Get Paid To Review!

Here's another handy little spot I found where you can get paid to write reviews about anything! You really can review anything on earth at this site, from the store where you just shopped, to the restaurant you just ate at, to the toy you just bought for your kid. Review everything you own or do, and basically make money for nothing!

My Daily Hit List...

Here are some of the sites I go to each day, in my never-ending quest to earn money online.

1. ForumBooster, where I get paid to post in different forums. I check each day to see if there are any new forums I can post in!
2. QuickRewards, where I spend five minutes going down the Daily Checklist to click on paid emails, take polls and quizzes, sign up for a few free offers, etc.
3. Go to SharedReviews and review a few products. (Come vote for my reviews, and you'll get a share of my revenue!)
4. Go to Associated Content to write an article or two.
5. Work on my blogs.

That shouldn't take me very long, should it? So why do the hours fly by so fast?

Memes Are Fun!

Guess what, faithful readers! I'm participating in a few memes, so you can learn more about me! Care to join in?



randomness...feed your mind and your blog
Week of March 30: Finish the Sentence

Fill in the blanks for this weeks meme....
1. I always wanted to live on a farm and have tons of pets!
2. I really hate it when people hurt children or animals.
3. My best friend is Diana.
4. In high school I was a loner with a bandana.
5. My greatest fear is saying goodbye to people I care about.
6. My dream job is running my own school for kids with learning differences.
7. Some people really should knock it off..
8. My favorite author is there are too many to name!

till next time....

Read Angel's Books!

You may not know this, but I'm a published author! Well, self-published, anyway. I've published two books on Lulu.com. The first one, Skye Blue, is a novel. The narrator is a fourteen-year-old girl, but its more of an adult novel due to the topics. Parts of the story are slightly autobiographical but most of it is fiction. Here is the summary:
At fourteen, Skye's life is chaotic. She's been raised by her older brother Jimmy for as long as she can remember. Jimmy's methods of supporting her involve frequenting motels and homeless shelters and scamming the occasional church for cash, and his own drug and alcohol problems make him less than the ideal parent. Yet Skye loves Jimmy desperately, and can't imagine life without him. When they meet Hannah, a young single mother with an adorable toddler in tow, things begin to change. Hannah dreams of creating the perfect family, and she's certain she can make this dream come true for Jimmy and Skye as well. But as Jimmy's behavior spirals out of control, the little family begins to fall apart. Can love really be enough to fix everything?

The other book I wrote, also fiction, is a children's book told from the point of view of a little boy with autism. Danny, Danny, Superstar is meant to be a sort of secretly-educational book, to be enjoyed by kids with autism, kids without autism, and kids who have children with autism in their families or are friends with children with autism. If you have or work with kids, I would recommend this book... Although its only self-published, its gotten great reviews from the people who've read it! (Not people from my family or anything. Mostly, I approached bloggers I knew of who had kids with autism and asked to send it to them.)

You can buy either one of these books at my Lulu bookstore... and I hope you will!

How Can You Help Angel?

There are many, many ways that you can help me to save up enough money to get my own apartment. Let me count the ways!

1.) You can click on my referral links! I belong to several programs that pay you to do random things, and they also pay you for referrals! I have tried many, many programs, but have only stuck with the ones that have really worked for me. So, if you click on my referral links, you know you're clicking on something good! Check these out!


I love writing, and I've combined my love of writing and my love of children to create a blog about children's issues, called They're All Our Children. When I created the blog, my idea was to use sponsored posts to raise money for children's organizations. I write about different issues that affect kids, but I also write sponsored posts, and donate half of the money to children's organizations. I've tried just about every sponsored post program on the Internet, and truthfully, PayPerPost is the only one I've stuck with. It has the most opportunities, the best paying opportunities, and they use their own ranking system, so even if your Google rank is low you can still get lots of opportunities! If you want to get paid for blogging, this is where you need to start! And, I also get paid for referrals. So if you join up, using my referral banner above, I will make some money!

MYLOT: This is a site where you get paid for posting messages! You can post about anything you want.... anything in the whole wide world! Except, I guess, porno and stuff. The more you post, the more you get paid! Its only pennies, but if you like message boards anyway, this is a great way to let the money add up while you do something you enjoy doing! And again, if you sign up using my referral link, I get paid!



