We have a local girl in the "Great Scandals of 2010" tour at Exxxtacy (sp?). She was a jailer for the sherriff's office, but her nude modeling career got in the way, and she was fired. She was on Playboy.com and became their Cybergirl of the Week.

After she posed for them but before she received the honor of being named C of the W, a coworker of hers made some comment about her nude photos on the internet --

Which I guess shows that you can't be an overnight celebrity even as a naked girl on the internet. Clearly, she had to work her way up to Cybergirl of the Week.

-- and she filed a sexual harassment complaint against him.

So we have an interesting collection of issues. First, there's the question of whether a person can reasonably complain about comments made about her online presence. I remember back in the early days of blogging there was a sort of manifesto going around that said something like, "Just because you read something at my blog doesn't give you the right to mention it to me IRL or to assume that you know me." This always struck me as unrealistic, if not unreasonable.

If you have naked pictures online, though, is it actually inappropriate for someone to mention them?

The other question is whether she should have been fired. There is a rule saying that workers in the sherriff's department must get permission to accept any outside paid job. Moonlighting is frowned upon. So the nudity seems tangential. She broke the rule and can be fired. The sherriff won't comment on policies, but says that her noteriety is distracting and interfering with their work.

The jailer in question isn't saying anything, what with being on the tour of scandalous women.

In other news, we're making a video for the Walton Arts Center video contest. If you'll go to their Facebook page  sometime this weekend and "like" it, we'll be grateful.

Only if you actually like it, of course.

#2 son came home yesterday. He showed off his new sports gear and told us about his experiences as an RA at Governors School.

He and a colleague had done a presentation for the students on hip-hop vs. rap music. He had wanted, he said, to get a discussion going among the students.

"My worst fear was that no one would show up," he said, "but then 30 students came. So my next worst fear was that nobody would talk. But they had lots of ideas and got excited. I left with more questions than I started with -- that's my idea of learning."

I just love that. And in fact I'm very impressed with him overall, even though he is my son. If he were interviewing for a position in my company, I'd be excited to have him.

As a parent, this naturally gives me hope that he'll be able to support himself, and/or be useful in the family business.

#1 daughter is getting serious with our video production. We're trying to do things to increase the stock of work.
You may remember the stock of work. The items on the left are where my work comes from. "Random Clients" is now a larger thing and I have several more regular customers, but otherwise it's about the same. Int he past, I've found that doing a little bit to increase the inflow of work results pretty quickly in lots of work. Work lapping around my ankles and threatening to overflow, in fact. At the moment, we have work lapping around #2 daughter's ankles and threatening to overflow, and mine is just over my toes. This is good.

#1 daughter is doing the back office stuff  (invoices go out today) and making better videos and stuff for our educational site. The educational site in question is our little lab for SEO and also for affiliate marketing. We're set up with Amazon. I know some of you guys do this sort of thing, too, so I'm going to share some numbers with you. It's hard to get useful data, it seems to me, because so often the only people sharing their numbers are those who've made lots of money and want to sell you their secret. We're not in either category.

The first month, we earned $2.15. The second month, we earned $10.65. So far this month, we've had 30 orders. They haven't all shipped, and we're currently getting orders every day, so I don't know what the total will be. My goal, though, was to pay for the hosting of the site. We've definitely achieved that.

Today I will finish up a site for men's underwear, I expect, and one for children's clothes. Then I'll get on at last to my online linkbuilding course, which is due on the 1st. Also, my husband has requested beef stew for dinner, so there will have to be cooking and probably grocery shopping first. And we have houseguests coming this weekend, so there will have to be housework at some point.

I'm having fun. I hope you are, too.

Yesterday I had a startling and unpleasant experience. I was fixing up someone's eStore, something I do fairly often. An eStore is one of those online stores you can set up the way you set up a blog, filling out forms and posting items. Volusion does them, and Magento, and probably hundreds of others. All of them have Content Management Systems, and I never met a CMS that wasn't my friend.

So there I was tweaking things and trying to fix things up for them, and all of a sudden the store disappeared. All the pages returned 404 messages ("The page you're trying to find does not exist").

It was horrible. Of all the things I hadf ever imagined could go wrong, breaking a client's site has never been on my radar at all. I felt sick. I called my go-to tech guys in turn: Arkenboy, The Art Prof, The Computer Guy.

