Janalisa and I went for a walk yesterday. We weren’t complaining, though we were both feeling slightly fraught over our respective workloads. Janalisa has house guests coming, and of course I have lots of work. I added a new six-month-two-hours-a-week guy, and I have a lot going on with my regular clients, including getting the client who wants a new page to sign the contract and pay the new designer his deposit so we can actually get her page done. His initial concept mock-up arrived today, and I like it very much.

I toyed with the idea of signing and paying him myself in order to get this going. However, it is not impossible that this client might decide to go in some other direction, and there I’d be. With this client, a regular, I am being paid for the project management tasks. Often I do them for free. I’ve been thinking that I’d like to change that, and I have another project coming up for which I may do exactly that.

Last night in Tuesday Class my friend the B&B owner and I were discussing project management. We were chatting about it sotto voce between hymns and then we got into the study of Deuteronomy and she looked meaningfully at me during a discussion of Moses and Joshua and mouthed, “project management.”

It is possible that this was the first time anyone has considered Deuteronomy as an example of PM.

Anyway, in addition to my regulars and my new guy and a bunch of sites launching or poised to launch and one more pro bono site that I offered to write last August but which is just now getting its contract signed, I also have a bevy of people with whom I’m in correspondence over their jobs: a Portuguese tourism site, a vocal training site, a Venezuelan energy rental site, and a local daycare. So I start my day with a list of five projects to accomplish and finish with… five projects to accomplish. Not the same five projects, but not a completely new list, either.

Maintaining enough availability to keep my regulars taken care of while also courting enough new business to keep me confident of the future is a challenge.

However, now that I no longer have any hope of actually finishing all the projects on the day I schedule them, I may feel more free to leave them alone while I go to the gym. After all, there’s no chance of finishing whether I go to the gym or not. Makes sense?

Janalisa gave me many useful suggestions on following Weight Watchers properly. She is a WW girl herself, and svelte. #1 daughter is a tiny skinny girl who works for Jenny Craig, though I think we all know that she has never tried the program and in fact can rarely manage to get herself up to 100 pounds even with unlimited eating of junk food. I feel that I am getting expert advice. I have exercised, eaten right, and kept track of points every day so far this week. It is of course only Wednesday.

In other news, my husband lost his temper last night. Domestic arrangements chez fibermom have been scanty. He comes home from a ten hour day at the factory and has to clean up the kitchen. I don’t want him to do that, because it is the job of #2 son, but my husband doesn’t like to leave it undone. Nor does he like to do it. #1 son spends most of his day relaxing, so I suggested that he could do a bit more around the house, since the rest of us are working.

He agreed that he probably should, but suggested that there were faults on all sides, since we don’t clean up after ourselves. “Do we have to use that many dishes?” he asked. My husband agreed that we use too many dishes, and indeed that we own too many dishes, and they “don’t do any good anyway!” Which I take to mean that they fail to fill themselves with tempting foods, so why do we give them houseroom? We then moved on to a discussion of whether it’s better to cook the laundry in the dryer or to set said dryer for a shorter time, thus not shrinking clothes and wasting energy — but also perhaps leaving the clothes damp because of going away and turning on the toggle and forgetting all about said dryer. There was also a discussion about ice cream, but I forget what particular point of ice cream stewardship was involved.

Maybe our house needs a project manager.