So, was late again with my "Friday" link dump for The Job Stalker (over ===> there), which always pisses me off, although I strongly suspect that nobody else in the known universe gives a flying frack about it one way or the other. This time it was due to exhaustion ... I listened to WSI's Pagans Tonight show on BlogTalkRadio, and fell asleep at the keyboard. When I came to around 4am, I wasn't able to get my act together enough to write (although I caught up with my Twitter reading), so it drifted into Saturday. Yeah, like you care, eh?I'm in a grumpy mood, so I guess I'll keep bitching ... it's almost getting to be comic that I've had no response to all my efforts to get some reports out of the Chicago Now folks about the damn blog. As I've noted, I found out that I should have been getting daily mailings on that and I have seen nothing so far, which makes it hard to see what's working and what's not. I'm also sort of pissed off about the missing author interview. I'd had to deal with the author's "people" on this and I kept asking if they could give me a "guesstimate" of when he might be able to get to this, and have heard NOTHING from them since two Fridays back (when it was indicated that they'd get the answers from him "next", aka last, week), so now I've "held space" for that feature two Mondays running. By strange timing I had just put up a Tweet today bemoaning the communications breakdown, and the author saw it and responded. I thought "Finally!", but unfortunately, he doesn't "do email" and I don't "do phone" (well), and his suggestions was that in a couple of weeks he might be able to do a 5-minute call! Frankly, he typed enough in our Twitter exchange that had he been answering the questions he'd have completed the damn interview questionnaire!
One project that I got knocked down this weekend was the CafePress shop I've been "threatening" to do for The Job Stalker. Of course, since I don't have any numbers I won't be able to tell if this is going to have any impact on traffic/readership, but it's something that I sort of wanted to do. My wangler over there was definitely lukewarm on the concept (ChicagoNow has some Zazzle shops, but they just have buttons and stickers), but she didn't say "no, you can't" (although I did make a point of not having any mark-up on any of the stuff in the store), so I went ahead. Not that I'm going to be spending a lot there (I do sort of want one of the coffee cups, though), it's fun to have that stuff available.One of the things I've read about blog promotion is "having your own stuff for sale" (generally, speaking about e-books and the like) is a big way to popularize it. Go figure. I just hope enough folks like the graphic (which I inherited with the blog ... it's not my design) and the concept of "job stalking" that they'll want to snag some stuff. I also registered http://jobstalker.info which now points to the blog, which is certainly easier to remember than the slash-slash-slash direct URL.
We're exhausted here. Daughter #2's birthday was Thursday, then on Friday there was Daughter #1's interview with the International Baccalaureate program (her number one choice for High School next year), then on Saturday we had a gaggle of 10-year-olds here for #2's party, with a couple of them staying over for a sleep-over, which went into lunch today. We spent way too much money on everything, which makes me crazy, and then The Wife gets crazy at my getting crazy (but, of course, it's my fault when there's no more money left!), and everything gets ugly. So, between still having chaos in the morning and the general level of stress, Valentines Day sucked about as much as usual (well, it was almost a non-event). I hate Valentine's almost as much as Xmas ... both of them are such awful "emotional blackmail" things ... and I was always the kid who never got ANY valentines in school.
Speaking of money issues. Those two phone interviews that I thought had gone so well? I have not heard a PEEP out of either of them. It's been two weeks on one and nearly three on the other. I'm assuming that I've been passed over, but it would be nice if folks would let you know. Of course, the last time I tried following up after an interview, I got a .pdf "thanks but no thanks" bit of boilerplate within a half hour of sending the e-mail. Very, very depressing.