Drawing winners and The Empty Bowl

First, the winners of the 2 drawings!

The QuadraFire Pellet Stove sponsored drawing for the teeshirt and notebook was won by WaterWaves
The Apartments.com drawing was won by AubreyLaine.

The Amazing Turnip Girl picked both winners randomly from a bowl. Congratulations to you both, and thank you to everyone who entered.

Learn more about SocialSpark, the site that connects sponsors and bloggers for contests like that.

Yesterday was the Annual Empty Bowl event here. I didn't bring my camera because I was in a fair amount of pain and didn't want to fuss with it, but it was a blast.

Empty Bowl is an annual fundraiser for our local soup kitchen. Unlike a lot of fundraisers, this one is very casual, and it's immensely popular. Potters and clay artists from around Alaska at all sorts of skill levels donate handmade bowls, thousands of them actually. With your 25 dollar ticket, you get to choose 1 bowl, and have as much soup and cornbread as you can eat. My kids look forward to this event, as do my husband and I.

This year, because I was hurting so badly when I woke up, we wound going a little later than usual. So we worried that the bowls would be pretty well picked over, but they just keep putting out new ones until all the bowls are gone and there was a great selection. I had my eye on 2 different bowls, both used the same color glaze and it's a color I must like because when we got home we found out they "matched" several other bowls from previous events. I finally settled on a tapered deep bowl, part of me still wanting the other bowl. Then my husband picked his bowl, and wouldn't you know it? He picked the other bowl. We must have the same tastes after all these years. TG and William took a little longer to choose their bowls. William picked a bowl that had a very plain outside and almost looked like crystal slices on the bottom of the inside. He really loved how it looked so ordinary until you saw into the depths of it. TG of course picked a bowl that was TARDIS blue, or as close as she could find. It's actually a blue and cream bowl.

My husband and I went to get soup while TG and William were choosing bowls. Our local soup kitchen is named Bean's Cafe, and the soups served are always bean soups. They hold a yearly contest to choose the recipe for the soup and do one vegetarian soup and one meat soup. The meat soup had bacon and kale in it, and the vegetarian soup was a creamy, cheesy soup with potatoes and beans. Michael and I both got the meat soup first and found a place to sit. Then the rest of our family joined us. It was pretty good soup and everyone sitting our table was friendly. Of course, TG can find a fellow Whovian anywhere and she and another lady compared matching TARDIS keyrings.

After we finished our first bowls, TG and I were full, Michael and William both went back to try the vegetarian soup. I had a bite of Michael's and OH GOSH it was so good. After they finished, we headed back to the car and Michael and I talked about what we liked about the vegetarian soup and possible ways to incorporate some of those things into a soup recipe of our own. TG and I discussed the possibility of entering the soup contest next year. One of the things Bean's Cafe does with the winner's soup is create bean mixes with the recipe for the soup as a fund raising item which they sell throughout the year.

I love our bowl collection. Last year, I picked a bowl that would nest with the one William picked so he could start a bowl collection of his own. All those pretty bowls from Empty Bowl events get used throughout the year and make me smile. They don't match, except some of them in color. They are different shapes and sizes, and all made by local artists and every one of them a memory of a nice lunch with my family to support a cause we really believe in. We help Bean's Cafe throughout the year, with inkind donations as well monetary donations and this is our favorite annual charity event.

After that, we went to the hardware store to look at lumber options for my garden beds this year. That was good too.

And if you read this far, do any of you grow horseradish? I'd really appreciate tips. Or if you're feeling really generous, maybe a root to plant this year?

Tom's of Maine puts Good First- With a printable quote!

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Tom's of Maine for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
Tom's of Maine is a company that really does put Good First. They strive to be an ethical company with a strong focus on sustainability. Now with Tom’s of Maine Good First application on Facebook , they are looking for people to open a dialogue with their friends on Facebook about the ways they can make a the world a better place.
What did you put first today that made you feel especially good?
You are given a choice of 5 things, helping people, helping animals, caring for the planet, healthy eating or healthy living. After you choose, you get a badge to share on Facebook.

Helping people is so important to me, and when you collect your badge, you'll see how your friends match up to you. I wasn't at all surprised to see that people I respect and like very much did match up on that goal! Some of them are perosnal heroes. They are always there with a kind word, or heartfelt encouragement. They help people in other ways, with charity and kindness.
My regular readers frequently inspire me too. Checking my email and finding emails from people who've made things for various non-profits groups, who spend their time working on causes they believe in. Those emails make my day.
When you look for opportunities to help other people, it doesn't have to be something big. It can be holding a door open for someone, a smile, a kind word. It takes just a little bit of time to possibly smooth someone's path for a bit.
You can also share your ideas, and see other ideas with Tom's of Maine on Twitter and Tom's of Maine on Pinterest.
Click on the image below to get a large version without the URL on it to print. You can print it on white paper and color it in, or on colored paper.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
-William James

Making money with SocialSpark

Making the decision to do sponsored posts was a difficult one. This blog is super important to me and I spend a lot of hours working on fresh, new and original content. I love my readers, and the comments from around the world.

Then my husband was out of work for 3 months, and we needed extra income. Looking at various options, sponsored posts were pretty near the bottom of my list. But I researched the idea. One name kept coming to the top, Social Spark. The bloggers who used it all seemed to like it.

So I checked to see if it was a company that could work with my ideology. It turned out that it really does work well and ethically.

You sign up, and they check out your blog to see if it fits their requirements. They want blogs with original content. You verify you own the blog by doing an entry with a random phrase. After it's verified, you can delete the sentence, and the verification is automatically done fairly quickly.

The offers will have required elements like links, images and occasionally videos. If you set it up to automatically post entries, when you get an offer, you'll type up the content on their site. On the right hand side are buttons to insert the required elements. After the advertiser approves the content, it goes live.

Because you can refuse the offers, that gives you time to research the companies to decide if it's a company you want to work with. There have been a couple offers that I turned down because they weren't a good fit. Some offers are for paid reviews, the company will send you the item to be reviewed. Everything is posted with a notice that it's a sponsored post and with nofollow links.

The offers are a point system that pays out a month after the blog entry is approved and posted. 1 point=1 cent so if you want to make a minimum of 50 dollars per post, you would specify 5000 points. When you have at least 5000 points, you can cash out you points to your Paypal account.

So it works for me, it's still my writing, thoughts and opinions. It's bringing in a bit of extra income at a time when we really need it.

I'm very happy with SocialSpark, and do recommend it as a way to help monetize your blog.  If you use one of my links to sign up, I'll get a small commission for referring you.