Another Week Whizzed By

I’m taking a break from writing posts for a website for those with rocky relationships. Sometimes I feel like Dear Abby for the lovelorn! And no, I am NOT going to tell you the name of this particular website.

I’m not sure where this week has gone. For that matter I’m not sure where August went, or a big part of 2009 for that matter. Just today I got a complimentary calendar in the mail for 2010. I am NOT ready for 2010! It just seems inconceivable we’re so close to a new year, and indeed, a new decade.

Fortunately, this has been a much, MUCH quieter week. I’m ready for boring for a while. Although I can’t really say it was a boring week, just more peaceful, without a bunch of big problems popping up. But not really boring.

For one thing, I participated in 4 webinars: one Tuesday night, 1 Wednesday, and 2 Thursday. All four were about making money on the internet. All were interesting.

I got real excited about one particular idea that was presented, thinking of a good use for it, but it was a new product, and way expensive. I thought about it for a couple of days, and realized it wouldn’t work for me anyway. There were a couple of major reasons, one being it was pretty labor intensive. I need something that doesn’t require constant upkeep.

While it's really good to have learned about the many options available, now it’s time to start narrowing my focus.

I’ve got about 2 months more of classes, then school's over. The time I spend will radically shift from leaning to doing. And I need to start getting a FOCUS on what I want to be doing. Instead of trying a whole bunch of different things, I need a to narrow it way down. I’ve pretty well decided what I want to do, and I’m in the process of working out a workflow. I’m sure there will probably be some tweaking of that as I finish up this last couple of months of classes and new ideas continue to filter into my brain.

Then it’s on my own and time to rock and roll.

More Monday Madness

Monday will soon be over, and it seems I've been on the move, physically or mentally, all day. Let me see if I can remember most of what I've done today:

• The usual morning chores of feeding and letting critters out, plus emptying and refilling all the water buckets.
• Got Monday's humor mailing out, plus set up the framework for the rest of the week's mailings.
• Got a new post up on the farm blog.
• Did some research trying to see if I could find any information to shed some light on why Dad's Printer Mailbox isn't working.
• FINALLY finished revamping all the posts and pages on the health food blog and ready to move forward with NEW stuff now.
• Spent some time in the basement AGAIN because Jonathan called from work to tell me there was a tornado spotted in our immediate area.
• Did evening chores by myself in-between rain storms.
• Talked to the Canadian Crew via Skype. Ellie still isn't quite sure what to make of a talking picture of Southern Mama on her dad's computer. :-)
• Got supper fixed.
• Watched "Dancing With The Stars"!
• Had a training session/teleseminar - not our usual day, but making up for last week's. It was canceled because our Thursday night was noonish on their Good Friday. Also not as long, being only about 90 minutes instead of the usual 2 - 2 1/2 hours.
• Cleaned the kitchen.
• Plus all kinds of other piddling stuff that needs done every day!

And now here I am, and I'm sure I missed some stuff, and that's just bare bones of what I did anyway. Briefly stated, long in doing!

For instance, take the humor mailings. That means I did one totally from scratch this morning, and got 4 more set up, which takes looking at about 3 different sites and doing Google searches to check the daily holidays, checking wikipedia and a couple other sites for history and birthdays, checking The Farmer's Almanac and the Naval Observatory site for sunrises, sunsets, and day lengths -- and that's just the top part.

Jokes and trivia come from several different sources - you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find any NEW jokes! Then choosing a picture and whatever the source, it almost always needs a size adjustment for emailing. It all takes time.

Then there's revamping the health food blog that has taken me 3 weeks. Yes, THREE WEEKS! I went back through all the posts and, well, never mind. If you're not "into" this stuff, you wouldn't understand what I was talking about with SEO optimization, affiliate marketing, keywords, and on and on. Suffice it to say it was labor intensive, gave my brain a work-out, and obviously took a lot of time. But the site already had decent traffic, and I haven't even started working on that yet, so I have high hopes for this particular site!

Oh, and I also totally upgraded the "guts" of the site - all the background stuff a person doesn't see but makes the site work well. Like upgrading my version of Wordpress, and installing a professional theme that works more like software with all the options and stuff you can do with it. Add a new header, new theme colors, new widgets.... you get the idea. LOTS of stuff and LOTS of time. Which is why it took 3 weeks!

Anyway, like I said, I've been on the move, physically or mentally, all day. And now I've finished yet another blog post, and after I check some stats, I may even get to bed before midnight.

A woman's work is never done.

