Found Not Lost

We live in North Carolina, the up and coming wine producing region. We have seen an increase of wineries popping up whenever we go out for a drive. Apparently, our soil is not just good for tobacco anymore, it can be great for wine too! We’ve visited a couple of home run wineries that just made us envious.

Wouldn’t it be great to have all that vineyard around us and to be able to brew and sell your own wine right from home? Well, we can always dream, can’t we?

My husband is an artist and he’s actually working with a small winery of a friend to design art for their label. There is a place that can print Wine Labels using your own artwork or you can use one from their varied collection. For the small winery where cost can be a big factor, a place where you can have a choice of pre-designed or custom designed labels can make a big difference in your overhead cost. Great for when you want to look professional like the big boys without spending the big bucks.

I have been running across a lot of blogs who are either giving things away or having some sort of contest. I must say I have been lucky enough to win a few of them and they are great fun! For instance, last December, I won a Tomagotchi toy for my kids from Elizabeth at Table for Five. That was such a treat, I think I was more excited than the kids. lol!

Most of these contests are of course designed to generate more readership, but hey, we all need more traffic, right? The newest one that I’m joining today is Alan’s Saturday giveaway at Zero and UP. He’s giving away hard, cold cash directly to your PayPal Account. All you have to do is subscribe to his feed. I’m already subscribed and find that it’s a lot easier to have him come to my inbox daily than having to remember to visit his site.

It took me while to figure out the RSS thingy, and now I think I am slowly getting the hang of it. I didn’t think it was very useful before, but what do you know, all the millions of other people were right! It is quite a useful little thing

I’ve never been one to care much about how I look. I’m over 40 and choose to go au natural even though most of my friends and co workers are all wearing full make up. Sometimes I feel like I should. They sure do photograph better than I do. But just the thought of putting all that stuff and chemicals on my face make me itch.

I’ve been using a natural shampoo lately to alleviate some of my hair problems and I’ve been getting pretty good results. So I’m thinking of trying some natural make up products. Ecco Bella Natural Beauty Products does not have any of the toxic chemicals that most products have. Instead, they use gentle and natural non-comedogenic products and most importantly, their products are never tested on animals. They have a full range of products from cosmetics, to skin care, to hair care, to fragrance plus more.

I don’t know what it is with warmer weather, but our appetite gets heightened every time the weather gets nicer. We start thinking of what to grow, what to cook, the ways to cook, and all that. We’re already looking forward to pulling out the grill and doing some outdoor cooking. The girls are already planning on end of school parties with their friends. Summer fever is surely starting to come on.

These cheesecake pops, would be perfect for a summer outdoor party. For one, they are beautiful and cute, and the best part, they are delicious and frozen! Yep, perfect snack for a hot afternoon, something sweet, cold and delicious.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I signed up for SocialSpark. What’s SocialSpark? Well, it’s sort of like where social networking meets paid blogging.

With SocialSpark, you can interact with your fellow bloggers as well as advertisers. I’ve been doing PayPerPost since last year, and have made a decent amount of money as well as having a good time. The only place to interact with other posties, as bloggers who work for PPP call themselves, was in the forums. If you wanted to find other bloggers who are also doing the same thing, you had to go in the forums. Now, with SocialSpark, you have both bloggers and advertisers right there within the platform.

The best part about SocialSpark though, is that the reviews you make on there are “no follow”. That means that the web bots won’t consider the links for relevance when it comes to page ranking. If you have been keeping track of the goings on in the paid blogging sector, you’ll know that many bloggers who have been making money by selling links or writing sponsored posts were penalized by having their page ranks taken away or demoted. By not having a good page rank, it makes the link not as valuable to advertisers thus causing bloggers to lose the source of their income. It was a mess that created a lot of discussions in the blogosphere.

With SocialSpark, hopefully, that will all change. All posties, me included, are waiting to see how this develops. I, personally, haven’t taken full advantage of SocialSpark yet. My learning curve is just a little higher than some, but I have high hopes. If you’d like to try out SocialSpar, go on over and sign up. They are now open to everyone!