Motivated on Monday

I didn't wake up with the alarm clock... but it was close today. As soon I as I put on the tea kettle to boil for my morning coffee (I'm from a 1940's noir--I drink instant) I got right to work. 150-word article out of the way before the kettle started screaming. I lined up a couple more similar articles for later in the day. While this won't make a huge dent in anything, I do feel like I'm finally back to work full swing.

I'm still looking for a job outside the home because things are getting a little desperate in the money category. My bank had the nerve to charge me a $5 service charge because I didn't have enough transactions. When you don't have a lot of money, there probably won't be enough transactions!

I also wrote two poems last week that I wanted to debut today, but since I sent them to the Yahoo Contributor Network, I guess I have to wait until both are approved. And of course I also have a complaint about YCN... I guess I didn't log in for 90 days, which is strange because Yahoo keeps me logged in automatically. But, I'll take their word for it that I didn't visit the page for that long. Anyway, they have cut of my performance views to count for the overall performance payments. From what I understand, these should have resume as soon as I started visiting the site again, but I don't think they have. I have zeros across the board and it upsets me because I would have never promoted the articles last week if I knew I wasn't going to get paid for them. But I have my queries into the forum, so we will see what I can find out about that.

What free time I do have left in the day I spend on promotion. Most of what I do is drops on Entrecard (which is also on my list--they tell me my book review blog doesn't have a widget--and it's right there for all to see) and I'm back to the traffic exchange game. I never realized before how truly sad traffic exchanges are. 99% of the pages I view are people advertising other traffic exchanges, MLM schemes or other get-rich-quick junk. I like to think I class up the joint a bit by promoting my blogs. I would love to promote my articles directly, but that's against every terms of service at every article website, so I have to hope that people will engage my blog after they see it. It's usually a statistic of one in a million, but it's still relatively free advertising, so I'll stick to it for now.

Monday, Monday

This week has started off better than I thought it would. I had way too much coffee and other caffeinated drinks before bed last night. I spent half the night awake and wondering why it wasn't time to get up yet! I should have just got out of bed at 3 a.m. to do my work. I gave up on sleep about 5:30... and now I'm really close to finishing work for the day. If I resist a nap, I can do almost anything--writing, photography, genealogy... the possibilities are endless. I haven't had this much free time in two months. I better enjoy it while I can. :)

Mildly Amusing Updates

The bird: He's NOT gone. He did it all again this morning, only a little later at 5:30. Well, you know what I did to show him? I got up, took a shower, and strapped my ears to my iPod and got to work. Now all of the work I planned for the morning is complete. Okay... so I could write more and not have to work this evening, but there's nothing on TV on Tuesdays. If I don't hold back some work for after 7pm, what else can I do? I'll probably end up buying something completely unnecessary online. That's why I have to keep the fingers busy.

Script Frenzy: What's that? I've never heard of that... okay, so I'm slacking a bit on this endeavor. No pages yet, but should there should be some words on a page by the end of the evening.

Coffee supply: cappuccino nearly gone! Oh... I think I have more stashed somewhere, I'll just have to find it. And run out for some more sugary, unhealthy Mountain Dew this weekend.

Twitter: I suck at it! I'm pretty much just following major news networks/celebrity people at the moment. And my followers, a whole 4 of them, dropped to just 2 this morning. I told everyone my updates wouldn't be interesting, but jeez...

I feel like Melanie

Melanie: the girl in Hitchcock's The Birds. For the past three or four nights, a lovely little bird has been waking me up between 4:30 and 5:00 in the morning. It is so loud, once I wake up I'm usually unable to get back to sleep until it stops. And when does this little bird cease? Around 6AM. I'm supposed to wake up at 7, but now I sleep through my alarm.

I honestly don't know what to do about this little problem. It seems to me if it wakes me up, others in my apartment complex would be bothered by it too. I really want to knock on some doors and find out if that's true. And in the past two days, I woke up and actually went to my window to see where the bird was, but it was impossible to tell. I know that it either lives in the bushes or in the trees in front of my apartment, but the trees are pretty far away for the volume of that little bugger. I even asked a friend who knows about birds what type it could be, but without a visual, I can't offer her much to go on.

It's wreaking havoc on my writing. I didn't wake up until 9 this morning, and I had a lot to do. I still have a lot to before I go to bed tonight, but I feel like a walking zombie! More coffee is my only answer at the moment.

The caffeine is gone

Anyone else get caffeine headaches when they go off of the stuff for awhile? I do, and I'm suffering for it now. I didn't realize how much caffeine I had been drinking over the past couple of weeks, and apparently it was a good amount. I still have coffee to drink, but I can't really get used to the idea of drinking it other than in the mornings. I guess I wanted to take it slow today anyway...