We have lots of roses, as this rotten photo attests. We're also having plenty of rain, so they're quite happy.

And I have lots of work. Also very nice. One of the things I'm working on is about the design of fireworks, always a fun topic, I'm sure you'll agree. I was surprised to learn that gunpowder was initially  used as a medicine.

Not only did it appear to have antibiotic properties, being sprinkled on bread or brewed into tea to help people heal wounds, but it also was used for skin diseases like ringworm.

I can't help but feel that there must have been some unfortunate side effects.

Anyway, you have to learn something every day, don't you?

The boys have settled into a summer break routine of sleeping late and then filling the day with video games and sports until #1 son goes to work in the evening. #2 son coached one class at the gymnastics studio yesterday, but generally spends his evenings playing Ultimate Frisbee with friends or video games by himself.

#2 son will be going down to stay with #1 daughter for a week or so before he heads back to school for his summer job. He needs to rest and play a lot before he gets back to work. #2 daughter and I have been feeling as though we should have a vacation, or one each, too. I think July is the right time for me to take a vacation. I'm not sure how I'll accomplish it, but I plan to try.

A couple more photos from the gardens. There is this giant egg-shaped arbor at one point.

Inside, as you can see from the photo below, there are chairs arranged as if for a meeting.

I think this would be a great place to hold a meeting. "It would encourage lateral thinking," I suggested.

"It would be distracting," said #2 son. "No one would be able to focus."

I'll leave it to you to decide.

Last night I went to a poetry reading. It was in the main theater of the Arts Center, and it was nearly full. There were older people, younger people, a couple of babies. Lots of friends of mine from various contexts. The stage was quite beautifully dressed, but the elderly poet, Mary Oliver, was wearing some ordinary dark kit and standing alone at a podium reading. We listened to Mary Oliver reading her poems for an hour, and gave her not one but two standing ovations.

That's the kind of town we are. It makes a person proud to live here.

I have to confess that I wasn't familiar with her poetry before last night, but it was great stuff.

Check out her "Beans"  and "Peonies."

Ms. Oliver also answered questions. She said at one point that people tried to write at random times and failed because "the creative process doesn't know you're going to be there, so it doesn't show up." Writing, she said, or any creative endeavor, has to be done every day in order to be easy.

I think she's right.

LaBella and I were talking about the question of what kind of town we are as we left. We're residents of a town that supports 70 year old poets and botanical gardens, but also is adding to our current annual motorcycle festival another one focused on women. Well, not women, but "babes" and "bling."

You can like this because it shows the diversity of the town, or you can feel like we're prostituting our lovely town for the sake of the money the bikers bring in. Maybe both.

We launched a new website yesterday, and I turned in the copy for two more. Today I meet with the client for another. I also have stuff for the Kennedy Center. And blogs.

Happy day!

  #1 daughter and I went up yesterday to turn in grades, sign  my contract, pick up my new textbooks, and visit a couple of clients.

Then I saw her off and got back to my computer and wrote stuff.

Following that, I had a meeting with the Art Professor, during which we examined our new client's website and laughed.

It's really that bad.

The Art Professor said that people are used to bad design, so they actually like it better. That hadn't occurred to me, I must say. I know that some of our clients don't see how bad their sites are till we point it out (in a loving, supportive way, of course), but I think they usually prefer the results when we make them a new one. Like the TV program What Not to Wear.

The day before, we took most of the family to the botanical gardens and the farmers market.

That's where these lovely poppies are from.

I've been reading The Edge of Physics, a most enjoyable book, and in it I learned that there aren't any smells in Antarctica. I guess that makes sense, but I hadn't thought about it.

As we walked through the gardens, just ahead of a thunderstorm that began pelting us just as we got to the car to go home, we were met by scents everywhere. Curry plant, and roses, and herbs, and something amazingly sweet in the native plants garden, but we never did figure out what it was.

Plus the nice scents of dirt and damp leaves.

Antarctica is not a place where people ought to live. 

Anyway, last night after finishing work at a reasonable time and having a nice dinner with salad and strawberries from the farmers market, I continued my hemming while #2 son played video games, and felt relaxed and happy.

I haven't been feeling that way lately. I've actually been somewhat stressed. I guess it's turning in the paperwork that did it. Or having a nice weekend with my family. Or getting some payments in at last. Or eating right and exercising and getting enough sleep. Or the combination of all those things.

