#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.

Yesterday was a full work day, but I did spend the evening knitting and reading, and sometimes also watching Hotel Babylon. In fact, I was watching Hotel Babylon on Netflix and just went ahead and watched several episodes in a row, using the time not only to knit, but also to clean out my purses and tidy cabinets.

I then got back to a book I’m reading and it said to give up multi-tasking for a week.

Multi-tasking is out of fashion now. It used to be one of the mainstays of time management, but apparently it cuts productivity and makes us nuts. We’re not, the current research says, actually doing several things at once. We’re just shifting our attention from one thing to another really fast. We end up doing worse at both tasks than we would have had we given either our full attention.

I’m not sure that I need full attention to watch Hotel Babylon.

It seems to me also that if one task is more mental, like reading or watching TV, then we could do a more physical task like knitting or doing Wii Free Step at the same time, since the two use different parts of the brain. However, I have to admit that I am a confirmed multi-tasker, and I am going to try to do without it for a week and see where it gets me.

#1 daughter and I went to visit my parents and then out to one of the local battlefields. This one is a national park, part of the wonderful system of national parks we have in this country.

There are people who go around to all the national parks after they retire, and I can see the charm of that.

This one preserves essentially unchanged the site of a horrible battle of the Civil War that took place just about this time of year a century and a half ago.

It was a beautiful spring day when we went, and we enjoyed traveling around the park, but it’s also sobering to think of all the young men who died there, and the anguish of making the strategic decisions which people now can so easily say were unwise decisions.

Stand Waitie, the only Native American general in the Civil War on either side and the last Confederate general to surrender to the Federals, led a Cherokee battalion in this battle. Two generals were killed, and there seems to have been a lot of internal power play and political positioning. This battle gave the north control of the Telegraph Road, the main source of supplies and communication to the south, and of Missouri.

We were   getting photos and information for our educational website, and #1 daughter made this little video with the pictures:
It was an enjoyable day, and made me feel a bit like Spring Break. I also quit early yesterday, so today I must work to make up for it. I have a couple of blogs to do and content for a security company’s website, and a couple of articles, and mountains of grading.

There will be some knitting, too, and perhaps even some sewing as well.

I’m working on Adelaide from Vintage Modern Knits: Contemporary Designs Using Classic Techniques. Since it’s worked from the bottom up, you get all the zombie knitting first and the epic knitting at the end when you do the colorwork yoke.

I’ve therefore been knitting while reading Stark on my Kindle. Kindle reading is hands-free and therefore perfect for knitting.

My other knitting tip is what to do about painful hands and wrists. This comes from doing all that movement while keeping the hands essentially closed. The muscles that close the hands — the flexors — get stronger than the ones that open the hands — the extensors — and the result is a painful imbalance. The solution is to lift small weights in a strange way: hold your arms out in front of you with your little weights held loosely in each hand. Pull your hands back toward you from the wrist and then push them back down. You then turn your arms outward and do the same thing from the side, pulling the thumb side of the hand toward you from the wrist. These are small movements, but they isolate that extensor muscle and strengthen it. That way you can keep on cheerily knitting.

We’re expecting rain today, so I hope to do a fair bit of cheery knitting once I get my work done. Exercise first, then breakfast, then work, then knitting while reading. That’s the plan. I’ll need to shoehorn grocery shopping and a little housework in there somewhere, too.

I finished the cotton cardigan I’ve been working on. It has no buttons, so I pinned the edges together here so it would stay on the hanger while I photographed it.  You can see in the photo below how nicely it shows the color of a shirt through its laciness.

I like this sweater a lot. I’ve begun another one. Yes, I did in fact spend some time yesterday knitting. I should have worked — I’m behind on grading and still have the Aussies to write for this week — but I just didn’t feel like it.

Other things I should do: housework, laundry, digging up the garden, clearing junk out of my bedroom, reviewing all the books that have been sent to me, cooking proper meals for my family…

Oh, well. It’ll all get done eventually, I suppose. I’ve got a site up at the WordPress Showcase, which is pretty cool. The site in question got quite a bit of traffic from being there, but only a few came on to my site from the link there. Makes sense. I still get the bragging rites.

Apart from that, I’m working on a whole bunch of interesting projects. I was feeling sorry for myself because I had planned to leave town for Spring Break, but that isn’t going to happen. #1 daughter points out that I’m a grown up and therefore don’t get Spring Break, but I do teach, so there’s some frail sense to my idea that I ought to get Spring Break, isn’t there? Maybe not.

