#2 son supported the idea of male/female shopping differences yesterday when I sent him out with a grocery list. He came back with exactly the listed items. One lime, not several limes. No surprises. If I make good shopping lists, I can certainly count on him to follow through on the groceries. That's good.

He also came to the gym with me yesterday, but doesn't plan to do it in future. He wants his brother to go with him.

I'm not teaching this week, but I have lots of work, plus all that homework. There was a brief moment last night when I got all the pieces of one of the website pages into approximately the right spots. I thought about taking a picture of it to show you guys, but decided to try to get the white spaces between the colored blocks out first, and unaccountably managed instead to move most of the right hand column back to the bottom of the page.

See how there's just white space around the picture? All the rest is hanging out under the colored parts. Shyly refusing to go back up where it belongs.

Now, this wouldn't be a good page even if I got everything into the right places, but I feel as though, if I could ever get things into the right spots, I'd then be able to work with the rest of the issues.

I'm thinking I may just start over. I could make all the pages very good with html, which is my friend, and then build a stylesheet one tiny step at a time, seeing what each change does, and perhaps get it all right.
 
Just in case you're curious, this is what it looks like in plain html, before the CSS. All the words and the picture just line up one after another on the page.

You can still occasionally see pages like this around the web, often in educational contexts.

CSS is styling. It takes all the words and makes them go to particular places and have different colors and backgrounds and lines and borders and stuff.

That is normally not my job, of course. I write up the words and send them off to some clever person. Or I write them into some previously-styled thing some clever person made before.

I need to do exactly those two things today. Quite a lot of both those things. I also have to figure out adwords, about which I know as much as I know about CSS.
 
The designer in Moldavia is waiting on me. He sent me a message at 1:45 a.m. asking when I'd get the content to him. Presumably he's asleep right now, but it still makes me feel pressured.

The girls have gone back to their workaday lives. Yesterday, I got up and put in a couple of hours for my Aussies. they're not making the progress I'd like, actually,  so I need to think more about them. Then we had blueberry pancakes and peppered bacon, and settled in for our business meeting.

We did a lesson on linkbuilding. The girls had their laptops and I was at the desktop, and we went through the three main methods of foundational linkbuilding. Then we attempted to get our strategic plan in place, with multiple interruptions. I'm not sure that we succeeded, However, we divided the goals into three groups and sorted out the responsibility for them, so that's a start.

Then we went to lunch with my parents, which is always fun. It had been a long time since all four of the kids could join us at one of these lunches.

Then I came home and got to my homework. There are three more assignments, plus the final project. I also think I probably need to go back and do the one I missed. It's too late to turn it in, but it probably contains things I need to know.

The current assignment is about making tables. It's easy.

Divs are another story. I don't know why I am being so unsuccessful with them.

I made this header for my final project -- I may change it, but I thought this had an into-the-woods feel to it that will go well with my classic fairytale images. Then I spent three hours trying to get it into the right place on the pages.

I have reached the point where I can consistently make some semblance of columns on my pages, but actually putting things where I want them eludes me. Sigh.

In real life, of course, I can just tell Dreamweaver that I want three columns, but we're not allowed any AI help for the project.

Today I must input grades, have a phone meeting with the IT guy from New York, spend some time on the bruise remedy people, and do a strategy document for the Northerners. I also need to go grocery shopping, get to the gym, and of course continue struggling with divs. I've sent off J2's mockup to a local preschool, and will probably have to a) pay him for that work and b) try to get our previous client to pay him for the previous work. I may see whether I can get #1 daughter to assist with that.

Onward!

Yesterday we went to the Farmers Market and stopped by this fun shop, and also the LYS.

We did lots of visiting with people as we traveled around. We stopped by the fabric shop to see whether the plain pink fabric there would be better for my quilt (no), and took #2 daughter for her hair appointment.

Then the kids went off to various amusements and appointments, and I got to my homework.

I was pretty unsuccessful there. I had three assignments to turn in last night, and I did reasonably well on the first, with much trial and error on the divs.

Then the kids all came home, and we cleaned out the garage.

It was very hot, but we did get all the outgrown clothes and toys off to the Salvation Army, and all the empty boxes broken down, and three bags of trash filled.

