I didn't end up making any lists yesterday. I had thirty-two papers to grade, so it was unrealistic of me to imagine that I would.

I did clean the porch, though. It was a beautiful day, and #1 son needed my computer for his homework (not sure why -- he has his own, but mine may be faster or something), so I got out there and scrubbed.

Here's my before picture. Can you see the bike? The dirt? The cobwebs?  I don't think I did a good job of showing you the absolute before-ness of my porch here.

I swept and scrubbed and put stuff away and here's the after:

Once it was quite clean, I sat in that rocking chair and read about porches from a design perspective.

Mine is not, of course, a proper porch from the point of view of sitting out on the porch being welcoming, or sleeping out in the cool night air, or any other practical porch usage.

It is, as the Lupton's point out that many porches from the late 20th century are, a vestigial porch.

I like it, and I do sit out here and read, but it's too narrow for people to feel they can really treat it like a room.

However, it's clean, which is what's supposed to happen for HGP week 1. As I did the cleaning, I did some idle thinking about what might be nice to make for Christmas gifts.

Christmas gifts for adults are, to my mind, very different from gifts for kids. Kids need to be given presents because they have no incomes and can't buy themselves things. Presents for adults aren't about meeting needs (or even wants) but about showing you care about people and giving them a happy surprise.

My family is on the edge of being a family of adults. While you have both grown-ups and kids in the family, you still have to treat the adults sort of like kids. you can't give the little ones Easter baskets or Christmas stockings and not the big ones. So, since I have a lot of kids, there has been a long spell of maintaining childhood holiday customs for the sake of the younger ones.

My daughters are both self-supporting and don't really need stuff given to them so much. My sons both require tuition and textbooks and have therefore been so expensive that there's not likely to be much left for gifts for them.

So I'm thinking that this is very much the right year to return to handmade gifts. I'm going to look through my crafts books and search a bit online and see if I can find something amazing and special to make.

If I can quit working so much.

Which I might be able to do. I'm teaching, of course, and also have my eight regular clients for whom I work one to six hours a week, but at the moment I have no other billable projects.

That could change by noon, of course.

I have a dental appointment today. I'm supposed to get a crown. And then, Lostarts tells me, I'll be good as new.

The temporary crown hurt quite a bit. I've had a variety of aches and pains lately. I think that if you're over forty you don't get to complain about those.

My kids might say that there's not much point in complaining to me about aches and pains anyway. It's the way I was brought up. When I was a kid, my mother had two explanations for all pains: growth (as in growing pains) and wickedness.

I have weird pains in my left arm sometimes. I do tell people about this, in hopes that someone will someday say, "I had that! and here's what fixed it." And then I also have a particular ache in my hip or upper thigh or someplace which I only get while scrubbing things. It must be psychosomatic. Or possibly wickedness.

Anyway, today is class, during which the bookkeeper is supposed to come and straighten out my accounting software for me, and then I'm going to the gym, and working for my Northerners, and then the dental appointment, and then tonight I have Master Chorale. A busy day.

It's List Week at the HGP.

I'm not trying to persuade anyone to do the Holiday Grand Plan. I looked back at last Christmas, and I see that I ended up cutting back on work for a couple of weeks and doing lots of baking and stuff. I made a couple of little presents, but bought most of them. We had a perfectly nice holiday even though I didn't do the HGP, and so can everyone else. However, there were years when I worked in public, and people would ask me why I was so serene about the holidays. I'd explain that I used the HGP.

There were some common responses.

First, people would say that they didn't like to think about the holidays so much, or didn't want to get out of order seasonally. I totally agree. With the HGP, you do spend a little time at the beginning thinking about it, but then you don't have to think -- and especially you don't have to fret or worry, as American moms so often do -- for the rest of the season. You just spend a few minutes a day following your plan and everything takes care of itself.

Second, people would say that they didn't have time. Studies show that the average American mom spends nearly 40 hours a week preparing for the holidays, from Thanksgiving till Christmas. It's like taking on an extra job for a month. I'd rather spread it out and be finished in time to observe Advent and have a peaceful Christmas.

