Websites can kill you

Arrrrrrgggh! I've been trying to get my family caregiver info website working how I want it to, but I keep having trouble getting the forums to work how they are supposed to. It's driving me insane and I have tried redoing them at least 3 or 4 times now the past few days... no, not just the forums... I've actually had to trash and rebuild the entire site 3 or 4 times. Gah!

I'm going to try a different approach, on another site. If it works, then I will revamp family caregiver info once again, if not I at least have not started from scratch for nothing.

Rare Coin Investments

We work and work every day to have a few coins that we can drop into the bank on the dresser at the end of the work day. Scratching and saving and eventually most of us will diligently sort through those coins searching for tiny treasures of rare coins that might have somehow slipped through the system and collector's hands and fallen into our hands.

I've heard of guys finding rare coins in their change before. It is possible, but if you are a serious collector looking for rare coins then you want to go to a rare coin dealer such as Monaco Rare Coin. A member of the Monex family of companies, and having immediate access to investment-grade coins valued in excess of $10,000,000, Monaco Rare Coin can help anyone with an interest in rare coins build a collection to be proud of.

Members of organizations such as the Professional Numismatic Guild, The National Silver Dollar Round Table, the American Numismatic Association and many more, the staff of Monaco Rare Coin have the experience to know rare coins and to help you in your investment decisions.

Find out more about investing in rare coins by visiting zoomcoin.com at the link above.

So, you want to be a blogger huh?

Do you know what you're getting yourself into?

While I was looking around at stuff on small businesses I came across something that meshed my passions together, an article on blogging by a small business trends writer. Anita Campbell, of Small Business Trends, has an article up over at the OPEN Forum that points out the chaotic mess that is blogging - particularly with the spotlight that has been directed on blogging with the clash this week between the Associated Press and the entire blogopshere as a whole.

In her article, This Blogging Stuff is Harder Than it Looks, Campbell takes a look at what a person needs to be skilled in to even consider the life of a blogger. It might seem like a glamorous lifestyle, sitting around in your jammies typing away about the lives of movie stars and the fashion industry, but bloggers have a hard job and need to be multi-skilled people just to keep their work going day to day. And that's before they attract attention that might leave them on the defending end of a lawsuit.

Yes, it's true, blogging is indeed harder than it looks.

The cost of not working at home

As though we needed any more reason to work at home, think about the rising gas prices. Last month Fox News 5 in Las Vegas did some calculations and that they determined is that it costs a lot to drive to work. In fact, according to their website entry How Much Does It Cost To Drive To Work? workers across America pay anywhere from $14.13 to $55.33 to commute from the suburbs into the city of sampled metropolitan areas. Note that I said from the suburbs to the city, that is for a one way ride. If you want to get back home at the end of your work day you need to double that amount. $28.26 to $110.66 to drive to work and back home for a single day.

And that was when the gas prices averaged $3.76 per gallon, now they are over $4.00 a gallon and rising.

This means that before the gas price increase it was costing people who lived in the suburbs and worked 5 days a week in the city anywhere from $141.30 to $553.30 every week to drive to work and back. That's a serious chunk of the paycheck just to get to work and back home at night. And it does not include car maintenance, oil, transmission fluid, windshield washer fluid, brake fluid, gas additives, tires... the list goes on and gets quite expensive by the time you sit back and look at what it is you are paying to commute to work each year.

No wonder more and more people are looking for ways that they can make money from home.

Options Trading and Investing for the Future

I have a set of goals for what I want to be doing with my business over the next five years. One of those goals is that I want to get to the point that I can do some kind of investing for my long term future. I want to look into stuff like options trading and other forms of investing.

I admit that I do not know a lot about options trading , but I want to learn and get ready so that in a few years maybe I can start dabbling in it as a way to build up a good retirement fund. Right now I am checking out sites such as PowerOptions (link above) to find out everything I can about options trading and other similar kinds of stock trading.

PowerOptions has SmartSearchXL®, which gives online investors the ability to identify what option trades will yield the highest returns. They also offer a 14 day free trial, which I am hoping that I will be able to get the time set aside later on this summer to make full use of to help me get a good start on investing for my future. Right now I am doing good to find 14 minutes to invest in looking into options trading, but with luck things will slow down toward the end of summer and I can get started on learning more about the stock market and investing.

