Archives for 2008

Monthly Summary from OTH Blog

March 1, 2008 by Amy 2 Comments

For those interested, February turned out to be an awesome month for my OTH site. Our feed readers, returning visitors and first-time visitors all went way up. Thankfully, that also turns into money apparently. Here are the full month of stats if you any of you are interested.

The show plays on Tuesday nights but Wednesday is by far our biggest day–that’s all the spikes in the stats. As you can see, we’ve gotten to a point about midway through the month where we don’t see less that 5,000 page views a day. Which is AWESOME.

So the good stuff…how does this translate to numbers.

Google Adsense: $76
BlogHer Ads: $228
Kontera: $22.87
LinkShare: $6.06

That’s right at $333 for the month. That’s double last month and way above the average of $200 I thought we’d see. For that, I’m very happy. That’s obviously an average of about $10. And that’s cool with me. A lot of stuff I’ve really gotten used to do every week such as the summaries, recaps, music lists, preview clips and such. It doesn’t take near as much time and I’m getting paid more for it. Now I won’t actually SEE any of this money for, in some cases, up to a year. Kontera for example makes you have a $100 balance and at the rate it’s going , it will be several months before we get there. And I LOVED to see us hit the all-important $100 mark at google for the first time this month.

I think all in all it is doing way better than I thought but of course I always believe there is room to make it better. The ending of the writer’s strike is wonderful news for us and I think it will be interesting to see what happens next month since we’ll have a break in new shows until they catch up from the strike.

It’s the weekend!

March 1, 2008 by Amy Leave a Comment

So Lexi’s fever never materialized into anything. She woke up in a great mood on Friday morning. Emma ended up with a fever last night but after some Tylenol and Zicam, she is fine as well.

So yesterday Mom ended up taking the girls up to Charlotte on the lightrail. Mom said Emma was so scared on the way up she thought she was going to have to turn around but after they got on, she was fine and they both liked it.

While they were doing that and Scott was in Columbia, I went up to work for the afternoon. After that, we spent the evening at Mom’s so Scott could wire up their lights in their new media room.

Today our church is having a big block party for that basketball league I’ve been helping the concessions for. He’s headed out as we speak and I guess me and the girls will be here at the house and go there around lunchtime. Sounds like it’s going to be a pretty easygoing day.

Thankful Thursday

February 28, 2008 by Amy 3 Comments

So, so glad to not be as sick as I was.
Thankful for the settlement money being more than we thought.
Thankful for family that helped out while I was sick.

Chick-fil-A Opening

February 28, 2008 by Amy 1 Comment

So of course I had to get in on the opening. I took the girls up there at lunch. Lexi has been SO excited for it to open. There were a TON of executives there and they were all extremely nice. They were all refilling drinks, handing out balloons and bringing around samples of food. One lady saw me seating the kids and said let me get you some table-toppers. I didn’t even know they had such a thing. Since Lexi has a fever, I didn’t let them play on the playground but I’m sure we’ll do that plenty. When we left, they gave stuffed cows to the kids and a free calendar with coupons to the adults. And I had a worker help me out of my parking spot since I was parked near the door so the drive thru line was blocking me. Anyway, it was a very nice visit and I’ll love that we can say we went to opening day for some odd reason.

Chick-fil-A Craziness

February 28, 2008 by Amy 1 Comment

There is some sort of Chick-fil-A craziness that happened here in town this morning. That picture is a picture of the first Chick-fil-A in our town. It opened this morning at 6 am and the first 100 people got a free meal for a year. This picture was taken about 6pm last night and I’m not sure if you can see them, but there are probably 10 tents set up to the right side of the building in the parking lot.

Scott was really curious so he went out last night about 9pm to see them and he said the entire parking lot was full and there was even a camper out there. AND they had a DJ out there playing music and people were up and dancing around.

What the heck? I calculated it and that only equals about $280. They slept outside in probably 20 degree weather for $280. Did anyone in town see this? Is this some sort of phenomenon that happens everywhere??

**Update: Scott just stopped by the house while he’s working today and said guess what I did at 5am this morning? I guessed he went to Chick-fil-A and sort of hoped he got us free food for a year. He said, I drove by Chick-fil-a in my patrol car and blew my air horn and said over the PA “Eat more chicken! Eat more chicken!” trying to wake everyone up. LOL

Not good

February 28, 2008 by Amy 1 Comment

Lexi woke me up at 2am with a fever. I was able to get her to take those chewable Tylenol and it definitely helped but by the time she woke up at 9:30 this morning, it was back. I’ve given her more and she’s huddled in my bed watching Noggin. Let’s hope she does NOT have the flu.

Pageant is a no-go

February 27, 2008 by Amy Leave a Comment

So Lexi was supposed to be in the state pageant in June. A few deadlines are quickly approaching and I really started reading what was required. First, we’ve already given $100 deposit. Now, the rest of the $300 entry fee is due. THEN, there’s a required ad page that is $250. You’re really supposed to sell the ad to individuals and businesses but I feel bad asking for people for money for a pageant and really, they want the money in THREE days. Then, there’s t-shirts and optional contests you can enter. Then, you have to have a professional headshot. I haven’t had one so I was going to have to get her portrait done TOMORROW to send it off on Friday. Then there’s the whole thing about the dress which is at least $100. Then the pageant is actually held somewhere where we’d need a hotel room so that’s probably another $50-100. And this is all for a THREE year old who may or may not be into getting on stage and waving for about 30 seconds.

With my recent debate of even buying things for the house we want, I REALLY can’t justify spending $6-700 on a pageant that Lexi won’t even remember. If she was a little older and really insistent on doing this and it was going to be the beginning of a career type thing, I may invest in it for the experience, but for now, I think we’re going to have to give this a big no.

Making Plans

February 27, 2008 by Amy 1 Comment

Since receiving word on an estimate of Scott’s shoulder compensation, receiving all of our tax returns and ALSO finding out we’ll be getting money in June, we’ve had lots of decisions to make on what we’re going to do with all the cash. Big problem to have, I know. We’ve already paid off our credit card and the refrigerator. That was done within about 2 minutes of having the tax return money in our account. But now we have lots of things we could do.

I think what we’ve decided on for now is to put hardwoods down everywhere but the bedrooms, update the kitchen countertop, get a water softener installed, pay for our anniversary weekend in August and then Scott will use the bulk of the money from the settlement on a truck and a TV.

I’m ecstatic that we can do all these things that have been on “the list” for so long but honestly it’s kind of hard spending that much money knowing all the people that are struggling financially and reading about Compassion for several weeks now. I realize I can’t save everybody with what we have but I also don’t know how to strike a balance, if there is such a thing.