So, if you want to consider joining in the HGP this year, this is when to start. You clean your front porch at some point this week. I did a bit of housework yesterday, and it was satisfying to do something mindless and physical, so I may go ahead today and get the porch cleaned. If not, I can spend 15 minutes a day on it and have it done by the end of the week.

You also make these lists:

• Gifts to be given, amount to spend (include family, friends, school, church, etc)
• Christmas card list
• Visits to make
• Parties/Entertaining
• Menus for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, other parties
• Goodies for Sharing/Gifts. Decide how much needs to be made and divide it between the weeks from now through December 1.
• Favorite meals of family members for freezing ahead.
• Long-term shopping list divided into: canned foods, perishables for each holiday, linens and dishes, decorations, etc.

This is kind of a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, so I may do some of that this afternoon as well. I had better hurry up, though, if I am to make it to church on time.

This week was the beginning of my having to be someplace at 8:00 four mornings a week, and it's surprising to me how hard I'm finding it.

I've finished half the Dutchman's Puzzle blocks, so I thought I'd play around with them a bit and decide on a setting.

The pattern puts all the blocks together with no sashing:

I decided that this was too wiggly-looking, and that sashing would be needed.

Initially I had planned to use the same solid-colored fabric for the sashing that's in the blocks:

However, this made the pinwheels stand out against a solid backing, and was still rather wiggly.
So I thought about this dark peach:

But that seemed like too much contrast, and too much brightness with the reds. It's kind of a nice retro-kitchen look, but I wanted a pale, low contrast sugary look.

So I went with  a filigree pattern using the same shade of pink, plus white:

I actually sewed two rows. They have some duplicates, so I'm not sewing them together, but I laid them out to get the effect.

I think I'll like it a lot. Each row has five completely different squares, though they are the same ones in each row, if you see what I mean. I can put one near the top of the quilt and one near the bottom.

Sashing is always sort of an issue for me, since it requires a level of accuracy that just isn't available to me, but I'm going to try hard and be prepared to tear out mistakes. I could have this sandwiched and ready to quilt by the time it gets cold. I could then still have it sandwiched and ready to quilt two years later, but that's another story.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the HGP, the Holiday Grand Plan. It's an online to-do list, basically, which you follow for the semester leading up to Christmas. By doing a little cleaning, baking, crafting, and shopping each week, you can be completely ready for the holidays with minimal stress. For years, I followed this plan with success, having a serene Christmas while all the women around me lost their minds.

Last year, I don't think I did it at all. I believe that we did celebrate Christmas last year, and I'm fairly sure that I gave people things but I don't remember it very clearly.

Things were a little out of hand last year, actually. I lost my job last spring, spent a long time job-hunting before settling into freelance work and part-time teaching, had kids come and go. Things were a little abnormal. This year I'm striving for normal.

Today I plan to clean house, work on my quilt, maybe loll around a bit and read. I ought to get checks in the mail that will bring my bank account up to the level it needs to be at when my son's tuition bank draft gets there. I'm hoping not to do much work, but of course I have to do some. Mostly Saturday plans, though.

My bento boxes are still neither decorative nor properly stuffed, but I'm getting there. Two little boxes are definitely a proper lunch, if you pack them correctly.

So I had a proper lunch, and did a brief Pilates video, and  got lots of work done, and talked with members of my family.

Both my daughters are having decision points in their lives. Decision points make for good drama, on TV or in books, but not necessarily for comfortable, pleasant days.

I tried to be useful to them. Honest, as I told a student who invited me to be brutal about his paper, but I hope never brutal.

#1 son had been given a definition of music in class. He didn't recall it exactly, and I don't remember exactly what he said, but I found this very similar definition online:

Non-musicians may be feeling confused about the color part, but we think of music as dark or bright, and also as warm or less warm.

We were in agreement with the "organized sound' bit, which has I think been the standard phrase since the '50s. If, as #1 son's teacher put it, you cut down a tree in a forest, it's not music. If you record it and repeat it in an organized way, then it can be music.

