It's interesting to look back on the microstock experiment I started a few years ago. I have been quite lazy this past year about uploading anything--and expected my sales to dry up because of it. While the sales have definitely not been through the roof, they do continue on slowly and surely. A certain percentage of the sales are coming from about 5 or 10 of the most popular images but a large percentage of sales continue to come from the bulk of the images in my portfolios that are not particularly popular and get downloaded only rarely. I've been averaging between $80 and $100 a month all year $125 a month since the experiment began in Feb. 2005. Now my question is how many images do I need to upload to have a nice enough side income to reduce my hours on my day job and use that time for writing, or art?
Janel heard a piece on NPR the other day about how to keep pests out of
the garden, and since something kept eating our squash flowers last
year, we took note. Apparently the urine of meat-eating males is an effective
deterrent to some garden pests, so I've been
surreptitiously distributing my pee around the perimeter of our garden.
I managed to put together a cartoon for "Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest" from the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was fun to try my hand at it again, although I'm not 100% satisfied with the result. I think I need to keep practicing in order to get my cartooning back to a level I am pleased with. (Caption: "All I'm suggesting is that you scientists stick to what you're good at: the science. And us politicians will stick to what we're good at: the politics . . . distortion . . . censorship. . .manipulation. . .lies. . .et cetera.")
Well, the beer is now bottled. Last Thursday some friends and I siphoned the brew into a bucket (from the fermenter it has been in for a few weeks), mixed in some new sugars for the yeast to consume, and then siphoned it into bottles that we had been collecting ourselves and from friends. We've capped the bottles and the yeast is busy eating the sugar and carbonating our beer. The kitchen still smells like beer and the floor is still a little sticky...but in just over two weeks we'll have homebrew!
The other day an old friend invited me to be virtual friends through Facebook, and since it didn't send me her email address (and the address I had on file didn't seem to be working anymore) I decided to sign up to reply to her message. After going through the sign-up process and entering my high school and college and uploading my address book, Facebook determined people that I knew who already had Facebook accounts and sent them notices that I had just signed up. Throughout the next few days, people added me as friends and it was interesting to see those who had accounts: my sister, sister-in-law, some friends from the area, old friends from high school or college. And then I found out I was befriended by...my mother-in-law?
It's interesting to look back on the 
