Nicole

Check it out and vote for me!

Kenny Rogers Kitteh

Go to the following link to vote. The hospital with the most votes will win a fun center for children who are chronically ill and have to spend their time in the hospital. Children’s hospital is in second place right now, so they have a chance to win. You can also vote daily if you want.

It’ll only take a minute!

If you have problems with the link, just cut and paste.

http://www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/Corp/CommunityPrograms/show-the-love.c

A few months back, I got serious (er, even more serious?) about making a side income and improving my finances. I started reading a number of personal finance (“PF,” as they call themselves) blogs. And after reading them for several months–3 of them in my RSS, one as a daily digest email–I’ve dropped them all, one by one. Why? They’re not good writers. Sentence after passive-voice sentence, post after boring post, you might read one good tip in twenty. Don’t worry about missing that good tip, they’ll recycle it into a half-dozen or more posts for you. I realize that blogging is essentially self-indulgent, but pf-blogs seem especially so. When there’s nothing to absorb, it’s usually best just to move on.

I have a friendship (not a particularly close one, for reasons that will soon be obvious) fit for an old-school sitcom. This girl usually runs into incredible streaks of luck, but also can’t help bragging about it. It often comes across as patronizing. If Fred Rutherford was a naturally-size-0, designer-obsessed, 26-year-old bubbleheaded PhD student, it would be her.

She keeps winning Amazon gift cards on Blingo.com, a Publisher’s Clearing House rebadge of Google’s search engine. And now I really want to win from them, too. I just keep missing it though.