Amy J. Bennett

Well, that didn’t turn out AT ALL like I planned.  Scott called this morning to remind me that they girls had a birthday party to go to.  And you know what that means…last minute trip to Target for a gift.  We got out and did that around 11 and then headed over to the church for the block party going on there.  The girls didn’t really want to leave but they were excited to go to the party.  We went to a place called Zuma.  Sort of like a Chuck E. Cheese with putt-putt, bumper boats and go-carts.  The girls had a lot of fun but they didn’t really get to play with the birthday girl that much so just the four of us were running around together.  It actually was sort of nice now that I think of it.  If someone could have removed about half the people there, we’d have been alright.

So after that, we headed back to the church.  I was just going to drop Scott off and let him help clean the block party up but we ended up staying.  And S was there and Emma and her went down the blow-up slide more times than I can count.  And Lexi and I hung out watching them eating popcorn and cotton candy.  By the time we were done there, it was dinnertime and Mom invited us over for lasagna.  I was craving Longhorn’s steak but I can’t pass up a free meal.  So by the time Scott got over there, ate and helped Dad move around a few things, it was bedtime when we got home.  The girls got a bath and were out pretty quickly.

Needless to say, my house did not get clean AGAIN.  Since I was sick last week, that’s two weeks now I haven’t done really good cleaning.  I hate to do it on a Sunday and I’m so worn out since I’m still fighting this bronchitis but it looks like I might have to do some cleaning tomorrow.  I can’t handle this mess!

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.

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.

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.