My last two weeks were kind of interesting ones.
First, there was my birthday. If you remember from my last entry, a friend of mine has her birthday two days before mine and we were supposed to meet up for a joint birthday celebration on the day in the middle (April 8th). What wound up happening is that Shawn got home from a week's vacation on April 7th and we had not yet finalized our plans, so did nothing on the 8th. We touched base on the 9th and she bought me lunch at the Mexican restaurant where she works. Then we went to lunch together on the 10th at the little pizza place where I enjoy flirting with all the staff and I bought Shawn's lunch. It was fun.
Note: I have been dieting and did not lose a single pound either my birth-week or last week. I did not GAIN any pounds, but did not lose any, either. I guess that just goes to show that no matter how good you are on a diet MOST of the time, just a few scattered indiscretions (like pizza and Mexican food) can HALT your progress in its tracks. So that was interesting to discover.
Then, I needed to figure out how to afford bringing my daughter and her mountain of stuff home for the summer. On the way to her first year of university studies, we rented an SUV. But my parents also came along and brought some of Anne's things in the trunk of their car. This presents rather a problem for getting everything home because I am picking Anne up by myself and can only drive one vehicle at a time. Of course, she has friends from school who live as close as Chicago and she was ready to either impose on them for what she could or go halvesies on a moving van, but I didn't like those ideas. So that was an interesting thing to figure out.
It did not take much thinking. I decided to drive down in my car and move most of her things into a storage unit. I will bring home a trunk-ful and no more. (Hopefully, the things she packs for home will include everything she needs to take for her studies in Europe next Fall.) I then spent about a week and a half trying to reserve a storage unit rental from hundreds of miles away. Groan. The process was... interesting. Good news, though -- their 800 line works well and I was and I have now talked to the district manager twice.
Then, I woke up one morning to a freezing cold house. (Not literally freezing, but very cold as the house was losing its heat to try to get down to the roughly 40 degrees that outside was keeping.) My heater had stopped working and it was 57 degrees inside! Brrr... Larry, my handiman (dubbed "The Amazing Norwegian" by my mother), came over right away when I called in distress with the dilemma. He gave me the saddest blue eyes when he could not discern how to fix it and then walked out my door without even asking for a fee for running over so quickly. Before he left, he gave me the number for his favorite heating and plumbing people, and they came over with haste to take care of it. Want to know what they did that was worth a $79 service call? They hit a reset button. The heat started working right away and Snickers was relieved of his duty to cuddle on my lap under a blanket to keep me warm. (Not that he actually gave up his warm, napping spot until a long while later.)
Keep in mind that, despite the cold, I have been having a healthy dose of Spring Fever. Every time I walk into a store that has gardening supplies, I wind up wandering out with some. In addition, I have ordered 6 rose bushes for my yard and two bleeding hearts, plus grass seed and I am already obligated to several yards of topsoil. It really needs to warm up outside so I can get out there and start working in my yard or I will wind up with way too much more work than I can actually accomplish!
Last in my list of interesting adventures is that I have started a new Youtube channel/blog combination. I figure that somebody, somewhere, has to be at least moderately interested in something that I am able to share. Yes, of course my children and friends ask me for advice and, yes, complete strangers regularly approach me with the most insane sharing of personal information/stories. (Like the lady in line in front of me at the grocery the other day who wound up talking to me about her daughter's wedding until we parted in the parking lot -- or the woman at the styling salon who started talking to me out of the blue about problems with her grandchild's mother's boyfriend -- and those were BOTH in JUST the last two weeks!) But that is not what I mean.
What I mean is that I am making yet another stab at using my accumulated knowledge/experience to try to earn some passive income. I have begun putting my recipes online. They are FREE to watch/read, of course. If I earn anything from them, it will be through my product recommendations and click-throughs. If not, at least I will have already done the work for my daughter to get copies of my recipes. She has asked for them, you know. :-)
But, regardless, I have been spending time on photographing my recipes as I make them and then recording voice-over instructions for them. Interested in seeing what I have done so far? Here are links to check it out: CLICK for Video - CLICK for Print
You might be wondering: Will I keep writing books? Well, I have two in process that I need to finish, The Mahogany King's Daughter (1st chapter already available in Amazon Prime's lending library - CLICK HERE) and The Legend of Lord Randall Castle. So, I will try to at least get those done. But, at this point, it is a race to see which vehicle, recipe channel or ebook sales, (if either) will produce enough income for me to keep them going. It will be interesting to see which one (if either) does that.
