Along with the economy in general, my web site revenues seemed to have put the worst behind them, but the recovery is slow. I had three months in a row where I will earn a payment from Amazon (greater than $10 worth of commissions earned) whereas last quarter I only had one. AdSense is still anemic, but I got $5 in September. Somebody bought a couple of LED flashlight bulbs, so that sale almost certainly came from a link on the blog when I wrote about those. The most expensive item I sold was a Casio Men’s Pathfinder Multi-Band Solar Atomic Black Watch for $167.92. That locked in a payment for the month all by itself with a commission of $10.08. For the quarter I sold 40 items worth $1,060.52, earning $54.38.
Opossum in a Fig Tree
I’ve had a lot of opossum activity lately. A few weeks ago at night, I let the dogs out and they were barking which they don’t do unless they’ve got something. So I rushed outside and they were barking at a tree. I used the flashlight to scan the tree and there were two faces looking back at me. Opossums about five feet apart in the branches. I thought it wouldn’t be good to take a picture because that might force them to play dead and they would fall out of the tree. Then just the other night we were taking a walk and the dogs perked up about something, but it was near a house where there are outdoor cats. I turned on my flashlight on low to look around and there was something scurrying towards us. It turned and came straight down the sidewalk towards us at a fairly casual walking pace, a opossum. I held the dogs back and it stopped as if it was just noticing us, thought better of its current path and turned to cross the street and away from us. The dogs loved this.
Then tonight I let the dogs out and they went bolting into the backyard. They don’t do this unless they are on to something. I grabbed the flashlight again (I keep one hanging right next to the back door for this kind of thing) and looked all around. Directly under the fig tree I could see out towards all of the canopy, but I didn’t see anything. I got out and went to the side and there was a opossum hanging on and watching us. I went back in and the dogs followed (amazingly) and got the camera. With the dogs shut inside I was able to snap this photo.
Yard Man, Meet Lawn Boy
When I first bought my house, Mr. Deckbar donated his old Lawn Boy mower to me. It was just like the one we used to have and I used it for several years but each Spring it was harder to get started. Norm turned me on to Starting Fluid which will bring just about any engine to life (it is pure octane, actually ether I think) but even with that it was sluggish. So I checked out Consumer Reports in 2003 and they had a Yard Man mower that they liked and said did a good job of mulching. With the old mower I would bag and compost the clippings sometimes, but mulching is better because it just recycles the clippings into the ground where they help the grass grow.
JP1 Still Kicking
Five years ago, I got a JP1 cable to connect my computer and JP1-compatible remote control. That remote stopped working (some of the buttons wore out, but I was able to remap those functions to other buttons for a while). I was at Mom’s house recently and wanted to help her JP1 remote learn to run her new iPod boom box. The easiest way is just to learn the signals from the device’s remote into the universal remote by pointing them at each other and pressing some buttons. But because I had done this to learn everything for her HDTV to analog converter box, there wasn’t any memory left for the boom box.
AJC Discount
I recently let my subscription to the newspaper lapse. They wanted a lot more than I had been paying in the past to resubscribe and their discounts were lousy. Mom showed me a flyer today with a 50% off discount, so I have re-upped. It is for new subscribers, but they had an ominous warning that they would charge for amounts past due (which I have because they always keep delivering the paper after it lapses), so we’ll see what happens with that.
These are 13-week prices, but you can also get 26 weeks for a little less:
7-day: $2.49/wk
Thu-Sun: $2.25/wk
Sunday: $1.47/wk
Just go to ajc.com/discount. You don’t seem to need an offer code, but the one I got from Mom was 2130.