I got #1 son’s quilt sewn together this weekend. Yes, I know the corners don’t match properly, but if they did, he would feel as though someone else had made it, and not his mother.

My husband and I got the quilting frame out of the garage and set up, sandwiched the quilt top, backing, and batting, and put it in the frame.

Then #1 son came back from his adventure at Hueco Tanks. This is a climbing area in Texas, near El Paso, and the link goes to a place that appears to be about climbing there, but its main navigation also includes “Capitalism” and “Tyranny,” so use your own judgement.

It snowed one day, so they went to the Carlsbad Caverns. In the evenings they went to El Pasito and hung out, and they did a little sightseeing, but mostly it was serious climbing. Sounded fun, assuming thtat you’re 22 and quite fit.

#1 son told me all this over a dinner of chicken curry, rice, strawberries, cucumber, and pineapple upside down cake. Then he biked off and my husband and I bedded out a bunch of torenia (clown flower or wishbone flower, like a short snapdragon) and hypoestes (polka dot plant or nosy neighbor).

All in all, a very pleasant weekend. Usually on spring break I like to travel a bit, but instead I worked for 60 hours this week, so a restful weekend was just the thing.

First things first: the new Knitty is up. It’s mostly tiny shawls, though there is a nice little cardigan called Petal and a nice raglan T shirt style top called Gemini, plus a pretty traditional sock called Phloem. Those are the ones I like, mind you. There are several more each of socks and warm-weather sweaters. I just didn’t like them as much.

I was planning to single out the knitted pineapple bag for special scorn, I confess, but then I read the notes on it. Apparently, Victorian women were mad for bags shaped like pineapples. How can it be that I didn’t know this? Knitting bags in the shape of pineapples was, according the the pattern’s author (or erhaps editor), le dernier cri for  the ladies of the mid-1800s. Like wearing Ugg boots or something.

I’m not the sort who wears Ugg boots and I’m not going to make the pineapple. However, sice it was written by Franklin Habit, I recommend that you go read the story.

There’s also a new Anticraft, which includes a Celtic style cross-stitch alphabet. The AntiCraft is generally not worth the bother of looking at if it’s knitting patterns you want, but you might want cross stitch, for all I know.

My new sewing machine arrived and I am hoping to get that quilt top finished up today, along with some errands and housework. I haven’t opened the box yet, so I am still operating in the realm of fantasy. In said fantasy, this magical new sewing machine that threads itself and makes its own buttonholes will not only work so splendidly that I can finish the quilt in a weekend, but will also make it possible for me to finish up the SWAP I started last summer. It will make up for my lack of skill and for the fact that I don’t oil my machine and also for the sleep deprivation which continues to be the main truth about my life.

I bought the sashing and sewed one row before my sewing machine died. I found a great deal on a little Brother machine with all kinds of fancy stuff like automatic buttonholes at Amazon, and hope it’ll arrive fast enough for me to get the quilt sewn for #1 son’s birthday.

The weather has been gorgeous. Nothing to complain about here, and you can’t say better than that.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I’m taking the day off, or at least most of the day. I played around online first, and then got all my T-shirt squares prepared and organized.

I think I’ve got a good variety of colors — enough that I can arrange them in a design with a reasonable degree of balance.

Now I need to decide about sashing and setting. I think this will make a great quilt for #1 son’s birthday.

I’ll be heading out soon for groceries.

I’m overlooking all the work I ought to be doing. I’ll be reading, cleaning, baking, and sewing. In fact, I will pretend that it is Spring Break, which it is and that I’m on vacation (which I’m not).

In business, it’s normal to go through cycles of comfort and discomfort. #2 son, who studies economics, told me the proper name for it and drew me the chart, but I don’t remember the official details.

Anyway, you grow and have plenty of work and money is coming in and everything’s good. Then you get too busy and you have to hire someone else, so the money goes out in another direction and things are less comfortable financially, but there are enough people to do the work and you grow a bit more and there are enough people and also enough money and you’re comfortable again. It may not be people, of course; it might be a larger building or more machinery or something, but for us it’s people.

