Dimestore Romance

So This is the New Year…

By Belynda, December 21st, 2009 in Other | 5 Comments
Tags: Blogenning, George Bush is a dungball, high-stakes cleaning, housework, laziness, New Years Resolutions

First of all, let’s just get this out of the way…

OH MY GOD HOLY SHIT YOU POSTED ON YOUR BLOG WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD AND WE WERE JUST WAITIN FER UR DOMAIN REGGY TO EXPIRE SO WE COULD ST33L UR AWSUM URL!!1One

Okay, with that done. Hello! I know. It’s been like a month or more. It’s been busy around here lately. But that’s a story for another post (or three.. since the Bloggening just started back up again and I’m already four posts behind. Damn you, Ian and Tom.)

Now for a word from your sponsors…

I am a slob. Actually, saying I’m a slob is like saying the second term of the Bush Administration was kind of a lame party. I cringe at the thought of pop-ins, I am comfortable with a level of “artistic disarray” that would make Martha Stewart loose her bowels into her neatly ironed chinos. I am… Godzillaslob. The best evidence of this came this Thanksgiving. We cleaned the house neat as a pin in anticipation of dinner at our house. The place was stunningly clean. Unaccustomed to such conditions, our two cats wandered the house crying mournfully and refusing to cuddle with us until the place regained its usual patina of hapless clutter.

To be fair, I’m a busy girl. Anyone who knows me personally will agree that I take on WAY too much. This year, in addition to work, I took three classes, wrote the first 50,000 words of a novel, and joined a Christmas choir group. Holy. Crap. How much laundry got done in this house? I bet you can guess.

At the beginning of this year, I made the New Year’s resolution to read/listen to a book a week for the entire year. It was more than I’d read in years, but I thought it was an attainable goal, so I blogged about it and started a Goodreads account to chart my progress. I’m happy to report that as of today, not only have I completed my fifty-two book spree, I’m actually working on books fifty-three and fifty-four at the moment.

With my first “NYR Challenge” out of the way, I thought perhaps my love of self-competition could cure my vile hatred of housework. Maybe, if I came up with a NEW New Year’s Resolution Challenge ^TM I would keep my house clean, my clothes laundered, and my sanity intact.

And here you have it: The “Enemy of the (Feminist) State” Homemaker New Year’s Challenge.

I hereby challenge myself in this public forum to commit to one hour of housework… every day…. FOR A YEAR.

Oh. Shit.

Here are the rules, both to keep me honest, and in case any of my six or seven dedicated readers would like to follow along at home:

1.     The victim… um.. competitor… uhh… Sexy Domestic Goddess (YES! That works) will commit to one hour of housekeeping per day for the period January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010.

2.     The SDG will record said housework (basic description of housekeeping prowess and time) on a blog, Facebook, Twitter or other place fit for public scrutiny.

3.     If an hour of housework is missed, it must be made up later within the same week. *Yes, this will occasionally mean seven miserable hours of solid housekeeping on a Sunday, as punishment for six previous days of doing f#%k all and stoning out on Warcraft.

4.     Hours may be banked within the same week. If the SDG does two hours of work on Monday, she may sit on her ass without shame on Tuesday. Bon Bons optional.

5.     Banked hours will disappear on the Monday after a given week. Put those Bon Bons to good use, girls.

Here is the part that will basically ensure that I keep my house as neat as a pin for the next 365 days.

6. If the SDG fails in this attempt to bring domestic order to her humble abode, the sting of failure will be felt in the form of $50 of her hard earned cash going to a cause she f#%king despises.

My anti-charity? As if it would be anything else…

The George W. Bush Presidential Center

As if that alone were not sufficient reason to keep to this resolution, here’s a little added incentive culled from the donation page of the site:

“With your tax-deductible contribution, you will take your place as one of the first to stand with President and Mrs. Bush as a Charter Member of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. When you contribute $50 or more, your name will also be included in the Freedom Registry on permanent display at the Center.”

Think of it: My name, forever scrawled in the pages of an unholy guestbook, alongside names of people who actually LIKE that guy.

I don’t think anyone reading this wants to see me fail this thing now.

The Freelance Dance

By Belynda, August 3rd, 2009 in Other | 3 Comments
Tags: clickbait tags, credit cards, Deb Ng, elance.com, freelance writing, laziness, What I did with my summer vacation..., Writing

In the first of a nine-part series about what I’ve been up to for the last three weeks, I’m going to talk about my adventures freelancing… or at least my adventures in bidding on freelance projects, designing some very rock’n'roll business cards, and buying a sparkly, shameless new domain name to hawk some literary goods.

I decided recently that while I love writing long-form fiction, it’s unreasonable to assume that my novels will be international best-sellers within the next year, or even that they’ll be sufficiently edited to see the light of day (that’s important, too.) With that in mind, I decided I’d like to start slinging articles on the downlow to make some cashymoney, stash it away for that little single-family I’ve had my eye on.

Away! To the Intertoobz for some getfilthyrichery!

Freelancing is not as easy as one might think. Basically, getting into freelancing is like turning 18 and wanting to get a credit card: No one will give you credit because you don’t have credit because no one will give you credit. There are resources out there to help you out, such as Deb Ng’s Freelance Writing Gigs blog. Deb is a special flavor of awesome in my book. She digs around for leads, posts them every day on the blog, and even gives some advice to the newbies on getting leads, getting noticed, and getting paid. I’ve been perusing her information, as well as checking out some of the less “pretty” ways of getting work, such as Elance and Guru.

It’s a lot of fun so far.

Elance.com is basically reverse Ebay for freelancers. You can roam the listings and bid on projects you think you want to work on. This sounds very shiny and awesome until you realize that there’s between 3 and 48 proposals for every job, there’s always some bastard who bids the minimum (Edit my 25,000 words doctoral thesis! $50 minimum bid. Some dude - whose profile reads like the product of a bad acid trip -invariably bids the $50 bucks.) Don’t get me wrong, Elance is great, but there are a lot of projects that dangle forever, get canceled for policy violations, mysteriously disappear, or get offered to the $50 guy… whether or not his english language skills lead him to believe dromedary is a synonym for boobies. Still, it’s good for building confidence and it’s a motivation to write some sample articles.. like a nifty one I just wrote about divorce. Have I ever been divorced? Nope… do I love to give unsolicited relationship advice? Yep.

I’m happy to report that I’ve actually nailed down one project so far, thus validating the $10 per month service fee, and then some. With this bounty of income I will get some business cards, and even ::gasp:: a website to peddle my wares. I feel a little self-aggrandizing buying my name as a website of course, but I’m going to do it… becuzzitswhatcha do! I’ll be able to host some examples of my work, post prices, and e-pimp myself to those needing some wordiness in their lives. It will come complete with a artsy picture and a self-important bio that only vaguely resembles the nutcase you all know in real life. I know everyone will really appreciate this. Don’t worry though… I won’t give up on Dimestore.. I’ll be posting here as much as I always do… which is to say, practically never.