Utter dismal failure.

I have been horrible about keeping this up to date. Hopefully soon something in my life will give and I can update more often again. I have a lot of new make up on the way to review and swatch, fish tanks to redo, and new things to post about my hopefully renewed comic store.

Ever the Updater.

Good morning comrades!

(It seems right now my largest readership is in Russia so "Большое спасибо!!" to everybody there who has been reading.)

I don't really know much Russian other then please and thank you, however I have been wanting to learn both Russian and Italian for quite some time now.  Once my life is back on some form of track I plan to pick up a copy of rosetta stone so I can start doing nightly lessons.  

Actually part of why I would like to either learn how to write SEO articles (ok, so technically I bought a book and it said how to write them, but it just seems too simple. I have to be missing something.) Or really just have any job I can do anywhere from my computer, so I can travel some times and see new places. Speaking of SEO articles I was going to try to work more on updating the look of the blog today and then trying to wrangle a couple little SEO gigs for myself. Yesterday I had the good fortune of dropping my phone into a puddle, so I could use all the extra income I can wrangle, when did phones get so expensive? I really want an iPhone 4s, I like most things apple, and most likely not for the reasons you may be thinking. While I do appreciate the beautiful product designs, I actually am devoted to them because their products actually hold up to my horrible abuse. I have had the same 1st gen iPod touch for going on 5 years now, and my little Macbook Pro for I am guessing nearly 3 or 4 years now and both still run like the day I got them, which for me and technology is outstanding.  I would just be pleased to have an older generation iPhone, however, the 4s is the only one with siri and since a good chunk of my time is spent driving, the idea of talk to text is really appealing to me. 

Back to SEO writing, it seems like the perfect fit for me. Unlimited income potential, can do it form anywhere where internet is present. It could easily help me get out of this hole I am stuck in. Actually that is part of why I started working so hard on blogging, so I could use it as a reference. I think that I am a fairly competent writer.  Of course, like most people I am best when writing about things I am truly passionate about, but I have written some fairly long essays in my time (I mean like 40 some odd pages) about subjects for school I could have completely cared less about (hello there sobriety and abstinence in western cultures... I mean what kind of weird, preachy, class is this even? So of course my paper got a C as I butted heads with the whole thing, BUT I was passionate about one thing, I hated the class, so I guess I can even be passionate about things I dislike if I dislike them enough for it to make me annoyed.) The point here is I just need to over some my fears and get to work. 

I do really enjoy blogging, I will enjoy it even more when I can start posting photos again. I think photos really help anything really, it just makes it more interesting, to me any way but I am an extremely visual person. Oh, that reminds me I LOVE pinterest as much as I thought I would! I am still getting the hang of it but so far it is fantastic and has given me all kinds of ideas, including trying to do "Starvin' Saturdays" here, where I will be posting about food or nutrition related stuff. I absolutely adore cooking although I am limited to what I can do here as the kitchen is horribly laid out and I don't have a full sized oven (tiny countertop convection ovens for the win!). It won't stop me though, I'll try  to make some fantastic things!

In other news the room rework is in the works. I moved my bed into the closet and it really is 40 inches, which means it is folded in half more like a sofa which for right now is fine but it can't stay in there forever, so I need to try to rework my plan again. I'll figure out something. 

Today I am going to be working on banners for fishy fridays and starvin' saturdays, and like I said working more on  the looks of the blog as well as finishing my diamond order for the comic book store and trying to make more progress on my room. I totally just have WAY too much stuff. 

Well ladies and gents, I should finish this up so I can work a little bit on my SEO page and then get to work doing all the other things I should be doing today. Have a fantastic tuesday!

Asparagus and Ham Fritata Time!

I'm cooking breakfast, well more like brunch as it is almost noon, but in my defense I had a meeting at work this morning, so that took until 10:30 plus grocery shopping for said delicious comestibles. While cooking I thought I would try to multi task and write a short post today asking for some suggestions for some normal weekly features. I already have decided I was going to do "Fishy Fridays" to pick up the slack from my aquatics blog... but other then that I am drawing a blank. Any one else have any suggestions? I can and happily will blog 5 to 7 days a week, so really if you have any ideas don't be shy, leave a comment or send me an email!