The teacher hadn't be sure that the "time" part was necessary, since we can't live outside of time, but I think it's essential. If you played notes on successive days, especially at random intervals, then I think it wouldn't be music. #1 son had a counter-example, but I think it would be conceptual art of some kind, but not music.

The expressing part seemed central to #1 son. Birdsong may be tuneful and pretty, but it's not music because it doesn't express anything, said the teacher. Really badly performed songs or intentionally hideous noises can be music when they're intended to express something. Music doesn't have to be pretty in order to be music. But the intention seems to be defining. Accidental music doesn't count. Yet this also bothered him, since it might be the intention of the listener, who perceives it as music and makes it into music in his or her brain while listening.

"I don't think we were supposed to think so hardly about this," #1 son remarked, having expanded his brain to the point at which it was being kind of flexible about language.

The quilt squares above are not music, and indeed one of them has been put together wrong, as you can see, and is not making a pinwheel. In fact, since I've been looking at the one on the top of the stack as I put together the next one, a couple of them have been put together in exactly that same wrong way. Now both Salt Peanuts and Dutchman's Puzzle have errors that have to be undone before I can go ahead with them. Sigh.

It's Friday, which may or may not mean anything. I still have a lot of work to do before I can consider the week ended.

Yesterday was not a good day from the point of view of normal life. I skipped the gym for a client meeting. Breakfast was an English muffin. I made hot dogs baked in bottled BBQ sauce (a favorite from childhood, but not healthy) and a baked potato and that with some grapes was both lunch and dinner, meaning that the proportion of fat and sugar to protein and fiber yesterday was miserable.

There were lots of rather emotional client interruptions, which messed up my perfect noon to six client work plan. I worked till 9:30 with only a break for choir.

Today will be better.

I started responding to Ozarque's comment from yesterday, and ended up with way too much for a comment, so I'm posting it here instead.

I had said something about web sites for the elderly, and Ozarque said that elderly people aren't a homogenous group. Very true.

Still, I think that people who are making web sites for groups that include a preponderance of older people should take that into account when they build the website. They should do at least these things:

• Make sure that the navigation is really clear. That's always a good thing, but we found that older testers often have more trouble finding and recognizing the navigation buttons, so I think that those sites should have buttons that really look like buttons.
• Don't rely on mouseover. Most of the older users I've been working with don't use mouseover to get information.
•  Be less concerned about scrolling. People who remember the days before CSS are often willing to scroll on a homepage, when younger users tend to scroll only after they've decided to read something.
•  Don't assume that their clients are already on Twitter. Half of all U.S. CEOs under forty are on Twitter, but the numbers get smaller as people get older.
• Be more cautious about designing forms. I think that older people are often more likely to be nervous about using the internet in vague ways, such as being hesitant about giving their names, closing sites as soon as they get warnings of any kind, or not wanting to use OpenID. Stuff like that. So there should be very clear statements about how information will be used, limited requests for information, etc.
• Check analytics before deciding what browsers to support. Older users may also be more likely to use older browsers and to change their screen resolutions. Designers may not be able to accommodate all of that sort of thing, but they should consider it. I've also helped a lot of people download new browsers lately.
• Don't use light type on dark backgrounds. This is a basic accessibility no-no, but I think it's okay if you know for sure that your audience is young.

I think that web workers are so often younger people that they don't think about these things, and they should. I think, too, that web developers who try to consider the needs of older people are likely to get it wrong. That is, they're likely to think in terms of older people being less skilled with their computers. That's not the difference.

My classes went well yesterday, I went to the gym, sat down to my pot roast leftovers bento box lunch, and still got back to my computer by noon. 

I got lots of stuff done in the afternoon, made chili and cornbread for dinner, and went with La Bella to the Master Chorale rehearsal. We're singing Messiah, but we're doing the whole thing. There are lots of bits that I've never done before, so it should be fun.

