Sometimes I wonder if it would be useful for blogs and forums to have a simple question for people to answer before clicking the “Submit” button.

Maybe something like this:

Before posting your comment, have you read the entire thread?

Yes, and my comment adds to the discussion.

Heck no! I don’t care if the question has already been answered a dozen times or if the situation has already been resolved or if the situation was not as originally described and that I will look like a complete idiot and be making a fool of myself for responding the way I have without any regard for the remainder of the discussion and what others have said. I just want to leave my comment with my all-important website link and also so I can add to my post count so I can look like someone who is contributing something of value when really all I do is contribute simple responses without regard for the topic at hand.

On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t read it anyway.

Sigh.

I’ve been out of school for many, many years. We had a home economics class in 7th grade, which I’m reasonably sure was a required course. We learned stuff like cooking, basic child care, etc. I’m not coming up with a good segue here, so I’m just going to jump to the next question… Do you have any wooden kitchen utensils? Knives and forks with wooden handles? Wooden bowls? Wooden spoons? Etc.

You know, the wood dries up and cracks over time, especially if you leave them soak in the water for too long or don’t dry them quickly enough after washing.

Did you know, though, that you can prevent that? Of course, the first step is to wash and dry them shortly after use, and don’t let them stand wet for an extended period of time. But, beyond that, you can also treat them occasionally by rubbing them down with mineral oil and letting it soak in. You can buy commercial preparations with mineral oils and waxes (approved for use on food service products) to keep your kitchen goods in good condition.

I just learned that a couple weeks ago. Didn’t learn that in school!

Also, you can help keep your knives sharper by washing and drying them immediately after use. If you let water set on them, it dulls the blades. Just learned that recently too.

You know, we’ve lived in a disposable-goods society for perhaps too long. Something wears out, you throw it away and buy new. Teaching people to take care of things was perhaps not a priority. Wooden handles dry out and crack? No worries. Just throw them away and buy new stuff. Who doesn’t like new stuff?

Well, I think we’ve learned the lesson of throwing things away and buying new stuff all the time. If you keep your things in good condition, you can use them longer. And that means you don’t have to throw them away and buy new ones. And that means you save money.

Even if you have to buy a commercial preparation of mineral oil and waxes and spend some time now and then applying it to your wooden goods, that’s still far less expensive then letting things go bad and buying new.

And, what of your tools? Sure, you probably learned how to use them in shop class, but what about how to maintain them? You probably know it’s not a good idea to leave them outside in the rain, but what about your everyday storage? Tools are most often kept in the garage or basement, which tend to have high humidity levels and are not the best place to store things that you don’t want to rust. After use, you should dry your tools (if they’ve gotten wet) and wipe them with a coat of oil to keep out rust. An oily rag will do the trick. You can also use commercial preparations for cleaning and rust-proofing your tools. For long-term storage, you should look at thicker coatings and dehumidifying agents.

The same goes for your gardening tools. Don’t leave caked-on mud and dirt on them. That only helps to seal in moisture and promote rust. Wash and dry them off. Maybe even rub a coat of oil on them to seal out moisture, as you do with your other tools.

You can’t afford to throw things away anymore. You shouldn’t have been doing it before, either. Spending money to replace things that could have been maintained or repaired doesn’t make sense.

Soon, we’ll be seeing flowers like this!

Well, maybe not quite like this one; I think my hibiscus generally flowers in mid-summer, but soon there will be some types of flowers anyway!

I should probably update the gardening blog…

She does eat a lot…

Is it sad that I’m still looking for dollhouse furniture, even though I don’t have a dollhouse?

I just need to find a decent carpet. I think that’s what I really need to finish this project. Maybe a blanket too. And some nice flooring. Walls. I think I can build the walls myself. Paint them a solid color. Maybe a faux finish. No patterns. Don’t want to have to buy tiny wallpaper. Flooring–don’t know what to do there. Obviously regular wood would be too large. Maybe I’ll have to be creative. I don’t want to spend much money on this project…

Here is Little Too in her St. Patrick’s Day outfit, standing next to, um, ol’ St. Pat, both of whom are right by the, um, St. Patrick’s Day tree.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

Ever feel trapped? Like you want to bust out the tiny window of your office and crawl through broken shards of glass to reach the freedom of the outdoors?

Well, don’t do that! After all, who can afford the window repairman in this economy?

