Nate, click here:

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This summer I want to expand my garden to include beans, peas, maybe some squash.  The kids want to plant some melons and maybe some tomatoes.  I think Ben wanted to plant some potatoes.

This weekend i need to test the soil to see if it needs an amendments / fertilizer.  I saw some articles that stressed how important it is to make sure the pH is correct.  I don’t mind deviating from recommendations, but I think  I should at least know what the state of the soil is before I decide not to follow someone’s advice.

I need to expand my meager plot so it can accommodate all the goodies I plant.  No corn this year.  It grew just fine, but I think the minimum amount of space it requires is more than I want to devote to it.

I also did some research and determined that I should do my planting in the middle of May except for the peas.  They get started two weeks earlier.

I hear it will rain all day Sunday.  I was thinking about reading that “Angels and Demons” book by Dan Brown.  It comes after “The Davinci Code” and it looks like there’s a good movie version coming out soon.

The girls are all signed up for softball.  Chloe has a new glove and we bought a couple of softballs so we can practice.  We can try getting them warmed up for the season.  I saw on their website that the season doesn’t open until the city officially opens the fields at the end of April, depending on the weather.

Otherwise, I think it promises to be a quiet weekend.

Originally I had some money tied up in a great little company who repairs and maintains oil equipment on the gulf coast.  I did ok with them after Katrina kicked the oil industry around.  So he split that up in to several blue chip stocks whose reliability was unquestioned:

Bank of America: I lost 85% of my original investment

Federal Express: I lost 60%

And that original company?  Well, it stopped shooting through the roof and since I split my holdings up its worth $57 more.

Oy… that advisor couldn’t have known what would happen, but I really regret not staying with my original inclination.

It also estimates that I could make upwards of $1.61 every day based on ad-revenue.  Interesting thought.  What if I included some advertisements on my website?  Maybe I could make $48 every month.  That would certainly pay for my web-costs.  I’ve tried including Google’s advertisements in the past and never made a dime on it.  On the other hand, maybe I was doing something wrong.

Here’s the trick: I have seen the statistics from my hosting company and at least half of the visitors to this site are crawlers/spiders from the search engines.  It really gets very little traffic.

Nonetheless, I am looking for some alternate means of income.  I have this website and a couple of others – none of them half as interesting as a defunct blogrilla.com.  But my hosting company has offered me a wide range of eCommerce tools.  Its practically begging me to come up with a way to at least cover the expenses of my website.

Any ideas?  I was thinking of something entrepreneurial.  An online business.  I thought I would sell something.  But what?  I don’t have access to anything that’s particularly cheap.  I don’t do any handicrafts or anything.

There are some websites that sell risque t-shirts.  I can come up with dumb things to put on a t-shirt as well as anyone else, I bet.  But do they make money?  I know someone who makes t-shirts.  I should talk to him about working together on something.

What else?

World of Goo for WII - World of Goo Wii - World of Goo WII Game

Four stars for World of Goo!!  The whole family likes it. 

Today I’m testing out Microsoft Live Writer – it was kind of wonky the last time I looked at it, but we’ll see if it behaves any better now.  I have a professional website that I want to spruce up but I’m not sure what tool I should use to put it together.  Honestly, I don’t need much from a website – a few pages to explain to people who I am and what I do. 

I was thinking about using MS Publisher or Joomla (content management tool).  So far, although I like Joomla I think its more than I need.  If I were going to frequently post articles or updates it might be more useful. but I think this will mostly be a fairly static website.

Suggestions?

In the end the line moved well and by 7:25am I was finished and on my way to work. 

I will be really interested to see how things play out tonight, but in truth I’m all election’ed out - I can’t stand any more political ads and get-out-the-vote efforts.  I’m fed up with it.  We live not far from one of the battleground states (New Hampshire) so we’ve been getting a LOT of advertisements but not a lot of phone calls. And this is good - I can always turn off the TV.  So tonight we plan on following the election results on the Comedy Channel - Jon Stewart always puts these things in the right perspective.

gObama!

