Mother's Day was nice. CD, Suwanda, and I went out for Mother's Day brunch on the spur of the moment, since we're all mothers and no one was taking us for brunch. Good food and good conversations.

Then I got home and the boys had worked it out to take care of the meals for the day, so I finished up that article and then lolled around reading and knitting for the rest of the day. That was nice.

#2 son also let me see his Self Reflection Power Point, an end of the senior year assignment for his English class. You know how I feel about Power Point, but it was clever and witty and I talked him out of using "The Harder They Come" as the sound track.

I woke up feeling somewhat frantic at 4:00 a.m., which is fifteen minutes before I have to get up, because of all the things that aren't getting taken care of. Mostly, I'm worrying about my parents, and the fact that I need to get my grades in today but haven't gotten the finals graded yet. But there's also the little matter of the estimated quarterly tax payment, the fact that I know I have unpaid invoices out there (I mean people who haven't yet paid me, though I bet I also have unpaid bills), and getting the boys' graduation and college stuff dealt with.

Things always seem worse in the wee hours of the morning.

So I got up and checked my mail, and I have another prospective new client. I haven't responded to him, because I don't know where I would fit him in if he did decide to hire me. I think a cup of tea will help me put everything in perspective.

Then I'm going to get the grades taken care of, because of the whole impending doom feeling that goes with that, and then I hope I'll go to the gym before I move on to the rest of my to-do list.

It's an interesting to-do list, I ended up losing another pound this week in spite of all that research, I have taken care (with #2 daughter's help) of the problem of what to wear to teach my summer class, there are groceries in the house and more order than there was last week, and things are generally going well.

I went to the grocery yesterday, cleaned my kitchen and bedroom (or at least removed a layer or two of dirt and debris) , and cooked a couple of proper meals. My husband came with me to the farmer's market and helped pick vegetables, and then joined me at the grocery store, where he resisted the temptation to buy meat with fat on it.

I'm not joking here. He told me, as we were driving home, that he was planning to buy lean meat for me and the boys(we did that part) and fat meat for himself, but decided that I wouldnt' approve of it.

The doctor no longer even checks my husband's cholesterol, because it is, as they always used to say, "like a sixteen year old" and I guess they all got tired of having to listen to him sweetly announcing that he smoked and never exercised and ate as much fat as possible.

A little bit of lolling took place -- I finished the book club book and started on one I need to review for Amazon Vine. My daughters and I also got together to work on our SWOT. That's a chart of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for our hypothetical (or planned -- take your pick) online marketing agency. We set it up as a grid on Google Docs and IMed "bingo!" when we got it filled out.

I also had further discussions with the chocolatier, but didn't grade papers or make much progress with the article for Today's Man.

I'm working on the part about Little Rock. Obviously, I need to take some men to Little Rock and try out the bars, interviewing people as I go. That worked really well here in my town.

Anyone who'd like to do that for me is warmly welcome to do so. Just ask any guys you fancy "Do you feel that living here is an urban experience?" The guys I asked had lots to say, and gave me their names,too. Of course, I am a nice, harmless matronly lady old enough to be their mothers, but if you are a young lady, you could probably ask for their phone numbers and get them. A notebook and a fascinated expression do the trick.

However, since I didn't run down to Little Rock yesterday, I needed to do online research,a nd I didn't get it done yesterday. So I got an email from the editor asking where the piece was. Asking nicely, mind you, but I was surprised. I mean, I'm a computer guy so I know that weekends are not different from weekdays, but I thought a magazine might be different. I had sent them an email on Friday night saying it would be later, but it must have gone astray.

So I was up at four writing about Little Rock dueling piano bars, and I'd appreciate any personal experience any of you have to offer. A quote from a man living there would be really perfect. I'll check when I get back from church and see whether anyone has left one here. Wouldn't that be cool?

 I got all fascinated with fabric origami a few years back and made an origami wallet and an origami purse. Now I have origami shoes.

