Ah, Tax Season 2009 has come to an end. Two days out, I’ve now spent most of two days playing a lot of LEGOs and Mario Kart with my son while the wife is out of town. (Shhh, don’t tell her — I know Mario Kart is essentially brain rot, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her! ) Should probably consider looking for something a bit more productive to do eventually, but right now I’d say spending time with my little five-year-old is just about the absolute right thing to do.

So in the last two months, what have I actually accomplished?

• A couple hundred tax returns.
• Completed somewhere in the range of half a Campaign Blast Challenge. The brain and time just wouldn’t cooperate to allow me to finish the whole thing. Outside of the challenge, I built next to nothing.
• A hard slap of my eBay AdWords campaigns by Google — twice. You know Google, if you don’t want my money, fine, I’ll move them and the substantial amount I was paying to advertise with you to…
• Yahoo & MSN. Transferred all my campaigns over. The traffic isn’t quite up to Google’s numbers, but they are slowly building. And the traffic appears to convert even better!
• I’ve got another side business that is in serious need of, well, going the hell away. I just have to come up with a means of making a clean break with it. Now that tax season has ended, I have no excuse in putting that off other than not wanting to deal with it.

OK, so I guess I did at least get a few things done on this side endeavor that I’d like to make my main one.

Immediately after the slaps, my earnings took a major nosedive to the tune of around 10% of my peak. I’m back to around 60% and steadily increasing. Now that I have time and available brain cells to focus, it’s time to get back to the game and see where I want to be and what I need to do in order to get there.

After all, I have a single monetary goal for the summer: September 1st, I plan to write a check for the remainder of our mortgage…

photo credit: giiks

At long last — in other words, a month — I’ve tracked down a Wii in the configuration I want… Every now and then, my December motivator would pop into my mind, but of course it was never in stock at anything like retail price. Sure, there are all kinds of ways to pick one up if I was willing to pay retail+50%, but I guess I’m just not that eager a consumer. Today, one is en route to me.

For those looking for one (or similar always out-of-stock items), here’s how I ended up tracking it down this afternoon:

• Install the Firefox plugin Check4Change.
• Load up a few retailers’ Wii console page, and find the Out of Stock text that almost always exists there.
• Highlight that text, right click, and Check4Change -> Every 5 Minutes.
• Do whatever you normally do, but keep Firefox and those tabs loaded.
• When that tidbit of text changes, Check4Change will give you a little visual cue on the tab that something has been altered. You can also configure it to play a sound or bring the window to the front if you happen to not live in your browser.
• Order your Wii.

This will certainly boost my productivity…

photo credit: S Migol

While November was an absolute mind blowing month for my latest endeavors, as of this morning it has been passed up by December. Seventeen days in, and I have already surpassed November’s total. I thought traffic would have at least started to slow down by now with the holidays rapidly approaching, but the last week showed two new record days up in the books (and those non-record ones couldn’t exactly be called bad either). Not quite time for a new sticky yet, but Monday sure made a good run at it!

Still waiting on good ol’ eBay to actually pay me instead of just telling me they are about to pay me, but I’m a reasonably patient man and can bide my time a little longer. But please step it up, can ya’? I’m itching to see a decent-sized deposit in my account. After all, I’ve got a credit card balance to wipe out as well as a Wii to go shop for…

photo credit: ColKorn1982

Because my brother & sister are going to be in distant corners of the world come Christmas time, my side of the family celebrated the holiday a little early this year. A fine ol’ time was had by all!

But I think the most fun was had firing up my parents’ Wii (an earlier gift that probably hadn’t hardly been touched by my technophobic folks since it was given) and getting everyone involved in a bit of living room virtual — and real — exercise. Enough fun that I made a bit of a deal with the wife so that she wouldn’t give me too much crap if I went and bought one.

Now before you go off and call my pussy whipped, you’ve got to understand. We’ve been in fairly heavy debt killing mode the last couple years, and superfluous purchases like a Wii have been pretty much nonexistent for quite awhile. It feels weird to spend even $100 that hasn’t been specifically budgeted. But the deal I made seemed pretty harmless anyway: have a five-figure month in December with my side endeavor, and I get to be guilt-free in making the purchase. Seemed like a stretch to both of us.

And then November ended. And a few things fell into place. And I had a five-figure month in November. And so far, December is looking to be even better than last month.

So, even if I may be a little premature, I’ve been doing a little Wii shopping. And I’ve just gotta ask: WTF Nintendo? Every time I look around, I find yet another Wii bundle. Can you possibly throw together just a couple dozen more to make the selection even more difficult?