Question of the Week took a bit of a vacation itself for a little while, so this week’s question is: What is your favorite quick dinner at home?

My absolute favorite quick dinner is calling out for Chinese! I’ve been longing to have a Chinese place which delivers and we were graced with one last year. Now that we’ve moved it’s not even five minutes away from us which means we often will just drive up there and pick it up BUT I think that really the idea was that we shared a recipe ^_~.

My favorite recipe to make when I’m pressed for time or feeling lazy is tuna pasta. I tend to cook by ‘eye’ so I can’t give any real measurements…though.

Ingredients:
1 large can tuna
2-3 handfuls small pasta (macaroni or twists, something like that)
mayonnaise/miracle whip
squirt of lemon juice
couple drops of hot sauce (to taste)

Optional:
a small amount of blue cheese/ranch dressing
a bit of mixed veggies,
Parmesan cheese.
Ginger, paprika, turmeric, cayenne
Half a small onion chopped (I’ve taken this out lately ’cause my husband doesn’t like onion).

How to make
Cook the pasta to tender.
While the pasta is cooking put in small bowl, drained tuna, enough mayo to bind the ingredients together, lemon juice, hot sauce, additional dressings/ingrediants, and stir until thoroughly mixed.
Once the pasta is cooked, drain and add to the bowl of ingredients, mix up.
Serve.

Often in our house we’ll make wraps of the tuna mix with lettuce and banana peppers and eat the wraps with those little 100 calorie snack packs of chips, but you can also just eat it ‘straight’.

July 1st’s Question of the Week was What are your vacation plans this year?

We don’t really have any. We had intended to take a long weekend with my Mum while my step-father was away; but he came back early due to things I’m not going to get into…which means our plans have been changed. My husband’s vacation time from work was spent with us moving so things will wait for now until after summer is done.

June 24th’s Question of the Week was Do you work outside the home only or are you involved in different home businesses?

I’m involved in several different home business ventures. I do tarot readings, and I’m a licensed hypnotherapist. I also do web design and do paid reviews for places like payu2blog and blogsvertise. Those are just the jobs I’m paid in case for: I also am a chef, maid, nanny, tech support, photographer, videographer, taxi service, fixer and accountant ^_~

What is your one BEST organization tip? It can be work, home or personal.

Wow, for me, it has to be “Do NOT BE AFRAID TO THROW THINGS OUT!” which I’m actually stikll working on myself. I am a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE pack rat. I have things everywhere. I’m hoping I can get rid of a lot of it during our upcoming move so that things will be better at the new place. It’s going to be larger, but that’s no reason to continue to cling to all this clutter and stuff “just in case” all it’s doing is making it hard for us to find things we really need.

Cecile does a weekly wrap up of all the QOTW answers. To see last week’s wrap up check How Does Your Work Schedule Change for Summer?; (I was the only one to answer o.o!) at the end of this week she’ll have wrap up of the other answers to this question, so be sure to check back with her site!
If you’re a WAHM be sure to join in the fun! You can find out a lot of interesting tips and might share something that is just the ticket to help someone else too!

How does your work schedule change during the summer?

My work schedule doesn’t really change by season. I might get a few more tarot reading clients towards the end of the summer; college students wondering about what direction they should take with their life and studies before they go to school or back to school, but that’s really the only way it might change. I actually get more around Valentine’s Day than during the summer, love is always a popular topic for fortune reading.

Cecile does a weekly wrap up of all the QOTW answers. To see last week’s wrap up check Do You Work Holidays?; at the end of this week she’ll have wrap up of the other answers to this question, so be sure to check back with her site!

Do you work on holidays?