They're not really origami, obviously. I just really like this kind of wrapped and folded look. Also pleats.

These are from Target (left) and Rocket Dog (right), and if I complain about not being able to pay my boys' tuition a month or two hence, you can remind me that I frivolously bought not one but two pairs of shoes merely because I liked them, so it's all my own fault.

Yesterday I had four things to accomplish: a talk with the German chocolatier about my work for him, contracts to send out to my other new clients, an article for Today's Man, and finishing up the grading of the finals and inputting the final grades.

I had multiple talks with the chocolatier, both by phone and online, plus lengthy negotiations with The Computer Guy to get him to take on the job. I have two other design jobs for which I have to line up designers, so I also sent off emails for that.

In all the talk about job hunting and layoffs and stuff like that, it's easy to forget how difficult it can be to find workers. I remember when I was hiring people for the store, how desperate we'd get. In the town where I live, we had an unemployment rate of 2%, which economists tell us means that there were people working who didn't even want jobs, but had been pulled off the street against their will by frantic business owners. I kind of feel that way about finding designers. Our county's unemployment rate, in case you were wondering, has rocketed to 3.9%. Three percent is officially considered "full employment," since there are generally people who don't want to work, since they're students or mothers with small children or ill or spouses of rich people or something. This means that there are in my town about 500 actual unemployed people, and they are probably not web designers.

Fortunately, I don't have to get designers just from our local area, though I have started my search here. I was also thinking about the guy who did the design for the lesson plan I was telling you about, but he is a team member of mine with The Northerners. I wonder whether hiring him on one of these jobs would be sort of like conspiring with a coworker to take work outside the company for a lower rate. I don't know. If you have views on this ethical quandary, let me know. In the meantime, I did suggest to the client in this case that she have a look at The Northerners' website and see whether she'd like to go through them. I don't know about her budget; if she goes through the firm, then the designer in question will still be paid, but it's bound to cost her more. On the other hand, I don't know about this designer's coding skills, while The Notherners' developer is hot stuff. And they have a Project Manager, too, so it could be better for her all around. And any problems would fall into the category of Not My Problem.

So by noon, I had gotten about two paragraphs written in that article, and I took #1 son off for some research. I'm writing about urban living in my highly rural state. We went down to our downtown area, strolled around looking for urbanesque views for the photos, and were fortunate enough to get a couple of excellent quotes from people who walked to work there in the downtown area.

We also got a nice lunch at a popular, fairly urban-feeling restaurant, where we were among people in business suits, women in hose and heels carrying babies, dreadlocked people in sweats, and all sorts of other folks.

That was fun. We also went to a local bakery (where we got one of those excellent quotes) and sampled all the varieties of croissants. I had lost six pounds, but one afternoon of deep research and the scale this morning is up by five pounds. I know that my lunch did not itself weigh five pounds. Oh well.

So I got home in time for a walk with Janalisa, and then got back to my article. However, I had only finished the one section when my NY financier guy IMed me to discuss a regular gig with him. I've been doing random jobs for him for about six months now -- websites, blog posts, articles -- but he's now hiring me on for regular Dark Art services. A year ago, I had a few of these monthly customers, but I now charge seven times as much. I do more for them, too, so I don't call them Dark Art Lite, but I still charge way less than the big companies, so I probably still could.
 
Having completed these negotiations, I intended to make dinner. However, my menfolks were all heading off to do other things, and no one intended to eat whatever I cooked. so I fixed myself a tuna sandwich, read a bit of the book for my physical world   book club (which I have now missed three months in a row), and took a five minute nap.

It seemed sort of crazy to take a nap at 8:00 in the evening. I was, however, thinking that I could get that to-do list finished up if I did so.

Nope. I sent off an email to the magazine saying that, since their deadline wasn't until Monday and there would probably not be anyone in the office to read the article till then anyway, I would not have it in on Friday as I had said. Sorry. I sent my bank info and a W9 to the financial guy, got one of the contracts off, showered, and went to bed.

