I haven’t been a very active knitter of late. I worked on this on Thanksgiving, when I figured out how to increase after knitting the fourth row, and then I did nothing until around Christmas time when I started up again.
I finished this dishcloth and laughed when I set it out to photograph it. I forgot to do the end border, which in this picture is missing from the top of the dishcloth.
And that’s what I like about knitting dishcloths. It’s a very low bar. If I give this to someone who likes knit dishcloths, they will be thrilled and not spend much time analyzing the flaws.
The dishcloths in the book I am working out of are winder than I would prefer. At their current width I should use more than one skein to make them square. But that would be a huge dishcloth, so they end up rectangular instead of square. Perhaps after I finish knitting all of them I will see if I can figure out how to make them not as wide, without destroying the pattern.
“Maybe I’m done making baby blankets?” I thought to myself in the spring. Most everyone I know who was going to have children seemed to have had them.
A week or so later I got a message from Cindy saying that Casey was pregnant and they were going to be mothers! So it seemed that I had yet to make my last baby blanket.
In June, Julie and I went to Fabric Depot for the supplies.
And then, some months passed. Fabric Depot closed their doors forever. The baby was born in August and still no blanket.
But I wanted to get the blanket done before the year was out and as December started to slip away, I blocked out a chunk of time on the last day of the year.
Voila!
One thing I like about making baby blankets is that I mostly make them in colors I like. (I know how that sounds, but it’s true.) And I quite like these colors, plus the cute birds.
Halfway through monogramming, I remembered one of my friends has a monogramming machine I probably could have used, and I sighed, because this isn’t my best work. But the plus of making the blanket after the baby is born is that I get to do a full set of initials which is fun.
I had a plan to monogram the outline of the symbol from the front of Sisterhood is Powerful, but that plan did not come to pass, alas.
Anyway, I hope Cindy, Casey and Baby M are happy with their gift.
I made some financial goals in 2018 and I met some of them.
First of all, I paid off my student loans! I am still excited about this, even many months later.
I had a rather ambitious savings rate goal, which I did not meet, partially because Oct–December I funnelled any extra money (including birthday money) into starting my business. But 35% of my net pay is nothing to sneeze at.
I did not start the financial independence blog. I thought I was going to take two months (September and October) and get both the 3SMReviews blog and the financial independence blog launched, and I was very wrong in that thinking. My new goal is to start in September 2019, when I’m more settled in my 3SMReview production schedule.
I did find some side gigs. I’m starting a copyediting business and I’ve got 3SMReviews on its way to making money, though that might be a slow process. I also learned what I don’t want to do for side gigs, which are gig economy things that throw me out of my routine (charging scooters, doing store audits, stuff like that). I’m happy to come home from work at the same time every day and work at my desk for two more hours. What I don’t like is random things popping up here and there. Basically, everything that Financial Panther does, does not work for me. I’m glad that I learned that.
“Retirement accounts in the best place for them,” was code for “Should I move my money match money out of the PERS system?” I have decided not to do that at this time. We shall see if that was a wise decision.
I came up five hours short of my time goal. But I still got 56 hours of work done that I wouldn’t have otherwise done.
This was a very good exercise and it’s gotten me much closer to getting 3SMR in shape for publication. FFI, hasn’t progressed at all. Lesson learned about how much time it takes to start a website.
Part of the problem was that I had something Monday, (Librarian Book Group) Tuesday, (Business Fundamentals I) and Thursday (Birthday dinner, REI shopping) nights, which precluded me getting any work done on those nights.
Business Fundamentals I is the class I am taking through Mercy Corps. The first class was last week and it was great! It was also three hours long, something I hadn’t quite realized until I sat down at 4 pm and realized 4-7 pm is three hours, not the two I was thinking. So there will be no blog work on Tuesday nights for five more weeks.
What did I accomplish this week? Ads finally showed up on the site! But they are only on the front page, not on any individual post pages. I poked around to try and figure out why they are not there, and eventually decided to wait a few days to see if they appear. That’s what happened with the front page.
I also wrote two posts, since I’ve pledged to myself to be officially “live” on December 1. That means getting up all the posts from October that haven’t been written since I’ve been working on the website.
I also decided I should figure out this SEO thing before I go any further with tagging posts. I starting reading an article et voila! my time had ended.
During my next session. I wrote two more posts, edited the previous posts I had written, and wrote drafts of three more posts. I’m still working on the flow of how to get things written and published.
I read more about SEO and feel like I have a handle on it. I also signed up to be an Amazon Associate, so I can have affiliate links on my site. I then went through and added affiliate links to my September top movies post. It took a long time.
