The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 77)

Made #1GF! her Sunday egg and bagel sandwich before going Cranston, RI, for a surprise 50th birthday party for my cousin. For the first time ever, Google maps failed us, putting us in the middle of a neighborhood a half mile from where we should have been. Because we kept failing miserably to sniff out the restaurant ourselves, we finally agreed that I’d ask for directions at a gas station.

Does anyone remember a time when if you needed directions, the gas station was the one place you could rely on to get you where you wanted to go? That is an idea of a long gone era. Even though we were pretty close to the restaurant, and it was in a local strip mall, the attendant just stared at me like I had asked him how I could modify my car’s flux capacitor to run on household waste instead of plutonium.

Eventually we semi-accidentally found the place, and had a good time catching up with extended family.

Monday (Day 78)

Got on a Stormtrooper kick as I started compiling my posts for the week, which ate many, many hours of research and writing. I read a lot of blogs during the day, so I sent a random e-mail to one of my daily reads to thank them for writing.

Tuesday (Day 79)

I wrote and worked on my site all day. I made a new icon for getting updates by e-mail (look up in the top right of the page and steal it if you need to). I added some lesser known features of Ultimate Tag Warrior (for WordPress) to generate related suggestions at the bottom of my posts. I ate cold pizza for dinner and got discouraged when I started thinking about the amount of time that I sink into writing and how flat the traffic growth has been compared to when I spent much less time on it.

Wednesday (Day 80)

I worked another full day (9 hours) on Stormtroopers vs. Ninjas. When considering the amount of time and research that went into that post, I think that there must be something wrong with me. Looked into advertising, and decided that I might as well give it a shot.

Thursday (Day 81)

Got advertising up and running on the site. Felt a little bad about it because it looked cluttered. Spent some time trying to figure out how to minimize clutter and still get the ads in a good spot. Got featured over at DoshDosh, a site that I read daily on how to make money online. It was only a question, but a prime link on a high traffic site made me feel pretty good. Realized that half the mail that I send to ex co-workers must get filtered by their mail filtering application. I guess you can’t use the word BIG in email titles any more.

Friday (Day 82)

Rebranded the site header with a new logo which looks pretty much the same as the old logo. Because I suck at design and had lost the original header to catastrophic drive failure a while back, I easily killed half a day reconstructing the header from bits and pieces.

Got in touch with my cousins on Facebook. I’m not one for social networking, but I really suggest Facebook as being worth a look.

To kill the rest of the day, I undertook a bit of site redesign. I widened the site, rebuilt the header and all the images, and added a column for ads. All told, I worked on the site from 9 AM until 11 PM. And I didn’t get to write a word, which is what I really enjoy doing. Anyone who proclaims that making money on the web is easy gets a kick in the ding ding.

In the last few minutes while I was on the computer, I decided that I’d figure out how to make a ringtone for my phone. In about 10 minutes time, I had the intro to Slayer’s “South of Heaven” installed as my ringtone. When I showed #1GF!, she didn’t understand why I did it and said it sounded scary. I think I might’ve retorted with something stupid like “Yea, well… scary awesome“, but I can’t be blamed because I had been nipple-deep in CSS for half the day and wasn’t fully human compatible at the time.

Saturday (Day 83)

Spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to add my contacts to my phone, and finally clicked a big green “synchronize” button that I somehow overlooked for the last three months. Gave up on the computer and went to the beach with #1GF!. The tide was out at 3:30 PM which made for an absolutely perfect beach day because the tide runs away from you rather than chasing you up the beach.

While we were there, I tried to think up more clever things to draw on the sand, while #1GF! kept asking, “What is that?” to every drawing. I gave up and made up a game called “circle of death” which involved #1GF! and I pushing each other out of a two foot circle in the sand. Two girls stopped to watch us, but I couldn’t pay attention because I was in the circle at the time.

Called a ton of people who were suffering in the 99 degree heat. Even on the beach, the breeze didn’t offer any relief, and the only relief we could find was standing in the water. The waves were peaking at 3 feet, and there were a bunch of surfers out. I tried to get #1GF! to float, but she kept freaking out whenever the smallest wave would come toward us. After 5 hours in the 99 degree heat, we went home to the air conditioned joy that is our apartment for some pasta salad and some episodes of the Shield. I waited for someone to call so that I could hear my Slayer ringtone, but I eventually had to call from #1GF!’s phone just to hear the ring.

What I learned

• Gas station attendants are not what they used to be.
• Even if the water is ice cold, you’ll get used to it if the air is 99 degrees.
• You can rough house on the beach even if you’re over 30.
• Facebook is also good for keeping up with your cousins.
• I know how to make ringtones. Wait. I know how to make SLAYER ringtones.
• Redesign can be a pain in the ass, but when it has to be done, sit down and grind it out.
• Thinking about making money doesn’t make it. The only way to make money online is to try out programs that pay you something.
• Making money online is not easy.
• I may not be genetically related to my family. They are well-dressed and personable. I live in cargo shorts and a T-shirts, and will step up to jeans if someone says that I have to look nice.
• I work too hard on my posts and I don’t really think people like them any better than posts that take me twenty minutes. I think I write and edit as if people are actually reading. I have to remember that people are skimming.

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Posted in Leisure