After that, we rented a movie and bought food for the evening. I made a cake, #2 son grilled some chicken, #1 daughter made grilled potatoes, #2 daughter and I sauteed zucchini, and I sliced up some cucumbers. #1 daughter had brought homegrown potatoes and onions along and the rest of the produce was from the Farmers Market, so it was a delicious meal.

People came and went, watching the movie and playing Wii and talking and so forth. The kids had gone, among them, to a cage fight, a skydiving dropzone, work, lunch, and various visits.

Along about 10:00, I realized with horror that I hadn't done my homework. It was due by midnight, with no late assignments being accepted.

I made a strong cup of tea and settled in to finish it up.

The first assignment was not so bad. I couldn't figure out how to make all the bold text yellow, but apart from that I was successful. I checked it in a couple of browsers and sent it in.

The second assignment involved divs. As you know, I've been unsuccessful with getting my divs to behave themselves and float neatly into columns.

I continued to have this problem. Time was running out, and my file staunchly refused to pay any attention to the importan tand useful things I was telling it about what to do with the divs.

#1 daughter, bless her heart, came and sat with me and went through the code line by line with various books and websites, and helped me get the columns under control, but by then it was 11:57 and the images weren't showing up properly. I turned it in anyway, because I had no choice.

So now I have one assignment for which I have a zero, and two assignments turned in with flaws.

I also didn't get the papers graded or do the work for my Aussies, nor did we get our business meeting done. So I think I'll stay home from church this morning and do those things. This afternoon we're meeting my parents for lunch, which ought to cheer me up after this horrid debacle with the assignments.

I never did get my divs to behave, in case you were wondering. Having looked through the textbook and all the friendly books I have on the subject, I turned to the CSS Pocket Reference, which said the following:

The book says lots more stuff along those lines, too. It sounds as though it probably contains the solution to my problem, but it didn't actually help.

I met with a client about a website.

Then I went on to class. There, for a final day of class treat, we had pizza and cookies and I read out the most amusing of the in-class essays. The topic (chosen by the class's vote) was male and female differences in shopping.

The most popular thesis in the class was that men are better at shopping than women. Men, the writers said, were efficient. They had a mission when they went shopping, a target, and they went out and found the thing they needed and bought it. Women went shopping with no clear goal in mind, and ended up spending lots of time shopping and might either not find what they needed or spend more than they should.

The next most popular thesis was that women were better at shopping than men. Women enjoyed shopping, made the most of it, and had the patience to find the perfect thing at the best price.

Some of the essays were amusing and well-argued. Today I have to grade the rest of the papers, calculate grades, and input said grades. Not fun.

Yesterday's class was fun, though, and then I went home and had a strategic discussion with my software company guy and wrote the website. Then I went with #1 son and bought him a bike for his transportation to school next term. He has a car, but it's older than he is and becoming very unreliable, so a bicycle seems like a good choice, and he found a good used one at a good price. It was about a hundred degrees out, but the bike wouldn't fit in the car, so he had to ride it home.

I stopped off at the used bookstore, so that I would pass him on the way home in case he was having heatstroke needed help, but he beat me back to the house.

A phone meeting with another client finished up the workday, and then I was so tired that I just sat on the couch watching a Netflix till the girls arrived. It was Slings and Arrows, a Canadian series. I enjoyed it, in an exhausted sort of way.

Today I have those papers to grade, and grocery shopping to do, and of course the planned family garage cleanup. I also have to catch up on my homework for the class I'm taking -- I have two projects due today. I plan to spend time with my kids, even if that time is cleaning out the garage time, and the girls and I intend to get on with the next step in our business plan. I also have to get in a couple of hours for the Australians.

It doesn't really sound like a very frolicsome day, does it?

I had to get up with my husband at 4:30 this morning, so naturally I thought, "Here's my chance to get my divs in order!" I'm sure you would have thought the same thing.

Unfortunately, while I can float to the left and the right, the center persists in hanging out at the bottom of the page instead of coming up and filling in between the floats as it is supposed to do. I'm at a loss.

