Jan A Writer checked out my Book Club pages and wrote "

I have done tons of those types of exercises. I used to think I enjoyed them, actually. Now I think I might just be a masochist."

I had to laugh about that. I like books with "exercises." My mother writes books like that, so I guess I grew up with them. And I also am the kind of person who has goals and stuff that I'm Working On and things like that. What's more, I meet a lot of those goals. In the classes I teach, I turn people who can't write very well into people who can get always good grades on their papers. I turned myself from someone who couldn't tell an MP3 player from a phone with confidence into a computer guy, and then into a successful freelance computer guy.

And I love books, so my first thought when I have a goal or a project is to find a helpful book.

I still haven't found a book telling The Least You Have to Know About Accounting to Stay Out of Prison, but I haven't given up hope.

Some of you know that I have a long-term goal of becoming a chic old lady. I figured I'd need a few decades to work on this goal, so I started fairly young. I had made some progress, actually. I had quit dressing like a person who didn't own a mirror, or perhaps even a closet. I quit wearing clothes with holes in them, and got dressed fully every day, generally in something different from what I wore the day before. I bought clothes, and even shoes. My husband, who knew me back when I owned two pairs of shoes, both with holes in them, is shocked and horrified by how many pairs of shoes I now own. I was getting my hair cut professionally on an almost regular basis, and wearing makeup when I left the house, and sunscreen every day.

I've backslidden. I show up to teach my class wearing a winter jacket covered with cat hair, in desperate need of a haircut, having done nothing more in the way of grooming than smearing on some lipstick in the car.

So when I had the chance to review "A Complete Beauty Revival for Women Over 45," I did. I have reviewed a couple of other makeover books, and I can tell you that this one is different.

For one thing, the before and after pictures don't have as their primary message, "Good posture and good lighting make you look better in photos." This guy takes ladies who look pretty frumpy and makes them look really beautiful. You can see the pictures at his website. He also has very specific instructions for things like how to put on foundation or determine whether you're too old for a decolletage.

Really. Women of my age will remember the famous Pencil Test. This guy has the equivalent.

Boys and girls, the Pencil Test was the official means of deciding whether or not you needed a bra, back when women considered this optional. You can try it yourself, sometime when you're naked. Take a pencil. Raise one arm. Set the pencil directly under your breast on the arm-raised side. Put your arm down and let go of the pencil. If the pencil falls to the floor, you don't need to wear a bra. You boys can probably believe the results of this test. For girls, however, it just allowed C cup girls like me to imagine that they could walk around braless without being conspicuous. I don't know why we thought that, but we did.

Anyway, if you're older now, you can put on the low-cut dress you were thinking about wearing and face the mirror. Cross your arms. If you don't see any wrinkles at the top of your cleavage, go ahead. That's the test.

This book will also tell you in graphic detail why older ladies shouldn't wear thong underpants.

Hopkins is writing for women who might have been savvy about their looks when they were younger but haven't updated their looks to keep pace with their age, or who quit thinking about such things when they got older, as well as the ignorant and clueless among us. He makes convincing arguments for why you should pay some attention to how you look, give up dark lipstick, and change your hair. And he provides forms to fill out (you can download them at his website, actually) and instructions for making yourself a three-ring binder which will help you give yourself a makeover and then maintain your fabulous new look.

I doubt that I'll go that far. However, I am inspired to get my hair cut and buy something to wear while I teach this summer. I think I already knew I had to do those things, but I now am inspired to do it, and have made a plan for getting it done. That's probably worth reading the book for.

The WSJ lady called me again yesterday. I was interviewing someone for an article, so she left me a voicemail message. It has that cute Northeastern accent and this snippy "I'm trying to get hold of you and I'm on deadline" sound (actually, those were even her words) that we just never hear around here. I saved it. I will probably play it for people. It's just so cute. Those of you who live in New York should feel free to laugh or indeed to snort derisively, but youall just leave a totally different kind of voicemail message, and it's very exotic for us in small southern towns. Like being in a TV show or something.

So I called her back. She wanted to know if I got lonely. And if, since I live in a small town, I had few job options. I regretfully told her no to both. "It would make a better story," I acknowledged. I emphasized how I really hadn't expected to succeed and hadn't wanted to work for myself. I mean, I'm really trying to make a good story for her.

Unlike the WSJ, where they spend months preinterviewing and interviewing and stuff, I did my interview with the local Crisis Center and just went home and wrote it up and sent it in. I'm on deadline, too. Only after choir practice did I realize that I had missed my physical world book club.I was dismayed, but I just plain forgot. Sigh.