This is a cool site because you get paid to do all of the things the banner above mentions. It only takes a few minutes a day. They actually give you a checklist, and you just navigate through it and do all the little tasks. Some things pay you in cash, and others pay you in tokens or points that can be exchanged for prizes. Again, its just small amounts of money, but if you have ten minutes a day to go through the checklist, the money and tokens add up fast! You can earn more if you sign up for orders or buy stuff, but you can earn money just by clicking on emails, playing a daily trivia game, doing surveys and polls, etc. And if you use my referral banner or my link to get started, I'll get paid!


This one is another paid-to-do-stuff program. But the thing I like about it is, you can download a thing that goes on the top of your screen, and you get paid for ever second that you have it running! its not spyware or anything. Its totally safe, and you can turn it on and off at your will. Basically, they just pay you to have ads on the top of your screen while you're doing normal things! If you sign up using my referral banner above, I'll get paid!


2. The next way that you can help me save up money is to buy things from me.
I sell a lot of brand new books on Amazon.com.
I also am a Bookwise associate, and if you become a Preferred member (for free!) I make money every time you buy a book from the site!
And I have my own Zlio Store, specializing in children's products! I get paid if you order things from there

3. Another way that you can help me is by becoming a Bookwise Associate yourself, using my referral link! You can read more about that at my Books blog!

4. Yet another way for you to help me is by reading my Blogchex blog, which is all about the fun and educational things I do with the little kids I spend my days caring for! In order for me to get paid for this, you have to click on the ads you see on the site... but you don't have to buy anything or fill anything out! Just click, and you've helped!

5. Finally, there is one more thing you could do, if you don't want to take any of the other options. I'm not asking for donations, but if anyone does feel urged to send me free money out of the goodness of their heart, you can do so with Paypal!

Thanks for reading and helping! I have to go to bed now, but in the next few days this site will have a lot more things added to it, so I hope you'll come back each and every day!

Who Is Angel, and Why Does She Need A Home?