I went to the gym yesterday in spite of being behind, and got back in time for a phone meeting which resulted in the addition of a new Dark Art client. This one is very sensibly using the time to learn how to do things herself, or delegate them to her staff. She's very smart. At one point, I actually said that. "You're such an intelligent woman!" I said. In tones of delight, I hope, rather than astonishment. I'm looking forward to working with her, though I hope I won't say things like that any more.

On to class, and then home to catch up with my Dark Art for the week. The bookkeeper came by. She has been planning to come every Thursday for about a month and never has before, so I wasn't sure she would this time either, but she did.

She asks me questions. I answer her, feeling as though I'm explaining my drug problem to a doctor or something.

"Oh," she'll say, looking at my one single piece of bookkeping, a sheet of paper on which I write my income as it arrives, "here's your checkbook balance at the beginning of the month."

No, I have to explain, that's where I write my total income for the month. She behaves as though it's quite normal to put the total at the top of the list, which apparently it is not. I think those totals are embarrassingly large, because I have always had a large family and a modest income, and it makes me wonder whether I'm paying her enough. However, they are probably less than she or any of her other clients make, so I resolutely ignore this concern.

She looks at my scratchings, seeing that I have put multiple payments from the same client during one month in all different places. This is apparently not comme il faut. "So you've invoiced --"

I have to admit that I don't know how much I've invoiced. I know how much I've been paid. There are invoices, PDFs, in my computer somewhere, which show what I've invoiced.

"So how much does this guy owe you?" she asks, indicating a client who I know is overdue.

"I don't know," I have to admit. "He's paid $400. So whatever is left over from the invoices after subtracting $400..."

We sort out which invoices belong to this guy, since I've used a nickname on the sheet of paper showing payments.

I hope she doesn't go out and tell everyone how incompetent I am.

Actually, she assured me as she left that my situation wasn't complex at all. I'm glad to hear this.

Then #2 son went through stacks of papers in search of the stuff he needs to finish up his college paperwork. He lectured me on the importance of filing. His brother added disgusted noises. I, having been working for twelve hours at this point, finished up the fifth blog post of the day while scraping together some semblance of a dinner. #1 son refused to eat it, on the grounds that we had eaten that food too frequently lately and he was tired of it.

I suggested that they were out of line. #2 son agreed. #1 son continued to behave as though he were staying in an unfortunately ill-run hotel and complaining no more than he absolutely had to.

I graded papers after dinner, but there were some exciting interruptions. First, the car's battery died. Fortunately, my husband can fix anything, and now with my newfound financial security, we just went and bought a battery.

#2 son's tuition will take up all the excess in our budget, and I'm also paying off our debts, but if I keep working as much as I have been, we may still be able to fix things without having crises. It's nice.

I had phone calls from both my daughters, who are coming in today. This is pretty exciting, except that the occasion is their daddy's insistence that we clean out the garage. He told me last night in some detail how messy all the neighbor's garages are. Ours, I take it, will shine out like a beacon, leading all the people on the block to clean theirs too and thus improving everyone's lives immeasurably.

Since he had just fixed my car, I didn't say much.

Then I got a note from The Northerners (Allbright, that is) asking if I'd work with their designer to make a new website for a client. Eight notes, actually, comprising all the correspondence hitherto, plus the designer's concept. I found this pretty thrilling, and I'm going to look over all the documents they sent me as soon as I finish my tea.

I am now working on two sites with The Computer Guy, one with J1, one with J2, and one with J3. I have another I'm waiting to hear about, with a guy whose name begins with M. If his designer's name also begins with J, I may have to refuse, but so far it looks good. The Computer Guy and I are supposed to begin with the Chocolatier on July 6. Today is my last day of class. I have eight Dark Art clients right now. So I figure I can write up all the websites in the first two weeks of July, since I won't be teaching, and also get all the homework for my design class finished. Then I'll go on vacation for a week.

Assuming I can get my divs to behave.

Yesterday, when I went to join the discussion for the online web design class I'm taking, the details of our final project were up.

We have six other assignments still, but the final project is due in about three weeks. we are to build a ten-page website, all in Notepad.

A five-page website, with me and a designer/developer working on it, takes four to six weeks. Actually, three to seven, but four to six sounds better, right? So I am slightly panicked about my final project.

In fact, after a long, long workday yesterday, I spent three and a half hours building one page for it. And not a very good page, either.

