It's Palm Sunday. I'm singing at two services at two churches, so I've had to get up very early in order to get my Australians settled before church.

This is because I really didn't feel like working yesterday, so I didn't.

I made a rather shapeless green silk charmeuse nightgown, since it should soon be too hot for flannel, and planted squash and peppers again with the idea that it will soon be hot, and sewed all the seams of a dress which I might have ready for Easter, and did the grocery shopping, and talked with my daughters, and sat out on the patio and read in the sunshine, and cleaned house a bit, and drank some of the Snow Dragon tea while idly watching basketball with #1 son -- everything, as you can see, except working.

I haven't kept a good Lent and I'm going into Holy Week with no plans beyond the usual Sunday church attendance. Odd for a church musician.  I don't even have plans for Easter.

Looking back in my xanga, I can see that I used to be rather good at daily life. Now, with the third anniversary of my self-employment upon me, I think I need to recapture that.

It's an anniversary. On this day in 2008,  I learned that the store where I had worked for 15 years was going out of business and that I would be unemployed.

Among the many cool things I saw up in the Big City were these triangular cushions.

I can add them to my list of things I think about making, since I don't actually have time to make anything.

#1 daughter says that I'm wrong about this. I choose to work a ridiculous amount, she says, but I have a choice.

She may be right. If so, then I ought to make these cushions. They are composed of long, triangular tubes stuffed firmly with something like horsehair. The tubes are then stacked up and sewn together. The result is a very firm, very comfortable backrest of a cushion.

You probably can't see that there are elephants walking along the fabric. A soft mushroom brown and pink stripe enlivened with elephants.

I feel as though this sort of cushion is so clever that I ought to make one for no other reason than that.

Actually, I still have quite a bit of work to do for this week, and I have to clean the carpet because one of the hideous dogs wee'd on it, but I also plan to go to the farmers market and plant some stuff.

Big plans, in other words.

This evening, #1 son and I had pizza, he told me the three characteristics he has chosen as the main things he wants to achieve with his writing, and then I watched Dirty Sexy Money and worked on my gray sweater.

I don't know whether I'll actually get around to the cushions, but the sweater should be finished in time for the cool weather in the fall.

#1 daughter and I had a doughnut and present birthday celebration with $2 son Friday and then came up to the Big City. We had a tea tasting (Snow Dragon Jasmine was the winner), inadvertently found ourselves in a dental convention, and met #2 daughter's work colleagues. Then #2 got offf work and came home to find us sitting on a bench outside her building.

#2's latest fellow had broken up with her. He had asked her to call him after work and when she did, told her it wasn't working out and it wasn't her, it was him.

I've never met him, but I wasn't impressed with what she had told me about him, so my reaction was, "Plenty of fish in the sea!" but I know this is not the correct response. Fortunately, #1 daughter is good at this sort of thing, and #2 will be meeting up today with her girlfriends for drinking and crying, so I don't have to work too hard at seeing this as a sad event.

We went out to dinner at a local Italian place. #2 had updated her facebook status, and so had sympathetic messages all night on her phone.

After dinner, we went out to the parking lot and noticed a sort of shrine set into the wall. We were wondering about it aloud, and a man came up to us and said, "Vito's grandfather put it there."

"Really? #1 daughter and I asked, moving closer to the man to hear all the details. #2 daughter was at the car, trying to hurry us out of there. It suddenly struck me that we were in the Big City, not in our little town where talking in a friendly fashion with strangers in dark parking lots might be okay.

We skedaddled.

Saturday morning we went down to the City Market, which I loved, and then to the Half Price Bookstore, where I picked up a bunch of SitePoint books on the cheap (naturally, this makes me think there are about to be giant changes in CSS which will make them all obsolete, but no matter) and also a book of clever ideas about how to make things with dead computers.

Then we walked around the plaza, admiring stuff and telling stories, and finished up with our business meeting at a Thai restaurant.

#2 daughter went on to the cathedral (her call was for an hour before the concert) and #1 and I moved all her furniture around and tidied and dusted her apartment. #1 also cleaned her kitchen.

The concert was extremely good, and the cathedral was certainly very beautiful. Afterwards, we went out to a pub with some old friends of #2's who had stayed with us when they were all at school together. It was fun.

We had the odd experience last week of being featured at the Google doodle -- that is, when someone clicked on Google's special logo for the day, we came up top choice. We had 45,553 visits in 24 hours. Those who use Google Analytics will appreciate that this completely messed up my plan to use our live analytics at a presentation I'm doing at a conference this summer.

Our webhost had to go buy two new CPUs.

With that excitement finished, I've been enjoying a lovely spring weekend, planting the early seeds and scrubbing surfaces. Did a little knitting, as well.

This morning I went to church where the choir director described our song as having "African" words. Fortunately, someone asked what language it was in. He said, "African," but I jumped in and answered "Xhosa," which was the truth. I felt better. We sang it right before a sermon which combined "Blindness" with the history of "Amazing Grace," which was written by a reformed slave trader. It was quite interesting.

Afterward, I was in the choir room with one of the sopranos, and we bid farewell to one of the perky little college girls on her side of the choir loft.

"She's such a sweet little thing," the lady said to me, and we watched through the picture window as she walked to the parking lot, contemplating her sweetness in silence.

The wind came up and flipped up her tiny skirt, revealing a completely bare bottom. We said nothing about her having mooned the choir after church -- during Lent, yet -- and just moved on to other things.

When I got home, #1 daughter was there. We like to cook ahead on Sundays for the week, packing up little parcels of each dish for her single girl freezer and larger parcels for my family freezer. Today, however, it was too hot, so we made lip balm and lotion bars and bubble bath.

Throughout this fun endeavor, we were getting messages from a new student designer we hired a week and a half ago to do a little job for us. He hasn't done anything visible, and we've been sending him polite little "How's it going? Need any help?" kinds of messages. At last, he admitted that he couldn't do the job, so #1 daughter and I were sending out cries for help. #2 daughter got us someone, and she appears to be working on our job successfully right now. We haven't asked her what she's going to charge, so we're hoping it won't be too far out of our price range.

Apart from the multiple emails, calls, and text messages required by this little adventure, though, we didn't talk about work at all. We discussed gardening, and people, and whether it is ever correct to be judgmental of anyone, and stuff like that.

At last, smelling absolutely ravishing, we finished up and cleared away our tools and I got back to my knitting. I sat outside for a bit (carefully balancing the need for vitamin D with concern about skin cancer), and now am heading off to bed with my Kindle.

I honestly don't know whether I've managed to give up multitasking for a week or not. I have been so insanely busy that I haven't noticed.