For some reason, as we get closer to the Christmas season with only 2 weeks left before Christmas Day, the collective need for more cash is cropping up around the ‘net. People want cash for Christmas shopping. People want cash to pay down credit card debt racked up because of Christmas shopping. But something very strange is showing up along with this. . . People want the cash, but they don’t want the effort required to obtain the cash, and don’t seem to have the commitment required to get it either. This seriously has me scratching my head!
Around this household, what you can’t pay for with cash, you pay for with effort. My health is not the greatest, so sometimes the effort needed to provide for myself or to earn the cash tires me out quickly. It isn’t fun to head up into the hills to go foraging and then come down to find myself zapped the rest of the day. But that is my reality. This past summer it was made worse by forest fire smoke in the hills. Allergic asthma means trying to filter out as much of that smoke as I can, but on hot Okanagan days, that means breathing in hot air and on a hike, that’s not fun. The long term rewards for my efforts however will last through the winter months and hopefully into the spring when plants start to grow again. We didn’t get as much as we wanted of some plants this year because of a) floods and b) forest fires hampering my breathing, but we got most of what we need for personal hygiene products, medicine, and teas. We broke down 8 large, heavy pumpkins into pumpkin puree to freeze as a winter vegetable, and roasted several tubs of pumpkin seeds which contain an ingredient highly important for managing my condition! My winter nibbles are more than welcome as a result!
In addition to writing about the family foraging lifestyle change, many articles over the course of 2017 related to another venture known as my bitcoin experiment. That experiment now has roughly just over $100 CAD in bitcoin sitting over at Freebitco.in. I can’t spend it just now because miners’ fees have skyrocketed to the point where believe it or not, that amount is just under the fee required to move those funds anywhere! So it sits there earning daily interest instead while I try to add to it. Faucet earnings have tanked with the stratospheric rise of trading value of Bitcoin. But I found another way to earn BTC back in August that I am amazed is having so much trouble getting off the ground!
For people like myself who are computer-savvy, but stamina and energy challenged, this particular venture almost seems like wasting one’s time for an hour while building a potentially-sustainable income! The simplicity of the system blows my mind, but what blows it even more is how difficult some people make it out to be!
For starters, EVERY computer or laptop these days needs antivirus software that’s kept up to date, whether the person is computer-savvy or not. Secondly, most mindful users will now need an anti-porn blocker on whatever browser they have chosen to use on their device. Having Spybot Search and Destroy’s Immunization feature updated on a regular basis further helps block out harmful websites from trying to access one’s machine via advertising. It doesn’t hurt to have Malwarebytes running either. Basically, have your system and your mind protected when you are online. Other tools exist for this task as well, but these are the ones I use.
But when those two things are looked after, the rest of the system seems to boggle people. I’m honestly scratching my head wondering what is so hard about two clicks every 15 seconds for up to an hour every day. So many people want the results of work without the work. When I was younger, it was a joke to tell each other you wanted to find a desk job where you got paid the big bucks to sit around and do nothing. This is almost THAT job! Seriously! You can even do something else while remembering to click that little coloured box and the rectangle “continue” button every 15 seconds. I do that. I have another BTC pay-per-click site up, well, two actually, that I click through while doing my 1hr per day. One of those PTC’s has paid me 3 times already. The second will pay me soon, but took far longer to get there. Having more than one monitor helps with the multitasking because I for one, don’t like sitting around bored. I need to keep my mind busy. To that end I even have a traffic exchange loaded onto my Blackberry Playbook and will click through it’s allotted 50 sites per day as part of my advertising efforts.
These tasks are NOT difficult! What makes them difficult is a combination of mindset, lack of willingness to self-educate and own the tasks at hand, lack of drive or reason to be involved in the first place, lack of commitment, and refusal to work! Clicking every 15 seconds can hardly be classified as work to be honest, but it is something that must be done if that particular system is going to work.
The system in question is InfinityTrafficBoost.
They are a traffic exchange first, and have built a solid earning opportunity for those willing to put in the time and finger-clicking effort. I am looking for four people willing to put in that time every day. Just four. In an age where it seems work causes an allergic reaction, this shouldn’t honestly feel like work. Most people sit and watch ads on TV all the time and never get paid for it. This site pays you! But you have to be willing to put out even just a little work and a little time. One hour per day. Is there anyone out there who thinks they can even do THAT much??? Humour me for 51 days in a row. If after 51 days you don’t want any part of it, you at least completed the experiment.
I’ll keep trying to find these people. When I do, I’ll let everyone know what happened 51 days after that fourth person is found. Just four people doing one hour of clicking every day is all I’m looking for. I had no idea it would be so hard, particularly leading up to Christmas. I thought people would want to finish the season debt-free, but apparently not. At least, not if it even remotely sounds like work.
As anyone who follows this blog now knows, I began a 
Imagine using your primary source of income to share the hope of the Gospel with people?! It is my hope that this marketing platform will become a significant monthly source of income, and I came to that conclusion early in August when the
So far in my “after hours” quest to find ways to actively accumulate usable levels of Bitcoin, it’s been quite an adventure. Part of that adventure has been the rise and fall of the BTC value when compared to the US dollar. Earnings now on 
On the plus side, thanks to the meteoric rise in value of BTC, the 
Comparison Shopping: Discovering the benefits and differences of a product or range of products before making a purchase.