We hired The New Guy, and that helped, and then we increased his hours, and that helped some more, but now I’m absolutely swamped again.

This is where it’s uncomfortable. Not only am I back to working way too much, but The New Guy is a student and can’t be expected to be the additional full time person we really need. I’ve been imaging that #2 daughter might come on board at this point, but it looks like that won’t happen.

So I’m back to 50 or 60 hour weeks for a bit till we figure out what to do. The danger here is not only that I’ll be living in squalor and eating take out pizza while my husband languishes alone, but also that things won’t get done, or won’t get done fast enough, and we’ll lose customers. We’ve lost one already this year, actually. He was very nice, very positive, but it’s entirely possible that we screwed up on that account.

This is the big danger in growth. For a company like ours that has been bootstrapped and has no extra capital, it’s a danger that we face every time we hit this point in the cycle.

Yesterday, in addition to some hours of work, I also got started on my T shirt quilt. You cut squares of interfacing (I used 10″ squares) and fuse them to your old T shirts. Trim them to match the squares, sort them by color families, and keep going till you have enough squares to make your quilt.

An interesting corner of The Art Professor’s office. I was there for a video project with a group of students and The New Guy. Said New Guy told us that this was done with a hair dryer, but The Art Professor didn’t say anything about it. He has all kinds of wild stuff in his office, as befits an art professor.

I lolled around on my birthday as planned. I went to a bookstore and bought an actual paperback novel  and a tiny box of Godiva chocolates, cleaned up the living room, and relaxed. Later, I cleaned my nightstand and put fresh sheets on the bed, used a Kose or sekkisei lotion mask, and lolled in bed reading till my husband came in. I think I did enough lolling to last me for a while.

I learned about the lotion mask in Little Tokyo while visiting a friend of my youth a couple of years ago. You can see it in action here. My friend and I put these things on our faces and rested for 5-10 minutes as directed, and then told one another how youthful and bright we looked. I think the great thing about these masks is that you rest for 5-10 minutes. However, I really like it and can recommend it as an anti-stress measure.

Does it do anything at all for the skin? I don’t know. I can tell you that I now have less visible sun damage than I did a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t know what has caused this. I’ve used Erno Laszlo soap and Korres botanical treatments, often together, and of course I have been holed up at my computer most of the time and getting very little sun, so that might be it.

Of course, at the same time that I have been reversing the discoloration to some extent, I’m also becoming more wrinkled, so I don’t expect to end up looking fabulous. However, I do feel that the coming year will be a fabulous year for me. This may be the result of lolling about eating chocolate rather than of any rational expectation, but it’s quite a pleasant feeling.

I told this to #1 daughter, and she told me that she had had just the same feeling on her birthday a couple of months ago. She has ended an unproductive relationship and moved into a snazzy new apartment in that time, so that sounds pretty good to me.

Today there’s church, and the Australians’ blog, and I will also need to work on this church history book I’m helping out with. It’s volunteer, and should be fun.

It’s my birthday today. I’m not working. I have a lot of work to do, and lots of housework as well, ut I once read somewhere that it isn’t fun to have nothing to do — it’s fun to have lots of things to do and not to do them.

That’s the plan. #1 son baked me a cake, with layers and everything, and I have plenty to read, so I expect to be doing lots of lolling around. Possibly a nice walk once the sun comes up. That;s it.

Since I’ve been driving a lot lately, I’ve been listening to a recorded book. I chose it largely at random, but it has been eye opening. The book is The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, a book about a different way to think about doing business.

If you’ve been reading my blog for years and have total recall, then you may know that I used to manage a bookstore, that I lost my job a few years ago and ended up, by a set of curious chances, owning a successful little business.

I think that some people have found this encouraging. Reading of my bumbling progress toward this goal, they think, “OMG, if she can do it, then I sure can!” People teaching courses in entrepreneurial skills probably read out bits of my adventures in class saying, “See, class, what happens when you have no proper plan? See how she slowed down the growth of her business with her irrational, unbusinesslike actions?”

