GrumpysMonkey

W00t! CookLocal had it’s first 100+ hit day today. For some reason, one of the posts I made this week (Honey Mustard Glazed Carrots) was Stumbled. Stumble Upon is a service that lets people rate pages on the Internet that they like. People can send popular pages to friends, and really popular pages can appear on StumbleUpon’s home page.

So by around 10am this morning, Cook Local had received over 100 visitors. Our daily average is running around 20-30 visitors.

While this doesn’t make us a huge amount of money, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen again tomorrow, at least it is possible. We’re producing good enough content with good enough pictures that at least a few people are noticing. As we continue to improve the content and the photography, hopefully more and more people will notice.

There are a few more milestones I’m looking forward to in the near future (say the next 3-6 months).

1. Being linked to by SlashFood
2. Being linked to by Serious Eats
3. Averaging 50 hits per day

I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable. If we manage to achieve all three of these milestones in the next month, then I’ll make new ones.

If you’d like to know what you can do to help, here are a few easy things that can go a long way.

1. Tell your friends about us. If you see a recipe you like, send it along to friends or post a link on your blog.
2. Submit any of our recipes you like to StumbleUpon or Digg. Just use the Share/Send link within each post to rate posts you like.
3. If you have any feedback about the look and feel of the site, or things you’d like to see, please let us know.

Between the house, the cats, and our lives, we’ve added a number of new list items that just have to get done every day (or every week). There’s the cleaning. I’m just not going to let our house ever get as dirty as the apartment got. So we’ve got a long list of weekend chores that need to get done. The good news is that this past weekend, we managed to get all of them done in around 2 hours. The bad news is that I can see us adding a lot more items to the list once the weather warms up and we can garden and have yard work to deal with.

Then there are the cats. Feeding, watering, and litter box maintenance are just three of the items we have to deal with twice a day with them. Not to mention playing with them. So every night when we head down to bed, we end up staying up an additional half an hour or so just running them around so that we can end up sleeping at night.

Finally, there’s life. We’re going to try to run a marathon in June. So that’s going to require a lot more running. So far we haven’t been too good at adding mileage. In fact, John only got out for his first run in over a month just Sunday. I haven’t run in over a week. But when you’ve got to cook, clean, take care of the cats, and watch TV to keep the DVR from getting full, there are only so many hours in the day.

So I’m looking for suggestions to get more done. Obviously I need to be more productive at work. I’m here 8 hours a day, and I’m not productive for all 8 of those hours. I need to be better at that. I need to get back to my listmaking at the office, as that really helped me. In order to do that, I’m going to reorganize my desk today. I’m hopeful that will help out. However, the majority of what I need help with is at home. The dishwasher has made life a lot easier, so at least we’re not spending all night cleaning up the kitchen. Obviously finally unpacking will also make things easier and that just takes time. But that still leaves Cook Local, the cats, and things like personal growth and running. I’d like to read more. I’d like to learn more. I’d like to knit and crochet more.

I’m rambling, so I guess I’m just looking for tips on how others balance work and life. Do you make lists? Come up with a schedule? Play it by ear?

I upgraded GrumpysMonkey to WordPress so that I could spend the weekend upgrading Cook Local to WordPress. Never do anything for the first time on race day… err, wait, that’s Ben’s running advice.

But really, never do anything for the first time in your live environment where you are trying to make money. It’s just not smart. So I’ve upgraded everything here, where if I mess up, only a handful of people will know it and since they’re my friends, they’ll forgive me. (I hope).

Like the RSS feeds. In order to not have two separate blogs running on this web server, I uninstalled the old blogging platform once I verified that the new one was functional. However, I neglected one key item. The RSS feed. The old RSS feed was /atom.xml. The new one is ?feed=rss2. While those little characters might not mean much to most people, what they mean to me is that my former subscribers might not be able to find me in their Google Reader. If they hit up the home page, they’ll see the new RSS link, but if they are just relying on an RSS reader, they will probably think I just stopped posting.

So, mistake #1. Fixable, with some work.

Luckily, so far I haven’t found any more mistakes. But tonight I’m going to customize the look and feel of the page. We’ll see what fun times that brings! I can’t move Cook Local over until I can reliably add a header image and a second column to the sidebar. Once I can do those things on this blog, I can easily move Cook Local over without too much worry.

Just a quick note that I’m making some changes to the publishing platform for GrumpysMonkey today. I’m doing a test run for an upgrade of www.cooklocal.com this weekend since I just can’t get everything I want out of Movable Type any more, at least not without A LOT more HTML knowledge.

So the site look and feel will likely be in flux, particularly this evening. Posts and comments should be preserved just fine though.

Last weekend, we went down to the local animal shelter and came home with two new family members. Well, ok, it was a little more complicated than that… but not much.

We adopted a 5 year old male cat (Binky) and a 3 month old male kitten (Barnacle, or Barney for short).

Here’s a picture of them on their first night home. No, John wasn’t actually sleeping, but it looks cute.

Binky is nearly 14 pounds and is HUGE. Despite the fact that I’ve had heavier cats (who were not fat), Binky (who is also not fat) seems a lot bigger. He’s very densely furred and has a huge head. He’s very affectionate when he wants to be, but also likes to be alone under the bed.

Barnacle is so named because he won’t leave us alone. As I type I’ve got him in a form of a sling sleeping on my chest. After the 10th time in the space of 5 minutes that I had to prevent him from forcing his way onto my lap (pushing the computer out of the way or just stepping on it), I gave up and wrapped him in a fleece scarf. He can also sleep anywhere, in any position. That second picture? He’s upside down on my legs (I’m sitting crosslegged).

Binky has a bit of a cold (a common occurrence in shelter cats), so he snores LOUDLY right now. But other than that, he’s quiet and has figured out how to get onto the window sils downstairs. They seem to be fine while we’re at work, though they are happy when we come home.

We’ve been staying up too late lately because we have to play with them and tire them out a bit before we turn in. Eventually, we’ll figure out how to do this AND get to bed on time.