A Work at Home Mom’s Blog

I’ve been reading about bartering in small business on a forum I belong to. The thought has crossed my mind before, but I never really explored the possibility. Until now.

I was hunting for a new theme for my blog the other day, and I found one in particular I liked. It had this awesome retro look and color scheme. But it looked more like a music blog than a diary/working from home blog. I kept searching, and found a couple more I liked reasonably well, but nothing to write home about. I uploaded the final candidates to my hosting account, then proceeded to try them out. The two that I liked best were broken, and I don’t know enough about WordPress themes to fix them.

Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: Why not see about bartering for a custom theme? I can’t offer gold necklaces or diamond rings, but I would be quite willing to do some writing in exchange for a good theme.

So, are there any WordPress theme designers out there who would be interested in some good articles for a blog or website? Or perhaps a bio or special report? I know basic HTML and can write for SEO purposes. If you’re interested, drop me a line via the contact form.

For some reason, I can’t seem to keep tabs on a good flashlight. We have a lot of flashlights, but half of them either do not work or are very dim. Hubby insists on keeping them, claiming that he can fix them and use them when he goes hunting. But most of the time they just sit in the cabinet until I need one and try them out only to find they’re in the same shape as before.

When I do get my hands on a good flashlight, it always disappears. I’m not sure where it goes. Hubby doesn’t get them, because he’s always complaining about a lack of good lights too. Pumpkin rarely uses them. So they must grow legs and walk off.

Pumpkin got a tiny little led light from Girl Scouts for selling nuts, and I grabbed it one night when I had to go down to the basement. I was surprised at how bright it was! It only had five tiny bulbs, but it lit the area under the porch up very nicely. I used it a few times, and now it has disappeared too.

I guess I need to get a good flashlight and lock it up when I’m not using it. Maybe then I can hang on to it.

I knew that I wanted to be my own boss from the time I was in middle or high school. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, though. It turned out that it was right under my nose the whole time. But I considered a number of different options before I figured that out.

For a while, I wanted to own a clothing boutique. I had a unique sense of style, but clothes I liked were not easy to find in the area where I grew up. I traveled to the nearest small city (about 45 minutes away) to buy most of my clothes, and even there I had to scour the racks to find things to suit my discriminating tastes. But I rarely left empty-handed.

You’d never know that today. Since I had Pumpkin and gained a lot of weight, I haven’t had the money to buy a lot of clothes. I still have my own style when I buy something for myself, but most of what I wear is hand-me-downs and whatever is cheap. Maybe I should have opened a boutique after all. But I don’t know if that would have made me happy.

I also considered opening up a franchise restaurant. I read extensively about it in entrepreneur magazines, and it seemed like an easy way to get started in business if you could come up with the initial investment. But unless you’re born into money or save up for many years, that’s easier said than done. Besides, once I thought about it, that didn’t really fit with my desire to be my own boss. I know I would have been the owner and gotten to hire, fire and oversee employees, but that’s not what attracted me to self-employment. And franchises come with their own rules and regulations, which franchisees must follow.

All I really wanted was to be a boss to myself. I’ve supervised others, but it’s not really my cup of tea. I can handle it just fine, but I don’t particularly like it. I just liked the idea of not having someone else looking over my shoulder all the time. I’ve had a couple of bosses that were pretty good about that, but I’d rather just be accountable to myself.

There are times when I could use some supervision, but I think I do alright considering. There’s definitely room for improvement, but I’m working on it.

So what does self-employment mean to you? Is it being The Boss, or having unlimited income potential, or is it simply being able to do your own thing with only clients to answer to? That’s an important question to ask yourself before you even consider starting a business.

I believe in working to earn a living. There have been several occasions since I’ve become a mother when my family and I have received government assistance, but it’s not because that’s the way I wanted it to be. I have worked for my entire adult life, except for a year and a half when circumstances beyond my control made it just about impossible. And even when we have needed help, I’ve tried hard to keep it to a minimum because I knew there were people who needed it more than we did.

Now, we’re down to no assistance except for health insurance (with a copay) for Pumpkin. We’re barely scraping by, but I’m proud that we are independent. And it just makes me really angry that some people arrange their lives so that the government will pay their way.

