Yesterday I was invited to apply for a new oDesk job -- and then someone else was chosen because I couldn't begin immediately. I also had confirmation that I was chosen for and could begin a new oDesk assignment, which quite fortunately is with a company in my own state, whose boss said that he really liked my work and that it was exactly what he needed and he looked forward to a long-term working relationship.

I received a check from a client who hadn't paid for a while -- along with a note saying she needed to cut expenses and wouldn't be continuing with me (actually, it said she wanted to discuss other options, but she's a long time client on a prior plan and I have no cheaper options to offer her). When I called #1 daughter to see whether she could envision any options I could offer this client, she said, "I hear you saying that you now have an opening for a new client under more advantageous terms." Of course, she's right.

But at that point I had to call #2 daughter, because she would understand why I was slightly distressed by those two events. Whether we have time to do all the work or not -- or, in her case, go on all the dates or not -- we always want people to choose us.

It may be an irrational need for approval (though I guess that doesn't really fit with the rest of our behavior, for either of us) or something equally unappealing, but there it is.

The result is that I end up with too many clients and she ends up with too many suitors. Although "too many clients" doesn't even seem right as a phrase. I just need some minions.

I also had a call from the college offering me three classes again for next term, including a brand new, particularly cool one. #1 son asked whether it was practical for me to take lots of teaching on, since it doesn't pay as well, but it's steady, predictable work that always does result in a paycheck, and they take out taxes, too, so I think that's good news.

If I can restrain myself from taking on more new clients, I may be able to conduct a normal life. I went to the gym yesterday, and out to lunch with Janalisa, and to choir practice, just like a normal person, and still got in nine hours of work.

As for #2 daughter, when I spoke with her she was on her way to pick up one guy at the train station and hoping another guy wouldn't decide to drop by. I assured her that he (the other guy) would decide to drop by, and that all the other guys she's dating would also drop by, converging on her in a manner reminiscent of the movie The Birds.

Of course, I hope I was wrong.

Yesterday I did blog posts, walked over to the church to fax my contract to the client for a job I finished over the weekend, did a couple more hours' work on the chocolatier's site, set up autopay at the internet provider, grabbed a sandwich and did the grocery shopping, did my usual ranks and analytics for The Northerners, spent another hour fiddling around with the chocolatier, edited #1 daughter's proposal for a potential client, put in an hour or two for a Dark Art client, went with La Bella to an AAUW meeting, came home to a new oDesk assignment, and graded papers while watching TV with #1 son.

It seemed like a nice, normal day.

It's pitiful that my big goal for life is having normal days.

But La Bella and I were talking about this. She's retired and has no children, and yet the list of things she had done that day was as long as mine. As we agreed to sell ads for the Gridiron Show and signed up on the cookie list before going upstairs to add our name to the book club luncheon, we thought that we might ought to say no to some things.

Not too many things, though. As they say, you get plenty of rest when you're dead.

At least, I think so. If heaven has a cookie rota, La Bella and I are probably going to be putting our names on it.

I went to a craft fair with Partygirl yesterday, after having finished up a little bit of work while the boys were sleeping. We strolled around admiring everyone's beautiful stuff, made a couple of small purchases, grabbed business cards, and (once Partygirl suggested it to me) I handed out my cards as well. Most of the artists didn't have websites, and their reasons were interesting to me.

Partygirl and I haven't seen each other much since Tuesday class ended, so we had to talk a lot and catch up. It was fun, and it was good to take some time off.

I came home and hung out with the remaining kids, and made them a good though very early dinner. Here you see Teriyaki chicken, brown rice and sticky rice, cucumbers and peaches and green beans from the farmers market (also tomatoes and peppers, but we didn't eat them -- I'll cook them up into something nice today), and Maple Walnut Cookies from Martha Stewart's Halloween issue, a nice macaroon-like cookie with a respectable amount of fiber. The dishes of peaches and cukes were full when I put them out, by the way, but the boys had snacked down halfway into the dishes by the time I got the rest of the food on the table.

We had a couple of cookies apiece, and I tried to send the rest back to the dorms with #2 son, but he declined. I put them into the freezer instead. #2 son says he's eating spinach at school, though he didn't eat any of the green beans. I put the rest of the dinner into a bento box for my lunch today, and intend to hit the gym this morning.

I have to fax a contract today, which I plan to do on my way to or from the gym, and I have lots of papers to grade. I'm also going to finish up the chocolatier's site, I sincerely hope. I had a couple of communications from people wanting websites this morning, and I have a couple of people from yesterday's fair who wanted me to contact them. I also have my usual Dark Art stuff to do.

So it's a busy day I have planned for today. I took quite a bit of time off over the weekend, though, and feel ready to get back to work.

Dutchman's Puzzle is now a square. There is a block in the lower right hand corner which I need to take apart and correct. I'm going to make another one or possibly two rows of pieced blocks, and then  add deep borders to get it to the right size for a bed.