As with most work-related things that’s flexible with me depending on what’s going on in life. This past holiday I did a little bit of coding work but not much else, often times unless it’s a BIG holiday like Yule or Thanksgiving I will work partially because I have a hard time keeping track of when actually is a holiday as my husband’s job is not one where he gets standard holidays off unless his schedule falls that way or he books it in advance.
There have been many times friends have called up or messaged me, “Why is your site saying you’re available for readings right now?” and I’ve said, “Well, the munchkin is napping so I thought I would take advantage as I don’t have any readings booked.”
“But it’s President’s Day!”
“It is?”
This year he is taking off July 4th so I will not do any work either as we’ll be spending the day with friends at their annual barbeque and fireworks extravaganza (wildfire’s allowing) but we’re not often so lucky, especially if it’s a big holiday that everyone is fighting to get off if they’re not scheduled. There have been times he’s actually been at work Christmas Day itself. His first year at the PD was particularly bad for holiday work as he was the rookie and had no seniority the PD itself isn’t closed to it’s officers only office staff because “crime never takes a vacation” and so on those situations we make our own holidays and have a different day we’ll take off and spend together with family.

Cecile does a weekly wrap up of all the QOTW answers. To see last week’s wrap up check How Do You Celebrate Your Birthday?; at the end of this week she’ll have wrap up of the other answers to this question, so be sure to check back with her site!

How do you like to celebrate your birthday?

I’m not one for huge parties so I like to spend times with friends and family. One of my favorite things to do for my birthday is go to our local tepponyaki and sushi restaurant and eat there and then just hang out and game with friends.

Cecile does a weekly wrap up of all the QOTW answers. To see last week’s wrap up check What time do you get up in the morning?; at the end of this week she’ll have wrap up of the other answers to this question, so be sure to check back with her site!

What is your “Breakfast of Champions”? (What do you normally eat for breakfast to get you going in the morning?)

I have either a slice of toast with peanut butter or a bowl of raisin bran; not very adventurous I know. This is a fairly new development as my doctor has asked me to try a blood pressure ‘safe’ diet as I’ve been borderline/slightly high on my blood pressure since I was around seven months pregnant.
My blood pressure has been averaging out into the safe zone since a week or so before my last check-up in April. I’m not sure if the diet has anything to do with it or I’m just handling things better now that I’m sleeping better at night. Either way the healthy turn in the diet can’t hurt; before this I would either skip breakfast entirely or make ‘concoctions’ of meat, potatoes, eggs and cheese for breakfast for us and that’s not so good. Now we only have that once a week, twice if it’s my husband’s weekend off and we have some good leftovers like chicken wings or something like that.

Cecile does a weekly wrap up of all the QOTW answers. To see last week’s wrap up check What kind of workspaces we WAHMs have; at the end of this week she’ll have wrap up of the other answers to this question, so be sure to check back with her site!

Last week we were asked:
What do you do about working at home if something unexpected happens? Do you bag it for the day or try to make it up later?

I’m lucky in some ways because my ‘at home business’ is client-driven, so if I don’t have a client in touch with me I don’t have much in the way of work to do. I’ve been trying to reorganize and improve my website, adding a ‘proper blog’ to it and things like that, but that and my work for PPP are all things that can really be done ‘when I have time’ during a day if there’s something unavoidable that comes up.
I do usually set aside time to do things. First thing in the morning I wil do work, say between 7:30 and 10 a.m. depending on how long the task I’ve set myself takes or if someone gets in touch with me for a reading. This gives me time to ‘wake up’ and check things out. I will do work around the house itself when my son naps, or after he’s gone to bed the rest of my work happens.
If a client calls and something’s come up they’re usually pretty understanding if there’s some reason I can’t accomodate them right at that moment and will schedule another time or let me email them their reading instead of doing it live that makes things a lot easier.

What kind of workspace to you have? Where is it located? Is it clean or messy?
Right now my workspace is the cleanest it’s been in a while. I actually posted pictures of my workspace on Sunday after I put the new desk together.

There we are. It does have the keyboard shelf on it now, but I can’t use it, as if I leave the keyboard in there the munchkin pulls it out and starts mashing the buttons on it, so I have to keep the keyboard on top of my printer when it’s not in use, but that’s where I work. We have a very comfy rocking chair that is my ‘desk chair’ at the moment, which is another reason why I don’t use the keyboard shelf, it’s not a decent angle in relation to the chair, which sits very low to the ground.