We have a new director. He's from Purdue, and seems like a nice guy. It's always interesting, when you start working with someone, to see how they communicate about sound.

We don't have many very direct ways to talk about sounds, so people have to speak metaphorically a lot of the time. This guy has a couple of 6-measure sections that he wants sung with a straight tone, and he told us to make them like lasers.

I got home in time to watch "The Big Bang Theory" on TV. I didn't do any needlework while watching it, just sat there. This is because Salt Peanuts, which ought to be my "pick up work," still hasn't been frogged back. I haven't had the heart to yet.

I think I've mentioned before how fond I am of Hallowe'en quilts. Autumn quilts generally, I guess, but for some reason I really like quilts with pumpkins.

The Dutchman's Puzzle I'm making is following the directions in a Jelly Rolls quilt book, but as I say, it looks quite wiggly without sashings, so I think I'm going to add some. I have a pattern for Dutchman's Puzzle with contrasting sashing in Thimbleberries Quilting for Harvest, so I was admiring all the nice pumpkins in there.

I really like this table runner. I like the way the pumpkin is made from strips. In fact, I sort of look at this and think "Jelly Roll! Bali Pop!" (It occurs to me that non-quilters won't know what I'm talking about here. These are names for collections of fabric you can buy where you get long strips of lots of different fabrics. It's not as cheap as actually having a scrapbag and using it, but it's way less expensive than using lots of fat quarters when you just need a little of each for the effect you want.)

Maybe next year.

The Keepsake Quilting fall catalog arrived, too, so I was admiring their fall quilts as well.

More Thimbleberries table runners in there.

These are fake -- that is, they're made from printed panels rather than pieced. 

I don't usually like fake quilting. I'm not big on fake anything, actually. But these are quite pretty, aren't they?

The Computer Guy launched one of our websites, only two weeks late, so that brings me to 13 hours of linkbuilding I have for him this week.

I've also got my people on retainer and my classes, so I've got plenty of billable work this week. I'm demonstrating this evening how to use a new website that launched a couple of weeks ago and has been confusing its users ever since. This makes two websites I've done with elderly people. I feel as though I'm getting knowledgeable about the special needs of this group, from the point of view of web design. I may write about that.

Right now I'm going to dress and have breakfast and stuff like that, since I'm trying to be disciplined about my schedule, and then I must go see whether my online class is doing anything.

It's the first day of class. I made myself a schedule, with some leeway and uncommitted parts.

I got my roll book ready, with the second class of the day marked by an elephant paper clip so I can readily find it. You can see this clip of which I speak in the picture below.

I have hedgehog magnets marking the most essential @computer tasks of the day.

I have my bento box lunch packed, and my gym bag as well.

My online class is ready (I hope and believe), I have a cool first-day writing activity for my face-to-face classes, and I finished all last week's assignments over the weekend.

I am ready.

So, while I drink my tea, I'm going to write about race. 

Now, the first thing we should remember about race is that it's a myth. There is no biological basis for any system of dividing human beings up into races, whether you go with the "red and yellow, black and white" system or the geolinguistic divisions system, and all are fairly arbitrary.

We should also acknowledge that a lot of people are just tired of the whole subject and feel that we should have gotten over this by now. I think I'm one of those, actually. When #2 son was interviewed about his experiences as a schoolboy of mixed-race heritage, he rolled his eyes and said, "This is [name of our town].We're not hicks!"

I'd really like to be able to say that the subject is obsolete.

But it came up a bit this week. First, I was writing an article about a very impressive organization in our state.I hadn't heard of it before, even though it's 116 years old. It was formed to support African-American medical professionals at a time when African-Americans were hard pressed to get medical care in our state. When segregation came in during the 20th century, African-Americans couldn't get service in most hospitals here, and could only get treatment from African-American doctors and dentists. This group organized conferences for ongoing professional development and helped African-Americans financially so they could get through medical school.

This was kind of a big deal. It still is, actually. As the president of the organization said to me, "We're trying to make inroads into equitable treatment." African-Americans continue to have much worse health stats here than whites do.

