This is two balls of Wonderwool Glanzeffect (that means "shiny") becoming Salt Peanuts from Interweave.

The new Knitty is up, and it includes some nice stuff. Here are my favorites: the Aeolian shawl which may be just the right triangular shawl pattern that I've been looking for since last spring, a lacy cardigan which seems like a good season-spanning choice, a kids' hoodie with stegosaurus scales, fancy socks, and an intriguing selection of book reviews.

#1 daughter and I ventured out yesterday. I had to renew my driver's license and get to the bank, and we went ahead and had half a sandwich and salad apiece at Jason's Deli. We were talking business. #1 daughter, in addition to providing moral support, is also trying to help me get on with the second of my three business goals of the year: getting systems in place.

I'd seen a group of book reviews for business books designed for creative workers or for women, and I was thinking that I might find those more helpful than the ones that leap into things like LLC and GL. So, having had our lunch, we went to the bookstore in search of such a thing. Instead, I found -- and bought -- a collection of toy patterns by Alan Dart.

I'm a fan of Dart's -- his Christmas Handbook and Witch's Handbook written with Malcom Bird are favorite holiday books of mine, and he's just so cute. His knitted hedgehog with hot water bottle and pirate with full costume are pretty fascinating.

I have no practical purpose for either of them, of course. I went ahead and picked up a nice little reference on green business, since this is one of the topics I write about most frequently nowadays, but that was just camouflage, I think we all know.

This picture of the hedgehog is from blogger Gingerbread Cottage.

It was obvious that I still couldn't be trusted to do the grocery shopping, so we just grabbed a loaf of garlic parmesan sourdough to go with the spaghetti and salad The Empress brought to us, and the ingredients for Fresh Fruit Indulgence, and went home.

There I wrote about the Solent Way and did linkbuilding for a charter boat company right along there. I think that this is where Miss Mapp and Lucia must have lived, and as I worked I was seized with a desire to go there. Because walking in the New Forest and gazing over salt marshes and sailing off toward the Isle of Wight sound excellent right about now.

I added another new UK assignment, too. I am gradually getting a sense of English geography. There isn't very much of it, and writing about 21 branch offices should have done it, you'd have thought, but I still had a terrible time sorting out the towns and counties. I think that the British name their neighborhoods, so that you think you've got a town and a county, and then you get a leftover word...

Yes, well. I quit work yesterday evening at 5:00 when my computer chimed at me. I have some work that I ought to do this weekend, but I hope to do very little of it. Housework, maybe. There's a lot of that which really needs doing, and scrubbing things can give a person an illusion of having set things to rights. And knitting and reading. And I hope that I will make it to the grocery store, too.

We've had a death in the family; my brother. People are rallying round. I'm continuing to work and otherwise not doing much. #1 daughter came up to hang out and provide moral support, and I appreciate that enormously. Partygirl has come to whisk me away for walks in the park and CD has come to sit and be cried at, and really both of those are good things to do, too.

The food brought by The Big Game Hunter's womenfolks is still on the table, being eaten and also there for us to put on plates and offer to visitors. At some point I need to do cooking and cleaning, but mostly I've been working and knitting and that's all.

#2 son said, "I don't know how to feel," and I know just what he means. #1 daughter said, "We're just waiting." I guess we are. I don't know what we're waiting for, exactly; mostly we're just shocked.

I told the church, and I did mention it briefly to a couple of major clients for whom I had deadlines on the day I found out about it, just in case I missed any deadlines (I didn't), but mostly I'm not mentioning it. As though ignoring it will make it go away.

#1 daughter and Partygirl  were over last night.

The mother, grandmother, sister-in-law, and niece of The Big Game Hunter all came over with fried chicken, baked beans, potato salad, a cake, and a couple of gallons of sweet tea. You can tell they've done this before.

I got my work done and my client meeting went well, I think. Then I stopped by the church. So I guess you can tell that I've done this before, too.

Salt Peanuts gets pinker and fluffier. It's a good epic knitting project -- the lacy rib is not hard, and then you just have swathes of stockinette.

The Wonderwool isn't twisted, really. It's like a thin strip of roving with a shiny acrylic thread wrapped around it. It doesn't seem fragile, though.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Yesterday began with class, where I took students' random ideas and showed them how to organize said ideas into a paper. We do this as a group, with further examples for the students to work on. I like this process, and I always hope that the students will walk out of class able to do it themselves.

Then I had to rush home and take #2 son to work (spring break). He works right next to T.J. Maxx, so I stopped in there and bought a jacket for $14.99. The original price was $106. It was worth $14.99 to get out of wool and black, which were my choices. This took about 15 minutes, and I then rushed home and got to work on my medical billing people. #1 son made lunch, bless him, and then I met The Computer Guy for a training with a new set of clients.

