Happy Easter!

I'm making a pie and a cake before getting to church at 8:00 a.m., which is a nice way to begin the day.

If you aren't that big on early mornings, let me offer you this YouTube from the Onion, on possible solutions for annoyingly cheerful people.

My menfolks helped me clean house a bit yesterday, so I spent some time reading. It is possible that I should have worked, but I didn't. However, having cleaned up my work area and filed everything made me feel as though I'd gotten some work done anyway. My work area looks relatively civilized now, though it still doesn't match my fantasy office space. I read this book that suggested comparing your current spaces with your fantasy perfect spaces and then just adjusting the real one till they matched. I don't know about that.

I'm not only giving you a glimpse of my relatively civilized office space, but also of my clean refrigerator, because that felt like an accomplishment. In the course of cleaning it, I discovered that I have half a dozen jars of pickles. I have no explanation for this... maybe it's because we don't eat pickles, so whenever I need some I go buy a new jar, not realizing that I already had jars in the back of the refrigerator.

We also have a jug of Red Diamond Sweet Tea, which nobody who lives here will drink. Maybe someone will drink it today at the Easter festivities. If not, I will have to find someone to give it to. Can you take a jug of Sweet Tea to a homeless shelter? Maybe I can take it to the church.

I also went out and did the shopping. I really dislike going shopping on a Saturday, and usually try to get it done early before the crowds appear. However, #2 daughter was telling me about her adventures in France, and that was worth facing the crowds for. So there I was in Target on a Saturday midmorning, in heavy shopping cart traffic, buying things like a drill and a bra. I needed to buy a new bra, I felt, because I have noticed that gravity is not my friend any more. Until recently, any wisp of lace would do so long as it had an underwire, but I think I may now need a bit of engineering. I probably should have a proper  fitting, or at least go to a store where you can try the things on, but instead I stood in the bra section at Target looking at the wares and trying to choose a serious one.

You know, it is not only your bosom and your bottom that slip a bit as you get older: your face does, too. I mean, parts of it actually slide down underneath the skin where you can't see it happening, except that the countours of the face change and your eyes appear to be in a different spot. It's not that your eyes have moved, but that the interior portions of the face have slid down.

And then, as you get older yet, more parts of your body slip down, too. However, by that time you're over thinking about what you look like. I hope.

The other big thing that happened yesterday was that we got the financial aid announcement from the extremely expensive school #2 son wants to go to. He got a bunch of scholarships, and some government loans and even a grant, but it still is going to be a lot of money.

At the moment, I'm making kind of a lot of money, by my standards, at least, but I am not totally confident of keeping that up. I guess, if I continue making money like that and spending money as though I weren't earning that much, we can have enough on hand to pay the tuition regardless.

So, as you can see, I have a variety of worldly things on my mind this morning. In a few minutes, I will leave my house (which smells wonderful -- having someone come in and bake a pineapple upside down cake every day would beat out any scented candle on the market) for church, where perhaps I will develop some uplifting thoughts instead.
 

Today's plans have two threads. First, I have to cook a clean a little, send thank you notes, deal with the garden, and generally get things settled for Easter.

Second, I have to relax a little.

I had a couple of performances yesterday, class, finished up the work for The Computer Guy. I still have a couple of clients with things hanging. 

One is the person who needs a design. And this is all I can do with Dreamweaver.

Well, of course, if the design is already done, I can have my way with the words. I can do anything with text.

But as far as design goes, all I can do is this flat 1980s stuff. For the modern style, you have to be able to make actual designs and then cut and code them and stick them together with great precision.

I do have a couple of actual designers, and I sent their estimates -- ranging from $300 to $1200+-- to the client, but haven't heard back yet. I've never worked with either of them, but they've got to be better than me, right?

If I don't get started, I will be shopping with the crowds at the grocery this morning.

Last night I was in the choir loft for the Maundy Thursday service when it started storming. There was hail drowning out the singing and the sermon, and then the rain began coming through the roof and falling onto our heads. The bass directly behind me got up and came to sit with us altos, since he was in an absolute torrent, but the rest of us just kept singing. I took off my glasses, since they were getting too rain-spattered to do me any good.

