This dish, which I lovingly call “pasta concoction”, is something I invented as a second or third year student. You boil up some pasta shells, grate hard cheese over the hot, drained shells and pour warmed-up baked beans over the top. The resultant ooey gooey mess is a wonderful comfort food and, of course, dirt cheap.

It’s been a long while coming, but Social Spark, the evolution (and sister site) to PPP is indeed here. Impressively transparent, with full in-post disclosure required and nofollow tags for links, the site goes a long way to mopping up the tarnished face of the paid-post industry while offering the blogger an opportunity to have fun while making a bit of cash.

SocialSpark is a social media site which operates in much the same way as any other: you can make friends, try to get kudos (props) to increase your visibility, and tout your stuff including your latest posts and happenings.

Meanwhile, and here’s the primary difference, those with advertising accounts might seek you out for a custom post, or you can browse the notice board for a job. I’ve yet to get a job off the bat, but you can sign up to be on a waiting list (which is how I got this post, as it turns out). This is a melting pot where advertisers and bloggers can come together easily, and it looks good too!

The reservation system is a nice feature, but I wish the reservation emails didn’t start going out at midnight eastern which has them arriving at 9pm, after I’m starting to wind down for the day. I have 12 hours to write and submit the post, but that 12 hours is overnight, and I think it would be better to start the reservations at noon eastern instead.

I’m looking forward to the day when there are enough opportunities to go around–I can see SocialSpark gaining the same popularity that PPP did, only without the glitches. In many ways this is a site that learned from its big sister’s mistakes, and is acting accordingly. I do find the social media sites hard to navigate, though, so it’s going to take me a while to really embrace the new one.

But the potential of some nice part-time income is there, waiting, and it’s well worth the look-around. Besides, it’s pretty and has a really cute logo. ;)

1. Turned the air conditioning on at 8 in the morning. Outside, uninhibited, the mercury hit 99 degrees–can you say “heat wave”?
   

2. Input a bunch of landmarks and watched as the 100,000th one was entered into the Markeroni database.
   

3. Twittered a little for the first time in a week, but had to stop because it tends to lock up my browser.
   

4. Packaged up my niece’s birthday present, ready to mail tomorrow. She’ll be thirteen! How could that possibly happen?
   

5. Tidied up my corner so that I no longer feel oppressed by all the mess. It looks good.
   

6. Wrote enough paid posts to pay today’s rent.

7. Earned my cats’ undying sporadic adoration for feeding and petting them.
   

8. Revamped the programs I use to join dual snarfs together (landmarks that are on more than one historic register) and thus cleared the backlog because it’s no longer so much of a chore. I also cleared more of the outstanding backlog off the deck including data entry requests and direct-logged landmarks.
   

9. Updated my business accounts up to the end of April. I’m actually quite excited because I almost got into the “comma club” (thanks, Shen! ;) for March. :)

10. Cooked my famous pasta concoction for the first time in at least a couple of years…and did the dishes.
    

11. Beat my inbox into submission a little bit.
    

12. Caught up on photos of the day for Raven’s RV and Raven’s Range.
    

13. Dug out my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel to start editing it and find out if it’s worth keeping. I think it will be. :)

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

Put them together in a few hours, save at least a grand over a pre-constructed machine, and have fun too! What’s not to love? They even have tutorials on upgrading processors, RAM and other adventures so you can truly customize your new computer. Whee!

This post was sponsored by Easy AS my PC Kits.

I picked up this little coffee maker in Target. It’s not electric, though I do see there are one-cup coffee makers; you just bung the coffee in and pour hot water through, like a percolator. It’s tiny enough to not make me wonder what the heck I was thinking (I have a very tiny kitchen).

But where we’re moving to, there’s no Starbucks for 40 miles.

The last Armchair Traveler lecture was today, and afterwards a dozen of us piled down to this funky pizza/pasta buffet for a late lunch. The food was nummy but, let’s say, quite high on the carbohydrates. ;) Didn’t stop us from having fun though. :)

I can’t remember the name of the place! I’m hoping that Amber will remind me. (Hint, hint.) It had games and all sorts of funky stuff and was definitely aimed at a younger crowd. I thought it was great fun and the staff was really attentive and friendly.

Sudden cardiac arrest carries nearly 900 people a day off to the next chapter of their existence. That’s a startling number, and if not treated within 4-6 minutes it is usually fatal. While it can occur out of the blue, it’s more likely that the victims have one of these risk factors–there are a couple on there that do ring bells for me.

If you want to find out more about sudden cardiac arrest, visit the inside cardiac arrest site. Informative plain-English videos presented by a doctor explain the condition and what can be done about it. Then, you might be able to avoid an ICD implant in the first place.

Normally I like big purple trucks. However, this one ran its generator on and off all night at Dunnigan rest area (southbound). It puts our loud generator into sharp perspective. ;)

From Thursday onwards we headed north to Redding. It was a different trip this time, more of a mission to find a new pad than to explore, and I admit that I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. There was much too much passive sitting around in an overheated cab and not much time to sit and just be zen about things. Not my kind of road trip, and not terribly relaxing. But we made some progress, and saw some pretty things, and I even got to go on snarfari.

I find myself not wanting to write much this week, so I’ll just leave it at this.

The hall of records at Colusa is part of a state historic landmark–the Colusa courthouse. We landed in Colusa sort of by accident, following signs for an Indian casino. I enjoyed my little snarfari there. :)