Out with coffee - in with tea

I've started cutting back on the coffee, particularly after realizing that I was drinking close to six cups of cappuccino in a day - which was over 700 calories in coffee per day. Subtract that from my 1,200 daily calorie goal and I was only leaving myself just under 500 calories for food a day. ::blink blink:: It's amazing I was keeping on target instead of gaining weight like mad.

So, I've cut out the cappuccino's and have taken to tea sweetened with a teaspoon of honey first thing in the morning to get myself going. That's 100 calories less than what the normal morning cappuccino was, and since I only need one cup of the spicy morning tea, compared to two cups of the cappuccino, I am able to cut back a total of over 200 calories first thing in the morning.

I work better on the tea too. Or at least I think I am working better on it. Seem to perk up faster from the jolt of the spices than I had from the caffeine of the cappuccino.

The great yarn hunters

I'm sitting here working away this morning and I look up to see the puppies out in the hallway. They have a skein of yarn and are enjoying a wonderful game of tug-of-war. ::sigh:: I ask for and receive the poor abused yarn. It's only hope now is to be untangled and wound into a ball. I'll take care of that later.

Back to work for now... until the blue skein of yarn shows up out in the hall between two happy puppies. No wonder they were so willing to part with their toy, they knew where the whole stash of wonderful yarn was at and had promptly gone to get a new skein that had not yet been hopelessly mangled.

I now have two matted skeins sitting on the end of the desk awaiting transformation into balls of yarn whenever I get some spare time. The puppies are off looking for their next victim.

PDA medical dictionary

Small business owners know the power of having a PDA that can help them keep track of everything associated with their business. As both a small business owner and a full-time family caregiver I know that being able to find tools that can help with multiple aspects of my life is invaluable.

Epocrates has a PDA medical dictionary that they created for doctors that want to be able to cross reference possible drug interactions when writing new prescriptions for patients. With the medical dictionary loaded onto their PDA, doctors are able to check patients current prescriptions for any potential interactions on new prescriptions.

The usefulness of such a PDA medical dictionary for family caregivers running their own business is easy to see, allowing the caregiver to have not only their important business records and documents, but the records and documents on their care recipient's medicine conveniently stored in a single device that can slip into a pocket or purse.

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This announcement was paid for by Epocrates.

Shopping bag advertising

I went into town the other day and picked up some things for a new marketing campaign idea I have. I purchased some of those canvas shopping bags, a package of iron on transfer material and a package of printer cartridges for my printer. Now I am working on ideas for advertising for my websites that I can place on the sides of the shopping bags.

I'll create large sized iron-on printouts for the websites, and iron them onto the sides of the shopping bags. That way when I go to the store people will see advertising for my websites.

I have also been thinking this would be a good way to do advertising in general, but I'm not certain on just how to sell the ad space on the shopping bags. I can see where it would be a great way to get out business information, though, so I might talk to someone with one of the advertising sites I know about starting up a "Green Ads" deal where advertisers pay so much for people to print out ads that are ironed onto their reusable shopping bags with the size and placement of the ad determining the cost of the thing.

Office Shelving

I've been looking up plans online for building built-in desks and cabinetry. I want to finish the work I had going on my office, so I am doing a bunch of research on woodworking and building built-in desks and stuff while I wait for being able to get the lumber that I need to build the rest of the shelves and stuff in the office.

Nutra-Trim Gum: weight management chewing gum

One of the problems with working at home is the close proximity of the kitchen to the office. Cravings can hit and make you want to stop working and go raiding the kitchen instead. That is why I am glad that I found Nutra-Trim Gum, the weight management chewing gum that helps to increase the metabolism while controlling cravings.

I was very skeptical about how this gum would work, but it seems to work very well and I have not even been using it according to the package directions yet. Packaging says to chew two pieces three or more times a day, I have been chewing one piece when I start to get cravings as a way to fight back against them so I don't raid the kitchen. That has averaged to one piece a day for me so far and I can see the difference in the cravings that I had been getting. The gum really seems to work.

The box above has 48 pieces in it, which used the way I am using it is almost a month's supply right there. I will definitely be buying more of this gum to help curb cravings.