The site was probably down -- or not quite down, but broken -- for more than half an hour.

Eventually, with the help of The Computer Guy and #1 daughter on Google, I was able to correct the problem and move on.

It was a horrible experience, but I have recovered now. Next time I'll be all blase about it. With an accent over the e. I'm pretty relaxed about breaking websites, because I know I can probably fix them. Now that I've broken a store and recovered, I guess I'll be relaxed about that, too. But it was certainly horrible at the time.

I have a rose! The bushes have recovered from their traumatic experience, or at least Falstaff here has.

Yesterday was the first day that #1 daughter and I shared an office. It's possible that we talked a lot, but I think we also got a lot done.

I finished up a couple of writing assignments. We visited The Computer Guy and a client, did videos for the educational blog, and got software installed.

I had a call from a prospective client, sent them a proposal, and got a call back accepting the proposal. I also got a new job from The Computer Guy. Two new jobs a day is about usual for me. However, we want to increase business so the business can support #1 daughter as well, so we're planning to be a bit more aggressive about marketing.

My husband cooked chicken and potatoes on the grill, and I steamed some cruciferous vegetables to go along with them. #1 daughter and I are hoping to maintain a more normal schedule, something I've been working on myself but which might be in conflict with our being more aggressive about marketing.

We're having fun, though. My kids are my favorite coworkers -- and I like all the people I work with. I'm quite lucky.

We left the big city early yesterday morning, went the wrong way for a bit, and got home in time for lunch.

I quickly got onto the week's homework.

It is not a good idea to do a week's homework in one afternoon. You skip through and don't learn what you ought to. However, this is my Photoshop class, and I didn't have Photoshop at #2 daughter's place, so it was a case of needs must.

While I was working on it, #1 daughter arrived with her dog. She's going to work for me full time, a circumstance which will lead to happiness and prosperity for all. She's living with me for a while, till the ROI hits the point where we can pay her a full time salary.

#2 daughter is going to quarter time, with the plan of bringing her on full time in a year.

I'm going to put #1 onto production work this morning. Spicer, her dog, is currently sitting in Toby's place at my feet, staring at me.

  Yesterday we made like tourists.

Actually, I did get up and work till #2 daughter woke up. We had planned to visit the City Market, but by the time she woke up I'd been awake for several hours, so I suggested that we have breakfast first.

Accordingly, we went to this nice creperie and feasted on crepes filled with things like asparagus and Black Forest ham while coming up with a timeline for #2 daughter's next year.

#1 daughter has done the same. Perhaps I should, too.

In any case, we got all the details worked out, and breakfast eaten, and then we set out on a shopping mission.

It is Brain Week over at the educational blog next week. (We just finished Fairy Tale Week.) Quite coincidentally, we did last week's math centers video with #2 daughter in a shirt that said "Mathematics," so we decided that we should find a brain shirt for her to do this week's videos in.

How hard could it be to find a brain shirt? Very hard, actually. We fairly quickly downgraded our expectations to anything at all to do with a brain.

There was quite a bit of shopping involved, actually, and I ended up with a minuscule pot of almond face cream from l'Occitane and a pressed glass juice glass from Anthropologie, as well as a real scoop on books at Half Price Books (with educator discount).

We had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, grabbed the supplies for the videos, and came back to #2 daughter's loft to create our videos.

Shortly thereafter, my husband arrived and he and #2 daughter settled in to watch spy movies. Today we're heading home.

I woke up this morning thinking, "Of course! A center for 'The Little Mermaid'!" Not quite as weird as it sounds, actually. I have been planning to do a lesson for my educational website which I can have my graphics guy make into a snazzy pdf  and which we can then either sell or give away as a gift for subscribers. So it was a sudden realization that a file folder center with a mermaid theme would be a good choice that jolted me awake.

Still, need I have all these joltings? What's wrong with just waking up because you've slept for eight hours. Not that I have done that in recent memory. I keep getting awakened by thoughts.

#2 daughter told Two last night that my visit here had just been a never-ending cloud of work. Or stream, maybe. Lots of work, anyway. It's true. I still have more work to do for the week, actually. But we've determined to go do something fun.

My husband is coming to get me tonight and we'll go home tomorrow morning. #1 daughter is on her way up.

