You may appear moodier than usual now that the Moon is in Leo, but don’t let occasional waves of negativity prevent you from seeing the potential in your life. On one hand, you might decide that your extra effort is not worth the meager return — emotionally or fiscally. On the other hand, you might not be able to see what’s on the other side of the wall that’s temporarily preventing your forward motion. Patience and tenacity should pay off in a few days.

That’s my horoscope for today. That helps a bit too. I’ve been very stressed out all last night working myself up about the house and the way the negotiations are going and everything, but today is a new day.

We just have to realize that we are in need of a place to live and we have to make it work. This is our best option, we’re meant to have that house, we can’t play coy about it. We’re just going to have to suck it up and deal with it.

Right now I’m putting pen to paper and making a shopping list because with having to back and forth with the realtor and my husband last night I didn’t get to do the shopping I needed to do. We found out yesterday that the bread was moldy and had to be pitched and I used up the last of the milk making myself a “white russian” so that I could relax.

This will work out.

Why must you try and escape at every opportunity? I was just joking about the suicidal lemming thing, you didn’t have to take it and run with it, literally, run with it, out into the parking lot, or off up the stairs, and down the stairs…eesh.

I know you have short legs and lots of energy and love to show off, but Mummy can’t catch you so well, especially not when she’s wearing platform-heeled boots and carrying six bags of things which we need because of you.

I do appreciate all the hugs and the licks, and even the attempts to gnaw of my toes but that isn’t going to do much when you’re a flattened pancake because the other idiots who live in the apartment complex don’t look around before peeling out in their suped up trash mobiles.

Seriously wanting you to live to see this Yule and many more,
Your mother.

So today we were house hunting again, unfortunately in our area there aren’t any condos for sale because we would seriously love to get a condo, but you go with what’s available. One of the places we looked at, it was like the heavens opened up when the wife of the family who own it told us that they need to close quickly because they’re trying to get out of the country, especially as it was one of the nicest places we’d seen.

I was practically dancing up the driveway.

Our realtor is drafting up a contract tonight, and we’re going to sign it tomorrow before my husband goes to work and then we get to see if they are as willing to entertain offers as they suggested or if they want to negotiate a bit and meet us in the middle.

Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

This is basically a cross-post of what I just wrote on my livejournal except that the parts addressed directly to my LJ-friends have been cut out because they’re not relevant here.

I am no longer working for PayPerPost

There I’ve said it. I started out doing paid blogging through them and in the beginning it was great. The vibe of the company was wonderful. I was hearing nothing but good things about them from the people who basically talked me into working for them. It was fun job. I liked doing it. I could rattle out my assignments in a matter of an hour or so per day, but the worm turned.

I’m not sure how or why, really, but even though I now had three blogs in their system and one was pretty high-rated I wasn’t finding anything to do. I was working and working at improving my blog. I was networking with other Posties and I had previously recommended the company to several friends and, for the most part, they were finding things to do and working and things seemed to be okay. It was definitely getting harder and harder for me to find opportunities to write about on livejournal especially, and while I had been there on PPP since January 2006 and initially using LJ as my only blog with them and they had been promising that they were going to fix all the codes and widgets to work with LJ they didn’t.

I understand that they were a booming company and it was hard for them to keep up especially with constantly coming up with “improvements” but it seemed like for all their “we care about the posties” they really weren’t.

Now, understand, there are lots of things I still do like about the company and their ideal. From what I see and hear their company does seem like it’s a fun one to work for directly, and I don’t fully understand everything that’s going on because a lot of things came about during times where I had a lot of turmoil going on in my own life, the death of my mother-in-law, my son being in hospital and going through treatments, us moving (and now getting ready to move again) and there were a lot of times I was trying to read about things that they were “changing” and “fixing” and it just didn’t make any sense to me at all.

The fact remains that I went from earning $300 a month with them to barely making $30. Overall I earned about $1200 from them, but the majority of that was in the first six months. In the past two months I have earned nothing at all. Although I will admit within the last 45 days I haven’t been checking their system at all, because I just gave up. A month and half with two opportunities that you can do will do that to you. It’s not as if there weren’t opportunities in the system. The last time I logged in there were 12 pages of opportunities (which is about 240 opportunities) but none of them were ones I was willing to do or could really fit into my blog, or hadn’t already “done to death”.

That’s not even getting into the messes with Terms of Service that were going on, and PostieCon and their Blogger Awards and everything else with all their new projects.

I stopped recommending them to people a while ago, because I couldn’t in all honesty keep up my “Good Postie/Proud Postie” front, because it was a front now, and I don’t like that. I went through enough false-promo when I was actually earning a paycheck.

In the last month and a half, or so, I’ve found other places to work through: PayU2Blog and Smorty, although most of my work is coming through PayU2Blog now, because frankly it’s a lot easier to work with them. 90% of what they have me do is just insert a link somewhere into a blog entry that I’m writing. I don’t have to visit a bunch of different websites and analyze a lot of things, and I also am not asked to lie about product as I would be sometimes by advertisers in other places. “Write about your use of Xbrand telescope” but I haven’t used it, ignore. I’ve been with PU2B long enough now that I am getting asked to occasionally write reviews of products, but you know what, I actually get the product to review. That’s a lot better for me.

Today I realized that I still do have a lot of the PPP content up and I’ve been going around removing it, or editing it so it’s not got their code in it. I need to finish up here getting rid of the last of those useless “Review my Post” badges, and then I should be done aside from removing myself from their system, but that has to wait until the start of the new year because I need to get my 1099 information.