We're rescuing these guys from a bad website. The Computer Guy showed the office people how to get into their website to make updates. He kept the mood light by telling little stories while things were loading.

"Don't touch anything while it's loading," he'd remind them, "or it might crash. See how I'm not touching the mouse?" And then he'd tell how he and his dad had built his first computer together when he was a little boy, and he had paid for the parts by doing household chores. He had therefore had a keyboard six months before he got the mouse, and this is why even now he uses keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse.

The office people, only slightly relieved by this, kept watching him with big eyes and frequent giggling announcements that they didn't know anything about computers. We could tell that they were the kinds of computer users who would jiggle the mouse and punch buttons randomly in hopes of making the remote files hurry up. I spoke to them in soothing tones.

"I live three minutes from here," I said, "and you can call me if you get confused and I'll come right up and help."

The Computer Guy would do another fusillade on the keyboard and say, "Okay, now I've changed the welcome page to the homepage and set up your analytics," and the office ladies would look as though all their worst fears were being realized.

Following this adventure, I came home and did some more unbillable stuff. The training was unbillable, but it was a training for a program I didn't previously know, and I didn't have to pay for it. I haven't had time to do any of the needed unbillable stuff for a while -- I missed doing the midmonth invoices, in fact. So it was good to have a bit of time to catch up on things.

As I was finishing up the Northerners, Arkenboy came to the door. While I invited him to come in and sit down, he said he didn't have time and instead stood in the doorway for a couple of hours discussing economics and new streaming video technology and web people.

Web people, he said, are all crazy. They ask clients what they want. Clients don't know what they want.

This is true.

However, as a hardware and network guy, Arkenboy has a different relationship with clients than we web people have. They are all really afraid of him. They'll do whatever he says, in hopes of mollifying the little green lights on their machinery that can lead to the end of all their hopes and dreams. A small business that is offline for ten days, I recently learned (it was during my IT support writing stint), has a 50% chance of going bankrupt immediately, and a 96% chance of going under within the next year.

I think that small businesses have pretty poor chances anyway -- 25% fail in their first year and 50% by year five,with a mere 20% of startups living for a decade -- so those figures shouldn't scare people too much, but they do. So hardware guys, like mechanics and doctors, have people's lives in their hands.

Web people have clients who may be scared at some points in the process, but who may very well have quite strong feelings when it comes to the colors of their websites and how they want their pages written, even if they're wrong.

Once Arkenboy and I had solved all the world's problems (he's in favor of piracy, unless I misunderstood him),I had a walk in the amazing spring weather. All our trees blossom at once, and they did so a couple of days ago. it's a bit sad, since so many of them are deformed and crippled-looking from the ice storm, but it smells wonderful.

I don't know that this can be called a better picture, but it may show the stitch detail better.
This is the whole of the lacy rib, and the first row of stockinette.

I did a couple of rows of the Salt Peanuts sweater yesterday, but mostly I worked. Grading, editing, and working on the Web CT course, to be specific. I have lots more work to do today, as well as sitting in on a training for Visual Basic.

Yesterday CD and I were meeting for our Lenten study. I got a bit derailed with Lent, frankly. Having given up sweets and then had a birthday with numerous cakes, I got off track with my Lenten sacrifice. Having gotten extremely busy at work, I then got off track with my Lenten study.

I'm getting back to it. One of the things in the book that I hadn't done was the personal mission statement. I felt lost with that. However, CD, who is a counselor, has skillz on this type of thing, and she whipped out a pen and wrote one up for me, both in text form and in a nice wheel-like graphic organizer. Was I ever impressed.

She also told me not to refer to my little agoraphobia issue as a mental disorder. That term, she said, means something different. What I have is merely an organic spatial processing issue that can lead to an experience of agoraphobia.

Professionals know these things.

Of course, I'm pleased to know that I needn't think of myself as having a mental disorder.

The next questions in Life@Work are about ambition. The book has pointed out many times the biblical teachings about excellence: we should do all our work as though we're doing it for God, which clearly has to mean that we do it as well as we possibly can. What's more, we're taught to be good and faithful servants to our employers and by extension to our clients and customers and presumably also our stockholders, and to work in a way that causes "outsiders" to respect us, thus honoring God.

Yet being ambitious and materialistic is just as clearly forbidden. What's the difference? Life@Work suggests that it's about motivation, and about perspective. "Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied," says Ecclesiastes. Paul urged the Philippians not to do things out of selfish ambition. It seems fairly clear that selfishness and a dependence on worldly rewards would be a sign of the wrong sort of ambition, while a desire to honor God by excellence in our work is the right kind.