I also signed myself and the girls up for a free online html class. I did the first lesson today (nothing new for me, but it will be for them) and set us up a shell in Workspace so we can work together on this. Soccer Boy estimates six months to real proficiency in coding, working on our own. The Computer Guy didn't give a time estimate, but he believes that people can learn this sort of thing on their own. Both these guys are computer engineers, so we don't know how true this is, but I have basic background, even if my quilt doesn't have pointy triangles, so the three of us might end up able to do our own sites if need be.

My LYS set up this tasty-looking table setting of yarn. It has nothing to do with my post today, but I thought you might like to see it.

Yesterday my duet in church made people cry, always a good thing. Then #1 daughter headed back south. We had A Talk about her life first. I usually don't interfere in my grown kids' lives much, but she said she was unhappy, so I meddled a bit. It probably wasn't useful of me.

The plans to enlarge my little freelance practice into a Firm depend on both the girls continuing to want to do it. I worry a bit about the possibility of continuing to grow at my current pace and then not having any partners. A friend of mine said not to worry about this, since I could always hire someone, but I really don't want to supervise people. I never liked that. Later, though, #2 daughter called to talk about whether we could become designers ourselves, thus solving the lack of designer problem. This was encouraging -- if she's willing to learn new skills for the purpose, she's probably fairly serious.

I tend to think of web design as something that requires talent, but #2 daughter is optimistic about the possibility that we could learn it. I need to brush up my HTML anyway since I want to retake my certification test (I passed, but not with the score I wanted) in a couple of weeks. So we think we'll work on it some in our copious free time.

I've also done three squares of row #5 of the Dutchman's Puzzle quilt. We were lolling around yesterday watching movies, but with occasional spurts of making things. #2 son made T-shirts and a hemp bracelet. I made Tuscan Sausage and Bean Stew for lunch and beef stew for dinner and the first HGP freezer meal, and a couple of quilt squares. I contemplated trying to make them extremely accurate, like with pointed triangles, but decided that it would look odd if I achieved it, having the last row of the piecing accurate while all the rest was not.

I did a little proofreading job for a weight loss website. They advocate eating 500 calories a day of lean protein and vegetables for four to six weeks, and I expect that would cause a person to lose weight.

A couple of my kids thought I shouldn't take the job, and I see their point, but I figure as long as the company's business is legal, they might as well have good grammar. I don't know if that's the right attitude or not.

#2 son is still here today, though he's asleep at the moment. I don't know how long he'll be here, but I have a date with Partygirl this morning, so I may leave and find him gone when I come home. I suggested that he come home once a month, but he said that one aspect of being in college was increasing one's independence, so he doesn't plan to come home again till Thanksgiving.

He says that kind of thing. He also uses the word "abrasion" in casual conversation. And yet, as we all had to admit in a conversation we had this weekend, the most common word people use to describe him is "adorable." Naturally, he sees this as a negative.

Yesterday was fun. We went to the farmers market for vegetables (I like the way the squash are all standing up in this picture) and the Asian market for a case of noodles for #2 son. We visited a client and hung around talking. #2 daughter went home after dinner (she works at a church), #1 daughter went out, and the boys watched football together in brotherly camaraderie.

This is Living Room week for the HGP, and my living room sure needs it. We are also supposed to buy extra flour and sugar when we go to the grocery store, and put a meal in the freezer. I'm planning to make a stew today, so I'll make enough to feed us and to make a freezer meal.

Order your Christmas cards -- the nice women at Heliotrope had some by one of my favoritee artists, so I did that. I also attempted to take a picture of my kids since they were all here, but #2 son was uncooperative. It will serve him right if I send out a picture of him looking grumpy. I'm not allowed to share these pictures, but here you can see my family all unrecognizably walking away.

The HGP considers this the week to do general browsing and philosophical discussions, too. You can learn about the holidays your friends from different faith traditions celebrate, and contemplate what Christmas means to you, while it's still early enough to change things if your celebration doesn't always reflect that.

Here are the HGP's suggested questions:

• Do I see Christmas time primarily as a time for entertaining friends and renewing long lost acquaintances or as a time for family?
• How much emphasis do our Christmas activities place on the spiritual side of Christmas?
• How involved is my family in the Christmas preparation?
• What activities are particularly important to our family at Christmas? To myself?
• Why do we observe the traditions we do in our house?
• How important is an elaborately decorated house, homemade gifts or food, to my feelings about Christmas?
• What would my ideal Christmas be like?

This is also the week to browse through holiday magazines or books and make some decisions about holiday crafting. Because, let's face it, if you decide to make gifts between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you will be wrapping up a lot of UFOs and presenting them with apologies.

All the kids are home for the weekend. It's wonderful.

#2 daughter arrived first, since she has to go back up and sing at her church tomorrow morning. She went to the optometrist while I taught my class, chatted with me while I did my blog posts, and then we had lunch,  picked up a birthday cake and a little gift for #2 son, and had haircuts. A cup of tea, an episode of Leverage, and then the other kids started arriving home.

We had pizza and birthday cake. #2 daughter went out with The Computer Guy and another computer guy, an old friend of #1 daughter's, came over. Conversation included servers, childhood memories, and whether "abrasion" sounds worse than "scrape" (#2 son said it did, though the rest of us were not convinced; we did however agree that it sounded better than "gaping wound").

