I've realized that I didn't even mention that this is Ash Wednesday.

I usually write about Lent, and probably will this year, too, because I think lots of people who don't observe it find it pretty mystifying, but I don't think I've ever written about the ashes.

Mainline Protestant churches (and I guess all evangelicals can get offended by the term if they care to, but it is the normal term we use, sort of like Inuits calling themselves "people" as though no one else were) often have the imposition of ashes in the evening, so that we only have to go to choir practice with smudged faces. High church types like Episcopalians, and usually Catholics as well, do the imposition of ashes in the morning so their members go around with dirty faces all day, providing an opportunity to witness to kindly people who let them know that they've got schmutz on their faces.

Here's how it's done: the palms from last year's Palm Sunday are gathered up and burnt, creating some ashes. There's a service and/or some confession, however your particular church goes about it, and then the pastor or priest dips his thumb into the ashes and makes a cross on the forehead of all the penitents (the people who've confessed their sins).

The object is to remind us that we're sinners, in case it has slipped our minds, and get us ready for Lent, the season of penitence that takes place between Mardi Gras and Easter.

Those of you who are still parading and partying and flashing your bosoms (or, if you are men, your pretend bosoms) for Mardi Gras must wrap it up pretty quickly here.

Here is Salt Peanuts, laid out unblocked but with the collar pinned out a bit. I want to see just how lacy and how rib-like I want this lacy rib to be.

It's a nice sweater, and once I get the ends woven and the collar as it should be, I'll move on to the next project, or at least decide what the next project might be. I'm glad to have a FO for 2010, and I hope it won't be the only one.

I've been reading YOU Being Beautiful  by Roizen and Oz. We've been through hair and skin, teeth, hands, and feet.

Much of the discussion in these chapters has been about how bad for you it is to do stuff. Since I have been remiss about grooming for most of my life, I can read about the long-term consequences of nail polish and high heels and hair treatments with cheerful interest and congratulate myself on not having any of the horrible symptoms Roizen and Oz describe with such relish.

In the section on hands, though, I had a terrible shock. A woman's index and ring fingers, they say, are the same length. Not men's. Men's index fingers are about .96 the length of their ring fingers.

Dear readers, it turns out that I am a man.

I had no idea. Maybe I shouldn't wear that fluffy pink sweater.

I made it down to the Next County to the South and back safely, mostly because my husband drove me. We left at 4:00 and returned at 8:00. During that time there were two hours of pleasant interaction as I explained online copywriting to a marketing class, and two hours of terror as I traveled in complete safety there and back.

It's so stupid. But there it is. The road in question is just filled with the most frightening sort of overpasses.

Before I left for that, I had class, did my Monday reports, and then worked on a site rewrite. I got my usual couple of new job leads. One was from a new art museum opening soon in the Next County to the North. I am now able to drive to that Next County myself, and in fact I do so every Friday to teach, so I am able to be completely excited about the idea that they're interested in me for their job without any admixture of fear in case they want me to come up there for meetings.

They also asked me to recommend a designer, so I checked with the Computer Guy before suggesting him. He assured me that he wouldn't get the job. "They just want to have three bids," he said, and I do know what he means. We'll see.

The other one was from a guy who wants to make an ecommerce site for men's underwear and accessories. I now know that it is possible to buy padded shorts, just like padded bras. Seems kind of tacky, but I guess it depends on the circles you travel in.

I'm thinking of throwing that one directly to the Computer Guy.

I'm just a few inches from the end of Salt Peanuts. It is of course possible that the second sleeve won't work for some reason and I'll have to redo something, but still, the end is in sight. I've sewn the other pieces together and it looks like it'll be a successful sweater. It is now time to choose my next knitting project.

It's a pleasure to do this, isn't it? I have a stash of yarn -- enough Telemark for a sweater, enough laceweight for a shawl. I'll even have a few skeins of the bulky Wonderwool from Salt Peanuts left, if I want to do some accessory to match the sweater.

I was, all that long time ago before I began Salt Peanuts, thinking of making this shawl. I'm concerned, though, since I take so little time to knit these days, that it would be too hard to keep track of lace. I'm doing pretty well, in 2010, about taking some knitting time on the weekends, but who knows if I'll maintain that.

I was thinking about this cardigan from Interweave Knits. I'd use the gray Telemark for it -- but I also have skeins of complementary colors, so I might ought to plan a colorwork project for that yarn.
I still have a couple of Scandinavian  colorwork pattern books that I haven't used.

There are also some glove/mitten patterns I've been admiring: Kingdom Gloves and Chevalier Mittens (the pattern is in Finnish as well as English, for your convenience).

Both are complex, but they're small, and I might finish them in some reasonable amount of time.

