Though I did some work yesterday, I mostly knitted, read, and watched Doc Martin with the Netflix/Wii hook up.

We an watch all sorts of things on our TV through Netflix and Wii, thereby avoiding the inconvenience of having to figure out when a program is on or waiting for a DVD to be sent to us, not to mention avoiding commercials and trailers.

However, we were given a free month of digital TV or something by our cable company. It involves a box, which can’t be hooked up at the same time as the Wii. We have to unhook the Wii and rehook the box or vice versa when we want to change data sources.

Oh, the traumas of modern life!

In spite of this terrible problem, I was able to complete the Nitid Cowl in Andean Treasure alpaca, and a lovely thing it is, too.

Another lovely thing is my new Kindle cover. #2 daughter got a cover for her Kindle, and it not only protects the device, but also makes it feel like a book.

The Kindle reads like a book, but you have to hold it like a piece of paper (of course, you can set it down and read it while you knit, but book readers will know what I mean here). In a cover, you can hold it like a book.

This particular cover is by Cole Hahn, which you will understand to mean that it is gorgeous, but also really expensive. I have admired and perhaps coveted it for years, never planning to have it in real life since I pay most of my income for tuition. However, it is a cover for the old Kindle. Now that the new one is the only Kindle being sold, Amazon put this lovely object on sale for a tiny fraction of its original price, and I succumbed. 

It holds the Kindle securely in place. It even has a pocket. Frankly, I have no idea what that pocket is for. It looks like it’s designed for papers, but it’s hard to imagine any situation in which you would need both a Kindle and papers.

Maybe it is for business cards.

We’re all going to have to order new business card chez fibermom, or rather chez the business. We are changing the name of the business to something short enough to say comfortably over the phone. We’re making ourselves a new website, too, since mine is over two years old and therefore ancient in computer years.

We’re kind of excited about this. We’re planning to do a WordPress conversion, since so much of our work nowadays is WordPress, and we’ll rework it to reflect our actual target market, not the market I though I’d appeal to when I first started.

Yesterday I worked on some panels for it.  Obviously, my panels aren’t as good as the real designer’s panels will be, but still, I like the way they turned out.

I spent a little time musing on the progress of the business. I had initially expected just to do contract work until someone hired me for a salaried job. Then I figured I could replace my salary and be a happy freelancer, with the fallback position of jobhunting again in the future if need be.

Now, though  we still have financial suspense, I have a successful enough business that I can employ my daughters and pay my sons’ tuition even at the ruinously expensive school #2 son attends. We’re not in debt, either, which is more than most two year old businesses can say.

I’m singing in both churches this morning, so I had better go get some clothes on. Enjoy your weekend!

I have a choir problem. I’d been managing pretty well, I guess, by singing with the choirlet and playing bells for one church while singing in the actual choir in the other. Last night, though,  I learned that both churches are having their big Christmas music on December 12th. Very early, actually.

Now what will I do?

Apart from that, life is good. The weather has been very beautiful, the trees are glorious in their fall colors, and I’m enjoying the web site I’m working on. We didn’t get the opera company site, I’m sorry to say, but I have plenty of work at the moment and #1 daughter has big plans for the future.

#1 son’s band also has some opportunities arising, and is planning to set up a website for the purpose. That won’t be a paying job for me, but I think it will be fun.

In knitting news, the Nitid Cowl from Interweave Knits’ Christmas present issue is coming along swimmingly. Also, the new cleaner came in yesterday, so we’re less grubby.

All things to be thankful for.

The Flying Squirrels and Sugar Gliders, the men’s and women’s teams respectively for Ultimate Frisbee  (now properly just called “ultimate,” but you might not have known what I meant), came to stay for the weekend during a tournament.

Here’s yesterday’s breakfast. We fed them very well, with things like pasta with artichokes and homemade key lime pie. They were all smart, fit, well-mannered, well behaved, and generally gave us cause for optimism about the rising generation.

I’ve spent most of the weekend cooking and then cleaning up the kitchen, as you can imagine, but I did get in some knitting.

I’ve been working on cowls. They seem to be all the rage of late in knitting circles. The idea is that they’re as stylish as a scarf, but easier to deal with since they stay put once you put them on. They fall in nice, slouchy folds around your neck inside your jacket without having any long ends to deal with.

It hasn’t been cold enough to wear one yet around here, but I can at least vouch for the fact that they’re fun to knit. Here’s the second Silk Fountain, in four shades of Japanese wool. I’ve just started on the Nitid Cowl  in Knitpicks alpaca. it’s not very interesting to look at yet. Neither is #2 son’s sweater, but I’ve put in a picture of it anyway, complete with dog hair trimmings. I took the opportunity to measure it on him while he was here, and it fits. I expect to complete it by Christmas.

#1 daughter came by this morning in time to talk with #2 son a little bit before he headed out for today’s games. He discussed school with her, and she was able to meet and get firsthand thanks from one of his teammates whom she helped out with a job.

She likes her snazzy new apartment, and is not exactly enjoying the seasonal retail job she took on, but she is okay with it, and feels that it could be worse. I’m trying not to ask her to do very much for my business, but am missing her quite a bit. I’m also trying not to ask much of #2 daughter, so there’s lots for me to do. We all feel that we’ll appreciate it even more when we all get back to working together.

Today we’re having a really gorgeous day. We have in fact had such a spell of lovely weather that Falstaff deigned to produce a vase full of roses for me. These roses are not only a stunning crimson but also have an amazingly rich and lovely scent. You have to get up close to smell them, but once you’re close enough, you want to just stand there and smell them. There also are some more tomatoes out on our bushes, but we expect they’ll get frost nipped before they ripen.

