Why I’m a bigger dork than you are

I’ve been noticing lately that when anyone posts about going to Blogher, someone inevitably comments that they could never go to Blogher because they are too big of a dork. Well, I am here to set the record straight. First of all, EVERYONE who goes to Blogher is a dork to some extent. Think about it-a bunch of women spending a long summer weekend sitting in conference rooms with their laptops talking about Search Engine Optimization and throwing around words like “domain” and “Flickr”? Right.

Still not convinced? Let me share with you exactly why I am, in fact, a way bigger dork than you are and therefore you should come to Blogher if only to bask in my supreme dorkitude. You know how I got an HP TouchSmart PC to try free for two weeks, right? And how I’ve been staying up sometimes until almost 3:00 a.m. because it is just THAT MUCH FUN to use, and I have to send it BACK next week, and they want to take my precioussss…. oh, sorry. Okay, so. I’ve been using this PC for a week now, and I’ve gotten very comfortable with the whole Touchscreen concept.

Yesterday, I had to get my laptop out to retrieve a file. Only I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, why the file wasn’t opening.

I was tapping the screen with my finger.

Shut UP! Quit laughing at me! Okay, laugh. Fine. Still think you’re a bigger dork than me? Another feature of the Touchsmart PC is a wireless keyboard and mouse, which is very cool. Kaitlyn is constantly tripping over or pulling out the cord for my regular mouse; the worst thing she can do with the wireless mouse is lose a battery. A wireless mouse works by using an infrared signal, so it just needs to be aimed at the computer.

Two nights ago, I sat down to do some work on the PC, while my husband and son played cribbage in the kitchen. But something was wrong-every time I moved the mouse to the right, the cursor went to the left. I yelled to my husband that something was wrong with the mouse.

NO, he said, you are holding it UPSIDE DOWN.

BEHOLD, for I am the queen of dork. You may feel socially awkward, or shy, but I bet you know the difference between a Touchscreen and a regular screen, and I bet you know which way to hold a wireless mouse. So come to Blogher, already. It’s what all the cool dorks are doing.

Wayback Wednesday-Get to Know me!

I’ve been going through my Uncategorized posts to get them into categories, which means I’ve also been reading a lot of older posts. You know what? I used to be a LOT funnier in my posts than I am now. That’s really sad. I need to bring the funny back. I also had a few moments of feeling sorry for myself after I read through the comments on a dozen or so old posts and realized that almost none of my original readers comes here anymore. But then I decided to look at it this way: blogging is not static, it is fluid. It grows, it moves, it changes. Everyone is constantly discovering new blogs to read, and there is only so much time in the day. I miss my old readers, but I am SO crazy about my new readers, so it all works out for the best!

And that’s where I got the idea for Wayback Wednesday. Many of my new readers have only been reading me for a few months, and I’d like you all to see what else I’ve written. The same goes for you-if I’ve only been reading your blog since March, I know I’ve missed lots of great posts. So let’s start a Wednesday meme/link type thing where each Wednesday, we dig through our archives and post links to some of our older posts. I think we should have a theme for each week too, so this week’s theme will be Get To Know Me. Post a link or two, or even copy and paste the whole text of a post you wrote where you answered meme questions, shared something personal, or even wrote about what makes you unique. Let’s get to know each other! Don’t forget to come back and leave your URL in the comments, and I’ll work on creating one of those Mr. Linky things for people to sign.

I’m going to kick things off by finally getting around to doing the memes that both Karly and Mommiebear tagged me for-I’m REALLY sorry, Karly, I know it’s been like FOREVER since you tagged me! Forgiven?? The purpose of the meme is to write 7-10 Interesting things about yourself, things you don’t normally write about in posts. Here are links to four mem-type posts I wrote last year:

http://table4five.net/2006/01/28/tagged-sort-of/

http://table4five.net/2006/02/13/more-fours/

http://table4five.net/2007/02/20/6-probably-not-so-weird-things-about-me/

http://table4five.net/2006/05/16/ten-m-things/

I hope you enjoy them, and please play along!

