Ooog

Today is one of those days that makes me tell would-be entrepreneurs to not quit their day job. Because oooooog, setting your own hours sounds great, but if you're going to actually make money, you sometimes need to give yourself some serious overtime, and you don't get time and a half for it.

I cut and sewed pretty much straight through the day, with two breaks, one to go run our renter's application down, and the other for dinner. I even shut off firefox so that I wouldn't get side tracked by interesting websites, though I did keep IRC open, else I'd have gone mad with boredom. I am not set up to focus on a single task. I just don't work that way.

Anyhow, today is an example of why most fursuit makers who try to go into business doing it fail. In several ways, in fact. Today, you see, I am working to a deadline. A customer was promised something at the end of the month, and I will deliver on that promise. I'm not perfect on this, and my website has the little "look, I may have to change this schedule, nothing is set in stone" disclaimer, but if you let yourself just put things off and put things off and put things off, you never get things done, and you have unhappy customers, and you have no money.

Which is the other problem I'm happily heading off today. (The no money bit, not the unhappy customer bit.) My current customer has paid his supply down payment, which is long since spent on all the stuff I use for the suit, and sometimes a smidge extra which generally buys me groceries. But he hasn't paid the rest. I don't require the full payment up front, and indeed prefer not to receive it until the suit is done or near done. I've seen WAY too many fursuiters get into the trap of taking full payments right away. They get their thousand bucks, or however much it is, and they stick the suit at the end of their queue of stuff to do, and then they go spend the money. And then, oh then, when in a month or season or however long it takes to get to that bit of the queue, they are broke! The money is spent, and the work hasn't been done. And they don't want to do the work now, because they will get nothing for it. It's already paid for, there is no reward for completion. Not only that, but they need more money now to pay the rent, so they must go after new commissions, which in turn will be put off for months while the money is spent today, and they get further and further in debt to their customers and themselves, and it's just not fun at all. But so many suit makers do this. I see them doing it, and I kind of shake my head and hope that their customers eventually get their suits.

But myself, oh virtuous person that I am, I try very hard not to do this, and nearly always succeed, and certainly never do it serially, so I never dig the hole deeper than one suit. (It was one suit deep before finishing the sheep, for example, as that was late in being finished, and thus ended up getting paid for before it was done.)

Anyhow, I am tired, tired, tired after working much harder than I normally would today, but I feel good. By the end of the week I should have a completely finished fursuit, which I can then get paid a nice tidy sum for, and I will have all the money I need for deposits and moving trucks and other such things required by our move. So all is well.

Ahem

Being variously stressed, depressed, and overworked, I want chocolate. For the time being I shall content myself with eating a Resses cup, but I think in the coming weeks I wouldn't mind something a little more exotic.

I recall a few people offering to help hook me up with Boost bars? The ones that Kain (bless you for those!) sent have long since run out...

*big kitten eyes*

Aughwhut!

Here is an article about the dumbing down of science in the UK.

Here is a sample test that shows what teens over there are supposed to know.

I have read a lot of science fiction, including some hard stuff that has real physics in it. But I have never taken a single physics class in my life. I could ace this thing. A monkey could ace this thing. It is the stupidest test I've ever seen in my life. There is literally a question on here that a kindergartener has a good chance of getting right, (see question 3) and several questions where the real correct answer is not even present, because they've dumbed it down so much that they've taken real physics right out of it and substituted something stupid.

Take, for example, question one. NONE OF THOSE THINGS ARE THE PATH A MOON TAKES if considered in relation to a sun, okay? OKAY? I want to take that and draw the correct path on there. AUGH! A real lunar orbit is this squiggly and/or looping thing, depending on how the orbit goes compared to that of the planet it's around. I don't even have to have studied to know this, it is common sense. The planet is moving around path A, and as it goes forward the moon loops around, making the moon's path go back and forth. A moon does not move in a neat circle like C unless the planet it's orbiting is stationary relative to the sun, and if you ever find a stationary planet, please tell me, I want to know how that happened.

And WHY are there two questions on here about retinal scans? What does the proper use of retinal scanning have to do with physics? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

And ten annoys the heck out of me. Jupiter is not uninhabitable because it is too cold, okay? It's uninhabitable because it's freaking HUGE, and is actually very hot, if you get down past the outer cloud layers and into the interior. And yes, duh, it's cold out at Jupiter because you're far from the sun, but couldn't the writers have found a better way to write this question than that? And what kind of idiotic physics student needs to be tested on the idea that close to the sun = hot, and far from the sun = cold? This is a second grade concept here!

Gah. Two thirds of this test are for utter morons, and the last third I can still see at least one option to every question that is obviously stupid and wrong. A good test doesn't let you eliminate answers unless you know something about the subject! But come on. Ultrasound is NOT going to be evidence of the Big Bang. Nosoundinspace! I would think that anybody who made it through elementary school knows that you don't get sound in space.

Also, why do we have to have little characters who go out and learn about astronomy? Why can this not just be a test? You do not need to say "Jas reads in a book that a galaxy has red shift. This provides evidence that:" You say "A galazy has red shift. This provides evidence that:" By high school kids should be past needing cutesy little stories to interest them in science, and if they're not, tacking on that "Jas" is studying science too is not going to help things.

Stupidity!

Oh well. I guess at least I can take comfort in knowing that America isn't the only country out there where this sort of total idiocy happens.