Funny Creatures, or, as I prefer to unofficially dub it, Hairless Hamsters.

Funny Creatures is a puzzle solving game with two levels of difficulty to it, easy and hard.   The goal of the game is to move the little critters (a circular creature with large eyes and small hamster-like feet poking out from it in four directions) around until you get it to stop in the round ‘base’ plate of the same color.

Some levels have arrows that will redirect the Creatures into the direction the arrow indicates, making it a bit harder to move them where you want them.  In all levels the same basic rules of movement apply.  Creatures move in a straight line until they meet an obstacle - either a wall or another creature.  You can not move say one square at a time, when they move they move as far as the open floor allows.

A nice “I’m asleep and wanna distract myself from going to bed” game, but not something to rush out and buy in my opinion.

Good points:

• Solve any puzzle you feel like working on, you do not have to solve puzzles in sequence.
• No timer, just a count of how many moves were needed to complete the puzzle
• East enough for small kids to play, but not so easy it would put adults to sleep
• Music is pleasant to listen to and not distracting - set volume in options
• Floor grid can be turned off/on in the options
• Full screen toggle in the options

Strikes against the game:

• Complaints have been made by other users at the giveaway site that it is not Windows 7 or Vista compatible.
• Simplistic no frills game with a too easy to reach ‘booooring’ margin

All in all it is worth a try if you like to veg and do not have something to do such as write a novel, get an article started, post to blogs, watch Netflix online or play Sims3 …. I have all of those other things, so I’ll head off and attack one or more of them and let you check out the Funny Creatures game some more yourself if you feel inclined.

Wish me luck on that working.

June has been… chaotic. But, things have settled down now so I should be back online and ready to dive back into my work as a freelance writer once again. Anyone comes near me with any kind of scheme to make me miss getting work done they better be ready to be bit.

:::dives into the websites that are too neglected:::

I’m not about to give up my writing, but I need to get another source of income if I want to ever stand a chance of owning my parent’s home. So, enter the quilts. Which is actually a very fitting business for trying to earn money for the house, since I got into quilting by making a quilt for my mom for Christmas one year.

I think that she would be very encouraging of me pursuing quilting as a home business. And I will need to pursue it from home, since the plans I had for participating in the Saturday Market in my local town seems to be more of a hassle than potential profit at this point. $25 each time I want to set up there to sell, with only a small handful of fellow vendors and half the number of people stopping in at the market. I would love to go every weekend, but between the low return on investment and the hassle of getting someone on the weekends that wants to hang out with dad so he does not have to go to the market from 9am to 7pm…. ::shakes head::: It is just much easier to run the business from home with an online storefront.

By buying more when you shop, you save more with their ’set savings’ deals, and with so many matched pieces created by their jewelers, you will want to create a customized jewelery collection just for you or that lucky recipient.

For over 37 years Holsted Jewelers has been providing their customers with quality fashionable jewelery, so if you are as much of a jewelery lover as my mom was, and have not yet seen their site, I would encourage you to stop by and take a closer look at what they have.

Mom used to growl about that.  Every year just as she was going to be able to make the yard look nice, she had to go south for one thing or anotehr and now — it’s happening to dad.  :::pounds head on desk:::

We’ll see what happens, but at moment I have no idea if he’s here or being made go to the lower 48 (rather he really wants to or not).  Looooong story… not getting into it.  Just wish I knew for sure what was going on rather than having dad say “I don’t wanna go south” then being put into position of “Okay… maybe I should go south.”  :::pounds head on desk:::  And people wonder why I’m stressed so often.

You can not believe how frustrating it can get to wait for the chance to plant flowers in the springtime. Long dark months are a proven cause of ‘cabin fever’ which makes people feel … :::shakes head::: Trapped and closed in on and like they want to leave and never come back to Alaska. Happens every spring, then the snow melts, the grass begins to grow and the flowers start to bloom.

Alaska is a wonderful place to live, you just have to tolerate that last minute run out of winter when you want to have Spring flowers *NOW* and know they are a week or two away.

I’m going to see what I can do to scrape it all together and will be sharing what I can that I learn along the way with other freelancers here.

As computers and the Internet have evolved, so have the time sinks.  Today we have websites such as Facebook and MySpace and ICanHasCheezburger (If you don’t think ICanHasCheezburger is a timesink, just read the comments on a few posts).  There are many many more timesinks out ther, far too many to discuss here, and they all have the same thing in common.  They suck you in, then keep you there doing nothing for hours on end without you realizing it.

I have disconnected.

I bailed off MySpace long long ago when I realized I was going to spend more time learning to use the system than I would actually spend on MySpace after I had learned it.  I have a friend that checks ICanHasCheezburger every day, so I at least only get the good stuff that she decides to share with me from there.  (which reminds me — these two I found as I was looking up proper name spelling for ICanHasCheezburger –

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

see more Lolcats and funny pictures
I have no idea what those Fox/kittehs are, but OMG I WANT ONE!!!!)

Anyway, where was I?  OH Yeah… ::blush:: not wasting time online in timesinks, huh?  Facebook was the latest timesink.  I got drawn into Facebook long ago, back when it first started.  It was a way to connect with some of the people I worked with online.  I bailed off it soon after and never looked back… until…

My older sister encouraged me to make a account on Facebook not very long ago.  I checked and sure enough, I already had one.  Okay, no problem. I’ll just log in occasionally through the day and keep up with the family that has now discovered Facebook.  Yeah… right.

First off, let me tell you.  When you are a full-time caregiver in the middle of a life and sanity struggle with brain numbing depression, is *not* the time to log into the internet daily and see your non-caregiver siblings chattering about heading off doing all kinds of stuff you could never stand a chance at doing.  And trust me - creating “groups” on Facebook does not really help much - they are just more timesinks that you need to learn to use before you can really sink serious time into them.

So, after thinking it over, I decided that I need to learn to recognize the timesinks and steer clear of them.  It is like navigating a starship through some kind of black hole spawning space anomaly. If you don’t keep the controls flicking lef-right-up-down-REVERSE!!! then you will be sucked into a timesink and wake up days later going “Awww hell… I didn’t get that done on time.”

There is a time and a place for such timesinks, and I envy those who have the time to sit in one place and sink into them, but I am going to have to take control of my online time and avoid such sinks if I am going to make my living online. For those who need to contact me - if you could not figure out how to contact me without Facebook or MySpace or any of those other timesinks, then you probably did not have enough interest in me to worry about it. I get semi-regular calls from Georgia and California and daily text messages on my cell phone from the Washington DC area as well as random pings on AIM from Philadelphia… if such spread out people can find me, then I think it is safe to say I am not hard to find. So… buhbye Facebook, nice wasting time with you.

Do you know of any habit forming timesinks online that are best escaped from? Leave a comment letting me know what they are and how you escaped, or plan to escape. Or why you are not going to even try escaping from the timesink.