We're back!

Jobs continue to flow in, we have now officially earned enough with FreshPlans to pay the hosting, and we have worked out a good system for our workflow.

So, having accomplished all that, we went out to the art museum last night.

I say "the art museum" as if there were only one. Really, there are lots here, but this is my favorite. Not only does it have many wonderful things in it, but it's free.

We try to be sure to donate and to shop at their shop, but the fact that they do all this just for the love of art and their city makes me love them.

Strolling around looking at beautiful paintings and sculptures and stuff made me feel relaxed and happy. I don't think that merely looking at paintings online would have the same effect. I suppose part of it is the walking around, if nothing else.

They were very nice to us and let us take lots of pictures for the educational blog. We filmed a video in the sculpture garden, and #2 daughter (who has remarkable powers of persuasion) got them to agree that we could film inside sometime, too.

We strolled out for lunch and photo taking earlier in the day (pictures when I get home), but it was so hot that by the time we got back to #2 daughter's loft we were dripping with sweat. Today, therefore, we are strolling out for breakfast and taking potluck for lunch.

Off to the local cafe! 

#1 daughter and I are up visiting #2 daughter. The main point of the trip was for us to attend a meeting for a conference we're co-hosting, and that meeting took place last night. We'll still be up here for a couple of days. We're hoping to have a bit of fun while we're here, but for me the next couple of days will need to include more working and less eating.

One of my new clients is a baby clothes shop that sells handmade gear. Very cute stuff. I also have another IT company and a manufacturer. I had contacts from a realtor and a martial arts trainer, too, but those aren't settled yet. Variety is always good.

I'm also participating slightly in back to school.

For many years I did back to school as a parent, taking one entire paycheck and all my children out for a  day of shopping with a bunch of lists from the school and their clothing inventories. Then I was a bookseller and I did back to school from the retail side, an experience which I do not recommend. For the past couple of years I've been back in the classroom teaching, but mostly back to school has been about scraping together money for textbooks for my boys. I pay tuition for them for ten months of the year, so that's pretty much an ongoing thing. This year, they're even buying their own books.

But my educational blog is getting pretty popular (see my visits at left) and I'm getting orders every day at Amazon, so there's a bit of  a pale imitation of my bookseller days.

I think it's pretty cool that the traffic is increasing like this, actually. Even if it is just back to school and will die away in October, I'm enjoying it right now. When I get home, I have to prep for my classes -- I have a new textbook, which I like a lot, but that means a new syllabus and new online classes.

Today I must work solidly all day. We traveled on Tuesday and went to check out conference venues, and then yesterday we did a lot of talking, and also got seven job offers/leads, which are time consuming to respond to, not to mention preparing for the meeting. so I'm feeling a bit behind on my work. I realize that I usually feel a bit behind on my work.

Even so.

I worked pretty much all weekend, except for last night after dinner. The boys and I played Scrabble, and then I settled in with knitting, my Kindle, and Leverage on TV.

I'm making good progress with the second front section of Diagonals from Lacy Little Knits.

On the Kindle I had Conquering Chaos: How to Grow a Small Business Without Going Crazy, or something similar. Getting the title precisely right doesn't matter, because the book is essentially a long ad for the authors' software. I felt cheated.

Never mind. I have lots of books to read, even if the rest don't make such tempting claims.

I also have lots of work to do. My shoulders are no longer painful; that's what knitting does for you. Or possibly Scrabble. Probably anything that involves moving away from the computer for a bit.

The Computer Guy asked me last night for the content for the underwear website which we're building. I sometimes write about underwear here, in the context of textiles or fiber arts or women's history or something, but I think this is the first time I've ever written about men's underwear. I was somewhat embarrassed to send it to him, frankly. I don't mind writing this stuff for strangers, but it's another thing entirely to ship it off to a colleague. He never sent me the design, either.

I have learned a lot of remarkable things. Did you know, for example, that men no longer use flies in underwear? That there is a thing called a "fashion jock"? That there is "enhancing" men's underwear (that's what the guys call it) similar to women's padded bras?

I learn a lot in my job, no question about it. Today I am working for the Arts Center, so I expect to learn completely different things. I have to price out some stuff, too, a thing I don't much like to do, but I think that #1 daughter will do most of the heavy lifting on that.

We went to the farmers market yesterday morning and  I used some of the good things we got there to make a proper dinner: chicken with a basil and pepper sauce, Potatoes Lyonnaise, and orange-chocolate coconut macaroons.