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic

In 1983 I was a Sophomore in High School. I had a Spiral Perm, I wore teal eyeshadow, and I was in love with a band called The Police. I had a boyfriend who had his hair cut just like Sting, and boys were wearing Members Only Jackets just like the band. We used our Hi-Fi stereos to record cassette tape copies of their Albums and passed them around at lunch. EVERYONE I knew was crazy about The Police. I had been too young when Outlandos d’Amour came out in 1978, but by 1980 and the release of Zenyatta Mondatta, you couldn’t turn the radio on for more than a minute without hearing “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” or “De Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da”.

Ghost in the Machine came out in ‘81, and spent 17 weeks at #1, because of hits like “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”. You’re talking four MONTHS where this was the biggest album in the country! By the time Synchronicity was released in 1983, The Police were a part of every day life for me. Which is why now, 24 years later, I am SO EXCITED that The Police are going on tour! Squueeeee!

In conjunction with the tour, Universal Music Group is releasing a new police cd, a 2 Disc set of 28 classic tracks:

Track Listings
Disc: 1
1. Fallout
2. Can’t Stand Losing You
3. Next to You
4. Roxanne
5. Truth Hits Everybody
6. Hole in My Life
7. So Lonely
8. Message in a Bottle
9. Reggatta de Blanc
10. Bring on the Night
11. Walking on the Moon
12. Don’t Stand So Close to Me
13. Driven to Tears
14. Canary in a Coalmine

Disc: 2
1. Do Do Do de da da Da
2. Voices Inside My Head
3. Invisible Sun
4. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
5. Spirits in the Material World
6. Demolition Man
7. Every Breath You Take
8. Synchronicity I
9. Wrapped Around Your Finger
10. Walking in Your Footsteps
11. Synchronicity II
12. King of Pain
13. Murder by Numbers
14. Tea in the Sahara

Now, as if that wasn’t awesome enough, Universal Music Group has partnered with PayPerPost to help spread the word about the tour and the CD, and has given PPP ONE HUNDRED CDs to give away to Posties! I’m just about hyperventilating here thinking about how badly I want one of the CDs, which also comes with a wicked awesome vintage Police concert poster, and some cool PPP gear. You can see the vintage poster and a cute photo of Ted and Britt holding some CDs here at the PayPerPost blog.

So, to whomever at PayPerPost is reading this-ooh, ooh, pick me! pick me! Why should I be one of the lucky CD recipients? Because I promised my husband that I would start an exercise program to get in shape and be healthy, and this Police CD will be PERFECT for listening to while I’m on the treadmill, exercise bike, elliptical trainer, or just walking around my neighborhood pushing Kaitlyn in her stroller. And because listening to these songs that I loved for so many years will help me feel young again! LOL

In the comments tell me, do you plan to purchase the new police cd? Did you grow up loving the band like I did? The POLICE! On TOUR! Goosebumps!

It looks like I’ll get to BlogHer after all!

I just checked PayPal, and I have $157.00!! I only need FIFTY more dollars to pay for registration! Thank you so much everyone who has clicked my donation button-I hope you know how much it means to me that you want to help me achieve this goal. The conference is going to help me be an even better blogger, and that benefits you as a reader as well as me. Whether your donation was $20, $10, $5 or $1, I am extremely grateful!

And if you aren’t able to donate, but you are coming here and reading, and leaving comments, you are still helping! There would be no point in my having this blog if no one was reading it because let’s be honest, no one blogs just for themselves. I like to think of the Blogosphere as being made up of countless smaller communities, and I’m so glad that you’ve chosen Table for Five to make up one of your communities! Gosh I’m feeling sentimental right now. Come here, everybody, let me give you a big hug. Thanks :)

PayPerPost launches PPP Direct!

