After several weeks of behind-the-scenes action, I was delighted to see TwitterFone launch today. This was a slightly unusual project in that I did the design and provided mock-ups, graphics and copy for the whole flow from the home page right through the registration and confirmation process, but the actual coding was done by the TwitterFone internal team - and a very tasty job they did, too. Also very cool to see a site I designed on TechCrunch.

Yesterday evening, just after the time at which my friendly neighbourhood GP closes up for the weekend, I started getting an occasional pain in my kidney, a pain which became progressively more sharp as time went on. You don’t have to be Marie Curie to know that this is either a kidney infection or a kidney stone, and you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to begin fervently praying for Door A: Infection.

Since “screaming in agony at 3 am” seemed like a sucktastic differential diagnosis method, I took myself off to SouthDoc. Last time I did this, they left me on the floor of their waiting room while my appendix ruptured and I departed in an ambulance; this time, I came home an hour and a half later with a barrel full of antibiotics and painkillers. Comparatively speaking, I think we can chalk that one up as a win.

24 hours later, I am delighted that this appears to definitively be an infection, because while I feel like complete shit, I am not screaming in agony whilst trying to piss an object just slightly wider than your average ureter. And for that I am very, very grateful.

I am also very, very weirded out. Most of my marriage is a battleground for possession of the thermostat; I run around barely clad in monkey pants and a vest, screaming like a menopausal hotflash harridan for my husband to turn the bloody heat down while he sits there fully dressed complaining that he’s cold.

At the moment, however, I am huddled in a miserable heap on the sofa, wearing a long sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, a bathrobe and a sleeping bag, and I cannot get warm. Meanwhile my poor husband is sitting next to me in a t-shirt, basking in sub-Saharan heat and sweltering to death.

But he looks damn cute in the monkey pants.

Despite the fact that I am the antithesis of a brazen careerist - I don’t do corporate hierarchy, and I am goal, not money, motivated - I am a long time reader of Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. There’s something refreshing about reading someone who is even bitchier and more acerbic than I am, and while I don’t always agree with her, I appreciate her willingness to continually put well-supported but unpopular views out there. Unpalatable doesn’t always mean wrong.

Often, she writes about women and work, a topic near and dear to my heart. Today she’s revealed that in the aftermath of her divorce, she’s hired a household manager to the tune of $50,000 a year. And before you start laughing, let me tell you: if I had it, I’d do it. And I don’t even have kids.

Of all of the sage advice my mother has ever given me, some of the smartest is “Every working woman needs a wife.” I hired a housekeeper about 10 years ago when I lived in a flat that was, quite literally, a shoebox. The loo was smaller than an airplane bathroom and the shower was in the kitchen. And despite the fact that I married a kick ass guy who does both all the grocery shopping and all the ironing, we still have a housekeeper.

There is a reason these wonderful women are referred to as “household help.” They help keep the household up and running, and more importantly (for me at least) they provide the reassurance of there being a human being out there who’s actual job it is to help you.

That’s worth a tremendous amount to me. When we have eaten out of the freezer because we’ve been utterly broke, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not bought each other holiday gifts, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not been able to pay the light bill, we have paid the housekeeper.

There’s a lot of talk about outsourcing these days, and a lot of people who do what I do who outsource pieces of work to other people and even other countries. I’m fine with that in theory, but I’m way too attached to what I produce to do that. So while I can’t outsource graphic design or HTML, I can outsource fridge cleaning and carpet hoovering.

To be honest, I’m jealous as hell of Penelope Trunk. Because I’ve got a housekeeper, but I really need a wife.

So as the weather turns a bit warmer and plans for summer firm up, it appears my husband is leaving me, again. This time it will be a week for the Glastonbury Festival and four weeks for the Edinburgh Festival. He booked his ticket for Glastonbury last night, at which point I told him to hand over his credit card because fair is fair and I too am getting the hell out of Dodge.

I have said this in advance of every summer for five years in a row. The mistake I have made up until now is trying to book a July holiday between his June and August commitments at a time we can both go away and to a destination we can both agree on. Every summer, we have completely failed to tick these boxes, and I have found myself facing a chilly September with not nearly enough air miles behind me.

This year I said “sod that for a game of soldiers” and let Aer Lingus have its pilfering way with me. Direct flights are a bit limited, but considering that I live in Cork, I’m delighted to have an airport at all and am not really going to start bitching that I can’t jet into Cannes on a whim. Of the available options, I have no interest in going to Berlin, I’ve already spent a lot of time in Rome, and I’d be happy to go to Spain again except the rest of you will already be there. So five minutes after demanding my husband hand over plastic liberty, I picked a destination very nearly at random and booked tickets to Prague.

I know absolutely nothing about Prague except that I’m staying at the Pension Museum. I assume this means there is a museum nearby, and that sounds nice because I enjoy museums, particularly when I have no idea what’s in them. I imagine there will also be coffee, books and whatever incarnation of Czech pastry passes for breakfast at noon.

