As soon as I saw Deb’s Surviving NJ blog I saw the post Grim Reaper and knew she had to be cool. I’m a bit of a Death-figure obsession myself, and to see that I’m not the only one over the age of twelve or so who watched “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy” was a great comfort.
Deb is an author for which I give her incredible kudos. To finish one book takes skill, but to have three published is rock star supahstardom!

was started by Colleen at GeekySpeaky to find out more and become a participant visit Supahstar Saturday.

I debate again rearranging some of my blogs. I feel like I should make more use of the blogging aspect on Look Beyond Mirrors Esoterica that that might drive more traffic to the site or more interactions between myself and clients. I’m not sure.

I put up my first flier for that business in the apartment complex’s mail room this morning. I have another one printed out and a new batch of business cards (without the home address) also printed. I forgot to get my ad into the Triangle, but I will do that today so it’s in early for next week. I think I’ll ask them to run me only for a couple of weeks. It’s $30 a week, and if it’s not going to generate business I don’t need to keep up with the expense. Looking at that the yellowpages is actually cheaper, because they were only $75 a month, it was just that I had to pay four months up front which made it an ouch.

I debate also offering different services with the business but I don’t know how viable they would be. I have the prospect of being a psychic investigator, which just sounds corny, but if things pan out with the one place that has asked me to look into their ghost problem, it might be corny but true. I just…I feel weird.

I’ve been a member of this organization called “Kasamba” but using them just makes me feel dirty. It’s funny, people talk all the time about how paid blogging is selling out and that we should be ashamed to work for them, but in all this time (I’ve been a member since January) I have never felt as dirty for writing about something through a blog review as I did in a month at Kasamba. Kasamba functions by saying that they will help people with talents connect to others. They say they will help you connect to experts who can aid you with something you need, whether you need an architect, an engineer or a psychic. They charge 30% commission on experts but 37% for psychics, and you’re supposed to put in your hourly rate. I raised mine a little to compensate for the fees they charge, but then, you actually have to bid to the clients to have them take you for work. Someone posts a message on the board like: “Does my boyfriend really love me?” and then all the psychics in their network type messages answering the inquiry explaining who they are and why that person should select them to answer. You have to propose a fee too, so there’s all these psychics undercutting each other saying things like, “Oh, honey I feel your pain. I’ve been reading for fifteen years I’ll do your reading for $10,” “My crystal are vibrating with the potency of your question. I will only charge you $7.50,” *shudders* I just feel sick every time I see the set up, and I’m going to delete myself shortly. I just…I can’t deal with working like that.

When I went to grad school the only way I could afford to do so was using a loan. I’d used government loans to supplement my scholarships to get through my bachelor’s degree also.
My employer had said that they would reimburse me for the cost of my grad classes, but they didn’t, through combinations of them having confusing paperwork and neglecting to tell me that they didn’t have all the information I needed, in the end all I got back from them was the $70 for the software I needed for my courses, the rest had to come out of my pocket, and there was no way I could afford that so I wound up with a loan through Sallie Mae.
I hadn’t really wanted to take out seven thousand dollars worth of debt considering I was still paying on twenty thousand from my liberal arts college, but it was either that or languish at the bottom of the food chain at my job, or so I thought.
By the time I was done with two semesters worth of courses at graduate level though my loan was practically doubled. It blew in some ways because there was no way I was finish my coursework knowing that my work wasn’t going to follow through with the promotion they promised be.
At least with the loans when I got married I was able to go ahead with consolidations. We combined all our loans together and just have one payment of $130 rather than three payments of about $90 each, so that saves us some money.