Even in my feverish state, I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to tell you about a new and very exciting feature now being offered by PayPerPost. It’s called PPP Direct, and it puts blog marketing directly into the hands of bloggers. On my left sidebar just under the familiar PPP badge, you will now see a new badge for PPP Direct. An advertiser can click on that badge, hire me to write a post, and PayPerPost will hold their money in escrow while I negotiate my rate with the advertiser, and then pay me directly. EVEN IF THE ADVERTISER DOES NOT HAVE AN ACCOUNT WITH PAYPERPOST! How awesome is THAT???

You’ve probably heard of sites like ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews, right? I have accounts with both of them in fact. Did you know that ReviewMe charges a fifty to ONE HUNDRED PERCENT markup to their advertisers? So if I accept a review from ReviewMe and make $10.00, they have charged the advertiser $15.00 to $20.00. Ridiculous! Sponsored Reviews adds as much as a 53 percent markup! Normally, PayPerPost adds a 35 percent markup for regular advertising through their system, but with PPP Direct, there is only a TEN PERCENT SERVICE CHARGE, of which five percent goes to processing credit cards and paying PayPal!

The hardest thing for me is deciding what to charge. Every advertiser has a different budget, and I don’t want to scare them away by asking for too much. On the other hand, I want to place a value on my writing that reflects the quality work that the advertiser will get from me. I have started by setting my price at $25.00, and I’ll adjust that accordingly once I see how I do at that price. I’m worth it! If you are reading this and thinking, I would like to get paid to blog, I encourage you to click on my “Get paid to blog about the things you love” badge in my left sidebar. PayPerPost has plenty of writing jobs available to serious bloggers who are willing to put a little extra time into their blogging. Get PAID!

When it comes I want to wail “Mail”!

When I was in college, I spent a summer working at a local park. We had a group of juvenile offenders who had been sentenced by the juvenile court to work at the park, and much to my surprise, one of the offenders was a boy who had been a few years behind me in school. His offense was that he and some of his friends had gone out driving one night and had been hitting residential mailboxes with baseball bats! They called it “mailbox baseball”. By the time he ended his ten weeks of scrubbing the slime off the bottoms of the paddle boats, I’m pretty sure he had learned his lesson :)

I lived in several cheap apartments during and after college, and one thing they all had in common were the crappy commercial mailboxes in the lobby. Anyone with a butter knife could have pried the doors of those mailboxes open if they had wanted to. I wish the apartment owners had given a little more thought to the quality of the mailboxes and purchased better ones from a website like Mailboxixchange. I never had any mail stolen (that I know of), but thinking back on it now, I know they weren’t very secure.

I remember when email was first introduced and people said that in a few years there would be no more paper mail. Ha. My mailbox isn’t any less full now, that’s for sure. I LIKE getting my mail now that I get free samples, free books to review, and even this cool new PC that I’m using. Email is fine, but I say keep that snail mail coming!

Self-help while you sleep

Now this is a product I can review from personal experience. I have been using subliminal CDs for YEARS to help me sleep. I have never found anything that helps me relax and get to sleep better or faster than a Guided Imagery CD. Do you know what that is? It’s a recording of music and sounds played at a frequency designed to get into your subconscious. The CD I use has a woman speaking in a soothing voice, with guidance on slowing down my breathing, and then slowly relaxing each part of my body. It starts at the toes, and I’m usually asleep before I get to my knees!

Subliminal-CDs.com also has a weight loss CD available for purchase or MP3 download. There are over 120 CDs to choose from, covering topics ranging from boosting your brain power to stopping smoking. Visit the site and browse through the catalog, I bet you’ll find something that you are interested in.

Someone’s got a case of the Tuesdays

It has NOT been a good day here at Casa del Cinco. Kaitlyn woke up crying, and all morning whenever I tried to put her down she would immediately come running at me with tears streaming down her face wailing “Maa maaa”. No idea why. She took a brief morning nap and then we set off for Wal-Mart, which has groceries now, so that’s pretty cool. But she lost her mind near the end and I figured she was hungry so we went to the Subway, and she cried the whole time I was waiting for my “sandwich artist” to make our freaking Seafood Sensation sandwiches. He was having some kind of wardrobe malfunction involving the thin plastic gloves he had to wear. Whatever.

