Day 7 of My November Challenge (and some Goodwill Goodness)

The challenge was uneventful...no exercise, no money earning, no activity, but I did get one more chapter of the book edited.  I suck at challenges.  :(
What we did do today was to get the hubby some new pets...

...the bowl was from the Goodwill (99 cents), the rocks were from the $1 store ($1), the plant we had, and the fish were from Petco (97 cents for all three).

We also made a haul from the Goodwill--for $24 we bought 9 shirts for hubby (photo below--great brands!), and a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt for me.

Day 6 of My November Challenge

Goal 1 work on book--yes, yes I did.  It seems to be missing something, however...perhaps a talented writer. Ugh.
Goal 2 make money--no, no I didn't.  My Adsense revenue is increasing a bit but I did nothing to make actual money today.  Another ugh.
Goal 3 exercise--yep.  Not much but hubby and I did walk the wash near our home which was a nice little walk (plus it is 80 degrees here so it is beautiful weather to walk in!).
Goal 4 activity--yep(ish).  Not sure if this counts for a full-fledged activity but hubby and I went to the Palms buffet for lunch today.  With hubby's comps we only had to pay $4 for both of us.  The buffet is amazingly awesome, and afterwards I suffered from a food coma.  I think I need a nap.

In other news...

• I'm glad I voted early so I avoided the lines today.  Now I'm wondering who will be our president tomorrow.  I don't like suspense.  I can't even stand waiting to see who will win American Idol or Dancing With the Stars that is how much I don't like suspense.  I may just turn the TV off early this evening and be surprised tomorrow with a final decision.
• My email was flooded with "the news" this morning.  Seems a friend I used to know was indicted yesterday for embezzling nearly a HALF MILLION DOLLARS from the company she used to work for.  Holy crap that is A LOT of money!  I can kind of/not really understand desperate people who get caught stealing a few thousand dollars from work to make ends meet but a half million dollars when you already have a very high paying job??? OMG
• Hubby is happy.  Three of his "on hold" movies at the library came in so this evening he will enjoy 'Hunger Games', 'It Had to be You', and 'What to Expect When You're Expecting'.  Glad some new movies came in as he has seen nearly every other movie in the entire library system.

Day 5 of My November Challenge (and Some Links)

Daily goal 1--work on book.  Done!  All five chapters have been reviewed, edited, and updated. Yeah!
Daily goal 2--make money.  Fail!  I was going to make another cooking video with the hubby and so we taped the prep work last night but in the middle of cooking today the battery on the camera died :(  Unfortunately we couldn't stop the cooking until the battery got charged so today's video was a fail and we will have to redo the recipe again sometime.  Note to self, charge camera before use.
Daily goal 3--exercise.  Yes!  I felt bad about not exercising at all yesterday so when I went to do my errands this morning I decided to walk instead of drive.  Hubby walked with me to a shopping center a little more than a mile from our house where I got my haircut and went to the bank.  I still haven't been able to talk hubby into cutting my hair.  Maybe next time.
Daily goal 4--activity.  Hubby took me to the movies today.  At the Palms Casino they have a $5 special all day on Mondays so we watched 'Taken 2' for a total of $10.  On the rare occasion when we go to the movies we try to hit up matinees and senior days at the movies but since seniors are $4 (hubby) and regular matinee price is $8 (me), today's $5 special was the cheapest way to go.  Good movie too.

And here's some links:

• 15 Possible Reasons Why You Are Always Broke
• The Ultimate Guide to Traveling When You Have No Money
• Health Law Spurs Shift in Hours (this is terrible!)
• Living on One Income

Day 4 of My November Challenge (And Some Tech Info)

...can be summed up in one word.  Fail.
Daily goal 1--work on book.  Didn't do this.  Bummer.  But I will do chapters 4 and 5 tomorrow so I can catch up.
Daily goal 2--make money.  I uploaded hubby's first cooking video today.  I seriously need to learn how to edit video!!  I gave it a shot and it could have been better but every time I tried to clip out a few frames that were unneeded it would delete the whole segment!  Eeekk  I also linked the YouTube channel with Adsense but I think it will take 24 hours to kick in.  What I really want to do is devise enough sources of passive income so that I won't need to go out and seek work to do and get paid for, kind of like this lady.
Daily goal 3--exercise.  I know I should have at least went out for a walk but I was lazy and didn't.  Bummer.
Daily goal 4--activity.  We stayed home all day so didn't do any kind of activity (unless cleaning up the garage counts, which it doesn't).