Apart from that, I worked most of the day. I did finish the hospital website, and I finished reading Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch, which turned out to be a very enjoyable book. It's the story of a man who works at a newspaper. Through most of the book, the entire staff of the paper is just fatalistically watching the slide down, knowing that people aren't reading newspapers so much any more but doing nothing besides feeling doomed.

I kept wondering what was wrong with these people, who really seemed in the book to be bright, sensible people overall. With their budget as described in the book, they could certainly have made the necessary changes to make their product relevant. Really, the doomed souls section dragged on long enough that I got irritated with them.

Now, I may be about to tell you part of a surprise ending. However, it shouldn't be a surprise, because no major corporation nowadays would really just ignore the internet, so I'll go ahead and say that part of the denoument did involve staff members becoming internet celebrities. This was discussed in such a fun and engaging way that I was still sort of in the story when I got a phone call about #2 daughter's Amazon review. I've been surprised by the amount of attention this video review has gotten, both at Amazon and on YouTube. Not because it's gotten lots of attention but because I don't usually get any attention at all for Amazon reviews, except in that manufacturers sometimes ask me to review stuff or if they can use my review in their packaging or something. The review in question isn't even one of our best efforts, but was thrown together quickly to try out the new camera. We also threw together Cinderella Centers so that we could try out the editing software.

66 people have watched this video. We don't have hugely popular YouTube videos. Our top one has had something like 469 views. Beauty and the Beast, which was designed to be popular and which we promoted in some slight way, has had 105 views. And Cinderella Centers is -- get this -- instructions on how to make file folder centers for teaching clock time. Both Cinderella and Beauty are watched mostly by young guys. Not really our target audience.

So the phone call, coming right in the middle of my reading about the internet celebrity thing, caused me to think about what it would be like if #2 daughter became an internet celebrity. Maybe like HotForWords but less tacky provocative. HotForWords was featured by Wired (that's how I heard of her) and similar celebrity might catapult us into...

Well, see, there's the problem. We're currently only doing the tiniest little bit of marketing -- namely, actually calling people back when they contact us -- and I'm working seven days a week. Celebrity might not really be a good thing. I'm not sure.

However, in the course of getting the callback number for that phone call I discovered on my voice mail a message from three days ago asking for a site analysis. So there I was at 9:00 on a Saturday night doing a site analysis and probably grousing about the workload, and #1 daughter got a bit stressed out and we had a somewhat tense discussion about how we were going to manage increasing the workload like this when the incoming money doesn't increase until a month or so after the workload increases, and #1 daughter might have to go get a salaried job to tide her over. It was probably a pointless and unnecessary conversation, but we were both feeling fretful, and #1 daughter was telling me that she wasn't going to be nagging people and giving me lectures about how salespeople are supposed to follow up and I was saying things like, "But have we actually spoken to any of these people?" We moved on to discussions of whether we could tell whether or not our business could support both of us or not, and how #1 daughter didn't want me to work double in order to support her and were we doing the right things and similar Whither? type questions. And then -- at 10:40 pm --  I got an email from the same person who caused me to work all weekend saying the first thing I sent was great, but where was the second? At that moment, I remembered that I was to read the scripture this morning, and quickly looked up the verse.

I am a skeptical person. I am not the kind of person who thinks she's getting messages from the universe. While I am sure that God could send me messages if He chose to, I don't generally think He does. But the verse was "Ask and it shall be given unto you; seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door will be opened unto you." This is the part where Jesus says that even if you wouldn't open the door for your friend because he's your friend, you'll open it because he's bold or (depending on the translation) persevering.

I decided to take this as a message from God. My shoulders hurt a lot, I'm tired, and I still have some work to do for my Aussies as well as for the persistent knocker on my email door, but if God told us to persevere and be bold, then we can certainly do so.

Yesterday was quite a stressful day. Nothing big, but every few minutes there was a small thing: the new designer couldn't get into the site he was supposed to be working on and needed help; the designer I'm working with on a big new project sent me an unusable site map for the new site; we couldn't get approval for the site we're trying to get launched because the client still won't answer her phone (email, text, in-person visits...); #1 daughter got into a panic about finances, one of our regular designers gave us an estimate 10 times what we'd expected and we had to track down someone else, one The Computer Guy's clients called me with complaints...

As I say, nothing big, but it was nonstop all day long as I tried to meet an unreasonable deadline.

