Lessons Learned

Never, never, EVER flat-rate, low-ball quote a web design job again. No, not even that one. Never. Ever.

Telephone Aversion

I find that, the older I get, the less I enjoy talking on the phone. As a teenager, I could waste hours on the phone, and I could rack up long distance bills with the best of them. Now that I am 33, I find that I talk on the phone as little as possible. We have a “family plan” for our cellphone usage, that allows us 550 minutes for both of our phones put together. We rarely use 60 minutes in a month.

Instead, I rely on texting, instant messaging, and email for the bulk of my non-meatspace communication, with the occasional Skype call thrown in. I think it’s just that telephone communication is so intrusive, compared to other forms of communication. A ringing phone demands your immediate, undivided attention, for however long the person decides to keep you on the phone. There’s very little multitasking you can do while talking on the phone, and it interrupts your work flow on someone else’s schedule in a way that other communication media just don’t.

I wonder how other people feel about this. Thoughts?

Guest List

Last night the kids were talking about their upcoming birthday parties, and who they would invite to them. Kayla, not surprisingly, wants to invite Sidney, her friend next door. Adam said he wanted to invite “smart people who just graduated from college, and hot girls I could flirt with.”

Precocious, much?

That’s Not Pretty

Yesterday was a total wash, workwise, as I was sick as a dog from 11PM Saturday, til now. I’m still not feeling great (only managing nibbles of toast and ginger ale for breakfast) but it’s a WHOLE lot better than it was at, say, 2AM Sunday morning. I had to cancel a meeting with a client that I’d been preparing for, and will have to reschedule it for this week.

I have a lot of projects coming “live” all at the same time, so I’d better get my butt in gear.

Week in Review

Monday I took Thomas to the doctor for his four-year-old well-child visit. All went well, though he was bored and cranky by the time it was over (he crashed in his carseat, so I blame fatigue). He came in at 34 pounds and 40 inches in height, all well within normal parameters. We discussed immunizations, but he didn’t get any. Then we went over the Payless to exchange some shoes and came home.

Mike spent the first part of the week feeling sickly, poor thing. I think something he ate must not’ve agreed with him (my guess is the seafood at the buffet; he suspects burgers from a fast-food place we went to). He seems to be mostly better now, thank goodness.

Tuesday Adam and I went to karate, as per usual. Nothing much to report, except that we went out to eat at Olive Garden afterward. The service was very slow, the food was adequate (Adam loved his pizza) though not remarkable. The manager (who I said hello to on the way out) was rude - he didn’t even acknowledge me, and it’s not possible he didn’t hear. But the worst was when I ordered tiramisu ($5.25) and it arrived at the table frozen. I literally couldn’t get my spoon through it. I sent it back, and they returned it to my table a few minutes later, microwaved and with more cocoa sprinkled on it. So now it was frozen in the middle, and melting at the edges. If I want microwaved frozen dessert, I can get that at home. I sent it back and told them to take it off my bill. I won’t be in a hurry to rush back.

Wednesday and Thursday were mostly stay-at-home days, though I did run out Wednesday for pizza-making supplies and yesterday for a storage cabinet and a few other things from Wal-Mart. I’m getting my fabric out of the open wire shelves it’s always been in, and putting it in a closed storage cabinet. The hope is that it will make the craft room look quite a lot less cluttered, and that it will cut down on the temptation Lindsey has to drag it out and play with it.

Today we had planned to go to Holiday World, but Thomas was pukey yesterday and is feeling a bit poorly today, so we canceled that. It’s probably just as well; Mike and I both need to get a bunch of work in.

Speaking of work, my first shopping cart client is ready to go live (we’re at the point of switching DNS records from her current shopping cart to the new one), and I’m working on landing a few more clients. I have one new one (contract signed, deposit paid) but the contractor work-wheel keeps spinning around.

I fired the cleaning crew this week. It’s not that they were doing a bad job, it was just growing increasingly hard to justify $200-$300/month when we’re about to drop thousands more dollars on work in the garden. I’ll just have to scrub toilets and vacuum carpets myself. I’ve done it before.

