[smartads] This is not the typical post that I normally do. I did mix some of that in here though. This will also be a short post so no need for the CR break before you sit down to read.
It’s almost 1:00pm now and I volunteered to sit in LolyKat. The last couple of days for me have not been so wonderful. I’ve been so gloomy recently that the rain cheers me up. Speaking of rain, I should mention now that Rain Days = 8 days in a row. I forgot to mention day #7 in my hastily written post yesterday.
I’ve been doing a lot of heavy thinking about this blog today, but so far I have not decided to make any changes. I am late on this post though. I just decided to do something different on Sunday night. Star Movies has new movies that start every Sunday night, so I just watched one of those. The one that started this past Sunday was “The Season of the Witch”, starring Nicolas Cage. It was pretty good. Good enough to finish watching it and plus Lita liked it. I figured she would when I saw the previews.
Getting back to the blog, I can say that if the people that asked to place a banner on my site, change their mind, then I most likely will be making some changes. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to offer to put an ad on my site. I really was getting tired of waiting. I’ve had this blog for right at 1 1/2 years now. I’ve got almost 2.4 million hits. That’s a lot of a personal blog that is so young. At least that is what I’m told. My income so far is basically zero. I did get a couple of donations, one of those being nice and there is the AdSense, but I have not been able to collect on it yet. It needs to reach a minimum amount before I can withdraw it and it has not gotten there yet. That’s one of the things I don’t understand. I know of other sites that use AdSense, that don’t get the number of hits I do and they make money there. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t think so. It just confuses me. I mean I’m not the smartest man on the planet, but I’m far from the dumbest too. Something is probably eluding me and I wish I knew what it was.
Circumstances seem to be against me also. My Paypal account for instance. I’ve had that account for years. When I got here I started using it to pay for my hosting on this blog. It has been working fine, but now that a little bit of money is coming into it, I can’t even get to it. Yeah, that’s right, I cannot even get to the donation money that was put there. It seems that since I am in the Philippines, I need a credit or debit card from a Philippine bank. Paypal, out of the blue, cancelled my payment to my host. Now I need another one before the end of this week. I asked Paypal several times why do they now have a problem with this, when I’ve been using it exactly the same way for the past 17 months. I can’t seem to get a straight answer from any of them. Now it seems that they have decided to stop communicating with me. The money is still there and I should be able to fix the problem when I get to Texas, but in the meantime, I can’t even get that. At least I will have a little bit of extra money when we get to Texas.
- Mga bata at the Window
My Amazon account has gotten me zero also. I’ve only got one ad on there now, but I did have a lot of them at the bottom of the blog before. That one ad is in an ideal spot, but when/if those banner people come through, that Amazon ad will be moved down or deleted because I only want things that are productive for me. For the Amazon ad someone has to actually buy something before I get any money from it. It just barely gets any hits, much less any buying. I guess people are not that interested in books about the Philippines. I figured since people were checking out a blog about the Philippines, they were interested in the Philippines, hence the Philippine books. Maybe I should put e-books there instead? If the banner ad come through and is big enough, I will put it in the center of the blog where the map is now. I will put the map back to the bottom. I just have it at the top because I think that’s the best fit right now. It’s not important or even necessary, just something nice to have.
When I first started this blog my sole purpose was was to make enough money so Lita and I could visit other places and do things. Naturally I want to do things, but I wanted to do it mostly for her. She works too hard and it seems that she can’t help it sometimes. She’s been working almost her whole life and it’s a kind of built in thing she can’t seem to turn off. I just wanted to help her find that off switch so she could learn to relax and not worry about things.
After I did the blog for awhile though and people seem to like what I was writing, the money became less important, but the need was still there. The need is still there and I’m not really sure what to do about it at this time. So to make a short story long, which I seem to be good at, I may be changing these posts to a weekly thing instead of daily. The weekly ones would be more to the point of things that happened during the week and less of the little things. I don’t really want to do that because plenty of people have told me they like the little things and the rambling that I often do. I need to try to concentrate my money making efforts in the right direction, whatever direction that is. I’m thinking that e-books will work, because I hear that people do well with those if the subjects are sell-able. I’m not even sure I can come up with enough things to write about, but I have a couple of ideas for now to at least try. If it doesn’t work out, well then I’ll cross that bridge then.
