*pant*

5 more articles to go and I'm done for the month.

Ever notice when you are getting to the end of a project, you can literally feel the load sliding off of your shoulders? Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but that still doesn't change the fact that work is work, and sometimes there are projects that, when they are done, you literally heave a sigh of relief and pat yourself on the back.

It's been a good run. I've had steady work since December. I haven't had to browse a single job board. I've got a steady source of income from my two UK content providers, my on-going work for Green Diva Mom, and my fiction subs. So far 2009 is exceeding my expectations according to the business plan I drafted back in January of 2008 when we first arrived here and I started down a new career path. I'm ahead of schedule on everything except for my novel, which is fine.

A lot of other irons in the fire. If you pay attention to Evy's blog, you'll notice she's been getting a lot of interest in her china-wear and other hand-made projects. We are hoping to have her Etsy shop up by the end of July. That means we are going to be making a few more china sets, some random trinkets, some boxes, wall plates, and a lot of other stuff. I'm just about done rough-drafting my cook-book, and I'm going to start working on doing the design and layout. I have the recipes, and I have about 70% of the photos I need. The rest is designing the layout and getting it all put together. That will likely take me a couple of months, but I'm hoping to have a polished cook-book ready for the printer by late September.

All the rest is stuff I talk about all the time on my blog :) Short stories to write, chapters to work on, and ongoing work. I'm bumping up to full-time for July and August, as my request for additional work was OK'd. They are supposed to be shipping me some open-ended projects, which will be nice.

Next Green Diva Mom article should be out in a few days. This one focuses on what it means to go paperless and how to incorporate the concept into your daily life. Will get a link up to it when it's live. I've also got a draft that I'm working on dicsussing the concept of carbon foot-print, with a little more detail than your average green-freak.

I made a great spaghetti sauce over the weekend, completely from scratch. I normally just buy a stock tomatoe paste and add my own spices, but this time I didn't even buy the paste, I just bought a couple kilos of tomatoes and I blanched and prepared them myself. Ended up with about 2 litres of tomatoe juice on the side, plus a huge pot of spaghettie sauce that we proceeded to devour over the weekend :) I love cooking from scratch. Yes, it takes longer, but it's sooo much healthier in that there are no preservatives and it's all natural. Sure, I got up at 6:30 to get it started, and the sauce wasn't done until 3 p.m., but damn...it was worth it!