I felt rebellious yesterday. I knew I ought to work, but I didn't feel like it, so I didn't. My husband will be coming home today from the fleshpots of Las Vegas (I bet they really have fleshpots there, whatever fleshpots are), so yesterday was, in addition to being Saturday, probably the last perfect opportunity for unlimited lolling about in a quiet house reading.

"Unlimited" is the key here, because if you live with other people, you can certainly lie on the sofa with a novel in the silence for a little while, but there is always the awareness that at some point you will have to get up, feed someone, let them watch TV, stuff like that.

I did watch TV for a while as I worked on the two-piece dress for my SWAP. The top is finished, and the skirt needs a hem and zipper but is otherwise finished.

I continued watching Kitchen Nightmares, and continued thinking about my business. On the one hand, I have a nice little business which is growing at a reasonable rate and which provides pleasant employment for me and for #1 daughter.

On the other hand, as long as you have a service business with one person providing the service, the limit to the business is always going to be the number of hours per week that person is willing to work. A cognitive scientist in Britain sent me, yesterday, a suggestion for how to harness my expert knowledge on my subject and make it available to junior staff. A Macedonian guy asked whether I had any websites.

Yes, I said, pointing him to my professional site. No, he meant sites that made me money. I pointed him to my educational site, but admitted that it is hitting a record $300 this month. He earns 10 times that much with his.  

So, if some potty-mouthed web pro went around like Gordon Ramsay roughing up web firms and improving their business practices, would he be saying to me, "Where's your f-ing salesforce? Why aren't you outsourcing your f-ing linkbuilding? Have you even tested your f-ing ads? Why the f- aren't you doing any f-ing networking? This is supposed to be a f-ing business, not a f-ing art colony!"

Or is it okay for me to let the business grow organically and take the occasional Saturday off? After all, most of the people Ramsay is swearing at are in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars and have no customers. My business has no debt and lots of customers. It may have unrealized potential, but is that a crime?

While I contemplate this deep question, it is the first day of the Holiday Grand Plan. If you do what these guys tell you, then you will be ready for all the holidays this year with no stress or last-minute madness. This week, you must clean your front porch and make lists. It is, in fact, List Week, so you should make lots of lists. Your Christmas card list. A list of the people you plan to give gifts to, with ideas and budget notes. Lists of the special foods you plan to make for the various holidays, including menus for the holidays themselves, a list of make-ahead foods for the freezer, and a list of the holiday goodies you'll be preparing for gifts and to have on hand for visitors. A Master Shopping List of all the things you need for completion of all those lists. 

It is also, for me, the last day before I begin a group diet with a bunch of very perky ladies, so I intend also to make a list of menus for the week. Then I have papers to grade, blogging to do, articles to write, and that hemming to accomplish, as well as homework for the online class I'm taking and the next Italian lesson. I still feel rebellious, frankly. I'd like to spend today lolling about and reading, too. Possibly with a box of chocolates. Church first... maybe after that I'll feel more like doing all these things that I know will be good for me in the long run

I've had a week of classes now. My classes seem particularly excellent this term, and my summer class did as well. There are three possibilities:

1. We are using happiness as our group topic rather than global warming, and this just makes everyone so cheerful that we naturally have fun and get more out of class.
2. I'm developing a reputation on campus, and students who will be comfortable with my teaching style are choosing to take my class.  This is actually possible, I suppose. Two of my students yesterday told me why they had chosen my class instead of someone else's, so it may just be a less random group.
3. It's the beginning of the term and I haven't yet noticed all the difficult, uncooperative, problematic things. I usually like everyone when I first meet them, so this is very possible.

Last night I finished the shell from simplicity 2263. You can see the drawing and a swatch of the fabric I used at right. I feel as though I ought to open up Photoshop and superimpose the two images. The front is cut on the bias, so it isn't quite as sacklike as it might be.  I plan to wear it to church tomorrow along with the skirt which was the other garment I made this week.

I have the matching skirt for this cut and hope to sew it today, though I actually have a whole lot of work to do and may not be able to take much sewing time.

I did the hemming of the top last night while watching a program called Kitchen Nightmares. The premise of this is that a successful chef goes into failing restaurants and turns them around.

Some of the issues are about cooking, but he also deals with marketing and management issues, so I was watching for business info. It's quite interesting, if you're in the market for increased business acumen, but I don't know why anyone else would want to watch it.I also don't get where it fits into the British TV landscape, since it is a) a cooking/business/reality show and b) every other word out of the heroe's mouth is "f-ing." In one episode  they were in Yorkshire (for reasons I do not understand, Yorkshire seems to be funny in England), where that word rhymes with "cooking," and most of the other characters said it all the time as well.