I both love and like my other half but I have a deeply ingrained habit of traveling on my own. We are not the same person and we don’t have perfectly aligned tastes, and I have this suspicion that nothing will exhaust a marriage as much as 40 years of constant compromise. That just sounds hideously frustrating. So for five days in July, there will be museums, graveyards, bookstores, fabric and bead stores.

There will not, however, be tents, mud or any kind of portaloos.

My dad used to tell this joke. When you’d complain about one of those days when everything had gone wrong - you woke up, slipped on dog puke, fell down the stairs, broke your ankle, hopped to the kitchen, realised your phone has been cut off of and you couldn’t call an ambulance, tried to administer first aid in the bathroom, and then noticed you’d somehow managed to lock yourself in there, he’d say “Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the theatre?”

While that is an old and very nearly completely true story, it is also pretty much what the last two weeks have been like. In other words, two weeks of miserable, epic Fail.

In all the incarnations of my blog I have been pretty much transparent. Were my archives online, which one day they will be, you could read about everything from heart break to politics to writing a sex advice column for a top shelf men’s mag to the fun ride that was a temporary psychotic break complete with my dead grandfather dropping in for a chat in my kitchen. You could, in short, read about the experiences of a woman in her mid-20s, which somehow fit into a different box of reality than a woman in her mid-30s.

Things are different now, and I’m not so transparent these days. Especially these days. Something happened, it was outside my control, I took the ride and I’m here to not tell the story. Sometimes, that’s just how it rolls, and I’ve decided today that that’s okay when it has to be.

I’m in the middle of returning all outstanding emails, and completed sites will begin to appear very shortly. I have a delightful pile of Xanax at my side, and frankly that and PhotoShop are enough to get me through the day and pending projects out the door.

Posts may be a bit light as I catch up, but we now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast. Thank you for standing by.

A brand new blog, Me and My Mac, for Ken Stanley as he chronicles his transition from being Bill Gates’ bitch to Steve Jobs’ rent boy - a slogan I came up with mysef and of which I am inordinately proud. In the annals of my web design portfolio, this ushers in what may retrospectively be known as The Illustrator Phase, which is odd as I usually dust off Illustrator about once a year - but it’s just been the right choice for a handful of clients in the pipeline.

I’m aware of the fact that this is an ironic weekend for this to have happened, but my work computer has officially keeled over and died. This is doubly ironic given that I was vaguely aware all was not well in Computerville, and just yesterday procured an enormous USB stick so I could back up my current projects folder.

Sticking the USB key into the computer? Is what finally killed it.

This is apparently a malady stemming from peripherals. It started with an increadibly troublesome printer that would freeze my entire system with each communication attempt to or from the PC, and finally ended in a blaze of absolute nothingness with the aforementioned USB issue.

There is a long day of mountaineering level rescue attempts ahead of my husband, but I am not terribly hopeful that this is going to end well. And on the off chance that this story does have some kind of happy ending, it is unlikely to be a quick one.

The real issue, however, is that all of my current projects in progress for all pending clients are locked on that dead hard drive. Even if this all gets sorted by the end of the long bank holiday weekend, a forced vacation during repairs is going to mean an enormously crunched work load, even if this event doesn’t mean starting completely from scratch for every single project.

Fortunately, I thrive on disasters, so it will all come good one way or another.

Unfortunately, if I promised you something this weekend, it is unlikely to appear. I will look at everyone’s deadlines, reshuffle in order of deadline priority, and get everything out early next week. When I know what the production schedule looks like, everyone will get an email from me so we can be sure nobody is being pushed to a new deadline that isn’t going to work for them.

I am, of course, very sorry this has happened and will do everything possible to make all of the pain mine and virtually none of it anyone else’s.

The last irony is that of course, I do have a back-up system in place. I back up all accepted layouts, all production designs and code, and every iteration in between. What I don’t back up is the 32 versions I go through before I send someone a suggested design. It just happened to work out that right now, I have about six clients in this awkward pre-production phase.

And yes, you can bet that the new computer system, in whatever incarnation, will involve a nightly, if not hourly, new back-up routine.

Greetings from my manic world, a planet so very insane I have virtually no idea what day of the week it is anymore. Given this fun fact, I’ve decided that since any day could be a Sunday, I’m going to roll out a Sunday Style just because I damn well feel like it.

Today’s topic: the joys of working from home. While any number of people are inclined to bitch and moan about the challenges of churning out designs, code and copy from a lonely turret, I myself am a fan of the self-imposed den of uninspired isolation.

While I’ve worked in some very nice professional spaces in my time, I don’t care how big the corner office may be, how expansive the view, or how fast you can get an intern to bring you a half fat double shot fair trade extra foam latte - you still cannot wear bunny slippers to the office. This fact, coupled with the annoying presence of other humans and the doubly irritating lack of cigarettes, makes working at home a complete and total winner for me.

