I’ve been more interested lately in my Wii (Wii Fit Plus and Animal Crossing: City Folk) and my book (Girls of Riyadh) than I have been in making connections between life and interesting reading material to make a post here. I sort of feel like my frantic busyness at work is washing over to home. I feel unstructured. Like Jell-O without a mold.

I just decided to make a list of things I feel I must get done now. And you know, I could only thing of one thing.

I need to make more money.

That’s it, that’s all I could think of. I don’t need to clean the house – I can push that on the weekend for the worst areas. I don’t need to spend more time with the kids – I already spend as much time as I can, and I won’t take away from it. I don’t have to read more, tidy up, organize, or anything else. Right now, money is my priority.

“But money doesn’t buy happiness!” My mind threw that one out as I thought about what other people may be thinking right now, which is really what I’m probably thinking without wanting to admit it. Sure, money doesn’t buy happiness, but money does fix the leaky bathtub. Money does pay for the Internet, daycare, and saving up for an emergency. More incoming funds do those things, and allow me to stress less about where the money will come from.

I will earn $100 in February.

Right now I honestly don’t know how that’s going to happen. $100 is a lot. I’m not going to put any extra funds into this little adventure – I’m going to do online things that don’t cost anything. If I earn money and decide to spend that cash trying to earn more, I think that’s okay.

There’s a goal. It feels like a big goal. If I meet it early, I’ll raise the stakes.

The plan for tomorrow:

• Squidoo – I wrote a list of ideas for lenses. I’m going to pull pictures and sketch modules for one tomorrow.
• mTurk – I earned a whopping $11 over 3 months, then gave up. Maybe if I give it a half-hour a night, I could rack up $20.
• I’m going to see if there’s anything that will fetch a price on eBay. I can get the buyer to pay for shipping, so it doesn’t really count as outgoing money.

Here we go.