Thursday, January 27, 2011

Just Another Mental Dump

Here are some things that have been on my mind:

1) I've had a low grade sinus infection for the last 3 weeks. I am entirely over the yellow-y green phlegmtasticness that is currently me right now. But honestly, I bring this up because I really just want to show you this again:



Hee hee.

I'd go to the doctor as, I'm sure, many of you would recommend, but I am the sufferer of many a sinus infection and I can tell you from experience, in all honesty, antibiotics don't actually help sinus infections. At least, not much.

So I'm suffering through it. Even when my teeth hurt so bad I can hardly swallow water.

2) You may have noticed I started a new blog about my journey through debt elimination. If you don't know this, it's at janesinfinitebudget.com. I purchased the domain with birthday money and, in a burst of inspiration, decided to call tech support at GoDaddy to help me set it up before I'd become frustrated. And then? Then I got the tech support person from hell. Her name was Aimee and, trust me, after my experience with her, I sent a scathing e-mail to customer satisfaction. In turn, I discovered this afternoon that "someone" had gone into my domain setup and had messed with my settings so that the host name wasn't pointing to the correct place rendering the domain useless.

It is fixed now. It is working.

And now? Now, I am stating, for the record, I'm on to you, Aimee. One more little tweak on my account like that? And I will do everything in my power to ensure you are unemployed before the week is out. K? Thanks. I hope you have 8 kids and they all starve to death.

Kidding.

Kinda.

3) Which brings up another point of tech contention. So...a few months ago, I enabled Google ad serving to this little space I call my own. You may or may not have noticed. I tried to keep the ad space to a minimum and as unobtrusive as possible.

Ad serving is a passive source of income for me and, when I reconciled myself to it, realized there was a way to enable it so that it wasn't really hurting anyone or getting in anyone's way.

The fact is every time someone visited my blog, it created a page impression and I earned money from that. Certainly not a lot. It takes something like 500 page impressions to generate a penny (I think. It's hard to say). But it was a little something that would have, eventually, come my way. If someone clicked through on an ad on my page? That generated significantly more revenue for me...say, a dollar per click. Sometimes more.

But you'll notice that ad serving is gone from this blog (it is still enabled on the other). The reason why is because, if you recall, I posted a somewhat inflammatory blog a couple of weeks ago about police brutality in which I posted 3 pictures of victims of police brutality. This was a "violation of service" because I depicted acts of extreme violence. I appealed stating that, "the post in question, while a particularly relevant, local, political topic in Denver right now, has been deleted and if you were to read my blog further you would realize it is mostly about baking pie and loving people".

They denied my appeal. No reason given other than I'd originally violated their terms of service and that's it. The end. Here's our middle finger.

Thanks, Google Ad Sense Team. Now I wonder if it wasn't the images that disturbed you so much as it was the topic. Can't talk about police brutality. Just like you can't take pictures of cops period.

Oh well. *shrug*

4) I'm having a good time with the new blog. While it is certainly harder to write and most definitely embarrassing at times, it also feels cathartic and possibly helpful to other people besides me. I've made terrible mistakes. I made decisions I knew were wrong before I put them into action. But I also know I'm not the only person in the world who's done what I've done.

And the interesting thing about shame? Shame is only as powerful as quietly as you keep its secret. I'm telling the world about what I did. And I don't feel shame about it anymore. I'm fixing it. The most shameful piece isn't that I bought into the American way, it's that I allowed the American way to make me feel bad.

No more.

5) We still don't have a clear picture of what's happening with Lex's job. At this point, we're expecting the worst come February 1...no paycheck. No job. But we don't know for certain.

The nice thing about expecting the worst? Anything better is a lovely surprise.

6) I've officially taken the "being responsible" thing too far. Tomorrow? I shall get new tires and an oil change. Birthday money and a loan from Lex's savings - a relatively small amount he felt he could afford - are allowing for this sudden activity.

You have to spend money to save it...right?

2 comments:

bete-noire said...

excuse me while i clean up this PILE OF POOP WHERE I JUST POOPED MYSELF, JANE, BECAUSE YOU JUST SCARED THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF ME.

*looks for a clean towel*

jesus h. particular christ.

bete-noire said...

PS i bought wine.