The E-myth isn’t exactly the story of my business. This book says that people are good at doing something (technicians) and then they have a fit of entrepreneurship and decide to go into business. This was not true of me. If it hadn’t been for The Computer Guy, I would never have gone into business at all, and the turning points in my progress from successful freelance web content writer to business owner are so peculiar and disjointed (…my unreasonable degree of loyalty… meeting the Web People… my brother’s death… being written up in the Wall Street Journal… my son’s decision to attend a really expensive school… my daughter’s romantic complications… ) that they wouldn’t even make good theater.

But I definitely recognized my business issues in the Describing the Problem section of the book. I’ve met with a couple of business counselors, and they look at my business and say that it’s doing fine and we should raise our prices. This book does what I had hoped the counselors would do: it says, “Okay, here’s where you’re making your mistake.”

I can see where the bookstore I managed went astray. I saw some of the problems at the time, and I could see the rest after I’m been in business myself for a little while. It seemed to me that my business wasn’t perfect, but the counselors saw nothing wrong (except needing to raise prices) and had little advice for me.

I’ve also read a number of business books that said to make a business plan and — well, I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do after that, because my reaction was always, “Nope. If I have to do that, I would rather not be in business.” I just went ahead and continued doing work and getting paid and hoping I was doing roughly the right things.

This book says: Start your business differently and do these things. I don’t know that I could have followed its advice from the beginning, what with having no plans to go into business, but it certainly is what I need at this point in my journey.

I think that if I had picked this book up in a bookstore and leafed through it (and I might have done so, for all I know), I would have been put off by the “Your spirit is a wild horse” and “The curtain lifted” kind of stuff and put it back down. I have little patience for mysticism. Since I was stuck listening to it while driving, I got through those parts and found many very useful parts. You might have a wild horse for your spirit, for all I know, and be utterly charmed by the part about curtains lifting.

I will say, though, that if you happen to be in business, you should go ahead and get this book. It gives practical steps the same way I give practical steps in my Freshman Comp classes for writing a research paper. If my students do those things, and have even the least little bit of ability, then they will end up with a research paper when they finish. I think this is true for the E-myth plan.

It does begin with some figuring out what you want from life. Once you’ve got that sorted, you make an organizational chart for your company. We did that, actually, in #2 daughter’s apartment last summer, getting crosser by the minute as we tried to figure it out. We determined that we needed 15 people, recognized that we had three, and figured that meant that we had a lot of empty spaces to fill in the future.

That’s wrong. You are actually supposed to put your people — even if it’s just you — into all those boxes. You do the work, and as you do, you figure out and document exactly what you’re doing. That is, I as a skilled web content writer figure out and document just what I’m doing so someone else could do it. When I get it all figured out, I can hire someone to apprentice and then to replace me in that position. You do this will all of your positions till you get them all figured out, documented, and filled. You keep one position for yourself, and “owner” is not a position in a business.

When you finish, you can sell the business because there will be something besides yourself and your own work to sell, or you can retire and know your business will continue successfully, or you can just keep your business humming along getting better and better with you as CEO.

There’s more, of course, but that’s the part I’m working on right now. It’s exciting, actually. I think it’ll be a big improvement for my customers and my workers, including me.

It’s also a glorious day out there. Once I finish my tea, I’m going to go out and enjoy it until it gets to cold and I’m driven back indoors.

Some knitting took place yesterday, along with errands and reading, Wii, housework, and cooking (see below).

#1 daughter came over to get most of the rest of her stuff taken over to her new place. We had California Club sandwiches, which you may know means turkey with tomato, bacon, and avocado, often on a croissant or whole wheat roll. When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to take us out for lunch and order Club Sandwiches.

Club Sandwiches involve chicken or turkey with bacon and tomato on toast, often using three slices of toast for one sandwich. My grandmother and my mother invariably had a little discussion before going to lunch. My grandmother would insist that we should have “a nice lunch” and my mother would assure her that “the kids would rather go to Orange Julius.” This discussion was repeated every single time we went to lunch, I think.

