Blogging for Money

Being in the technology industry, and being older, you tend to miss things that other people pick up on. It took me forever to figure out why Twitter was such a big deal, and as I work my way through this blogging thing, I’ve discovered what it appears everyone but me has known for a long time. Blogging is a business.

I rememmber blogging when it first started, and people were trying to explain how the word came about. It was journaling for everyone to see. I’m sure there’s more than a few people that regret being quite so open and honest for the world to see on this new fangled web journalling thing, called blogs. It’s certainly occured to me that some people can make money doing this, and there are a number of blogs that I do my best to keep up with, (meaning I check in occasionally). But blogging for money didn’t even enter my mind as I was shoved into this single parenthood thing. I didn’t think more than a couple of people might be interested in what I had to say. Mostly I just figured I would be more likely to write stuff down if it was in a place that I could access from anywhere, and since it didn’t cost anything to do, why not just use a blog.

I didn’t know until recently that there are blogging conferences, and I can’t really wrap my head around what people do there, besides drink and introduce themselves, and take down a bunch of new blogs to go home and read. I’d be the guy sitting in the corner, with my phone, reading some particularly interesting blog that I has discovered, or more accurately, pretending to read something interesting until someone came along and started talking to me. Actually, I do that now.

I’m sure it doesn’t apply to everyone, but I think I’d change what I write if I was writing for an audience. If I had an advertiser, I’d wonder what would interest the people who might click on that ad. I wouldn’t write things that might offend people, and I’d be overly careful not to be boring, (which should be obvious that I’m not doing now). I might bring in a few bucks, (I don’t really want to know what a well marketed active blog makes), but I think I’d have to go find another outlet for getting the thoughts out of my head.

Ad odds with that, I just read an post at http://www.sgwkids.blogspot.com/ about a day in the life of a single dad. Laundry, cleaning, making lunches, pretty darn close to my routine, but entertaining at the same time.

Maybe this is practice for moving into a role where I can write for money, please feel free to comment and tell me it’s not a good thing to waste my time on. Focus on your strentghs.

888

I’m sitting around the office, kids are at mom’s, my regular Wednesday night tennis game has been canceled again, (and we’re running out of tennis weather), and I managed to get around to trying to clean up the flickr account. There’s over 4,000 photos in my flickr account, I’m trying to use it as a backup, but it’s really hard, (at least for me) to organize things in a reasonable way on Flickr.

So I’m looking through pictures, and wind up at May 2009, and thought hey, I wonder what pictures I took and uploaded just before the kids mom announced she was leaving? That’d be kind of interesting, in a looking at a totaled car after an accident kind of way. Some of the pictures were really old, like that was forever ago that we did whatever thing. So I headed over towolframalpha.com and typed in days between may 21, 2009 and today, and it came back with 888. If I was superstitious, I’d find some revelation in 888. Being less than that, I just thought it was cool, and thought about Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, which has no connection, other than the repeating numbers, and it’s in the news a lot.

So my Flickr pics aren’t really any more organized, but I did find my previous attempts at making some sense of way too many photos somehow reasonable. I’m starting to think there was value in having to pay for film, pay for processing, and then wait a few days, or overnight, or 1 hour, (depending on the year) for your printed pictures to come back. If I’d had to buy all of that film, it would be about $537, just for the film. Processing would easily double that figure. I do have lots of pictures of the kids, although, they’re pretty repetitive.

So I’ve used up an hour, written some meandering paragraphs, answered txt’s from an old friend, who only contacts me when his website, (which I host) is down.

Sigh…

Happiness

I’ve started a few posts, trying to describe, more to myself than the few people that stop by here, that while my life is pretty good, and I’ve made a lot of little improvements to how I do things to try and get myself out of the rut that I feel like I’m in, I’m not happy. I have a good time, I do fun things, I go out with friends, had my post marital relationship, and while I can honestly say I have fun, I can’t say that I’m happy. I think I was close for a while, or I was working so hard at not being unhappy, I didn’t have time to think about anything else.

Knowing your not alone, in this weird sort of, life is good but… state is helpful. Jenni at singlemomwhoami.com , wrote about, what I think is a very similar situation and summed it up much more eloquently than I did. I had decided the day before yesterday that exercise was my next attempt, maybe I’m on to something. Thanks Jenni for putting so well.