Actually, I was mostly getting all the pages up and connected with one another. Making a skeleton, you know. I have a ten-page skeleton. And then I spent half an hour trying to find some way to round my corners.

I want rounded corners. All the cool kids have them. In fact, I want my page to look like a real web page, something I haven't learned to achieve in this class.

It doesn't really matter. I'm not a designer. I work with designers. They can do the cool parts.

Sigh.

I went to the gym yesterday, and to a concert last night, just like a normal person. True, I'm up at 4:30 to finish grading papers, but still..

One of the main reasons not to skip the gym, it seems to me, is that you don't enjoy it as much if it's been a while since you went. I don't have sore muscles today (disappointing, that) but it was a bit of a slog to get through the whole 30 minutes on the treadmill yesterday.

The concert was good. It was a youth choir, and they had some very good voices, and instrumentalists who were apparently heavily influenced by Led Zeppelin. Two of the boys came home with me, walking through the firefly-filled dusk, to take showers and play video games for a bit. They were both from Crowley's Ridge,and said "Yes, ma'am" every other sentence. They'll be coming to the university here in the fall; I told them to look up #1 son.

Must grade those papers...

Last night while watching "The Big Bang Theory," I started putting together another quilt block. 

If I make enough samples with this fabric, I'll have a quilt before I make up my mind to do something different.

I've been reading the book Nudge. I enjoyed it quite a lot, though we have to keep in mind that I like books on economics. This book is about economics and design, though.

The authors take a look at the assumption among economists that people will make rational decisions based on their own self-interest. They look at the stupid things we do all the time and suggest that we make some decisions based on rational thought -- reflective reactions, they say. But we also make some decisions based on automatic reactions, which are not rational.

After advancing some suggestions about why that might be adaptive in some circumstances, they suggest that we should  -- when we're in a reflective state -- set up some rational decisions for ourselves (and others, if we have that responsibility) when we're reacting in an automatic state. These rational decisions can serve to nudge us toward making the best choices when we're making bad decisions.

That is, we should set up automatic payroll deductions for our retirement funds, fill our kitchens with healthy foods, make an exercise date with a friend -- we know this, right? I needed the reminder, though.

It gets more intriguing when the authors begin to analyze and speculate on government nudges. What went wrong with the whole Medicare prescription bit for the elderly, the worthlessness of the terror alert color system, what might happen if we privatized marriage -- interesting stuff, there.

It inspired me, since I was going over logical fallacies with my class yesterday. About half the class was present. Today is the due date for their rough draft of their research paper, so I'll be lucky to have half the class present today. The persistent belief that not showing up makes it okay not to turn in the assignment baffles me. Anyway, I went over the stuff for the sake of the ones who showed -- not necessarily the ones who needed it most.

Then on to The Computer Guy's place to meet with a new shared client. He launched into a strange diatribe on The Computer Guy's ethnic heritage at one point. I kept my eyes riveted on him so as not to exchange glances with The Computer Guy. Later, he made off-color jokes and added a rant against children. More not-exchanging of glances took place. Apart from this, he seemed like a nice guy. In fact, even while saying these things he seemed like an essentially nice guy. Lacking a sense of audience, perhaps.

I came home to some interesting assignments from my Northerners and a few hours for one of the remaining pro bono projects. This week, I may get all of those three that I took on last year finished up. If so, then I can begin thinking about what would be a good one for the next year. I'm doing some market research among nonprofits right now, so I may encounter someone ...

Here's our manly Fathers Day feast, with three kinds of chips and three kinds of fruit and an empty place for the hot dogs.

There was an empty place because the boys didn't, as I had imagined they would, put the grill together while I was at church.

They waited till I got home and ceremoniously hauled the box out of its hiding place in the garage.

"I'd have thought you'd have done this already," I said sotto voce.

"That's a good idea," said #1 son. "You should have told us that."

For reasons I haven't grasped, #1 son frequently talks to me as though it's his painful duty to point out to me the better path I should have taken. Often the topic is something like this. I resist the impulse to say, "I figured you guys would be able to think of that on your own, and also you were asleep when I left."

We spent a couple of hours building the grill. My husband is really good at that sort of thing, and of course I have all those years of putting store fixtures together, so there were few really dramatic moments.