The interesting thing is that none of the background information, nothing on the website, and none of the interviews mentioned this.

There was a lot of talk about financial need among medical students, and the word "minority" came up once. Apart from that, no one ever mentioned that the organization was for African American medical professionals.

Normally, the race of the people I'm writing about is irrelevant. It doesn't even come up. In this particular case, it was important. And yet no one was prepared to tell me about it. This is because it is considered impolite to mention race.

In general, I agree. not only do I not care about people's ethnicity, but it usually doesn't matter at all. In this case, it mattered a lot. This organization, both historically and currently, is an organization dedicated to the civil rights of an oppressed group. Not mentioning that leaves out an important part of the story.

Then I visited the ladies' Sunday School class. There was a question in the lesson asking, "Have you ever had a prejudice about a group of people and later changed your mind?" One of the group said, "Well, I grew up in [name of town]. I don't need to say any more." This town is famous for being almost entirely African-American, though the Sunday School lady herself is not, as far as I can tell.

I didn't know exactly what she was talking about, but the others in the group did. "I've never been there," I said, giving them the chance to explain. "Don't go," they said firmly.

And then I was doing my roll book last night and trying to guess the ethnic makeup of my classes.

I had what seemed to me to be a good reason for this. It is very hard for me to learn names and distinguish one student from another. If there is some ethnic diversity, I have a better chance. Age differences would also work, but I don't usually get much of that in Freshman comp. My first semester I had a guy with a beard, and that helped. Strikingly different self-presentation is a plus, too. But those things can't be determined from the grade book. So I was trying to get a sense of how much diversity I might have this term, based on names.

We used to do this in the hiring committees at the university -- deciding to interview D'nisha Jackson rather than Emily Lockhart in hopes of turning in a good affrimative action report.

It's time I gave that up. What's the point? I'm better off hoping for beards and only one Goth girl.

Yesterday was my third annual Pampered Chef kickoff. The first year, I went out of curiosity and saw that PC could pay my kid's tuition bill (it did). Last year, things were very up in the air for me, and I didn't know what I might be doing, though I hadn't been keeping up with my PC business well at the time (unemployment interfered with my already limited perkiness). This year I decided to go on the spur of the moment, even though I obviously don't have time to be a PC lady. They always have interesting presentations on business issues, and a preview of the new season's products and recipes. Computer guys don't have this type of meeting, as far as I know.

#2 daughter keeps up her involvement in a similar company, BeautiControl, just enough to provide for her friends and family even though she doesn't have time to do parties. I like getting the new recipes and things from PC, I like the discount on their products, it's a fun group. So I may do another catalog show or two. On the other hand, I know plenty of PC ladies, and could probably always get spice blends when I need them without too much effort.

After that, I spent some time lolling around reading, and even had a nap. Then I worked on the Dutchman's Puzzle quilt a bit. I have a dozen squares made,which is not quite half, so obviously I won't have it finished before school starts. I think I may use sashing between the squares. It turns out very wiggly-looking if you don't.

And then I have to decide what evening activities to commit to this year. I need to make a schedule. I'm going to pack my gym bag tonight so I'll have it tomorrow after class. I'll get caught up on the laundry and print out my class lists and make sure my online class is ready. And I do have a couple of jobs to do, and a GoToMeeting meeting with the girls.

I really don't want to limit my life to nothing but work. However much we enjoy our work, we have to have other things in our lives as well. I think I need a lot of music, and the Master Chorale is doing Messiah this year. I can't ignore my family and friends and expect them to remain close. I've made new friends this year, but it's easy to drift apart if you don't see one another. We also have to take care of ourselves. Janalisa and I were talking about that yesterday. If, in your forties and fifties, you don't take care of yourself, then in your sixties and seventies you will be a decrepit old lady, guaranteed.

So, yeah, I have a lively day ahead. Two church services, first. I may have to give that up.

Yesterday was less insane. I got all the assignments finished. I even went outdoors into the beautiful day at one point (bank, post office, grocery for snacks to fill up the box once I saw how much room was left after I put in the books, back to the post office). And I quit work at 5:30.