The Chemist mentioned that she was having trouble with her instrument. I thought maybe it was allergies, but she wasn't speaking of her voice. In fact, it was her HPLC instrument that was giving her trouble. Probably the leaky roof made her think of it. One mechanical failure is very like another.

Otherwise, it was a good solid workday. I didn't get to the gym. I did get a website draft written and sent to the client and the designer.The client has sent me 20 pages of stuff, and intended to send me her business plan as well, and has also spent four hours of meeting time talking about herself and her business. I distilled this into a 1200 word website for her, and she told me it was too wordy. I've also had people who have hired me to write 280 words for me say that my 280 word article was too wordy. I wonder whether this word "wordy" -- which I understand to mean that there are too many words -- has some other meaning to other people. Hmm.

I got estimates gathered and sent off to the client from the various designers. The estimates ranged from $300 to $900 for one coded page. The $900 person offers cheap hosting, and she's a Facebook friend, but she's also going to charge $70 just to migrate the page. In fact, her estimate came to more than $1200 with all the little extra bits and pieces. I hope that her estimate will at least make the $300 seem more palatable to the client. However, I also broke down and bought myself a Dreamweaver manual, because I have a feeling that I may be doing this one myself.

And I did linkbuilding and grading of papers, blogging and graphic fix-ups of blogs, and some correspondence with a person contemplating freelance life. I can recommend it.

#1 son's birthday present arrived -- a set of a dozen harmonicas in different keys. With it came the trial box of champagne truffles. #2 daughter and I were thinking that we needed some way to celebrate when people's new websites launched. Launching made us think of boats, and champagne bottles broken over the prow of the boat, and then she thought of champagne truffles. I found a supplier of champagne truffles which makes them with my initial (and thus the initial of my company) on them. How perfect is that? So I ordered a box, tried one to make sure they were good, and then packaged them up in pairs in little organza bags. I'm delivering the first today. I don't know about mailing them. But for local people, it should be a nice festive touch.

Today I have more linkbuilding to do, and more blogging, and a couple of services to sing at, and a class to teach. I got a new assignment from an ongoing customer this morning, but I put it out on Monday for him, because I think I'll also be spending more time struggling with the design issue.

This will be good for me, actually, I can't always rely on The Computer Guy. I need to be able to do some of these things myself.

And then I'll shift over to Easter. The house needs cleaning, the garden needs fixing up, and things need to be cooked and baked.

#2 daughter is safely home, and #1 son had a nice birthday.

As for me, I had a really normal day yesterday. I dealt with the stuff that had happened overnight, taught my class, went to the gym, came home and worked on several projects, meeting my NSSEA deadline and completing all the stuff The Northerner needed done quickly and making good progress on the stuff for The Computer Guy. I have more work for both of them today, and expect to have everything finished when it's supposed to be. I stopped for a healthy lunch, and again in midafternoon for a walk with Janalisa, and for dinner with my family. I went to rehearsal, came home and dealt with emails, and then slept for eight hours.

This is evidence that it's possible.

#1 son is 20 today. I stopped yesterday to pick up a cake for him. The girl at the bakery knew how to spell his name. "The Bible!" she said when I expressed surprise and admiration that she could spell it. "It's a strong name."

His present will not arrive today. I ordered it online, and didn't leave enough time apparently.

The ice cream shop fired #2 son for having a bad attitude. I leave a moment here for everyone who has ever met #2 son to get over their astonishment at the thought of his having a bad attitude. #1 son still works there, but he thinks the boss is trying to make him quit. They've scheduled him to work only 9:00 to 11:00 pm on Friday and Saturday nights this week. Seems pretty hostile to me -- it spoils his social plans without actually providing enough money for the week. #1 son has never done anything to deserve this, but seems to be suffering because of whatever his brother did that the boss interpreted as having a bad attitude.

And I got another imperfect feedback -- from the Spaniard, for whom I've done no work for months. My average is 4.84 out of 5, so it is unlikely that anyone will refuse to hire me based on that, but still. How could he give me a 4 out of 5 for deadlines when I never missed a deadline? Quality of work, okay, it's his call, but the only way I could have done better on deadlines is if I had done the work before he asked for it. So we are disgruntled workers here, at least a little bit.

