Finally Got Some Google Love

Somewhere between late Friday night or Saturday afternoon, Google made an update. I now have rank on my blogs! While I know PageRank is not the end all and be all of the Internet that it pretends to be (ie - the saga of John Chow), I am ecstatic. I am doing the happy dance. There’s just something about being recognized by Google that makes me want to wag my little tail.

As of Friday afternoon, I had no PageRank on my blogs. I accepted that; they are under six months old and unproven to Big Brother Google. To my delight, yesterday I noticed a change - HippyGeek.net (this blog) went from a zero PageRank to a TWO! Two! Happy news for a young personal blog. CrestlineLiving.com got a three and JillFlorio.com has a three. Threes are almost respectable! John Chow has a three! I will take it.

A result: I feel newly inspired to write more content. I was starting to feel discouraged, even though intellectually I knew I had to be patient. After all, I had just come back from a fantastic Izea Blog Conference and met great people who make actual money from their blogs. And here I was with zero pagerank. So this was just the boot to the butt I needed.

My Amazon Reviewer Rank Process - September Goals Update

Good news! My Amazon rank made another leap…I went from 108,327 in late August, to 47,226 today! My next milestone had been to make it under the 99,000 rank, and there it went, very quickly.

That inspired me to post more Amazon reviews yesterday. I now have almost 90 reviews and they are all real, full-length critiques.

My goal by May 09 is to make it to the teens. So my next realistic shorter-term goal is to break 20k. I imagine it gets harder to drill through the ranks as you go along.

Another short term goal is to have more than 100 reviews up in the next two months.

In other news, in my quest to get my Crestline Living site highly ranked, I am now 3rd from the top on page two of Google for the search term ‘Crestline CA’. For just the term ‘Crestline’ I am on page 3. These are really great advances for me, as I was previously really buried for those terms before.

I don’t have anything positive to add in my other goals, but those did make me happy. It was nice to come home from traveling and see that I am getting somewhere.

To IzeaFest and Blog Orlando this month! Plus Mickey.

Hey, I am going to my first blogger’s conference! All the way out in Orlando, FL. I will attend two conferences, in fact, IzeaFest and BlogOrlando.

Dan will join me for the IzeaFest, and we will wear our Runpee.com tee shirts with pride. We’ve ordered business cards to hand out. I will also promote CrestlineLiving.com, but not HippyGeek, which is only my personal blog, after all.

What is slightly ironic is that I will miss the huge BlogWorld event in Vegas (which is a short three hour drive from Crestline, where I live) to fly across the country to attend these smaller events.

I do prefer a more intimate venue, and these will provide just that. Plus I will get to go to Disneyworld a few times. Epcot’s massive Food & Wine Festival (yeah!), the Animal Kingdom and the Magic Kingdom are on my list. Dan has never even been to the Magic Kingdom, so this is my chance to introduce him to Pirates of the Caribbean, yo ho ho!

I’ll probably get to BlogWorld next year. Anyone attending any of these three blogging events, or some other blog conference elsewhere?

We Have to Fly, But Now We Hates It

I unfortunately have to fly next month. We officially now hate flying, so we tried hard to come up with an alternate plan:

• Driving from CA to FL was out - too much time, too much hassle, too much gas.
• We figured we’d try a sleeper car on the train. Well, there we inexplicably would have to go from FL via CHICAGO to CA, adding a lot of time to the trip. Plus the sleeper compartments cost about the same as a vacation on a cruise ship. So, no go.
• Then we saw the first class flight tickets also cost more than a cruise.
• We even considered renting an RV to drive back so we would only have to fly one way…then got wrapped back up in the ungodly expensive gas situation. One can’t win.

So, yeah, we gave up and bought plane tickets on Expedia, which sneakily tacks on booking fees and massive taxes. We’re forced to change planes in Atlanta and can’t even sit together on the last leg to FL. We have a three hour stop-over in Atlanta too. I hope it’s got WIFI, or decent shops.

I am afraid to check and see which airlines we are stuck with. Some are stingier than others: I wonder if we will be charged now for water and coffee. If so, all the more reason to just get drunk on tiny bottles of wine in-flight. I am by now trained to bring my own darned pillow, so they can’t nickel and dime me there.

Am NOT looking forward to this. I always catch a flu bug when I fly. I’m going to try really hard not to this time, even if it means wearing gloves and a mask. Sheesh. Flying. Bah.

THIS is why I do the Low Carb

Last night I was at my local farmers’ market, talking with a candles vendor about how I was on low carb. She looked at me and said, “You look great - why do YOU need to be on low carb?”

….well, it’s because if I am not low carbing, I am about 15-20 pounds heavier, even though I am very physically active. But I didn’t say that - just told her thank you and said it’s about eating healthier overall.

I just thought that was nice for my ego and helps validate why I am making this effort. I guess low carbing is working, then. Which is nice, as it’s not the easiest plan to follow in our comfort-food oriented, starchy world.

Has anyone else had this happen?

My New Goal is 100 Push Ups

I have to admit the uber-simple idea of this website - 100 Pushups - is somehow very appealing.

I never thought about push ups much - I do about 15 of them when I do floorwork, and lots of my yoga poses use the same muscles. But taking a look at that fit woman with the cute hair made me think - HEY! I can do 100 push ups too, if I wanted!