It might be wiser to make something very simple, like a one-piece raglan, which I can ignore for months without being completely lost when I pick it up again.

In any case, it was a pleasure to sit with my stack of knitting books, looking at all the possibilities as I worked on Salt Peanuts.

It might also be smart of me to plan on doing some quilting instead of knitting for a while. I have a couple of unquilted tops. We'd have been glad of them, had I gotten them done in time to provide warmth for this winter.

I've reached the challenging stage: trying to make sure that the sleeve cap is the same on the second sleeve as on the the first. 

Since the directions for this sweater didn't work for me, and I altered them, I can't just follow the directions slavishly and hope for the best. So I've already done some frogging, and may do more.

Fortunately, I had DVDs of Leverage, and thus had some distraction.

I worked for about six hours yesterday, fielding emails throughout the time.

Since I was actually at my computer working, it isn't reasonable of me to feel cross about getting work-related emails on Saturday, but I did. Especially the snippy one reminding me that some work had been "in the works and scheduled for some time." I'd had the heads-up that this project was ready for me to work on fairly late on Friday afternoon, and had instantly responded with "I have a site launching this weekend, so it'll be Monday before I can do this, but I have it on my calendar." Then on Saturday morning -- it wasn't even 9:00 yet -- I get this complaint about my speed? Really, I was angry.

I wrote back saying, "'In the works' is not the same as 'scheduled,'" and it was fortunate that #2 daugther was also working yesterday, since her IM counsels of calm kept me from saying "Fix your own blankety-blank website."

Anyway, after I completed that project, I felt justified in switching to knitting and DVDs.

We have a TV discussion going on at our house. Our TV is about four years old, I guess -- it's from before flat screens. It's a cube. I think it has about a 27" screen. It, and the DVD player, and all the game consoles, and lots of games and movies and controllers and stuff, are all in the living room next to the fireplace. I would like them to be in a cabinet, away from view.

I have always wanted this, and my husband went some years ago and bought a cabinet, but it is a "Look! I have lots of electronic stuff!" kind of cabinet. So I finally decided to replace it with the kind of cabinet I've always wanted. A nice armoire, I thought, with a cottage-like feeling. Mission, or Provencal, something like that.

They no longer make this type of cabinet. My kids have explained to me that no one in the entire world wants a cabinet like this any more. Also that every one in the entire world now has a flat-screen TV. And indeed it seems to be true. All furniture for TVs and electronic gear is now too narrow for our TV, and none of it puts the TV inside a cabinet.

I lie. You can get an enormous electronica armoire for your bedroom, if you don't mind looking like a fugitive from Dynasty. These items are also too expensive. For less than the price of a piece of furniture which would dwarf everything else in the room, including the fireplace, I could buy a flat screen TV and a modern media console (that's what they call them) to put it on. This move is being strongly advocated by the menfolks.

I would rather put that money toward the dental work I still haven't been able to afford. I just want to spend a couple hundred dollars on a nice little cabinet to stick the TV and all its gear into. I may hit the flea markets.

Though I worked from 14:41 to 20:06 on it yesterday, I didn't quite finish the new website I'm writing. Somehow, the use of European time (or military time, I think people also call it) makes it seem worse. I'm hoping that I inadvertently left the Toggl running while I did other things. I know that I sent out quite a few emails saying that I would take care of whatever it was ASAP but that I had a deadline, and I ate pizza and Cheez Its at my desk instead of having a proper dinner, so it may be that I really did spend that much time on it, and I'm about to get back to it now.

The client said on his Facebook page that he was going to launch it yesterday, so I feel bad about not getting it completed. However, I also felt bad about not getting the grading completed. And there was that whole hours-long adventure with the photos for another site -- and I didn't even Toggl for that.

Yesterday morning in class we were working on research skills. Since it was Darwins' birthday, we used the topic of evolution as our example. We saw how to use the online library, and how to distinguish a respectable website from a loony one (I have to mention -- all the websites saying things like "Hitler killed people because he was an evolutionist so don't let your kids study that" are badly designed). We also encountered a rare beast: a personal website.

Our textbook explains how to cite a personal website, but usually I just have to say that's something people used to have, back before Facebook and Xanga.

This site, though, belongs to an 80-some year old English gentleman. He used to be a banker, but now he lives in his stately manor house (open by appointment) and writes essays on things like "A Christian View of Evolution" and other religious and philosophical questions, for his website. He also seems to have written a cookbook. He enjoys entertaining, he says.

I suggested that we could all go visit him, taking our sleeping bags, and the students said that would be like The Magic Schoolbus. He's in Saxmundham, and he really does seem to have lots of room.

There's something very charming about that, I think.

Well, back to the salt mines.