I went over to the Wellbeing site and filled out the form, and they magically discerned that my day had been an 8 out of 10. Things are clearly pretty good if the most stressful day I've had in ages is an 8 out of 10.

I'm just finishing up the end notes of The Selfless Gene. Definitely an interesting book. Foster begins by pointing out that both people using evolution to evangelize for atheism and people using creation to evangelize for fundamentalist Christianity are taking the position that there is just one thing explaining everything in the world.

While acknowledging the emotional appeal of that attitude, Foster lays out the problems with it. If you say that everything is the result of natural selection, you really are left with the problems of goodness and beauty. If you say that the Bible provides a literally accurate story of creation (two of them, actually, with significant differences in their details), then you're left with the problems of evidence and of evil.

Foster explores these issues first with current science and logical argumentation, and then with scripture and philosophy. This book is a pleasure to read from either perspective.

Apart from reading, I've been working, and things are feeling a little hectic. Since we're doing things to increase our future workload, there are numerous meetings and phone calls going on, all of which distract me from my paid work. If I were a salaried worker, I think I would be enjoying it. It makes you feel like you're getting stuff done, and seems full of promise. As it is, it just makes me very conscious that I'm not getting my paid work finished. This is the wrong attitude. I'm working on it.

I haven't written about evolution in a while, probably because no one has said anything new on the subject for a while. Now I'm reading The Selfless Gene, by Charles Foster, which is currently (first three chapters) saying exactly what I think.

That so rarely happens with books, you know. I read something and think, "Well, they aren't considering thus and so" and then the next book on the subject comes out and they still aren't considering thus and so. In this case, Foster is bringing up all the points that bother me when I read recent books on evolution. Like, what about things with no or little apparent adaptive value, like art? And do people who think that Genesis must be taken literally think God isn't smart enough to write figuratively? And has anyone noticed that memes have no actual physical existence and therefore probably don't belong in biology? Stuff like that.

Naturally, the suspense is considerable. I mean, he's bringing up these points, but he hasn't answered them yet. I hope he has answers.

This is also a witty, well-written, well-argued book. Foster gives basic explanations for things like natural selection, but he mostly gives new information and responses to people like Gould and Dawkins. I think he's assuming that all his readers have already read that stuff. On the other hand, he has copious end notes, so probably everyone can read and enjoy this book.

I'd love to know what other people think of it.

Yesterday I got some work done -- my Amazon reviews, blogging for my Aussies, that kind of stuff -- and played Scrabble with the kids and began reading the very enjoyable book The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin, which we discussed over teriyaki steak and local peaches last night.

Then, around 8:30 at night I realized that I had 5 quizzes due by midnight, which I had not done. This is my summer Photoshop class, and I also had a bunch of homework I hadn't done, so I spent two and a half hours cramming work in, and not doing very well, either. I'll probably get a poor grade in this class.

Don't do this.

I didn't sign up for the Summer Reading Challenge this year, but I am reading. While I was up in the Big City with #2 daughter last week, I went with her to a cool place called Half Price Books. It's an enormous bookstore filled with, I guess, remainders. I got a book on Photoshop that taught me how to do those pesky panels right. Yep, that's my work on the left. I'm comically proud of that fade.

Mostly I bought books for work, but I also got a Williams-Sonoma baking cookbook, a Terry Pratchett novel, and a little book called Better Than Beauty: A Guide to Charm, written in 1938. I really like old books of instruction for women, from cookbooks to sewing manuals to books like this one. I don't know why. This particular one is quite practical, though. I can see Hepburn and Bacall following this advice.

There were surprises -- did you know that women used to wash their hair with soap, change their underwear only every other day, and use salad oil for hand cream? Me, neither. And I really liked the advice about buying hats: buy a hat on a day when you look your worst, so you'll be pleasantly surprised when you put it on instead of getting a terrible shock.

Overall, though, it seems to me to be a very sensible book, filled with good advice. I'm going to pass it on to #2 daughter.

#1 daughter and I finished our first week of working together in the same office. She got a lot done, and turns out to have a positive talent for video. Check out our "Beauty and the Beast" video or the ones on octodogs and sea creatures at her YouTube channel.

Her fiance came up to visit this weekend. We had beignets for breakfast and I made an orange cake for dinner. Dinner will involve steak because that's what I took out of the freezer, but I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it yet... Maybe I'd better decide...