Unfortunately, I am no longer allowed to wear the fabulous bunny slippers outside of the house. This leaves me with a fundamental question of what I can roll out of bed and wear that will allow me to comfortably sit on my arse for 12 hours a day and still have a husband at the end of the night.

• Yoga pants. I don’t care if they are so three years ago. They are comfortable, and while they don’t have monkeys stamped on the booty like my favourite pyjamas, they also don’t make my husband threaten to divorce me on the grounds of irreconcilable humiliation when I walk the dog in them.
• Monkey knickers. In 12 colours. My personal protest against not being able to wear monkey pyjamas all day long. Unfortunately I can no longer find them online they do not ship to Ireland, and no, you cannot have mine - don’t be disgusting.
• Fake Uggs. Because bare feet and bunny slippers are apparently unacceptable attire for short public outings. In the summer I wear flip flops; in the winter I wear €20 red BearPaws from TK Maxx that make me look like a cross between an elf and an Eskimo. This is still better than divorce, and way cheaper than £130 for Uggs, too.
• A good support bra. Because let’s face it: nobody lounging around in monkey pants is going to willingly choose to endure the discomfort of an underwire. Having said this, nobody wants navel-gazing boobies, either. The best solution is to wrestle the twins into the lingerie equivalent of a hammock. Depending on the demands of your rack, this can be either cute and cozy or something entirely industrial strength.

And there you have it: more information about the underwear and daily attire of your friendly neighbourhood web designer than you ever really needed to know.

Dear Internets:

I am completely willing to admit I do not know everything. I believe in taking advice on the things I am clueless about, usually from you and your pal Doctor Google. Foolhardy, possibly; but it’s always worked for me.

This year marks a transition for me from being part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being full-time self employed. It also marks the year in which we will, at some point, be applying for a mortgage. (Yes, I am 35 years old. No, I don’t own my own house. I’ve also lived in three countries in 10 years and been broke in all of them; give me a break.)

So while getting my financial ducks in a row is a high priority, the broader world of full-time freelance is also a bit of a mystery I hope to unravel with your help.

Things mama never told me about service providers:

• Where can I find an accountant or financial adviser in Cork to do my stuff and give me advice about setting aside enough money for taxes and paying PRSI and all that jazz?
• As my previous employer will no longer be paying my mobile bill, which I’ve never even seen, I need to know which provider and plan to go with. Hint: I like to talk. I do not believe SMS is a medium in which real adults can carry on real conversations. That said I really only use my mobile when traveling in Ireland (about once a month) but can rack up several hours in calls then.

Speaking of money, down to the nitty gritty:

I have no idea what market rates are in Ireland. I design sites, I code sites; I provide consulting and strategy for online marketing and positioning; I package and brand products; I write understandable web copy that reads like it comes from humans; I do site assessments, usability analysis, and user testing.

For all of these things, I have been charging a figure that is less than €50 an hour, except for usability testing - I charge test group costs plus the same hourly for that. The people who are paying me are telling me to charge more, and I know they’re right but I have don’t know what the right numbers are.

• What should I be charging for all of these various things?
• How can I keep costs accessible for people who have fun and interesting projects but low budgets? I often like those projects; they tend to refresh my creativity and I don’t want to price myself out of ever being offered them.
• If you’re booking clients months in advance, do you take a deposit now to block out the time for them at a future date? Usually I do 50% up front and 50% on delivery or go-live, depending, but getting 50% now for something I am not going to get to for three months seems a little dodgy.
• What do you do if you’re killing yourself to stay on top of a series of tight production schedules and a client doesn’t have their bits ready for their project’s agreed upon start date? My contracts state that if they can’t deliver their clearly articulated To Do list, delivery dates will be pushed accordingly, but what if you literally do not have room for slippage?

So, dear Internets, do you have any words of wisdom and experience for me? This is my year of Getting Things Done, and I’d like to do them right.

Yours, always,
Sabrina

The things I get myself into, I tell you.

Anyway, Ellie Parker and I are delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Sass.ie, going live sometime this month. We’re going to be aggregating posts from women bloggers in Ireland to help promote some of these great bloggers into bigger audiences.

But we’re going to build a ton of content around that, too. Our hope is that Sassie will also be a single point of contact for women (I hate the word portal) to find out about networking events like Girl Geek Dinners or to buddy up to attend things like CreativeCamps and Barcamps, as well as being able to access a well-written and well laid out body of information on running and promoting web sites from commerical enterprises to personal blogs.

We’ve actually got grand plans to cram a lot of high-value stuff in there, but right now all you can do is take a quick look, read what’s in the pipeline, and add your name to the alerts list so you’ll get a quick email when the site goes live.

And yes, by Jove, men are very welcome to join in, too!