I’ve mentioned before that I like horror movies. That’s not entirely correct. I LOVE horror movies. I love entering the world of nightmares, and allowing myself to be scared, even though I know the blood on screen is really corn syrup, powder, and red food coloring (with a couple drops of green added if you want it to look more visceral). I love the collective release of breath from the audience when a lead character manages not to be killed – this time – and the completely girlish, but also completely real, screams that come when someone finally buys it in a mass spray of blood, guts and gore. Movies, after all, and horror movies especially, are all about the willful suspension of disbelief.

My favorite horror movie ever is actually Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street. To me, nothing is scarier than the notion of dying in your dreams, and having it be real. I liked one of the sequels – the one that bent reality – Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – but the middle movies were disappointing, and we won’t talk about Freddy’s Dead. I also liked the original Halloween series and have nothing but good things to say about a quiet little John Malkovich film called Shadow of the Vampire.

Knowing all this, it should come as no surprise that I’m completely excited about Halloween the movie, which is Rob Zombie’s remake of the John Carpenter classic.

Zombie tends to be a lot more gory than Carpenter was, so I’m expecting the murders to be more brutal, and bloodier, but I also know he’ll bring a sort of rock star showmanship and sensibility to the film, with fast-paced imagery, and a darker tone over all, so that the violent scenes really pop, like fireworks against a black sky. He’s also stated in interviews that he likes to know the mind of the killer – the shaping forces that make you realize a serial killer is all lead character Michael Myers could ever have been.

From the trailer, it’s obvious that Zombie has honored the original as well as re-imagined it. Parts of the original score (the piano music) remain, and the relationships are the same. What is different is that there is a real-world grittiness to the tone of the film – making it a horror film, and not a cheap flick to be ignored.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween will be in theaters on August 31st, 2007.

Always on Sunday I wake to a flash of “we have to visit Grandma,” even though she’s been dead for almost six years now. While my relationship with my grandfather was closer in many ways, my grandmother was also a constant part of my life.

I hear her words in my head, used them on another blog I keep, just a few days ago. “That’s dear,” she said in my brain, as I noticed the price of avocados today ($1.79 each). She would have made one of those inverted hissing sounds that occur when you inhale through your teeth. The sound of disapproval. She might even have decided not to buy the avocado. I chose to buy it anyway. Other people buy shoes, I buy vegetables.

(Okay, actually, I do have quite the shoe collection.)

Always on Sunday, I wish we had a physical Sunday paper. My favorite newspaper is not the New York Times, but the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner dual Sunday edition with the crossword puzzle and the pink pages. I love the pink pages. I enjoy the comics. I do the crossword in ink.

But we rarely actually took the time to read the paper, and they would stack up, unread, wasted money. I read news online, and follow CNN, but printed news is more visceral despite the lack of color video clips. Power of the pen, and all that.

Always on Sunday, I call my mother, even if I talked to her more than once during the week. It’s a ritual. We each have a mug of something – tea, coffee, whatever – and we chat as if we were sharing a table. It’s the one day of the week where we’re not talking about work.

Other days of the week, I might talk to my step-father as well, but never on Sunday. Sunday is just for mother-daughter bonding.

Always on Sunday I try to write at least one letter to someone. Lately, it’s been the day I write to my adopted soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it used to be personal correspondence. There’s email, and IM, and text and phone calls, but none of that approaches the magic of a physical letter, with colorful stamps, odd paper, bad handwriting. Letters represent the human condition so much more than anything technological.

Always on Sunday, I find myself a little more thoughtful, a little quieter inside. I have a personal rule that I don’t like to do things outside the house after about seven PM on Sunday evening. It’s important to have quiet time before the business and busy-ness of the work week begin on Monday morning. Sometimes we do the church thing, but recently I’m finding more value in just spending time alone with Fuzzy and the dogs, alternately napping, reading, and puttering on our computers.

And Always on Sunday, I miss my grandmother, because she used to hate Sundays. She said they were for families. She never realized that she and my grandfather, after their children had all grown up and moved on, were still a family, if only a family of two.

Fuzzy and I are also a family of two. Four if you count the dogs, which we do, though others may not.

But I love Sundays.

Earlier tonight, I’d written that I wasn’t feeling into going to ComedySportz tonight, but as soon as we were in the car, I found myself excited. I knew, going in, that I wasn’t scheduled to play, but I also knew that our sound guy and his wife, another player, had a medical issue, and had to miss the show. When I got there, I found out that another player had also called in sick. One of the guys scheduled to play already was pulled to do sound, and I was put into the liners.