Trying to Keep Up

I’m learning lots of stuff with this course I’m taking, and I’m moving ahead each day, but never as much as I’d hoped. And I’ve had to back track a few times to redo stuff as I learn new things and realize there was a better way of doing something, or that I need to shift my focus just a little, or … whatever.

Just trying to decide who I am is a chore! Do I use my "real" name, or a pen name, or my own first name and a different last name, or what? I've got to make up my mind, and it has to go across several interconnected blogs, and just trying to figure this out is driving me crazy! (Okay, crazier than usual.)

This week I didn’t get as much done on Monday since it was a holiday and I wasn’t home alone (come on, you know how much easier it is to get work done when you’re all by yourself and fewer distractions), and then it’s been a big phone week. We had an advanced training call yesterday, a 2-hour Question & Answer session this evening, and have TWO training calls tomorrow.

Whew! With trying to keep up around the house and farm, and trying to get all this information crammed into my head, and get new blogs and websites fixed up while learning new software and more, I’m having trouble keeping up.

Just take the new software for instance. I’m having to learn a new blogging platform, switching from Blogger to Wordpress. I’ve having to learn how to use autoresponders. I’m having to learn how to use Google Analytics and Google Optimizer.

Then I also have to know how to create a download page, an opt-in page, how to ping, and a whole bunch of other stuff with acronyms like JV’s, SEO, PPC, PLR’s, MRR and on and on! It would take up too much space to list it all here (plus bore you to tears)! Suffice it to say, I’m on information overload.

And if learning new things keeps your brain active, mine is positively in overdrive!

The Daily Grind

I need to head off to bed, but I know it’s an exercise in futility. Rain is coming. Rain pain keeps me awake.

A whole lot of today seemed to be an exercise in futility, or at best, just the same old daily grind. Get up and fix Jess’s lunch and put it in his cooler. Feed the cat, turtle and bird, then go outside and feed all the critters there.

Clean the kitchen. Run the dishwasher. Do some laundry.

Answer the phone, not once, but twice. (I’m not a phone person. I consider it a necessary evil for emergency use only.) The first time was the receptionist from the dentist’s office. How fortuitous! I needed to call her to see if I could get an appointment for Jonathan to go in and get the crown put back on his molar.

She was calling to remind Jess he has an appointment tomorrow. She also made an appointment for Jonathan to go in tomorrow. I jokingly told her it’s too bad she didn’t have an appointment for me too, and we could just all sit there together in their office!

Phone call #2. Once again somebody I needed to call, but had been putting off. She’s a nice lady, but a talker. She called to ask me who does our farm website. Well, I do. "Okay then," says she, "how do you do it?" Uhhhh, could you be more specific please? I tried to answer her questions and hope I actually helped her a little.

Somewhere in the conversation she asked me when we might want the sheep sheared, which is what I needed to call her about, and I said Saturday. She’s supposed to double check with her husband and get back to me. I’ll have to answer the phone when she calls, can’t just let her leave a message, cause I think the answering machine is broken. I lost an hour in the middle of my work day today talking to her. I don’t want to lose another hour this week, because I’ve got to waste time on Friday to go to the doctor and I have soooo much I need to get done.

I nailed the old towel rack onto the back of the old bathroom door. I haven’t bought new towel racks yet, but was tired of moving wet towels around (shower curtain rod to commode lid to counter to...). If I put up the old rack back on the wall, it would make holes in our freshly painted wall when I yanked it back out. Not good. I figured old rack on old door, good solution. They’ll both eventually be replaced.

I replaced the egg turner in one of the incubators as the one in there didn’t seem to be working. I tested the replacement, and it worked fine, but now it’s in that incubator, I haven’t seen it move. What’s with this? Bad electrical outlet, or what?

I fixed myself some soup for lunch, and made a homemade pizza for supper.

Somewhere in this day I managed to do some research and write an article on Yerba Mate for the “Real. Easy. Good. Food.” website, and also got an “About” page written and posted. This blog will be a key component for the first go round of what I’m learning with my course work.

I also spent two hours listening to a “Question & Answer” session for our course. I think I have about 10 pages of notes from it. It wasn't the best timing, as I had to go do evening chores early, and it lasted so late both guys came home in the middle of it, and Jess had picked up our first basket of food from our CSA, which needed to be put away.

Jess put the perishables like the eggs and meat away, then once the teleseminar was finally over, I washed the radishes and cut them up, and put the greens and peas and broccoli and stuff away.

Writing about it, I can see I maybe got a little more done than I thought, but it still wasn’t what I had hoped to get done, especially relating to my course work, but had too many interruptions to manage it.

Oh well, tomorrow’s another day, Lord willing.