On what station, or in what time slot, can you put a show with a combination of cooking and swearing? Maybe it is supposed to make the cooking bit more manly. The guys are constantly going on about bollocks as well, so perhaps that's it.

This morning when I woke, I found that one dog had wet her bed and another had made a mess on the kitchen floor. Once I had dealt with that and fed the monsters, the third dog vomited on the carpet.

And yet last night I went to a recital of transcendently lovely music. For about an hour the world consisted only of lovely things like Faure's Theme and Variations. The pianist made witty comments on the pieces he had chosen, including both George Crumb's Rain-Death and The Legend of Zelda. His hands flew about on the keys and his body swayed, and the piano gleamed beneath a silver-draped ceiling. Quite wonderful.

This is one of the central tensions in life: the beauty of art, thought, love, kindness, and even of an affection dog -- juxtaposed against the messy physical realities of digestion, defecation, childbirth, illness, death.

We had a bunch of new hymns for a 9/11 festival we have coming up. "Come and Dwell in Solomon's Halls" was completely new to us, and Egypt and I were both tearing up over it. It's just a beautiful piece. She was also rather emotional over Mark Hayes arrangement of "Let There Be Peace on Earth," but to me it sounds like the choirs that sing behind the picture of the girl in her cashmere sweater in 1950s movies -- you know, she has a gentle smile and you can just see tears glistening in her eyes, and possibly a bit of script lettering runs across the screen saying Merry Christmas or something.

We're also doing Rutter's Gaelic Blessing, often known to the irreverent or those who've sung it a million times as Garlic Dressing. Nice stuff.

Here's the blouse from Simplicity 2263. It's constructed in an interesting way. The front and back are cut in one piece each, the back on the straight grain and the front on the bias. The back extends over the shoulders and meets up with the front right about at the collar bone.

When you heard that the front was cut on the bias, you might have thought that the front would have a graceful drape that would keep this top from being sacklike.

You might also have thought that it would cling and cup in odd ways. In fact, it's a little of both. I doubt I'll make it again, though I'm sure it will be fine under a jacket, which is where most of my tops end up. I made it in the sateen print, which is soft and lovely and reasonably well behave. I used the same stuff to line the yoke of the khaki skirt (the straight skirt from the same pattern), making the two pieces a set of some kind. I also cut the flared skirt from that pattern from the sateen.

I am following the rules admirably.

Master Chorale started up and La Bella and I went. We know most of the people there, and did a reasonable amount of friendly chatting. We're singing a piece called Celebrations by Pirsichetti which is a setting of poems from Leaves of Grass. It was not easy.

However, last semester they premiered a piece by a New York composer whose name can hardly be said in the department without groans as the response. I punked out last term, but the director did talk a little about the piece. It was not, he said, the least successful premiere in which he had ever taken part.

The point he was making was that by comparison the Pirischetti will be easy.

I came home to an empty house, since my husband is in Las Vegas competing in the Nationals of the pool league ("league" may not be the right word here, but the other one that comes to mind is "guild," which I'm quite sure is wrong). I had intended to hem the blouse and add fastenings to the skirt, but I did neither.

I have my first class tomorrow at 7:30 am.

Here's yesterday's sewing: the straight skirt from Simplicity 2263, though I changed the pleats to gathers on this one, since I plan to make this in the teal gabardine as part of the suit for this SWAP. I also cut the two piece dress from the sateen print, and used said print to line the yoke of the khakhi skirt.

So I combined the two approaches a bit, and will have a finished garment this week (hemming the skirt today) and also a couple of items cut out for sewing when and if I have time.

Time will be in short supply, because everything starts up this week.

I got my online classes up, and it was good practice for me with html. Face to face classes begin this week. My schedule will allow me to continue to go to Pump It Up class. I think that's what it's called. I know it's a class involving a nice, fit woman in her thirties yelling at a roomful of mothers and grandmothers to "dig deep" and "push yourself" and also to call upon Jesus, in whom we can do all things.

No doubt this is true, but making people do push ups and planks in the name of Jesus seems a bit iffy.

Anyway, that class is on Monday and Wednesday and my classes are on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. This means that I'll be at my desk at about 9:30 every day. If I work till 6:00, that'll be a normal workday length. Then I have Master Chorale on Mondays, Bible study on Tuesdays, choir on Wednesdays, my own online class on Wednesdays and Fridays, and the choirlet on Thursdays. I'm thinking of giving up the choirlet.

The choirlet is the most social of these activities, so it might not be good to do that. I have to make efforts to keep some social element in my life. Having things to go to every night of the week will keep me from working so much (at least in theory), but I notice a grave lack of lolling around time in this schedule.

Weekends will have tasks from the HGP, and sewing.

