It's mid-August, and every year at this time, I look back over the summer and wonder where the time went. The new geese are learning to fly in a vee formation (looks more like an "M" when they first start flying over the cornfields), the rosebushes are full of fruit to be harvested next month, I budgeted new tires for the Buick so that I will be prepared for the Minnesota winters...and, teachers return to school in a few short weeks. That would be me...

This summer my goal was to develop some interesting ways of adding to my discretionary income. (Read, a way to finance my daily dose of Caribou soy latte at $4.50 a pop). I've done the mystery shopping thing...it's kind of fun, but by the time you enter your report, tally up the mileage on the Buick (hence, the new tires), it comes to about $2.00 an hour. Not that I'm a snob, or anything like that, but I would think at least minimum wage would be kind of nice. Suddenly, Xomba appears on my search engine, and...I think maybe this is it. The Shangri-la of occupations you can do easily at home...heck, I type 80 wpm. I can read, and I can write. This might work.

So, for the past two weeks, I've been doing quite a bit of typing. We're talking a complete half lunar phase. I mean, the rose hips on the bushes went from green to medium orange in ripeness. I installed a page counter on my articles about a week ago, and that says something like the mid-300s or so of views. Somehow, my adsense account doesn't seem to be real accurate. It says that I have only had 139 page impressions that are credited to my account. That would mean that I must have viewed my own articles roughly 211 times.

The big victory happened 11 days into my Xomba life - I actually got a click. A whole click! Somehow, that translated into 4 cents. Now, I'm not sure if I have to split my 4 cents with Xomba or not...ya know, the 50/50 split. Anyway, I excitedly explained to my husband that I "got a click". He didn't quite understand the gravity of the moment, but did mutter something about how tricky it must be writing HTML tags.

Please let me know when I will be receiving my check. In the meantime, I'm so glad that I'm going back to work at the end of August. I'll harvest my rose hips, pick up an iced soy latte at Caribou each day, have my tires installed at Wal-Mart, and thank the good Lord in heaven that I'll be getting paid soon.

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