Lunch was invariably part of a trip to the shopping mall, where my grandmother would look for shoes that would precisely match her latest hand knitted Chanel-style suit. Naturally, since I grew up in a family in which people hardly wore shoes, let alone shoes chosen to match one’s suit, I considered my grandmother a very chic woman, and I have ordered Club Sandwiches in situations in which I wanted to seem like one of those. Avocado makes any sandwich better, though, and is much more wholesome than mayonnaise, so nowadays I go with that instead.

Club Sandwiches were supposedly developed at the famous Saratoga Club (whence comes the potato chip) in the late 1890s, in case you were wondering.

So #1 daughter and I had California Club sandwiches and talked about work. In the evening, I made Whole Wheat Happy Rolls, Chicken with Meyer Lemon Sauce, carrots roasted with herbs, and high-protein egg noodles. #1 son came over for dinner and we watched How to Murder Your Wife, a classic movie in which there is a courtroom speech arguing that any man would murder his wife if he could, so a man who does so should not be punished.

#1 son and I had, the previous evening, been discussing those classic problem questions in which you flip a switch to divert a train knowing that you will kill one person by doing so — but also that you will save 75 people (most people will do this) or throw one person onto the train tracks in order to divert the train and prevent the death of 75 (most people won’t). The movie involves one of those questions, in a way, but I think that such overt misogyny would keep the movie from being made now. In any case, we enjoyed the movie and the reprise of the previous conversation, and also the meal.

While sleeping in till 6:30 makes me feel like my normal self, getting up at 4:00, going back to bed at 5:00, and sleepin gtill 7:00 makes me feel even worse than the usual sleep deprived state.

That was my obligatory whine about how tired I am. I had a good week, though. Too many meetings, for sure — five or six, counting phone meetings, plus three classes to teach. I realize that there are people who hae meetings every day, several times a day, and live, but this is me. Apart from that, I got a lot done, got some new jobs, and enjoyed my work.

#1 son came over last night and we discussed literature, his future, and what circumstances would drive someone to kill another person. I think it was all about Iago to begin with.

Iago, you may recall, was the bad guy in Shakespeare’s play Othello. Othello promotes Cassio over Iago, who feels that he deserves the promotion. Iago therefore makes Othello think that his wife, Desdemona, is having an affair with Cassio. Everybody dies.

Iago is clearly jealous of Cassio, and perhaps also of Othello and Desdemona. He announces at one point that he hates Othello, though it’s not clear why. This seems like an adequate reason for Iago to decide not to go to Desdemona’s cocktail parties, but not really enough to cause him to destroy the lives of all three.

Envious Casca, Georgette Heyer’s masterpiece of a mystery novel, suggests that Iago just loved having control over other people’s lives. I mentioned this, thinking that such a desire could show a mental illness, a feeling that no one else should be able to thwart him without paying for it with their lives. #1 son said that the mental illness was the second step.

Anyone, he thought, might feel bitter or jealous and want to do harm to the object of that bitterness. Sane people just wouldn’t do it. I’m inclined to feel that wickedness is ipso facto evidence of insanity, on the grounds that sane people don’t want to do evil things — or, if they want to, couldn’t usually bring themselves to do those things in real life. There is a problem of circular reasoning here, I know, but really, could a healthy mind entertain the idea of causing someone else to commit a murder for very long?

Iago is an interesting character, and I have a novel from his point of view to read. I may begin that today. First I plan to do housework. There will also be knitting and possibly sewing. I don’t intend to do anything evil, apart from a little sloth. I’ve toggled 53 work hours so far this week, though, so I bet I could get quite a bit of slothfulness in before it would count as real evil.

The picture here is of one of my gussied up clipboards. #1 daughter saw the idea at Pinterest and I made it part of my office transformation. I need a round thing, I think to go in the open space at about 11:00 in the picture here.