My boys, who are actually college students, are both going South for the break, to beaches.

I plan to take up traveling at some point in the future. I’ll probably have to wait until the boys are out of school so I can afford it, but the desire to travel about and see the sites grows on me.

I was watching a DVD from Netflix called “Two Fat Ladies” about a couple of old Englishwomen who travel about with a motorcycle and sidecar, cooking things. They burst into song, say things like, “I blame the Ameddicans,” and cook up delicious-looking stuff. Obviously, they have a camera crew and much of the impression of just tootling around is an illusion, but they appear to take off with stuff in a wicker basket and otherwise no particular preparation at all. They cook in other people’s kitchens and seem entirely unencumbered.

I figure I could do that. Take my laptop and go roving.

#1 daughter and I do plan to visit a couple of tourist sites in our area on one day during Spring Break.That can count as travel.

My new knitting project is a wool sweater, one of the Bohus type. For these sweaters, you knit the body and sleeves up from the bottom, join them, and knit a colorwork yoke in the round.

I’m using a pattern from Vintage Modern Knits. I might change the colorwork design, though. Don’t those flowers look a bit like insects?

It’s time for colorwork, though. I’ve been doing lacy stuff for quite a long time, and there was #2 son’s completely plain sweater in the midst of it there, so colorwork it is.

On Friday, I started the day by finishing up my short class in the Next County to the North. Possibly because of sleep deprivation, I ended up giving the students a rant about the value of writing and of doing your best work and stuff like that.

I believe those things, but I think they probably rolled their eyes about it in the hall after class.

Following that, #1 daughter and I had a working lunch in the school coffee shop (the food is horrible) and then went on to a meeting with some new prospective clients. I like them a lot and I hope we get the job. They live and work in a geodesic dome in the Next County to the East, making alternative energy devices. We met in the library coffee shop.

I got home from the meeting just in time to leave for a singing gig in the Next County to the South. Traveling there is always fairly traumatic for me, because there are some fairly swoopy roads between here and there, but I slept on the way down and woke up just as we crossed the river.

It’s hard for me to explain how I feel around large bodies of water. It’s as though all the molecules of water in my body respond to a call from the molecules in the river, lake, or ocean. Even swimming pools have a bit of that effect for me. I probably shouldn’t be living in a land-locked place.

We sang for the older people’s group at a church there, ate weird things at their potluck, and then drove back home.

It was a fun day.

Yesterday I worked, but also spent some time sitting outside in the lovely springtime. I did some housework, and some slight gardening. My husband saw what pitiful stuff I was doing with the plants and took over. He can’t stand to see things done badly. He has to jump in and do it better himself.

In the evening, #1 son and I watched Journey to the Center of the Earth and I finished up the sleeves of the Diagonals cardigan. Or at least provisionally finished them. I have to see whether they actually fit the sweater before I can say they’re finished. However, I may finish up the cardigan entirely today. That would be nice.

Today I accepted a whole bunch of social invitations. This is odd, since otherwise by day consisted of getting up early to work before church, going to church, and coming back and working some more.

That might be why I accepted all those invitations. That’s not what Sundays are supposed to be like, even for people who enjoy their jobs.

It might also be that I have a birthday this week, so I feel as though I ought to be having some fun. That would be a good reason, too.

I ended up working pretty much all day yesterday, since some issues arose with websites. In the evening, though, I traced off the pattern pieces, cut the dress from the unpleasant fabric, and basted the front together to see if I could figure it out. While I seem to have done it backwards, it does appear to work, and I expect that it will fit and look reasonably good when finished, too. I guess I should slap the whole thing together real quick and resolve fitting issues, and then make a real one.

However, this is a pretty color, and it seems like a lot of work to get even this far with the dress and then quit and move on to another version of it.

This is where the whole concept of the wearable muslin comes in, and why I have so many garments made of weird fabrics. By the time I’ve actually made the wearable muslin, I often don’t go ahead an make a real one at all.

In addition to working yesterday (and cleaning up the living room, only to have the other residents of the house mess it up again immediately), I did the grocery shopping for #1 daughter’s and my Big Cooking Adventure today.

In light of that fun plan, I got up quit early this morning and finished up my work. I figure I can go to church and come home and get going on the cooking. This way, we’ll have delicious, healthy food all week.

#2 daughter and I had lunch yesterday, our usual Friday custom but one which has been baffled by the snow recently. I teach on Friday mornings in the town where she lives, so we meet at Panera and deal with all the business issues that have arisen during the week. It’s a good system.