Today I have an article, several blog posts, a linkbuilding campaign to finish up and another to begin, a website to write, and papers to grade. I'm also going to call my hairdresser.

My parents sent my husband a cool DVD for his birthday: "7 Days in Laos." We all sat down to watch it while he gave us additional tidbits of information.

Recipes, of course. You can't watch nature shows, or even go to the zoo with my husband without hearing about the best ways to cook every living creature. We also often get to hear the stories about the super powers of former rulers of Laos. I don't know why we never get presidents with super powers. Last night we heard about the king who stopped three million destructive elephants with a baseball bat. I feel fairly sure that Mr. Obama couldn't do that. Or even Jackie Chan.

But he also told us about why houses in his country can't be built like the houses here. It's the spirits in the big trees. You can't cut down a big tree and make a house out of it because the spirit of the tree would cause bad luck for everyone in the village. He told us this, and a related story about fish, in great detail.

"Do you believe that?" I asked him.

Like many people from traditional cultures, my husband often tells stories with the inclusion of how this story is told and believed by many people, though he didn't see it himself. I was curious, though.

He assured me that the big trees in his country had spirits, but that American trees don't. This is why we can build houses from wood. Also, presumably, why we can't catch fish without elaborate equipment.

I sometimes wonder what effect this has on our kids. I know it leaves me with that dreamlike feeling of having entered another reality. It's also why I tend to find American supposed animists and pagans unconvincing. When you've chatted about architecture with someone who really believes that trees have spirits, those Mother Nature and We Are Stardust approaches seem disingenuous.

Here's my lettuce crop.

This means lovely salads every day.

I just pick leaves, rather than pulling up the plants, so there's always lots more, and will be till it gets too hot.

The great thing is that this is the direct result of my having been too lazy last year and allowing the lettuce to bolt -- that is, to produce flowers and seeds.

It all just came up all by itself this year.

True, there are some lost lettuces elsewhere in the garden, as in the picture below, but it's not as though that part of the garden was busy producing anything else besides weeds.

In fact,  my gardens have reverted to jungle.

The roses are downright scary. Think Sleeping Beauty's thorn thicket.

I had eight billable hours yesterday, counting another four hour meeting with the client who wants to write her own stuff. She wants me to type it for her and correct the errors, which I'm happy to do, and give occasional suggestions, but mostly she wants me to tell her that it's good. Which it isn't. So I'm trying to be nice. This is costing her a lot of money. I'm not sure what to do with her. I've never seen anything like this before.

The new designer sent over a mock-up of Client #3's new homepage. I hope she likes it. I'd like to get her up and running. I'd like to get everyone up and running. Remember my workflow diagram? I have lots of work coming in, from all directions. Work is piling up in the green box and spilling all over the floor. In one month, I'll also be teaching five mornings a week. I'm planning a vacation in July. Then I have three classes in the fall.

So I've decided to quit doing things designed to increase my workflow. Not that I've done many of those, because, well, I have eight billable hours a day, and work is splashing all over the pale green boxes.

However, it's scary to think of not trying to increase my workflow, because I have to pay tuitions and stuff, and what if no one ever wants me to do any work for them ever again? I mean, as soon as I get all the extra work sopped up and completed and dry the floor.

On the other hand, it's also scary to think of having so much work splashing about that I fail to complete it within a reasonable length of time, and everybody gets mad at me.

However, at this rate I'll be able to have my dental work done. A year or two ago my dentist told me I had to have some stuff done, and my insurance will pay 80% of it, but the only place in town which does this work requires full payment up front. So I have been trying to save up this unimaginable amount of money ever since, without success.

It could happen. And, if work continues at the same rate it is now and I don't drown in it, I will also be able to pay the boys' tuitions. These things could happen.

On the other hand, I sternly remind myself, I could also lose all my income sources and starve in the gutter.

I don't know why I need to remind myself of this, exactly. To avoid smugness, maybe.

Chapter three of The Creative Entrepreneur has you look at your behavior in four ways, which the author calls four modes of work. You make an image about your best way of working in each mode, list constructive and destructive examples, and then look at the constructive lists for remedies for the items on the destructive list.

The first mode of work is sensing, which I found interesting. My work includes the sensory pleasure of sitting by my window in view of the flowers, with a sweet breeze wafting the lace curtains about, and the stimulation of thinking, of finding information, of figuring things out.