At this point, I thought of two things. First, I remembered a friend of mine who shared that her daughter and son in law, when deciding whether or not they should marry, asked themselves whether they could serve God better together or apart.

I was then, and am now,  incredulous at this. I literally cannot imagine having that degree of God-centeredness, or having kids with that degree of it, either. I can see choosing jobs based on which one would best allow you to serve God (or which gives you the best opportunity for right livelihood, if God isn't the center of your spiritual life), but decisions about whether or not to marry seem so obviously about things like love and romance and selfishness that someone who bypasses that stuff and thinks about honoring God with his or her marriage seems like some other kind of being, not a human. Which just shows how worldly I am.

The other thing I thought of was the lovely hymn, "Be Thou My Vision." Click over there and see something cool about St. Patrick, since tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. YouTube has lots of performances of the piece.

Here's the verse that makes this song relevant to the questions of the day:

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

I baked a Pi Day pie yesterday (Aunt Kitty's Lemon Pie, to be precise), bought new blinds for the boys' bedrooms, met with that client I mentioned,  did some content updates and responded to some work-related emails, cleaned and dusted the living room, talked with my daughters, and thought about my SWAP, though I didn't actually take any actions on it at all.

Apart from these things, I knitted and read a frivolous book from Booksfree.

Salt Peanuts (the sweater from Interweave knits) begins with a moose lace ribbing. I'll need to get you a better picture some day. Still, it is shiny and fluffy and lacy and ribby and pink, so any thoughts I had of having a simple understated rose beige cardi to give a little sophisticated sass to some neutral outift....

Well, I'm going to have a shiny, fluffy, lacy, ribby pink cardi. There are days for that, too.

I might be singing at the Monrovia Traditional Music Gathering this summer.

Happy Pi Day!
I'm going to make pies today, actually. Quiche for breakfast, and a lemon or lime pie for dinner. because it's either that or sing the Pi Song all day long.

I had a plan to sleep in, but my husband had to go to work, so that was not to be. So I got up at 4:30 and made his coffee, and did some updates on web content that had been waiting for me, and responded to an email from my Aussies and checked out my new Twitter followers -- but here's the difference: now I can go back to bed and read for a bit if I want to.

I might even fall asleep, though usually once I'm up, I'm up.

In my whining about how tired and sleep-deprived I am, I may have failed to mention that my husband is also getting up at 4:30, and then he goes and makes ratchets for ten hours.

I plan to do the grocery shopping today, and to visit Partygirl and a local client, and to do some knitting and sewing and cleaning. I may also make a storyboard for my new SWAP, and possibly even get started on it -- organizing and cutting, at least.

Last night I swatched with the Wonderwool.
It's not as soft as it looks, presumably because of the acrylic content, but   it's still very nice. I started it on size 6 needles, with a gauge of about 16 st/10 cm, and then switched to size 3, which brought it down to 20 st/10 cm. This means that I can use this for "Salt Peanuts," which was the next project I was planning to make anyway. So it's really not a bulky yarn, more just worsted weight.

I haven't given up on the Doctor's bag, but it's the Epic Project, so I was needing a Zombie one, and this should be perfect.

Salt Peanuts is this pretty little cardigan from Interweave.

It's in the book The Best of Interweave Knits.

Since yesterday, I've added a couple of things to my work schedule for next week. The Computer Guy and I are meeting with a new client on Tuesday. He says he thinks she needs petting. Like a cat, presumably. I'll be interested to see how he approaches that. We're also going to join forces to do some on-site optimization for my Aussies. They've been a bit frustrating, and probably a bit frustrated as well, because they haven't been able to get the on-site optimization done. My giving them a plan doesn't actually get results if none of the suggestions are implemented, but naturally they feel as though it's not working. It's not working in the same way that a diet doesn't work if you don't follow it. I'm also going to a training session The Computer Guy is doing for some folks who've hired me for a few hours of strategizing. And then my Northerners want me to practice the Dark Art a bit for them. The New Yorker has gone to ground; The Computer Guy already turned in his files and the Art Teacher is trying to get a sign off, and I've been trying to get some word about whether the content is final or not, but we're not hearing, so I guess I'll just assume that it's okay. Same with the Brits -- I'm just assuming it's settled until I hear otherwise.

So basically my work for next week is set, and I'll be able to take the weekend off with confidence. Except for a client visit today and grading papers and doing the Blackboard homework for certification. And housework.

