Onward...

Several things are happening right now.

1. I've successfully published some articles on Helium and Yahoo's Associated Content--the latter is a far superior system that offers significantly higher pay for articles, as well as better exposure.

2. I've successfully borrowed some money. It should be enough to make it far enough into July that I'll be making my own money again (probably doing factory work for that staffing firm I keep referencing).

3. I have officially begun the ten-day training program for teaching at the online university. That has a very promising potential for being lucrative and relatively painless. I'm excited to get into it; it's unique how student-centric everything is. By the by, it's a for-profit university, which is interesting; but it is accredited.

4. We (meaning myself, Juliet, and some other people related to Juliet) are heading to Florida tonight-into-tomorrow. It will be a long drive (around 24 hours, if I did the made-up math in my head correctly).

5. For the foreseeable future, I have local-within-Emporia transportation; i.e. my bike is fixed. Except I rode it to Wal-Mart yesterday to buy a new back tire and on the way home the back tire went flat. So, I now have to get a new tube for it. But other than that, hooray for my bike working again.

6. Jorge (my 'neighbor'--is it a neighbor if technically he lives in the other side of the same house? Duplexes are confusing for linguists) has apparently read this blog. I had no idea he knew about it. You should check out his blog, especially if you like Siberian Huskies. You can find it somewhere around here.

So, that's that, update-wise, I suppose. What are all of you up to?

Waiting and Trying to Survive Unemployment Without Unemployment Benefits

I still haven't started the (unpaid) training for the online university. That all starts on Monday. I still can't work for the staffing firm until I come back from Florida. So, I'm down to pretty much having no money in the bank. I may not be able to pay July rent on time (fortunately our landlord is awesome about these things), bills are still coming up due, and all around it's just a bit frustrating. I am still hopeful, though, because not being hopeful would just be, well, depressing.

I have officially applied for food stamps, and the very kind people at SRS seemed to rush to the rescue. I now have a Vision card and can purchase food with that, until I start making money again. I have asked some family and friends to borrow money, and am still waiting for a response on some of those. Currently, it looks like we'll be broke until around mid-August, which is when Juliet gets her loans for the semester and when I (should) start getting paid for my online teaching job.

In the meantime, I've been working on writing for content websites like Helium and Associated Content, and started bidding on writing and editing projects on Elance. No luck on the latter, but for the others I've written a total of (I think) seven articles and have made, so far, about $2.09. All but four cents of that came from Yahoo! paying me up front for this article. The four cents came from residual revenue from people going to the articles and/or clicking on ads on the pages the articles are on. Speaking of ads, I decided to reinstate AdSense onto this blog, simply in order to increase the meager earning potential I currently have. Anyway, if I write enough articles over time, my residual income of about a penny a day should increase gradually. Eventually, I should be able to pull in a decent secondary income from writing articles. But that won't happen immediately. But it will be nice to have a little bit of money coming in. Even if it's only a couple dollars here and there.

Edit: while I was typing the above, I discovered the I received $2.00 for this article on Helium. So, the total is $4.09, which reminds me of the Beach Boys. But since I don't want that stuck in my head, I'll say it reminds me of the Spin Doctors.