I told my boys to go out and look for other jobs. There are plenty of fish in the sea. And I told myself to get over myself. You can't please everyone, you can't win everything, and you can't be perfect. I always tell my kids this in similar circumstances.

I had meetings yesterday. Four unbillable hours, of varying degrees of usefulness and pleasantness... I still haven't found a solution for my client who needs a new page, and the grading I did last night (instead of going to the AAUW meeting and my Tuesday class) was frustrating. My online class seems not to own the textbook, not to read the assignment files, and not to grasp the concept of plagiarism. I'm feeling pretty disenchanted with distance learning right now.

Hmm... is there anything else I can whine about? Oh, yeah, I'm still tired. And I haven't gotten to the gym even once yet this week.

Okay. That's probably enough whining. I blocked things out on my calendar, and I can get to the gym today, and still complete all my work for the week. I got my taxes done and mailed in. I have plenty of interesting work to do. My husband has four days off for Easter, so I might get to sleep in till 6:00 or so and catch up on my sleep.

I still don't have a designer, but a local competitor of both mine and The Computer Guy's said she'd give me an  estimate and The Art Teacher said he'd see if he could hunt up a student for me. So it could happen.

Last night we had rehearsal with the symphony conductor. We did a bit better than we had with the conductor of the National Symphony. 

The photo on the left is our choirmaster for this concert, our beloved conductor, who is going home to Canada this summer, never to return. On the right is the poster for the concert, with the symphony conductor Photoshopped up as Brahms.

Our conductor leads us with an air of fastidious courtesy throughout. He tells us to use intervals from "O, Canada," and that's as far as he goes with a joke.  He stops us occasionally for quiet little chats about what Brahms might have had in mind. "We know," he'll say gently, "that Brahms knew how to write a crescendo, and yet here he didn't write one. What can we conclude from that?"

The symphony conductor sweated and scowled. His shirt came untucked. He mopped his brow. He hunched his back and bent his knees and swooped up again. He conducted the piano with ferocity, which must have been a new experience for the accompanist. He told us stories about WWII to illustrate his points.

I don't know what an augmented sixth is, but from now on I will associate it with the invasion of Poland.

The concert should be good.

Today I have meetings. Yesterday I got a reasonable number of hours in for The Computer Guy and The Northerner, and I'll be continuing with them today. Also with the search for a crew to get Client #3's new page done. I never did get to my GTD yesterday, but it could happen today. I also have to order a birthday cake for #1 son. His birthday is usually so close to Easter that he has a couple of times in the past ended up with an Easter cake, and has taken it hard. Therefore, even though he is 20 tomorrow and also doesn't like sweets, it is very important that I get him a proper birthday cake. I've been informed that the boys expect Easter baskets, too. This may not be a realistic expectation on their part.

Oh -- the client who gave me imperfect feedback last time, and whose work I feared would be so late (what with the time difference) that he would give me even lower marks? Remember him? He gave me perfect feedback this time, and a testimonial nice enough that I put it on my website. He didn't even need any changes. Nonetheless, this experience will help me remember to check time zones before I say when I'm going to deliver.

I have a little design job, and have so far been turned down by both The Computer Guy and The Design Student, but The Art Teacher hasn't yet said no, and my brother's housemate might actually be able to help me out. I am therefore not panicking yet, though I spent a couple of hours yesterday putting together a rudimentary page for the client and trying not to compare it with The Computer Guy's pages. The trouble is, I am very good at saying, "This should go here and this should go there" and writing the words for it, but I really have no graphic design skills at all. And severely limited coding skills, too. It seems to me that my books should help me. I pull a book confidently from the shelf and look for things like "how to make rounded corners" and "how to achieve a gradient" and "how to make the header look all cool like The Computer Guy's headers," and find none of those things. Actually, I did find stuff on how to make rounded corners, but it has too many prerequisites.

If I have to do this myself, I will need to look upon it as an excellent learning opportunity, not as an experience that just shows why there are so many rotten websites out there.