#1 daughter has a plot in which she and a friend of hers manage my workflow and do my bookkeeping and all that sort of general business stuff, also acting as my sales force so I have regular work going on at all times and can therefore afford to pay them for doing this. We talked about it at great length last night, but it's hard to see how it would work.

I have at least for the moment finished with my 20 k words on IT support. I say for the moment because I send stuff off and then wait for the response, which is sometimes something like, "The copy is brilliant!" and sometimes something like, "Please rewrite this completely." Since it can be a while till I know which one it is, I can never think I'm finished right away.

For example, my medical billing stuff has returned to me, so I have that and my rehab addition and the online magazine editing at the top of my list today. I turned in the last of the IT support stuff last night shortly after 11:00, and at 4:30 a.m. there had been no response. I was startled. This just goes to show the power of peer pressure.

What I ought to do now is go back to sleep, but I have to grade papers before class, which means that I have two hours to get it done. It seems possible that sleeping for an hour would allow me to do a better job in the remaining hour than I could currently do in two, but given how great my sleep debt is by now, that's probably not true. In fact, I'd probably sleep through class.

CD told me last night that I should make a list here of all the things I've figured out in the past year. The context was my not having figured out how to get any sleep. However, I think that's more about my husband's work schedule, really. It's true that people in my field don't seem to sleep much, but I think I'd be willing to be the exception, if only because I'm the one who isn't 23 years old. But I see from my xanga that I was sleep deprived at this time last year, too, and it was also because of having to get up at 0 dark thirty to take my husband's coffee to him. This is apparently the big season for toolmaking.

The ladies of the choirlet told me last night that I should get an automatic coffee maker and set it up on my husband's bedside table. I'm thinking about it.

I will say that I now know lots about IT support.

I had a call yesterday asking if I'd be willing to be interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. I have seen the WSJ make people sound like complete idiots, but I still said yes. I thought it was pretty cool to be asked. #1 son told me not to gloat, and told me in particular that I shouldn't gloat about it on my xanga, which I am of course doing right now in spite of his wise advice. This is because I can't be going around gloating about it IRL.

#2 son, who has changed his planned major from architecture to economics, put his finger on the other point, aside from the general coolness of having even been thought of for this gig: if they didn't make me sound like an idiot, I might have a nice little uptick in business from it. "What would you do if you got more business?" he asked.

Good question. I haven't been very successful in getting people Out on the Calendar. While people seem cheerful enough about having their website design out a few months, they want their content immediately. Or rather, they want each step of it done immediately, and they want to have a week or two between the steps and then as soon as they get it back to you, they want the next bit done immediately.

It made me think about success. Because there was a time when having an international clientele meant you were successful. Being mentioned in the WSJ meant you were successful. Now, of course, it means nothing. We're all online, any of us can be read by people anywhere around the world, and I see my analytics so I know I don't have thousands of readers. One with some connection to the WSJ, apparently, but that's random chance.

I've always thought of success in terms of meeting my goals and being happy. But it would be nice to have some external indicator of business success, because as far as I can tell, I've been quite successful so far, but might well have no work at all next month. There ought to be a point at which I could say, "Okay, now I can relax about that, because..."

Actually, in one month and a few days it'll be the anniversary of my losing my salaried job. Maybe I can relax then, on the grounds that if I were going to starve in the gutter, I'd already have done so.

I wrote 10,000 words yesterday. This is what you can write in eight hours, in case you've ever wondered.

That might not be accurate, really. It depends on so many factors, after all. But there was an odd concatenation of circumstances yesterday: namely, that I was writing one long document on a program with a word counter, and that I spent eight full hours on oDesk, where of course they only count the time when you're actually writing. So when I came to the end of the document and I saw that I had eight hours and 10,000 words, I thought, "Okay, so if I actually spent eight hours a day writing, that's what I could produce. Now I know."

I went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday, to get the stuff for my article on the subject, which did get turned in by the deadline. And I spent an hour with the Art Teacher, explaining Google Analytics and what they tell you about design, which was fun. It also involved climbing one squillion stairs. The Art Teacher was a little taken aback by an email he and I had received from our mutual client, nudging us. He had turned stuff in for review on Friday, so getting a "hurry up" message on Monday seemed odd to him. It's actually quite normal. Any computer guy who takes the weekend off can expect to get nagging messages on Monday morning.

On the other hand, you can turn in your article at 9:30 p.m. and not consider it late, so there are pluses and minuses.

I didn't take the picture above, by the way. The nice people at the Gardens sent me a bunch of photos to go with my article.

I fully intended to go to bed early last night. I skipped my class in order to meet my deadline, and signed off from the computer early enough to get some sleep, but it just wasn't meant to be. Sigh.