Are your charitable donations going where you think they are going?

Today's Arizona Republic reports that a network of charities getting donations from the Combined Federal Campaign has been using that money to pay for vacations in France while supplies they claimed had been sent to hospitals sat in warehouses. The worst part is their actions are entirely legal.

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Telephone Pioneers of America Park, a park built for people with disabilities

Parents of disabled children in Phoenix have an exceptional recreational resource and yet few seem to know about it. Telephone Pioneers of America Park is a facility designed from the ground up for full accessibility. It was the first barrier-free park in the country.

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Swine flu hysteria strikes again

It's been my experience that parents of special needs children have a different attitude than other parents toward incidents like this swine flu scare. Either they get philosophical about it, too busy with actual problems to worry about media-invented ones, or they panic unreasonably. I'm hoping Phoenix parents are in the first group rather than giving in to the frenzy.

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[Yes this is a blatant Google bait article. It's the frenzy of the moment and at least marginally relevant to my topic.]

Arizona state budget cuts: Help disabled kids or help abused kids?

Parents of special needs kids in Phoenix and throughout Arizona are protesting attempts by the state government to cut programs providing therapy and other services to their families. The common cry is care for children with disabilities is a necessity not a luxury. While true, other programs are necessary as well.

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How to protect kids against Phoenix summers

With the first 100-degree day of the year less than a week behind us, this is a good time to review the dangers our kids face from the hot Phoenix weather. Heat is insidious and the dangers it poses can creep up on us. The risk is magnified for many special needs kids.

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AMC Theaters settles discrimination lawsuit in Arizona; Harkins continues to fight

In order to settle a lawsuit filed by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, AMC MultiCinema Inc. has agreed to increase the number of theaters fitted with digital captioning and descriptive video services. This makes their theaters more accessible to hearing and vision impaired customers.

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How to advocate for children with disabilities

You are an advocate for your child whether you know it or not. You don't have to be standing outside the Arizona Capitol holding a picket sign to stand up for your child's rights. Every time you take him somewhere you are saying he has the right to be at this shopping center, this park, this school or this airport just like every other kid. Although the law requires reasonable accommodation for disabled children, sometimes we have to ask for that accommodation. The most effective technique is "Be firm but don't be a jerk".

Actually, I don't use the word "jerk" but this is a family site.

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My last three LTK articles

Since I know you just can't live without knowing, I've posted the last of my LoveToKnow Business articles: How To Start a Home Based Business, Search Engine Optimization Services, and Sales Reports.

More articles

Posted articles on expense reports and business reports. Electrifying as always.

Two more business articles

I got two articles done after all: Annual Finance Reports and Payroll Tax Reporting. I'm hoping to do two more tomorrow.

Federal Tax ID Number

I just posted an article on getting a Federal Tax ID Number for your business. I'm pretty much back on track with the writing. I used my latest gift certificates from HTDT to pick up copies of "The Renegade Writer", "Chicago Manual of Style", and "Grant Writing for Dummies", re-investing my income back into the business.

More business articles

Two more articles are up at LTK Business: Wireless Internet Service and Internet Explorer 7.0. I did a bit better on speed than I have in the past, but I wasted a HELL of a lot of time trying to find an IE7 logo then trying to find out if I could use it. I'm learning, but I still get sidetracked by stupid stuff.

A little "vacation"

I have a couple more articles up: How To Teach Autistic Children and Wi-Fi Business Advantages.

I decided to take the day off yesterday because I've been so busy lately I was starting to get frazzled. Every time I take a day off, I get a little behind, and then some disaster strikes which gets me even further behind. This time the disaster is my niece, who was admitted to the hospital through the ER last night. It's probably nothing more than a minor infection, but there are complications from her hydrocephalus and the barium swallow she had recently. If you care about the details you can see them on my other blog.

So today I just can't get into working and tomorrow will be one of my regular Maria days, assuming she's out of the hospital. That means I won't get any more work done until at least Friday. Then Friday evening, my father and his wife are visiting which pretty much blows the weekend. The problem is that the longer I go without working the harder it is to start up again. And I was doing so well for a while there.

The dangers of research

Ah, research - the biggest time waster the freelancer faces. Obviously research is important but only to a point. It's easy to keep going, because it's "for work". When is enough enough? Let's consider two examples.

While researching my article, "How To Recognize Sleep Disorders In Babies," I went off on a tangent as I researched cosleeping. It's a subject I'm interested in but ultimately it was irrelevant to the article. It wasted over an hour of my time.

Today I was researching an article on autism. I instantly found a great resource, an article with all the information I needed, and yet was disorganized and not that well written. It was easy for me to take the information from this piece, organize it better, and create my own article. But I hate to use just one source. So I start looking for another one. This was further complicated that when writing about things like special needs, I'm reluctant to use commercial sites. If I use them I should link to them, but that is an implied endorsement of their product. Eventually I found a piece that I used to add a paragraph to the article, but the bulk of it came from the original source. I could have gotten that article done in an hour; instead it took more than two.

I'm learning, though. I'm slowly getting better at popping out articles faster while still maintaining quality. I think this is going to be important for my gig at LoveToKnow Business. At $15/article, I can't spend all day on each one. I have to get better at popping them out faster so that I can increase my hourly income. If I can achieve 90% of the quality in 20% of the time, that's a good tradeoff. The piece will never be perfect, so learn to accept "close enough".

A good day

HTDT approved How To Find a Cord Blood Bank. I am also writing for LoveToKnow Business and got my first article up about Internet Domain Registration. They are going to train me as site editor after I get a couple more articles in. And one of my niece's doctors is trying to set up a study and needs a grant writer. It's a good day to be me.

Good boy! You may have a cookie.

Today is Thursday, which is one of my days to take care of my niece. I usually don't even bother trying to work on those days. However she didn't sleep much last night so took a long nap this morning. I managed to pop out not one but TWO articles in that time! Yay me! Both articles were on cord blood storage, so the same research applied to both articles which is why I did them. Yet another good skill to learn - how to make research yield several articles rather than just one.

One of the articles, How to Understand Cord Blood Storage has already been approved along with an article I wrote yesterday, How To Recognize Dyslexia in Children.

Some nice feedback

My latest article, How To Understand Special Education Inclusion, is up on HTDT.

I also got a nice little email from one of the editors saying how much she likes my writing. OK, the cynic in me wonders if it's some kind of automatic message generated when they accept your seventh article. But I'll assume that it was genuine :)

The cat is sleeping in my computer chair

Yes, that is one of they many feeble excuses I use to avoid working. Other excuses include "I can't work because I need to <insert errand>" (of course, the errand doesn't actually get run which gives me an excuse for tomorrow), "I can't work when the weather is so beautiful", "I can't work when the weather is so awful" (OK, I don't get to use that one very often in Phoenix), as well as a whole lot of excuses involving my niece.

Among all of this not working, I managed to get another article published: How To Understand Infant Cognitive Development.

Fixed

They fixed my article pretty quickly. The correct url is now How To Recognize Sleep Disorders in Babies. Yeah, the old link works (redirects to the correct one) but this way the search spiders have the correct url and I get 0.00000001% more famous on Google.

I know this blog has been pretty boring lately. I have a couple of entries I want to make just based on my HTDT experience but haven't found the time. I try and focus my writing each day some paying gig and by the time I'm done I'm all written out. I hope to have something more interesting soon, though.

More articles published

HowToDoThings published two more of my articles: How To Clean a CD Rom Drive and How To Choose PC Power Supplies.