Then my husband came home and yay, we got into a fight. Which is ALWAYS a good time. See, we have no money. ALL THE MONEY I’VE EARNED OVER THE LAST TWO MONTHS OF PAID BLOGGING MY ASS OFF? GONE. That’s right, GONE. I may have to put up one of those goddamn DONATION buttons if I even want to GO to Blogher. Where did the money go? Well, when our regular checking account turned out to be $140.00 NEGATIVE, I had to withdraw my BlogHer money to buy two weeks worth of groceries.

So yeah. Blogher money gone. Seriously, gone. It takes thirty days to get paid by PayPerPost, so even if I could GET three new assignments every day, which I won’t, I wouldn’t have the $200.00 I need for registration plus the other $300.00 for the hotel plus the $40.00 for the train tickets until right before it was time to leave. Last year, Blogher registration SOLD OUT. So I don’t know what the hell I am going to do. Besides be really, really pissed off. Sorry for the ranting.

So my husband is saying how we (meaning ME, because it’s my job) have to start balancing the checkbook, and get our spending under control (gee, how much does a pack of cigarettes a day add up to anyway? Hmmm?), and he’s stomping around and I’m agreeing with him, and then I say “My Blogher money is gone. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go any more”, and he FREAKED OUT. He was all “why is it that the first thing you think of is your Blogher money? What about the money I work hard to earn every day? We spend it all EVERY PAYCHECK”. And then he stomped outside to angrily mow the front and back yards. Dude.

Backgammon-world’s oldest board game

Does anybody know how to play Backgammon? It’s one of those board games that requires a lot of strategy and planning of the moves, and I have never been able to learn how to play. Did you know that backgammon is the world’s oldest board game? It’s based on an ancient game called Senat, and Senat boards dating between 3000 and 1788 BCE have been excavated from the royal tomb in Ur, in Mesopotamia, and even in King Tut’s tomb!

Now you can play backgammon online at BackgammonMasters.com. Find thousands of other players from all over the world, learn the rules of the game as well as the best strategy. You can enter backgammon tournaments, play for real money, and become a world champion! Not only that, but BackgammonMasters also offers other games on their site, and with only one download from one site, players enter one game lobby and select from any number of games whether it be backgammon, perudo, poker and soon to come, blackjack. All of BackgammonMasters games are developed in multi player variations as part of their community concept, and the company has stated that more popular games for the Latin Markets are already in the works.

Free STUFF, people! FREE!

When I was running Blogher ads, I was not allowed to click on my own ads to see what they were. If I wanted to know more about an ad, I had to go find another blog in the network and click on theirs. So it never even occurred to me that it would be okay for me to click on my own text link ads there in the left sidebar. And then I got a very nice email from the advertiser running the ad you see in that list, the one called FREEBIES-freebies for parents. He wanted to know what I thought of his site, and I hadn’t even looked at it! Well, let me tell you what I think of his site-m, AWESOME.

If you didn’t already know, the makers of major brand products want to give you free samples. And while you are probably thinking that filling out your name and address to get free samples will fill your mailbox with more junk, I have not found that to be the case. I have received free samples of Curel Hand cream, foot cream, Dove ProAge Body wash and lotion, and Biore face wash, moisturizer and pore strips, and there is no more junk in my mailbox than before ;)

So, what other kinds of free samples can you get? Today’s Freebies of the day are: FREE sample pack of ThermaShine Shampoo, Conditioner, and Detangling Shine Spray, plus $2 in gift cards, sample of Ban deoderant, a “Scoop NYC” fragrance sample, a free t-shirt for filling out a questionnaire about cell phones, Iams Healthy Naturals dog food, even a coupon for a FREE CD single from Bob Dylan, and MORE. I am one happy camper today! I LOVE free samples! Don’t you???