Tag Archives: Blog

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

What are your fondest memories of the library?

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I can recall near the back of the kids room there was a section for graphic novels. They were somewhere between comics and books. I think they were the perfect bridge between children’s books and adult literature.

I enjoyed reading Tin Tin and Elf Quest.

As I grew older, I began reading the fiction books on the spinning book rack on the second floor. These books were later relocated to the kids section after remodeling.

We would often borrow VHS tapes from the library. I remember the library had full sets of Red Dwarf and Black Adder. I watched these often. I think this is where I got my peculiar sense of humor.

I actually got to attend a Red Dwarf convention in Seattle. I remember meeting Craig Charles and the cast, getting autographs, and showing off my own dread locks to Craig. It is a cherished memory from my childhood.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

What is one thing you would change about yourself?

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I’ve been on medication for my cholesterol since 2020. I had made some attempts at changing my diet and exercising more often, but I just couldn’t keep it up.

Thankfully there are inexpensive generics available for my medicine.

But, I would like to change my lifestyle.

I watch YouTube channels like Julien Kang and Gym Jong Kook and I envy their dedication to fitness. I would love to be able to maintain that kind of lifestyle.

Since I am not working and I don’t have a vehicle or any current activities beyond the grounds of the property I have become quite sedentary.

I spend most of my day studying in front of the computer. Afterwards, I might head over to the living room and sit down to watch episodes of I Am Solo or My Little Old Boy on Viki.

We have an exercise bike and there’s even a BowFlex in the basement. I sometimes, very occasionally, take walks around the house and sometimes the property.

One summer, a long time ago, when I was still quite active I made walking paths all around the property and graded them with gravel. There are flower beds along some of the paths, but they don’t really get enough light.

I even dug out a small watering hole for frogs. I taken to referring to it as the “pond.” Although, now it is surrounded by a bamboo grove, but I still hear the frogs each season.

I’ve run off and lost my point.

If I could change something it would be my lifestyle. I want to lose weight, improve my diet, and get off medicine permanently.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

Do you ever see wild animals?

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We regularly get squirrels and deer each season. The deer are always trying to get into our vegetable garden and most years they succeed!

  1. Racoon
  2. Interesting Moth
  3. Red-Tailed Hawk
  4. Eastern Cottontail Rabbits
  5. Abandoned Kitten

Racoon

I have this old photo from my hometown. This is at Fort Warden State Park just outside the Cablehouse Canteen, circa 91′.

Interesting Moth

This fellow was found inside our greenhouse one afternoon.

Red-Tailed Hawk

They stalk prey under the canopy in the early mornings.

Eastern Cottontail Rabbits

There are three species of rabbits native to North Carolina. In my region, we get these Eastern Cottontails.

Abandoned Kitten

Well, this wasn’t really a wild animal. But it did take a while to clean him up and find a nice family to adopt.

Errant Literary, Side Hustles

3 Ways to Earn Extra Income Online

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Don’t you hate it when you click on a link titled like this and it turns out to either be a generic list of activities or a veiled suggestion to think for yourself?

You won’t get that here. I hate it when I fall for clickbait, and I’m sure you’ve probably run into that stuff yourself. So, I should probably get to the list.

Referral links included. Use or ignore, no worries.

1. Rev: Closed Captioning

If you have watched any videos online, you will have likely seen the CC option to enable subtitles or closed captioning.

Rev is a company that employs freelance workers to create those captions. I came across this service back in 2021, and my application was accepted after a short while.

The way it works is, after logging into your account, you can review a list of available captioning jobs and watch previews of the content. Once you find one you want, you can claim it.

There are estimates on each video for how long it is expected will take to finish the project. So, you try to finish the work within the time limit. If a job is proving difficult, you can ‘un-claim’ it and leave it for a more experienced captioner.

The service uses a ranking system to designate job availability. As you improve your captioning skills and receive good grades on your completed jobs, your rank will improve, and you can get access to higher-paying captioning tasks.

They issue payment for jobs completed each week on Fridays. Payments are sent to your PayPal account.

You need to be 18 years or older to work as a freelancer at Rev.

Here is the Eligibility article for the service.

2. Get Paid To sites

You may or may not have heard of these; they’ve been around since the early days of the dotcom boom and subsequent bust.

