Day 69

As anticipated, no post yesterday. Well, there was nothing GOOD to post anyway! Going away to an expo at the showgrounds means eating isn't what it could be. Also, today was a bit of a dead loss... this morning I ate a good breakfast as usual, and later in the day we went for a walk around the lake (so far so good!). However, I had to take my husband home and we were away during tea time, which meant junk for tea! Ate some chips and then some hot chips. Full of fat, carbs and blah... so yeah, didn't end the day well (oh... and had a Kahlua (sp??) and coke to round it all off).

And thus... not expecting great things weight wise tomorrow! I did good exercise during the week, but not enough to make up for the poor eating really. Hmm... now it's less than two weeks to the reunion (gulp!) so I am wondering what I can accomplish in that time if I give it 250% effort! Kinda like they do in The Biggest Loser to get massive weight loss in a short time!

Basically eating must be 100%... no ifs ands or buts about it... And exercise needs to be ramped up to the next level. This means LONGER rides, EPOC three times a week without fail, and extra exercise thrown in. My husband and I made a deal with our 11 year old son that we'll buy him a new Nintendo DSi XL WHEN he runs around the lake (6km) without stopping (well maybe to drink ;)). For some kids this wouldn't be too hard (in fact... we will not challenge the 9 year old with the same deal cause he'd probably be able to do it in a relatively short time), but my oldest son is quite sedentary and overweight. He's 3cm taller than his younger brother and probably outweighs him by a good 15kg or more. I've really been trying to prevent him from eating so much, but it seems that my efforts aren't enough... so we have to try something to really push him harder! He'll be starting high school next year, and he's the sort of kid who's going to find it hard enough (he's the short, brainy, bookish type of kid) without being obese to boot. At least if we can get him to a healthy weight he'll have somewhat of an easier time! (I can only hope). At least he's not shy ;) He's very academically keen though... which is sort of alienating from a lot of the peer group who think it's not cool to study!

So... I basically said that after school I'll take the kids to the lake and we'll start off easy... 500m jog, 500m walk then we'll turn back for a further 500m jog and 500m walk (each 500m around the lake's perimeter is marked out). Once he's good at that we'll go further before turning back, until we can get the whole 6km around (maybe alternating walking and jogging still). Of course, I have to not only take him but my 9 year old son and 8 year old daughter, so we'll all be getting exercise.

Anyway, this means I'll be not only getting exercise cycling and doing EPOC but jogging as well. That plus ultra healthy eating should kick me out of this plateau phase I'm in at the moment.

Now onto tomorrow... I have LOTS to achieve. I need to get stuck into the house (not much got done on the weekend at all so it's in a bit of a state), and I need to really get into money making activities. I have an article to finish, and I'll probably be given more work from another client (poor paying though :( ) I'm also going to try to get back into some online affiliate marketing. I've been reading a couple of great reports that have given me some fantastic ideas (both long term and short term earning potential). Ideally I'd like to set up a few websites and get them earning $1000 a month or so. Once I can get these sort of income streams set up, I can focus more on my own writing and not need to worry so much about trying to get Elance writing gigs for other people.

Now, I have tried affiliate marketing in the past and never really made great strides (I did make some $$$ but not enough to retire on lol). However, as in most things, I sort of flitted from one thing to another, not really sticking firmly with a single program. I still have a tendency to look for the "next big thing"... but I know that's not really ideal. I now have an excellent blueprint for setting up a money site (not sure of topic yet though...) which is sort of a long term thing (may take awhile to start earning money), but I've also read of a short term way of getting products promoted and sold. It's the sort of method where you may get a couple of hundred dollars one day and nothing for the next three days... and there's no long term potential in it BUT if I could make, say, an average of $100 a day on it (even less would do) it would free up more of my time and resources into putting together a quality site and promoting it. It seems to be a bit of a random method... in that you can maybe make $600 in a few hours if you hit on the right thing at the right time, but other times the payoff is a lot less. However, putting some hard time and experimentation into it will hopefully pay off.

Also, this second method doesn't require me to have a website (I do have a couple of websites still... I had a bunch more at some stage but lost most of my domain names... bad registrar lol... the GoDaddy domain names I bought first I still have, but they're not great domains...I bought them before I knew anything about creating good keyword rich domain names). Anyway, I will probably end up getting another domain name and some more hosting for my long term site plan. I don't want to end up with a zillion websites though, cause it's too confusing haha. 10 sites all earning a few hundred a month would be ideal! But that's long term... Eventually I want to be able to have money sites that don't need too much continual work (barring the occasional blog post etc.) so I can get onto my MAIN job of being a WRITER of fiction rather than a writer of web content ;)

Anyways... all this means I have lots of work tomorrow! I'll do a bit of research for the niche for my main website, and will try this other method to get an injection of a bit of ready cash. I'll try and do this for an hour or two tomorrow and see how I go (however I won't get any good results until I've done it consistently for a couple of weeks I don't think... too many variables and too much experimentation).

Well, it seems what started off as a quick daily update has become an essay, and it's already tomorrow lol. So, high time I was in BED!