Today, I still have quite a bit of yesterday's to-do list. I also really need to do some grocery shopping, preferably at the farmers' market and natural foods store, and housework. Knitting and reading ought to be on the list. So should gardening.

During yesterday's walk, Janalisa was expressing some frustration about not being able to keep up with her business the way she wants to, and also keep her house and social calendar the way she wants them. I was able to sympathize. However, I now have enough regular gigs to quite applying for one-off jobs. Not that I've spent much time on that recently, but I've been feeling as though I ought to.

However, as I said to Janalisa, we have to quit thinking of our current rushed circumstances as a temporary glitch that means we have to get back to normal. This is the new normal. So we just have to figure out how to make the rest of our lives the way we want them, within the reality of our new normal.

I'm working on that.

I have this absolute thicket of roses, all about to bloom. The question always is, which will bloom first?

I have four rose bushes under my window, or did at one time. I sometimes think that the New Dawn rose has strangled the others and taken over.

Indeed, the one that's about to bloom -- see below, the apparent front runner in the rose race -- looks like a New Dawn.

I'm going to try to get some domestic stuff done this weekend, perhaps including working in the garden.

There are higher priority domestic tasks, but I was toying with the idea of buying a lawn chair, and my kids have told me very firmly that I have no business getting a lawn chair if the back yard is a jungle. Also, I need to plant some tomatoes before it's too late.

So there may be yard work.

N40 was over yesterday, sorting out my paperwork for me. She didn't appear to find it frightening at all.

While I didn't get a link from the WSJ, I did get a call from a green cleaning company in the north saying he had read about me in the paper and wanted to hire me to write his blog three times a week. I got an email from a liquid transportation service needing a redesign; I'll be sending them a contract today. I got an email and a phone call from a German chocolatier who will call again today to firm up details. I got web visitor forms from a bunch of others expressing interest, but haven't set all of them up yet.

You can get an extra thousand visits to your site from a mention at Stumbleupon, but they're mostly visiting for fun. So this has been quite good. I was hoping for a couple more clients, and I seem to have met and surpassed that goal.

My mother emailed me saying, "You're all over the internet!" but I think she had never Googled me before. I'm always all over the internet.

Anyway, I spent much of the day reponding to these emails and phone calls, so I didn't finish grading those finals. I have to do that today. I have to turn in the grades. I have to write about urban living, so I think that I'm going to need to go do some research, in the form of wandering around downtown trying out the coffee shops.

TGIF!

In this picture you can see what I've been up to lately. The list of synonyms for biohazardous waste is there, and a copy of the WSJ article which one of my fellow choristers brought to choir practice last night, a bottle of perfume purchased online during a sleep-deprived moment, and the very cool coloring page the Northerner's graphic designer made to go with a lesson plan.

Let me tell you about the lesson plan, because it's quite an exciting project. My Northerners have this website with a tough name to rank for.

Listen, if you ever decide to start a business, don't choose the name of the business without checking to see what kind of competition you have for it online, okay? This company is competing for its company name with the following entities:

• a major school program with hundreds of .edu links
• a federal government program
• a division of Amazon
• a division of Microsoft
• the Malaysian government's petroleum company

I mean, what were they thinking?

Anyway, their marketing guy keeps sending me more companies with their same name and saying, "Look and see what they're doing to get to the top of Google." I respond with things like, "They're being the government of the United States." Not really an area where we can compete.

With the school program, though, I said, "They have hundreds of .edu links," and then as I was typing I got inspired. "We could do a lesson on paper and the environment as a free download for teachers at the website, and push it hard for .edu and .org links, as Kraft and Disney do. I can't think of any simpler way to accomplish it."

"Sounds good," said the CEO. So I wrote up a lesson plan, and the designer on the team made it look extremely cool.

I write lesson plans all the time, of course, but nobody makes coloring pages for them or gives them snazzy illustrations. It's amazing how much more exciting it makes a lesson look.