So basically that is what I did all day, which wasn't much.  When were were cleaning up the garage, hubby's daughter called and said she needed a laptop for her son and it just so happened that we found an old laptop (circa 2005) in a box in the garage so I spent hours--literally--updating it.  Here's how I take an old computer and make it newish again:

• Turn it on and hook it up to the internet.
• Go to 'add/delete programs' and check what programs are on the computer.  There was some pretty old software still on this computer as well as other obsolete programs which I uninstalled.
• Go to 'Windows Update' and see if there are any updates for the computer (there were 75 so it took ages for all of the updates to load!)
• After all of the updates load, turn off then restart the computer then hit windows update again.  Sometimes needed updates won't show up until other updates have been installed.
• Delete anything else off the computer that you don't want there (in this case there were a bunch of old picture and music files which I already have on my new computer so all of these files got deleted as well).
• Get on the internet then go to internet options then click on 'delete'.  You have the option to delete browsing history, TIFs, etc.  I deleted everything.
• Then I reset the home page to a generic page (Yahoo.com in this case) instead of the homepage I use.
• Next I emptied the recycle bin on the computer.
• Next I turned off then restarted the computer just to get all of the changes settled.
• Then I went to start, all programs, accessories, system tools and did a disc clean up then a disc defragment (this takes forever!).
• Finally, I installed some new software they might like at www.ninite.com.  In this case I chose the Chrome browser, Skype, VLC, LibreOffice, Avast, and Ad Aware.

So while I didn't do a whole lot today, I still feel relatively productive!

Day 3 of My November Challenge

Daily Goal 1--work on book.  I was hammering away on chapter three and determined that chapter one needs to be "catchier".  Chapter three is updated, chapter one needs to be redone. Ugh.
Daily Goal 2--make money.  First thing this morning I set up a YouTube channel for the hubby.  The channel will feature him cooking all of his yummy recipes and I will be able to monitize it and generate some ad revenue.  Then we got the camera figured out, then I found that the best free video editing software (Windows Movie maker) is already installed on my computer!  Tomorrow hubby will make his first video and we will go from there.  Also, today we "found" $150!  Yesterday on the radio I heard an advertisement for our credit union that said you can earn money from the points you earn when you use your credit card.  Hubby hasn't used this card in ages (yes, he still keeps one credit card although I have tried many times to get rid of all of them but he rarely uses it and if he does use it he pays it off right away).  I think the last big thing he paid for with the card was our tickets to Asia last year because he said that would be safer than using our debit cards to pay for such a big purchase.  So I told him this morning that he should check and see if he has any points just for the heck of it and it turns out that yes, he had points that he could redeem for a $150 Visa gift card!  Which he promptly did.  We figured that the points have been adding up for years and we didn't know anything about it.  That was a really nice surprise!
Daily Goal 3--exercise.  The hubby and I went to the local outlet mall.  It is a huge mall and it is indoors which is nice so we walked around the mall for about two hours...and didn't buy anything!  Yeah!
Daily Goal 4--activity.  The World Series of Bowling is in town this week so we stopped by to check out the action.  It was free (yeah) and we were also able to pick up free tickets for the finals next weekend (double yeah).  Hubby was happy about this activity because we used to own a bowling pro shop and he knew a lot of guys from the tour 20+ years ago.  We were pretty surprised to see about a half dozen guys that we knew way back then are still professional bowlers!

Day 2 of My November Challenge

A quick update...

• Daily Goal 1--work on book.  Chapter 2 has been edited and updated and I think it looks pretty good!
• Daily Goal 2--make money.  I listed one of my websites for sale on eBay (I tried to sell it last year on Flippa with no luck).  Someone suggested listing it on eBay--at no charge!--so I did...for $4000 minimum and $6000 buy it now.
• Daily Goal 3--exercise.  Hubby and I hiked to the top of Exploration Peak and back.  Don't worry, it wasn't a "peak" as in 10,000+ feet, more like a small hill with an elevation gain of about 700 feet.
• Daily Goal 4--activity.  Our activity for today was supposed to be to go to a balloon festival but when we arrived at the venue there were no balloons!  The guy said it was the first year of the event so they were still figuring things out and that the balloons had left around 6am because they need to lift off in cool air(?!).  So we were driving away and decided to do another thing on our list, go to Pahrump.  This is a small town about an hour away from Las Vegas; it's known as the closest place to Las Vegas with legal brothels.  I imagined an "old West" kind of town with a few buildings but it was a pretty good sized small city with about 40,000 people according to a lady I talked to in a restaurant.  We drove by the Chicken Ranch just to get a picture then we went to a couple of casinos on the main road through town but compared to Vegas they were really small casinos with mostly slot machines.  Over all it was a nice little day trip to explore a new place and the views on the way there were amazing (see photo above).

Day 1 Of My November Challenge (and a Great Shopping Find)

My November challenge got off to a great start today!