I may go out for a long walk this afternoon. On the other hand, I currently have the house to myself. I have to grade papers, and I have plenty of other work that I could and possibly should do, but I’m thinking that it’s a perfect day for knitting. I’m reading The Sibyl in Her Grave by Sarah Caudwell, a wonderful book which I found in my closet while looking for something else entirely, and which I haven’t read in years. It’s just the thing to read while working on an alpaca cowl.

I’ve just about talked myself into it. There are leftovers from the various lavish meals I’ve cooked this weekend, too… Friday’s beef tips and last night’s key lime pie, along with that grapefruit-dressed green salad, could make a fine lunch. There might even be a nap on today’s agenda.

I start the day with 30 minutes of Wii Fit . Sometimes I step on and off the balance board while watching TV, one of the options with the system. Usually I watch a DVD if I’m going to do this, but today I watched House, and I saw the tail end of a commercial which, if I understand it correctly, promised “luscious and defiant curls.”

Luscious and defiant? Even separately, that’s a weird description for hair. Together…. Well, it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?

I’m starting the day with a continuation of something I was working on yesterday. I was rewriting — optimizing — descriptions for 87 house plans. I’m interested in house plans, and I was enjoying it, but I couldn’t help noticing that the original copywriter had gotten a bit odd with the adjectives as the list went on. A thoughtful back porch? A family room showing intelligent design?

I think you just can’t write “convenient,” “spacious,” and “stylish” 87 times. You move on to “charming” and “welcoming,” of course, but after a while you sort of run out of the characteristics a utility room could realistically have.

I expect that the same thing happens with curls. You’ve done bouncy and shiny so many times you can’t face those words again, and even lustrous and manageable got old, the art department puts its foot down on even one more pass at sexy, so you just put down luscious and defiant. When someone questions it, you pitch a hissy fit and they back off. “Okay,” they say, “luscious and defiant.”

Or I could have mis-heard the description in the commercial.

Yesterday I taught class, then got back to my computer to do a proposal and some content updates, and then went to a meeting with The Computer Guy and #1 daughter.

The meeting went well, I think. I went with comforting reassurance, and The Computer Guy did the engineer bits. #1 daughter was highly decorative and had all the facts and figures at her fingertips. I think the clients liked us, and I know it’s down to two companies, so I’m optimistic.

In the parking lot we talked about the client, our other assorted clients, and how a company can make money — the last in a very abstract way. The Computer Guy and I don’t usually have such discussions, so it might have been mostly for #1 daughter.

The other interesting thing about the meeting was that we ran into some young women on the way: one when we stopped (we arrived early to be sure we would find the building and had time to kill) to get #1 daughter a caramel mochaccino and one when we went the wrong way and found ourselves at a branch of the college.

The college has branches everywhere. You go out for pizza and there one is. Look for veterinary supplies, and there’s another. I wasn’t surprised to see it.

Anyway, the girls stared openly at #1 daughter. One said, “You look like a businesswoman. Are you in business?” The other just stared silently with her mouth open. I wanted to say, “You can do this, too. Just study hard.”

She clearly could be a good role model for young women. Not sure how best to harness that…

After the meeting and the hanging around in the parking lot talking, we got to our separate cars and #1 daughter said to me, “He’s a nice guy. Almost eerily like #2 son.”

This is a high compliment.

I’m still sick and feeling sorry for myself, though actually the chicken pie did help a bit.

So did the good news about our educational website. #1 daughter points out that we’re be highly successful with the website that doesn’t pay anything, while our rankings have slipped at the one that brings us work. It’s true. But it seems to me that it’s a worthwhile project. Bill Bryson, in At Home: A Short History of Private Life, points out that the country rector of the 18th and 19th centuries often had a good income and education, and very little work to do. This allowed them to do some amazing things in the way of research and philanthropy, bringing us a whole lot of amazing scientific breakthroughs.

For a long time we focused on the things with the best ROI. But perhaps the internet now encourages us to spend time on things with less obvious monetary value, simply because it’s easy. We can all blog and review stuff and make websites and write for Wikipedia, and some of that stuff turns out to have value for someone eventually — occasionally even monetary value.  This is the argument I present to #1 daughter.

She’s right, though; if we were doing as much for our company website as for the educational one, we might be richer than we are now.

Right now we have a bunch of proposals out. I feel reasonably rich right now, though the business owes people some money, and if any of those proposals comes through I will feel quite rich. As one of the guys I interviewed recently says, getting to get up every morning and do what you love is being rich.

Breakfast and aspirin may help me feel more like doing what I love and less like going back to bed and feeling sorry for myself. But I am planning to quit at lunchtime if I still feel this rotten. Blogging and grading of papers first.

I had intended to take today as a sick day, since I had no deadlines. However, I had to teach class, and then when I got home I had a mad desire to make a quick correction at my company website.

I broke it.

I then spent three hours fixing it, feeling more and more stupid, not to mention headachy. Sore throat and coughing followed, and then dejection and a sense of deep stupidity and unworthiness.

If was therefore a very good thing that the Schwanns man came, giving me completely false hope with his specious claim that chicken pot pies are good for colds. I have one heating in the oven right now. It will almost certainly be a disappointment, but I was grasping at straws.

And then teAchonology.com, a major educational website, emailed #2 daughter to ask permission to include us in their resources database. That helped a bit, actually.