PLEASE READ THIS!
My name is Angel and I am a 28-year-old who is in need of a home! Here is my story... at least, the short version!
I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family. I won't get into the details here, in case one of them reads this and their feelings are hurt, but I will tell you that as a kid I vowed that the minute I turned eighteen, I was going to leave home and never go back. I didn't want to go to college or anything like that... I just wanted to be out, and on my own, and I knew I'd survive somehow!
And I did end up leaving home, actually before I turned eighteen for the first time, and then when I was forced to return, I left again at the age of eighteen. I didn't have any money, I had severe ADHD and some developmental disabilities, plus had always dealt with severe depression and anxiety. And I was really naive and would trust anyone who was even slightly kind to me... and you can probably guess that things would not go well for an eighteen-year-old uneducated kid in that situation! I ended up being homeless, but I adapted and learned to survive. I made it work for me.
Let me point out that although I lived on the streets and became part of a culture thick with substance abuse, crime and violence, I managed to avoid most of that. I did commit some petty crimes when I was a teenager, mostly stealing small things like food, soda, and once a chapstick for my very chapped lips! I never touched alcohol until I was twenty years old, and even that was only a small amount, not enough to get drunk from! I did not join gangs, did not touch drugs, did not do any of the things that other people around me did on a regular basis!
My biggest problem was that I was grateful for any little kindness anyone showed me, and that got me inti a few rough situations. (Although, let me point out, that when I look back on that life, I am amazed that the majority of the people I was around protected me, rather than took advantage of me. There were a handful of people who were not very nice. But I lived with ex-convicts, drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and all sorts of random people, and most of them were extremely protective of me, never laid a hand on me, and shared everything they could with me! These memories have always given me hope!)
I drifted aimlessly through life for a while, just trying to survive. The best thing I ever did was join AmeriCorps, when I was twenty-one, where I worked as a fulltime volunteer with children with special needs. In exchange, I gained a lot of work experience, and also got a voucher for $4,750 towards higher education. I took advantage of that voucher and started in community college, part-time. Since AmeriCorps had taught me that I loved, and was good at, working with kids with special needs, I got a job as a teacher's aide as a special education school.
I was homeless during most of this time. During Americorps I lived in Colorado, where rent was much cheaper and where I had a roommate. But after Americorps I returned to Chicago, and soon found that, even working full-time at the special ed school, there was literally no way for me to get an apartment. I tried looking for roommates but found a lot of strange people out there. For a while I was living in a crack house, only because a friend I had made on the streets invited me to live with her. She was living in a subsidized housing building (aka "the projects") that was supposed to be for families with kids, but her kids had been taken away from her and somehow she was still able to live there. She did drugs and made money for the drugs by letting drug dealers work out of her house. I lived there, and once again found that the drug dealers I knew were some of the kindest people I'd ever met! It was a crazy life, though. I slept on a bare mattress in the living room. All night I would sleep, while a few feet away all sorts of people would be sitting at the dining room table, smoking rock. I learned to sleep through their noisiness. In the mornings, I would get up and go straight to work at the special ed school. I wouldn't even take a shower there, because I felt uncomfortable using the bathroom in an apartment full of strangers. I would get to work early and wash up in the bathroom, and then get started at preparing my lessons for the day. I had confided to the other staff members in the classroom where I worked about how my life was, and they would help me out, sneaking me food and stuff. I would stay really late after work, working on stuff for the class, and then either go to evening classes at the community college, or go home to the apartment. There was rarely much food there because every ounce of money went towards crack for the others in the apartment. If I went to the food pantry, or bought groceries with my paycheck, I often came home to find that the others had returned the food to stores in exchange for cash for themselves! I would eat weird things like crackers with ketchup, or go hungry. Sometimes the drug dealers would bring me fast food, or give me money for running errands for them.
Eventually I moved in with a different neighbor in the building, and then later moved in with a family member, who I had lived with a few times before. Then at Christmas time I went to my parents' house to visit. My younger brother, who had left home and moved to California when he was seventeen, was visiting, and I stayed at the house so I could spend more time with him. The visit went well, and eventually my mom asked me to move back in with her.
Shortly thereafter, I decided that I'd better start going to school full-time somehow. I learned I could now get financial aid, because my income was so alarmingly low. This was good, because my voucher from Americorps was running out by then! I loved working with kids with special needs so much, I decided what I wanted was to become a special ed teacher, instead of just an aide.
I quit my job at the school, so I could go to my own school full time. From then on I went to school during the day, and worked different part-time jobs in the afternoons. Life wasn't so bad, even though I was living with my parents, because I was rarely home! I was always at school, or working! On weekends I usually stayed at the home of the same family member I used to live with. For the next few years, I actually managed to avoid becoming homeless again! I also managed to save up a little money, and I got to do some cool things, like volunteer at Camp To Belong, and visit my younger brother in California.
As I finished community college, I made plans to transfer to a state university in the southernmost area of the state. I would still have financial aid, and there, my financial aid was enough to actually cover an apartment! I made the arrangements, got everything set up. At the end of the summer in 2006, I moved down there for what seemed to be the beginning of the rest of my life!
But things didn't go well. For the last few months before I'd moved down, I'd gotten along extremely well with my parents, especially my mom. It had actually felt like a normal family for a while, with the three of us spending time together. When I got down to my new school, eight hours away from where I'd lived with my parents, I suddenly had a nervous breakdown! I missed my parents so much! I couldn't do anything but sit on the floor of my beautiful new apartment and bawl my eyes out! I'm sure others in the apartment building heard me wailing and wondered if I was insane! I begged to come home. I went home for what was supposed to be a short break for me to gather my thoughts, but all that week I still couldn't do anything but cry! I couldn't focus my eyes on anything without getting sick. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't watch TV. All I could do was cry! I was having a serious, serious bout with depression... my worst ever! even after I was given medication and sedatives, I couldn't get better. I eventually had to drop out of school and move all my stuff back home.
After that, things spiraled downwards quickly. Although I got into another university, only forty minutes from where my parents lived, and immediately started going to school and working again, and although my depression cleared up a little as I got my new routine together, life at my parents' house returned to the way it had been when I was a kid.
Perhaps my mom was just so disgusted with me, with my failure to stay at the school in southern Illinois. After all, I wasn't some fresh-faced kid... I was twenty-six years old by then, and had lived on my own many times before! She went back to acting differently around me, shouting at me a lot, putting me down, or ignoring me.
Not always, though. She could be very nice to me, also. Like, last year, me and her went to Disney World together, just the two of us, and had an awesome time! I got so attached to her that week, and it broke my heart when, the minute we returned to Illinois, she went back to acting like she hated me.
Lately it has been worse than ever. It has gotten to the point where, half the time, when I am at home, I am thinking of killing myself! I think about suicide many times each day. And I know that is a bad sign. I know I'm not in a very healthy situation. As a kid, I knew I had to get out of this house... but somehow I keep ending up back here! What I need is to find a way to be independent.
*****
So many factors are making it nearly impossible for me to just go out and get another apartment. My aggravating brain is probably the biggest factor! When I worked at the special ed school, I loved every minute of it and rarely missed a day. But I could not work there and go to school full time at the same time, because there just aren't enough hours in the day! Since then, I've found myself in a vicious cycle: 1. Find a part-time job that seems great.
2. Things start to go wrong at that job. 3. My depression and anxiety starts to kick in big time. 4. I impulsively quit the job when my depression and anxiety gets so severe that I can't stand to go back! 5. I spend several weeks living off my savings, depleting it, while I look for a new job.