Hang in there!

Spring is just around the corner!

The other day, Michael Kwan commented that, while I’ve updated my theme again, I haven’t done anything about my goal posting in the sidebar. You can still see where it says “Goal $300k by 2007/12/31″

I have two reasons for not changing that. As most of you probably know, I didn’t meet that goal. Nowhere close, as you can tell by the progress amount that shows “Remaining: $299,994.75.” My first reason is that I don’t want to hide the failure. I don’t want to bury the attempt and pretend as though it never happened. At some point, I will remove it from the sidebar, but the old posts referencing it will remain. The other reason I haven’t removed it is because I don’t want to remove it until I replace it with a new goal. I haven’t yet set that goal. Until I do, that old, unmet goal will remain.

Mind you, that’s not to say I don’t have goals. I do, but what I want in the “sidebar goal” is another monetary goal, probably another big money goal like the first one.

That $300,000 is certainly not the first unrealized goal that I’ve had. Back in grade school, I figured that I would have my own space station by the mid-1990s. I’d have a space ship by then and be able to travel to the stars. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know how to build those things but I figured by the 1990s that would have been time enough to figure it all out!

We grew up with the fear that there might not be a tomorrow, that a nuclear war might kill us all. So, my plans revolved around that. I had plans for an underground shelter, that would be a comfortable living quarters. I figured it could be built in my backyard. I’d have room for my family and some of my friends. I don’t remember if I planned for my friends’ parents or not. It would also house all my pets.

The major part of the shelter was a living room. There’d be chairs, TV with VCR (because the TV stations would be off the air having been destroyed in the nuclear holocaust so you’d have to watch tapes), games and stuff. Off of the living room were different rooms. There was a food storage room, a room for water and I think there was a kitchen. I think I had planned for being able to store at least 10 years worth of food and water. There were bathrooms, and bedrooms for people. There was also a couple rooms for my pets (had to keep the birds and fish separate from the cat and dog). And, since the nuclear winter could last for years, there was a mortuary room where bodies could be interred.

There was also a garage where my indestructible, radiation-proof car could be stored. It would also allow me to exit the house if we needed something.

There was also a library and I think a science lab too. I might have also had a hospital room.

Over the years, that idea evolved. Later, the underground house became a three-level facility that could take off and head into space. After all, if all life on Earth was destroyed, it’d be time to look for greener pastures!

When I was older, instead of having my own space station in the mid-1990s, I figured I’d be a millionaire by that time.

I’m sure you’ve realized I didn’t meet those goals either.

But, I’ll share with you my current goals, and I hope that I will achieve these.

First, I want to make enough money that I can pay off all of my debts and all of my parents’ debts as well.

I want to be able to build my dream house. And that dream house is still one that will be at least partially underground! I want a house that will stand for generations to come. I want it to be able to withstand tornados, flooding, earthquakes and anything else that may happen. If I one day have a family, I’d like it to be a house where at least a part of my family can live for generations to come.

When I was growing up, before we moved to Ohio, we lived next door to my grandparents. Three generations of my family had lived in that house. The house wasn’t that old. My grandparents bought it. But, my great grandfather also lived with them in that house for a time. My mother grew up in it as well. Our house was actually built on their land. The lot was a large lot, so it was split and my parents built our house. So, it could be argued that four generations of my family had lived on that land.

That’s something that I think is nice, and I would like to build a house that would be a home for my family for, hopefully, generation after generation to come.

And, if I don’t have a family, I would like my dream house to be a museum to show how we lived in our time. We seem to focus too much on famous people and we don’t often see how normal people lived. So, I think it would be nice to be able to show that for future generations.

Of course, if I do have a family, maybe I could have a large enough plot of land that both the museum and the family home could be on the property. Then my family could be the curators of the museum and keep it as both a family history and also as a historical museum displaying a slice of life during our period of history.

I’d also like a small aviary and botanical gardens, but they can be part of the house.

I would also like to grow my rubber stamp company, and have its own building (perhaps on the same lot as the family home and museum!) and keep it in the family. I have a small collection of old rubber stamps, and, again, it would be nice to have something that shows old-time rubber stamping as well as keeping up with new advances and keeping the company going. And, if digital documents do away with rubber stamping, perhaps it could become a rubber stamping museum. Though, I imagine people will always be using rubber stamps, at least for artistic purposes. I don’t see that permanently dying out. Even with digital media, people still like to do things with their hands.