One of the things that makes tagging old posts and linking to Amazon products a very slow process is that my current monitor is 17.5 inches. I can only have one window visible at a time, which means I have to toggle back and forth a lot. Since I have three monitors at work (one very, very large) I’ve gotten used to having at least three open windows at once. Deciding that this one-window madness could not continue, I bought a 24-inch monitor. It should be available to pick up at Best Buy next Saturday.
My mental state this week has not been very good. I was disappointed not to meet my seven hour goal this week, and disappointed to not meet that goal for two weeks in a row now. Plus, I had a small flame of hope that I could avoid working at the paid job next week, but unfortunately, the work rolled in, so I must go to my day job on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This more or less crushes my hope of catching up, hours-wise.
I’m also very tired. I was hoping to become more rested over nine days of not going to work. Now that resting must happen over four days of not going to work. Which, since it’s four days and two of those days are a weekend just like any other weekend, and the other day is full of family obligations, it feels like I must do all my catching up, resting and other various chores (Decorating for Christmas! Making a baby blanket! Shopping for the fall wardrobe! Getting a haircut! Writing back to people who have written me! Etc!) on Friday.
So I head into next week feeling defeated. I’m making progress, but I feel like falling behind. John Green’s video then, was quite on point.
John Green says that acknowledging it helps (I’m not really feeling that). He also says that prioritizing the most important relationships in my life is important. Okay, then, it was good that I spent time with Matt, and sang karaoke when I could have been doing work on the websites. And I should not begrudge the loss of my Thursday to spending time with my family.
He further says I should remember what actually matters. Which I guess is that I’m making progress, even if it’s not all the progress I want to be making.
I don’t really feel that, John Green. But I appreciate you for mapping it out.
This was the week where I got very tired. I had already gotten very tired last week, on Sunday when I collapsed around 4 pm. I used Monday to finish off the things I would have done Sunday night.
On Tuesday I downloaded my new 3SMR logo and put it on the site in all the places. I did not love it as much, once I got it up. The spacing is a little odd. But the whole thing cost me around $50 and it will do for now.
I also made a foray into getting social media sites set up. That crashed and burned due to Facebook stuff. So I turned to revising the display style of the movie pages. Because starting a website when you don’t know much about what you’re doing means redoing a lot of stuff.
On Wednesday I sat down to get work done and I just couldn’t. I ended up watching three episodes of Anne with an E and eating oyster crackers.
Oh! On Friday I had 30 minutes at work where there was suddenly nothing to do, so I spent that time looking at other financial bloggers websites to see how they were set up. I took notes on four of them before the work rolled back in. So I got some work done on Female Financial Independence! That was great.
On Saturday I spent a solid three hours and accomplished much. I now have a Twitter handle, a Facebook page and (possibly) an Instagram account for 3SMR. And they all have the same name! @3SMReviews. I also finished revising all the website page layouts. They now all display 30 posts, and then go to pagination. In that process, I discovered four pages I hadn’t yet set up.
I also now have a Mailchimp account for 3SMR. Yes, you can be on my mailing list. I also put a sign up form on the front page of 3SMR.
The last thing I did was poke around to see why the AdSense ads aren’t showing up on the site. The code is in the headers, but still: nothing. I’ll figure that out soon.
My hours this week totaled 5, which has me 1.5 short for the month so far. But I can probably make up that amount in the remaining days, provided I am not too tired.
Whew! 8 hours this week. And that was with feeling under the weather on Monday and not hitting my 2-hour goal.
This week was my transformation week. I went from feeling uncomfortable with the Jupiter theme to having something click. Tech support helped me make a page where all the posts went. And I finished most of the home page and set up the framework for all of the pages. It’s looking like a draft website now.
Also, I enlisted the help of my writer’s group and they wrote some tag lines for both sites. I put together a google survey and put it on Facebook. We shall see if anyone fills it out or not.
I’ve got a few cleanup things to do, but I think next week will be the week I import all my existing three sentence movie review posts. I’m very nervous about this. Importing posts has gone well in the past, but who knows if it will still go well when I do it this time.
And once things are imported successfully, there comes the long task of coding all the posts to the new framework. And will I have to download all the posters again? Time will tell.
How many three sentence movie reviews do I have, anyway? I just sorted my posts by category and it seems as though I have 1,080 posts tagged as three sentence movie reviews. Yikes.
That’s right! We’ve left behind the crosstitch-pattern method of knitted dishcloths and have moved on to learning new “16 new stitches as you knit cheery dishcloths” which is the subtitle of the book.
Also, this book names their patterns after specific yarn recommendations. I’m following my own yarn path, so the names might not always match the completed project.
This was a nice start. I’m looking forward to more difficult stitches.