I think this guy should do a book with me. He lives in the Philippines, so it is conceivable that I could even some day afford to pay him to take my collection of lesson plans on fairy tales, for example, and make them all look this snazzy.

Yes, well, I'm adding it to my fantasy list.

On the real rather than fantasy list, I have an interesting new assignment. I'm writing about living in urban neighborhoods in my very rural state, for a statewide men's magazine. I didn't know that there was a special online magazine for the men of my state. Now I know. We have only one city of any size at all, and it isn't very big. It has only half a million inhabitants. So I'm writing about a few neighborhoods in that town, and then about the downtown in my own city. I remember when we came here we thought the town was so cute, because it was like a toy city. There's a downtown, with parking meters and everything, just as though it were an actual city! How cute!

So I think I'm going to get #1 son to go downtown with me, to take pictures and to give me the perspective of the young man about town on what it would be like to live in our tiny little urban area. We have marvelous high-end condos built over the downtown businesses, and some great restaurants and bakeries and stuff. It'll be fun. It would be fun to go do the same in the neighborhoods in the big town, too, but the deadline is tomorrow, so that's not going to happen. I've roped #1 daughter in to get some quotes from urban dwellers.
 
So yeah, that's the fun stuff. I also have to grade final exams and try to get my accounting software going, ply the Dark Art for a hypnotist and a lawn care company, and call a chocolatier who might like to hire me -- possibly after having seen me in the WSJ article. I don't like talking on the phone, and it's essentially a job interview by phone, but I would like to work with their site. Lots of potential there.

I visited my dad in the hospital yesterday, and he was hopeful of being sprung today.

My dad seemed pretty cross about having to stay in the hospital yesterday, so I hope they've let him go home. Last I heard, they'd given him lots of tests but couldn't come up with any convincing diagnosis. At least, as I told him, by the time he leaves he'll be confident that he's completely healthy.

The first thing they asked him, after they'd established that he knew his name, was "Do you feel safe in your home?" which I found weird. He also found it weird. I assume that they get used to having people look at them in that "What kind of question is that, you weirdo?" manner, and aren't bothered by it. The nurse asking this looked just like Jordan on Scrubs, if you add eighty pounds. I want you to have the full experience here.

The WSJ article ran, but without any link to my website, so I am no longer excited about it. However, it was still a fun experience. The writer called me again last night to ask whether I'd share how much I earn, but I said no. She was nice about it. "I probably wouldn't either," she said, "but my editor said to ask." The photographer was also nice, though of course I don't like the picture they ran. It has a clear view of my dirty kitchen floor and dog bowl. I didn't see any of the pictures, but he took close-ups and ones with the piano in the background, so I was just unlucky about the floor.

I'm giving a final this morning, and signing the contract for my summer class. Grades go in on Friday, and then I have a couple of weeks off from teaching,during which I hope to catch up with work and reading the books I'm supposed to review. And clean my kitchen floor. There's just one more week of my Tuesday class, too. My workshop for this Saturday didn't make, so I have that off the list. More importantly, I'm doing better about including gym time and downtime and stopping for proper meals. I've lost six pounds and am feeling less tired.

Because it's clear that I'm not in some situation waiting for things to get back to normal. This is normal. If I want "normal" to include proper meals and a clean house and not being sleep-deprived all the time, then I'm going to have to arrange for that.

Tomorrow, someone is coming in to help with bookkeeping. Or data entry, or something. I don't know what her background is, exactly, but she's a nice, sensible woman who has been running her own business for some years. She mentioned to me that business is not going well for her, she has some health issues, and she's worrying about money. Business is going well for me, but I'm adding new clients and jobs all the time and have no records of any kind, and I'm worrying about the fact that all my business information exists in the form of emails. So I figure we can help each other out a little.

I'm hoping she has some skills that I don't. I told her last night that I had tried to think of some way to organize the data for her, but really if I had time to organize the data, I'd have time to input it into the accounting software, which I think is the highest priority item. And there is just flat no way for me to do that that wouldn't involve sleeping even less than I do. Maybe this lady can get things underway for me and then I can keep it up on Monday and Tuesday evenings, once I have both of those free. Because sleeping less is not a good plan.

