My little youth choir sang the special music in church yesterday, and they did a great job. They did not lift their robes over their heads or fail to come in on time, which were my main concerns. We had a clutch of visiting preachers there for discussions of polity, and they came up and asked about our youth music program so that they could take the information back to their own churches.

As you know, our youth music program consists of me and Janalisa having met with the kids this summer and learned a few songs, with me waving my arms around in a pretense of conducting, so there is an element of humor there. It was gratifying anyway. I am sending out “Congratulations!” cards to the kids for their hard work and so forth.

I also had a call from my first catalog show hostess with her orders, and got to tell her that she had $60 in free stuff and two half price items coming, plus a special gift for being one of my charter hosts. She is an experienced host, and had already figured it up for herself, but I found it gratifying. It might have been more gratifying if I could have done it smoothly rather than having to spend 20 minutes figuring out the software and calling her back with the totals, but still.

The Pampered Chef business starts you off with some goals to reach, in terms of the number of shows booked in your first month with them and the quantity of sales you make and so forth. Having read Influencer shortly before beginning this, I have mostly just zeroed in on the “eight shows a month” item, since it appears that that is the key to doing the rest of the stuff. There are outre things like Pan-o-Rama and cruises which I may work up to, but right now I am just trying to get my eight shows a month bit lined up. I have two cooking shows this week, and another catalog show out there from last week, and yesterday’s experience has me closer to being convinced that this will work out. Or at least that I will in fact receive the stainless sauce pan for reaching my September sales goal, and be allowed to have a website in October.

I showed my husband the calendar with dollar signs on the days when they deposit paychecks to your account. This is because there is a gap, as in so many jobs, between beginning and actually getting paid. I don’t want him to lose hope and think that I should have gone and worked at a car dealership, something he frequently suggests to me. He should know, from how testy I get when he makes me go look at car engines with him, that I am not suited to that work, but he keeps suggesting it.

#1 daughter kindly suggested that I keep practicing with the mandoline. She says that right now I make it look too hard and no one will ever want it if they see me trying to slice things with it. I will not be having to show it in public till Thursday, and so I have a few more days to learn to slice with it convincingly. I have a Plan B, in case I am not able to master it by then: I will use The Food Chopper, with which I have become adept, and merely point to the mandoline and tell the story about the kickstand and impaling fruit on the spikes. As the guests laugh, I will move on to the microplane grater and the knives and they will never even realize that I didn’t actually use the mandoline.

#1 daughter begins her job at 9:00 this morning. She is going to be a front office girl at a weight loss clinic. She brought home their literature, and it looks like a sensible plan much like what my doctor told me to do, so I don’t think she has to be embarrassed about working there, and I am hoping that she will have fun with it. She is worrying that she will have to spend all day listening to people make comments about her weight. I’m thinking that a weight-loss clinic is probably the one place where people will not tell her that she is too thin. We’ll see.

I am going to be struggling today with the section of the store publishing project where the little children are learning about what the governor does. We have had some mighty colorful governors in our state, but probably my knowledge of government scandal for the past 200 years will not be useful in doing the citizenship section of the first grade book, so I will try to put that out of my mind.