My husband is going to the national pool tournament finals in Las Vega this week, so I can try out the new fall schedule without any added features like noticing having no time with him, or possibly getting complaints about that.

The boys both go back to school this week, but none of us actually starts tomorrow.

Enough maundering. I have work to do. If I can't get all my work done within the work week now, what makes me think I'll be able to do it between 9:30 and 6:00 every day?

Once again the stupid dogs woke me up at 4:30 am (actually, 4:22, but who's counting?). If I ignore them, they'll wet on the floor, so I really don't have an option. If you'd like a nice dog, for free, come and pick up one or more.

This was probably a good day to be awakened at 4:30, if there can be such a thing, because yesterday was the deadline for getting all my online classes up, and I'm not yet finished. The department chair said he'd be reviewing them this weekend, so if I finish them up in the next hour or two I'll probably be okay.

 
However, I'm very torn, because yesterday my SWAP fabrics arrived. I had planned on making this year's SWAP a stashbuster. I have all these nice fabrics I was given, and I didn't want to spend money because I have thousands upon thousands in tuition to pay.

However, I didn't actually have the fabrics I needed. I could have made eight jackets, for example, but no blouses. So I ordered some fabric from the excellent cheap online fabric store, Fashion Fabric Club.

They sent me a lovely flannel backed wool gabardine in teal for the three piece suit, a brighter teal lightweight Italian wool, a geometric print sateen for the two piece dress, a gorgeous Japanese silk print, a great stripe for a classic shirt, a rich brown wool for an additional jacket, and matching thread -- all for under $100. It's a bit of a pig in a poke since you can't see or feel the fabrics before buying them, but my experience with them has generally been positive. Silk and wool at $5 a yard represent enough of a savings to make me forgive the occasional fabric that isn't as great in person as it looked in its photo.

On the subject of online fabric stores, did you know that Fabric.com has free downloads from HotPatterns? I plan to make the knit top and the Sumatra bags.

Of course, that's in my fantasy where I spend the weekend sewing, not in the real world where I spend it getting ready for classes. School starts on Monday, so it's not as though I have a lot of leeway.

Breakfast. Classes. Then maybe sewing.

What I really should do is cut everything out. Then I can thread the sewing machine with teal and sew up major seams in teal whenever I have a bit of time. Then I switch to brown and do the same till the brown fabrics are finished. Then gray, I suppose, and finish it up. This would be the most efficient approach, probably. It doesn't necessarily give the same kind of satisfaction as completing one item a week, but it might result in more finished projects in the long run.

I do have plum and burgundy knits which I think will provide a bit of a rest from the whole teal and brown color scheme. However, I think that having everything go together will be a plus while traveling.

In other news... No, that's enough. I need to have breakfast and get my classes done. Also, the phrase reminded me of this week's Big Bang Theory, in which the girlfriend of chief nerd Sheldon tells Penny, "Sheldon and I had sexual intercourse. In other news, I'm starting an herb garden." The two are checking to see whether salacious gossip travels faster than more neutral gossip. They're testing meme theory, and their outcome will surprise no one.

I have no salacious gossip to offer.

Today's schedule:
4:00 a.m. Be awakened by stupid dogs, after having bolted out of bed lat last night upon realizing that I had forgotten a client's blog.
4:30 Try to go back to sleep, but have confused dozy dreams about cardigans until dogs bark some more.
5:00 Get up.Threaten dogs. Begin blogging. Make breakfast and husband's coffee in between bouts of blogging.
6:00 Start working on ecommerce site. Write compelling, unique descriptions of hundreds of nearly identical products.
7:00 Dress and return to ecommerce site.
8:00 Skip gym to continue working on ecommerce site. Realize that there is no chance of finishing said site before leaving for faculty meeting. Crash browser. Make tea while computer composes self.
8:45 Look at syllabus from last year. Change all dates. Consider leaving like that.
9:00 Answer emails asking things like how much to write sales emails for soccer coaching site, how best to improve weight loss website, how much for press releases, would I like to partner with company A, would I like to partner with company B, and have I noticed that the street view gets blurry if you perform a highly unlikely sequence of geeky steps.
9:30 Return to ecommerce site. Notice that it is taking far longer than I said it would. Get confused about difference between premium and non-premium versions of product and email colleague asking for details.
9:45 Receive answer and return to ecommerce site. Think of blog posts haven't written and vacillate between continuing with ecommerce site till eyes cross, or trying to do blog posts.
11:00 Leave for campus, planning to get parking tag and ID before meeting.
11:44 Arrive at campus way later than anticipated. Attempt to get parking tag, but discover that I must have the old one, which has disappeared while I shared car with #1 son. Must find it or pay large fine.
12:00 Give up and have lunch with #1 daughter. Discuss servers and other geeky things in Panera Bread while being immersed in sandalwood scent of numerous men in ties and badges. Spend 20 minutes waiting in line. Sandwiches and fruit total over $20.
1:00 Go to faculty meeting. Read papers, listen to what everyone did over summer, have bullet points of PowerPoint slides read aloud.
3:30 Speaker announces that he will be emailing all the info to us tomorrow anyway. Stop listening. Think instead about cupcakes on side table.
4:30 Speaker winds up. Someone carries cupcakes around, so I snag one. Secretary comes up with contract for me to sign, entire reason for going to faculty meeting. Sign contract. Eat cupcake. Drive through rush hour traffic.
5:22 Arrive home, make and eat egg for dinner.
6:00 Do Lesson 1 of my online class which began today. Get 100% on the quiz. no assignments, no discussions in the discussion room. Call #1 daughter and ask about her class. It is much more fun than mine. People put <3 signs in their discussions and the teacher answers. Friend is studying with her and has built VM for them to play in.
6:50 Go to choir with La Bella. Sing things with double sharps. Don't fully believe in the existence of double sharps.
8:30 Ride home with La Tenora. Hang out with husband. Think I should return to ecommerce site. Instead, hang out with husband listening to his theories about America's Got Talent. Come in to work on ecommerce site. Find that screen swims before eyes. Make threatening remarks to dogs about letting me sleep till 6:00 tomorrow. Write xanga post instead of working.
9:16 The end. Will now be going to bed to read and sleep.

