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Home > Doing pretty well with the online surveys...

Doing pretty well with the online surveys...

February 3rd, 2011 at 12:41 am

Since becoming unemployed again, I decided to step up my online surveys. Last year, I averaged just $35 a month, but that's just an average. A more realistic figure was between $20 and $50 a month. I stopped doing them entirely when I was working.

My goal was to really ramp up my monthly income from these things. If they can pay for something like my electric bill...wonderful.

So I'm happy to report that since early January, roughly a month's time, I've earned $100. That could cover my monthly electric AND cable bill combined with a little left over.

It would be great if I could keep that up the entire year, but I don't know, it is very time-consuming and tedious. I once figured it to be about $1 an hour. But time is one thing I have these days, and since I seem to end up sitting at the computer anyway, I might as well do something for a little cash.

Other than that, my life this past week has been wholly dominated by the crazy weather. Last night and today we had a major ice storm. Shoveling the driveway, shoveling the roof, chipping away at the ice dam in the gutters. Really ridiculous. I hope we get a warm-up soon but they're talking more snow possibly on Saturday and something after that as well.

I've also been sticking pretty close to home, as another informal money goal I've set for myself is just one gas tank fill-up a month. I don't see why I should need more since I'm not working.

So when I had to return a book to the library and get a few key groceries for meals I was making, I walked there. It was about an hour round-trip, and I must say, a rather cold day, so I feel proud that I did that.

Still waiting for 2 more tax-related forms from a bank and a brokerage before starting my taxes.

Bad weather always has me cooking, so I recently made a turkey chili with tomatoes from last summer's garden, plus frizzled cabbage, which is basically shredded green cabbage and onion sauteed tiil soft with olive oil with egg noodles mixed in; you can also add peas if you wish.

I started researching portable generators. I never knew that I could keep my furnace running during a power outage using one. Duh. But I probably won't do anything for the time period; they're rather expensive. I'd want to go for a 3 or 4,000 watt generator for just my furnace and refrigerator. I'd also have to spend extra to have an electrician install a transfer switch, so all in all, too expensive for me right now.

I always worry bigtime during storms about downed trees and power outages and possible frozen pipes, but in the 15 years i've lived here, there was just one power outage that lasted about 24 hours, and the house got down to a very chilly 50 degrees.

I hate to be at the mercy of the power company and their repair crews; you always hear of people being without power for days at a time, and if that happened to me in winter, I'd be sunk.

But as it happened, the tree trimming crew was out here trimming the trees in front of my house on the day just before the snow/ice storm. They had actually been at it several days. Initially they passed my house and I knew, since I called to find out when they'd be coming, that they only come once every 5 years, so i didn't want them to pass by my house. The guy said the trees were growing right into the wires so much so that they'd have to do a "planned outage," in which they notify residents they'd be without power for at least a few hours.

In the dead of winter, with the kind of temps we've been having?? Well, I guess they thought better of it because they went ahead and did all the work without having to shut power down. They spent quite a bit of time here and I hope it reduces the many outages we seem to have here.

It actually was partly my fault becus once, years ago, when a workman came to the house for permission to trim the trees, nature nut that i am, I said "no" becus i'd seen the way they scalp the branches in a very unnatural looking way. The guy got annoyed with me and said he could go to town hall and override me anyway, which just annoyed me and made me dig in my heels, so they left and never trimmed.

I regretted it in later years when tree branches fell on the wires, caught on fire and shorted out the transformer. Mea culpa.

Now my feeling is, they can trim all they want.

1 Responses to “Doing pretty well with the online surveys...”

  1. cotten Says:
    1296773032

    Well good for you! Love the battle with the ice dams. I've taken a pacifists approach and decided to let them win, call the insurance company, and go from there.

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