I have a couple of weeks till my next class begins. I'm planning to shoehorn some sewing into my schedule. I'm scheduled today for a training session with the new billing system, and tonight I'm going to a poetry reading with LaBella. Before that, lots of writing. I also need to vote and get to the grocery store. Enough idle persiflage, then; I'm off to work.

During my sewing adventures this weekend, I was watching Netflix instant watch. I like to have movies in the background while I'm sewing. I had watched Cashmere Mafia and enjoyed it, so Netflix suggested an Australian TV show about a group of women working in a brothel.

So, as I pinned and cut and sewed, I had the Australian show playing in the background, and my mind totted up the following things:

• prostitution is legal in Australia (I checked and this is true).
• Australian TV can show absolutely anything (this seems to be true -- parts of this program were distinctly x-rated).
• Australians are serious about fancy undies.

Now, it was when I had this thought that I sort of woke up and noticed the conclusions the unattended part of my brain was drawing while I was busy trying to match notches. Deciding that Australians like fancy undies on the basis of a TV show set in a brothel is pretty irrational, isn't it? It reminds me of the foreign students I used to teach, nearly all of whom were really disappointed that Americans didn't carry guns on the street.

On further consideration, I think it involves these things:

• I was predisposed to believe this because, when I was sewing underthings, I read Australian articles on the subject. Australians are, I believe, big on heirloom sewing, and this shows in their articles about sewing bras and panties.
• I wasn't paying proper attention, so the less rational bit of my brain got to do the thinking about it. I bet this is behind a lot of stereotyping.
• Underwear was a major theme of this program, and they had some quite nice stuff, too. A skinny teenager running away from her unhappy home in the outback had stylish pink lace, and the call girls themselves had things like feather trimmings -- possibly impractical for daily life. Plus they kept asking one another, "Have you got any knickers?" and accusing each other of stealing their knickers and whatnot. The motif forced itself upon the watcher.

So I will try not to imagine that my Australian clients are all prancing around the job site in lacy thongs and bustiers. Bad enough that I already think they're barbecuing shrimp all the time.

Here is a messy and chaotic picture showing my sewing progress.

The large gray thing is a woven T in slate-blue linen which just needs a few more inches of hemming. The pile of blue stuff is a Prudence blouse in the making. It has all its major seams completed and you can see a bit of it below.

This is a blouse from Hot Patterns. It took me nearly two hours to prepare, pin, and cut out. Partly this is the pattern, and partly it's the fabric -- a very filmy,slippery chiffon from CD's donated stash.

Fabrics like this don't hold their shape. It also has no right or wrong side, which makes it hard to figure out how to put the pieces together. It's sort of like sewing a jellyfish.

Actually, it's nothing at all like sewing a jellyfish. Sewing a jellyfish would be painful and messy. This stuff just slithers around confusingly.

The geometry of the pattern is simple, and it's sensible, too. I'll make another, I think, in a crisper fabric, and it'll have a completely different effect.

So yesterday I sewed till the boys got up, and did a little grocery shopping, and bought doughnuts at the American bakery. It was raining, and I have #2 son home for just a couple of weeks and #1 daughter was coming in, so I skipped the hike and sewed some more.

I also got the grades finished.  This is my least favorite part of teaching. I don't like giving grades anyway, and we have a baroque and rather stupid system, too, so it's pretty unpleasant, and but it's good to be through.

The other unpleasant thing which isn't finished is dealing with paperwork.The boys' college stuff requires whole bunches of it. Not to mention going out in the rain to make more copies of tax and insurance documents, plus the jolly fun of searching through my badly-kept files for missing documents while my children lecture me about the importance of keeping proper files.

#1 daughter arrived, and we spent the afternoon and evening in light conversation while everyone but me played video games. I did hemming. At one point, #2 son explained to us that he had learned in econ the right way to grow a business: when your income is much greater than your costs and you're working to capacity, you invest in your business. Then your revenue is lower for a while, relative to your costs. When the ratio shifts again, you invest some more. We felt as though we were doing this properly and felt validated. We also discussed good and evil and whether they can be scientifically determined (we say no, on the grounds that the definition of the words precludes it -- you could only say that something was functional or adaptive), where the boys should spend the summer, #1 daughter's very cool new car, and movies.