2) Have a budget in mind. You didn’t expect to come across an article like this on THIS blog without some mention of that all-important financial word, did you? Once you know what you’re looking for, build an understanding of how much this product typically costs and assess whether or not it can fit into your budget right now. If the price is all over the map, ask yourself why? Sometimes the item can come in different sizes, quantities, quality, list more or fewer benefits, come with sales, deals, add-on’s, member-only pricing, etc. Narrow down the criteria you are after, then compare pricing to your budget again. If you only have a certain dollar value you can put toward the purchase, this will narrow the field all by itself. You may have to choose between quantity and price, or quality and price, just as two examples of the decisions you may have to make.
3) If you are shopping solely online, you also have to factor in shipping. Compare the cost of purchasing online versus going to the local offline store to get it yourself. Is there enough of a price difference between in-store and online to warrant paying the additional shipping charges, or is it cheaper to drive down there instead? Depending on what you are shopping for, this answer will vary, particularly when considering outlets where it may be purchased.
I like to use chokecherry in making vinegar for salads, pancake syrop, and using the leaves, dried crushed berries, and bark in 
Foraging in my part of the world has received quite the setback thanks to a very wet spring. The plantain plants are only now in enough abundance to start harvesting. Wild strawberries are several weeks behind as well. Domestically, we were blessed with a huge amount of Lovage, a cousin to the celery only stronger in flavour. I managed to dry and crush most of the leaves to make a very nice celery spice! After being given some salt, I intend to take some of it and turn it into Lovage celery salt.
We were also given some very nice Rhubarb that has already made one beautiful batch of pancake syrup and seen entrance into batches of scones and pancakes themselves. I plan to make several more batches of the syrup as that will save money having to buy it at the store. Not only will it save money at the store, it will cut down on the chemicals and preservatives being ingested as well.
Sometimes doing things yourself is not always a money-saver, healthier perhaps, but sometimes more expensive. Around this house, we are about both saving money AND eating healthier! So being able to make celery salt without the additives and make syrop without the extra ingredients as well, hits the best of both worlds. Some of my readers might laugh, but I’ve decided to ensure I have enough sugar for baking, cereals, pancake syrop and a pine needle syrop intended for lung ailments. I therefore divided up my current sugar stores into several containers!
We have wild parsley growing up in the hills and have made two harvests so far. One has been nicely crushed into just under half a usual spice bottle. The other harvest still needs to be washed, dried, and crushed. It is currently in the back of the fridge freezing. Gotta love it when fridges do that, not merely their freezer boxes.
We also found Prairie Sage growing on the property where we live. It is a milder smelling sage than what is bought at the store, but still a pleasant smell. It’s first use has been in a bottle of home-made fly spray for the two horses.
Our dinner salads have finally come back full swing. Plantain, dandelion, false solomon’s seal, purslane, and finally chickweed and a ground vine for good measure. I need to make more chokecherry vinaigrette, but that won’t happen till we are harvesting those berries this summer. One major thing we learned over the winter months was that we hadn’t harvested nearly enough chokecherry to get us through till the next harvest season! We hope to change that sad state of affairs this summer! Nor had we harvested enough purslane! Needless to say when my daughter was asked to weed a garden at her place of work, she came home with a huge haul of both purslane AND chickweed! Both have been divided in half for either immediate consumption or drying and crushing for use in teas, baking and medicine.
Near our home and up a logging road, there are many chokecherry stands, so we hope to overrun the house with them until they are either boiled, frozen, or dried. Those same harvesting areas are also crawling in oregon grape, kinnickinnick, and surprisingly the wild strawberry as well. Our home could be very interesting as we end up with stuff drying all over the place at various times in the season.
Already, we’ve harvested, dried, and begun putting to use the nettle in our area. Nettle gets used in baking, tea, shampoo, conditioner, and its seeds are also a wild seasoning. Again, we almost didn’t have enough once I began using it in crackers and more teas, so we need to get far more this year to last through until next Spring.
Last November, we had to move yet again, for the second time in two years. When we were house-hunting, we reached a stage where it became humanly impossible to find a place to live. We made up an impossible list of needs and preferences, then laid that before God. Included in that prayer was the request to be near foraging grounds so we could continue our wild adventures. FrontcounterBC had shown us that our new location was near crown land and when the snows began to recede, we began exploring. That crown land is going to be a treasure trove of berries by the time June rolls around! Its crawling with Oregon Grape, Kinnickinnick and Chokecherry! We took a couple treks out to our old stomping grounds near the regional park and came home with one evening’s salad roughly. But those weren’t the biggest surprise.
The grasses and hillside around our rental property began to grow and lo and behold. . . we are LIVING in the middle of a foraging ground! Yarrow is growing in droves up on the hillside above us, along with barley (read quack) grasses and Arrowleaf Balsam Root. However, down around our portion of the yard we didn’t give the horses, we have dandelion, chicory, alfalfa, and another salad leaf I am still trying to identify, growing in such abundance that we can have several days’ worth of mixed green salads in maybe 10 minutes of picking! The alfalfa is blow-overs from the hay field below us. As we are up on a hillside now, the dandelions are slower in getting their flowering heads up, but I saw one today.
It’s nice to have the salads again as we discovered that winter salad teas, while they may have a similar nutrition count, are not as filling and were missing the phytochemicals that we need.