The author wouldn't put those things in the sensory section, but for me there is a physical thrill to good thinking, just as good music feels good in my ears.

I had a brief spell of feeling as though this might be odd of me, but I moved on.

Thinking was mostly constructive for me. So was feeling.
But for both of them, I realized that when I get tired, I am prey to feelings on the negative, unconstructive list. I get smug and self-centered when I'm tired, but that's also when I can feel discouraged by perfectly courteous and ordinary requests for changes in work, or being turned down for a job.
 
I'm not sure why I used "but" in that sentence. Obviously, if I feel self-centered, then I'm also going to react badly to things that could be construed as a failure to appreciate my awesomeness, as our family in-joke goes.

So then we go back to our pages and add "remedies" -- things from the positive, constructive behaviors that can be used to counter the negative, destructive things.

The object of this section is to identify the things that serve as obstacles to success. Our own obstacles, that is: bad habits, things we do that are not in our best interests. We identify the positive behaviors that can counteract the negative behaviors. Then, in the next chapter where we plan our strategies, we can incorporate our remedies.

So after we've made our pages with constructive and destructive aspects of the modes of working, we go back and add the remedies.

On my sensing page, I wrote about getting distracted by noise and feeling anxiety, and then suggested to myself that the remedy could be focusing on the sensory pleasures of my work.

On my thinking page, I suggested to myself that when I found myself entertaining non-constructive thoughts, I could break for a walk or a rest, and come back with better attention and capacity.

The fourth page is the acting page, with the list of positive and negative actions.

For this, the remedy is very obviously to do the positive things and not do the negative things.

I didn't find that as obvious for the other pages. I'm not sure why not. It was a bit of a revelation to me that taking a break would be a good thing to do if I felt disheartened or began thinking in non-constructive ways.

But I also found the remedies step less convincing on the acting page. Yeah, I see that setting boundaries, working reasonable amounts, and taking care of myself and my space would be good things to do. It's not like I wasn't aware of that.  What good is that information supposed to do me? If I were able to take constructive actions all the time merely because I know I should -- well, I wouldn't have anything in the "destructive" sections, would I?

So I went back and made remedies additions to  the pages where I was able to, and they seem reasonable to me. Here's my feelings page with remedies.

But for the acting page, my remedies may have to wait for the strategy section in the next chapter.

In all, this was fun. I often find these personal introspection exercises tedious, frankly. Especially in business books, where they tend to be overtly dull, as well as just having the intrinsic tedium of thinking about yourself all the time.

But I think that this was useful. It gave me a practical background for making plans. I can see the areas where I'm on top of things, and the areas where I need to do more research and figuring.

The book might be more suited to a graphic artist, but maybe not. I think that doing the visual journal bit caused me to spend more time on the questions than I otherwise might have, and perhaps to see connections among them that I wouldn't otherwise have seen.

My daughters and I are working through The Creative Entrepreneur together. I was just writing down the answers, because I'm not that visual, but #2 daughter, having attended a seminar on how to create a business plan and having discovered strong similarities between this book and that seminar, persuaded me to jump in and attempt to do the stuff they recommend.

Accordingly, I made chapters 1-2 into visual things, and started on our current chapter, chapter 3.

I'm putting these here to send on to my fellow book club folks, and for my future self, but you're welcome to check them out if you want.  You know I'm no good at this sort of thing, so you won't hold it against me.

Here's step 1: exploring heart and meaning -- what your most meaningful and empassioned work would be like.

For me, it's gathering, sysnthesizing, analyzing, and disseminating information in creative ways that help other meet their goals.

I've included what Kipling said was the motto of the mongoose: "Run and Find Out," along with the mongoose crest of some royal military outfit that says, "Danger is Our Opportunity," which strikes me as a fitting touch for beginning a business during an economic downturn. Also, loyalty, which I think is one of the things that makes me a good partner to my clients on a heart and meaning level.

For step 2,  we explore gifts and flow: what we're good at. Also what makes us feel like we're swimming against the current.

For me, this was an easy one. I'm old enough to know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at.

Then I guess you need some ideas on how to get the going-against-the-current stuff to flow more easily, in cases where you have to do it.

Marcus Buckingham has some interesting and useful things to say on this subject.

The next section is on value and profitability. What's your USP? I've been in business long enough to know that, too. I offer real solutions to problems small businesses face, with good quality, integrity, and sincere concern for my clients.

