In class last night we were informed that “a black hole was supposed to swallow the earth. It was supposed to be last Wednesday.”
The topic was the Large Hadron Collider.
Wednesday is a good day, because I don’t have to drive to the Next County. Although I am driving there two days a week, on the freeway, and not being terror-stricken for very much of that time, though I am always tired at the end of it.
My Aussies are happy with the work I’ve done for them and want to come on board for Dark Art Lite, though of course I don’t use that term professionally. I found these guys through oDesk, and I was very happy to hear from them this morning, because I had sent their report off with a little note that probably sounded as though I were sending them off to college.
“Don’t hesitate to write if you have questions!” it said “Keep me posted! I hope you have wonderful results! Don’t forget to wear a sweater!” Maybe not exactly that. But you know, I check everybody’s analytics anxiously every morning, and exult when they’re doing well and strategize if their numbers — God forbid! — go down. I was feeling as though I were sending them off to make their site improvements and I’d never know how it came out.
Client #2’s traffic is up 58% and my New Mexican is just shooting up. I’m not through with her initial hours, and she has already hired me on for another project. I also have a new guy, eight hours, and my students are gratifyingly excited about their improving writing skills. “This paper is so much better,” one told me when she turned her essay in yesterday. And they really are improving. I had them do an in-class assignment in small groups yesterday and you should have heard the clever thing one group wrote about fractals. Except FERPA forbids me to tell you these things, so I’ll stop there.
So, yes, all those things are good, especially the whole not getting swallowed by a black hole part.
But also I can’t get into my website to do the content. Dreamweaver keeps telling me that the server is busy and the other program is busy and all these “really it’s not my fault it’s the other guy” kinds of excuses for not hooking me up. And also taunting me with how few days I have left in my free trial. And a guy for whom I wrote a nice family business two generations here in the area call us up and Mr. X and all the little Xs will take right good care of you sort of website has said that he wants it just like that but with no names or other clues to the identity of the people, which is a lot like asking for a recipe for chocolate cake to be rewritten without the chocolate part. And another person for whom I’ve done a nice job of keyword development and linkbuilding wants me to help figure out the internal linking structure of her site, which is not only an example of Scope Creep, but also rather beyond my capabilities. She was asking me about colors, too, and I finally just had to say firmly that search engines don’t see colors so that was outside my purview. Oh, and The Computer Guy’s reports are so gorgeous that it has caused me to realize that my reports are sort of shabby looking. Or, as The Computer Guy puts it, “so 2003.” So that’s another thing to worry about.
But at least we didn’t get swallowed by a black hole.
If we’d been swallowed by a black hole, I would not be swallowing more antibiotics. Personally, I would not have gone to the doctor. However, public opinion was against me. ~x~
Congratulations on all the good news — but I would understand if you completely ran out of patience on the subject of your website. That’s infuriating.
As for being “so 2003” … let’s hear it for traditionalism.
Forgot to mention how rare it is to be someone who can not only teach, but can also do…
@ozarque – Well, if you had seen The Computer Guy’s reports, compared with mine, you wouldn’t be cheering on traditionalism. You’d be thinking, “Why didn’t I hire him instead?” of course, if you had, he’d have hired me to write the stuff, but the reports would have looked way better.
@pink_hebe – It seems to me that when you reach the point of thinking of the upside of being swallowed by a black hole, you ought to go see the doctor. I avoid antibiotics, too, but there’s a time for them.
I’m so with you on the whole black hole thing, good thing it didn’t happen just yet.
If we had been swallowed up by the black hole, I wonder how much warning we would have had. Would we all scurry to find our loved ones? Make that last phone call? Or “poof” would we all just be gone?
What’s FERPA? I thought hospitals were the only ones who had “PA” organizations (HIPAA) telling us what we could and couldn’t say. Glad to know we’re not alone.
@JewelE19 – FERPA is just like HIPAA. I think someone from our school amde a comment about a student’s attitude on Facebook last term, and now we are all having to be extra careful. Which maybe I’m not, but at least I’ve only said nice things.
@princess_smartypants – I bet black holes offer little warning. But I don’t suppose anyone ever survives to report on that.