Links and Minifeatures 05 30 Wednesday

My shoulder is hurting less than it was, although it's not fully healed yet, as Tuesday proved.



Went to Sea World with my older daughter's first grade class as a parent volunteer. Talk about herding cats! Having done the "class field trip" thing twice now, I can testify that divvying up the class three or four students per volunteer (what the teacher did last time) seems to work a lot better than trying to keep the whole class in one big gaggle. For one thing, I could learn three or four faces and keep track of them, but I found learning all but the couple I already know that quickly to be beyond me, with the upshot being that the parents could count the students, but had no real idea if students from another class had gotten mixed in. Only the teacher knew for sure if the count matched the members of the class.



I'm hoping to start up with more extra articles again soon. I put one up earlier today. I'm working on an Iraq post, off and on. We'll see how it works out. My shoulder is improving, but it still gets to hurting sometimes. I've also been very depressed about Thing. I still miss that little dog something fierce. I'm looking forward to things stabilizing enough that I can buy another puppy (or two - one for me and one for Hilda)



I've been using enough bandwidth that it's worthwhile to upgrade the service plan the site is on. 23 gigs of bandwidth so far this month - all text. One would think that 135,000 visits from almost 40,000 unique visitors so far this month would result in more income from Blogads - or at least more loan and real estate inquiries for me. With two days to go in the month, looks like the site is headed for another traffic record this month, despite the relative lack of new articles. My point is this: the expenses of this site are not huge, but they're not trivial either. If you like having the site here, please send me your friends who are Californians for loans, or better yet, San Diegans for real estate, so that I can justify the time and expense, not just to my wife but in my own mind as well. Or, if you don't want to do that, come here to do your google searches where you're going to click on some paid advertising link anyway (but please, no phantom clicks. People clicking on stuff they're not really interested in doesn't really help, and it's cheating to boot. I appreciate the thought, but let's not cheat the advertisers, even those that may be scum of the earth).



(Or you could just hit my tip jar at top left, although with less than $100 in almost two years, that's not going to pay my mortgage - or even bandwidth bill - any time soon)



My business commercial is here, for those in San Diego or California.