I’ve been trying out Project Wonderful which is an ad placing service that I’ve seen on Akashik: Battle of Angels a nifty comic site that I check out daily. I’ve had it on my tarot reading site for almost a week now and thought I would try adding a few spots on this site to see what happens.

It seems to work well for placing ads, although I haven’t quite worked out a decent average for bids yet. I know the tarot site is a bit…narrow in it’s appeal, but perhaps the blog will be a bit more interesting to people. I like the way that the site is set up it’s easy to sign up and it’s very easy to customize. I haven’t tried out advertising yet. I’ll wait until I accrue a bit more funds in my account and then redistribute them.

In this case it’s a thank you to Val at BusyMomma for sharing her Thank Yous with me after I posted mine yesterday.

Thank you, Val.

I’ve been pretty busy the past few days because I’ve been helping my Mum to move again. I still need to catch up with my Photo a Day blog and do some tarot readings for people. I have some earrings and jewelry to make as well.

It’s also bill-paying day, which really sucks. Things are going to be tight for a little while. We really have to watch our spending until we can balance things out.

I found an interesting site while browsing my friend’s entries on Livejournal. You can find and grow dragons and then at later times breed them with each other. Some of my friends are doing a lot better with their dragons because they found the site several weeks ago, and it takes a good deal of timing to be able to find eggs of your own as they’re only available at the cave at certain times.

Within a couple of days these should start to hatch, hopefully…Click on them to help me! See if you can catch your own. It’s a fun game!

Here’s a site that someone from PunkyMoms mentioned just recently that I had to share. They’re a site which specializes in plus size lingerie and corsets and things of that nature, which is wonderful for me because I love my corsets but being beyond a DD it’s hard to find things which fit and still hold well enough to show off my assets without showing off my assets (if you know what I mean).

Hips and Curves are very reasonably priced and their items are not cheaply made where you wear things once or twice and then you have to repair or throw them out, which is great to hear. Several of the ladies on the forum partake of their clothing on a pretty regular basis. It’s always good to hear that a place has repeat shoppers and doesn’t have people going, “OMG NO!! STAY AWAY!!!”

I was mortified earlier when I read something on a fellow’s bloggers website. I’m definitely going to be washing anything I buy even after scouring over it with a fine tooth comb. As I was telling Colleen a few moments ago. I generally wash things when I buy them from Goodwill or a thrift store because then you know that they’ve been worn by someone else you expect that the store won’t have washed them and most people don’t pre-wash things they’re donating.

However if you go to a retail store you expect a certain quality of goods when you’re buying them. You don’t expect to find what Colleen found, and you definitely don’t expect to be treated the way that she was when you complain about expecting good clean clothes when buying them. Read the full account on Colleen’s blog: Old Navy’s Dirty Clothes.

I was tagged by Loretta for this meme about things to do at the New Year.

Rule: Copy the person and persons’ names that sent it to you and add your own at the bottom of the list. It really helps to build community.

Traditions are all listed after the jump…..

*My mom used to collect some coins and when the new year comes she put the coins in a bowl and shake it to create sounds. She said its good luck for money throughout the year. And also wearing dotted dresses on new year don’t know why. CC/chalyza/keep

*My old folks always told us to avoid spending money on new years day. They said, once you spend on the first day of the year, you like to spend the rest of the year. Behind d Scenes of ME/ Retchel’s Pure Life/ A little bit of me

*I grew up believing that if you have some money on your pocket (whatever you’re wearing) come New Year’s eve it will ensure steady flow of income throughout the year. The other belief is that the main door of the house should be wide open come New Year’s eve so that good luck will be ushered in. Juliana of MY WORLD and JULIANA’S LAIR.

*I don’t know if what I am about to write is a new year’s tradition or not. In my place, most people will ‘jump’ into the sea or take a shower as soon as the clock strikes to 12 in New Year’s Eve to get rid of all the bad lucks in the previous year. ;D ~ CHOC MINT GIRL~

*Like most other East Tennesseans, I always have a side of blackeyed peas with my dinner on New Year’s Day. - Tish of The Kat House

*To be honest, I never even heard of people having good luck traditions on New Year’s. These all sound pretty neat to me (except for that blackeyed peas thing…). But growing up we definitely had a New Year’s tradition. We’d spend every New Year’s as a family with my mom’s college roommate and her family (she also had 2 kids just about our age). We’d alternate houses each year, and spend the night. The big traditions were always playing board games like Trivial Pursuit (adults and kids together) and then cooking some crazy fun or elaborate dinner (like paella, lobsters, fondue). On New Year’s Day itself, we’d watch some college football and usually drive around to see what stores, if any, were open. Andrew of Everybody Loves Coupons