I've done some cooking and some baking here at #2 daughter's place.

But we've also been to a couple of restaurants, and had some artisanal chocolates.

I haven't done much walking. Turned out I had a lot of work to do.

And it has been rainy.

But we did at least stroll about the plaza a bit, and see this odd phenomenon.

I guess if you have a courtyard full of statues you naturally want to put Christmas lights on them.

We went to dinner last night with people who have interesting jobs.

One of them retrieves eyes. She harvests them from dead people, but they don't use the term "harvest." They like to say "retrieve" or "recover," as though the eyes had been in their collection and then went missing. So she goes to hospitals and funeral homes, checks out the bodies for signs of STDs, and removes their eyes. I guess she then takes them back to the eye bank.

The other reads through company emails to find damaging stuff. When a company is being sued and their files are seized, he reads through everything to find damaging stuff, which he then passes on to the defending attorneys so they'll know what they might have to explain away in court.

To me, these jobs are both in the category of Stuff I Probably Knew Had to Be Done By Someone, But Which I've Never Thought of as a Job.

I mean, I'm an organ donor. I know organs get removed from bodies. But for some reason I had never thought about someone's having that job. I guess my mental image was more of a doctor grabbing the eyes and popping them into their new owner. If I had thought about it much, I'd have realized how unlikely that was.

We discussed these things -- embarrassing emails and eyeball harvesting -- over dinner at Buca di Beppo, and then strolled over to the large chain bookstore on the Plaza. Even though it is a chain, it's much bigger than my local representative of that chain, so I enjoyed browsing around. They had foreign magazines, but no Australian or European sewing magazines, and no web design magazines I hadn't already seen.

This was a mild disappointment, but I think I'll live. I did buy a French woman's mag that had a lot of stuff about social media and blogging in it, but so far I've only learned that it is "pas glam" to geolocalise one's friends on one's phone.

I've been hired by a French financial software company to rewrite their website, one of my favorite things to do. However, they only hired me for one hour. I don't know quite what they want me to do. I told them I needed five. I've pointed this out to them, so they can fix it if they just made an error. If not, then they can tell me which hour's worth of work they want me to do.

I'm also overseeing some other jobs. I hired my favorite oDesk graphic designer on one job, and I have a couple of my regular team members doing stuff. I also have several leads back in the town where I live. I'm corresponding with them and hoping to get a few more sites going this summer.  I've also got some articles to write today, and blog posts. I have moved a lot of fairy tale lesson plan posts from my old educational blog here at xanga to my new educational site and updated them, so have a look if you have any interest in fairy tale lesson plans.

So, what with one thing and another, I haven't really taken a vacation. I hope to have a walk today, though. I could take myself out for coffee or walk over to the river. I really should seize the moment, since I'll be going home in the next day or two.

Yesterday was a fairly normal workday. I blogged for some of the people I blog for, wrote a newsletter for my New Yorker, had phone calls from Arkenboy (potential new client) and the church which The Computer Guy and I are working on (more new navigation plans), not to mention #1 daughter with an update on leads and Elkhart asking me to sing something over the phone. There was also a call from #2 son saying he has a ride home from college next week, bless him

I had emails asking for a couple of articles, an update on content for another site The Computer Guy and I are doing (change "maple" to "walnut"), and optimistic words from The Art Prof on the site that he and I are working on. I worked on #2 daughter's laptop, which meant that I got much less done than usual. I stopped work in time to have dinner ready for #2 daughter when she got home.

True, I don't do this for my husband, but he gets home at 4:00 p.m.

After dinner we went out and bought a computer. This was punctuated by phone calls from boys to #2 daughter. All the calls were ostensibly about the computer.

I woke up this morning with a sense of horror. It seemed to me in my pre-dawn drowse that my kids were all making bad decisions. This may not be true; at least, I can't seem to replicate the same level of horror now that I'm awake. But even if it is true, there's nothing I can do about it. And probably nothing I should do about it, either. Who among us doesn't make bad decisions? And who among us can be rescued from bad decisions by anyone, let alone our parents?

Today, I plan to work on the new desktop computer and thereby get more done, so I can go out during the day and explore the city a bit. I think that tonight we're going out with some friends of #2 daughter's. There has been talk of bookstores.