Goings on

Hello all, got a good bit to update today. Daughter and school put on X-mas play Thursday and Friday, she was second in line of narrators, she was not happy as she wanted a bigger part but she did well. I will be posting pictures and videos either Sunday or Monday.

Thursday night we literally, albeit unintentionally, crashed some X-mas festivities at partners University. Back when I had my interview at the campus computer center I saw a flier for an X-mas get together at a place called the Hub on campus. Only being in the lobby of the computer center for a short time I did not see a smaller print line on the bottom of the flier that said in order to book, email so and so. Well, Thursday evening came along and we went only to find out it cost 5pounds to enter, you had to bring a gift for Santa to give to your kid and it was intended for school staff. Oh were we bummed, luckily they did not turn us away although since we did not know about the gift we told daughter she would not get one this go around. She did have a blast though, and while she was having fun I made a quick dash to the apartment (only about a 10-15 minute walk from campus) both to take her school stuff home, we had come straight from picking her up, and grabbed a small pre-wrapped "Santa" gift. When it came time to hand out gifts daughter was extremely happy and surprised to receive something. She got to unwrap (all the other kids were doing it) she uncovered a Nintendo DS game, Pokemon Ranger. She was very excited to get playing upon making it home. We thanked the ladies running the event for allowing us to crash and they said they were glad to have us and hoped we would return next year.

Also on Thursday partner and I were able to make 10 pounds by attending a study in the psychology department. It took us about 20 minutes and it was kind of fun, we just had to push a button when an English word popped up on a screen. Simple enough, we then spent a little of it grabbing a quick cup of coffee so that we could bid one of our friends farewell as he set off to the next stop on his study abroad.

Saturday, we helped out with daughters X-mas fair. We all went in a 9am to help with set-up and we took turns helpung run one of the activity booths to raise money. Meanwhile partner and I took turns walking daughter around doing that and other activites. It was all quite fun plus, I got to eat the biggest hot dog I have ever seen, it was huge. We won a few things in the raffles including some kind of wierd bath thing, a spoken word version of Wind in the Willows, candles of various kinds and more bath stuff. I won a very nice brown leather clutch for myself (which I will give to daughter, she was just saying she needed a purse) and I won a marble race game against a little kid but, gave him the prize candy. I have no idea how much we spent, I probably do not want to know as partner brought and spent most of the money. I also bought daughter a stuffed animal/ Rudolph as it was one of the few items on her X-mas list. All in all I think we all had a great time while there and I will upload the few pictures I was able to snap while there.

We may or may not be going to a fair-trade fair tomorrow depending on how tired we are from today errr... yesterday, as it is currently about 1:30 am as of writing this. We may just stay home and rest.

This past Tuesday we got a grocery delivery, our first from new to us ASDA. Apparently it is somehow owned by Wally World from back stateside. We were getting our groceries from Sainsbury's but grew tired of their online system. I believe after this first ASDA order that they have a much better selection of vegetarian and organic foods, as well as being cheaper as we got quite a bit of food in this delivery.

I have started using another site along with Associated Content, called Squidoo which can help me promote my writing as well as help boost the availability. Plus it had the added benefit of giving me an idea on one of my next topics as both sites have limited to no content on it. I am also looking into websites that look specifically at writing product reviews and doing article reviews as ways to continue supplementing. As far as Associated Content goes I am currently nearing 300 total views of my four currently published articles. I did however get my first rejected article, one of the Content calls they have, asking for favored rum drink recipes. I wrote on my preferred ones and provided recipes but, only one was my own creation, something I noted by crediting sources for other recipes but apparently that was not what they wanted. Oh well, you cannot win them all.

My two Squidoo links are as follows
http://www.squidoo.com/hotdstitles

http://www.squidoo.com/Movies-2008

These links are mostly a way to get increased viewership to my articles but, they are also pages unto themselves. I have already posted my articles to both my Facebook and Myspace accounts as well as Digg. I guess I could probably do my Linked In account also but I do not know anyone on there yet.

Ok well I guess that is all, as always I will continue to keep anyone and everyone updated.

Thank You for reading
Chris

Peace... One Love