Not being sleep deprived all the time is a particularly important goal, since my Creative Entrepreneur exercises revealed to me how many of the negative or destructive thoughts/feelings/actions were only problems when I was very tired. Since that revelation, that truth has been borne in on me repeatedly. I read that self-discipline takes energy, so we're more likely to skip the gym or overindulge in pizza and ice cream when we're tired. We're more likely to make mistakes and be bad-tempered or impatient when we're tired. I even noticed that I'm tempted by e-commerce when I'm tired.

Seriously. There've been a couple of mornings when I was trying to wake up by making desultory forays around the web (surfing, to put it in normal language) and found myself shopping. This is kind of astounding, considering how little I enjoy shopping, but yes, when I am so exhausted that I realize it would be better not to answer those important emails yet, I also can think I need some yarn (Salt Peanuts is progressing slowly, thank you) or books (I have a dozen I need to review) or stationery from Singapore or something.

I'd better get going or I'll be late for that final.

I have a photographer coming at 8:00. I got my haircut and I plan to tidy up a bit before he arrives, but there it is.

Shortly after the call from the photographer, who sounded as vague about his connection with the WSJ as I am, I had an email from someone wanting a quick article. I write for a local online magazine, and this person is with a larger, statewide online magazine.

As I pushed the button to send my fees to this person, I got a call from my mother saying my dad was on his way to the hospital. Life is too exciting.I left dinner half-cooked and zipped over to the hospital.

Where I found a couple of ladies from church hanging out in the emergency room. We proceeded to hold a little party there. After about an hour of cheery conversation, I decided that I must be in the wrong place. It just couldn't take an hour for an ambulance to get to the hospital, it seemed to me.

My husband thought they might have run into traffic.

"It's an ambulance," I said. "It doesn't have to wait for traffic."

So I went up to the window, where they began calling around to other hospitals in case. Pretty soon, someone recalled having seen a squad come in by another route, and they directed me to my dad's room. He was fairly chipper, for someone hooked up to all kinds of stuff. The staff, also, were very relaxed about the whole thing. I'm going to take him some flowers today, and hope everything is still fine.

The nurse took away his saline drip. My husband disapproved of this. "He's old," he said in an outraged tone. "He needs that."

Apparently, you can buy this stuff in the grocery stores in his country, and people often settle down with a nice saline drip if they're feeling a bit tired.

It's too exciting around my house, that's all.

Lostarts had a link to a purveyor of really good bags. In some branches of my possibility tree, I travel around, working from different places. If I ever end up out on one of those branches, I'm going to get a bag from those guys. You can tell they really know what they're doing.

I also like the bags at Pallygiraffe. I resisted the temptation to buy one, but did order a folder. Their prices are in Singaporean dollars, so it is much cheaper than it looks to shop from them. I got that link from the new designer I'm working with. Coming back to say that this company only ships to Singapore. They're sending me those folders, out of the goodness of their hearts, but no one else in America gets any. Sorry.

And I followed someone's blog to this place, which the seamstresses in the house will like.

Online window shopping is something I can find myself doing when I'm really exhausted. Usually, I get online in the morning and see what work has piled up during the night, answer email, write here, check my subscriptions here and at Bloglines, and by then I've drunk my tea and gotten my eyes open enough to get to work.

But sometimes, by the end of the week of getting up at 4:15 in the morning, I'm too tired to wake up that easily, and that's when I find myself following links at blogs to exotic e-commerce places.

I don't plan to be that exhausted this week.

I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the amount of work that I have. However, if I just keep my head down and plow through it, so to speak, it'll all get done. Eventually.