Yesterday, I worked fiendishly on the day's projects as a barrage of emails from people needing stuff arrived at my desk. At the end of the day I went and picked up a client's photos for the website we're building them, and then had a fusillade of emails back and forth with the crew trying to decide what to do now that -- after waiting for their photos for two weeks -- we saw that they weren't actually going to work at all. I made dinner for the family, and then went off to the rehearsal of the choirlet. Home at 10:30, I answered more emails needing things done, attempted to grade papers, and at last gave up and went to bed around 11:00.

At 4:21 this morning, my husband's alarm went off and I struggled out of bed to make his coffee.

Now, my point here is not that I mind making coffee. In fact, having to get up that early meant that I got all my grading done (and I have to admit that I had fallen behind with one of my classes).

My complaint is that my husband never warns me about these schedule changes. I think that, if I were the one who set the alarm for both of us, I would say, "Oh, by the way, we'll be getting up at 4:21. You might want to get to bed early."

It's just an hour's difference, so perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but 4:21 feels to me like the middle of the night. 5:21 is morning.

I have to drive up to the Next County and teach a three-hour class this morning, and then come back and finish up a website. And of course all the stuff that appears in my large collection of in-boxes. Sometime between now and then I hope to wake up.

While I think it's still true that the main advice for having good hair is to choose your ancestors wisely and leave your hair alone (in the sense of avoiding a lot of processing and chemicals), I've learned that hair loss may be avoided by consuming less red meat and more caffeine.

One of my students wrote a paper about the "perfect job." He works in a poultry processing plant, as many people around here do. The worst part of the job,he says, is slitting the chickens' throats, but it's just generally hard work at a low wage.

He was comparing his job to the "perfect job" as envisioned by TV and magazines. All he was able to come up with in his description of the perfect job was having a desk and a chair. As you see, I have a desk and a chair.

We worked on his paper together in class. We added to the description of the stereotypical perfect job, giving the successful guy a mahogany desk and plate glass windows in an office on an upper floor. Some wanted to give him a secretary bringing him a cup of coffee, but most agreed that her existence would be implied by his suit and fancy furniture and the fact that he had his own office with windows.

We compared this with the image of the student shoveling out chicken houses in a pair of blood-stained blue jeans.

Although this paper had an upbeat thesis (a job may be the perfect job for your current needs even if it doesn't conform to the stereotype of the "perfect job"), I'm newly appreciative of the face that I have a desk and a chair.

I'm reading the new Rozen and Oz book, You: Being Beautiful. I like these guys' books. They're not for the squeamish, because always full of intense detail on how your body works. So far in this book I've read about skin and hair. They give practical advice for taking care of your skin and hair, with huge magnifications of cross-sections showing glands and stuff. Also little cartoon characters. If your idea of a beauty book is based on Vogue articles, you won't like this book. But if you want to know the dire consequences of pulling nose hairs (I know, I know... apparently it's something guys do), then this book will tell you boldly.

Most of the things that have to do with taking care of skin and hair I knew before -- exfoliate, use sunscreen, leave your hair alone -- but I had no idea about ear hairs or people who compulsively pull their hair out.

Today I have a couple of fairly big writing projects, two phone meetings, and more grading of papers. I really need to do a GTD processing, too.

Here's the view out my door this morning.

The next picture is where I teach, and then I also have a picture of the road in between, once the sun came up properly.

It's been snowing ever since I took these pictures this morning, so by now it's lots snowier, but I'm not going out in it.

I've been averaging about two new assignments a day, I think, but today I got three completely new jobs, plus a couple of new things from old or continuing people and calls from some regulars.

One of my IT guys called me to say that he wanted me to care about him and worry about him.

I assured him that I do indeed care.

"You're not a developer," he informed me. "Sometimes you have to have things explained to you really simply."

I agreed with him.

He told me that he still wanted to work things out.

From his side of the conversation, it probably sounded like an extremely weird bf/gf call.

"No wonder those computer guys are all single," passersby were probably saying to one another.

I'm joining him and all his developers for a meeting tomorrow.

"We're all getting together tomorrow. You can come if you want," he said. "We'll all get up and say where we're from and present." I had a momentary fear that he was expecting me to fly there. "Get together" and "get up" sound so physical world, don't they?

Then I returned to my senses, fortunately before I said anything that would remind him again that I wasn't a developer. So I'm meeting with him and the lads tomorrow, virtually. I have no idea what I'll say if I have to get up and present.

"Hi," perhaps, "I'm the woman in this outfit. I really care about all you guys."

However, one of the new things was an invitation to come and speak to a group in the next county south of here. It's a terrifying drive, but good for networking, prestige, local contacts, and they're paying me, so I'll need to do it. Maybe I'll take a cab. Or if I start right now I could walk there.