I had been pretty good at avoiding procrastination on the latest project until today. I spent the last three days working very intensely on it, and I spent a lot of time working on it prior to the visit from my relatives. I had planned to spend the whole day working on it today, but I just couldn't. There was too much psychological resistance. In total, I probably spent less than 2 hours on it today, although I spent all day in front of the computer with all the project files open. I took many long breaks. Less than the usual amount of that was on the internet, because there is much less activity online on Saturdays.

I have been watching a lot of Chinese Paladin season 3. The main character's name coincidentally is the same as my father's real name. He has two names for some reason that has never been fully explained to me. I suspect that his legal name is a fake one used in his escape from China. My mother and grandmother always called him by this name, which is totally different from the one that he used on legal documents.

It's too hot for cooking and I don't feel hungry at all. Dinner tonight is herbal tea with rice protein, electrolytes, and a lot of water. I already consumed 3/4 gallon of water today.

I'm not sure if this "vacation" is ending today or tomorrow. The Canadian visitors will still be in New York until Friday, but my sister is going to leave early. That will make it easier for me to also escape. She had told me earlier that she would be participating in tomorrow's activities, but it seems now that she will be departing some time tomorrow.

I need proper sleep and food, and I have to get back to working on the website that is due in mid-August.

Also this:

The plan was originally to visit the American Museum of Natural History with my family tomorrow. That has now been changed to visiting the Museum of Sex.

I rarely see any activity on there now. All new items on there for the past three months have been the result of integration with something else like Twitter, Flickr, or Google Chat status updates.

I had a meeting on Tuesday to discuss my proposal for redesigning a diamond jewelry website. It's for a company that has two sites. One is performing well. The other hasn't made a single sale yet since it's launch in March. The current site is ugly, not optimized for search engines, and inconvenient to use due to complex navigation. The shopping cart was totally non-functional when I looked. They told me that it was probably just a bug in a new update, but I wonder why nobody else tested it. Considering how things currently are, I would not be surprised if the shopping cart had never worked.

My proposal was accepted, which theoretically should be a good thing, but I was given only 6 weeks to build this site, and it has to be done entirely from scratch, because it differs significantly from other projects that I have worked on. I had originally offered to build this in 2 to 3 months, but they don't want to wait that long. Assistants are on the payroll, but no money is coming in, and they don't want to fire anyone. Because they are operating at a loss, fixing things quickly is a priority. This means I will not be getting much rest for the next 6 weeks. Adding to this is a week-long visit from relatives that begins tomorrow, so I actually get only 5 weeks to work on this.