Do you love yarn? Enter to win a bumper sticker that says Peace, Love, Yarn! It’s a gift from my current blog sponsor and a gift from me. Read a bit about it then enter to win at the bottom.

Sponsor Props: BuildASign

BuildASign Bumper Stickers is a website that you can use to order bumper stickers, magnets and a variety of other promotional materials. You can use the designs that they have as is. You can modify their designs to suit your style. Or you can start from scratch and create your own designs.

I chose option number two. I took a design that they already had and modified it. I left the “peace” and “love” part as they were. I took out the last design, added the yarn clipart and the word “yarn” and that gave me the bumper sticker that I wanted.

The whole process was really simple. For full disclosure, I was given the bumper stickers and some magnets for free in exchange for a review but that didn’t bias my opinion. I’ve ordered various promotional items online before and I found this procedure really easy compared to some other sites. I like the quality of the product and was especially thrilled with how quickly it came to my door. So I’m happy to recommend BuildASign for customer bumper stickers, magnets and other personalized items, irrelevant of whether or not I got the free items.

How to Enter to Win

I am giving away two identical bumper stickers to one lucky winner to place on a car, notebook, wherever you want to add a sticker to show off yarn-y love. All that you need to do to enter is to leave a comment on this blog post saying where you’d place your bumper stickers if you win. Make sure you leave an email address or some other way to contact you if you’re the winner.

Giveaway closes on Wednesday March 7th. Winners will be announced on the blog later that week.

Note: For my Crochet Concupiscence fans … I don’t have any magnets left so this is the giveaway for bumper stickers only.

Tags: bumper sticker, giveaway, yarn lover

I thought of a handful of different topics for the “H” letter of the A-Z Blogging Challenge and then I thought well then H is for Handful!

H is for Happiness

Happiness is important to me. Not everyone sees happiness as a goal … some people see it as a byproduct … but it is a goal for me. I would rather be happy than successful. I would rather be happy than rich. Not that these things are mutually exclusive but for me happiness is the ultimate goal. To that end I am always exploring ideas of what makes me happy, how to change my thinking to increase happiness and how to manage unhappiness to minimize it as much as possible.

Do you see happiness as a goal or the pleasant byproduct of other goals?

H is for Health

Because not much matters if you don’t have decent health! And it sure is hard to be happy without it.

H is for HubPages

I have to throw in a mention for HubPages because I really like writing for the site. I have written there for four years and recently reached a milestone of having written more than 1000 articles on the site. I earn passive income on the work I’ve done there through Adsense and some affiliate programs. I write about the topics that interest me most at any given time.

Right now HubPages is running a contest where you can earn money for writing about long tail topics. Check it out!

H is for How To

The first “H” that came to mind was “how to”. I write a lot of “how to” articles for a lot of different sites. And when I don’t know how to do something the first thing I’m likely to do to remedy that is to look up a “how to” in Google. I noticed that a lot of other people chose this phrase for the H of their A-Z blogging challenge too!

Tags: a-z blogging challenge, happiness, how to, hubpages

Check out the pretty award that I received for this blog from A Storybook World.

Isn’t the artwork lovely? Check out all of the other great blogs that have received awards here.

A few days ago I came across a site that mentioned the A-Z blogging challenge. This is a challenge to write on your blog every day except Sundays throughout the month of January. That’s 26 days and each day corresponds to a letter of the alphabet.

A is for About

So today is the first day and that means A. I chose to do “about” so that I could let you know what the blogging challenge is, where to find out more about it and why I’m doing it.

Why I’m Doing the A-Z Blogging Challenge

I think that challenges like this are a great way to make a blog fresh and new, to connect to a community of bloggers and to get some new eyes on your blog. At first I was planning to enter my crochet blog in the blogging challenge. However I already blog there 4-5 times daily so it seemed like the A-Z challenge posts would get lost. Plus I’m participating in Knit and Crochet Blog Week over there right now so it seemed ridiculous to add another challenge to that blog.

Then I started thinking about this blog. I love this blog because it allows me a place to talk about all of the weird different things that interest and intrigue me. However I’ve been neglecting it. A lot of the reason for that is because I started the crochet blog in January and I’m super passionate about that blog so it gets most of my free time. But I do love this blog, too, and I think the challenge will be a great way to kickstart the goal of writing more regularly here.

I hope you enjoy it!

More about the Challenge

There are more than 700 people who are doing this challenge! That’s a lot of blogs to read and it’s going to be tough to keep up but if you check out a few each day then you’ll still get a lot out of it. Learn more about the challenge and find links to all of those blogs here.

Tags: a-z blogging challenge, april blogging, blogging

I was just reading through an old article that I wrote a couple of years back about lowering your risk of cancer. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think that the information I’d shared there seemed so incredibly obvious. Only then it occurred to me that sometimes we need to have the obvious stuff shoved in our faces again and again so that we remember to do it.

