I find as I dive into farming that I am often too busy to livetweet my farming life, but that I can use my phone to take pictures and videos. You can find the videos at my YouTube channel, and the pictures at my Flickr channel.

A survey I've filled out: "Envisioning the future of schools". Results will be collated on or before Saturday. I'll post them here afterwards.

I have a home game in which the PCs have been jumping from one fictional universe to another whenever I felt the campaign stagnating. Most recently, they jumped from Joss Whedon's Firefly 'verse to Paradigm Concepts' Arcanis setting. Arcanis is rich in different factions and I think it would be cool to have a different group of people playing out the politicking of the factions, some of whom will desire to reverse-engineer the 'verse tech the party just brought to this dimension. The speed will be glacially slow as my home game meets on an average of once a month. One or two factions are also represented by PCs who may be issued secret missions by the faction's overlord. I plan to run this play-by-post, here (livejournal) or on dndorks.com. Please comment if you may like to play.

Robert, today

You weren't born yesterday,
but near enough it seems

to run
shamelessly with the new-born lambs,

to root
thoughtlessly with the new-born piglets,

to hold
gently the newly hatched ducklings
cupped in your
careless, capable, five-year-old hands.

May 18, 2011

My father answered the phone tonight. Living in New Hampshire, we get political survey calls fairly often, and the primaries are on Tuesday. He told me about it afterwards.

"The caller wasn't very flexible."

"What happened?"

"He asked me if I was 18 or over, and I said yes. Then he asked if I was registered to vote, and I said yes. Then he asked if I was registered to vote at this address."

Knowing my father, I asked, "And you pointed out that you would have to go to the polling place to vote?" He said yes, he had said that no one could cast their vote at this address. The man on the other end of the phone kept repeating his question verbatim, but my father felt it would be untruthful to say yes. Eventually, my father said, "If by that you mean that when I go to the polls and they check if I am registered to vote they will see that I live at this address, then yes." The reply? "Are you registered to vote at this address?" Eventually the surveyor gave up.

I was so moved by a paragraph in New England Yearly Meeting's Minute of Sending Forth from this year's Annual Session that I am reproducing it here.

We refute the lies of the present situation: the lie that causes movements for transformation to see each other as competitors; the lie that says that social action is spiritually shallow and spirituality is socially passive; the lie that says that war and destruction are inevitable and efforts for change are hopeless; the lie that says we can't change the world until we have perfected ourselves.

It's been four weeks since I decided to try working ten hours a week. Here's an update. To make it more fun, I'll also list how much I would have earned if I were charging the rates I intend to charge when I get my business going ($30/hour for web design, $20/hour for computer tutoring).

Week of 1/4/2010

Talk it Out website: 4:43 @ $30/hour = $141.50
Kerman Enterprises (non-web design): 1:07 = $0 This is office work that I would have to do to build up my business routines and keep them going. I'll be counting this blog post in this category, as well.

Week of 1/11/2010

Talk it Out website: 2:00 @ $30/hour = $60

This week was a low point.

Week of 1/18/2010

Talk it out website: 3:30 @ $30/hour = $105

Mothers Uniting website: 0:05 @ $30/hour = $2.50

I'm certain that I did some non-billable work for myself, as well, but although this week I got more hours in than the previous week, it was a low point for record keeping and by the time I sat down to do my timesheet I couldn't remember all the details.

Week of 1/25/2010

Talk it out website: 0:55 @ $30/hour = $27.50

Kerman Enterprises - non-billable: 0:45

Another low point. I did take a long weekend, though, so that was a four-day week rather than a seven-day one.

Total gross "income" for January: $336.50

It's Tuesday morning for the week of 2/2/2010 and I've put in over one hour of work (after coming back from a long weekend), fifteen minutes of it billable work for Talk it Out. Should be a better week than last week.

Oh yeah. Just had an awesome weekend with @Canageek!

Listen to my station on Blip.fm!

I don't often do New Year's resolutions, preferring to change things as an ongoing process. But I want to make a change soon, so I may as well call it that. And I'm publishing it to create extra accountability.

After Herald died, I decided that I could get by on his life insurance and our family's Social Security benefits for some time, so I've set a goal of earning money around the time my son enters kindergarten in the fall of '11. This gives me time to update my computer skills, and I've taken some online classes with an eye to doing web design, since I already know something about it, and enjoy what I've done. My last class ended in November, and my teacher only recommended one more programming language to study. So I decided to take a few months working on family web sites, as a practicum or coöp. Most especially, to learn the skills and set up the structure to work from home, as I suspect that it will be easier to do freelance web design around here than get a job doing so. Accordingly, I've started tracking my hours, and I haven't clocked many.

This, then, is my resolution: starting in January, I'll work ten hours a week, counting the week as starting on Monday. If I get fancy, I may even post a weekly report, but that's not part of the goal. Feel free to ask me how I'm doing, though.