Upwork (“Upchuck”) will be down for maintenance all day today, so you’re going to be the beneficiary of the extra time. Yippy skippy, right?

 

When Elance renamed itself Upwork several years ago, I thought that was the dumbest move they’d ever made.

 

How many positive words do you know that start with “up”?  Most are negative (upheaval, upchuck, upsetting, etc.), so I renamed the Elance icon on my desktop “Upchuck.”

 

Actually, I did that for two reasons.

 

The other is that it prepared me, in a semi-humorous way, for the distaste I encounter every time I visit the site looking for work.

 

Most people who go there looking for providers want to pay next to nothing to hire us, so I have to spend literally hours every day separating the wheat from the chaff, or the needle from the haystack.

 

It’s a damned frustrating thing to have to do.

 

But because I’ve been a Top-Rated provider (and a Preferred Provider back in the days of Elance) I can’t very well abandon the platform because now people come looking for me there. I don’t accept most of the invites I get from Upchuck, because (again) the clients want to pay too little for what my expertise is worth, but I want to keep the door open for those who do pay adequately and understand the evergreen value of exemplary copywriting.

 

So I’m kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

I only want about another ten hours’ per week of copy (sales) or content (informational, educational, entertainment, features) writing work at$100/hour. If I can get that, I will be right where I want to be as a semi-retired provider.

 

I love to write and want to keep doing it, but not full-time, or even close to part time.

 

I already have a stable of regulars (obtained direct, not from the Upwork platform) who use me semi-regularly, so I just need a few more hours to be able to add to my existing savings (which are meager).

 

There are always miscellaneous, sporadic expenses that come along.  I just had to put two new tires on my vehicle and get it aligned and the transmission fluid replaced, which cost me over $400, and my cat Patches has a medical issue that will be costing several hundred more dollars before she gets squared away. I should replace the two rear tires, too, my mechanic suggested, but I won’t for now. (They aren’t threadbare by any stretch of the imagination; it’s just good to replace them all at the same time for alignment and road wear/tire rotation purposes, I reckon.)

 

There’s always something that needs doing that isn’t a regular part of my expense sheet, so I want to have enough set aside to be able to do those things as they need to be done…

 

Besides, I’m getting antsy and want to start taking some local trips to shake off “cabin fever” now that I’m fully immunized against COVID and don’t need to stay as hunkered down as I  have been for a freaking year. That’s going to take gasoline…

 

I got my second Pfizer COVID shot just yesterday. Haven’t felt any deleterious side effects at all.  Unless I press on the injection site, there is no sense of pain or discomfort at all, even when I lift my left arm high.

 

I expect I haven’t experienced any of the side effects because I believe (and my doctor concurs) I had COVID a year ago, so my system is already primed to combat the virus, so it didn’t need to mount a huge defense when I was immunized either time.  That’s my theory, anyway, and I’m sticking to it unless some authority can convince me otherwise!

 

In Other News….

 

I’ve been reauthorized to get panniculectomy surgery in April.  I’m very much looking forward to having that done and over with.  It’s going to make me feel a lot better.

 

It also means I’ll need some new clothes (another additional expense!) because I’ll be at least two inches smaller around the middle than I am right now, and my clothes are already falling off me unless I wear a belt to keep them from sliding south. (I lost over 100 pounds in 1978, I’ve lost 25 pounds over the past two years, and expect to lose 14 to 16 pounds more when the extra skin is removed from my belly and abdomen in April. So, obviously I will need some new duds! I expect I’ll go from having a 38-40″ waist to a 36″ or smaller circumference. I will weigh under 200 pounds afterward, too, which will put me in the overweight category instead of the obese category. (Excess skin weighs plenty, and it’s the amount of excess skin I’m presently saddled with that puts me in the obese category.)

 

What else? I guess that’s that’s pretty much it for this time.  I hope you enjoy your weekend!