A prime example is someone in Hubby’s family. She has five kids with four different fathers, and she doesn’t work. Her husband only does an occasional odd job. They receive every possible type of assistance for families, plus she collects disability for two or three of the kids. I was shocked that she got her tubes tied, because that means that she won’t be able to milk any more money out of the system. And before you start sending hate mail, know that she’s not having kids just because she loves kids. (I don’t condone that when you can’t support them yourself, but I can almost understand it.) She hardly takes care of the ones she has, and never sees the one that lives with her father.

But what bothers me even more than that is when people who already have plenty of money get money from the government. Money that comes from taxes I paid because I worked my butt off to earn a dollar. You know who I’m talking about. These high-level bankers and insurance people who think nothing of buying a Rolex Daytona for every day of the week while we little people are juggling bills so we can feed our families and keep a roof over their heads. Their bonuses were handed to them on a silver platter out of the bailout funds that were supposedly being used to keep their companies afloat.

I’m glad to see that our president is trying to take back most of it. But all this crap could have been prevented with closer oversight. At least the public is finally starting to protest. If there is a large enough outcry, maybe, just maybe, it will force the government to stop stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

I’ve always been fascinated with marketing. My mom told me that when I was a toddler and she was watching TV with me, I would doze off during the shows but wake up as soon as I heard the jingles from the commercials. I’m one of those people who hates football but has often watched the Super Bowl just to see the commercials. I’m not easily persuaded to buy stuff, but I like to see how it’s being marketed.

I took marketing and advertising in college. I did quite well in both subjects. We had to set up an advertising campaign for our final project, and my professor liked mine so well that she gave me an A+ in spite of serious math errors in the budget section. Yet when it comes to marketing myself as a freelance writer, I don’t do very well.

I guess it’s because I don’t really like to toot my own horn. I ran across a website of another freelance writer the other day, and it was very nice and professional. I browsed around a bit, and thought she must get lots of clients. But when I looked at her published works page, I saw that she had much less experience than me. Two thoughts ran through my head: That it takes courage to present yourself that well when you’re first starting out, and that I needed to get my portfolio site started because I now knew that it wouldn’t be the least impressive one out there.

Maybe I could benefit from some sales training. Salespeople know how to exude confidence and persuade others to buy whatever they have to offer. But really, I guess I’ve got it in me if I can just let it shine through. For the first few jobs I actually got, I remember trying to think like someone who was really confident in her abilities. Obviously it worked, because I had no experience except for personal blogging, and I got them anyway.

Confidence hasn’t really been my strong point lately, though. I know I can write, but thanks to my lack of concentration, it has been slow going. And for some reason I’ve been more critical of myself than usual. I’ve got to work on both of those things so I can keep moving forward.

I’ve had my new computer for almost a week now, and so far I love it. It’s so liberating to not have to wait five minutes just to check my email. I had a bad week last week with my ADD, yet I still managed to get my work done on schedule. How awesome is that?

Now if I can just reign in my brain and stay focused, I should be able to get more work done in much, much less time. I knew my old machine was ridiculously slow, but I don’t think I fully grasped how slow until I started working on this one. I can actually write an article in a reasonable amount of time now. Part of it is because of the faster computer itself, and part of it is the fact that I can be more productive when I’m not mentally (and sometimes literally) screaming at the computer all the time.

Hubby still won’t let the fact that I bought a new one rest. He nearly went into fits when his friend told him that he had one he would have sold me for $20. But when I asked him about it, he said it had Windows 98 and needed a memory upgrade. If I wanted to go that route, I could have done so with my old computer. If I could upgrade the memory myself, I would have come out a little bit ahead by the time I bought Vista and some memory. But I can’t, so that really wouldn’t have made much sense. But try telling Hubby that.

He’ll get over it in time. If not, I just don’t really care any more.

After much research, I finally found a computer that appears to have the power I need that was within my meager budget. I would have liked to have gotten a quad-core, but Hubby would have pitched a fit if I had spent that much on one. So I ended up ordering this model from eMachines.

I hope it will be a good one. I was a bit apprehensive about buying a low-end computer, but I didn’t have much choice if I wanted a decent processor and enough memory. And I looked up all the reviews I could find on eMachines, and they were all good.

They offer toll free tech support, which is a good thing. I hope I won’t need it, but you never can tell.

According to the UPS website, it should be here tomorrow. I’ll keep y’all posted.

