Day Nineteen - Back to Zero and Musings about Pavlina and Communism

Day 19 was another good one, as we’re still off work – where I live there is another public holiday on Tuesday, so many businesses are closed until Wednesday of next week. It meant I could concentrate on doing things I wanted to do, rather than chasing around on other people’s behalf.

We spent the day working in the garden – there’s nothing like some hard physical work to take your mind off your troubles. We were creating paths and a raised flower bed, which meant a lot of shifting of soil and stones, and there’s more to do tomorrow.
Our backs were aching after that lot, so we had a terrific relaxation session in the hot tub, and I then followed that with some great time spent catching up on blog research, RSS feeds and the world news.

The latter is quite depressing at the moment, with Israel having moved ground troops into The Gaza Strip, and then of course there’s the all pervading recession. Its funny how things change – I was at school during the cold war, and when we studied economics, we had a look at the Russian communist model of the time. How we laughed at their incompetence! Their banks were so unstable, that they were owned and supported by the government, to prevent them from going bust, and the factories were full of workers being paid to make products that nobody wanted!

Fast forward to 2008 and the British government has invested heavily in their banks, to prevent them going bust, and the US government is investing billions into their car industry to keep them full of workers being paid to make products that nobody wants! Where did it all go wrong?

During my net travels in the day I caught up with Steve Pavlina’s site at www.stevepavlina.com I hesitated to write about it, as Steve is a serious A-list blogger, and I’m currently a complete nobody, but I have read his site for some time (long before I got into blogging) as I have always been interested in personal development. I was quite shocked to read his piece about polyamory – you can see it Here
Essentially Steve, who has been happily married for 15 years to Erin, is planning in 2009, and with Erin’s blessing, to explore new relationships with other women and to live a polyamorous life as part of his own personal development. There is no doubt that Steve takes his personal development very seriously, and converted to a totally raw vegetarian diet in 2008 as part of that process. But I do wonder if this new idea is a step too far – is Steve in danger of disappearing up his own exhaust pipe, the way many celebrities do? I guess only time will tell, and I’ll be keeping an eye on his blog to find out how it all pans out.

In terms of blog activity, we did well again on visitors with 62 coming to the site, and they viewed 306 pages, but after the euphoria of breaking the dollar barrier for the first time, I was brought back to earth with a thump, as earnings from the site were zero, which was a bit of a shock. But I suppose it was naïve to expect growth and earnings (even at such a low level) every day, so let’s hope we come back tomorrow.