I know it’s been a while since my last post.  A lot has happened since December.  And, I know, most people that read this don’t care about anything I have to say.  They just want to see pictures of my girls.  So, for those people, here are a couple of pictures:

Big Sister

Little Sister

So there you go.

Even though both of those pictures are a great pick me up, I did have something else to say that caught me completely off guard today.  No…we’re not pregnant again.  That would be wild.  New job and new pregnancy in a month.

Oh, yeah.  I forgot to mention that I got a new job last month.  I’m now working at Acxiom in Conway.  Shorter commute and it seems to be more in line with what I want to do.  So far, so good.  I’m working with some really great people.

Man, I get distracted easy.  Anyway, for the pick me up.  Have you ever reached into your pocket and found 5 bucks that you forgot you had?  That’s awesome, isn’t it?  To know that you have money that you didn’t know you had.  Not much else is as satisfying as that.  I mean, you just made 5 bucks for reaching into your pocket.  I wish all jobs were that easy and rewarding.  That happened to me today.  Except it wasn’t my pocket and it wasn’t 5 bucks.  I reached into my email and found 240 bucks that I didn’t know I had.  Yeah, that’s right.  Two hundred and forty dollars.  WTF?!?!?!

Let me explain:  About 2 1/2 years ago, I ran the 2007 Chicago Marathon.  The exploits of that weekend can be found in great detail in this post.  You’ll notice in that post that Amy made up some shirts for the family.  Iliana’s said, “My Dad just ran 26.2 miles…What did your do?”  I thought they were really cute and fun. So, when I got back to AR, I made up a couple of designs for CafePress.com and SpreadShirt.com.  And promptly forgot about it.

Well, I was checking my email this morning, like usual, and came across another CafePress.com email and I automatically deleted it.  Well, as soon as I hit the delete button I noticed the subject line said something about a CafeCash balance.  So, I went to my trash folder and looked at the email again.  It said that I had a balance of $241.00 and that I need to log on and update my payee information so that they could send me payment.  My first thought was, “Phishing scam!”  Here’s a little web tip for you:  If you get an email requesting you to click a link to update financial or account information, hover over the link and look in the bottom left hand corner of your browser.  The actual address of the link will be shown.  If the link goes to an address that looks like a bunch of gibberish, then it’s a scam.  If it points to the actual website, you should be safe.  But you should actually just open another window and manually type the website address so that you know you are going straight there.

Okay, little bit of ADD going on there.  Anyway, so I go to my CafePress.com account and sure enough, I had a balance of $241.00.  There was also a message asking me to update my account information so that they could send me my commission check.  I thought, “No way!”  So, I started looking at all of the sales.  That was nuts.  The sales reports only go back 3 months.  But in the last 3 months, my stores have sold 28 items.  The commission averages about $1 to $1.50 per item or 10% of the cost of the item.  So, that means in the past 2 1/2 years, I’ve sold about 200 items and didn’t even know it.  How’s that for reaching into your pocket and pulling out some change?

So, what’s your best “I just found some money” story?

I was recently introduced to a very nice little site. I’m sure that all of you are already aware of it, but I wasn’t. It’s called Lifehacker. It has a great collection of articles about all kinds of stuff. If you like technology and computers, I highly recommend visiting this site.

So, this week I have found 2 really nice web apps. Mint and ted. Since I use torrents to watch all of my TV shows, you can imagine how much of a pain it is to have to go out and search for new episodes each week. Thanks to Lifehacker, I was introduced to ted. ted stands for Torrent Episode Downloader. It comes with a list of predefined shows and all you have to do is click on a show, find an episode and it does the rest. It will search the torrent sites and then open the torrent in your torrent client. Also, when the next week rolls around, it will automatically go out and find the new episodes. Huge time saver. If you download TV torrents, this is the way to go.

Mint is an online finance manager. If you use internet banking or have credit cards, this is a really great all-in-one site. It’s like Quicken online, but better. Very easy to use interface and it just came out of beta so future enhancements are on the way. I can see, at a glace, where all of my money is going each month. Looks like I need to be buying stock in Sonic, since it looks like that is Amy’s favorite place to go. She loves the Sonic drinks. It also looks at all of your expenses and finds offers that could save you money. I pay about $60 dollars a month for all of our cell phones. Well, it saw this expense and went out and found a savings of over $400 a year for me if I switched to Vonage. Neat stuff. Check it out.

I was recently introduced to a very nice little site. I’m sure that all of you are already aware of it, but I wasn’t. It’s called Lifehacker. It has a great collection of articles about all kinds of stuff. If you like technology and computers, I highly recommend visiting this site.

So, this week I have found 2 really nice web apps. Mint and ted. Since I use torrents to watch all of my TV shows, you can imagine how much of a pain it is to have to go out and search for new episodes each week. Thanks to Lifehacker, I was introduced to ted. ted stands for Torrent Episode Downloader. It comes with a list of predefined shows and all you have to do is click on a show, find an episode and it does the rest. It will search the torrent sites and then open the torrent in your torrent client. Also, when the next week rolls around, it will automatically go out and find the new episodes. Huge time saver. If you download TV torrents, this is the way to go.

Mint is an online finance manager. If you use internet banking or have credit cards, this is a really great all-in-one site. It’s like Quicken online, but better. Very easy to use interface and it just came out of beta so future enhancements are on the way. I can see, at a glace, where all of my money is going each month. Looks like I need to be buying stock in Sonic, since it looks like that is Amy’s favorite place to go. She loves the Sonic drinks. It also looks at all of your expenses and finds offers that could save you money. I pay about $60 dollars a month for all of our cell phones. Well, it saw this expense and went out and found a savings of over $400 a year for me if I switched to Vonage. Neat stuff. Check it out.

I was recently introduced to a very nice little site. I’m sure that all of you are already aware of it, but I wasn’t. It’s called Lifehacker. It has a great collection of articles about all kinds of stuff. If you like technology and computers, I highly recommend visiting this site.

So, this week I have found 2 really nice web apps. Mint and ted. Since I use torrents to watch all of my TV shows, you can imagine how much of a pain it is to have to go out and search for new episodes each week. Thanks to Lifehacker, I was introduced to ted. ted stands for Torrent Episode Downloader. It comes with a list of predefined shows and all you have to do is click on a show, find an episode and it does the rest. It will search the torrent sites and then open the torrent in your torrent client. Also, when the next week rolls around, it will automatically go out and find the new episodes. Huge time saver. If you download TV torrents, this is the way to go.

Mint is an online finance manager. If you use internet banking or have credit cards, this is a really great all-in-one site. It’s like Quicken online, but better. Very easy to use interface and it just came out of beta so future enhancements are on the way. I can see, at a glace, where all of my money is going each month. Looks like I need to be buying stock in Sonic, since it looks like that is Amy’s favorite place to go. She loves the Sonic drinks. It also looks at all of your expenses and finds offers that could save you money. I pay about $60 dollars a month for all of our cell phones. Well, it saw this expense and went out and found a savings of over $400 a year for me if I switched to Vonage. Neat stuff. Check it out.