Yes today has been a GOOD one.

Slept well, including one stint of a whole four hours without waking up and headed out to aqua-natal. It was a given we were all having coffee after - brilliant, I haven’t been able to persuade anyone to do that before so it’s obviously improved over the 3 weeks I’ve missed.

During our lengthy chat - very nice and sociable - one woman said I could get free re-usable nappies from the council, I rang and sure enough I am now the proud owner of 4 brand-new medium sized Motherese Rikki outer pants, 4 little pants made by someone else but they look pretty good, 12 terry cloth foldy things to go inside them, 600 biodegradeable liners (!) and a nappy pail. So combined with the stuff I already have that’s another item ticked on the must have list.

Even better, with the ones I have already bought at a car boot - used once, sterilised by the seller and then twice more by me - I now have the prerequisite 24 sets of nappies with a blessed 4 of the terry cloths in hand so yes, I’ve also sorted my muslin squares. All this stuff would be about £230 or more new and I’ve spent the grand total of £7 for £188’s worth and scored the rest absolutely free.

Booyacka!

I guess the moral of this story is that help comes from the most unexpected of places.  Who’d have thought that if you want some free nappies, the thing to do was ask your local council.

I’ve also managed to get rid of the giant computer which was cluttering up my office… god bless Freecycle and all who sail in her! I’ve got at least five takers on that one and I’m very pleased as it means I will have a new place to start storing my boxes of packed stuff ahead of our smashing attic floor-o-rama.

On to my next topic.

Dreams.

I dreamt a lot the other night. I can’t remember all of them but a couple spring to mind, one because it was possibly the bizarrest thing I’ve ever dreamt and the other because I remembered it. I wear a couple of those bead bangles, a brown one - tiger’s eye, a whatever volcanic glass is called (can’t remember) and amethyst. I dreamt I lost them the other day and found them… wait for it…

Yes…

Up my arse!

I had to pull them out and wash them off before I could put them back on.

How fricking odd is that?

I also dreamed some very good looking and most buff hunk wanted to shag me but all I wanted was to shag Mr BC. Mr BC didn’t want to shag me though, which is par for the course, he doesn’t at the moment, I freak him out. He is clearly not into shagging truckers. It’s that kind of wank seance thing, too where you feel like the baby is watching. Even so, he was clearly happy when I told him about it and that despite feeling a bit of nooky would be nice I only wanted it with him.

That said, of course, although I’d kind of like a bit of bedroom action er… on paper, so to speak, when it actually comes to it (phnar phnar) I feel less in the mood for sex than I ever have in my life. I ache too much, if you’ve ever tried to have a shag after some major surgery or at least, when some bit of your bod is really hurting, you’ll know you think it sounds like a great idea until you try and then find it’s not really all it’s cracked (gnurk) up to be.

Sorry. Channelling Finbarr Saunders there.

Actually, they didn’t. I did. They were well active though. BTW the not while you’re eating tag is switched on so if you are, don’t read to the end!

So, note to self, when you go to aqua natal with a large hole in the top of your thumb take a plaster, this will stop you from bleeding all over the following:

• bra
• pants
• shirt
• towel
• brand new swimming costume
• bag
• lovely tubigrip SPD-countering truss thing

You will then not have to wash them all when you get home. The truss thing, especially, looks like I’ve committed an axe murder in it! Oh dear.

I had a bit of a flop sweat last night. This whole pregnancy thing has to be the biggest conspiracy ever, nobody told me about those but it appears they are normal… some people get them after, too. Please god no!

So I woke up hot and bothered in pyjamas which were actually damp. Ack. Wanted to change them but Mr BC was fast asleep and had a tough day ahead. When Mr BC wakes up, he seldom goes back to sleep again so I felt that condemning him to a night of wakefulness was too cruel. Anyway, I stuck them over the radiator in the bathroom and by the time I had finished having a pee and doing my pressure points , they’d dried.

Yeh, I do the SPD pressure points in my feet by putting my foot on a small round stone positioned on the go point for two minutes a pop but it takes me 5 minutes to find the go point and I usually only remember to do it in the middle of the night. It’s not often I’m glad of something like this.

This morning, clearly, it was change the sheets time. After swimming…

I put the bottom sheet on and went into the bathroom to remove my blood-spattered bra and put a clean one on. Luckily I noticed the blood all over my tit before I bled all over the clean white bra I was about to put on.

