For the past year Allison, Eva and I have set aside $10 a month to buy toys. The toys are not for Eva, they are not even for me. No, these toys are for a special event that happens each year, the Christmas is for Kids Toy Drive. My friend Sarah Achin of Achin’s garage and her family put on this wonderful toy drive to help out Christmas is for Kids, a local charity that collects money and toys, new and unwrapped, and distributes them to local children.
Today was another really crazy day. I have a new project at work and I am pretty excited about it. But I don’t like talking work here on this blog or on any blog. This is a blog about me and my stuff for you like my daily photos.
With it being the Christmas season and my not being able to get home while it is still light out I end up taking many photos in the house. I am experimenting with the settings on the camera so I get some interesting, not great, shots. Here are a few that didn’t make it for today’s Photo-A-Day.
Today was also a major day because today launched a huge promotion on this blog. The promotion was with Sears. I have a sponsored post below that details an outing that Allison, Eva and I had at Sears. We had an wonderful time and did pretty well getting toys for Christmas is for Kids. I got the idea because of a post on Facebook by my college and high school friend Sarah. Her family’s auto shop sponsored a toy drive that I went to about a week or so ago.
Some people may think that getting toys is frivolous especially with people out of work and needing so much more, but I firmly believe that toys are so important to children. I see kids growing up way to fast and not having proper childhoods. Toys are powerful things to spark imagination. Overdoing it with toys is possible to so there has to be moderation. But I can’t see kids missing out on getting toys on Christmas, I just can’t. So, you may read that in my post I will be socking away $10 a month to do another shopping spree next year. That isn’t bullshit. I have already created a payee called Christmas is for Kids in Microsoft Money and each month when I am paid $10 gets put towards that payee, that way I know the money is spent. We should have a good sum of money to use next year.
I think that this is very important to do as a family and to show Eva that we can strive to help others.
So the BenSpark Grants A Wish contest is running till December 23rd. I have a contest to give away a Silver Pass to Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, that contest ends this Friday, December 19th. So far no-one has entered. So if you decide to Enter you have a pretty good shot to win. The big contest however is BenSpark’s Big Box of Awesome. That contest ends tomorrow at 12:00pm EST. And there are a ton of entries. I have a very special thing planned to announce the winner too! Here is the last thing that is in the box, right now. If I have room I will maybe put some secrets in there too!
Tonight I had my first ever IZEA Inisders meeting online. It was great to chat with all the insiders at once. And also great to chat with Ashley as well. That guy rocks! I may push him and give him a hard time but I love the guy.
Does anyone in my readership know of an affiliate opportunity with Rosetta Stone? Please leave me a message through my contact page. Thanks.
This is our Christmas tree. I keep trying different shots with it, this was decent, standard and all but it shows much of the tree. I had to crop the dining room table out of it. I have another photo of the tree up on the Nokia Chronicles site. If you load up the site and see the crappy picture of a floating Christmas tree, that would be mine. Lesson: Don’t give a blogger a craptastic 2MP phone to take photos and post to a site that should be a multimedia site but is just a sucktastic sucky site for sucky photos, it does not showcase the lives of the 20 diverse bloggers in the program. We should have gotten Nokia phones with full qwerty keyboards and unlimited usage for our 2 week trial periods. The bloggers deserve more from the program, the program deserves more for their expense as well. What they got was a glorified flash page that shows random pictures of things bloggers took pictures of. My Phone was recharged today with $25.00. I sent about 4 pictures to the site and I’m down to $21.00. I hate this phone (Nokia 6650), the plan and so much about this whole thing. I am embarrassed that my name is attached to the project as well. Before I finally got my refill I constantly got this message over and over.
So damn annoying. The site is terrible, there is no way to interact with the bloggers or comment on their photos. I have no memory card or cable for the phone so I can’t even pull up the images to share with you, they are on the site and that is that. (Wait, Oh I think I can, I may get them off the phone tomorrow and write what I should have been able to write in the 1st place. Okay I’ve ranted about this too much, but expect a full on rantfest when the project is over. I’m taking and sending a photo right now of my displeasure at the whole thing.