- View from Tricycle in Tacloban
I’m not sure I will be doing a travel blog anymore either. The way I’m thinking now is to take my notes and just put the information on this site as an extra post. Maybe that’s a mistake, I don’t know. I’m thinking at this time to get rid of all my other sites too. I don’t really want to mess with them and there is a problem with leaving comments on them anyway. I don’t get any feedback from them because of that. I don’t seem to have the time or the patience to deal with them all these days.
Salamat, Paalam
Hi John,
I was a bit sad that I missed the Nicolas Cage movie. I planned to watch that one but I did not realize thah my satiliite load was due to expire that day. By the time I turned on the TV it was too late to reload it that day. I guess this will motivate me to get it set up on a auto debit program. I have been working hard installing a wood fired oven in our bakery to reduce the high cost of cooking gas. After researching what it would take to build a masonary version I decided to fabricate one from steel. I got really lucky because I saw one already built at a welding shop and it almost matched my design. The only change that I made was to insert fire bricks inside the wall cavities instead of fiberglass. Today will be the initial baking trial. I did fire it up yesterday and it stayed hot for several hours so I am thinking it will be good. The reason that we worked for the wood oven is two fold. Gas is too expensive and it will increase capacity. The items sold from the display case puts us at the break even point profit wise after salaries. We will use the wood oven to make simple pandasal that will be packaged and delivered to the numerous sari sari stores for resale. A bakery is only profitable will sufficient sales volume so we will create a higher volume with our deliveries. thought this might interest you since you have mentioned starting a bakery.
Tom thanks for the info. Although I will not be the one making the decisions for the bakery, I can add my 2 cents or in this case it’d be 1 cent from me and 1 cent from you. I believe that he plans on a wood fire stove and never considered a gas stove anyway. I’ll mention the steel vs. masonry thing to him. It’s Titing’s project and he is an Engineer so he probably has a good idea of what to do.
I definitely will mention the re-sale of the pandesal and maybe a few of other items too.
Don’t worry about that movie “The Season of the Witch”. I’m sure it will be around for awhile for you to watch. It was a good movie, but not fantastic.
I can certainly understand the need for more money. There is never enough, and when there is, we all NEED more. One of the main reasons I have decided to ‘retire’ early is for the exact opposite reason of needing more money. Life for me here has become hum drum, working for the next almighty dollar, only to lose it or spend it on things we really don’t need. From time to time, I reel in my common sense and analyse the how’s and whys, and it never really registers on my quality of life meter. We work, we earn, we spend….and in many cases it’s simply not healthy, IMO. I have also found blogging to be self satisfying, to a point, and it becomes obligatory after time. I got to a point in my online presence that I became saturated with these obligations until I realized that it was not returning $$ commensurate with the amount of time I was spending to crank out all this superfluous garb. After many years of building my online presence, I have slowly begun to dis-assemble. And I’m enjoying the equivalent satisfaction of winding down. So I have chosen the path to more relaxation and less work. I simply don’t need more than I need to be content. Being content with working hard at something with only the expectation of success is pure insanity. To me, contentment is not in the material things that we can accumulate in life, hell, it takes work to keep up with it all. These days, I’m mostly content with giving advice for free. I might as well, as I’m not using it anymore!
If it was just me, I have plenty to do with what I want. There would be no need to work anymore. Actually if I just have what I do have now and I could just update a blog 2 or 3 times per week, you know, something easy to do. It wouldn’t seem like work at all.
Like an e-book. If I had one of those and it was selling, I wouldn’t have to do anything else, just let it sell. I just have to get it to the right place first.
I think we could make it on what we have now, if we didn’t have bills. That is my next goal to accomplish. We shouldn’t have any, but stupidity got in the way.
By this time next year, we hope to have made a couple of trips out of here, not counting our trip to Texas this April.
I agree that everything you said should be true.
Wind down, not up. That’s a good motto to live by when you are ready to retire.