I immediately dropped to the floor and and assumed the push up pose. Or, yes, a modified push up pose, on my knees. I did my usual 15 and realized how sloppy my push ups were. I needed to go all the way down, right? I really didn’t.

So I have a new goal. I want to get to 100 push ups, even if I have to use the modified sissy technique. I can work on getting around to the full, proper posture after that. My first step is to whip my 15 modified push ups into shape - going all the way to the ground. Once I feel comfortable with that I will take a closer look at their actual program.

Anyone care to join me?

The Joy of Poop Putting

I like to putt poops off my porch. On a daily basis. It’s a great new sport that anyone can learn. The key is to get the poop to sail sweetly off your porch in one swing, using a golf club of your choice.

This fabulous game was developed when I realized, a few months back, that I had trained my pets to poop on the porch - my upper deck around the back of the house. Back when we first moved in, we didn’t have a dog run, and the deck was knee high with snow. So we encouraged the dogs to eliminate on the deck.

We built a nice big dog run in May. And really, the dogs did a lot of their business down there. Yet my littlest one still preferred pooping on the deck.

For months I had been kicking the poops off with:

1. My Shoe (eeeew!)
2. A Big Stick (not enough control)
3. The Force (this rarely worked)

It occurred to me I could do better. I COULD USE A GOLF CLUB!

Of course I did not have a golf club, as I don’t golf, but by GOD why should that stop me? I saw golf clubs at Goodwill all the time. So I drove to my local thrift store and poof - there it was. A lovely sand wedge slicer for three dollars. Overjoyed, I brought it home.

Fast forward to now, mid-summer: I am now a proud expert poop putter, at least with a sand wedge. I have mad skillz. It can be tricky to get the poop off in one swing, as there is only a small opening between the deck and the wooden railing. It’s really easy to bounce the poop right off the railing and thus, back to where I started. It can take a few tries to get those dookies in a perfect sailing arc into the air.

But when they go, boy oh boy is it satisfying.

Join the Mastermind Blog Program

I am signing up for this class right, now, as we speak. I can’t wait to report on it for you all!

Click here to join the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program

Cleaning Out The Office

Often on Sundays I feel inspired to clean and/or organize something. Cleaning makes me feel happy - it’s like I can impose my will on reality, and create order out of chaos. Perhaps it’s my Dark Side of the Force in action, wanting to create ORDER in the GALAXY.

I originally had my office on the main floor but then decided I wanted to move it downstairs where the bedrooms and Dan’s office is. That way we could reserve the main floor as our “off-duty” relaxing zone.

1:30 pm: Here is a picture of the random clutter I had “before.” I had stuff everywhere that was just shoved together the day I set up, in this odd bonus room right off our master bedroom. I am not sure the purpose of this room - nursery? Unfinished bathroom? Possibly a craft area?

To illustrate how much my husband loves me, he even made me a wooden floor for this bizarre little room. I hate carpet and wanted a floor so I could zip around on my chair between work stations. He literally made me a floor out of plywood, complete with foundations. What a guy! <3 ( <– a heart shaped emoticon)

2pm: Right now I am at the point where everything is dragged out of the room. I just vacuumed the floor and polished my wood shelves. I took down the white board and am currently thinking where things should be re-established for the best use of traffic and work flow. I don’t have much room to spare.

2:35pm: Spent 35 minutes moving around my six bookcases, credenzas and wall units. I think I *finally* have a configuration that will be useful for me.

My office needs a lot of space for books (for reference and titles to-be-reviewed), papers (we journalists have notes and brochures everywhere), products (also to be reviewed) and various wonderful doodads gifted to me by beloved friends and family members. These are useless things that take up space, but still I refuse to give them up: looking at them makes me happy.

2:45PM: Slightly frustrated about the furniture. This is a 7X7 space. I need places to put things. Lots of things. My husband has a paper-less office so his decorating is easy. My trick is to get everything I need in here without making it look cruddy.

2:55pm: Am getting serious about this: poured myself some Chardonnay, put on loud tunes to get the creative juices flowing. Still messing with the bookshelf placement.

3:16pm: Enjoying being in the “organizing zone.” Things are just leaping onto my shelves! Singing and grooving to retro tunes. Jungle Boogie!

4:02: DONE! Everything I want in the office is in the office. I feel great and it looks so much more usable in here now. Everything smells like my lemon oil wood polish and I am no longer ashamed of this space.

I decided to not sort my books yet. I put them wherever on the shelves: will place them by category another day. I also didn’t bother with the inside of drawers, for similar sanity reasons.

It’s never good to bite off more than you can chew in one afternoon.

So I have my Liz Phair playing - woot! I am slightly buzzed from the wine and ready to press my Staples Easy Button…get ready, here we go: “…that was easy…”

PolyGeek Tee Shirts at Cafe Press

My hubby the uber geek made up some cool tee shirts in the style of Back to the Future. I like the direct reference to the popular quote that ends the movie…but am not in the know about what will be replacing those browsers.

I guess I am not ‘leet enough to get the joke. If anyone here is tech savvy, you could try explaining it to me. I can’t ask Dan; his explanations usually make my head hurt.

I still think the shirts are way cool - Where We’re Going, We Won’t NEED Browsers…..