So it was a pleasant, low-key day, and I expect more of the same today, though I have to go play bells in church first. We are accompanying a teenage violinist. The piece was amazingly bad at rehearsal -- the kind of thing that makes you wonder why everyone is continuing to play. The horrible noises go on and everyone keeps making them, in a fatalistic death march of bad music.

Fortunately, the people of the church love us and are always very supportive of this girl, and so we will, this morning, make incredibly unpleasant noise for three minutes and it'll be over.

I don't feel well this morning, physically. There was a spell last year when I was waking up not feeling well, and I decided that I was eating wrong and not exercising and working too much and not sleeping enough, and that may be true now, too. I had improved, and perhaps I have not backslidden. On the other hand, it could also be allergies, what with all the sneezing and nose-blowing.

#2 son and I were talking about the fact that we aren't bothered by minor physical ailments (though I do have allergies, which he does not). He likes to quip, "It's because I'm a good person," while I always say, "Clean living."

This is pretty obnoxious of us. However, I think maybe yesterday's doughnuts and pizza and ice cream and staying up late, combined with a 70 hour work week, might be at fault. I'm going to take allergy medicine to hedge my bets.

I'm about to get back to work, but I did spend some time last night and this morning sewing. I'm sewing up all the blue parts of the SWAP. You do this so as to avoid changing thread colors and all. Once the blue is all done, I'll move on to the mushroom shade.

Here are my two basic colors:

I have some other shades of the same colors around, but these are the basics, which will provide the main pieces of the SWAP.

I'm thinking about accent colors, though.

I have some linen in this red. What about a camp shirt this color? Would it work nicely, or would it be too primary?

There's also this lavender:

Fairly nice, right? Again, I've got some linen in that shade.

I also have some heavier linen in aqua:

I could add another jacket.

Hmmm....

A guy came yesterday for a site visit to make sure that I was worthy to accept credit card payments. He took snaps of my house and my mailbox, and then followed me back to my office. I was able to give him a business card, but had no further artifacts (brochures, licenses...), nor did I have credit card logos displayed. No inventory for him to look at, and no credit card machine or cash register.

He took a picture of my file cabinet.

I showed him websites I had made. I showed him my Basecamp account. I showed him the article from WSJ that mentioned me. Eventually, he agreed that I was conducting business on the premises.

Now I can accept credit card payments. If you're in business, you might have debated the value of doing this. On the surface, it seems to me that it'll work out, since we've paid PayPal about $30 per transaction, and this new merchant account will run us $20 a month. However, I may never take another credit card transaction, and then I'll be sorry, won't I?

The client for whose sake I did this doesn't take American Express himself, I noticed as I worked on his site last night. I also noticed that he has about 18 pages of stuff on that site which is plastered all over chiropractors' websites from one coast to the other. I don't know where they all get this stuff, but I was sort of shocked. I rewrote it all, of course, and learned all about chiropractic in the process.

They have a history of weirdness, it's true, but then so does mainstream medicine. But this widespread plagiarism from one another's sites is something else again. I've had an absolute rash of it among students this term, too. I wonder whether the copy/paste function is at least partially to blame...

So yesterday, in my efforts to convey how totally stressful the past couple of 16-hour workdays have been, I sort of neglected to mention the good stuff.

Like having #2 son home for  a few weeks. And #1 daughter coming for the weekend. And receiving flowers from my aunt. And getting a new assignment from the Kennedy Center. And having one site about to launch and another about to start. And being almost finished with the semester, with a couple of weeks before the summer term begins.
See, if I had listed all that stuff, it wouldn't have sounded as bad.

If you ever drop by here and feel like I'm insufferably cheerful, read on, because I have had a couple of rough days.

