When it’s part of a blog post.
The other day, I was contacted by e-mail by someone who claimed to represent an advertising company that bought text ads on small blogs. They were interested in placing an ad on Maria’s Guides.
I was interested. It’s always nice to make a few bucks with advertising. I replied that I was interested but did not accept ads for pharmaceuticals, casinos/gambling, or sex/dating services. He got back to me within 24 hours and told me the rate they’d pay, which was agreeable, and the fact that they just wanted to ad to appear in one post on the site.
That should have started alarm bells ringing, but it didn’t. I had another advertiser some time ago who bought 10 ads, each on a different post. Targeting, I supposed.
He got back to me the next day with the text of the ad. It was about three sentences, one of which included a link to some kind of mobile Internet service. The ad was written in first person and ended with a the phrase “[Redacted company name] gets a big thumbs up in my book.”
I read the instructions. They wanted me to place the text of the ad, with its link, in the middle of a paragraph of blog post text. As if it were part of the post and I was the one giving the thumbs up.
I wrote back:
I don’t think you understand. I agreed to an advertisement. I didn’t agree to modify my blog post’s text to apparently recommend an organization I know nothing about.
I wouldn’t mind putting similar text — without the recommendation — in a box floating “above the fold” within the post. That box would be titled “Sponsored Link” or something similar. But I will NOT put it into the post itself as if I wrote it.
Obviously, he wasn’t interested in an advertisement. He was interested in a paid endorsement. He wrote back to thank me and let me know he’d remove me from his contact list.
I guess some bloggers will do anything for a few bucks. I won’t.
Scud running is dangerous and I don’t do it without full understanding of that danger. Not once did I ever lose sight of the ground or immediate surroundings. When I realized I could not go forward the way I was going, I went back. As you can clearly see by shape of the white line U-turns I made, I was required to turn in two very tight places. These are turns that an airplane could not accomplish, especially since they were made in narrow canyons with no view over the canyon walls. The photo here shows how low the clouds were on that third attempt — the successful one. At several points, I was 200-300 feet below the clouds.
About two weeks ago, I bought a 
I left Wenatchee Heights with my 5th wheel RV hooked up behind my husband’s Chevy pickup. The first day’s drive was relatively short: from Wenatchee Heights to Walla Walla, a distance of only 190 miles. Only a small portion of the drive was on a freeway (I-90); the rest was on back roads through farmland.
In Walla Walla, I stayed at the 
On Friday night, I got the trailer hooked up again and mostly ready to go. I needed to be on the road early for the next leg of my trip: from Walla Walla, WA to Draper, UT (south of Salt Lake City), a distance of 606 miles. I was on the road not long after dawn. The route took me south almost to Pendleton, OR, then onto I-84 through Oregon and Idaho and down into Utah, where I picked up I-15. The landscape started with farmland, then mountains, then more flat farmland, then more mountains, and then finally into the Salt Lake basin. I’d driven the route before with my underpowered Ford F150 pickup towing my old 22-foot Starcraft. It wasn’t fun then; Saturday’s drive was much more tolerable. I stopped three times for fuel and twice for food. It was very unlike me to make so many stops; I usually try to get food and fuel on the same stop, but the situation made that tough. I rolled into Draper, UT’s Camping World parking lot at 6:15 PM local time, just 15 minutes after the store closed. I’d called the week before and knew I could park out back, so I did. I even got to hook up 50 amp power.
On Sunday, @AnnTorrence picked me up for a drive to Ft. Bridger, WY. There was a 
Monday — Labor Day — was my last drive day. I drove from Draper, UT to Page, AZ, a distance of 370 miles. I got a very early start, pulling out of the parking lot at 6:30 AM local time. By the time I stopped for fuel two hours later, I’d already gone more than 100 miles. (I parked with the big rig trucks and discovered that my rig was about as long as theirs.) This part of the drive was mostly on I-15, but started east on route 20 to Highway 89, which took us all the way to Page. The roads were mountainous and there was a lot of climbing and descending. There were also a lot more vehicles on the road, making driving a bit more of a chore.
The only food stop I made along the way was at the Thunderbird Restaurant at Mount Carmel Junction. The place is a bit of a tourist trap, but it does have good “ho-made” pies (whatever that means). Odd thing happened when I tried to leave. They couldn’t give me a bill because the computer was down. Apparently no one knows how to do basic math. All I had was a piece of pie with ice cream and an iced tea. They apparently expected me to wait until the computers came back online. With Alex the Bird in the front seat of the car, that was not an option. Finally, my waitress disappeared into the kitchen where she may have used her “lifeline” to get help with this difficult math problem. The verdict was $7.79. I was afraid to count my change.
My husband, who’d flown up in his plane and spent a few hours swimming in the lake, met me at the lodge restaurant for lunch. Afterwards, we put fuel in the truck and parked it (temporarily) at Page Municipal Airport. I gathered my belongings — forgetting only two things, one of which was vital — and we loaded into Mike’s plane. Then we started the long (90 minutes), hot (90°F+), and bumpy (I almost got sick) flight to Wickenburg. The only sights of interest along the way — keeping in mind that I make that flight about 1000 feet lower at least a dozen times a year — were a handful of forest fires east of our Howard Mesa place and a heavy rain shower coming out of a remarkably small cloud near Granite Mountain.