Like I don’t have anything else to do. I am on an ongoing mission to finally decide on, and be estatic with, ONE design theme for this blog.

The one up now? Ah, Temporary.   I should have the new design up by the end of November.

I have eight bazillion things to do, and about a million things to do here at this site. (Amongst other semi-important things such as showering, eating, sleeping.)  I probably could even get to a 1/10000th of them if my daughter would sleep. Ever.  For some reason, I gave birth to a female robot who has no need or desire for a nap lasting longer than 6 minutes.  If you think I’m joking, please step over the clothes piled on the floor and somehow make your way here to my living room.

(Photo of living room was supposed to go here, but the room is so hammered that I chickened out at the last minute.  Still - just pretend it’s here and you’re horrified, k?)

Alright, so maybe this doesn’t prove that my 16 week old doesn’t sleep. Maybe it just means that I’m a total slob. But really.  It’s because I can’t get anything done here. When she’s content, she needs to be held.  And if I put her down momentarily for a bathroom trip, I now immediately just head over to my Tyelenol cabinet because it’s instant headache.

I’m throwing around the idea of hiring a one-time cleaning lady to help me out. Just get me somewhat cleaned out and hopefully I can maintain it from then.  Probably a waste of money, I know, but it really makes me feel depressed living/working around such a mess.   When someone does stop by to see the baby is my only real chance at getting anything done… and that’s maybe an hour out of each week.   So I’ll probably look around Craigslist tonight and see if anyone fits the bill.

I wonder if the ad I’ve started to write will scare anyone off?

Wanted:   Someone to save my sanity.  I haven’t cleaned my house in 16 weeks.  I can’t find my sink, but I presume it’s somewhere in the room where I’m supposed to be cooking.  I don’t know where my cleaning supplies are, so you will need to bring your own.  You can take some before and after photos if you desire, so you can share this with your disbelieving cleaning friends.  Can you help me?  Please?  I will leave the back door open; feel free to climb your way in.

Yeah, I’m still working on it. I suppose I should leave my meager attempt at humor out (although I’m sadly not joking).

I seriously don’t know how people have two + kids and still have a nice, clean home and a home business.  I can usually only have one of those things at any one given time.  If the place is clean, my business is failing.  If it’s a disaster here, the kids are usually fed and clothed (for the most part).  If I’m doing well with work, my kids are screaming and I can’t find them in the clutter.

Percocet, take me away.

So far this week, I haven’t gotten much on my To Do list done. My son has been home sick and, of course, there’s this 3 month old bundle of baby that hasn’t went anywhere yet. So between making breakfast and lunch, nursing, perfecting the great “vacant mom stare” (the look I give Dan when I want to dump the baby on his lap for 5 glorious minutes of child-free bathroom time), and watching old Spongebob Episodes, I can’t say I’ve made much progress.

I’m totally psyched that my daughter is still asleep now while I fix my mailing list script issues. I’ve had a pretty frustrating time so far, but I gotta say that even though the script itself is a pain in the ASCII, the script’s developer is super helpful and patient.

I also want to note that I am a little ADD-ish about the theme of this blog, so you may see the layout change six to twelve times in one day. I’ll eventually decide on just one theme and get all of the links (finally) up and running… and I plan on doing this within the next few years, so I thankyouverymuch for your patience.

What a week!

Ever since I started working online, I’ve always tried to be cautious when selecting people to work with for online projects, mainly because of the high rate of disappearing acts that so easily happens online. So I guess I shouldn’t be totally shocked when a few of the workers I’ve hired to outsource some of my more mundane work have decided to magically disappear upon deadline.

What I am surprised at, though, is that FOUR out of FOUR outsourcers decided to take off at once! Holy hell! Not only is the work I was supposed to have completed by the end of October totally pushed till December (if doing it on my own), but now I’m out a ton of money. I’ve filed a Paypal dispute with one of the outsourcers and hopefully I’ll see a small portion of that $200 payment back someday (but I’m not holding my breath). One of the writers refunded me earlier today with a note of apology, saying that he felt bad but he couldn’t complete the project on time.

As for the other two outsourcers, I’m giving one woman the benefit of the doubt because she is admittedly swamped with work. The other guy I’ve worked with successfully before, and I hate to think he just poofed and vanished because he was one of the best people I’ve used ever. (Not to mention it was a $300 project that I had him running with!)

So lesson learned: don’t outsource all of your work all at once. I totally jumped the gun and figured I’d lessen my workload by 70% this month. Bad idea! I should have outsourced one thing at a time.

Another craptastic work event happening this week is the “breaking” of my mailing list script. I’ve used the same script to host all of my mailing lists for YEARS, without ever running into a problem. All of a sudden, the entire thing decides to go haywire and now I can’t get any emails out to any of my lists. I had a promo email to send out that would have easily netted me $500 this month, that I’ve had to kiss goodbye. I’ve been chatting with the script developer for the past three days, but so far it’s not looking good. I’m hoping to get this script working again and then quickly switch to AWeber’s service. Hopefully most of my 6000 subscribers will follow me over there.

This week, I don’t plan on getting a whole bunch of work done, but I do want to fix my mailing list script issue, get my lists switched over to AWeber, and then get some of my outsourcers working or at least getting refunded. Wish me luck on that.

Update:

Outsourcer #3 (the woman) has contacted me (after IMing her a few times) saying that things are still going as planned.  I’m not totally convinced, but slightly reassured just by hearing from her.

Outsourcer #1: (the one I’ve filed a Paypal dispute against) still no word, but someone else has contacted me privately about his whereabouts, and I think we will be trying to get something from him together. I’d be happy to just get the project going, but I’m doubting it.