serious source of stress. I also have a home and family that I ought to pay some attention to.

So, yeah. A little organization first thing today, and then things may seem more manageable.

We had a new member with the choirlet last night.

We were singing through a variety of pieces to choose our Easter music. This involves sight reading at various levels of skill, and looking over people's shoulders because there aren't enough copies of the music, and trying out various harmonies in a fitful fashion, and other shenanigans. It's fun.

We settled on half a dozen pieces for the Easter season. I've been nominated to sing "The Holy City" as a solo on Palm Sunday. I have a list for the Danish orchestral arrangers to fix up for us. We felt as though we had made some good progress.

Next was cake. It is possible that I have mentioned before that the choirlet's program always includes these features: tea, singing, cake and conversation.

One of the ladies had brought Possum Pie, a confection of pecans and chocolate and whipped cream, and another had brought an angel food cake with strawberries. By the time we reached the table, plates filled with these delicacies had already been distributed, so we gave up all thought of choosing between the two and sat down and enjoyed them.

We caught up on everyone's ice storm experiences and so on and began talking about music for Lent. Naturally, this led to discussions of sin, snakes, and the time MR's whole family was so infested with seed ticks on a camping trip that they had to drive home wearing only T shirts she'd bought for them at a souvenir shop. Her description of the scene when they had to stop for gas was hilarious.

I've known these women for just about exactly a year now, and I sat thinking about how nice it was to have made such friendships, and how much we've been through together in that year.

We should make a cookbook, with cakes and funny stories for the year.

I spent much of yesterday virtually in the UK. This happens when you're working on stuff for another country. I think it's the reason that I get all that pornographic sounding spam in German -- though I don't have enough German to know for sure what they're saying, so it doesn't bother me much.

Last time I was hanging out in the virtual UK, I got to see how different it is not to talk about drug users primarily as criminals. This time, I got to learn about compliment slips. These are little things rather like business cards with the words "with compliments" on them, and space to write. English people put them into packages, it would seem, and use them to write little notes on. Isn't that a charming custom?

Here in my own xanga neighborhood, I know a woman who works for an English IT company. I know from reading her blog what it is like to work for the British. I now also know that it is a normal business custom in the UK to send people little gifts and write them little complimentary notes.

Now, I do get compliments, in the American English sense, from my clients. I have no complaints there. But I can't help but notice that, even though I now work for three English companies, I still do not have access to a break room always outfitted with chocolate, Welshmen, or little presents with notes saying, "with compliments."

True, I have access to an astounding number of TV channels and large amounts of open space, but I'm not sure that this is a fair trade-off.

I got up with my husband at 4:30 this morning, but I was so tired that I went back to bed after I made his coffee, and slept until 7:00. I am now therefore not tired or sleep-deprived, but I am feeling groggy, because that's what going back to sleep does to a person.

I have to go write some soul-stirring words on personalised and specialised printing (I keep telling my spell checker that I'm in England, but it forgets and corrects me all the time anyway), and then I have virtual meetings with a couple of my developers regarding revolutionary new processes or something. Developers have revolutions continually. You'd think they were small countries in extreme climates. I also have lots of papers to grade. And then I have to write Australian for a bit, and if I have time I will then analyze some hunting stories in preparation for a meeting tomorrow.

Thanks to those who visited and commented on my About page. It turned out to be magical, by the way. The goal of the page was to lessen the amount of basic "can I trust you?" interviewing required by new clients. Shortly after I made the suggested changes, I had an email from a new client consisting of "Here's what I want done. How's your diary and how much?"

"How's your diary?" I took to be British for "How busy are you?"

When I first began working among the IT folk-- the web people, if you will -- I had an encounter which left me with the impression that "What tools do you use?" was a common greeting. This is not the case, as I discovered when I tried it out with the next designer I met.

But I think that variants on "How busy are you?" (including "What's your availability?" "How's your schedule?""Do you have a lot of clients?" and "How far out are you on your calendar?") are the way this community says, "Want a job?"

In addition to my snazzy new About page, I also had The Computer Guy make me a report template for Word. Do any of you use Word? Because I've got to tell you, you can do so much stuff with Word, you wouldn't believe it.

Or possibly everyone knew except me. The Computer Guy sent me this report template, and I saved it as a document, thinking that I would just open it up and replace the content when I wanted to write a report. I had even thought so far as cutting and pasting, since there was a table in there, and some other fancy stuff. He said to call him for a walkthrough, and I thought he would be giving me tips on using it like "That box I gave you can be used for this and that type of paragraph, and your page will look especially good if you use that other thing as a footer."

No such thing! It turns out that you can save styles into your Word set up, and special boxes and side bars and stuff, and then whenever you want one, you can just put them in as you would a link or an image.

