10 I tried to get some kind of identifiable picture of the lace scarf for you.

I don’t think I was very successful, but I tried. I think it’ll be nice. Not very lacy, but a little bit. Tailored lace.

I applied for a lot of things yesterday. I have some customer leads, and there are also all kinds of content writer positions being offered all over the place in online want ads. It is fun to apply for positions at Rosetta Stone and Google, though I assume that they will have huge numbers of applicants and I most likely won’t hear from them at all. At least they won’t fire back “rate too high” messages the way oDesk buyers do.

One of the things about self-employment is that you have to be continually looking for work. This takes a lot of time, and is of course not billable. I also got my 10new contract from the encyclopedia, and my current topic is apparently less valuable than hookworm. It is almost in the “unbillable” category. I also have a long list of things like getting the state history books into shape and uploaded at Lulu.com, increasing my skills at various technical things, following through with the evaluation process at the college, doing SEO for my own site, and volunteer work I’ve agreed to. Since I only have about ten hours of billable work scheduled this week, my plan is to do all that other stuff that has been waiting, and try not to panic about not having more hours than I do.

I’m also planning to get to the gym earlier. I’ve been trying to go at my usual time (if I can say that when I only manage it once a week), and then one of the boys needs the car then, so I tell myself I’ll walk later, and then of course I’m working and I don’t walk later. So, since neither boy needs me to make his breakfast any more, I plan to go earlier, before I really begin my work day.

Except that I woke up at 3:00 a.m. with a great idea for a post at my marketing blog, and had to write that first thing this morning, so it is already later than I had planned to leave and I haven’t so much as had breakfast yet.

Yesterday during coffee time at church, a woman whom I know slightly came up to tell me she had enjoyed the duet, and burst into tears. She was just feeling overwhelmed, she said. Work and her family, and her house was a mess and she wasn’t eating right…. She just couldn’t get her life back to normal.

I don’t feel like bursting into tears over it, but I do sometimes feel that way. I’d like to get over feeling that way.

#2 daughter has all As, and both the boys are also doing well in school. #2 son got an AP scholar award and first place at a climbing competition (he refused the prize he won on the grounds that it wasn’t fair for him to win again, which made his brother feel pretty sick, since he’d have really liked the very luxurious prize himself if #2 son was determined to be noble and give it away). #1 son is ignoring my frequent reminders to him that he needs to get a job and my husband looks at the reports from our retirement plans and gets deeply depressed about how much money we’ve lost. I tell him that it doesn’t matter, since we won’t be retiring soon, and will probably die before we get to retire anyway. For some reason, he doesn’t find this cheering.