Suffice it to say, the short version is in bold at the top and now here too: I no longer work for PayPerPost, or IZEA, or whatever they’re calling themselves now.

I don’t have any huge dramatic expose going on. Just that I don’t feel they’re living up to their end of the bargain for me any more so I quit. I have enough stress in my life. I don’t need to be constantly checking their website, blogs and TOS to find out if they think they own my blog, or have changed things so that my posts no longer qualify for money, or constantly adding and deleting things from clauses and disclaimers or any of that. No more. No thank you. No way.

I’m not going to get mad or ticked off or stop talking to anyone who still works for them. I understand that people do what they have to do. If they’re still working out for you, that’s great. They’re not for me.

The munchkin is extremely interested in everything that I’m packing. So interested that he takes half of them out or he’ll bring me other things to pack instead, like the body shop supplies that we have. He brought me the drill earlier, thankfully I keep it turned off and with the batteries and everything out, but then when he brought the hair spray from the bathroom, and the toothpaste and tried to pack those.

On the other hand he’s getting to be very sweet. He’s into hugging now, and it melts me every time he climbs up in my lap and hugs me. It’s especially cute because he’ll pat and rub my shoulder because he’s used to me doing that if I’m comforting him I guess. He tries to kiss sometimes too, but mostly that just means we get slobbery licks.

Still, he’s growing up. Once we move we’re going to see about getting him started with potty training…it’s so weird to think that he’s closer to two now than one.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Self Portrait Sunday because things have been hectic here. I’ve been meaning to do some nifty things with pictures and Photoshop and yesterday gave me the opportunity. If you click on the picture you can see the original.

You can see what other people are doing with their pictures by checking out this week’s Self-portrait Sunday.

Well, so much for “picture a day” right?

I don’t think I’ve posted a picture for two weeks now.

This blog has suffered greatly due to the personal mess that’s been going on, between NaBloPoMo, NaNoWriMo and MOVEYOUNAO! Sadly I haven’t even done NaNoWriMo that well either, my creativity dried up horribly when the move out order was received.

Once we’re settled in the new place I will pick things back up here.

…that’s at a bit of a stalemate at the moment. The house is there perched just over the horizon but it’s a wily one and has so far been able to keep us at bay. We haven’t even really seen what it looks like yet, but we know it’s there, waiting, watching, ready to pounce when we’re not directly looking.

Or so I hope.

Our realtor’s scheduling some more places for us to look on Tuesday afternoon. So, hopefully then there’s some place that really fits and where the owners are not a bank starting foreclosure proceedings.

We’re not the only ones in our family on the look out, so hopefully it’s a good year. My brother in law and his future wife are starting their savings plans so that they can be ready to hire someone like mover NYC to get them going, luckily for them they don’t have so tight a schedule, so they’re saving up for the next year or so to be ready once they tie the knot to purchase. I wish we had that luxury.

Something will come though. I have to believe that otherwise I’m going to be sitting in the corner making bubble sounds with my bottom lip.

Thanksgiving had the marks that it might be somewhat disastrous but actually turned out pretty well.

Initially the plan had been that we would cook veggies but that the turkey itself and some other parts of the meal would be catered elsewhere. However it took long enough for the go ahead to be given to order the turkey that the place which had been picked out to cater couldn’t get a bird in on such short a notice as their supplies were already well booked up by other peoples orders.

So, I volunteered to cook the meal. However I was wondering where we would find a turkey/if we would be able to find a turkey and so on. Mum to the rescue on that one. We were planning on having Thanksgiving at my FILs place, and he had invited Mum to come too so that she wouldn’t be by herself for any major portion of the day and everyone could be together without splitting time between two houses. She had previously bought a 15lb pre-cooked turkey several months ago when it looked as though my Gran might be here for Thanksgiving. So, she brought the turkey and I looked up recipes for sausage stuffing, green bean casserole and got all the ingredients and we set to work.

We got things going by around 1 p.m. and were able to eat right around 5 p.m. not bad, even if I do say so myself. We’d thought the turkey might not cook in time as seemed like it was still pretty frozen but it was actually done just before everything else was. Then all we had to do was warm up the stuffing and carrots and finish up the roasted potatoes and we were set.

A friend of my FILs brought French Silk Pie, Mince Pie, Apple Pie and ice cream, and we sat down to eat.

It was a really great experience. The first time I cooked a major meal, and I didn’t feel stressed at all, perhaps this had to do with the fact I think my MIL was watching over things and also that my FIL had white wine for us cooks to partake in, or that my step-father wasn’t there causing huge amounts of aggravation. Maybe all three? Who knows? Who cares?

There were some moments that were a bit strange, because it was the first big holiday we’ve had without my MIL being there. She’s definitely missed, but as I say I feel she was there in spirit, kicking the turkey into submission and making mushroom soup appear in the cabinet given I’d forgotten to buy a can.

Here’s hoping our other get togethers go well in the future.

…and only if you’ve ever watched “Sailor Moon” will you get that reference.

This is how my hair turned out. I was afraid it would dry and I would loathe it because pink is not a favorite color of mine. This pink, however, is not pastel, or Chibi-usa pink, which is the pale baby pink I had to wear over and over when I was in ballet, so I can deal with it. In fact I love it.

I can’t wait to have my hair and do myself up in my new sexy boots.

I really like them too. They are appropriately witchy, really comfy and have a bit of a heel, but not enough for me to break my neck in. New hair. New boots. I’m about set.