Stupid back
When will my stupid back stop hurting? I was doing so much better today — I only had to lie down once during the day — but we went for a good-sized walk tonight and that did it…. I was fine until we were less than a block away and then my back started to get real sore. The worst was after we got back in and I sat down to take off my shoes. Yikes! My lower back completed siezed up. It did not like it when I relaxed into the chair. It had gotten nicely stretched during the walk, but once I sat down, well, that was that! I just took some Aleve though, and Jen put on a back pactch. Hopefully it will be better by night, because it’s hard to sleep when my back hurts so much.
I got so much done today, though! I checked off so many ‘todo’s, it felt so good! I had a couple of no-fun moments though. I spent about 45 minutes or an hour today reading and rewriting a work agreement with Juice. But some emails with him earlier today….well, I had to put my foot down. I had given him my estimates, and they just included the cost and the estimated number of days until delivery. I calculate the cost by estimating the number of hours it will take me, but I hide the ‘hours’ column in my spreadsheet before exporting it to PDF and sending it over. I’ve found that with most of my clients there are fewer questions this way. But since Juice works with a staffing company they want my actual number of hours so they can recompute the time with their own rate because that’s what they charge their client.
Anyway, after he saw my hour estimation vs. my day estimation he sent me a concerned email wanting to know why it was taking me so long to do those hours. Apparently he didn’t understand that I’m not the typical poor schmoe that he must work with most of the time. I know the type — starving recent graduates, eager for any job because they normally have three weeks between them. I used to be that person. But no more! So anyway, he didn’t understand that I have lots of other clients all wanting me to start big projects right now. I didn’t bother to tell him that I had already given him the most optimistic estimation I felt I could give! So I just had to tell him that if wanted more of my time, I was going to have to charge him more than what I was charging all of my other clients that are wanting my time.
He got the message though — as soon as I mentioned “raise my rates” he backed right down. His next email was more along the lines of “ok, sounds great!” Sometimes you just have to put your foot down. (usually on their wallet)