Newish.

I joined bloglovin' today and signed up for an invite to pinterest (which makes 300% more sense to me then any other type of social networking, I am a very visual person so I love the concept and idea behind it. )

It should be fairly obvious to most of you I am still pretty new to the blogging scene, it doesn't really help that I can't narrow my blog down to specific things. I started this blog to try to help find myself, which it hasn't really helped much with, but it does give me a really great place to unload stuff that is on my mind (i.e. what is happening right now) I feel like part of the problem is my lack of social skills. I am beyond awkward in all social situations be it in real life or behind a computer screen. I have 6 friends in real life, 2 of them live across the ocean, one is my roommate, one lives 15 hours away and 2 live in my home town (which is 2 hours away). Online I don't really have any friends,  and this is not a "oh you should all be my friends I'm so lonely post" although having some online friends would be nice, it's just more of an exploratory post on why it's hard for me to get people to follow my blog I guess. I also want advertisers to help out with the costs of my blog, but with so many interests, and so few followers, who would bother. So I need to come up with a better game plan I suppose.

I need to redo my room, I planned onto moving my bed into my closet, but my closet is only 23 inches deep and my bed is 40 (which is weird cause I though twin sized beds were suppose to only be 29 inches wide) but, I am sure I will figure it out, maybe monday I will try to move things around. Part of the problem of sharing a house with some one is me being how I am, I don't want to move all my stuff in (partially because it is a teensy tiny house) but the stuff I do have I don't like it spilling into the other parts of the house so I just try to cram it all into my room. (why one entire wall is fish tanks.) I wish I could just have a personal mentor or something to help me with everything that I just can't understand. Then again I know the answers. I just can't get to the steps that lead me to them. Need more room get rid of stuff... ok BUT what stuff and how and where to? Again my brain is such a help. ug. Further awesomeness includes that I have an entire large 2 bedroom house all packed into a storage unit, including sofa, love seat, nice office, ect. but it is just sitting there because I can't make enough to even get a small apartment on my own, and even if I could I couldn't because of the foreclosure further ruining my credit. Yup. My life is the bomb.

Ok, ok ug, I need to stop. In more exciting news the diet pill pyramid scheme was not really a pyramid scheme... although it sort of was, they wanted 200 bucks to start up, which I don't have so it's back to blogging and trying to get SEO articles to write. Which maybe I will try to write a couple tuesday, I just get very apprehensive about doing new things I am green on, I never want to disappoint any one and while I am more then sure that I can do it, I have never actually done so, meaning there is a possibility that I could some how mess it up, you should see me closing at work, haha there are notes every where apologizing for things I may have done wrong.

I also remembered the end of my train of thought from yesterday. I was going to write about Desert Essence and Shea Moisture and their equally fabulous natural products of which I use both. If you walked in the bathroom right now (honestly you would probably cry and run screaming, I have been sick and thus have not been able to keep up with house keeping, BUT...) you would see a sea of lime greens, corals, salmons and teals with a few chocolate browns tossed in. I am very loyal to products that don't cause my skin to go into an all out revolt. To date I have found 4 companies that most of their products don't cause me to have to walk around hiding behind my hair or scarves; those companies being:

1. Aquage
2. Desert Essence
3. Shea Moisture
and finally
4. e-sen-cis by Samy

I have a horrible time finding products, and my roommate loves it because all the spoils are just handed off (which is a lot.) However I have been on a winning streak lately. Desert Essence thoroughly clean face wash is absolutely fantastic for my overly sensitive skin while still controlling my weird adult acne (I still have no idea why I suddenly started have acne problems at 28), also the tea tree facial cleansing pads are great for when I am too tired or in a place I can't bust out my face wash! I also use their tea tree and neem toothpaste and tea tree mouth wash (see a pattern here? My body really gets along great with tea tree so I'm sticking with it!) and while these are probably not for every one (they are fluoride free) for those of us who have a very low tolerance for fluoride (I can't drink tap water with out getting ill) or for those trying to avoid it because of it's possible carcinogenic properties, give these a try! Lastly I also use their Apple Ginger shampoo, but I mix it 50/50 with Shea Moisture's Coconut & Hibiscus Curl and Shine Shampoo, because on it's own it was a little too drying for my already very dry hair.

