Gazelling

The closest thing I can think of to describe what I've been doing lately is "gazelling". For anyone who is familiar with Dave Ramsey, you know just what I'm talking about. Only I'm not doing it for debt - I'm doing it for savings. Gazelling is basically working your toosh off to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible. Dave Ramsey recommends it for paying off credit card debt, but like I said, I'm in it for the savings. I've been working about a thousand piddly jobs lately to make as much money as possible. For all those interested in what I'm doing -

*ExpoTV pays anywhere from $2-$10 per video you submit to their site. This means making videos of yourself reviewing products, editing them, then uploading them. I usually make between 5-10 videos a day during Lauren's naptime, then edit and upload them at night when I'm doing other things. Between Donald and I, we've made over $2,000 doing this in the past two months. Not bad!

*SharedReviews.com pays me $10 for every product review I write. They have a limit of $100 a person, so you can only do 50 reviews. Right now they're in beta testing and only have $10,000 to pay out during this time, and they've already paid out $5000, so I've kinda been in a hurry to get my reviews in before they run out of money. I just found this site 2 days ago, and since then I've written 27 reviews. I need to finish up the rest of mine, plus do 50 for Donald before they run out of money. This will only get us $200, but every little bit helps!

*Of course I've been teaching my Kaplan course on Saturdays. I've also been picking up proctoring hours when I can. Proctoring only pays $7 an hour, but all you have to do is hold a timer for 4 hours while the kids take the tests. I don't even have to stay in the room with them! So, I just go in the conference room and work on other stuff during this time. Not bad!

*I just picked up a student for private ACT tutoring through Kaplan. This gives me an extra 2 hours of teaching pay a week, plus an extra 2-3 hours of prep pay.

*I've been doing demo events at Wal-Mart. These are really easy and pay pretty well ($70 for 5 hours). I could do more, but of course most of them are on Saturday mornings when I'm teaching my class. I've done two in the last week on weeknights, so hopefully more will pop up soon. My next scheduled one isn't until October 28.

*Brainfuse tutoring starts in two weeks! I'm hoping to get in at least 10 hours a week doing this for an extra $400-$500 a month.

And this, folks, is how we are able to save anywhere from $800-$1000 a month. We can only save about $50-$100 from each of Donald's paychecks, so most of it is on my shoulders. It's okay though. Even though I bitch, I like staying busy. THANKFULLY I am working on my last class for school and should be done in a few weeks, so that is one less thing to worry about. That is, until I start student teaching in January. That's when things will get interesting!

Heard on the radio today:

"It's going to be a great week weather-wise. Highs in the high 80s, lows in the 60s all week. No rain in the forecast. I just love this wonderful, cool fall weather!"

Umm, yeah. While I agree that this week's weather is much better than previous weeks' weather, this is NOT "cool fall weather"! Not even a little!

I love fall in the North. Adore it. After a hot, humid August and early September, there is nothing better than being able to open your windows again and let the cool breeze come through your house. Real fall in Wisconsin starts in late September, or early October, depending on when Indian Summer comes around. Real fall weather is lows 60s for highs and 30s-40s at night. It's just cool enough for a sweater but not cold enough for a jacket. It's simply wonderful.

Fall up north is leaves burning in ditches along side the road. Yum. And speaking of leaves, you can't beat the fire reds of the Maples. Which of course coincides with the annual "leaf book" project at every elementary school. You know you are from the north if you know how to preserve a leaf between two sheets of wax paper!

Donald and I started our fall tradition the first year I was back in Wisconsin for college. I decided one day that I needed to carve a pumpkin, and conveniently that was the day that my lovely Corsica was not running. So, we borrowed a wagon from Brian's house and we walked all the way from Brian's house near 5 Points (if you know Janesville) to the fruit place way out on 51 South, past Burger King. I don't know why, but Donald ended up pulling me in the wagon most of the way there. It had to be at least 2 miles from Bri's house to the pumpkin place, but we had a great time. Every year after that we always went to the pumpkin place a few weeks before Halloween to get a few pumpkins to carve. That first year was the only time we walked though :o)

Mmmmm, fall. Homemade apple pie, crunchy leaves, frosty breath, yellow-orange-red wonderful fall. This is always the time of year that I want to go home because I miss it so much. Last year we were up in November, but by then the "good" fall had already passed - the trees were bare, the pumpkins were frozen, and well, it was just cold. Sadly I don't think we're going up this year for fall either. Ahhh....a girl can dream!

This week I did two college fairs for Kaplan. Basically I just had to go to the school, set up our table, and talk to students (or more likely - their parents) about our classes. It was interesting, and strange at the same time, being back in a high school. It'd been a long time since I'd been around high school kids. It went well, though. It was fun talking to them and talking to other college recruiters, too. Kind of depressing at the same time, though - if I'd have known in high school what I know now I would have probably went to a different college. Not that I didn't like Madison, because I did - I loved it. BUT - there's something to be said about leaving college with no student loans. Ah well. Can't change the past!

Anyway, I teach my first "real" class on Saturday. Last week I just talked to the parents while the kids took their diagnostic test. I think I have 5 kids in my class, and their scores range from a 14 to a 27, so there's a big variety there. I'm looking forward to it, so hopefully it goes well!

Everything else is fine. Donald isn't annoying me as much this week (maybe it was PMS?), so I guess I'll keep him :o) It's finally starting to cool off, but I wish it was still about 20 degrees cooler (60s would be nice).