Generally, these types of sites are used by commercial businesses to advertise apps or digital products to highly engaged target groups. They also serve as hosts to data acquisition firms and survey issuers.

The main players in this space are Prodege, Almedia, and ironSource.

Prodege is the parent company of InboxDollars, MyPoints, and Swagbucks.

Almedia operates FreeCash, and ironSource runs Tapjoy.

Many of the offers or deals on the site can be completed for free, such as completing a survey, answering a poll, or playing a game. They also offer points for using their referral links when you shop at online retailers.

You can upload your receipts from grocery stores to get points on the items you bought. They will have special deals where you can get large chunks of points for buying specific branded items.

The sites each have different point valuations for redemption. Swagbucks is 100 points per dollar, and MyPoints is 150. FreeCash and InboxDollars both use direct USD reward amounts. All sites allow you to redeem for gift cards, PayPal, or a bank transfer. FreeCash also allows for Crypto redemptions.

The game offers are the most lucrative, in my opinion. The highest-paying game I’ve seen was $395 USD (Puzzles & Survival). You need a smartphone if you’re going to do the mobile games.

Android is preferred, but you can manage with an iPhone. The main problem with Apple devices is that the Privacy settings on them block the tracking cookies that are used to track your gameplay and completion of other types of offers. This can be disabled in settings, but updates will usually re-enable it, which could cause you to lose money.

You can see my lifetime earnings above. I joined Swagbucks in January 2020 and have earned $3833, with $3013 of that from deals and games.

Most of the platforms support users from the US, UK, Canada, and other countries. I have guides to the offers and games elsewhere on the site.

3. Payhip

I must apologize, but this last one skirts dangerously close to “think for yourself.”

Payhip is a selling platform primarily for digital goods and services. I started using it after I ran into problems with Amazon Publishing. I have used Payhip to publish a free digital magazine.

https://kasanje.com/b/wqb2S

I actually made more money with Kindle Unlimited. However, after a while, it became too much trouble because they kept sending me mixed signals about which categories my content should be listed in.

This option for making money is less certain than the two previous choices I provided. With this avenue, you will need something to sell.

  • If you have some insight into a particular subject, maybe you could put together a course teaching the topic and sell that.
  • Have a large photo collection? You might consider packaging it all up for sale as stock imagery and slap a price on the download.

There are websites where you can try to sell stock imagery, but the competition is intense. I think you would have a better shot if you promoted your collection on WordPress.

That is it for my list of “3 Ways to Earn Extra Income Online.” I hope it has been of some use to you.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any other ideas for making money online. I’d love to get your insights.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?

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My favorite place? It’s hard to choose just one. I’ve been to so many places.

Many a childhood Summer was spent with my father sailing. We would mostly go up through the San Juan Islands and into British Columbia. Although, once we went to Seattle and used the locks to enter the inner-bay.

We never made it as far as Alaska, not that we didn’t want to, we just lacked enough available time to make the journey.

Later in life, after finishing my tour at the Job Corps Center in Astoria, OR, I travelled again with my father, to visit my uncle in England. We stayed and visited with family for a time before shoving on to the next leg of our journey.

We flew down to the city of Toulouse in France and rode the trains, stopping off in small towns along the way. I got to visit castles which I was always fond of since a child.

WyrdLight.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

After France, we took a bus into Spain and then another train as we made our way into to Barcelona. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with the journey, culture shock, and the language barrier by this point.

My father and I decided to head back at this point. We travelled northward along the Mediterranean coastline and sampled those foods unique to the regions.

photos by Stephan Audiger of Hotels.com

Eventually we got back into France where we rented a car and returned to visiting yet more castles. I still have my commemorative coins from the sites we visited; there were little coin-operated vending machines supplying the collectibles.

I think my favorite place was Villandry. It has these elaborate decorative gardens, and Japanese koi swimming in the waterways around the grounds.

The last site we visited was Mont Saint-Michel. We took a bus from the port town and spent the day there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many tourists in any one spot as at Mont Saint-Michel. The parking lot was packed with buses and the causeway up the hill was full of people.

photos by Robert Lio

I lost all of my photos from the trip quite sadly. I had uploaded them to an early cloud-storage site which traded hands a few times before going out of business. They were asking for outrageous sums of money to download my own photo catalog before the server shutdown.