First, there was my birthday. If you remember from my last entry, a friend of mine has her birthday two days before mine and we were supposed to meet up for a joint birthday celebration on the day in the middle (April 8th). What wound up happening is that Shawn got home from a week's vacation on April 7th and we had not yet finalized our plans, so did nothing on the 8th. We touched base on the 9th and she bought me lunch at the Mexican restaurant where she works. Then we went to lunch together on the 10th at the little pizza place where I enjoy flirting with all the staff and I bought Shawn's lunch. It was fun.
Note: I have been dieting and did not lose a single pound either my birth-week or last week. I did not GAIN any pounds, but did not lose any, either. I guess that just goes to show that no matter how good you are on a diet MOST of the time, just a few scattered indiscretions (like pizza and Mexican food) can HALT your progress in its tracks. So that was interesting to discover.
Then, I needed to figure out how to afford bringing my daughter and her mountain of stuff home for the summer. On the way to her first year of university studies, we rented an SUV. But my parents also came along and brought some of Anne's things in the trunk of their car. This presents rather a problem for getting everything home because I am picking Anne up by myself and can only drive one vehicle at a time. Of course, she has friends from school who live as close as Chicago and she was ready to either impose on them for what she could or go halvesies on a moving van, but I didn't like those ideas. So that was an interesting thing to figure out.
It did not take much thinking. I decided to drive down in my car and move most of her things into a storage unit. I will bring home a trunk-ful and no more. (Hopefully, the things she packs for home will include everything she needs to take for her studies in Europe next Fall.) I then spent about a week and a half trying to reserve a storage unit rental from hundreds of miles away. Groan. The process was... interesting. Good news, though -- their 800 line works well and I was and I have now talked to the district manager twice.
Then, I woke up one morning to a freezing cold house. (Not literally freezing, but very cold as the house was losing its heat to try to get down to the roughly 40 degrees that outside was keeping.) My heater had stopped working and it was 57 degrees inside! Brrr... Larry, my handiman (dubbed "The Amazing Norwegian" by my mother), came over right away when I called in distress with the dilemma. He gave me the saddest blue eyes when he could not discern how to fix it and then walked out my door without even asking for a fee for running over so quickly. Before he left, he gave me the number for his favorite heating and plumbing people, and they came over with haste to take care of it. Want to know what they did that was worth a $79 service call? They hit a reset button. The heat started working right away and Snickers was relieved of his duty to cuddle on my lap under a blanket to keep me warm. (Not that he actually gave up his warm, napping spot until a long while later.)
Keep in mind that, despite the cold, I have been having a healthy dose of Spring Fever. Every time I walk into a store that has gardening supplies, I wind up wandering out with some. In addition, I have ordered 6 rose bushes for my yard and two bleeding hearts, plus grass seed and I am already obligated to several yards of topsoil. It really needs to warm up outside so I can get out there and start working in my yard or I will wind up with way too much more work than I can actually accomplish!
Last in my list of interesting adventures is that I have started a new Youtube channel/blog combination. I figure that somebody, somewhere, has to be at least moderately interested in something that I am able to share. Yes, of course my children and friends ask me for advice and, yes, complete strangers regularly approach me with the most insane sharing of personal information/stories. (Like the lady in line in front of me at the grocery the other day who wound up talking to me about her daughter's wedding until we parted in the parking lot -- or the woman at the styling salon who started talking to me out of the blue about problems with her grandchild's mother's boyfriend -- and those were BOTH in JUST the last two weeks!) But that is not what I mean.
But, regardless, I have been spending time on photographing my recipes as I make them and then recording voice-over instructions for them. Interested in seeing what I have done so far? Here are links to check it out: CLICK for Video - CLICK for Print
You might be wondering: Will I keep writing books? Well, I have two in process that I need to finish, The Mahogany King's Daughter (1st chapter already available in Amazon Prime's lending library - CLICK HERE) and The Legend of Lord Randall Castle. So, I will try to at least get those done. But, at this point, it is a race to see which vehicle, recipe channel or ebook sales, (if either) will produce enough income for me to keep them going. It will be interesting to see which one (if either) does that.
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