The Computer Guy has also refused to host the page in question. It's not pornography or anything, so I am still hopeful of being able to persuade him to do so, but if not, then I have to try to find the client a host as well. There are so many terrible hosts out there, you wouldn't believe it. I am naturally tempted to put her with The Northerner. However, the whole balance of my northern and southern web design companies could be thrown off if I give The Northerner one of my local customers. But if I place her with a local competitor of The Computer Guy, it'll be ... well, all his fault, right?

I'm sending a bunch of money off to the IRS today. I'm also teaching my morning class, and plying the Dark Art for a couple of websites. Just saying that brings to mind all the myriad things I need to do this week, and my anxiety at the thought that I may not be able to find a designer willing to work with me on my little design job. I need to sit down with my calendar straightaway and figure out my week.

I should have done that last night, of course. However, I had so much work to do yesterday afternoon that I went to bed with a book at about 7:30 last night. I think it's GTD time.

Yesterday's vendor table.

There were some distinctly fun things about yesterday. It was nice to be among large quantities of physical books again. People would come up and pet them, and pull them out happily to read them and talk with me about them. That was a pleasure of working in a bookstore that my current job doesn't have.

I met nice people and saw old friends. I was there on behalf of one of my clients and another was there across the hall, so I got quite a bit of work done. If you eavesdrop on people in my field, you will hear a good bit about dragging the content out of clients, and it's all true. Being able to look at their stock and hold direct conversations can help.

On the other hand, carrying eight boxes of books from the parking lot to the building and then carrying most of them back out again is hard work. It was a ten-hour day, and I was on my feet for most of it. And I was tired to begin with. Also, it was a child care conference and I had a collection of books about "going potty," and therefore I had people coming up all day and sharing the details of their children's potty experiences. I don't get why people do this, but they always do. I made every effort to look interested.

So when I stopped off at the Sprint store afterwards, I was not at my sweetest and nicest.

#2 daughter and I went there last week to arrange to switch from her being on Sprint and me under the old store's plan at AT&T, to having both of us on the Sprint Family Data Plan. This would be cheaper, but involved buying Blackberries. However, they were offering us a great discount. The Blackberries were not actually in the store, but would be soon. The switch was to take place on April 3rd.

It didn't happen. I went in to check, and was told that I needed to bring in three pieces of information. I should have been told that in the first place, but what the heck. I got the information and raced in at the last moment after yesterday's conference, only to learn that the Blackberries wouldn't be available, possibly for months.

So we're paying for the Sprint Family Data Plan, but can't use it. And I may be without a phone  in between times -- but maybe not. The guy at the desk couldn't tell me.

"Do I have a problem?" I asked him. "If it's just a question of waiting for the phone, that's not a problem. But if I'll be paying for two phone plans, or not having a phone at all, then this is something that I should have been told on the previous occasions when I was in here."

The workers looked helpless.

"So what do you plan to do at this point?" I asked. "You were going to call me when they arrived, but if I won't have a phone, that won't work."

"I don't know," the guy said. And that was the final word on it.

However, my phone does appear to work still, so I guess the worst-case scenario is paying double phone bills.

I have a solo this morning, for Palm Sunday. Then I have a meeting and a rehearsal, simultaneously, during the Sunday School hour. I will therefore not be discussing work and rest during Sunday School. I have an overwhelming amount of stuff to do, and I'm still seriously tired. Or maybe I don't have an overwhelming amount of stuff to do. Maybe I just need to make a nice list and put things on my calendar in orderly fashion, and then I will see that I just have enough to do, not too much. That could happen.

This week's Life@Work topic is work and rest. This is a very timely topic for me, as I head out for a day at a vendor table. This week in particular I really tried to find some space for rest, and wasn't successful at that. Not that I had no down time. But when I did take time away from work intentionally for rest, I spent it almost in physical recuperation, lying on the sofa. And when I spent time away from work on other things -- music, time with friends, walking -- I was thinking about the work that needed doing or about how tired I was, not fully participating and enjoying it.

When I was talking with The Empress on Thursday, I shared with her my thinking in systems idea about work flow and stock. Also, since we are very old friends, I told her how much I earned last month.

It was enough that, as #2 son pointed out yesterday, I was able to buy tires and made a payment on tuition and will still be able to pay the taxes, and we're not in financial crisis. I even bought #1 son a cool birthday present. This is pretty wonderful.