Parents & Drinking

Singlemommyhood.com linked to an article on the Today show about drinking parents. They asked what thoughts were about being a single parent, and drinking. I started thinking about how different my kids lives are compared to my childhood. Beyond the fact that both their mother and I are fairly non-social, we’re not anti-social, we’re just awkward, and don’t know exactly how to handle the social settings, so we tended to find things to do that usually didn’t involve large groups.

When I was a kid, we had parties, and parties meant more beverages than normal. I played waiter when I was a kid, making sure eveyone had a drink. When I was 9, I tried taking a sip or two of every drink I delivered, which resulted in a lot of humor for the guests and a lot of puking later in the night, and the next day. I remember having dreams, when my mother was pregnant with my sister, that I could hear the baby crying, because mom was drinking so much. I had no idea, being just shy of 10, that alcohol during pregancy was bad for the baby, I just didn’t think the baby would like it much, and it was in there, and there was nothing the poor little thing could do.

Parties would wind up, on those occasions when I was still awake, where the guests would all assure each other they were fine to get home. But one night, an hour or two after everyone left, the phone rang, and it was one of my dad’s coworkers, calling from jail. They wanted the hosts of the party, my parents, to come and bail him out. A whopping lapse of judgement on his part, exceeded only by my parents packing me and my baby sister up and driving the 20 miles or so to the jail he was to pick him up and drive him home. I didn’t think of the sheer stupidity of the entire situation at the time, but, really?

There would also be the occasional, or more than occasional fight that comes out when both parents are pretty hammered. I remember hearing my parents fighting, and glass breaking. I pulled the blankets up in my bed and tried not to hear. The next morning my mother’s favorite lamp was missing. She threw it at my dad.

In my teens, mom would pop open her first can of whatever beer was on sale at about 11 am. I’m not at all sure how she managed to make it all the way to dinner, and manage to actually cook something, but she did. On a night after a long day of swilling down the beer, somehow mom and I were at a neighbors, and they wound up making out, while I sat and waited for her to ride me home.

I stopped acknowldeging my mothers existence that night. I didn’t talk to her, answer her questions, or respond to her in any way. It wound up being considerably easier than dealing with her. I guess I was a stubborn kid, because this went on for months, until my dad sat me down one night and said, “you should give your mother a break…” I asked him why, and he said, “she’s been going to AA for a month, and hasn’t had anything to drink, and you haven’t even noticed.

He was right, I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t care, but somehow loving our parents is in our DNA, and I gave her a break. I never told him what happened, and I’m certain she didn’t. I’m pretty sure she didn’t remember any of it.

Which brings me back to parents and drinking. The Today show article was about baby Lisa’s mother, who admits she had more than 5, but less than 10 glasses of wine, and blacked out at some point during the night. She’s not at all certain what she did that night, but she KNOWS that she didn’t do anything bad to the baby.

If you have a glass or two of wine after you put the kids to bed, while you read your book, watch a movie, talk on the phone, or just sit in a dark room and breathe, that seems pretty reasonable to me. You’re still able to provide your full attention to your children, should something happen. If you drink enough to black out, or make out with a neighbor in front of your kid, I think maybe that’s not ok.

Garage Sales

Garage sale season must be nearly over. Saturday mornings when I don’t have the kids I take the motorcycle out and search for garage sales. It’s a simple and enjoyable thing that tents to work out pretty well. It’s a good excuse to get up early on a Saturday. If you start late, all the good stuff is gone. Riding early in the morning is both really pretty, and there’s less traffic. It’s also way to be back at the house before I’d normally be up on a Saturday, and a good excuse to take a nap in the afternoon. It’s convenient that, on the bike, I can only buy what will fit in my backpack, which keeps down my spending as well as the amount of other people’s crap I haul home and have to deal with. It also gives me a chance to meet people, which I tend not do find opportunities to do. People tend to be talkative when they’re sitting in their yards with nowhere to go.

I usually don’t have a destination in mind when I leave, and no particular time to go home, I just follow the signs, turn at random and find myself on roads, and in areas I’ve never even know where there. Sometimes a full pack sends me home, or an empty wallet. More often it’s the heat, with a jacket on, and no place to put it, it gets uncomfortable.