First Stripe

Adam was awarded his first stripe today!! Alas, I forgot my camera, so you’ll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that he had a BIG cheesy grin on his face at the time. I’m really, super proud of him. He had also obviously been paying attention to the other kids’ katas, because when he got up to start his new kata, he already pretty much knew the whole thing! That’s muh boy!!!

Ouch.

Paper cuts to the cheek: not recommended.

Not what I expected, but good

So I had this vision for how my career would go after QI closed. I was going to get dozens of stores signed up for my new, awesome shopping cart and start a new community of quilt stores who would live in awe of the fierceness of my fabulous new shopping cart. Turns out, that probably isn’t going to materialize. The cart IS awesome, make no mistake, but selling it is proving to be quite a challenge.

What’s happening instead is that the word of mouth thing is starting to get me some local work, on smaller sites, for smaller clients. Not really what I had imagined, but still cool, nonetheless. Coding still beats jockeying email, so I’m a happy girl. Today I met with a new potential client (who is enthusiastic - I give it about 95% odds in favor at this point) who I met through the mother of a ChunJiDo student. Said mother, who is a writer, will probably also be wanting a site to promote her books. Add that to the karate site, the landscaping site, and the stuff I’m already doing, and I’m a pretty busy girl! I need to do a webcast for the shopping cart (a marketing tool), a proposal for the potential new client, and some big updates to the code on the ChunJiDo site. I’m lucky. Blessed. Happy. Also overwhelmed, self-doubting at times, and short on time to do the really fun things I like, without feeling guilty. But my life is good.

Holiday World, SRDCart, and Family Photos

Been a long, long time since I posted here. Life has been way too busy to sit down and write anything coherent. I guess I’ll do one of my trademarked bullet-point blog entries, followed by lots and lots of pictures. Make sure you have your internet hamster running on the BIG wheel before you click the more link.

• We went to Holiday World on the 21st. It was a blast, and all of us had fun. Pics after the cut, but some highlights were riding the antique cars, toasting my phone on the log ride, eating too much junk food, seeing my son face down his fear and my daughter … not.
• Mike and I had our ninth anniversary, and I think it’s fair to say we’re more in love with each other than ever. A friend (Deb) came by to babysit the munchkins while we went out alone (gasp!) for dinner, then to Barnes & Noble for some book-shopping. The kids were well-behaved enough that Deb said she’d be willing to babysit once a month! Doubt we’ll take her up on it *quite* that often, but it was still a proud Mommy moment.
• I’ve been working my ass off on a shopping cart for quilt stores. I released it into beta last night, and so far (11:30AM) none of the store owners have commented on it. Either I’ll get some signups, or I will have learned enough Rails for Mike to pimp me out to some of his customers. Guess it’s a win-win no matter what.
• The first phase of the landscaping project is done. They ripped out the ugly scratchy plants from the front of the house, and installed raised beds in the front with flowerbeds in the front of those, flower beds in the back, trees in the front and on the east side of the fence, a playground area filled with pea gravel, a giant stone patio outside the sliding glass door, plus a couple of other odds and ends. We’re very pleased with their work, and immediately started planting things in the empty areas of the beds. Mike’s seeds are all coming up now (even the okra!) and my flowers are mostly hanging in there. Mike bought and assembled a big play structure to go in the playground part, and the kids have enjoyed climbing, scooping, sliding, swinging, and otherwise horsing around on it. The next phase is putting in sprinklers and sod, but that won’t happen until sometime in June, at the earliest.
• I made my niece, who is pregnant with her first baby, a pregnancy journal. I completed the whole thing, start to finish, in one very long day. She loves it, and I’m proud of myself.
• Adam and I are still going to karate. He seems to enjoy it, and practices occasionally at home. Kayla’s gone with us once, including dinner after, and she liked having a couple of other kids to play with. I’ve asked if she wants to join the class and she definitely does not, but she might still come occasionally to play with the other kids. As long as she can do so without disrupting any ongoing classes, I’m fine with that.

That’s all I can think of that’s important at the moment. Now, on to the pictures!!

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I have SO had days like this