This past week was consumed with babysitting Rylan. They really shouldn't call it baby "sitting" because, when she was a wake, I was not sitting. Well, maybe I sat while she was eating. But then again, that was a whole new challenge because she's testing her limits and often refuses to open her mouth. 10 months old with attitude. My strategy was too let her finger eat pieces of cooked carrots, canned peas (her favorite), toddler puff snacks, and then shove cereal with either baby food apple sauce or more peas, or squash. Rylan is also at the stage where she loves to drop things off of her high chair. I could handle the toys and even the wash clothes, but the air born distribution of food was discerning. Nonetheless, we had a splendid week. I love that little girl like she was my own. We just play, eat, sleep, and poop. Lots of mutual giggling. I can't wait for the next time.
My own food consumption and exercise went to hell this week, but I'll be back in the gym tomorrow. I'm afraid to hit the scale because I'm sure I gained weight. When you only have moments to eat, you tend not to pay much attention to what is going into your mouth. At any rate, I think running after Rylan all week constituted exercise.
I may have mentioned before that the art world, which I rely on for income, comes to a complete halt during the month of August. So the major acquisition that I had hoped would close in August will not close. As a matter of fact, it may take many more months to close if it closes at all. This has cut my pay by 90% so I decided to aggressively pursue freelance writing contracts. I thought I had found my wind fall with freelance.com but I was very wrong. I was bidding on over ten jobs a day, but I was either losing the bid or the job went to someone who would do a ridiculous amount of work for $30. Many of the article requests were being bid out at less than a dollar for 500 words. Plus, your expected to write 30 to 100 articles in just a view days. Basically your supposed to write 10 new original articles a day... for a lump sum of $10. Forget that. I can make more money doing surveys only.
But God is good and He has brought money back into our family financial needs. I really need to contribute about $3000 per month to the family budget. As you can see, ramping up to speed will take some time, but in the mean time God helped me obtain a substantial "front" from my NYC gallery and He has helped me collect film royalties from some of my more compassionate distributors. In addition, He surprised us with an oil lease contract signing bonus.
Since my grandfather died, we have kept up on the property taxes for three mineral rights sites. They were not producing. They were just sitting out there so I really didn't pay attention to the size of our stake. I assumed it was trivial but I continued to pay the taxes anyway. As it turns out I own 1/8th interest in 680 acres of high potential oil fields in north east Colorado. And it would appear that one of the world's largest oil exploration companies is very optimistic about finding oil shale and natural gas on our land. I don't own the surface rights, but everything below the ground. The Green River Formation in Northwest Colorado is said to be one of the biggest oil fields in the world. Maybe some of it bled over to our land. Who knows? The potential is there. We'll just have to sit and wait until they fully qualify the find. Could be real fun or at the very least, another source of royalties. If it paid my auto insurance and the cable bill each month I would be happy. So I guess the conclusion to this story is that the Lord has always provided for us in ways we could not have foreseen. I publicly thank you Lord. Now maybe I can continue my trek to better heath.
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