I have to work some more today, and I also really have to do housework, but I am hoping also to spend some time sewing. I want to make this dress. It’s a Burda pattern, so I have to trace the pattern, a huge enormous bother, and then there’s all sorts of complex 3 dimensional stuff, so I must first make a muslin.

LaBella gave me a whole bunch of fabric a couple of years ago, and one piece was in one of my favorite colors, but polyester that truly feels like polyester. I figure I’ll use that for the muslin. If it doesn’t work out, I won’t feel that I’ve spoiled good fabric, but if it does work out, I’ll wear it in spite of the way it feels.

This whole dress-making idea actually came up because I am thinking of making a SWAP again this year. SWAP stands for Sewing With a Plan, and involves planning out a whole wardrobe according to various rules and sewing it up so that you have plenty to wear.

I do need clothes, and I also have quite a lot of nice fabrics, so the idea of sewing some clothes seems quite reasonable.   However, I’m also working 55-60 hours a week, so I haven’t gotten much sewing done.

In fact, the only time I have ever made a complete by the rules SWAP was in 2007. Last year, I started a SWAP and actually completed a jacket, a 2 piece dress, a solid top, and two print tops that didn’t fit into the SWAP at all, though I wear both of them often.

I ‘m heading down the same path with this year’s SWAP, I fear. Here I have a lovely print jersey which should be the two piece dress. It works well with the jacket I made earlier this month — you can see the jacket fabric in the photo below. There’s enough left of that fabric to make a straight skirt so I’d have a suit, and then there are the remaining fabrics from left to right: a lightweight gray wool for a skirt or pants, pale sage green linen for a blouse, burgundy linen and deep blue peachskin  for  simple woven tanks or shells, the aforementioned suit fabric, a nice burgundy jacquard linen to make a shirt to wear on its own or over the tops, and a twill for pants.

Having figured all this out, I needed only to choose a pattern for the two piece dress and get started.

The one I made last year looks sort of dumpy on me. Now I am an overweight middle aged woman, so things do look dumpy on me, but this seemed too dumpy, so I set off a on quest for a better choice, and ended up noticing the lovely dress at the top of the page. It’s not two piece and it’s not designed for knits, so I really have no business thinking about it when I should be working on a SWAP so I’ll have clothes to wear, but it’s very pretty, isn’t it?

So I’ll make my potentially-wearable muslin with it, probably over the next couple of months, and see what happens next, and this is roughly why I haven’t finished a SWAP in all these years. Still, I do end up with a handful of wearable garments in the process of failing to make the SWAP, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Our horrible dog has been crying at night again. This combined with my husband’s getting up at 4:00 am for work (and therefore my getting up at the same time) has resulted in a severe degree of sleep deprivation. But sometime in between bouts of swearing at the horrible dog, I had an odd dream.

I was living across the hall from a restaurant. The Computer Guy came to discuss some job or other, and left the door open. People from the restaurant then began to come over and sit down at the tables which fortunately appeared, complete with linens and centerpieces and dishes. I tried to suggest that they were in the wrong place, but for some reason couldn’t get this point made. I ended up with 150 people eating their restaurant meals at my place, and — this is the part that I found distressing in the dream — using my bathroom. I woke up when I was about to have to wash all the dishes.

Clearly, this is a housekeeping dream.

After working a mere six hours yesterday, bringing myself to 55 hours for the week, I did the grocery shopping, had some conversation with my husband and son, made Jerk Chicken Nachos, watched Eureka with #1 son, and knitted.

I made cowls for the women on my Christmas gift list this past holiday season, and then once I gave them away wanted one for myself, so I am making the Silk Fountain Hood. I stopped at cowl length when I made it for my mother and #1 daughter (#2 daughter, who doesn’t like lace, got a more tailored style), but now in the snow I am going to make it long enough to pull up as a hood.

Today is church, a little more work for my Australians, and then I guess I had better clean my bathroom and kitchen in case I have another restaurant dream. I was quite embarrassed to think of people walking through my untidy bedroom, too, in that dream, so I may just be very domestic. On the other hand, I may do more knitting. Ideally I’ll manage both. I’m enjoying Eureka, and also enjoying the book I’m reading, Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deanna Raybourn. It seems to be part of a series, so I’ll have to go back and read the rest. It’s an intelligently written romantic detective novel set in the Himalayas during the Raj (not sure whether the Raj properly belongs in time or in space, actually…).