What's more, once you've done this, all your Office software is customized. The color schemes for all the various things that were in there already are now coordinated, and the fonts and spacings and things are all customized. So I can make PowerPoints or Excel spreadsheets or whatever that match my website.

This should increase the luxuriousness of my clients' experience with no further investment on my part, aside from an extra keystroke or two. It also should do the intended job of distinguishing the paid-for reports from the casual emails enough to lessen my unbillable hours a bit by establishing some boundaries through design. #1 daughter says I should turn on the Toggl every time I pick up the phone, but that's because she works with lawyers. I think that changing the environment is always the first choice for changing behaviors. We'll see.

Also, I was jealous of The Computer Guy's reports, which were far and away more snazzy than mine. But I'm looking at it as a business investment, not as coveting thy neighbor's headers.

Suppose you wanted to have this done for your own business, I can hook you up with The Computer Guy. Just message me. But some of you who have businesses are artists. So you could probably get quite good results from the stuff that's already there in the software. When you make a new document, choose a template. On the Home page, look at the boxes on your toolbar called "styles." I now have special custom styles there, but you will have some stuff to play with already. Then on the Insert page, in roughly the same spot, you'll find "Quick Parts" and "Text Box."

My glee over these things was, for The Computer Guy, roughly akin to someone's saying, "What? I have headlights? You're kidding! How cool!" and then, moments later, saying, "You mean this car has a RADIO? You're kidding!" You may feel the same way. I realize that many people, upon first opening a piece of software, would naturally learn how to use it, and explore all the twiddly bits and play with it.

Not I. I learn about my software on a Need to Know basis. And so, in case there are others like me out there, I draw your attention this morning to the top right quadrant of your MSWord 2007 screen. Go forth and play!

I was impressed that there was no point at which he made me feel stupid, even when he was saying, "Now go to [some screen I've been failing to notice for years as I used the program every day]" and I was saying "Huh?"

Most people would not have been able to resist saying, "Excuse me? You've sent me 412 Word documents and you've never noticed the existence of the 'templates' option? Or the Quick Parts box?" The Computer Guy merely said, "Quick Parts. With a Q. Count over from the top left: pages, tables..."

He gets points.

I stayed up late last night, writing my About page.

Some of you have websites. You know what I mean. The About page is, as I explain to my clients, the place people go when they're thinking about hiring you, buying from you, or for some other reason sending you money. It's your chance to make your visitors like and trust you. That's the place for your mission statement, I say, the picture of you and your family and dog. If it were possible for each visitor to see a picture of him or herself, that would probably be the ideal About page.

About pages don't matter much for search, only about 10% of the visitors will go there, and while hardly anyone actually reads the whole thing, it is a page where it's good to have a lot of text. People will skim it and feel reassured. So, as a general rule, About pages are pretty easy to write.

Not for my own website, though. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, after all. I've written the whole website in the first person so I don't have the option of switching over to third person and speaking about myself as an observer.

Originally, I didn't even have an About page. My main reason, apart from the obvious difficulty of writing a good About page for myself, was that I didn't expect strangers to visit my website. I have highly competitive keywords and make very little effort at SEO for my own site, hardly anybody is looking for me by name (that's what I'm #1 for), and I figured people would just go there because I'd given them my business card. They would therefore already trust me, and my website only needed to be reassuring about the idea of getting some computer services, which can be scary.

But in fact I get calls and emails from tech guys, who must have found me somewhere. I spend 20 minutes or so with them, till they say, "Well, you sound like a bright, accountable person" and hire me. So I figured I could save some (unbillable) time by adding an About page which carried the message, "I am a bright, accountable person." Accordingly, I got The Computer Guy to make me another navigation button, and stayed up after rehearsal last night and wrote the thing.

You know where my website is, right? If you have the time, I'd love for you to go over there and read my About page and see what you think. Then come back and tell me. Feedback is so helpful. Thanks.

Now, when I decided to stay up late and do this, I wasn't aware that my husband would be having to get up at 4:30 this morning for work. He doesn't tell me these things. Since it means that I also have to get up at that ungodly hour, you'd think he'd mention it. Nope.

So I'm seriously sleep-deprived this morning. I have a lot of work to do today, praise be, but I might take a nap in between stints.

Last night I also got back to the Master Chorale. We had a whole bunch of new young singers. The website I wrote for them just went live last month. It has pictures of young singers. I'm not going to claim a causal connection, I'm just mentioning it.

"In choir conducting school," said our director, "we learned to teach the fugue on the first day. Also on all subsequent days." So we sang fugues. With fear and trembling. In German.

I think tea and waffles would be just the thing this morning.

Church yesterday, where we prayed for those who still don't have power, and compared tree damage stories.