*Pork and Sauerkraut. I’m Slovak, what can I say? Although, I suppose it’s also very Pittsburgh-ish …. hubby’s family had the same tradition and they are certainly not Slovak. The problem with this tradition is that I despise Sauerkraut. I hate cabbage. Loathe it. Can’t stand to be in the house if it’s cooking. It’s the most disgusting food in the world to me. I blame my heritage and my grandmother’s kitchen for this hatred of all things cabbage since there was always some main course cabbagey dish cooking, Halushki, Stuffed Cabbage, Ham and Cabbage, Pork and Sauerkraut, Hot dogs and Sauerkraut, just about anything plus cabbage several times a week. Yuck, cabbage. Loretta at Just Not Martha

I really didn’t do much for the New Year this year because we had just moved, and my husband was on duty with the PD so it was just me and the munchkin. Our neighbors had a huge bonfire. One tradition I remember from growing up in England though was that a tall man had to carry a lump of coal over the threshold of the house first thing in the new year to ensure good fortune for the year to come. I need to get some coal so we can do that next year! ~ Cat at ami-chan.net

Now… who to tag…
Skeet at Skeet’s Stuff
Lisa at H2-Hippie Spelunker
Molly at Unheard Melodies

That’ll do for now.

One thing with the move is I’m hoping for the possibility of being able to work from home a bit more thoroughly than I already do. While I don’t think I’m ready for a huge overhaul and an office depending on how things go and our luck with electronics we may well need to get new phones. I wonder from time to time about using VOIP, and have Skype downloaded on my computer, but there are other options like Talkswitch, from Neobits.
One very nifty thing going for these guys is that they will come in and install your phone line themselves instead of having to figure it out, they also deal with broadband internet, which is cool. I’m pretty well versed in technological things, but a lot of times it’s nice to be able to sit back and let someone else do the work especially if you have a lot of other things going on, like we’ll have when we get moved, and especially once we find an office building it’ll be extremely helpful to have someone else doing all that, one less thing that we have to worry about.
I never realized how pricey these things can get, but it looks as though the company has specials going on pretty consistently.

I was pointed to this site by a friend of mine over IM earlier today. It’s Free Rice, and it’s a wonderful little tool that improves your vocabulary and donates food supplies to the United Nations.

It’s a quiz that has you test your vocabulary by asking you to pick the definition of a word out from four possibilities, for example.

cacography means:
1. argumentation
2. seller
3. bad handwriting
4. peasant

When you select the answer if it’s correct 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. It doesn’t sound like much, but think for example how I’ve been playing on and off all morning and have donated 420 grains of rice. My friend in the past few days has a total of 3000 grains. Even if each of you only clicks a few times that’s still going to add up look at their totals. Over the past month they’ve got over 1,330,639,890 grains.

So, check the site out, answer a few questions and do your part to help end world hunger!

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. I think it’s getting myself too wound up over NaNo and just some other things which have been going on around and about within my family and also without. There’s a bug going round, and while normally that would have slammed me and had me in bed for a few days, which hasn’t, which is a good sign I’ve just been feeling really drained, and not really up to writing about anything, which doesn’t help NaNo either.

Anyway I was tagged by Val from Busy Momma to talk about the five websites that I visit quite a bit, so here we are.

PunkyMoms which is an alternative parenting community that I was introduced to in February of 2006 right before my son was born. They’ve been my saving grace more times than one, a place that I can really feel at home in given the parents there are like me they’re not going to look at me strange because I have tattoos, and like to dye my hair blue, or purple, or red, or stripes. They’re a great collection of Moms from all around the world who are genuinely great. Much hats of to the three top punkymoms, Sarah, Jen and Winter who keep the board going.

IMVU. I’ve been on there a lot lately because I’m working with a group there called “Tarot Cafe” and it’s a great deal of fun having esoteric discussions with the other patrons and doing reading exchanges.

Meebo. I use Meebo quite a bit because it’s a really good combo messenger program and it enables me to be “live online” to do readings through my site. In theory. It’s really only helped me out twice so far, but I also like that I can log in to it from anywhere. When I used to go up to my Mum’s or my ILs to do laundry I could log on to it using their computers and still be active, and I only have to remember the one password and it logs in to all the different AOL, MSN and Yahoo handles for me, and gives me a chat room of my very own too!

Greatest Journal I’ve been using them a lot more than LJ lately for my back up blogging/keeping in touch with certain friends.

Ain’t it Cool News my husband introduced me to this site. They’re chock full of movie and television news goodness.

I know I’m supposed to tag five people, but I’m not going to tag people this time. It’s taken me the better part of two hours to actually get this post finished between various things, so I know I won’t get chance to email people I’ve tagged them ;_; if you want to do it let me know and I’ll link to you

I’m a little disappointed that there’s been no interest at all in the free tarot reading contest that I put up, but it’s lessons learned and so on.

I’m debating still on NaNo. I need to sort that out. I have a story outline that I first wrote when I was sixteen, and another story that I’ve had on the cards since college, which was the major inspiration behind it. But I’m just not sure…do I want to write about ghosts, demons and angels? or do I want to write about aliens trying to survive on a planet torn about by a war started inadvertently by other characters I have from another story series.