I also want to finish my novels and see them published, as well as have movies made of some of my ideas, even if I have to finance them myself. I have stories I want to tell. Some would work best as novels, while others really need to be on-screen.

And, there are also charitable things I would like to do. I’m not really sure what things I would do though, I have various ideas, but haven’t really settled on anything specific, and those ideas are always changing, too. So, I don’t have any clear goals in mind as far as that is concerned. I think it would be kind of cool to be like a secret Santa of sorts. Something where you might read about a family needing something, whether it’s money or a wheelchair or something, and I’d find a way to get that to them without them ever knowing where it came from. I think that would be cool. It would kind of bring a sense of magic to life, and that’s something we all need at times.

Anyway, so that’s why I would like to be rich! It’s not about money per se–it’s about the things you can do with that money.

Every month, I get thousands of readers to this blog.

I say that not to brag but to stress the importance of sticking with things.

I didn’t always have that much traffic. I was fortunate that I had heard about John Chow before starting this blog. I had read his free eBook, so I had a head start in knowing some of the things to do to start getting readers to my blog. I had my first comment (from Michael Kwan) on this blog in just a little over three hours after my first post.

Some of my early commentators don’t appear to have blogs anymore. Some are gone completely; others have sat idle for months, even over a year. The blogging crowd changes constantly. Some people leave with some notice. Some have gone on to build other blogs, and let their original blogs fall by the wayside. Some have moved on to other things, and blogging was no longer at the top of their interests. Others just left without a word. What happened to them? Did they simply move on to other things? Did they fall on hard times and couldn’t afford Internet access anymore? Did they have health problems?

When I was getting started, I met a number of bloggers who started around the same time I did. Many of them had also read John Chow’s eBook, and they were interested in “blogging for money.” And, that’s where consistency really pays off. You have to keep at it. A number of these “blogging for money” bloggers were gone in a couple months. New ones sprout up now and then, and are often gone too with a couple months time.

Many such bloggers aim for the stars, but they give up before their rocket reaches the launch pad.

Mind you, perhaps some of them started earning money in other ways, and decided to focus on those things and quit blogging in favor of those efforts. But, I suspect that may not be the case with some of the money bloggers. I’m sure a number of them thought it would be easy to make money blogging. At the time, John Chow was making maybe around $20,000 per month on his blog. So, I know many people figured that, heck, just 5% of that would be great! I’m sure many people would be leaping for joy if their blog brought them an extra $1,000 a month.

But, you are not going to get to that overnight! It took me over a year of blogging before I had a month that approached $600. I am sure I would be doing much better if I blogged more consistently with higher quality posts rather than phoning it in, as I have been largely doing lately.

You have to aim for the stars! But, you can’t quit before you’ve launched your rocket!

Traffic, the key ingredient to any blog, takes time to build. Sure, you can find ways to speed things up, but if you don’t have the time or money to put into building traffic and producing content, you largely limit your focus to one or the other. And content is really where your initial focus should be. Make sure that it’s good stuff you’re putting out there. Then, you have to wait for organic traffic to build and people to start hitting your site. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do any traffic building efforts to start. You need to put some work in at building traffic, but your main focus should be content. Write your content, invest the bulk of your time on that, and then try to bring in traffic in the time you have left.

This is true no matter what kind of business you want to get into. You have to be patient. Overnight success rarely happens and, when it does, it was probably the result of a lot of hard work and preparation… and patience!

Throughout the week, I’ve put up several free background patterns.

Well, I’ve been busy creating more!

I’m up to 56 background patterns at the moment, including those you’ve already seen on the blog.

You won’t get to see them all, though. It wasn’t my original plan, but I got busy making these things and figured out something to do with them. They’ll be part of a HTML basics guide. They’ll serve as both a lesson and bonus material.

I think I’ll try for about a hundred different patterns. That should be enough to get people started. If I get carried away, I may add more. Who knows?

Oh, and the yellow and blue diamond pattern above I created is another that you can use on your websites or blogs. Just right-click it and save it to your computer, and then upload to your site! No hot-linking! Hot-linking is bandwidth theft, and you may not like what happens to bandwidth thieves. Free to use, but acknowledgment and a link back would be appreciated!

Note: The background is free for your own personal use only. You can use it on your personal or commercial sites. You cannot sell or give it away though.