I was sharing this with The Empress as evidence that I don't have my workflow under control. I earned nearly three times as much in March as I did in January. Clearly, I worked too much in March and not enough in January, right? Maybe not, though.

Here are some factors I didn't take into account:

• The stock of work doesn't change immediately when the flow changes. If you pull the plug in the bathtub as the water is still running in, the level of water won't go down immediately. It takes time for the system to respond.
• How much I earn is not the same thing as how much I work, because my earnings can arrive weeks or in some cases even a couple of months after the work is done. My low earnings in January reflected my two weeks off in December and my clients' failure to pay me because they were busy with the holidays, the unbillable hours involved in building my online course, and the college's pay schedule, not just how much I worked in January.
• The amount of rest I get is not just about my billable hours. It's also about the unbillable hours. Since I also had a family crisis in March, it might well be that my stock of billable hours was exactly right in March, and I just had too much other stuff going on.

I think I can conclude that my stock and flow diagram is inadequate to describe my workflow situation, let alone to predict my income.

Life@Work advocates taking a sabbath: one day a week when you don't work. I'm not really expecting to do that, because I'll have taxes and housework and stuff to do, and Holy Week begins tomorrow so I already have a lot of extra singing and whatnot, plus meetings and more than 20 billable hours already scheduled. Work@Life says,"It takes faith not to work on the sabbath -- faith to keep you from worrying about getting left behind, about being able to get everything done, about pressure from peers who don't observe a biblical rest."

Looking back at this week and trying to extrapolate to the future from it doesn't really work, because it included grief and the Wall Street Journal. Looking ahead to the coming week and trying to use it to create a workable work/rest schedule doesn't really work, because it's Holy Week, and I have to get ready for Easter dinner guests, too.

But that may be the benefit of thinking in terms of a Sabbath. Life@Work says that people structure work/rest differently. We may work way too much in hopes of retiring early, or work nonstop on a project and then crash when it's finished. I know people who work ineffectively and waste lots of time while fretting that they work all the time, and people who work continually and joyfully for the pleasure they get from their work. If we commit to a Sabbath, then our personal foibles can be accommodated and the unpredictable things of life can take place, and we will still have the right amount of rest.

Now, this is a long post, but if you're still reading, I want to share with you something I read this morning in an article on passive barriers to change by Ramit Sethi:

1. Get a piece of paper and a pen, or open up Notepad on your computer.
2. Identify 10 things you would do if you were perfect. Don’t censor —just write what comes to mind. And focus on actions, not outcomes. Examples: “I’d work out 4 times per week, clean my garage by this Sunday, play with my son for 30 minutes each day, and check my spending once per week.”
3. Now, play the “Five Whys” game: Why aren’t you doing it?

Getting all my systems in order is one of my goals for this year, and I feel as though I'm getting the whole workflow thing closer to where it should be. But I know that I should be taking time not only for rest but also for exercise, arranging for healthy meals, and housework. So I think I'm going to contemplate why I don't do these things that I know I should, and see whether I can't get that under control.

Because my method of waiting for things to Get Back to Normal isn't working.

This is the pie I made for rehearsal yesterday. Fortunately, I remembered about an hour beforehand that I was supposed to bring the treats, and fortunately I had the ingredients on hand, so I was able to rustle it up in time.

I did take a couple of hours off yesterday -- first to talk with The Empress when she came over and then to fold laundry and watch Fortysomething. The result was that this morning I had a message asking where that text was and when would it be ready.

I had said Thursday afternoon, so it was my fault. It'll have to wait for after class today, and he's in England, so it'll seem later to him.

This is also the guy who gave me an imperfect feedback at oDesk, thus spoiling my perfect 5s. He may give me 3s this time, in which case I might have to stop working for him. Actually I guess the moral of the story is that I shouldn't take time off.

I wouldn't really stop working for someone who gave me imperfect feedback, BTW. That was a joke.

Here's another joke.

I thought that was really funny.

So after class today I'll be writing up copy for the Englishman, and I've got a site launching today. I think I did all the last-minute revisions for that last night (see "Things I did instead of writing that guy's copy"). Tomorrow I'm at a vendor table for a local client,  and also will get my taxes finished up and sent in.

Tonight I really do plan to take time off.