• Daily Goal 1: Work on book--chapter one is completed, edited, re-edited, and awesome!
• Daily Goal 2: Make money--I didn't think this would go well today.  First I checked CraigsList thinking there may be a quick gig I could get for today to make some money.  This was the first ad I saw on the "gigs" list (NSFW!); disgusting but par for the course when it comes to CraigsList in Las Vegas.  Needless to say I decided to look elsewhere for some way to make money.  Then I thought about selling a few purses on eBay so I checked eBay for the going rate on Coach and LeSportsac purses and I was really disappointed that the average prices for these expensive bags was around $20 (and even at $20-$30 most were getting no bidders!).  So that was a no go.  Things were looking bleak.  Then I checked Adsense and saw that for last month I made $112 which I will get later this month.  Then I checked my book sales and saw that I will get a whole $10.95 from book sales from last month (see, I told you I need to do some PR for the book!).  Then I saw that my webhost has an affiliate link that would allow me to make some money if people click through the ad on my website and sign up for webhosting.  As I was searching for the code I stumbled across "my affiliate account" and noticed that there was $119.90 in the account!  Waiting for me!  I didn't even know it was there! A while back I had told a friend to host her website with this company and since then I have been getting affiliate income from her each time she renews her hosting plan.  So while I basically did nothing to earn money today, I have earned a total of $232.85 on day one!  (And a note on webhosting:  you will see the affiliate ad at the top of this page.  This is the company I have used to host my websites for over ten years.  Up until this year they hosted my low traffic sites for free and I only paid for my high traffic sites but--and you may remember the rant--they raised the price to $150 a year for hosting recently.  I was taken aback by the change but then I looked around at the alternatives and realized there is no such thing as free webhosting any more.  I also realized that $150 for an unlimited number of websites hosted--unless the traffic is kind of high at which point you pay for more bandwidth--was a pretty awesome deal.  They also have a $100 coupon for this fee if you are a new client (see ad on their home page), plus the customer service can't be beat (any time I call I usually talk to Wayne and he doesn't even hesitate when I tell him I messed up a site so completely that I want him to delete all the files and let me start all over...I've done this a few times.  They were also really great when I was overseas and a hacker brought down two of my sites--all I did was call and they deleted the hacked sites and re-uploaded the original files stored on their server.  So if you need a great webhost click the ad above!).
• Daily Goal 3: Exercise--there is a new park near one of the major casinos here in Las Vegas so the hubby and I went and checked it out.  They have an amazingly huge walking path (it's circular and about the size of three football fields) so hubby and I walked the path and enjoyed a bit of exercise.
• Daily Goal 4: Activity--we went to a free 'Dia de los Muertos' community event.  Unfortunately I didn't check the time so we were really early and they were just setting up but we checked it out, talked to some people, and I took some photographs.  The actual Dia de los Muertos holiday is tomorrow so if you have the opportunity to visit one of these fun community events, give it a try!  Even though the holiday celebrates those who have died, it is a festive atmosphere with vendors, music, food, entertainment, and interesting shrines to the dearly departed.  Fascinating!

And a really good shopping find!

As we were coming back from the Dia de Los Muertos event we saw a huge Latino grocery store so decided to drop in.  We were shocked that their prices were so low!  For $9.27 we got: a pineapple, four apples, 2 pounds of jalapenos, a bunch of cilantro, five onions, four limes, five cucumbers, eight tomatoes, a half pound of cheese, a baked bun, and a cream filled bun (not in the photo because I ate it before we got home!).  Needless to say, this store is going to be on our Wednesday shopping rounds from now on.

My November 'Make $1000 Challenge'

I was going to do the NaNoWriMo challenge in November (I still may, I haven't decided yet).  Then I was going to challenge myself to have 30 new experiences in Las Vegas during the month of November (can you tell I like challenges?).  And then I decided that I need some money because hopefully by early December we will be moving into our new place and will need to furnish it.  I am also dying for a new laptop, camera, and android phone.  Plus Christmas is coming up (yikes!).  So some extra money would come in handy right about now.
I haven't earned much money since somewhere around January and it is a disconcerting feeling when I can't even buy a $100 item because I have no idea where that $100 will come from (in my previous life as a money-earning person, a $100 purchase was nothing now it is a Very. Big. Deal.). 
So my challenge to myself (and you if you are so inclined to join me) is to make $1000 during the month of November.
Currently I have no idea how I will do this as selling things is out (I have nothing left to sell), earning it via overtime at a job is out (I have no job), and stripping or something equally nefarious--we are in Las Vegas after all--is out (they would pay me to get OFF the stage...).  But some how I am going to earn me $1000 by the end of November...I just don't know how yet.  Of course I will post on this blog each day my success (or lack thereof) and hopefully give you some ideas that you can use to make some extra money as well.