That's worth a lot in my field. Many of my competitors offer poor quality, shadiness, and a desire to get the most money from clients with the least effort. Sorry to say that, but it's true. As with construction work, my field is one in which a company that does a good job, on time, within the budget stands out. Add respectful behavior and you've beaten most of the competition right out of the box.

I'm working in a growth industry, providing a useful service at a reasonable rate.

This section makes me feel optimistic. Like, how could I fail?

Next up is the skills and tools section. I have good skills and tools, and so do my daughters. There are also lots of things I need to learn.

I don't know what all of them are.

I don't know what things I really need to know and what I should just pay for.

I don't know, given a shaky list of skills needed, how to learn them all.

I don't know where to find people with all those skills.

I know some of the tools I need, and have most of them, but I don't know what else I ought to have, so there are things I think I might ought to buy, but I'm not sure.

This is an area where I'm still learning, clearly. I've decided, therefore, to show it as an area of growth. That sounds better, doesn't it?

With the four big questions completed, I did a right brain/left brain map.

I think this was largely for fun I don't really see a connection to or important implications for my business. However, it was fun.

This was chapter 2.

We've actually discussed this section already, the business plan book club and I, but now they can look at the pictures, too.

I went on to chapter three, the current assignment, so I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

Girls, you could show me your pages, too!

Oh, and also anyone else playing with this book. I'm very interested in what you're doing.

Yesterday's handbell clinic was long, and I did indeed work hard. We were all exhausted by the end. I assume that the college choirs who came in from other parts of the state went and got out of their concert gear and then hit the nightclubs, but us middle-aged people were knackered by the end.

My favorite part was the singing bells, where you run a stick around the outside of the bell to make unearthly humming sounds. With lots of bells involved, it sounded extremely cool.

Our clinician was a cowboy. The D4 summed it up: "Tight jeans, billowy shirt, long curly hair, mustache, boots." The guy looked like Wild Bill Hickock. And is a handbell director and composer,

We had bandanas and BBQ and and other Western accoutrements.

#1 daughter came to town, and she and #1 son went to a crawfish boil. #2 son went to play ultimate frisbee. And thus is was that the house was empty when I came home. I sprawled on the couch with a book.

Pleasant.

Last night #2 son and I were having a conversation about luck versus hard work.

#2 daughter won a pair of box tickets to see the KC Royals game in a random drawing. That's obviously just luck. No hard work involved, though she might have had to go to the trouble of writing her name down or something .

But #2 son was saying that some people work hard and get good jobs and succeed, and some work hard and fail, and some don't work hard and yet still get good jobs and succeed. Maybe, but I'd have to see the raw data on that. I agree with Samuel Goldwyn, who said, "I believe in luck. The harder I work, the luckier I get."

#2 son likes to brag about getting good grades without studying. Yet those who know him will agree that he throws himself with passionate intensity into things that he cares about. He ends up with hard work and success in those areas, without identifying it as a result of his having worked hard, and I think it spills over into other areas.

He was saying that while #2's success at her job is about hard work, #1's was luck. I can't agree. She caught the eye of someone who had the power to hand out jobs, because she was working hard in an entry-level job. She was recruited away from that entry-level job and amazed her new boss by how hard she worked, and has gotten promotions steadily since. How is that luck rather than work?

I feel amazingly lucky about my self-employment. I think the WJS will perhaps never use the interview they did with me because it was too  happy -- it sounded like I lost my job and then just through luck was able to do well as a self-employed person instead. But I've actually worked quite hard.

Sometimes it might be that success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but the right place is hardly ever going to be hanging out in your living room watching TV, right?

Today I have handbell clinic, where I'll work hard and almost certainly fail, because while I am no longer the world's worst handbell player, I'm still very bad. It should be fun anyway, though.

I have to grade papers rather than writing here this morning. Sigh.

Perhaps I was in a bad mood last night.

I don't think I was conscious of it, if so. #1 son cleaned the kitchen yesterday morning, and when my husband came home I was in the kitchen cooking, which is where he likes me to be, so he was happy. It's true that yesterday was a long and action-packed day centering on biohazardous waste and how tormented Einsten was (just words, no real waste or torment), and that I was tired, but still...

Anway, I threw a little fit in bells. We're getting ready for the handbell clinic this weekend, and Bigsax said something about our bell choir. His remarks ended with "We can do well on all the level 2 stuff."

"That's the trouble," I burst out. "We do well on level 2 stuff, but we always play level 5 stuff. Couldn't we play some level 2 stuff sometimes?"

I suggested that we could lure new people in that way, announcing that we were going to do an easy piece.