I haven't seen anything more from the new designer, though. I'm feeling a little bit alarmed about that. We have two projects, in theory. One got safely to the mock up stage, but hasn't been completed yet and we're a couple of days from the deadline, and the other hasn't even gotten a quick concept yet. His wedding is on Thursday. Whatever he hasn't done by then is going to wait till after his honeymoon, at least.

I turned in the draft for the church website, and sent it along to The Computer Guy. Yesterday I announced in church that it was now the time for people to send along anything they wanted to have included in the website. This was of course very dangerous. However, I see these people frequently. I don't want to have the site go up and then have them buttonholing me with complaints. After it goes up, changes cost money.

So I may spend the day fielding stuff from the various ministries and classes. I also have a very cool assignment -- a corporate lesson plan. You know how companies like Kraft and Riceland have lesson plans for teachers? I get to do one of those. The very cool thing is that once I do the lesson plan, it will go to the designer. I've been working with this designer. I send him a text file, and once it's daylight in his part of the world, he sends it right back all snazzy looking, with illustrations.

I have never had this done with a lesson plan. Exciting, eh?

We started the day at the bakery, where there is always a line out the door on Saturday mornings.

#2 son, #2 daughter, and I bought about 5,000 calories worth of croissants, doughnuts, fruit, and hot chocolate, plus a cup of tea for me, and admired one another's Book Club visual journals.

Not that #2 son has a visual journal. He is not in the Book Club. He just came along for the food.

Actually, he was also up for the shopping.

We went to the early-opening places to begin our shopping expedition. I had a list. #2 daughter helped me by saying things like, "You don't always have to wear gray."

Actually, we had a salesperson who was quite informative about colors, but that was later.  After we had bought things like dog food and athletic shorts for #2 son, we dropped him off at home and went on to the hairdresser. We were going early in hopes that she could fit in #2 daughter, who was going to something fancy and needed a little something done for her hair.

We sat out in the hall waiting our turn, and actually discussing hair. "I like the stripey bits," I said about my hair, "but I don't know about the part that's just getting gray. Maybe I should color it."

"No, you're not!" the hairdresser, Cecelia, shouted from inside her lair.

"Because you think I won't come back regularly?" I called. It's true that I don't go regularly to get my hair cut.    

There was no answer.

When it was our turn and I went in, though, we discussed it further. Cecelia assured me that my current hair is a good look for me. "And when it gets white, it'll be awesome."

I explained about the photographer. "I want to deceive people into thinking I'm stylish," I said.

Cecelia stared despairingly at my face. "I could straighten it for you," she said.

"I like it curly." More staring ensued. I ended up with exactly the same hair style as always.

#2 daughter, however, came out with an entirely different look.

Nice, eh?

We then drove up to the shopping center in the next county, where the special clothing store for older ladies is located.

I needed a jacket for warm weather. I was thinking that I would be amazingly bold and go for navy blue pants. And I was thinking I should get a summer blouse or two.

I bought this blouse.

We went around the store looking at all the jackets, but there was a preponderance of bright prints.

The salesperson liked that idea.

"You can wear a black pant and a little white cami and then just a pop of color," she said.

People who use the word "pant" are not speaking the same language as me. People who can even entertain the concept of wearing a pop of color, as opposed to having such a thing as an element of, say, a logo, are thinking in a different way from me.

This is fine, of course. But I could tell this lady was knowledgeable and could perhaps be helpful, if we could get on the same page, so I tried explaining that I had to teach five days a week next month, so I had to have stuff to wear for that purpose.

I wasn't speaking her language. To her, clothes were not for utilitarian purposes like looking appropriate for a job. They were Fun and Decorative and Expressive. Or something.

While I was off somewhere else, she asked #2 daughter, "Do you always go shopping with her?" #2 daughter was a little confused by this. "Do you help her?" the salesperson expanded on the earlier question.

Apparently, she thought #2 daughter was my keeper or something.

Anyway, she gave up on trying to make the process fun and started being very specifically helpful about fit and color.

