08:14 – No word yet on when Barbara’s dad will be discharged from the hospital to the rehab facility. Barbara said her dad’s personality has changed. She’d never expected him to behave nastily, which he’s doing now. I told her we’d probably be nasty too if we were in his situation. He’s tired of being in the hospital, and being sent home and then immediately going back didn’t help any, either.
Our new friend Abby stopped over yesterday so I could help her get a domain name registered and get her set up on my shared server at Dreamhost. Abby’s mother is a friend of Paula, our neighbor across the street. We met Abby last autumn, when Paula hired her to dog sit Max, her very old dog, who needs someone with him constantly. One day, I spotted Abby raking leaves in the front yard. I asked her if Paula was also paying her to rake the leaves, and she said Paula hadn’t mentioned it but it needed to be done. So she’s a worker.
Abby is 26 years old and can’t find a job. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2009 with a major in history and a minor in art and design, and then spent two years at the Irish School of Animation, Ballyfermot College in Dublin, Ireland, where she received a Higher National Diploma in Computer and Classical Animation. She’s smart, hard-working, and confident. But right now she’s limited to doing freelance work because the job market is simply abysmal.
Paula recently made an extended trip out to California and hired Abby to dogsit Max while she was gone. Over that couple of weeks, Barbara and I saw Abby frequently and decided we really liked her. I asked Abby if she did stuff like designing logos and brochures. She said she did, so I invited her over to our house to talk about doing some stuff for our business later this year. She rang the doorbell at the appointed time. I opened the door, found her standing on the porch, and invited her in. She asked if I was sure it was okay with Barbara for her to be here when Barbara wasn’t. I assured her that Barbara trusted me, and wouldn’t object to the two of us being alone in the house. So she came in, and we had a long discussion about logos and brochures, writing (she wants to be a writer), and everything else under the sun. When I told Barbara about Abby’s concern, she just laughed. The next day Barbara saw Abby out with Max and went over to tell Abby not to worry about being alone with me.
So Abby stopped over yesterday so we could get a domain name registered for her, get email set up for the domain, and so on. I’d originally intended to register her domain on Godaddy.com, where I have my domains, but as it turns out Dreamhost is also a registrar so I decided just to register Abby’s domain there.
Abby wasn’t sure whether she should register the domain, and it was obvious to me that she was concerned about whether having the domain was worth spending the $10 to register it. I told her she’d be nuts not to register it, particularly since she’s running her own business. I told her that I understood her problem because I remembered being young and poor. I was trying to figure out how to pay for the domain myself without making her feel obligated to me, but as it turned out that wasn’t necessary. I’d forgotten that Dreamhost bundles one free domain registration or renewal per year with an annual hosting contract. So when I clicked on the Register Domain button, the charge came back as $0.00. I explained to Abby what was going on, and she protested that I should use that $10 credit myself. I told her that all my domains were already registered at Godaddy.com, and that using that credit myself would require moving a domain over to Dreamhost, which wasn’t worth the time or aggravation.
When I told Barbara about all this later, she completely approved and said I should explain to Abby about pay-it-forward. I told Barbara that I’d already explained that to Abby and told Abby that some day five years from now or 25 years from now she’d run into a nice young person who needed some help getting started and that would be Abby’s chance to pay it forward. I also told Barbara that I suspected Abby would try to do some free design work for me in return for the help I was giving her, but that I’d insist on paying Abby her regular rate. Barbara said she agreed absolutely. No free work from Abby. She can just add that to her pay-it-forward account balance.