"Then they'd just leave when we got back to our regular stuff," objected one of the Suwandas.

"Oh no," said I. "Once they're here, they can't escape. I've been trying to get out for years."

I tried to make up for that by being unusually cheerful and cooperative through the rest of bells, and made a donation to the choir robe fund, and got through much of choir practice without joining in the usual bickering and whining and carrying on, but then we got to the anthem for this week.

"Soon I Will Be Done" is the piece. Here are the lyrics as printed in our music:

I like this song. I enjoy singing songs from the African-American musical heritage which are so popular in our churches.

I'm white. I'm not going to put on a stereotypical "dialect" when I sing this excellent music.

This has never been an issue before, but last night Bigsax got onto me for it. "It's not 'with.' It's 'wid.'" He stopped the rehearsal to tell me this.

"That's offensive, Bigsax," I said.

There was a shocked silence. Many of the people in the choir are of a generation that was brought up to be very casual about racism, and they really don't see what's wrong with it.

My students are of a generation that was brought up to be very casual about public obscenities. I don't correct them or get shocked at their speech, but I also don't join in.

Well, there it is.

#2 daughter has called me on the phone, so I might as well give up on this entry...

Janalisa and I went for a walk yesterday. We weren't complaining, though we were both feeling slightly fraught over our respective workloads. Janalisa has house guests coming, and of course I have lots of work. I added a new six-month-two-hours-a-week guy, and I have a lot going on with my regular clients, including getting the client who wants a new page to sign the contract and pay the new designer his deposit so we can actually get her page done. His initial concept mock-up arrived today, and I like it very much.

I toyed with the idea of signing and paying him myself in order to get this going. However, it is not impossible that this client might decide to go in some other direction, and there I'd be. With this client, a regular, I am being paid for the project management tasks. Often I do them for free. I've been thinking that I'd like to change that, and I have another project coming up for which I may do exactly that.

Last night in Tuesday Class my friend the B&B owner and I were discussing project management. We were chatting about it sotto voce between hymns and then we got into the study of Deuteronomy and she looked meaningfully at me during a discussion of Moses and Joshua and mouthed, "project management."

It is possible that this was the first time anyone has considered Deuteronomy as an example of PM.

Anyway, in addition to my regulars and my new guy and a bunch of sites launching or poised to launch and one more pro bono site that I offered to write last August but which is just now getting its contract signed, I also have a bevy of people with whom I'm in correspondence over their jobs: a Portuguese tourism site, a vocal training site, a Venezuelan energy rental site, and a local daycare. So I start my day with a list of five projects to accomplish and finish with... five projects to accomplish. Not the same five projects, but not a completely new list, either.

Maintaining enough availability to keep my regulars taken care of while also courting enough new business to keep me confident of the future is a challenge.

However, now that I no longer have any hope of actually finishing all the projects on the day I schedule them, I may feel more free to leave them alone while I go to the gym. After all, there's no chance of finishing whether I go to the gym or not. Makes sense?

Janalisa gave me many useful suggestions on following Weight Watchers properly. She is a WW girl herself, and svelte. #1 daughter is a tiny skinny girl who works for Jenny Craig, though I think we all know that she has never tried the program and in fact can rarely manage to get herself up to 100 pounds even with unlimited eating of junk food. I feel that I am getting expert advice. I have exercised, eaten right, and kept track of points every day so far this week. It is of course only Wednesday.

In other news, my husband lost his temper last night. Domestic arrangements chez fibermom have been scanty. He comes home from a ten hour day at the factory and has to clean up the kitchen. I don't want him to do that, because it is the job of #2 son, but my husband doesn't like to leave it undone. Nor does he like to do it. #1 son spends most of his day relaxing, so I suggested that he could do a bit more around the house, since the rest of us are working.

He agreed that he probably should, but suggested that there were faults on all sides, since we don't clean up after ourselves. "Do we have to use that many dishes?" he asked. My husband agreed that we use too many dishes, and indeed that we own too many dishes, and they "don't do any good anyway!" Which I take to mean that they fail to fill themselves with tempting foods, so why do we give them houseroom? We then moved on to a discussion of whether it's better to cook the laundry in the dryer or to set said dryer for a shorter time, thus not shrinking clothes and wasting energy -- but also perhaps leaving the clothes damp because of going away and turning on the toggle and forgetting all about said dryer. There was also a discussion about ice cream, but I forget what particular point of ice cream stewardship was involved.

Maybe our house needs a project manager.