When we went trick-or-treating on Friday we took all seven of the kids, plus a friend from across the street brought his 2.5 year old.  Really, I think everything worked out surprisingly well.  Nobody was injured.  Nobody’s feelings got hurt.  Everyone seemed to get along remarkably well.

The weather was perfect on Friday night and we all had a good time going to our favorite houses.  Afterwards we returned home and the six oldest kids sat down to haggle with each other for candy.  We followed that up with Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin Halloween special on TV.  Then it was bedtime for the kids!  Whew!

We spent the following morning visiting and recovering.

The rest of Saturday is kind of a blur.  I don’t even remember what we did.  Oh yeah, we went to a swim lesson for the kids and then to the scout store to get some boy scout uniform supplies for Gabriel and Benjamin.  Then I think I watched some football.

Sunday was somewhat more productive.  I cleaned up the backyard and mowed it for the last time of the season.  I put away all the lawn furniture and whatnot.  The mowing mulched up a lot of the leaves that had fallen.  We don’t get very many leaves in the yard anymore - since we lost, like five trees in one season.  “The night of the long axes”.

The boys each had a friend over with mixed results.  Ben and his friend, Finn, blew stuff up on the computer while Gabe’s buddy, Enzo clocked my six-year-old daughter in the skull with a swing by accident.  He isn’t careful and tends to hurt the other kids - I’m getting pissed off at him and he knows that he’s about to get ejected from our house.  I hope he improves.

I ran a couple of errands and watched some more football.  So overall it was a pretty good weekend.  Mostly, any weekend that doesn’t contain some kind of disaster counts as “good” in my book.  Maybe its time I raise the bar a little, though and start shooting for getting more done.

Well, for now I’m back at work.  I don’t think I have any emergencies this week.  yay.

Ben got to shoot a 20-gauge shotgun, a 30-30 hunting rile and an old SKS rifle.  It looked like fun and I wish I could have gone.

Instead I took the other kids to LaserQuest for a couple of games of laser tag.  The kids love it and I even have a good time at it.  But I wasn’t in the mood so Liz and I just let the kids play the first round.  Gracie didn’t have a good time because she didn’t do well. She came out all boo-hooey so for the second game, I carried the pack and she carried the gun.  She did much better and more importantly was much happier.

Gabe was bummed about not getting to shoot the real guns, but he had a good time at LaserQuest instead.

Afterwards we went to Barnes and Noble and each of the kids got to pick out a book - Gabe even got an extra for Ben so he wouldn’t feel left out.  Nice kid, eh?

Then we went home and watched the 1938 movie “Son of Frankenstein” - it was ok.  By now the whole story is a little tired and overdone.  Me and Grace dozed off and slept through some of it, but i think Chloe managed to watch the whole thing.

That night it rained and the wind blew and Liz wished aloud that just once the weather would cooperate for one of his camp-outs.  The next day when I picked him up, Ben reported having a great time.  The other kids, I understand chose to pitch their tents at the bottom of a slope against the advice of their leaders.  Yes, it was flat at the bottom, but its also where all the water wound up.

Some of the kids got really soaking wet, but it was warm - like 48 and nobody was in any danger of freezing or anything.  They found snakes and toads and shot up the targets.  They had a very good time.

We watched some football, which was nice and I helped Chloe and Grace make a pineapple upside down cake in the dutch oven.  It didn’t come out as pretty as we had hoped, but it did come out delicious!

So it was a decent enough weekend.  I think next weekend I have to mow the yard one more time before putting the mower away for the season.

I have a parent/teacher conference with Grace’s teacher on Wednesday so I will probably work at home that day.  I also need to have the car looked at.

• The check engine light is on - I know that the car thinks there’s something wrong with the gas tank.  The mechanics replaced the gas cap, but that didn’t fix it.
• The emergency brake light keeps coming on when the brake is not engaged.  I had heard kind of an ominous “clunk” somewhere in there not long ago and I am wondering if something is resting on the brake cable increasing the amount of tension on the cable making the light come on intermittently.
• The heat takes twenty minutes to come on
• The defroster doesn’t work

With winter coming up I should get this stuff looked at.  I just finished paying the car off in February, so I guess its about time for it to go to pieces.