Last night I realized that my schedule was about to get more ferocious. I work all summer, so I don't think about this the way most teachers do -- the summer is half over, or it's only three weeks till I get back to the classroom...

But not only do I get back to the classroom next week with three college classes to teach, I also begin an online class as a student on Wednesday, choir begins, Master Chorale begins, Bible study begins, and the Holiday Grand Plan begins.

That's a lot of beginnings. Accordingly, I did some housework and cooking, hemmed the new trousers, and then watched Mad Men with the intention of lolling about enough to feel ready to jump in today and get my online classes set up, my gradebook ready, and all that before our faculty meeting on Wednesday, while also doing a good job on my regular work.

I have a skirt cut out, but I decided, in the midst of my lolling, that I want to line the yoke with a print from which I plan to make a shirt. I therefore must cut out the shirt before I make the skirt. This isn't how the sewing bloggers do their SWAPs. They cut everything out and organize it and sit down and sew all the long seams in one color of thread. That is much faster.

Still, I am having a much more normal life these days; I may be close to achieving that goal, at least briefly.

I spent several hours yesterday scrubbing things and a couple of hours working and sewed a pair of pants (all but hems and fastenings, and then I decided to have a look at the knitting blogs of yore.

"Knitting blogs of yore?" That's worse than "astronauts in the old days," which   #2 son once said.

I just mean that five years ago or so I spent August reading all the knitting blogs in the knitting blog ring to which I belonged at the time, and I linked to the good ones here at my xanga. So I went back there and clicked on a bunch of links to see what the knitters are up to these days, because I am not only out of the ring, but out of the loop as well.

Mostly, they have stopped knitting. A lot of them have also stopped blogging. Generally, if they aren't just showing pictures of pets, they're cooking.

So I begin this post with cooking, not that I can honestly claim it's a matter of peer pressure. That's just my segue. Last night's dinner was chicken with almond-mint pesto, roasted butternut squash, and assorted fresh produce.

This is from the magazine Every Day with Rachael Ray, which has a feature this month where you cook five things for the freezer and end up with basic "building blocks" for lots of fresh meals. Chicken and roasted vegetables are two of them, and I now have them in the freezer. Today, I intend to get the others into the freezer, and perhaps this will help me be better about dinner.

I have a tendency to feel that there is no point in cooking just for myself, now that all the kids are gone. This is a bad tendency which must be overcome. But my husband comes home from work  around 4:00, which is way too early for me to eat dinner, and he eats when he gets home, so it's just me.

This shouldn't mean there's no point in cooking. It should mean that I can have all the vegetables I want without fear of whining. That's what I'm aiming for.

The other picture here shows my new trousers with one of the tops from the Summer Top Project. This is the same pattern I used for the coffee brown pair (no pockets) in a cotton and Lycra twill which I quite like. There was enough for a skirt, too, so I hope to get that made today in order to get back on schedule with my sewing. I also have more things to scrub and more work to do.

It was cooler here yesterday -- really gorgeous in the morning, in fact, and not bad at all in the afternoon, so I spent some time outdoors. The Four o' Clocks bloomed for just a few minutes, showing their pretty freckled throats -- not long enough to catch a photo, but for a little while at least. It was nice.