On that note, after seeing probably 56 online reviews of Shea Moistures various hair and body products I decided to wander on over to Walgreens and pick some up to try and I have to say I am not disappointed in the least, although the shampoo didn't get my hair as clean feeling as I like so thus is why it is perfect to mix with my Desert Essence shampoo. The repairing conditioner is great and I use it as a wash out, I think as a leave in it would just make my fine but fluffy hair a stringy, crunchy, mess. Lastly I have been using their eponymous "Curl enhancing smoothy", which my friends is fantastic and will most likely last me forever as I use about a 1/4 teaspoon sized glob once a week! I have read some times it makes hair crunchy, and yes it will, if you use a lot, but once I figured out I needed hardly any, my hair is soft and shiny and relatively frizz free (which just doesn't happen.)

As for Aquage and E-sen-cia, I use their plethora of hair styling products when I actually need to use styling products (which is rare but does happen.) I urge you to check out all these companies at the links below if you are into natural beauty, they are a bit pricy but I am happy to not have irritates skin so I will deal with it!

• Desert Essence
• Shea Moisture
• Aquage
• E-sen-cia

Oh! My I have been writing for over an hour! I had better go get ready for work! Opps! Have a great day!

Ick.

Or rather Ich, short for Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (also known as white spot disease); It’s a parasite that lives on the slime coat of fish and all fish keepers dread the appearance of those little white dots. Today while trying to take pictures of my new tanks I noticed my betta “Promeitius” had 3 white spots and I basically freaked, not only for his health but also for the health of all the other fish in that tank.  I treat ich as naturally as possible, I am not a believer of dosing up my fish with antibiotics or other medicines, so my usual coarse of action is cranking the temp in the tank to a balmy 86 degrees and adding aquarium salt. (ich can’t live in high water temperatures nor can the freshwater variety tolerate salt).  

Speaking of fish and fish related things, I will be closing my “Miss Ellyse’s Aquatics” blog and just posting the content here instead. I think snouts heart sprouts might be easier to remember for most people, even though most fish don’t have snouts.   So in the coming weeks there will far more fish and aquatics related posts then before.  If there are ever any topics you would like for me to blog about please don’t be shy. I love suggestions; they make my life a lot easier!!

What else is going on in my life currently? I am battling a horrible infection, so I am really weak and I am not being able to get done ever 1/16^th of what I should be getting accomplished however, I am going to dig through my storage unit to find my box of bags so I can have a few ebay auctions to try to raise enough money for that Epiphanie Clover Camera Purse I posted about in one of my previous posts. It seems silly being as I do not have enough money for the $800 dollar camera I plan on getting, HOWEVER, I will have a better paying job soon and I WILL have a new camera that I can manually focus.  I did manage to get my little point and shoot digital camera fixed, however trying to take photos of anything fast moving (ie fish, shrimp, cats, dogs) is not exactly a piece of cake. I manage to get it done, but for each picture that I manage to get in focus there are 25 that I do not, which believe me wastes a lot of my time (something I have hardly any of.) Focus and fast movement issues aside, my little camera is working pretty well again. It will work great for taking pictures of who knows what. Most likely food, as I have been stalking several blogs lately especially “Delighted Mama” which have tons of amazing alternative recipes which use natural and nontraditional sweeteners and healthful ingredients. This whole infection thing is getting me to try to take better care of my self again, which I sometimes forget about when I am running around like mad and trying to be super woman.

I look forward to feeling better so I can get some spring cleaning under way as well as planting my little garden and getting my outdoor fish tubs set up. I am glad I had been forcing myself to wait because the past 4 nights have been well below freezing again, which would have been detrimental to my little fishy friends.