Ants..

A couple weeks ago, I was filling the cat food dish and I was surprised by a small amount of ants scurrying about the food bowl and the mat it was on. We have never had any type of insect (other than the random spider) in the house, so this was a shock. They were tiny ants similar to fire ants I remember from Texas, but they were slow moving and did not bite. I cleaned up the area and my wife bought some organic ant spray (as to not harm the cats) and we sprayed the area and thought it was a fluke.

Well to my surprise, 30 or so were wandering around on the bathroom tile a couple days ago. I could not tell where they were coming from, but this was the last straw. I went to the store and got some Raid ant hotels. I tracked them down to a small hole in the corner between the tub and the tile wall. The hole is just small enough for them to come in and out single file. I could have sprayed and sealed the hole, but what would be the fun in that? I wanted them to feast on the ant bait so I put 2 hotels right there in the corner.

They found the bait traps, and holy crap, they like, no wait, they love them! The good thing is, they no longer wander around the bathroom floor, they just hang out at the ant hotel. The theory is, they will eat it and take it back to the colony and it will kill the whole colony. I hope this works and I will keep you updated.

You already know I do not subscribe to global warming hype, but we have lived in this house for over 20 years and never had ants in the house of any kind. A couple times last summer, I did notice the same type (I assume) of ant in the driveway coming up through the cracks. 2 or 3 times in the early morning, they would come out of their nests and swarm together in softball sized ant balls. At that time I went and got some fancy type of granular pesticide recommended by the guy at the co-op. It would get rid of them for a few days, and they would just move to another crack.

I wonder if they are some type of mutant super ant? Maybe someone that has had success ridding their house or yard of this super-ant could post a comment!

Cactus Cuties National Anthem

Fuzzy Butt Dressing..

I was shopping at the local grocery store when a stroll down the salad dressing aisle led me to burst out laughing uncontrollably. I don't know what it was, I take that back, I do know what it was about this Poppy Seed salad dressing bottle. The picture on the front of the bottle looks like a big fuzzy butthole. There is no way around it, I have no idea why this picture is on the front of the bottle. To give them the benefit of the doubt, it could be a peach pit, but why would that be on a poppy seed dressing bottle? I thought poppy seeds were real tiny. Anyway, poppies have beautiful flowers (remember the Wizard of Oz?), why not put the flower on the bottle? You be the judge.

And here is a closeup of the fuzzy butt

I don't know, but I think marketing needs to have a meeting.

I bet you are starving now, maybe you could have a big helping of "Spotted Dick".

Hey, it is even a "Hot Seller"

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My Excuse For Not Posting..

Well it has been a busy past couple weeks. I had to move 6 sites from a host that I really had high hopes for. A kid named Justin from Colorado emailed me about a year ago and offered me free web hosting for a couple of my most popular sites; http://free-templates.org and http://buildfree.org. I was flattered but skeptical and decided to use the opportunity to start out a couple new websites. Well Justin is a great guy and very smart but I think he may have bit off more that he could chew. Several times over the year my new sites suffered complete outages for hours at a time. I realize the occasional server upgrade and unforeseen disasters, but with the last Google crawl, 3 of the sites actually obtained a page rank of 2. This just means that they are now candidates to move to the mainstream and earn some possible advertising income. Well another 8 hour outage just killed me. I had just emailed a prospective client with the new sites for review. Enough said.

I also had a generous offer for the purchase of http://buildfree.org. Let's just say that generous in this case was close to 6 figures and made me re-look at my whole internet business model. I have about 20 websites that are live right now, but buildfree.org was one of my first sites and it has been around since 2003. It has a page rank of 4 and gets the most hits of any of my websites. So I use buildfree.org to promote the other websites and to help my little website family grow. buildfree.org sends traffic to all my other sites, so losing it would be like losing a parent. Not only would the revenue be lost from buildfree.org but with the other sites as well.

The first thing I had to do was investigate the buyer and to make sure they are reputable and honest. I will not reveal the company but I was satisfied this was a serious offer. We traded a lot of technical information on site traffic and revenue. The next thing I wanted to do was to get to know the contact. He turned out to be very personable and we talked many times over the last two weeks. He actually came back with a respectable counter-offer and I said I had to mull it over. I talked to my attorney and and he said no problem, he could handle it for a reasonable fee. My next question was to my accountant about the tax repercussions. He said we could get through the deal with about 25% capital gains tax. so 1/4 of the money would go right out the door.

Well it all boiled down to should I accept today what buildfree.org will earn in 2-3 years anyway? Yes it would be great to bank some money and show some results for my many hours of frustrating webmasterdom, but after some soul-searching, I had to refuse the offer. I did make a counter-offer that would justify starting my internet journey over, but we reached an impasse.

So there you go, I am still the proud owner of 20 websites, but my tires have been officially kicked..

It's Connie Talbot day!