Back into the bedroom where I decided red polka-dots were not on and took recently applied, clean bottom sheet straight off again. Clean sheet number two fitted along with a plaster over my no longer painful but copiously bleeding thumb! Never mind, at least I managed to spot it before I damaged the other bra AND I successfully rummaged in the drawer for clean pyjamas without bleeding all over everything in there… Now I call that a result.

On the downside I have applied copious anti-stretch mark product all over my bump, legs and bum… where do I have them? Underneath my tits. That’s a big YUCK going out to all my pregnant friends, may you never suffer with stretch marks underneath your tits. Eugh.

I repulse me.

Ah the joys of being pregnant… and a bit of a spanner.

It could be even worse. I could be able to see them. At least underneath they will be invisible unless I sunbathe topless and how likely is that (not any more).

I used it as an excuse to myself some illicit toys from Woolies to make up for it… they were two for the price of one so it was churlish not to… and last week I bought some way cool shoes! I could throw those in, too. Mmm…

Perhaps I should replace them with a pair of these… then again, what if I had a night sweat, the bed would be full of melted brown goo… and it’d be the middle of the night so I’d be far too disorientated to realise what it was…

I should stop now…

Enjoy.

I have SPD. Basically not all the muscles round my pelvis are working hard enough so as it gets looser in preparation for Muffin’s birth, it also chafes itself and gets painful. Apparently it’s giving too much because my back is stiff so first we must strengthen the muscles with exercises and then we can loosen the back to stop it reoccurring.

Annoying. I run around quite a bit normally, mainly because if I stop my back seizes up. I stopped exercising regularly at about week 9 because I was getting too morning sick. Surprise, surprise, my back’s seized up, something has to give and I’ve got SPD. Bugger.

They’ve given me a huge tubi-grip tube to wear to support the muscles. This is ace but is causing me fear. You see I’m pregnant, right? That means I’m very vague, I’m very vague anyway at the best of times. So… my worry is that I seem to have established a dangerous routine. It’s this.

I go to the loo. I pull down my trousers, then I pull down the tubi-grip and then I sit down.

One of those little “this-isn’t-quite-right” lights comes on at the back of my brain.

Ah yes. That’s it.

I’ve forgotten to pull down my pants.

Luckily, so far, I have always noticed before I’ve got comfortable and started my pee. However, I fear that if I don’t train myself into an automatic three tier removal system soon the inevitable is going to happen.

Second up something I found on the net this morning made me chuckle.

There’s a certain type of marketing where you get a whole page of information which, when you’ve read it and digested it, usually tells you very little more than how much money the person running “the business” is earning, the enormous amount by which it is increasing every month and an invitation to imagine what you could do with the same kind of earnings. The implication is that if you pay the joining fee and sign up to the scheme you, too could be rolling in the clover with them - or at least it is until you read their legal disclaimer page, always a good idea to read that first, I reckon but then, I’m cynical.

As I understand it, the important thing, for them, is to concentrate on what you want from the business rather than what’s involved, until you’ve paid anything from about $5 to $45 for information “worth thousands” or a set up pack which will allow you to set up a branch of the “business” of your own.

Looking at it from the outside, it seems to me that rather than any concrete sales, the making money part is often about rewards for your referrals, another percentage for any of their referrals and so on.

This means you are very likely to make a lot of money if you are at the top of the chain but the later you join the less you are likely to make. Usually only a handful of people make meaningful money out of ideas like this and everyone else makes a few pence or nothing at all.

Pitch the price for the information, set up pack etc at a reasonably small amount of money and the people who end up out of pocket will just shrug and think it didn’t work out. Even if they do feel cheated or that it wasn’t worth the money their mentality is most likely to be to let it go, that it’s not worth bothering over a few quid etc… Of course, for the people running the enterprise, everyone’s few quid soon adds up. It does for people who sign up for more than one of these schemes, too.

I am chuckling about this page here… Mainly because it looks like the exact same scam and the exact same technique only it’s selling something called; “Stop Being A Victim.” For $5 you too can learn the psychology behind this kind of recruiting and selling… and then you can put it into practise scamming public spiritedly selling an explanation of how the scam works to other people to ensure they don’t get scammed either.

Simple question. Isn’t anyone putting information like this out to STOP people getting scammed going to do it for free - or give you the basics and ask for a donation of few quid to cover their site admin expenses?

I’m thinking computer programmes like AVG free edition virus checker or Spybot Search and Destroy and the like. Ok these are computer tools but they are free - you can upgrade one to a paid version, the other asks for a donation towards running costs.

The thing is, both are updated regularly. Write a book about how scammers scam and yes, it’s hard work but when it’s done, it’s done. Write and distribute a free virus or spyware checker and you will have to keep it updated on an ongoing basis. A similar amount of work to writing a book but without an end. Yet, both these high maintenance applications - and many similar - are provided without charge.