If you want to lower your risk of cancer, you need to use common sense to take care of yourself. Eight obvious things that you should be doing to lower your risk of cancer are:

1. Eat right. Don’t eat too much red meat or drink too much alcohol. Do drink enough water. Eat moderately. We know these things but are we doing them.
2. Exercise. Regularly. Even though you don’t want to.
3. Avoid smoking. C’mon, you know this one.
4. Make sure you get preventative shots. Reducing your likelihood of getting such other diseases as HPV is going to reduce the likelihood that you’ll get certain types of cancer.
5. Get outside. Spend time in nature so that you’re not just sitting inside the toxic chemicals of home and work.
6. Green your home. Speaking of toxic chemicals, stop using them in your own home.
7. Get preventative health screening. You need to know early on if there are signs of cancer so you can combat them.
8. Talk to your doctor about cancer. The more you know, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to prevent it.

Tags: common sense cancer, lower your risk of cancer, prevent cancer

It’s a new month. I think that’s a good time to think about what’s going to be happening around here on the blog and I thought that’s something that you might want to know as readers as well. Here’s what you can expect from Diary of a Smart Chick this month:

• Photo of the Day. I haven’t gotten much feedback about whether or not the Photo of the Day is a good feature of this site. However, I’m enjoying the fact that it gives me a reason to take more photos so I’ll continue on with it through September. Your thoughts are welcome.
• Book Reviews and Author Interviews. Last month I started doing a “book of the day” as well but that didn’t really work out so well. Although I do read an average of 5-7 books per week I was finding it too difficult to really keep up with reviewing them all daily. However, I do want to feature more book reviews on the site. There will be approximately one review per week this month and that will include at least one interview with the author of a book.
• One giveaway. I did a giveaway last month that worked out really well so I’ll be trying to do at least one more this month.
• Question of the Week. This will be a new feature on Diary of a Smart Chick. It will be a simple question that I’ll pose to my readers for you to answer and debate in the comments section. This will be going live every Tuesday morning starting next week. Let me know what you think of it!
• Links to my Work Around the Web. Part of what I do here on Diary of a Smart Chick is to link to the work that I’m doing around the web in order to share it with others and to create an online portfolio. When you see links on the site that’s often where they’re directing you to so if you’re interested in my writing then you may want to follow those links.

What else would you like to see on Diary of a Smart Chick?

Tags: Blog, blog update, question of the week

One of the sites that I particularly enjoy writing for is HubPages. I get to write about a lot of different topics here and to interact with a great community of writers through the site.

I like to see which articles do well through the site and which ones don’t. I think it provides a good overview of what people are reading on the web at any given time. If that’s something that interests you then maybe you’d like to know how my Hub articles did in August.

The ten articles that got the most traffic in August were:

1. Short Layered Haircuts and Styles
2. Calorie-Burners: Swimming vs. Running
3. How to Delete a Browser Cookie
4. Indoor Activities that Bring Couples Together
5. 25 Fun Things to Do at the Beach
6. Teacher’s Checklist for the First Week of School
7. How to Build a Treehouse
8. Can’t Find a Job: Make Sure You’ve Done These Things
9. How Do You Know when Mushrooms Go Bad?
10. Simple Trail Mix Recipes

What a range of topics people were reading? I’m not surprised to see that the articles on summer stuff and back-to-school stuff are popular right now. But what about the article on deleting browser cookies – isn’t that a strange one to be so popular? I guess it’s information that a lot of people need so I’m glad it’s been useful.

The ten hubs that got the least traffic in August were: Keep reading…

Tags: hubpages, hubs, kathryn vercillo, smartchick

People who read this blog regularly know that I tend to update it multiple times daily. Therefore it seems really quiet around here when I go a day or two without posting. I just thought that I’d give a brief update to let you know what’s been going on.

I’m sad to say that I’ve been dealing with some health issues. The good news is that none of them are serious and I’m starting to get them under control. However, appointments to deal with the issues have taken up a lot of my time lately. As a result I’ve fallen a bit behind on my work. I’m catching on on everything for my clients first and then I’ll be back here and active on the blog.

Expect one or two posts to trickle in over the next couple of days and then things should be back to normal. Thanks for your patience!

Tags: blog update, illness

Every afternoon I post a photo of the day here on the blog. Some of the reasons I do this include:

• I like sharing my photos especially the ones of the city where I live.
• It motivates me to keep taking pictures on a regular basis.
• It also motivates me to try to get better at taking photographs.
• I think it adds something to this blog to have visuals like that.

But this blog isn’t just here for me. It’s here for my readers too. So I’m curious, what do you think of the photo of the day? Should I keep doing it? Should I be doing anything differently with it?

Tags: Photos, photos of the day, smartchick

I recently wrote a post on this site about some really cool cooker hoods for kitchen stoves. Although I included links to where you could see those cooker hoods, I didn’t include many pictures. Several people told me that they wanted to see what really cool cooker hoods look like. So I wrote another article featuring 10 awesome cooker hoods. That article is photo-heavy so if you’re a SmartChick (or SmartGuy) who wants to see some pics of what cooker hoods can look like then you may want to check out that article.

And now I’d like to put a question out there: what other kitchen appliances (or home furniture) in general would you like to see more articles about? There aren’t too many articles on the topic of cooker hoods and I like to pride myself on topics like this that aren’t widely covered. Your suggestions are welcome!

Tags: cooker hoods, hubpages, kathryn vercillo