Change of focus

Some days/weeks, I'm so motivated to do business things. Work on the computer, do research, create new pages for my sites, write articles, start new things, etc. And some days/weeks, I'm so focused on taking care of the home front. Cleaning the house, practicing softball with the girls, and really checking up on homework and the kids rooms. I wonder if, for me, it's easier to dedicate certain days to different activities, rather than dedicating hours within the day and try to fit all of that in every day. Speaking of cleaning the house, one thing I realized today is, that it would be great, if once a month, I had someone come in to clean. Move everything in the living room so that every square inch of carpet can be vaccuumed, scrub every part of all the bathrooms, etc. Of course, I'd keep up with the day-to-day, but if I can have someone do a real throrough cleaning just once a month, that would be cool! I think I'll make that a goal and work toward affording that. I'll also have to research what company I want to bring in. Or do I just offer $50.00 to a family member to clean my house for two hours once a month because I know of a couple who would probably take up that offer. Hmmmm....

Work from home in FL

Wow! A utility company in Florida, launched a pilot "Work at Home" program involving over a dozen employees. How neat is that? I hope it works out! I'm sure there will be a number of issues to work through as they perfect the program. I wonder how they chose which employees would be part of this program. I would think there were quite a few who wanted in on the opportunity. Can you imagine if more and more companies started doing this? Moms (and dads) may have more work-at-home/telecommuting opportunities! That would be so cool. Anyway - you can read the brief article about this at Orlando Business Journal.

Challenge between sites

Last month was the first that my fastpitch site had more visitors than DH's pitbull site. I call it his because I made it for him. He doesn't actually work on it or anything, but he also calls it his site. LOL Anyway - last month I beat him by over 500 unique visitors.

I thought my fastpitch site was going to start outpacing his as far as visitors, but this month, the pitbull site made a comeback. As of yesterday, he had over a thousand more unique visitors than I did. Man! I think it has to do with a link exchange we did for the pitbull site. It's one of those where people can "vote" for your site by clicking on a banner then as your site gets more and more votes in moves up in the directory of pitbull sites. I better get on my horse and start beefing up the marketing for my fastpitch site. I think I've gotten a bit complacent in that because I know I have my newsletter subscribers returning. I've also been adding content to keep it search engine friendly, but maybe I need to go back out and get links on other relavent sites. Off to work I go!

Going on Vacation

Whoop-Dee-Do, I've got a vacation coming up! We're slowly getting ready for it. I think we're going to go shopping for some clothes this weekend. We also need to book a hotel room for one night because we will be getting into Miami the night before our ship sails. Yes, we are going on a cruise!

I was looking up different hotels in the area last night and will book the room today. Other than that, we've bought a digital camera for the trip. We got a new DVD players to keep us entertained while waiting at the airport. DH also bought headphones for the DVD player so that we can listen to it without bugging everyone else around. He used this as a good excuse to get the Bose earphones he's wanted for a while. Then we got a neat little carrying case for the DVD player. That will enable us to easily carry it with us as well as carry a number of DVDs without having to bring along the cases.

DH charged up his DVD player yesterday to try it out and I charged up my new camera to try it out. It was so funny. After the kids went to sleep last night we were both sitting in the living room checking out our new toys.

Kids love the simplest things

For Easter, my mom brought a little something over for the girls and for my son. The thing my son seemed to like most about what he got was the ribbon that tied the cellophane together. It wasn't one of those skinny ribbons. It was a bright green fabric ribbon about 3/4 in. thick. He thought it was the coolest thing. My mom also got him a Pooh bank. Just a tin, rectangle little box that you can insert coins and money in through a little slit on the top. It stands about 4" high. My son loves to sit on it. I don't know why, but he thinks it's so cool to plop his little butt down on the bank. He's 16 months old now and it's just funny to watch him sometimes.

Then today, the thing he was most excited about in his Easter basket were the plastic eggs. No I didn't put anything in them because I knew he'd like just the eggs themselves. He think they're balls. He had so much fun throwing them around. Such an easy guy to please for now. :)

What simple things do your children like?