I spent yesterday afternoon printing out my site design portfolio and assembling things, it’s been a long overdue project. I’ve also redesigned my business cards, but I forgot to send them into Triangle. They’re due today. Hopefully I’ll get it off there this afternoon.
I have to pick up some prescriptions.
I was finally able to go to the doctor this morning. This new doctor says his unsure if I have fibro, but there’s definitely problems with my legs and with my sleeping, so he’s got me another prescription for ambien, which is good and wants me to take glucosamine and chondroitin every day for a few weeks to see how things go. I have a follow-up appointment in three weeks.
I haven’t gained any weight in a month, which is good. I didn’t lose any, but I’ll take not gaining. I’m going in a good step with the direction with my exercise though, and hopefully once I’m sleeping better I’ll have more energy and that will put us on the right track.

Work at Home Bloggers does a Question of the Week. I’m a little behind so I’m going to do this week and last week’s together.

How many hours a week do you spend on your home business? Do you think it is too much or too little?

My hours per week vary depending on what I have going on. If I have freebie specials going on I wind up doing a lot more work because I have a lot more people asking for readings if they don’t have to pay. Generally I probably spend a couple of hours per day doing PPP stuff, and then at least an hour fending off people contacting me over IM who I hope are there for readings but they’re really wanting to ‘cyber’, as well as fending off telemarketers who want to sell me new ways to take credit cards, or alarm systems or pens.
Right now I’m just starting out so I haven’t really built a client base that isn’t the few friends of mine who know that I’m legit and not a scam artist. It’s a frustrating time right now, because I know I’d probably get more business if I had a store front but we can’t afford that because we’re just starting out. Right now I’m taking one evening each week to research different ways to market myself and test things out. I’ve thrown a lot of stuff out…but I’ve found one or two things which are useful and will hopefully be helpful.
I feel like it’s too little because I’m not getting anywhere right now, or at least I feel like I’m not, but I have to persevere. No one ever said working at home is easy, I think in many ways it’s harder than when I worked in an office, but it’s more rewarding and fulfilling.

How do you remind yourself of daily tasks? A to do list? A computer program?

If I want to get anything done I have to write a to-do list, sometimes I put it on my livejournal, other times I write it on the white board I have. I started using white board in college because we had to have one and put it outside our dorm door so that people could leave us messages and we could let people know where we were. I would also use it as a to do list, and that habit’s stuck.
My problem right now is that I lost the marker pen that goes with it, so now I have to remember to replace it so I can use the to-do list again and I keep forgetting!

I’m adding Baby Harness to the munchkin’s birthday wish list. Why?

Because of what he’s now managing to do:
Munchkin Walks

(The video will only stay up for a few days, and then I will password-protect this post).
I’m sorry it’s not embedded…I tried to use WPVideo and it said it couldn’t embed it. I tried to just embed it using Photobucket and it caused a funky error where instead of saving the post it just took me to my own front page.
Still I will take the video down after a few days. I just wanted to make sure this went out on the feed

The munchkin’s birthday is in exactly one month. I’ve been hearing from people they’d like suggestions for sorts of things to get him.

So here we are.

Clothes:
This is a big one because he grows like a weed. He’s currently in 12-18 months sizes for pants, and 18 months for onesies/shirts, as a general rule. He weighs about 25 lbs, and is 32 inches (or thereabouts tall) so that gives you a general idea for sizes. UK relatives that means he’s about 80 cm tall and around 14-15 kilograms.
Shorts, trousers, jeans, PJs, t-shirts, jumpers, hooded jackets, socks. Anything like that.

Toys:
Basically anything fun and educational as I’m thinking about it. It’s probably better to list what he has, rather than hasn’t got.
He has:
Fisherprice Musical Ring Stacker
Fisherprice Musical Shape Sorter.
Fisherprice Pop-Up Tool Bench.
Building Blocks
Plushie Bowling Pins
and various small musical rattles and toys.

One thing that would be really useful is something he can use to help him learn to walk. Like a toy lawn mower or something like that.

I tagged a few things in Amazon if people are looking for other ideas.

Stuff we can Always use more of:
Sippie Cups
Plastic Food Containers
Diapers (He’s in Size 4. No Huggies–he’s allergic).