One was when the guys realized that they had put the grill body in backwards. I aided this realization by finding the holes for the shelf brackets -- on the opposite side from where the shelf should go.

"That's okay!" I chirped. "We'll just take this off, whip it around, and put it in the right way." Airy hand gestures might have accompanied this statement.

My husband wordlessly went and got a drill and put some holes in the right place.

Once it was put together, the grill was quite grand, as you can see. It will also serve as a smoker. We have a turkey in the freezer from Thanksgiving. I'm going to check the rules on freezer safety for turkeys, and if it hasn't been too long, we'll smoke that turkey.

We used the charcoal chimney. This is a thing which you fill with charcoal. You put some crumpled newspaper in the bottom and light that, and   after a bit you spill the hot coals into your grill.

It makes lots of smoke while it's working. However, once it's ready, your food cooks with startling rapidity.

No lighter fluid, either. I recommend these things highly.

Today I'm meeting with The Computer Guy about a new project. I got a mock up from the new designer for the last of my pro bono projects. It isn't as good as The Computer Guy's, but it's certainly better than anything I could have done. And it won't cost as much as The Computer Guy's.

I sat down last night and figured out a schedule. I did calculations about my jobs and discovered that, given my usual sources of inflow into my stock of work, I typically have between 31 and 54 billable hours per week. Then I have meetings and other unbillable hours on top of that, plus life. So then I made a schedule including life.

#2 son was glad to hear this, since it seems to suggest that we'll be able to pay his tuition, something we were all rather nervous about. He's planning his "Odyssey," his overseas study project, already. He intends to go to Thailand. To that end, we've ordered Rosetta Stone in Thai for him. He's going to work for me and study Thai for the remainder of the summer. #1 son is going to find a bike for us to buy for him so he'll have reliable transport, and then he's going to see if he can't get more work hours in some way.

IMHO, the boys don't have full-time work because they haven't tried hard enough. However, they are both working part-time, and if #2 son will take on enough of my unbillable hours that I can actually finish my billable ones, he'll be making a contribution.

So that's the plan.

So yesterday I spent a few hours working, then took #2 son to help buy a Father's Day gift for my husband. Buying gifts for him is never a very rewarding process, because he will complain that we spent the money and criticize what we bought. We like to think that he is secretly pleased.

Pleased or not, we bought him a new grill. #1 son took our old grill to a friend's cabin and shows no signs of ever planning to bring it back, and we sort of felt that it was time for a new grill anyway. We had contemplated getting one of those fancy gas grills, but there were some drawbacks to that:

• None of them would fit in the trunk of the car. I have to admit that I didn't foresee that.
• We feared that things cooked over gas wouldn't taste as good as those cooked with charcoal.
• #1 daughter thought that her daddy would miss the fire-starting experience.
• They cost enough that we feared the cost of the item might completely spoil even secret pleasure in the gift.

So we bought this fun little charcoal grill that serves as a smoker as well as a grill. We also got a chimney fire-starter thing that claims to eliminate the need for starter fluid. And lots of charcoal. We plan a jolly feast of hot dogs and roasted vegetables today. #2 son made certain that I bought chips for the occasion, as well as Italian soda.

Following this adventure, I dropped off #2 son at home with the grill (hidden in the garage) and did the grocery shopping. I stopped off on the way to buy some plain pink cotton for my continuing quilt block experiments, but left empty-handed. All the pinks were so pink. None of them could be considered rose beige.

Feeling ridiculous, I went on home and joined my daughters for a business strategy meeting.

My daughters are so smart.

We're planning as face-to-face meeting next weekend and we all have our assignments before then.

#2 son made dinner. The meal consisted of  this exotic local dish: Frito Pie. I had never heard of Frito Pie before I came here, so I want to share it with you.

First, you have to say "Free-toe" even if you normally pronounce "Frito" to rhyme with "incognito." Get a serious "t" sound in there.

Now make some chili. #2 son made it with a chili kit and canned beans, and it was delicious. Put some Fritos Corn Chips into a bowl. Put some chili on top. Add shredded cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole, onions, jalapeno peppers, sour cream, corn -- whatever you have around that sounds good.

Eat it.