Freelance achievement stickers: [link]

I love those!

Ha! They're funny because they're true. (Does taking the trash out count as "went outside"? Because that's the best I've done today.)

Oh man. The 1:00am one should have a 4 in it.

And, I probably need to embroider the tax one and sew it to my keyboard. Sigh.

I definitely get the skype one for a class I am taking where a surprisingly high percentage of the 80+ students eat, pick their noses and otherwise assume they are alone in front of a camera and microphone!

Mute yourselves, people! (in more ways than one.)

Those things speak truth.

Quick whine: trying to make sell sheets & flyers for the baking venture I'm currently embarking on, and this is terrible. This is like writing a (theater production) program bio, but worse. Just buy the cookies & spiced nuts, people!

(Also, I have discovered that this type of work is impossible for me to do in a loud, social environment (coffeeshop or bar))

I mentioned in Natter that I got gifted a copy of Finding My Virginity from Richard Branson as a reward for sharing my business tip. The request was for the best tip you have received, so randomly because I saw the post early in the morning which is my prime FB time I responded. So the full story here.

Back in the late 80s when I started my business I had a very elderly customer that I helped set up his home computer system. He was a seriously brilliant guy, but old so personal computers where quite the new challenge. He had been head of the professional engineers association and had quite a remarkable career. Two memories of him are clearest.

First was how furious he was with me when I told him that Brendon and I were planning to have children. He argued with me vigorously that B and I were too smart to waste our time and energy on something so unimportant as raising children. He could not fathom why we would want to do such a thing. We were meant to use our brains and do great things. My retort was that I didn't think it made a whole lot of evolutionary sense for only the poor and stupid to breed. After Brendon Jr. was born Gordon came to see me in the hospital. Although well into his 80s, my son was the first baby he had ever held.

The second thing was how he hounded me to write down everything we learned and discovered in our business. He was insistent that the volume of knowledge that we were accumulating in our brains every day as we figured out fixing people's problems absolutely had to be documented. First so we could go back to it ourselves, and also as a resource for employees. He explained when we are young we keep way the hell too much in our brains and we need to write that shit down.

Gordon is long gone, but I remember his love and wisdom fondly.

OH!! One more Gordon story. We often went out to lunch together, always his treat because old guy. He was of an age where he thought $1 was a good tip despite being a wealthy man and going to nice places for lunch. I used to have to "go to the restroom" while he got the car so I could run back to the table and leave more.

Quick new client whine, mostly so I don't do it later on the phone with my other major client:

Working on a fun new language gig and learning how much I don't really think about the technical specifics of things when I use French and oh how that is coming back to bite me in the ass.

But the bigger annoyance is that, not only does this client use Google sheets (which I hate but is kind of inevitable for this sort of thing), our weekly conference calls (which were never mentioned before the project started) are in Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts. As god is my witness, I'll never complain about WebEx and the like again. (Ok, that's probably a lie.)

And the woman who hired me also does that annoying thing where she contacts you about your work the morning of the day it's due to "check in" on you. Good lord.

"I wanted simple, I wanted in-and-out, I wanted easy money."

Oh no! I disabled Hangouts and haven't used it, but that sounds horrifying.

I just needed to come in here and vent. I'm in the middle of a ton of work stress and it is all related to cash flow. It's just crazy making and its one of my triggers that makes me feel like an absolute failure who has no right to have a business or be responsible for any of this let alone things that can effect my employees lives.