We took the ferry from Saint Malo back to Portsmouth where we were met by my uncle. I stayed there for a few days and then flew back to the states. My father returned to his trip. He went down to Portugal and found himself a crew position on a catamaran making the return journey across the Atlantic and back to the US.

Many more trips would occur in the years to follow. But, I’ll save those for another day.

Errant Literary

Garden Memories (May 2019)

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We have planted our garden for this year.

There will be tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, and peppers in the circular beds and some along the outer edge.

Radishes, strawberries, okra, eggplant, and Swiss chard are being placed into the central parallel beds.

The outlying beds will contain a mix of lettuce, kale, watermelon, squash, and cucumbers.

I have also planted out two varieties of bamboo in the woods.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

Share five things you’re good at.

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Five items that I excel at are: Computers, Gardening, Sailing, Photography, and Learning. But I don’t want to talk your ears off, so I will just detail a single thing I am good at today.

Green Thumb

I’ve always had a knack with plants.

When I was a child we had a large garden that wrapped around the remains of a boat. I can recall snow peas, sugar snaps, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, and rocket.

We lived in a step-van parked behind a house. The property was surrounded by fields of wheat and a lone apple tree stood to one side near my fathers knife workshop.

Where I live now there is also a garden. It is not nearly as large as my childhood garden, but we still put effort into working the soil and tending the greenery.

I have acquired over the years a habit of saving my seeds whenever I eat fruit. I have successfully grown Avocado and Tangerine trees here in North Carolina, despite the harsh winters.

In the backwoods area of the property I have planted Golden Bamboo and Timber Bamboo, the later of which has come in handy for construction projects in and around our home.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

Are you more of a night or morning person?

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I am a “stay up too late, wake up too late” person.

I tend to wake up around 11AM-12PM, sometimes later, if I haven’t got anything going on. Coffee seems to be my first consumed item come the new day.

There is always a mad dash to clear as many daily activities as I possibly can before settling down to study or work on a class project. I always feel like I am running behind schedule.

This isn’t a consistent pattern for me though.

There have been weeks where I managed to go to bed on time (11PM), I get a full nights rest and begin the new day fresh and ready to go. But this usually doesn’t last much longer than a week.

I keep telling myself that thing’s will be better once I finish the semester. However, I’ve told myself that for the past two years; and here I am playing the night owl once again.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

What are your two favorite things to wear?

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As I am lounging about the house, I tend to wear pajamas and some bedroom loafers. I find the pairing to be quite comfortable.

I go for the pajamas with an elastic waistband, I can’t be bothered with untying and retying strings throughout the day. A couple of scrunchies to keep my hair out of the way and i am ready to take on the day (at home).

If I am going out to the store or for an appointment, I like to dress up a bit. I’ll usually wear a black or brown suit jacket with a polo shirt and some dress pants.

I’m not a big spender and get most of my clothes at Goodwill. My father always said, “Waste not, want not.” I think I’ve managed to follow his advice for the most part. I enjoy finding new ways to reuse old items, giving them a second life.

There are all sorts of DIY videos on YouTube, full of ideas on how to recycle and reuse anything and everything. It’s well worth a look if you have the time.

Daily Writing, Errant Literary

What technology would you be better off without, why?

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This is an easy question to answer for myself. It’s the Internet.

Through the internet, I can explore any location, interact with other cultures, learn about any topic, and while away every single day.

Day after day.

A computer, smartphone, or even a tablet, without internet access, is suddenly a whole lot less appealing.

What would I do without the internet?

Well, I might rummage through my closet to find some old CDs or DVDs, maybe find an old game to install, or a movie to watch.

Oh! Wait, I haven’t got a drive that can read them.

The only accessible ports are USB, so let’s head back to the closet and find my old thumb drive collection.

Gosh! That won’t work either.

Why? Because I moved everything to the Cloud, I need Internet access to get to my stuff.

I don’t deny the usefulness of the internet; in fact, I can’t get by without it. Everything from my investments and banking to school and healthcare is all digital nowadays.

If it were out of my life, I would most certainly be better off as far as my physical and mental health.

Those console emulators I downloaded back in the 90’s really got in the way of my middle school education.

Financially, too, since I wouldn’t have been able to drop everything on the stock market, I wouldn’t have indulged in Cryptocurrency or gotten hooked on mobile games.

So my answer is the Internet.

With the benefit of hindsight, that is the technology I would have been better off without.