Books:
We have several “Spot” books and I’ve been picking up bits and piecs of the Magic Treehouse series to read to him every now and then.
We have “The Chronicles of Narnia” box set and also “Harry Potter” of course…anything else is great.

Thomas the Tank Engine stuff is a good bet, and also Winnie the Pooh

Please avoid anything “Barney” I refuse to have Barney stuff in the house.

Also, please include receipts, just in case there are duplications of things, especially if you buy anything frorm Target. As of April 1st Target is implementing a policy that you can only return up to $40 worth of stuff without a receipt, as of August 1st that’s going down to $20. Currently as it is you can only return without a receipt twice a year.

Freebies is a great site for finding interesting and better than that free stuff around the internet. One thing I loved is that the author recommends Firefox I do that too. Firefox is the best browser in my humble opinion.

Through him I also found this wonderful Tron Game you should check it out, and check his blog out too. Lots of great stuff, far too much to list here.

Here’s another .

Cecile writes Work at Home Musings as she runs a business from her home, while also being a stay-at-home Mom. I know first hand this is not an easy task. In addition to all this she also runs a blog carnival about working at home: Question of the Week, each week a question is asked about working at home for those of us who do to answer. It’s a great way to find out how things are working for others and improve your own ways of managing time and resources to better balance things out.

Her blog is full of tips and tricks for those of us trying to run a business from our homes without taking away from our main priority of raising our children, such as The Secret which reviews the book “The Secret Science of Getting Rich” by Rhonda Byrne. Just check out her “Home Business” category.

My son will be one in one month and two days, if he survives. He’s doing a good job of getting himself into all kinds of crazy scrapes that I’m sure are going to wind up with us going to the E.R. and having some kind of safety straps and padding installed to prevent these things, but I remind myself part of learning is falling down, getting bumps and bruises, and apparently givng your parents heart failure on a half-hourly basis.

This is his latest exploit. I’m constantly scooping him off and putting him in his playpen trying to get him to understand that he shouldn’t be playing with the phone or the dragon lamp behind it. He’s so quick though that as soon as I let him out of the pen hoping he’s learned his lesson that he’s back over there dialing Timbuctoo on the handset or paging all the phones in the apartment and resetting the answering machine.

I need to get a wall shelf and put the phone up. I’ve tried to put it on the kitchen counter but the cords don’t stretch far enough :(.

The other cute and less hair-raising baby anecdote happened on Tuesday. My husband and I went out to lunch at a local tepponyaki restaurant with a Visa gift card a friend sent us for our anniversary the day before. The munchkin, of course, came with us, and was very well-behaved. One of the first things they give at this particularly restaurant is a salad which is mostly lettuce with a wonderful ginger citrus dressing. Munchkin does not like lettuce, he’s stolen it from my sandwiches before and left slimy trails of it all over the house, but as soon as he saw the salad going in my mouth he was making the “I want” sign and pointing to his mouth. I told him, “Honey, you don’t like lettuce,” but he persisted in signing and whining that he wanted some, so in the end I relented and gave him a small piece.

He rolled the lettuce around his mouth pulling a variety of strange faces, spat it out into his hand, looked at it, put it back, rolled it around again and then put his hand up to his mouth and took it out, stuck his tongue out, “Ewww…nasty,” and then offered the offending vileness to his Dad who was sitting on the other side of him, and said, “Dada?”

I was trying and failing miserably at not laughing especially when my husband goes, “Ewww…no. I don’t want it, give it your Mom!” and the child turns and looks at me.
“I don’t want it either,” but I wound up taking it, wrapping it up in a napkin and getting rid of it anyway.

Chicken, rice and mushrooms went over a lot better, but then we already knew he liked chicken and rice. The mushrooms were a suprise as neither his Dad or I will eat the things. But they were there, and I figured I would let him try them, because we want to try and make sure he’s not a fussy eater. The first piece went down and then he asked for more. My husband is now calling him, “The traitorous fungus eater.”