As you probably know if you’re a regular reader, I have needed a new computer for a very long time. This one gets quirkier and less reliable every day. So I decided that if we got a decent tax refund this year, I was going to get one. If my computer dies, I can’t work, and if I can’t work, I can’t make any money.

Hubby has known this for months. He has also known that we desperately need to get caught up on the bills so we don’t have to worry so much, and buy some things we’ve needed for a long time but haven’t had the money to get. But when I got the taxes done, all he could think about was buying something he wants.

His argument? That I’m making something that I “want” top priority. As in my new computer. I’ve tried calmly explaining to him that I wouldn’t be so adamant about it if I didn’t need it for my livelihood. I’ve tried bringing up the fact that I bought him a 4-wheeler that he certainly didn’t need, not with my “share” of the tax money, but with money I worked my butt off for. And I’ve tried telling him to f*** off. But he’s still being a big baby over it.

Things always get hairy when we get our tax refund. Every year, it never fails, I want to put it toward things we need and maybe save some, and he wants to blow it. So far we’ve always divided it down the middle and used our halves as we saw fit. But if we do that this year, I’ll be buying a computer and using the rest of mine to pay some on the bills without making much progress. And he will waste his half. We can’t afford to do things that way.

It’s not like I want to use all of the money to go on one of those wild weekend getaways without him. I just want to be able to do my work without sitting around waiting on my computer to cooperate half the day, and without having to worry about losing the articles I’m working on (yes, that has happened a couple of times). I have every intention of making sure he has some money to spend after doing that and paying the bills. But he just wants to be a big baby about it.

Am I being unreasonable? I know a properly functioning computer is not too much to ask, especially when it’s what enables me to help pay the bills. And as far as the bills go, I think I should be able to get them caught up without any static. After all, I’m the one who has to juggle them constantly. He might earn the money to pay a good portion of them, but if I didn’t send it in, they wouldn’t get paid.

I hate being in charge of the finances. It’s a completely thankless job, and one that I’m not particularly good at, but I do my best.

Other than the occasional celebrity train wreck that captures my attention, I’m not real big on celebrity news. But I found something out last night that I just had to share: Peter Tork, former Monkee and current Shoe Suede Blues frontman, has cancer.

Cancer is a scary thing. I’ve lost a dad and three grandparents to it, and my aunt is a survivor. The good news in this case is that Peter’s prognosis appears to be good. A biopsy indicated that the cancer has not spread, and he is having surgery today (March 4th, 2009) to remove what they’ve found. You can read more at Peter’s website.

I’m a Monkees fan from way back. Not back when they were the kings of the world, because I wasn’t alive then, but I started watching their show when it came on MTV in the 80s. I was just a kid then, and they were the first music group I went totally gaga over.

I got older and pursued new interests, but a couple of months ago I heard about their movie, Head. I never knew they even put out a movie, and the more I heard about it, the more I wanted to see it. So I borrowed it from Netflix, and I loved it. That renewed my Monkee interest, and I started looking for my old favorite songs and seeing what the members were up to now.

I always really identified with Peter, because he was so… different. Kind of like me, only cooler. I looked up some of his new stuff online, and I was blown away. He’s just got so much talent. And even at the age of 67, he’s still a cutie pie.

Anyway, I just wanted to share the news in hopes that my readers would send some thoughts and prayers his way. I hope he gets through all this with no complications, and that he can eventually come back to North Carolina so I can see him perform live.

When I was cleaning out my office last week, I found a bunch of clothes that I had been meaning to get rid of. Some were ones I couldn’t wear or didn’t like, but most were Pumpkin’s that she had outgrown. Heck, I even found some old baby bedding that I had no clue we still had.

I had planned on having another yard sale when it warmed up, but I decided to just give as much of it away as possible. So Hubby took most of the girls’ clothes to a coworker. The things his daughter couldn’t wear are still in a box in the hallway. Maybe we’ll give them to Hubby’s brother for his daughter, even though it will be a while before she can wear them.

I don’t know what I’ll do with the stuff that was mine. Maybe I’ll put it on the local Freecycle group. Surely there’s somebody who can use it around here. I wouldn’t mind making some money from it, but I’m just so tired of all the clutter. Besides, the way the economy is right now, it would be better to give the stuff to people who need it.