This is a good week for the house: three showings in two days. There is a new showing scheduled for this evening.

A lady I work with pointed out that I should try to have a better attitude. I’ve been rather pessimistic. Would you be if you’d had 25+ viewings and no offers? She said that the house is getting good visibility and I just need to focus on attracting the right people to purchase the house. Think positive and all that.

Funny. I gave a similar talk to my sister when she was frustrated with a job hunt.

My stepmom sent me this picture in my email with the caption “Just checking on you.. Yup. There you are… Sitting at your computer again.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

What caption would you put on this picture?

I’m not sure where she got it from, so please pardon no link to the original photographer.

I enjoy odd pens and odd dice. Makes sense, since I’m a writer and a gamer. During the late 1990s, I used to play a game calle Dragon Dice. I lost my dice in one of my previous moves, and have missed playing it. I thought it had been discontinued after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR.

I recently discovered that SFR had purchased the rights to Dragon Dice. My starter set of dice came yesterday. Yay! Ah the memories! Now if I can only remember how to play…

Out of curiousity, I searched for Dragon Dice on YouTube and found this walk down memory lane:

Snicker.

This is a first! The house has two showings scheduled back to back for tonight: 6:30 and 7:00. Wow.Here’s hoping that things will go well and maybe someone will make an offer.

I’ve been investigating other blogging opportunities (see the job board at ProBlogger.net for an example of the available jobs). I don’t have a lot of spare time, but I’m a good writer with a decent portfolio. I’ve managed to keep this blog for four years–something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep up. (Of course writing on a blog like this doesn’t create the best quality of writing samples either, if you are writing about day-to-day things.)

Any who, one of the jobs on the blog was an ad for writers for a pet-centric web site, petlovr.com. The job description included an interest in writers willing to author stories about horses. The horse-specific site is HorseLvr.com. The most recent post I could find was from 2007. Definitely a need for writers on that blog.

I’m not a breeder or a trainer, but I’ve had horses all of my life. My current mare is insulin resistant (more commonly referred to as equine metabolic syndrome) so I have some familiarity with symptoms, treatment, and management for this condition. My real interests lie in the history of the horse (particularly in ancient Rome and Gaul), religious iconography related to the horse in that same time period, ancient and modern tack (and how similar it is!), and how modern day breeds compare to the ones used by Roman or Gallic cavalry. I can write about other topics, too, but those are the topics that come to mind.

I read through some of the posts and the writing wasn’t bad, but most of the articles had very few citations to backup assertions. The researcher in me cringed. When I sit down to write an article, I’m very careful about my citations. In particular, the reliability and quality of the citations. In an ideal world, you can’t rely on only one source for an entire article’s content (i.e., Wikipedia).

Okay, so I might have interest and a slew of article ideas: basics for lunging, Roman cavalry equipment, snaffle bits ancient and modern, how the bit interacts with a horse’s mouth (anatomy based), insulin resistance, and quite a few others. Plus profiles of breeders, equestrians and average people doing things with their horses. Overcoming fear when you lose confidence. All reasonable topics, and I’ve recently developed a good network in NC for interview candidates, too.

I want to research Petlovr’s other sites and the writing quality is okay. The HorseLovr.com web site is mostly ads before you get to content. Any content produced for the site is their exclusive content for a year. It isn’t that different from a publisher buying first North American serial rights. I couldn’t post anything I wrote for them here. I could write the article on this site, send a blurb to the other blog, and then link the content to an article here (no renumeration). The payment for a 1000 word article is $15.

The tech writer in me thinks okay I might spend 5-6 or more hours researching and writing the article. Quite likely longer than that editing and checking facts. So my payment comes down to $2/hour. It’s better than nothing, plus it gets me a byline on a site — and builds my publication credits.

I’m not sure how writing for a blog site compares with writing for a regular horse magazine (and how it effects my credibility as an author). Definitely something to think about. The time commitment for some of the articles varies. The research-intensive ones will take considerably longer. The history of the Arabian horse in Roman times I’ve considered writing for a breed journal like the Arabian Horse Times.

The freelancer in me is chanting “selective marketing:” send the less intensive articles to the blog and the more involved articles to a publication.

The freelancer in me also thinks that I shouldn’t post this if I’m considering applying for the position.

I’ve received two notifications on the house today for two showings: one this afternoon at 1:00 and another tomorrow evening.

Wow. Lots of activity but no offers. I know the house has an odd floor plan–that’s what happens with additions and remodelling–but it’s still a great house at a reasonable price.

How in the world do other people manage to not get stressed out over things? Since I’m paying mortgage and rent right now maybe things are just more accute.

Things have definitely picked up with the house. My real estate agent thought that activity would pick up with spring and she was right. There is another viewing scheduled for tomorrow evening.

Each time I have a note about someone viewing the house, I always wait to see if there will be an offer. So far, nothing.

I checked the value of my home on a few of the real estate web sites (like Zillow). Their information was incorrect. They said the house was about 1000 square feet, when it’s actually 1692 suqare feet. The house was listed as having three bedrooms; it has two. The third bedroom was split to become a laundry room and a large walk-in closet for the master bedroom. The house’s estimated value on the real estate sites is based upon three bedrooms and ~650 less square feet. Someone who doesn’t know the house might look at the real estate site and seriously think I had lost my mind with what I’m asking for the house.

I keep searching for sites with mis-information and adding the updates that have been done to the house. I don’t know how much of a difference it will make, but there’s not much else I can do…

The good thing was seeing that other houses in my neighborhood have sold for the price range I’m asking — and those houses are considerably smaller.

I had two problems with WordPress since I updated to 2.5.1 last week: the trackback field disappeared and no one could leave comments on the posts. The issue turned out to be an incomplete upload of the wp-admin/inludes folder. Once I re-uploaded the folder, the trackback field and comments-enabled options re-appeared on the Write New Post page.

If you encounter any posts that do not have comments enabled, please let me know. I’ll have to verify that things are still working okay. After a database conversion to 2.5.1 and having to re-upload the inludes folder, I wouldn’t be surprised if something else needed to be tweaked.

I was randomly reading web pages and came acros a site called Photo Basement, a site that contains humourous modern day and historical photos, some times captioned and some times not. The photo sets are pretty funny. The set of what happens when geeks have kids got me laughing, especially this first image: