Today seemed really long, but not for any particular reason.

Gwynn (my wife), Gela (my daughter), and I ran some errands and we visited our friend Jeni, mostly to hang out and catch up and, a little, because Jeni wants me to re-redesign a logo for the plumbing business her and her husband, Brad, own.

I designed them a few logos a while back, then they decided to change the business name; which they ended up not doing, and finally they decided they’d like to go a different direction with the look and feel for the logo. Here are the rough logos we stopped at before the ‘almost’ name change back in September 2007:

It was cool hanging out, sketching ideas, and brainstorming. We ended up staying there almost 3 hours. When we got home I spent about an hour and a half or so doing some research and rough sketches of some of the ideas and themes we talked about. I’m not sure how it’s all going to turn out, but some of the concepts we all came up with have potential.

At 9:30pm or 10:00pm I decided I wanted tortillas, so I did what any self-respecting tortilla wanting person does: I made some tortillas. I used the recipe from “How To Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman. His recipe is:

• 1 1/2 cup flour (plus some for rolling the tortillas out)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons lard/butter/oil — I used Canola oil
• Water to make dough
• Profit!

They turned out alright, maybe a little too flour-y, but they didn’t take very long to make at all. My tortilla desires have been fulfilled.

For the last several days, I’ve been trying to update my blog to use a layout I created. Each time I sat down to work on changing WordPress’ default template (named Kubrick), my brain would seemingly click off and refuse to concentrate. It was as if looking at CSS and PHP was the same as those crazy anime scenes that gave all those kids seisures. Half the time I would just stare blankly at the screen waiting for something to happen. I kept searching for tutorials with the hope that maybe there was some super easy way to do what I wanted and that, somehow, I’d skipped over it the last time I did the same exact search.

Fast forward a few days, several glasses of iced tea, and a lot of research later and here’s my newly updated blog. Of course once I figured out the bigger picture, like using my own header image or using a custom background for the page element only, the little details started to kick my ass…like, how to make that whole header image a link and why that custom page background didn’t seem to be repeating correctly. I found work arounds to most of the problems I encountered.

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Being a freelancer can be an amazingly rewarding experience, while being an incredibly stress inducing and mind numbing experience. In addition to juggling clients, being your own IT support and customer service desk, and taking care of those little secondary things like completing projects and finding clients, you have to deal with billing…namely invoices.

I’ve used all sorts of time management and accounting software and from a design standpoint, all of their automated invoices suck. Yep, every single one. The layout of the invoices in those programs are rarely end user friendly: the ability to modify the invoice to match your company’s image and brand, especially fonts, is very limited and, generally speaking, the invoices aren’t nice to look at at all — which sometimes makes the difference between that invoice getting paid in a timely manner or whether it gets forgotten and ignored for weeks. The only real plus in using the invoices provided with software is that the programs do all the nasty calculations for you. Numbers can be evil for those on the arty side of things.

I wanted to find a way to make an invoice that I could customize with graphics, that would allow my choice of fonts, that would do any calculations for me, that could be easily adapted to both billing and quoting, and, most importantly, was as automated as possible.

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