Instead of having teams of three with a DJ (designated jokester – a player who floats between teams), we had teams of two with a DJ. This meant everyone had to work a little harder.

Continue reading →

Fuzzy got home just in time for us to grab a late dinner and then tumble into bed, last night, and so far, neither of us has actually left bed for very long, despite the fact that I’ve been blogging on and off all day. I so love having laptops at my disposal. And wifi. Yay wifi.

I’m trying to stay busy, because my skin is itchy everywhere. Showers don’t help, and moisturizers don’t either. Antihistamines knock me out, and then I wake up cranky, dehydrated, and still itchy (if slightly less so). I blame the mosquitoes who apparently think snacking on my succulent flesh is an uber-cool way to spend time.

I forgot, until we moved here almost three years ago, how much I hated mosquitoes.
We didn’t have them in California.

I don’t really miss the pace of life in California. I miss the weather, and the lack of bugs.
Oh, and the beach.

My Shark Week obsession this week has made me almost teary for sun, sand, and surf. Fuzzy and I really need a weekend away, where we can go snooze on the sand and dip our toes in blue water. Or rather, where I can, and he can hide inside. It’s all good.

I’m so itchy and crabby that I don’t want to go to CSz tonight because I don’t feel that I should be around people. My inner bitch might come out, and that shouldn’t happen in public. I think I will send an email and ask if we’re needed.

While I’ve never been a full-time professional marketer, I have been involved in enough small campaigns to know that it’s really rare to get an overwhelming response from any single type of marketing. If a direct mail campaign, either snailmail or email, nets a 1% return, for example, that’s considered good.

So, while I knew that paid blogging could work for me as a blogger – after all, I determine how many posts I want to make, and on which topics – I wasn’t certain how it would work for advertisers.

Last year, I wrote a series of pieces about paid advertising from the prospective advertiser’s point of view, so I knew a little about click-through rates (CTR) and that there are different kinds of payment for such things. Some advertisers pay for impressions, while others pay for actions, for example. But ultimately, it’s click-throughs – the number of people who actually follow a link, and then browse or buy – that matter.

When I read an article in the PayPerPost blog about the average ctr from sponsored posts being more than 10.5%, I was seriously impressed. That’s up to ten times better than the average Google AdWords result after all.

To me, as a blogger, this number means that writing these posts isn’t just lucrative, but actually useful as a means of advertising.
To me, as an advertiser, which role I sometimes have to take for my work, it assures me that when we place a paid blog post, it’s advertising money well spent.

10.5%.
Wow.

Paid blogging works.

1. If you had to leave your job on Monday, how confident would you feel that you could get another job paying close to the same amount quickly?
I don’t know for sure about this job, but I could always step back into mortgages, where the money is better, if I needed to. I have offers for those jobs daily.

2. How many different employers have you worked for over the years?
I’ve been self-employed on and off for so long that the number of actual employers I’ve had is only four.

3. Consider the employer you worked for the longest: how big of a factor was money in determining why you left or would consider leaving that employer?
Money wasn’t really the issue, and actually I stayed longer than I should have because I had so much autonomy. We were both tired of living to pay or California mortgage, so I left because we were leaving the state.

4. Take the quiz: How good are you with money?

You Are Great With Money

You know the value of a dollar – and you save and spend wisely. By living below your means, you’ve set yourself up for a rich future. And while it may hurt to sacrifice now, you’ll probably have plenty of money later on. You’re on your way to riches – just keep it up.

5. When is the last time you actually were told what your credit score actually is?
I pull our tri-merge once a year, actually.

6. Do you think that learning what your score would be would be likely to make you change anything you’re doing with money?
Knowing our score merely made me put a plan into place, not any specific changes. Working in the mortgage industry for a good portion of my life, and seeing what everyone else was doing, made more of an impact.

Like this meme? Play along here.

In honor of the last day of Shark Week, I’m going to share my impressions of a really special place

I don’t remember all the details of my first visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I know it can’t have been too long after it opened, because it was before they added the (temporary) exhibit for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I do remember looking up and seeing the giant whale hanging from the ceiling. At the time, even though I had to be thirteen or fourteen years old (because the Aquarium opened in 1984), I remember feeling like I’d entered a place of magic.