You can sort of see the chair in that picture.
So, that’s where I work from day to day, doing my blogging and occasionally meeting people on IM to do readings for them there.

I do not have a weekly meal plan. We do eat a lot of the same meals quite a bit, because I get a lot of fish: cajun catfish, salmon pinwheels and things from Publix because they do their fish prep a lot better than I can. I fall into patterns of making the same foods, but it’s not really intentional, and our schedule varies so much from week to week because of the way my husband’s shifts work and the munchkin not being able to eat some of the things I prepare for us (like the fish) so right now there’s no real family meals. Often I will feed him first and then after I put him to bed I’ll eat and my husband will reheat his food when he comes home at 5 a.m. Lunch is the only meal we eat together regularly and that’s getting hard now that the munchkin can climb out of what we used to use as his “highchair” so it’s unsafe.

To see the other answers to this question see Work at Home Musings.

As a side note, which I forgot to put in the previous post, I have several other memes and also some comments I need to catch up on and answer, which I will do starting next week. The main ones I remember of these right now were from Cecile and Drew, I’m sure there are others though.
The rest of the week is taken up with doctor’s appointments and house work because Saturday is the munchkin’s birthday party and Sunday is his baptism. I’m doubting I’ll get any real computer time until potentially Monday night.

What is the worst Work at Home Scam you have seen or heard about?

Wow. I’ve heard about quite a few scams. I think it’s one of the reasons I was so very hesitant to sign up with PPP because I was afraid that it was another scam, but I reasoned that I wasn’t putting any money out for it so if I didn’t get any I hadn’t lost anything.

I think one of the worst things I’ve heard about recently is the Secret Shopper Scam, a friend of mine got roped into one of these and lost at least $500.
I’ve heard about a lot of pyramid schemes also and nearly got myself roped into one of those through Pre-Paid Legal when I was still working at the library. I went to one meeting and when I heard everyone speaking the exact same ‘dogma’ over and over again my ‘trap’ radar went off and I hightailed it.
There’s also ‘The Team’, which another friend was nearly roped into. She asked me to look into it because she knew I had a lot of work-at-home contacts, and the cost they were asking her to pay to join was making her very apprehensive. The bad I heard about it definitely outweighed the good.

These programs have a lot of indoctrination techniques which are scarily cult-like. I would hear from people when asking about both Pre-Paid Legal and The Team who were warning ‘Stay Away! Stay Away! Danger! Danger!’ because of the cost you had to put out to get anywhere, and the fact that you could basically only earn money by ‘duping’ other people to sign up below you so you would get kick-backs, so that the person at the top was the only one really making any money, and then others who were involved saying contrary things like, “It’s not as much as your friend says, I don’t know where she got the idea it’s almost $400 to sign up. It’s only $35 because you don’t have to buy the tapes and all the other extras. It’s all about the effort you put in. Sure if you don’t buy the tapes you’re not going to make nearly as much as you could…”
It’s scary when you hear from people involved in a program and they all parrot back to you almost exactly the same spiel.

Generally if you’re looking for a good work-at-home program they’re not going to ask you to pay them, and they’re also not going to ask you to pay out and then volunteer to pay you back. One of the best ways to make sure something is legit is to either run it through Google or call your local ‘Better Business Bureau’ and see if they’ve had any complaints or red flags drawn up on the place in their system.

Not so far but I really need to. Our apartment is once again, if I’m being brutally honest, starting to look like a bomb hit it, and I need to go through and toss some stuff and reorganize and also baby proof.
The overall way we’re going about things isn’t so bad, it’s just keeping up with the now walking munchkin whose idea of ‘helping’ is to pull things down and litter them all over the floor, and also the fact that our dining room table is constantly a ‘catch all’ for every thing.

Short of using the dining room table as a bonfire for the a barbeque I’m not sure how I can stop that…maybe electro-shock?