Recently I got the perfect job... The same family member I have lived with several times, who is also my best friend on Earth, asked me to watch her two youngest children three days a week. I love it because I can do so many things with the kids! One is an infant and one is in preschool. They also have a brother who is eleven. Those three kids are my life! It is the perfect job because the kids keep me busy, I can really use my brain and creativity to come up with things to do with the kids, and my family member is a person who understands me more than anyone else in the world does. When she and her baby-daddy get home from work, I usually stay and hang out with them, and this gives me a lot of support and happiness! But I only am able to make $800 a month from this job. Its not a lot, but the trade off... me not wanting to kill myself every moment of the day... is worth it!
I still live with my parents though. In Chicago, $800 a month would maybe buy you a studio apartment in the worst drug-infested neighborhood there is. Plus, I can't spend every penny of my income on an apartment... I'd still have to pay for transportation, food, etc! I sleep over at my family members' house several times a week, so that helps a little, but it is still hard to be there... and things with my mom are getting harsher by the moment!
My family member and her boyfriend have suggested I move in with them. But they have a small three-bedroom house, with themselves and three kids living there, and I feel bad enough just staying with them and mooching off of them a few days a week! Plus I think I really do need to have some independence, you know?

I've figured out that there are several things that I need, in order to be an independent, functioning person in life.

1.) I need to live in an area that is somewhat close to my parents... and hopefully closer to my other family member! I don't want to get really far away from my parents. I really think I would have an okay relationship with them if I wasn't living with them and if they weren't basically supporting me. Part of my problem is that my mom can control me by threatening to take things away from me... for instance, threatening to put my cat to sleep, or telling me I can no longer take my dog out of the house, or just plain threatening to kick me out! If I was living on my own, we would be on equal footing, and I could deal with it better.

2.) I need to have an apartment to myself without a roommate, because of my anxiety. I have a dog and a cat that can go with me everywhere, even in no-pets apartments, because of my disability. (They can be classified as "emotional support pets" because of my severe depression and anxiety. My dog, particulary, is helpful in keeping me stable, and I am training her to be an actual service dog so she can go with me to school as well!)

Thats it, really! I really could be a very well-functioning person. I mean, most of the time I am a stable person, especially when it comes to kids! I am at my best when I am helping, educating, or mentoring children.

Since my income from watching the kids isn't enough to pay rent anywhere, I figure my best bet is to save up as much money as possible, and then pay for a whole bunch of months in advance. In order to save up more quickly, I am enlisting in help from you, kind Internet-dwellers!

But I am not asking for donations or anything like that. In the next blog entry, I will post a lot of decent, honest ways that you can help me out, without a lot of effort or pain for yourself!

Keep reading!