Then I came home and worked. I'm just about to catch up.

In addition to working, I read Blue Blood, by Susan McBride. This gave me an odd sense of deja vu when I graded a paper by a student of the same name. Like, didn't I already grade her paper? That's not the same topic, though... Then it struck me.

This novel was disappointing to me, actually. I wouldn't give it an A. I've enjoyed several others of the same series, so I was excited when Booksfree sent me the first in the series. There's a sassy heroine and snappy repartee and clever metaphors. But the first book has a high level of whining. Poor me, my parents gave me everything but love. I still live off the trust fund they set up for me, but in my heart I'm an artist. I get my mom or her minions to do stuff for me every day but I show my fierce independence by rejecting the pretty dresses she gives me.

Like that. True, the book started off with the whiny girl whining about having dinner with a wealthy philosophy major who played the pipe organ and told her about his trip to Tibet. Oh, I'm so bored! Why won't they let me have a hamburger, which would be so much more authentic and cool than salmon. Eeeeuw, this guy is so boring, talking about philosophy, why does my mom always do this to me?

McBride wised up by the time she wrote the later books, so I would just recommend that you skip this one.

I also made lemon bars. I use the Southern Living recipe, obviously. I mean, I have standards. I use a larger pan, so that each individual lemon bar is thinner. That means you can eat two. We had this with pork chops in raspberry chipotle sauce, rice, and salad.

This meal did not tempt the boys away from the Super Bowl.

I was invited to a Super Bowl party, actually, but I was determined to catch up on my work before the beginning of the week.  At least that's my excuse.

I stayed home with my menfolks and knitted after I had done all the work I could stand.

The Doctor's Bag is coming along --- well, I'm not sure I can say nicely. I'm using small needles and a heavy yarn so I'll get a really stiff fabric. This is what I want as far as final outcome goes, but it's not fun to knit a stiff fabric. Especially not with a texture stitch.

I'm making this much smaller than the original. The pattern says to make the front 20 x 11, and I'm going with 14.5 x 8, preserving the shape but in handbag size rather than suitcase size. I may have enough of this yarn to make a suitcase size one later. I still have this fantasy about traveling around doing my work on a laptop, and a matching purse and weekender fit right into the fantasy.

I read a sewing blogger who says that when she makes an outfit that doesn't fit into her current life, it encourages her to expand her current life so she'll have someplace to wear the outfit. Not an altogether bad plan.

I went out for a walk yesterday, intending to take pictures of the aftermath of the storm, but it was too sad. It would have been like taking pictures at the scene of an accident or something. So many trees have broken in half that our skyline looks completely different.

"Skyline" may be the wrong word for a place as rural as this, but there is all this openness. And every house in my neighborhood has horrible devastation, or else stumps with stacks of branches and lengths of trunks.

Sad.

I thought I'd grade papers yesterday, but so few are in that I couldn't. I don't grade ont he curve, exactly, but I like to have a sense of how the whole class has done on an assignment before assigning grades, for the sake of having realistic standards. Whether my students had no electricity, were among those who have been working around the clock during the crisis, or are taking advantage of the situation to turn their papers in late, I don't know, but my college inbox was almost empty.

I did get another job, one of those where if I do well on the first task they'll keep me on for the future. This is another oDesk job, and they've set me up for ten hours. I should explain that buyers can set an upper limit of working hours, so that they don't end up with some overzealous worker racking up way more hours than needed. I don't expect to have ten hours a week with this buyer, but I take it as a good omen. I looked at all my assignments there, and if I actually worked all those hours, I'd have 36 hours a week there, plus my teaching and my private clients, and of course I'd never get to sleep at all.

In actuality, I decided at the new year to increase my hours there from the 2008 average of three a week to five a week. In January, I did six hours the first couple of weeks and ten the second couple of weeks. Were the new client to have ten hours for me on a regular basis, I would meet my 2009 goal for billable hours. I'm doing reasonably well with the reduction of unbillable hours, too.

I'm not doing as well with my health-related goals, but that is in part because of the ice storm. Being without power made me feel like the helpless plaything of fate, having no choice but to huddle under blankets eating corn chips (that's what the menfolks brought back from their expedition to find foods that didn't need to be cooked, but there were also oranges and carrots here -- still are, for that matter). CraftyMommaVT would doubtless have said that it wasn't cold and just strapped on her snowshoes and grilled up some chicken in the backyard, encouraging us to play touch football while we waited for dinner.

I don't know what people from The Frozen North would have done, really, but she left a comment yesterday about her favorite thing to do after ice storms that just left me flabbergasted. Like having a favorite thing to do after volcanic eruptions or something. If nothing else, it implies that ice storms are a normal part of life where she lives.

I'll leave you with that sobering thought.