outsidetheparty | Random stuff, while I wait for a conference call

I woke up this morning filled with energy -- which is to say, I woke up groggy and discombobulated as ever, but my morning coffee was unusually effective -- so decided to tackle a backlog of emails and other miscellaneous work stuff I'd let pile up, before starting work in earnest.

I just finished, but it's now 3:10 PM, and I have a call coming in in twenty minutes, and I forgot to have lunch. Or breakfast, unless you count a banana as breakfast. So so much for working in earnest today. Or at all.

The good news is that I now have two new potential jobs lined up (one with an old friend I've worked with a lot in the past, so I know that'll be good. The other another with a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who I don't know anything about, other than that he's starting a new website and needs a designer, and somebody I trust says he has funding, so it's all good. And get this! It's a social networking website! Hooray! (Seriously, what the hell is up with all these social network startups lately? Don't they realize that market filled itself way past capacity three years ago?) He asked me to sign an incredibly overzealous non-compete agreement and NDA and so forth, so I'm pretty sure this is his first startup -- the beginners always hire too many lawyers and think their brilliant idea will be stolen by everyone they talk to. The jaded cynics know that the brilliant idea is the easy part; the implementation is what's important. Dunno. May not take this job; I'll wait to see what he's like in person.

Meanwhile, it's an absolutely gorgeous indian-summer day which if I'd known I wasn't going to get any work done anyway I'd have spent more of outside. Frank and I took a nice walk down to the mailbox, nice sunlight in the yellow leaves, then I gleefully entered every one of the stack of catalogs in it into this website which promises that they'll stop people sending me those catalogs. Hooray for saving trees. I've been doing it for less than a week now and already have fifty or so catalogs entered... very satisfying (if it actually works.) I can't think of how many trees have died so that we could have the privilege of throwing away two copies of the Pottery Barn catalog every three weeks. (Also, it's a well-designed ajax website, which I plan to use as an example to show clients the Right Way To Do Things.)

Hmm, he's late. I hate waiting for scheduled calls. Never know what to do with myself in the meantime.

Work progresses on the house; the hammering and sawblades are very distracting, but it's looking good. I think it'll look a lot more like it was meant to be part of the house than the original sunroom did, and it does fun things to the roofline. I've been taking daily photos while the carpenter is on his lunch break, see if we can't get some nice timelapse action going.

Okay, call just came in. Interesting. I think he may actually have an idea worth building. How unusual. I'll have to try talking him out of describing it as 'social networking,' though, because it isn't. As it turns out, I can't do what he called to ask for, but I might be able to do what he didn't know he needed later on. Funny how often that happens. And I was able to recommend some friends to him who maybe *can* do what he called for, which is always nice.

(And while I was on the call, yet another friend emailed about *another* job. This always happens. Nothing new for months, I start to think it's all over, time to pack it in, then everything happens in one afternoon. Explain that.)

And now it's the end of the day, time to go on to drum class, and I definitely did not get any work done at all, unless you count that sort of networking as work. Which it probably is, it's necessary to get the work after all, but it doesn't pay and isn't satisfying like real work. Oh well.

And now it's time to venture forth and leave the house for the first time in, um.... rather a large number of days, as it happens. Tempting to keep this open and keep the running commentary going when I get back, but that way lies madness. Or an infinitely long post which never gets posted. Which is much the same thing. I have still not had lunch. Or breakfast. Just that banana and the coffee. One of these days my body will stop allowing me to do this to myself. I'll grab something after drum class.

And now it's the middle of the night, because class ran late, and then enough dancers showed up so there was a dance class too, which is unusual, and then I came home and spent a couple hours answering even more emails. And then behind them I see this form still here, unposted, because I apparently forgot to click the button. So now I will click the button. Hello. How are you?