We went to the farmers market yesterday morning and  I used some of the good things we got there to make a proper dinner: chicken with a basil and pepper sauce, Potatoes Lyonnaise, and orange-chocolate coconut macaroons.

Apart from that, I worked most of the day. I did finish the hospital website, and I finished reading Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch, which turned out to be a very enjoyable book. It’s the story of a man who works at a newspaper. Through most of the book, the entire staff of the paper is just fatalistically watching the slide down, knowing that people aren’t reading newspapers so much any more but doing nothing besides feeling doomed.

I kept wondering what was wrong with these people, who really seemed in the book to be bright, sensible people overall. With their budget as described in the book, they could certainly have made the necessary changes to make their product relevant. Really, the doomed souls section dragged on long enough that I got irritated with them.

Now, I may be about to tell you part of a surprise ending. However, it shouldn’t be a surprise, because no major corporation nowadays would really just ignore the internet, so I’ll go ahead and say that part of the denoument did involve staff members becoming internet celebrities. This was discussed in such a fun and engaging way that I was still sort of in the story when I got a phone call about #2 daughter’s Amazon review. I’ve been surprised by the amount of attention this video review has gotten, both at Amazon and on YouTube. Not because it’s gotten lots of attention but because I don’t usually get any attention at all for Amazon reviews, except in that manufacturers sometimes ask me to review stuff or if they can use my review in their packaging or something. The review in question isn’t even one of our best efforts, but was thrown together quickly to try out the new camera. We also threw together Cinderella Centers so that we could try out the editing software.

66 people have watched this video. We don’t have hugely popular YouTube videos. Our top one has had something like 469 views. Beauty and the Beast, which was designed to be popular and which we promoted in some slight way, has had 105 views. And Cinderella Centers is — get this — instructions on how to make file folder centers for teaching clock time. Both Cinderella and Beauty are watched mostly by young guys. Not really our target audience.

So the phone call, coming right in the middle of my reading about the internet celebrity thing, caused me to think about what it would be like if #2 daughter became an internet celebrity. Maybe like HotForWords but less tacky provocative. HotForWords was featured by Wired (that’s how I heard of her) and similar celebrity might catapult us into…

Well, see, there’s the problem. We’re currently only doing the tiniest little bit of marketing — namely, actually calling people back when they contact us — and I’m working seven days a week. Celebrity might not really be a good thing. I’m not sure.

However, in the course of getting the callback number for that phone call I discovered on my voice mail a message from three days ago asking for a site analysis. So there I was at 9:00 on a Saturday night doing a site analysis and probably grousing about the workload, and #1 daughter got a bit stressed out and we had a somewhat tense discussion about how we were going to manage increasing the workload like this when the incoming money doesn’t increase until a month or so after the workload increases, and #1 daughter might have to go get a salaried job to tide her over. It was probably a pointless and unnecessary conversation, but we were both feeling fretful, and #1 daughter was telling me that she wasn’t going to be nagging people and giving me lectures about how salespeople are supposed to follow up and I was saying things like, “But have we actually spoken to any of these people?” We moved on to discussions of whether we could tell whether or not our business could support both of us or not, and how #1 daughter didn’t want me to work double in order to support her and were we doing the right things and similar Whither? type questions. And then — at 10:40 pm —  I got an email from the same person who caused me to work all weekend saying the first thing I sent was great, but where was the second? At that moment, I remembered that I was to read the scripture this morning, and quickly looked up the verse.

I am a skeptical person. I am not the kind of person who thinks she’s getting messages from the universe. While I am sure that God could send me messages if He chose to, I don’t generally think He does. But the verse was “Ask and it shall be given unto you; seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door will be opened unto you.” This is the part where Jesus says that even if you wouldn’t open the door for your friend because he’s your friend, you’ll open it because he’s bold or (depending on the translation) persevering.

I decided to take this as a message from God. My shoulders hurt a lot, I’m tired, and I still have some work to do for my Aussies as well as for the persistent knocker on my email door, but if God told us to persevere and be bold, then we can certainly do so.