Yet on the Stop Being a Victim page, the Online Business Alliance (who wrote the content or at least it’s copyrighted to them) use exactly the same techniques as the scammers use, ostensibly while offering to “help” you learn how not to be scammed by this particular marketing scam. That is, they spend about 500 words telling you how much money your public spiritedness is going to make you if you pay them $5. Because obviously, you don’t just buy the information, right? No! You sign up and sell it on, yourself, under your own affiliate scheme.

Obviously you’re not doing this to earn money although…

“this industry is one of the few where one can write their own check in terms of earnings, “

(Don’t forget people, they’re not scamming you or trying to raise your expectations, this is a quote from the earnings disclaimer page which clearly states that they’re not responsible if you earn bugger all!)

No! You’re not going to be doing this to “write your own check”! You’re doing it to help people.

Yeh right.

Smell a rat? I reckon you should.

The best bit is the aforementioned legal disclaimers page which takes five paragraphs all written in capitals - ie shouted - to say, essentially, “we’re earning stacks of money doing this but don’t think that means you will.” Any site with one page of content to three legal has got to raise a few questions among the sane. Apart from the one page hard sell you can find a disclaimer, earnings disclaimer, child protection law compliance statement, privacy notice, anti spam policy and terms of use… hmm you might even be able to class that as one page hard sell to six legal…

They give you a preview - it’s a pdf so give it a minute or two to load. This is a short summary of the things which will be covered in detail when you pay your $5 to sign up. It also happens to be comprehensive summary of what you will need to know to set up a scam of your own and looking at it you can’t help thinking that the marketing material you are reading follows it to the letter.

In other words, it looks like a how to scam school disguised as a how not to be scammed school for legal reasons. Obviously this is my view the people behind this may have the best of intentions.

However, if they do, why do they choose to present themselves in exactly the same way as the people they claim to be helping us to avoid? Might it be that they feel the only way to help the suckers is to market to them in a language they understand? My US friends, you can tell me whether that’s just how marketing is done over the pond. Here in the UK the usual consensus is that anything requiring a sell that desperate and that hard has got to be flawed.

The whole thing is a bit like a tabloid kiss and tell which describes some torrid celebrity affair in intimate detail for the titillation and pleasure of the readers but is disguised as a condemnation of the protagonists so the paper can print and you can read with a clear social conscience.

A scam disguised as a crusade against itself? Another cheap trick to rip off the monumentally stupid? Elegant. If a little unethical.

Then again via my ferreting about with their links, I have stumbled upon something called lulu.com - a self publishing site, kind of like zazzle perhaps, only for writers. Now that might actually turn out be worth five dollars!

Mmm, red letter day today, time for our huge hairy cat, Chewbacca, to have his shots. I book him in for 10am so he can go out have a quick patrol of the parameters and then when he comes back to sit on my lap and purr from about 9 onwards I can lock the cat flap and stuff him into his box before he knows what’s hit him.

Good plan huh?

Yes.

Except as usual, the wheels fall off.

He goes out at the usual time and that is when we realise that our neighbours, either side, have clubbed together to have new TV ariels fitted at the same time. Their gardens - and ours - are full of strange men, friendly but strange nonetheless. There are power tools, noises and smells which do not compute and Chewie does a bunk.

Bollocks.

I wait until he is too late for me to make the appointment before ringing the vet to cancel. Within seconds he is at my side, chirruping merrily.

Git.

I ring the vet and explain he has just turned up. They agree I can be late.

Phew.

Once in the surgery, I open the box. He is sitting with his back to me, sulking. I up end the box and without changing position he slowly slides to the bottom. Finally he is weighed, checked and (hoorah) the vet administers a worming tablet. He is now asleep, upside down, where he shouldn’t be but I will allow him to spend the morning there, to make up for the trauma!

On a completely different note, I have found an interesting website. It’s one of these write stuff and earn rewards sites.

If any of you are up on this kind of thing you’ll know what I’m about, if not it’s places like epinions, ciao or dooyoo where you write product reviews in return for points.

The points add up and if you’re lucky after about… ooooh… ten years or so? You earn enough to redeem them for a £5 Amazon voucher. However for all the sweat blood for bugger all aspect (actually you can earn a good living off them but only if you treat it like a job, submit something every day and read practically everything else which appears so people find out who you are and begin to read your stuff) they have their uses.