Shameless Self Promotion

I've written some Free for Reprint Articles that can be used for free by anyone who wants them. Right now, there are only 4 listed, but I'll be adding a few more in the near future and they'll be available for download once they are reviewed by the site. I never even thought about putting this link out there for others to utilize, but here it is!

To read or use the articles I've written, click on the link below

Articles by Stacie

Another WAHM accomplishment!

I may not have been keeping up with all the ladies at MM for increasing VRE. However, I've already done my VRE work for the entire week because I put up a new site! And for me....that's more new VRE than usual. I know what you're thinking, another one? Yes, because this one I'm totally excited about and will have so much fun with! Plus, it sort of relates to my Fastpitch Site since I think many of my visitors there would be interested in this new one.

I guess it would be good to share the link - LOL. Here it is:
Baseball Cards Central

I actually have a personal Baseball Card Collection that I haven't added to for a while. About a week ago I thought about getting back into it and that's when I got the idea for this website. Anyway - like I said, I think it'll be tons of fun. Eventually I'm going to add a WP blog to it so that I can finish the Other FAQ's section and also be able to easily provide other articles and information about collecting baseball cards.

Okay - now for lunch! I'm starving! ;)

WAHM Challenge - Increasing VRE

This month at Mom Masterminds, some of us have taken the challenge to work on increasing our VRE or Virtual Real Estate. One way to do this is by adding pages to our site(s). The benefits include giving search engines more ways to find us and creating more pages on which we can earn AdSense, promote affiliate products, or make sales. Some women are looking to increase by as many as 50 page per week! Yowza! I don't think I could even do 50 pages in a month. So my goal is just to add an average of 2 per week in addition to blog posts.

So far I've found a couple of cool reprint articles and added them to my site. I also created a page of pitching resources which I need because there is not much at my site about pitching. One of my subscribers asked me for information on where he could learn more about pitching. That's were I got the idea for this pitching resources page - I simply posted the information I gave him on a new page for other visitors to use. :)

Got a new toy, I mean printer for business

Yay! I finally got a new printer. I had been putting it off because I don't like to just go out an buy something like that. I like to shop around because otherwise I'd be sick to see something better for cheaper one week later. Well, I'm finally done shopping around!

Yesterday was my MIL b-day and we couldn't figure out what to get her. So I told DH, why don't we print out a bunch of pics of our family and put it in an album for her. Cool idea - one problem. My printer doesn't work - well, I liked the idea so much I decided it was a great reason to stop putting off buying a printer and go out and get one. After "trying it out" on this personal project, this is going to be my business printer, so I wrote down the expense I have in the monthly expense log I now keep thanks to Mom Masterminds. They have this cool expense log you can just print out and keep track of expsense on. I like it. Anyway, back to the printer.

I love it! It's a Canon which I've never bought before, but it had a much higher dpi than the HP's I was looking at. Plus it has a cool screen that can flip forward or lay down. I need it to flip forward because my printer is above everything else on my desk. I can see the top of it from my seat. Anyway, my favorite thing about it so far is that it's faster than I expected. I mean, yeah, it said 30 ppm black and 24 ppm color, but that's usually when you're doing "draft" type prints, when you do higher quality type prints, like for photos, I've seen printers slow down quite significantly. But this one definitely has speed to my liking. I printed out over 100 4" X 6" photos for my MIL's album and this baby kept up with me fine. I wasn't waiting for hours for the printing to finish.

This one also has the separate color cartridges instead of the tri-color, so we'll see how that goes. I know I'll be much happier to go out and buy a $13 magenta cartridge if that's all I need vs. having to toss the entire tri-color cartridge and buy a replacment for $35+.

So anyway, I got a cool printer, a whole set up back up ink cartridges, a box of 100 sheets of photo paper, and a 2-year replacement plan for the printer - all for less than $500.00, which I will deduct for taxes next year. :) Oh, in case you were wondering, this is a Canon Pixma MP800.