Over the years, and many subsequent visits, that feeling would never change, and to this day, more than 20 years later the Aquarium is one of my favorite tourist attractions ever.

My second visit to the Aquarium was in late 1986 or early 1987. ST:TVH had come out by then, and anyone – everyone – who knew anything about the area had recognized the Aquarium playing the part of the Cetacean Institute in the movie. Of course, the Aquarium has never, and will never, have real whales in their exhibit – and why should they, when these same animals pass by the facility every year? I have fond memories of the alert horn being sounded, though, and of everyone rushing outside to stand by the railings and watch as a pod of whales passed by. Excited pointing and gleeful shouts of “Look, one’s blowing!” and “Thar she blows!” were exhibited by adults and kids alike.

Other than the Star Trek exhibit, some of my favorite experiences at the Monterey Bay Aquarium included being among the first to play with the bat rays (my parents were Aquarium members, and we would go to special members-only previews) – fish with chihuahua faces, that were learning to be social – handling Sea Stars (star fish) in the tide pool exhibit, watching the seven-gill sharks (it always comes back to sharks with me), and their famous jellyfish display, which was rather like walking through a dark tunnel lined with glowing aliens.

Aquariums and museums grow up faster than humans, but I like to think that the Aquarium and I sort of grew up together.

Last month, when was still half-considering participating in the annual blogathon, where bloggers raise money for pet charities, the Aquarium wasn’t on my list. In fact, it wasn’t until after the ‘thon had started that I went to its page at Charity Navigator and found out that they’re really a non-profit, and that they have a five-star rating on the site. (If I do blogathon next year, they’ll definitely be one of my top contenders.)

I hadn’t realized they were a non-profit. I did, of course, know about their conservation and research efforts, not just studying great white sharks, but also sea otters and tuna, pushing for legislation that protects oceanic ecosystems, and educating us about sustainable fishing practices, and sustainable fish eating.

My only disappointment regarding the Monterey Bay Aquarium is that I never got to visit it during the period in 2004 when they had a Great White Shark living in the Outer Bay exhibit. We were, at that point, in the process of moving to Texas. Still, I have fond memories of eating fish and chips at Phil’s (near the MBARI – Montery Bay Aquarium Research Institute – docks), and then going into the Aquarium to walk under the great whale.

I’m closer to forty than fourteen now, and the magic hasn’t dissipated at all.

Appetizer
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being highest, how polite are you?
Well, I start at about an eight, but things can digress when I’m confronted with stupidity. Mind you, my version of polite is casual.

Soup
What was the last thing that made you laugh out loud?
A bad pun Shane left on my most recent Thursday 13 entry.

Salad
Who is your favorite cartoon character?
I’m not really a cartoon fan. Actually, I really dislike most animation. Superman from the 1970’s Superfriends, or the sports car Michael Keaton voiced in Cars, I guess. Or Goliath from Gargoyles

Main Course
Tell about the funniest teacher you ever had.
Thomas Edholm, science teacher extraordinaire, and all-around great person. He kept humor and fun part of the normal routine, even in Gifted/Honors/AP classes.

Dessert
Complete this sentence: I strongly believe that ______________________.
You can get a good education from public schools if you have active parents and the will to learn.

It’s been about two weeks now since I started my blog for money experiment. I began it because I kept seeing advertisements for people to get paid to blog, and I thought it made sense for a blog to pay for itself. I’ve signed up with several sites that offer blog advertising, but so far my favorite is Smorty.

Here’s what I like about Smorty: they require the blogger to disclose that some of their posts are sponsored. To be honest, most of the ethical sites where you can get paid for blogging require this, but I’d never contract with a site that didn’t.

Here’s what I really like about them: they pay weekly, instead of making you wait a month. I was a little dubious about that, but I made my first post for them last Saturday, and my first paypal deposit showed up this evening. That’s pretty impressive.

Here’s what I think completely rocks: unlike most other sites that offer people the opportunity to get paid to blog, Smorty requires a 3:1 ratio of original, non-sponsored content to sponsored posts. That means bloggers have to be bloggers first, and paid advertisers second, and I think that’s appropriate.

In addition to their timely payment schedule, Smorty also has helpful, friendly customer service. When I asked a question about how long it would take them to review my blog, they not only answered the question fairly quickly, but also apologized for any delay. (There was no delay, but that’s okay.)

To sum up? If you’re going to try blogging for money, try Smorty. They’re a smart choice.