She told me I should wear pinks and blues, not orange or brown. I believed her. She also said I should wear aqua, so I accepted the aqua shirt from her hands. You may notice that the shirts pictured here are nearly identical apart from color. This store has lots of things that are nearly identical except for color.

"It's a store for people like you," said #2 daughter. That's what I thought, too. I bought four of these roughly identical shirts in the colors the nice woman told me to buy.

She also brought me a yellow jacket. I would never, under normal circumstances, have considered wearing a yellow jacket. There is no way yellow can be considered a neutral. However, by this time I was simply doing as I was told. I added navy trousers to the stack. "I bet you don't wear white pants," the woman said confidingly. I would have bought a pair if she had told me to, actually, but I agreed with her instead.

At this point, clearly having decided that I was an unfortunately disabled person of some kind who would just do whatever she told me to do, she brought me this necklace.

"You could wear anything with that jacket and put this on," she said.

#2 daughter and I stood and tried to imagine my putting on that necklace. Pretty as it was, it just didn't seem likely. I've been doing well about putting on earrings most days when I'm going to teach, but necklaces are kind of advanced for me.

"I think I'm set," I said.

We went home, and I changed into some of the new gear. We headed off to the Derby party, where neither of us drew the winning horse, but we had fun.

The custom is to wear silly hats. This was one of the silliest.

Notice that the owner of the hat is wearing a bright print jacket.

No one said, "Mercy sakes, what are you got up as?" even though I was wearing a yellow jacket and bright blue shoes, so I guess it'll work for teaching. Although my classroom doesn't feature bourbon as prominently as the Derby party did.

Janalisa was there, and had read about the photographer in my blog, and was all excited about it. "She's going to be insufferable," she told #2 daughter.

I'm not, though. It is true that I was childishly excited about being interviewed, but I am merely alarmed about being photographed. I hope that the story does run, does contain my web address, and does bring bunches of traffic to my website. I get all thrilled about that (did I mention that nearly 700 people went to my work blog the other day from Stumbleupon?). I also hope that the article causes several rich people to hire me, that being a newspaper that caters to rich people. I also hope that people click through to The Computer Guy's website from mine and that he ends up with some major corporate client, because he would like that, and I'd be happy to have the work from such an event, even though I'm not personally set up for many major corporate clients.
  
But I plan to be stay as sweet as I am even if this comes about.

We then came home and got #2 daughter dressed up for her next party. It was fun, but it was also a humbling experience, she told me, because she kept meeting people and having them tell her that The Computer Guy is a keeper and she should hold onto him. Normally, her date is told that he should hold onto her. She kept wanting to say, "Excuse me? I'm the keeper. That's my job."

It's good to have humbling experiences occasionally.

Today is church, and also church meetings. I hope to get everything sewn up for the content of their website. I also intend to loll around. I haven't worked at all this weekend, and I plan to keep that up.

The photographer did not call, thank goodness.

#2 daughter arrived. We have big plans for today. We're going to go to the American bakery (the one with the handsome baker), to the spring festival and farmers market if the rain lets up, to my hair appointment, shopping for clothes for me to wear to teach summer school, and then heading to the annual Derby party.

Then, this evening, she's going out with The Computer Guy.

I believe that all three of us are the kind of people who can be in this arrangement -- that is, my daughter dating someone I work with -- without any problems.

At some point, the photographer may indeed call. I don't know how the WSJ goes about finding a photographer in a remote rural location. However, I am hoping that we'll be able to do the planned shopping. I am not good at shopping, myself. It is pretty clear that I'm not going to sew up the summer SWAP I had planned, though, so I have to shop.

There is, in the next county to the north, a clothing shop that caters to Ladies of a Certain Age. They send me catalogs. I think that, if #2 daughter comes along to assist me, I can go there and find a couple of warm-weather jackets so that I won't have to spend the whole summer in black and forest green wool, which is what I wore for the fall and spring semesters. I own three pairs of trousers, in brown and gray, so if I get a jacket or two and perhaps a summery blouse, I think I'll be able to wear clothing every work day.

This is the plan.