This was a tiring week. I read an article this morning that claimed that "Organising your time is all about introducing some rhythm into your life. Our brains love working in patterns, so if we can start implementing some tasks that recur at regular intervals during our week, our brains will quickly snap into the right mode for the right task at the right time. This is the first step in establishing some structure to your week." I'm going to see whether I can get my brain to snap quickly into the right mode for packing my lunch and getting to the gym.

He says further, "Each of us would have a set number of tasks that we have to complete each week to ensure our business runs smoothly. This could be marketing, sales, accounting or business development just to suggest a few. By defining these key tasks and working out when we will do these tasks each week, we instantly gain focus on what needs to be done and when. For example, if you decide that on Tuesday mornings, you will focus on marketing, each Tuesday morning, you’ll wake up and your brain will instantly click into marketing mode!

It’s important that once you define this rhythm, you never stray from it. If you get some ideas to market your business, write them down and keep them for your marketing time. If you think about an account that needs to be balanced, save that for your Accounting time. Doing this will actually motivate you more and will allow you to think about those ideas a little further before rushing into them."

On the other hand, it is possible that I'm not having problems with productivity or organization, but with my expectations. For example, I like to do two or three projects a day. It's possible that three articles on various subjects requiring research and interviews don't actually equal one project just because they were all for the same person. It's possible that teaching college classes isn't something I do in my spare time. It could be that I'm now running a business, and that doing so takes some time beyond the time involved in doing assignments.

Back before I decided that my payments weren't going to arrive before the tuition due date (which may not be true at all), I ordered some stuff from Japan. You may recall that #2 daughter and I both felt that our bento boxes weren't really large enough (mine actually holds exactly 1 cup; hers holds 2 total). I have since read how to put a healthy, balanced, 500 calorie lunch into a little bento box, but initially I went in search of a 2-cup box. I didn't find any meeting my qualifications (cheap, excessively cute, with engrish on them) though I certainly found plenty of elegant executive bento boxes with room for a proper lunch.

I did find this sort of Japanese dollar store, and the things I ordered from it arrived yesterday. There I was able to score another little 1-cup bento box (the white thing showing in it is a moveable divider), plus one with nesting boxes which seems useless for packing lunches to take somewhere, but just fine for packing lunches to be ready when you get home, or escape from your computer. I also succumbed to the weird hardboiled egg mold above, which also makes a nice little onigiri rice ball. You're supposed to seriously compress your rice so it takes up less room, and while mine didn't look like a bear,it was nicely compressed. This is my husband's sticky rice, by the way, not ordinary rice.

Also, in the frenzied  dollar store way, I bought these bento accessories, which I plan to share with #2 daughter, my partner in the bento box = healthy lunch effort.

Here you see an insulated carrying sack for a water bottle, soy sauce bottles and wee elephant dividers and an odd hippo-shaped thing which they sent to me gratis. I assume it's another soy sauce bottle, and it also has with it a little plastic cocktail pick.

The object is to pack your bento box very full, with things divided up neatly using these various accessories, and then nothing moves around or leaks during the morning and your bento lunch is still lovely when you eat it.

I'll let you know how that goes.

I also have these Japanese office supplies.  There are Post-it flags shaped like hedgehogs, hedgehog magnets, and paperclips like both hedgehogs and elephants, as well as a handy folder with smiling coffee cups on it. They also sent "soda candy" in a cute traingular container.

If I am $33 short on the tuition and textbooks, we'll know why, won't we?

However, this was a fun punctuation to the day.

It's tempting to imagine that having the proper bento box accessories will magically cause me not to end up eating fast food at the computer, but I must resist this idea. I think that will require getting enough sleep to make good decisions, and not being panicky about the tuition, and not spending all day Monday saying, "Sure, I'll have that for you by the end of the week."

Today I'm going to Janalisa's kick-off party. I intend to turn off my phone so it won't beep at me whenever I have email.