The kids were kind of severe about my Dutchman's Puzzle quilt. #2 daughter decried my lack of precision, and said in fact that my failure to have points on my triangles proved that I'd never be able to code websites well. She stopped short of saying I had wasted good fabrics. #2 just chided me gently for starting a new quilt before finishing the one I had already begun. My husband agreed on that point.

I agree on that point, actually, but I think that my imprecision, though not exactly a good thing for quilts, is not enough to make them completely worthless. They have a certain wonky charm.

We had a very noisy thunderstorm this morning, and I had to get up to close the windows anyway, so I stayed up and made multigrain lemon-pecan muffins, quiche, and hot chocolate from scratch. I got out my crafts and Christmas books and worked on those lists.

I got the menus, the baking list, and the master grocery list done easily enough.

The guest list is something else.

There are things to be said for giving people the same thing each year. My grandfather used to send us a fruitcake and --fruitcake jokes notwithstanding, I looked forward to it.

If you give people things that get used up and worn out, then it makes sense to replace them.

But there's an appeal to new ideas.

Here are #1 son's T-shirt transfers. He made his little brother a new one for his birthday. This is his standard gift, and I think all recipients of his shirts cherish them.

So I am thinking that it might be time to make people some slippers again, since they'll have work them out since last time I made those for Christmas.

But there are things I've never made for people. I've never made people socks, because they seem so utilitarian. And yet handmade socks are so much better than store-bought ones that they might be a nice gift.

What are you guys making for Christmas?

The choirlet met last night. We sang a bit, talked a lot, and tested the chocolate eggs.

I'm running late, and have just realized that I don't have time to post today at all.

After class and blogging and client meetings and choir practice, I watched Leverage and  worked on Dutchman's Puzzle.

I think it's going to be very pretty. I've got three rows completed and sewn together. That's half of the middle section.

The pattern I was ostensibly following at some point when I started had just blocks all set together and bound with a binding made by sewing together all the bits of the jelly roll left over after the piecing.

Then I saw the same block with sashing in Quilting for Harvest, liked it better, and switched to that pattern. It has a plain narrow border and a plain wide border, with a contrast binding.

But there are all these little triangles left over, and I'm thinking that I could piece a scrappy narrow border with them. Then I could add a plain border, and do the scrappy binding as discussed.

I'm definitely a fan of the jelly roll now.

 Yesterday was a glorious day, so I'm sharing my walk with you.

First there's the generalized greenery.

Then you ca stop off and play chess by the river.

These pictures are for my college chum, because we saw public chess tables near her place and I told her about this one. It overlooks the creek.

There are still plenty of wildflowers.

But there are also signs of fall approaching.

It was a nice walk. I had two big projects involving clients yesterday, and both were postponed. I therefore spent some time working on a new website I'm making and coincidentally my website building skills, such as they are. I also had a whole lot of papers to grade and Dark Artwork to do. Bits of intrigue among and around competitors. Interesting possible assignments, because that's how it is in this business -- you ask people whether they'd be up for something if the client comes through, and the client may or may not come through. I do that, too, with the designers. Would they do X and if so what would they charge? And then it may or may not come to fruition. It just adds interest to the day.

I was also named a Top Writer at oDesk, which is kind of cool, I guess. Like so many awards, it's based on numbers of some kind rather than literary quality or anything, so it's fairly artificial. Still, being in the top 25 of the thousands over there was a nice end to the day.

Still, it's really all about the beginning of the day, isn't it? I always think that how you feel when you first wake up is a good indicator of how your life is going. I wake up with a sore back and my mind full of things like what the chances of success are for an adwords campaign or whether I've gotten everything graded or not.

So, yeah, still working on the normal life part.
 

Here's where I'm teaching this term. A high muckety muck came to visit us yesterday and I asked for a computer in the classroom, or at least white boards that could be erased. The current ones just get more gray and smeary.

I bet that's what it's like when you're a pooh-ba. Everywhere you go people are either trying to impress you for the sake of their careers or hoping you can get something for them.

In any case, my enforced hanging out with him took up my gym time and I went home and conferred with the bookkeeper until time to go to the dentist.

The dentist sort of beat me up. I'm sure that's not how they see their work, but that's how I feel about it. In any case, I now have a crown, which is apparently quite a normal thing. Everyone I know seems to have one.

I did the work for The Northerners. My logistics people feel satisfied and finished for the nonce, which is a relief. I like them a lot, but I needed to cut back somewhere. I sent out invoices. Then I got an emergency writing assignment for this men's magazine I write for, and agreed to write it last night after rehearsal so it could go to press today.

La Bella picked me up for rehearsal. We worked on a whole bunch of Messiah, including "He Trusted in God," which was new to me. We're supposed to sing it in a sarcastic and snarky manner, but haven't yet gotten that tone to the director's satisfaction.

Then I came home and wrote about another charity gala. I hadn't realized how many of those we have around here. I don't get invited to them much.

And that was it.