The signs are getting fewer and further between, and while it might just be my perception, the junk isn’t as good as it is in the peak of the season. So today, at 10:00 am I’m sitting at starbucks, drinking coffee and writing with a pen and notepad. It’s kind of a novel concept, especially for a blog entry. There are 2 older men sitting at the next table, solving, or at least discussing the world’s economic problems. A family with little kids sitting next to them. People come and go, ordering a variety of beverages I don’t recognize. It’s amazing how seldom the word coffee is actually used in a starbucks.

After an hour of listening to bits of conversation and jazz, which I’ve decided that I really don’t much care for, the crowd has come and gone a couple of times. The line has grown and disappeared, and I think my handwriting needs work. It’s been a long time since just sat and written. I’m not certain I’ll be able to transcribe this when I get back, (which, since this post is here, appears to have been ok).

First Day of School

There’s some concern about going back to school at our house, and then there’s some general freaking out. Sadly, it’s me doing the freaking out, and I can’t really figure out why. I’ve had to convince myself that it’s NOT tomorrow for the last couple of days. Right now, minutes before midnight, stew is cooking in the crockpot for their lunch. Not tomorrow’s lunch, but the day after tomorrow. They have enough clean laundry to cover the next 2 weeks at my house, and we went out and bought my daughter some jeans, not because she needed them, but because I needed her to have them.

Sigh…

Backing up a few days, Labor day weekend was mine on the rotating schedule, but the parenting plan says that odd years, labor day weekend is hers. She didn’t notice this bit of trivia, and near the last minute, she kindly offered to let me have the kids over the holiday, and she’d just go ahead and take next labor day, and we’d adjust the parenting plan so she’d now have even years. So my plan of plodding through a 3 day weekend, getting things done between bouts of napping and motorcycling was tossed out the window in exchange for boat maintenance, and a full day on the water on Sunday. An excellent day, beautiful weather, great scenery, and generally happy kids. Monday followed with a variety of kid activities, laundry, grocery shopping, dinner, and the evening routine. So my schedule is off.

I can’t even remember how I did this last year. I think I was still so overwhelmed by the divorce that I was running on auto-pilot, which may have provided the kids with a more stable parent than they’re getting this year. We’re supposed to find the pink folder with last year’s math problems for my 8 year old. I’ve never had to go find last years work before. I’m not even sure it’s here. It could be at mom’s house, it could be part of the 90% post consumer grocery bag we brought home from Trader Joe’s on Saturday.

It seems that beyond the day-early stew that’s bubbling in the kitchen as I type, I’ve completely forgotten what I send for lunch. I went through the cupboards, and I think I have enough for at least 3 days of lunches without going to the store, which was a relieve, but I still feel a tension that is exponentially larger than it needs to be for an event like, getting them to school on Wednesday.

The kids appear to have their own stress over going back to school, although to a significantly lesser degree than me. Both are a bit edgy, but still in mostly good spirits. We had a good weekend, they seem to have had a lot of fun, even though they were told it was dad’s house, mom’s house, oh, no, it’s dad’s house, which has to be kind of a pain for them.

Here’s hoping Wednesday morning goes well.

Vacation 2011

Vacation 2011. I’m not much of a vacation guy, I tend to be kind of frantic after a day or two, I don’t sit around and do nothing very well. We tended not to do annual vacations, both because of expense, and coordinating our schedules. I’ve also discovered that part of skipping vacations was trying to figure out where and what the vacation would encompass.

This year the mom and the new boyfriend took the kids to the coast, stayed in, what the kids describe as a huge resort, and a beach house, that my daughter said isn’t a beach house because it’s not on the beach. It was 2 blocks from the beach. She seemed fairly upset that they kept calling it a beach house.

I had a trip planned to visit family, and a friend that runs cabins in the forest. It would mean a lot of driving and covering some of the territory they covered with mom, but it was different destinations and would include an theme park, which is one of my favorite vacation stops. My vacation also included work. W visited and fixed computers and websites, and covered the bills. It saved hundreds of dollars, but meant the kids had to find their own things to do for a few hours while I paid for the trip.

We spent hours in the van, listening to music, stories, talking, and laughing. My daughter was the navigator, programming the gps, finding things on the phone, and helping pick out places to stop. We worked on not having too much of a schedule, so we could opt to take some time off to go do unexpected things. We toured a candy factory, but missed the cheese company tour. The kids found a Chinese buffet that had an amazing variety, and they ate tons of food.