Many years go I went to a book signing. I told the writer, Terry Pratchett, that I wanted to write a novel but that it wasn’t going very well because what was in my head was very detailed and somehow I just couldn’t do it justice, on paper.

I asked if he could give me some advice. He said I should just write stuff. Write something every day, write letters, e-mails or write about how I can’t think of anything to write. He said that if I did that long enough, I’d learn to drop the details in, in passing, by instinct and it would all come together. He’s dead right. It hasn’t come together quite yet but it’s improved enough to prove that yes, practice helps.

Anyway, as a writer, before I started writing this blog, I used to write reviews for review sites on the grounds that for those days where I couldn’t think of anything to write, I could pick something to review from their ready made categories and earn a very small amount of money for following Terry’s advice.

I still do this when I’m short of inspiration and then I submit the results to as many article and review sites as I can. In my view, since I’ve written the stuff anyway, I may as well get as many pennies for it as I can, they all add up eventually and/or give me another link to ingratiate me with those nice people at Google.

So, recently, I’ve found this site called Quassia which does pretty much this but it also follows the trend of article sites - you publish lots of articles with links to more information on your own site and it counts as an incoming link andGoogle loves you and yada, yada, yada.

Well, because it’s new, Quassia pays you more points than many other sites. Interestingly, it’s entirely geared to website promotion so you sign up add a website you want people to visit and then go about the process of earning points. The more points you earn the more your site is promoted - a bit like paid listings on Google, only sliding scale, the more you “earn” the higher your link is placed. You can also affiliate an adsense account with your area on the site - which seemed quite a good idea to me.

So… You get credits (they call them Quasia dollars but since they’re points and are not a financial thing, I prefer to call them credits) if…

• you tell someone else about it and they join.
• you write an article, yourself, points vary depending on whether the work is original to you, published for the first time on Quasia or elsewhere and how well it gets rated by other users.
• you look at new articles or “screeng intels” as they, rather pretentiously, call it, written by others and rating them on a quality level A - Outstanding, B - Good job, C - Decent enough, D - Below average, E - Awful or even F - Fail [Reject] although you can fail articles which are not in English, incomprehensible, about Quassia itself or pornographic.
• further units if your rating is the same as the majority
• further units if you are the first person to read and rate an article.
• Any article you submit has to be rated by 10 other people before it goes live.

When you’re rating other people’s work, you get extra credits for being the first to read it and if your rating agrees with the majority you also get bonus credits. I’ve managed double credits for most of the articles I’ve “screened” ie read and rated.

What’s on there? So far I’ve read some interesting recipes, some pretty good SEO and web editing hints and some absolutely AWFUL lyrics and poetry! I got 100 credits for submitting a bread recipe… which was nice, especially when I guess the nearest comparable site would be, DooYoo which gives you a mere 50 points for submitting an article - 50 points which have usually expired before I have earned the minimum redeemable points allowance.
In summary, it seemed like a good place to put soundbites, like yesterday’s thing about cats and static, it seemed like a good place for me to dump writing and earn something useful - optimisation (however little of it) for my business website in the form of links - I doubt I’ll do it enough to get actual promotional value - but if, like me, you have more than one blog or website to promote, it has a handy extra of allowing you to add as many sites as you like, so long as they belong to you.

I’ve no idea if it will work but it will be another useful thing to keep me writing a times like now, when inspiration is thin on the ground and it seems I can earn about 100 credits with absolutely no hassle from rating new articles as they appear. I just stuck the site up in a background window, go there sporadically, refresh the page and then read and rate the two or three new intels which have appeared.

I’ll let you know more when I’ve managed to link it up to my adsense account - which I stupidly linked with this site before I realised adsense on WordPress is verboten.

Still, I know some of you are quite active promoting your blogs (or at least, it looks like it to me although that might just be because I’m comparing your efforts with mine and I do, frankly, bugger all to promote this blog) so I thought the odd one of my readers might be interested. If you are and you want to join then if you go in via my page here I get some credits which would be very nice.

Oh yeh and a word of warning… they don’t respond to my kind of humour very well!  I don’t think I’ll be earning huge amounts of points for any of my material.  After explaining that kneading bread with nail varnish or false nails was a no-no I got, and I quote “Very interesting but lost my attention with the false nails part…yuck!“

Yep, it’s out there. Here’s how.

If you stroke a cat 70 million times you will wear out its fur.

You will also create enough static electricity to power a light bulb for one minute. Don’t try this at home though, kids, because remember, you’ll wear out its fur. It won’t thank you if it ends up looking like Mr Bigglesworth.

Thank you Radio 2 for this piece of mindless trivia!