Had to get Lauren ANOTHER pair of shoes today because she's out grown 4 pairs in the past few months. The kid is breaking me with shoes. In March I got her a pair of Keds sandals, size 5 that were huge on her. She wore those until about June, then I got her a pair of cheapo sandals at Target, size 6. Only took her about a month to outgrow those. She outgrew her sneakers about the same time, so I got her a pair of New Balances (6.5) in July. Now they're too small! So, she got a pair of Nike mary jane sneaks today at Kohls (size 7!!!), so I'm hoping those will at least last her through the fall! The kid has some huge feet! It's really annoying buying shoes all the time. I looked at some at Target last time I was there for some sneakers, but they were so stiff that I just couldn't bring myself to making her wear them. The shoes we got today from Kohls are so light and flexible that I wish I could get a pair!

Donald has this horrible habit that when he takes clothes out of the dryer, he just throws them in a clothes basket. This drives me nuts because then the clothes get all wrinkly and I either have to iron them or run them through the dryer again. I've told him that this drives me nuts time and again, but he never listens. I don't know why I bothered, but a few nights ago I told him again to PLEASE not do this, but to either lay them flat or take the ten minutes to fold them.

So tonight he put in a load of laundry before he put Lauren in the bath. After I got done putting her to sleep, I came out and noticed the dryer running. Of course curious to know what he did with the clothes that were in the dryer, I searched high and low for them. They were no where to be found. Only when I opened the dryer when it buzzed I discovered where the clothes were. He put the wet load in with the already-dry load and just ran the whole thing like that! The dryer was so full that I don't know how he got it all in there in the first place! Needless to say, the clothes were no where near dry, so I had to take out half and re-run them! So, now it is going to cost us three times the amount to dry that dang load. Not to mention the fact that now I have to stay until this load is dry so that I can fold them and run the second load before they get mildew-y. MEN!!!!

Let me tell you about my horrible week....

Yesterday I was getting ready to go to Target to pick up a few things, and decided that I'd better check to see how much money we had in the checking account. When I pulled up our account, I was in for a shock - our rent check had bounced! I about passed out. Turns out I forgot to write down our trip to Cozumel for lunch one day last week, which made our checking account $12 short when the rent check went to go through. Yeah. So of course we have every penny of our extra money sitting in our HSBC high interest savings account, and couldn't just transfer the money, so I had to go talk to our apartment manager and let her know what was going on. I ended up bawling my eyes out in front of her (yes, I totally felt like a douche bag), and she was really nice about it and everything. She said that we'd have to pay a late fee now as well as a returned check fee (an extra $50 - youch!) plus pay the rent that day with a money order. We still use our credit union in Wisconsin for our checking, so I couldn't just run to the bank to get the money out. I had to seriously DIG through all of our filing cabinet to find our ATM card for our savings account, the dig to find the PIN (we've never taken money out of this account before!), then go to three different ATMs in order to get out enough money. I finally got it all taken care of, but jeez I felt stupid. That's the first time we've ever bounced a check! Then when I came back to the office to give them the money order, I ended up bawling again. Ugh. That's so unlike me - usually I'm able to hold it together pretty well, but I was wreck yesterday. I guess between the situation and Donald and then Lauren being in a cranky mood it was all just too much. Donald was pissed, but I think he's over it now. Oh well. Life goes on I guess.

Then today I wake up and find that almost all of the videos Donald made last month for ExpoTV have been rejected! We've been making video reviews of a website to make extra money for our savings account - we've made over $2000 so far! Well, last month they decided to change some of the categories to $10 a video, so of course we made a ton of $10 videos. They rejected them all for "poor audio and video quality" when we used the same set-up we'd used on every other video that was approved! So, by them rejected those 50 videos or so, we lost $500! We are going to email them about it so hopefully they change their minds, but geez! This is too much!

So on top of all this, I've been trying to finish that damned SAT. Yeah. Not going to happen. Apparently the SAT is a hell of a lot harder than the ACT. Heh. I sat down to do the math sections the other night and just laughed. I emailed my supervisor and told her that there's no way I'd feel comfortable teaching kids this stuff right now, and she hasn't emailed me back yet so she's probably mad. Whatever. These kids (or their parents, I should say) pay nearly $1000 bucks to take this class, and for that kind of money they deserve a teacher who knows what they're doing. If I had a few months and could actually take the time to re-learn this stuff, it would be a totally different story. I told her I'd be happy to study for a while and then try to teach an SAT class at a later date, so we'll see.

So yeah. I hope my first ACT class tomorrow goes better than the rest of the week has. I told Donald I need a free vacation! Free because I don't want to stress about having to spend any money on it! Too bad I don't think that's going to happen :o(

Tonight was my last session for Kaplan teacher training. I guess they like me because they've given me two classes already. The first one is for the ACT and starts this Saturday! The second is for the SAT (which I've never taken) and starts next Sunday.

I'm VERY nervous about the SAT class. First, I don't know jack about the SAT. I have a test that I have to do and score at least in the 90th percentile on to be able to teach it, but my trainer seems to think that won't be a problem. Hah! Second, I'm starting half-way through a class. The guy who is teaching it right now is an awesome teacher, so I'll have big shoes to fill. Third, the guy who's teaching the class right now told me that there's a kid in it that is a mighty big pain in the rump. Terrific. I'm going to go in on Sunday and observe the class, so hopefully I won't find out that I've bitten off more than I can chew.

I'll also have two students that I'll tutoring privately once a week each for the SAT. This again makes me nervous. These kids (well, their parents) pay big bucks for private tutoring, and I kind of feel like a sham, since I really know nothing about the SAT. I guess I have a lot to learn in the next few weeks!

The good news is that I will be done with both classes by the beginning of December and I may or may not take any thing else after that, depending on what happens with student teaching. I'm happy to be making some extra money for the savings account, though! Every penny of what I make from all my little side ventures is being saved for the move, so I'm happy to contribute more!