Itty Bitty Hooves

Watching Kittens Play

This is an absolutely adorable kitten video. No I don’t get enough of seeing my own playful twosome romping about my house, I have to go looking on YouTube for more of them. Since I don’t have a video of mine doing pretty much the same things as these I thought it would be cute to share this video with you. Having kittens in the house is a non-stop riot. It is hard to get anything done since we spend so much time watching them play.

Doggie Bloopers

I just wrote an article for a company on dog agility training. It’s a sport I used to compete in quite a bit with our dobies and have long had a passion for so writing the article was easy enough. It brought up some more memories however, and since I am currently dogless as hubby and I try to decide which breed would be best suited to join us in our home I have no doggies to go out and ‘play’ with. So I went over to trusty YouTube–there is nothing you can’t find on YouTube I swear, and looked up dog agility. This is one of several blooper reels and I haven’t laughed this hard in quite awhile. I had to share I hope you find it just as funny.

Fond Memories

Every once in awhile I cruise YouTube looking for videos of American Saddlebred horses. Growing up that was my breed of choice. I’ve owned several in my youth and while they don’t fit my lifestyle (or budget) now, I sure do miss them. Seeing videos like this one brings back fond memories, and even a few momentary tears. Maybe someday I’ll find myself aboard another magnificient Saddlebred… maybe, but if not, I’ll always have my own memories, and lovely videos like this to help me remember them.

How to Make Ends Meet While Doing What You Love

For those of us that live on small farms and homesteads it can be difficult to balance the need to make money, and the need to be at home to care for all the chores that have to be done with animals, or even other food production. While on any of the homestead and animal boards I go to a very common complaint is that they can’t manage full-time jobs away from the farm, but they also can’t afford to not work. So the next question is always — what can I do to make money at home?

Man you’d think it would be easy wouldn’t you? I mean just look around online and you’ll see hundreds if not thousands of ads promising riches while you sleep. Sure if it was that easy every office building in the country would be vacant. The thing is–you CAN work from home… the downside is, it really is work. Saying that I have to laugh and tell a little story that rather exemplifies that point. Just two weeks ago, my son who was temporarily laid off from a local factory job due to the economical crunch and downsizing looked at me and said ‘hey, how about showing me how to do what you do?’

Now right off the bat I have to tell you that I’m pretty sure what he meant by that was ’sit at home on your butt and play on the computer all day long.’ When you put it that way it does sound like fun. The truth of the matter is I do love my job, and I make money from home, sitting on my butt in front of a computer. The truth also is–its work, which my dear son found out in about 30 minutes of ‘doing what I do’. Suddenly the whole idea of making a bunch of money for playing on the computer all day didn’t appeal to him quite as much and he got busy finding himself another 9-5 job.

See, that’s the point. If you LOVE writing, and dealing with the pressures of deadlines and various clients demands, and working 15 hour days, you can make money from home and enjoy it. If you don’t love the process of it, you’ll probably decide that working somewhere else isn’t such a bad deal after all, you can feed the animals when you get home.

Working from home offers tons of flexibility, but at the same time you have to be your own slave driver. You can’t let yourself get away with watching ‘Oprah’ instead of doing an assignment. You are your own boss, and as great as that sounds it comes with a lot of responsibility–if you want to get paid that is. Certainly it is flexible in that if you truly don’t need a lot of money and just want to put in a hour or two a day, you can do that too, and actually be successful in getting the amount of work you desire, but you have to know that you probably won’t pay the bills doing that, although you’ll make a little bit of spending money.

So where are these great opprotunities? I’m sure a lot of you are shaking your head saying ‘yeah, I’ve seen all those things, they’re all scams.’

Laregely you would be correct. You have to be very careful of what you choose to do. Here are a few of the types of jobs I do online that are legitimate and DO make money (however, a caveat—always be sure the companies are legit, even in real opprotunities there are some companies that are not above board. These things do have a great many resources online that are viable though.

*Freelance writing: This is as varied as can be and ranges from writing SEO articles of anywhere from 100 to 1000 words, to ghostwriting ebooks, to writing webcontent for a developing website. There are also freelance magazine article jobs and other types of freelancing, and the great thing about this type of working from home is that if you have a talent for writing, you will almost never be bored because every assignment is different.