Oddly the theme park wasn’t the highlight of their trip, the hotel pool on the first and last days seemed to be their favorite. Wee went to target and bought goggles and some diving toys, and they had a great time playing with them.

I continue to learn how much less stressful my life is being the sole decision maker. I might still be married if I hadn’t have tried so hard to be what she wanted me to be, and was just who I am. Of course, she may have left years earlier.

The lesson? I am learning to just be me, and when someone shows up that I really fall for, I need to keep being me, being the dad that I am, and let her be who she is, and it will work, or it won’t.

Breastfeeding Doll

The breastfeeding doll has been making a stir, from the news, the mom blogs, even wait wait don’t tell me, the NPR news comedy program. The whole concept pisses me off, but probably not for the reason you think.

Both of my kids were breastfed. It just wasn’t an issue in our house. They understood when their niece and nephew were breastfed, and the small grocery coop we shop at has a place set aside for moms. The thing that pisses me off about the dolls isn’t that they highlight breastfeeding, but that they take the imagination away from the child and give them a doll with a specific purpose. The doll, from what I understand, is keyed to the special halter that comes with it, and the battery operated doll will move it’s lips and make sucking noises when it comes in contact with the particular places on the top.

It amazes me that the toy makers haven’t figured out, or maybe it’s the parents that don’t understand, that a doll that doesn’t anything is a doll that does anything. My kids both had dolls, and they did all kinds of things, including being nursed. It didn’t require a special top, sometimes there wasn’t any top at all. Either of the kids would sit with the doll and hold it to their chest and say “shhhhhhh” she’s nursing. It was really cute, and didn’t need batteries, special clothing, or an $80 doll to make it work. These same dolls were babies, coworkers, friends, and a multitude of other things. Whatever their imagination came up with, these dolls filled the bill.

I have a hard time with any toy that takes the imagination out of play. I was a huge fan of Legos until they started making kits that forced kids to make a particular thing, rather than whatever they could dream up. Anyone who has seen a kid play with a cardboard box knows how creativity can grow with the simplest of toys.

A breastfeeding doll forces kids to address breastfeeding, rather than letting them discover it on their own, when they’re ready to mimic what mom did with them, or their younger siblings. Sadly, breastfeeding isn’t a natural, normal thing in a lot of American households. Parents are stuck with explaining what that lady is doing with the baby, or worse, here’s what you do with this doll.

Kids have unlimited imaginations. They can make blocks into a building, a car, a spaceship, or a million other things in their heads. Why do we keep insisting on giving them toys that make them do this or that, rather than anything? Blocks don’t need batteries, and they’re biodegradable.

Written on The iPad.

Wii

Sometimes when I make decisions on kid things, I think about the things that I remember most about my parents, and what I thought were important as a kid. When I was 10 the most important thing in the world was a BMX bike. Not just any bike, but the right one, in the right color, with the right wheels, pedals, handlebars, it had to be the right bike. This was more than transportation, more than a status symbol, it was important to me. It’s all I wanted for Christmas. It’s all I wanted. I let them know what bike I wanted and what bike shop to get it at. It wasn’t overly expensive, I didn’t want the one for twice the price because it cost more. I just wanted the mid-range bike that met all of my criteria.

Vacations and Phone Calls

The kids mom is taking the kids on a summer vacation. They didn’t get a summer vacation last year, so this is their first time deviating from our regular rotation with mom. She wrote and asked a good time to have them call me during the week, so they can check in. I’ve never been a fan of the scheduled “check in” or “call your dad” thing. I got to watch the stepkids react to, do you want to call your dad, say hi? I was always surprised at how little enthusiasm this offer was met with. From “I guess” to a plain, “nope”. I found it heartbreaking, and didn’t understand how they could just not be interested in checking in with their dad.

I made the offer early on, when we’d go do something to see if they wanted to let their mom know what was going on, or say hi, or goodnight or whatever, and the answer was never enthusiastic. I never had the experience as a kid, of being in a 2 household situation, but my suspicision is that some kids don’t want to be reminded that the other parent isn’t there. They’re having fun, doing cool stuff, or even just doing everyday stuff, and the offer to contact the other parent is a reminder that that parent isn’t there, and isn’t going to be there.