I guess they're not that rough. However, the people with whom I'm in contact in the physical world don't want to hear any more whining, so here it is:

• PayPal refused a transaction -- AMEX from a doctor. They agreed that there was nothing wrong with my account or with the doctor's card, but it tripped something in their algorithm, so too bad. For me, the worst part was the email in which they suggested that I should be happy that they were so vigilant. The doctor, who wants a website built, wasn't happy.
• So I had to arrange for a merchant account. This wasn't actually that bad. It took one day, and probably involved only about an hour's worth of time, spread out over the day. But it meant that every twenty minutes or so i had to track down something -- the bank's routing number, my tax ID number, three months' worth of bank statements -- and send it back to them. Also, they will be coming in tomorrow to visit my office and take pictures. No pressure there, of course. Especially since #2 son, who sleeps in said office, just got home from college.
• I gave a final on Monday, but a couple of students missed it, so I had to regive the final today for one of them and work out an incomplete for the other. Three hours' worth of time, that.
• Because of these two lost sheep, I couldn't get my grades completed and turned in yesterday, when I planned to do so. Also, my online course included three students with obviously plagiarized final papers. So I still have to deal with Stuff before I can get the grades in.
• Once the grades are in, I then have to transfer them -- manually -- to paper, print out the grades I put in, and take all these papers, physically, up tot he next county and turn them in. Another few hours.
• In the midst of all this, I got a call from a client for whom I'd done a slideshow, saying that there was a name spelled wrong. I wasn't the one who had spelled it wrong, but this was for a retirement party. Obviously it had to be fixed -- and for the program I was using, that meant reconstructing it from scratch. We also had myriad technical difficulties, so I spent an additional three or four hours total dealing with this.
• Meanwhile, I'm trying to get all my blogs done, launch one website, and start another. I'm also working on a homepage update for a regular client. I did the text and sent it to the developer, only to be told that I needed to make the changes myself. Okay. The site's being converted to WordPress, so I naturally figured I could make the changes from the dashboard. Nope. I had to get into the xml file, change it, and FTP it up. Again, no problem -- except that no one told me this, and instead we talked at cross-purposes all afternoon, till the developer (one of a large team of developers) told me to go read the documentation. Gotta say, having a team of developers hang around waiting for the writer to figure out her own problems with the xml file seems a little hostile.

You may not be amazed to learn that I haven't gotten all my work done.

And I think you're definitely not amazed that people don't want to listen to this stuff any more.

My jacket is looking pretty good. It needs buttonholes, finishing of seams, hems for the sleeves, pressing... But I like it quite well. In fact, I cut out another in a very dark blue linen. I also finished a top, a woven T-shirt in a nice soft rayon/cotton. I have another top from the same pattern to sew up, in a slate blue linen. I also have beige linen pants cut and ready to sew up.

I was successful in having now just one, but two PSDs this weekend, with a Numb3rs marathon to accompany a nice balance of pinning, cutting, machine sewing, and handwork.

I think it very likely that I will, between now and the beginning of summer school, get my new working wardrobe in order. I think I may also have a new textbook, though, so I will have to prep a new class and write a new syllabus. Plus of course I'm working. But I'm also hiking and sewing and stuff like that. There are signs of normalcy in my life.

There was church on Sunday, and #1 son made lunch and cleaned the kitchen with his dad, and all my other kids called or emailed or tweeted, so it was a fine Mother's Day.

I have presents for my own mother, but haven't seen her to hand them over. At some point we'll do that. #2 son is expected home in the next couple of days, so I'm thinking we may go out to visit his grandparents and on to a nearby tourist town we used to visit frequently but haven't recently. By the time he gets home, I should have my grades done and be ready to celebrate the end of the semester.

Yesterday I gave a final. I do nothing during a final exam except hang out with the students and try to be encouraging while preventing any cheating from taking place. Therefore, I can read. I was reading The Edge of Physics,  which has quite a nice explanation of dark matter, if you are in need of one. It also has really fascinating descriptions of some of the places where research in physics takes place, including an abandoned iron mine which is really sticking in my mind.

I think that from now on, anyone who complains about his or her job will get one question from me: "Are you a 19th century iron miner?" If not, they don't get to complain.

That's unreasonable, of course. The existence, or former existence, of really horrible jobs doesn't make slightly less horrible jobs better. It's just hard to imagine people working under those conditions.

I am happy to say that when I graded the papers (without looking at the names first, for fairness's sake), there was a clear difference between the quality of papers turned in by people who had attended class and done their work, and papers turned in by slackers.

One of the papers included the phrase, "A Slacker by trade, he..." I love that. The idea that someone could think of Slacker as a career choice worth distinguishing by a capital letter says something about Generation Y, doesn't it?

At least they're not going to be iron miners.