*Website development: If you have a knack for building websites you can put that to work for you and get paid very well for it.

*Paid Blogging: While this isn’t a paid post, quite a few of the ones I write are. Nice huh? How many of you have a blog? Wouldn’t it be nice to earn some money for writing on it once in awhile?

*Adsense/Adwords: These two are very commonly employeed and while they can work, they are not really for the entry level worker online. There’s a lot that is needed to make these programs pay off, but once you get to that level it can provide a nice occassional income.

Those are mostly what I do. There are many other things available online, and I’ve done a few other things as well, but as a rule I stick to the above. Again, beware of shading opprotunities. A few things to consider before deciding to try a company:

*Never (let me repeat that with emphasis) NEVER pay anyone to work. If an ad offers you untold riches, easy money, and the keys to success if you just send them $30.95 (or whatever the amount) I can tell you EXACTLY how they are making all their money–from all the suckers sending them $30.95.

*While it is not always possible, and this is not a hard rule since I’ve done it, in fact one of the companies I am currently working for didn’t meet this criteria–but its a play at your own risk type thing until you see if it is legitimate: see who else is doing it. Many of the companies that offer writing gigs of the various types listed above also host forums, and blogs and such to give you a good idea of how the company works, how the people who work for it feel about their jobs, if they’re getting paid, getting paid on time, etc… Again, you will not always have such forums and blogs to judge a company by, and you can develop other senses to help you decide if you want to take a chance–and since you are going to remember the rule above this one above all else and NEVER spend any money to work, even when you do take a chance on a company you can’t easily check out, you won’t be out money, you just may be out a little bit of time and effort. That does hurt, but not as much as losing money to do it.

*My final, and absolutely unbreakable rule is ‘never put your eggs in one basket’ (just in case one of them is bad). You may have noticed throughout this little post that I have mentioned working for several companies. I don’t mean that as in over the years I’ve worked for several (although that is also true) I mean that as in AT ONE TIME. I have even right as we speak eight different companies that I work regularly for, many of them every day. The reason for this is simple, and three-fold:

1st, and the most common reason is that unfortunately internet companies can be somewhat unstable. If you put all of your effort and work into one company, and it folds, you are left ‘jobless’. Although this is not the end of the world as you can go seek more work, you may have a week, two, or even months before you find another good ‘one’.

2nd, probably the best reason because you will find some companies that defy the first reason well enough to have reasonable stability, is that all of these companies go through times of feast and famine. One minute they will have tons of work for you and the next nothing or close to it. If you can deal with that kind of instability in your income, and like a little enforced ‘vacation’ now and then, disregard this reason.

3rd, and although the most important reason, it is also the most ‘temporary’ of reasons and I’ll tell you why after–if you work for many companies and you bring on a new one and it ends up not paying you for the work you did, you are still not broke because you have the others that are paying, so you don’t feel the pain so badly. This can also apply to companies that were faithful in paying but suddenly go under and don’t pay final amounts due. Thankfully it does not happen all that often, but it CAN happen. The reason I said this is the most temporary of the reasons is that if it happens because a company goes under it certainly isn’t going to happen to you again (at least from that company) and if it happens because they are just disreputable it SURE isn’t going to happen again because you better not be stupid enough to continue working for them.

The bottom line is what is being said about opprotunities to work from home are true. There are even brick and mortar companies beginning to ‘farm out’ work to people looking to work from home. There are many ‘freelancing’ boards online that post such jobs and they are free to use. Search them out. Learn about the various jobs avaible and see if any of them are a fit for you, or if it is something you might like to learn, and go for it.

Do You Ever Finish?

Everytime I think I’m done, at least for awhile, redecorating, renovating, or repairing something in or on this house, something else pops up. We finally finished the flooring in the livingroom and now the kitchen faucet is leaking. I told my husband that I know exactly what kind I want. I had always wanted a faucet in the kitchen sink that had one of those hand held hoses on the side to rinse, and when we first moved here there was one. I was thrilled. It was soon replaced by a water softner for drinking water… bummer. Well, now that I’ve looked at some of the kitchen faucets available I see that they make one that has a hose that lifts off the actual faucet rather than alongside since that area is still occupied by the drinking water softner setup. I’m excited. Okay, I really didn’t want another project so soon, but at least I’ll get my rinse hose back!