We had some guests stay with us for a couple of days. They were here from Michigan on a family cruise. It was good to see them again and hang around with Jeff and putter around the house doing “man stuff” (taking down lights, smoking cigars). Plus, the fire pit in the back yard got a good work out. Now they’re gone and it’s back to the grind for us.

The Lightning lost a close one to Philly the other night. Tampa Bay had one ten in a row against Philly going into the game, a stretch of two years. I was supposed to be at the game buy had to miss it due to some last minute stuff. I did get to watch it at home and this team has me scratching my head.

My mom gave us a gift card for Christmas with the instruction that it be used on some new patio furniture, so we’ve been looking around and getting some ideas on what we want. I’ve heard about teak before, because I know it’s used in making boat decks, and if it can take salty sea air and the weather, it’s obviously durable stuff. We found some outdoor teak furniture and it doesn’t need to be treated to keep looking good. That’s a huge plus for us, since taking care of outside furniture is one more hassle I don’t need. I just want it to look good and be able to enjoy it when we have parties and friends over.

Wife is a big television watcher. She’s also into reality tv. We’ve watched a few episodes of RockStartUp together now, and it’s probably the only reality tv I can stomach! I’m not down with Survivor or any of that other crap, but I can hang with Ted and crew, especially since wife won $1000 in the RockStartUp puzzle. There are 4 or 5 episodes up now, but the Vegas ones were my favorite, I guess because I’ve been out there several times and saw some things I recognized. Plus there was a lot of Britt in those episodes.

There was also a new holiday episode where Ted and the PayPerPost staff took a trip in the PayPerPost blue monster to deliver toys and goodies to a local charity. We give to United Way though my workplace, so it was cool to see another Florida company giving back to the community.

I think wife will be in a new episode of RockStartUp soon since she went to PayPerPost HQ yesterday to suprise Ted, so that will probably end up being my favorite episode. RockStartUp has done their part to sponsor this blog and our next vacation thanks to their opps and that $1000 prize.

Our houseguests are gone. The tree is down and the lights are put away. Now it’s time to catch up on cleaning and laundry, because we’re leaving in 3 days for vacation. This week went by quickly with everything we had going on.

I’ve got a new sponsor, and they’ve got a cool concept. Wouldn’t it be neat to be able to rank sites when you search on certain keywords, based on what you think of the site and how they relate to your search terms? Visit the Sproose home page and you’ll see that you can do just that now. You can vote on a website and give it from 1 to 5 stars, and all of the scores and votes from users come together to give one overall ranking to that site. Hopefully there are safeguards in place so people can’t game the system.

Everyone liked the gifts they received for Christmas. Santa brought the kids Playstation 2, which was a big hit. However, I think the Wife spent the most time playing it, but she was getting a bit frustrated with her Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. She was having trouble getting past the first stage. She’ll get it though…

The big news in the blogging world tonight is that PayPerPost announced they’ll be acquiring Performancing.com, Performancing Metrics and Performancing Exchange. Wife is a member over there and was giving me some of the scoop tonight on what the site does. The exchange is a place where webmasters and companies and bloggers can all hook up, so if you’re a writer looking for a blogging job, check it out. There’s some money to be made there. The metrics area is a big thing for those wishing to track their blog stats. I don’t follow my stats, because I don’t care, but wife is pretty into that sort of thing and how her traffic is doing.

PayPerPost plans to implement some of these things on their site, so that’ll be a cool new feature for us bloggers. I’m just impressed that a start up dot com is still making money and doing so well - it’s definitely a big difference from the dot come bust several years ago. Ted Murphy is onto something here, and I hope he’s able to take it where he wants to. They’ll be able to access 28,000 members over at Performancing so they may just add to their PayPerPost numbers, but they’ll definitely need to ramp up on sponsors for their blog advertising and staff to do that. This is a sponsored post, but it’s all my opinion.

It’s always nice having friends come and visit. We’ve had Sindy and Jeff here for a few days, with their kids, and they’re leaving tomorrow. Jeff and I have been doing man things outside while Sindy and Colleen shop and go to the movies. The men get to do their man stuff, and the chicks do chick stuff, and it’s all good.

PayPerPost was in Chicago right before my trip there, and Colleen showed me the video of it today. I’m glad I missed out on those cold temps and all of that snow! I am sorry I missed out on getting some great HP swag though. That would have been a great gift to have brought back to the wife. She would have been upset that I had done a PayPerPost video without her though. Ted seems like a crazy guy - I think he’d be fun to go out drinking with. He brings out the crazy in everyone around him too. That’s a fun quality in a person. You can check out the HP digital photography review on their site after you watch Robyn in this video:

HP sponsored this post.