Chris Wondra . com

I got this email from my wife this afternoon. You want to know what’s new and exciting in my life? This is about as good as it gets:

Hi Hon,
I stumbled across the best fertilizer for the garden today! Lama poop! AND…we can get a bunch FREEEEEEEE!!!!! How’s that for great? You just have to haul some home in the trailer. Maybe Sunday afternoon? It’s just up at Loretta’s. And you don’t have to compost it before planting! And it keeps the deer and the rabbits away! It’s so perfect for us. I am excited!
Love,
Lisa
ps. You are a great poop hauler!

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You’ve Won!

3 Quick Friday Observations

Tonight’s Top News Story: Wondra’s an Idiot

A little levity, a little truth.

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Because: The New Magic Word

Direct Buy Makes Contact

How this blog made $400 in its first month with AdSense . . .

Today, I’d like to proudly introduce you to the project that I feel like I’ve been giving birth to for the last couple of weeks:
Think Thank Thunk (found at www.3thinks.com)is my humble attempt at a blog specifically written and designed for parents and teachers. It’s still a bit under construction, but I thought I’d offer you up a sneak peek before I put on the finishing touches and begin promoting it through other channels.

Loyal readers will immediately recognize many of the articles that I used to initially populate the site. But obviously there’s much more new stuff to come.

I’ve been blogging now for just about a year and a half, and it’s been quite a trip–from the wordpress community, to an independent blog on a shared server, to running ads and actually making a few bucks. It’s been fun. But I’ve struggled from the start with my focus. Indeed, despite understanding that focusing on a tight niche is a smarter way to build an audience, I resisted that approach–mostly because I couldn’t narrow it down. And I didn’t want to. There are all kinds of topics in this blog: from parenting to finance to consumer reports to teaching to just silly stories or blurbs about whatever.

And I’m glad I did it that way.

And I am amazed to look at my stats and see that I’ve had now close to 1.5 million hits. I’m amazed and thrilled when I look at my adsence account and see that this blog has generated close to $4,000 in the 12 months I’ve been running ads from Google. Really, when a regular chump like me can do stuff like that–what an exciting time to be alive!

This blog–and others like it–undoubtedly have a place and serve a purpose both for the blogger and his or her readers: Collaboration, community, sharing valuable information, and solving problems together. Being a part of all that thrills me to no end.

This blog will live on. There is just way too much in this world to write about. But as a writer and a professional, I thought it was time for me to take the next step. That’s all. I have no idea where it will lead.

The basic seeds for Think Thank Thunk or 3thinks.com came a long time ago when I was “thinking” about writing a consistent column type of thing for my local paper. But because I struggled narrowing my focus, that idea never really got off the ground. Now, however, since I’ve started my Masters last fall, I’ve begun to realize just how much fascinating information exists (and is indeed being discovered) that parents and teachers can use to make their (as well as their children and students’) lives better.

And it really turns me on!

So click on over, take a look around, leave a comment here or there on the site, and let me know what you think! Then stop by often. My hope is to update something at least twice (hopefully 3 times) per week.

Hah! And you thought I’d just been sitting around picking my nose the last few weeks.

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The Tooth Fairy Letters

Volvo’s Overseas Delivery Program Means Travel To, From, and Within Europe is (almost) ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Teacher Tools: Persuasive Writing (Student Work)

I’m correcting quizzes for Treasure Island, the novel we are currently reading. Each question requires an essay/short answer response.

The first question is: Describe Treasure Island, including the hills and vegetation.

This is one of the responses:

“Treasure Island has like trees and like different types and there is like a stream in it and a spring with like clean water also there are like scattered big rocks and grasses and kinda bushes.”

Ugh . . .

The embarrassing thing is I’ve been teaching this group of kids now for almost 27 weeks.

Sheesh.

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The car skidded off the road, and the two occupants, a man and his son, were badly injured. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, the father died. The son was taken straight to emergency surgery. The surgeon on call took one look at the patient and gasped, “Oh no . . .it’s my son.”

I heard this riddle a few years ago and have to admit that it stumped me at first. I can’t remember now if I came to the conclusion on my own or if someone eventually told me the answer. But once I knew, it bugged the hell out of me.

Like so many riddles, the answer should have been immediately obvious. In this case, however, it was tougher to laugh it off as mere ignorance. My lack of cerebral fitness has been well documented and so I have no trouble admitting that I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.

This one’s different though. It’s difficult to acknowledge (to myself anyway) why I really had trouble solving this riddle.

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How to kill a house wasp-like a ninja

It’s about a thirty-minute drive from our house to my parents’. Getting to Lisa’s parents’ takes twice as long. For a 5-year-old, this is an excruciatingly long time to be strapped into a car seat with nothing to do. In fact, in a 5-year-old’s universe, this is roughly equivalent to what an adult would perceive to be three months.

So, to stay alert, stave off boredom and prevent car-seat sores, we play, “The Guessing Game.”

This is a complex game of emotional intrigue in which someone in the car thinks of an object, and the rest of us try to guess what it is. Like this:

[Read more →]

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Your Card . . .

Gift-Card-onomics

Songs That Speak To Me

I get a lot of comment spam on this blog. To date, Askimet, my spam filter, has captured 9,277 incidents of spam. This amazes me. I wonder who these spammers are and why they think what they’re doing is the least bit affective. I mean, I can’t imagine clicking over on a random list of links–porn, drugs, clothing, stationary.

I just don’t get it.

So anyway, I appreciate when someone puts a little effort and creativity into what they are doing.

Today, I saw this comment flopping and squirming in Askimet’s net:
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The Tooth Fairy Letters

Palindrome Challenge

Proudly Introducing: Think Thank Thunk!

This is probably going to sound weird, but I actually have a few magical talismans. I found them when I was a kid. Of course I didn’t know it at the time. They aren’t wands or weapons or glowing crystals. They’re just plain, ordinary . . . things. I didn’t choose them, yet each has somehow attached itself and is riding through this life with me.

The best way I can describe it is that these things have a certain energy or vibration that sort of matches my own so that if you could hear them they would harmonize and fit neatly into my own little hum.

One of the most powerful is a thin, nondescript paperback. Completely white accept for the title, The Mason Williams Reading Matter couldn’t be more plain. About as sexy as an appliance owner’s manual, it’s really just a silly little book of poems, prose and odd pictures of ordinary things. But for me (and this is incredibly hard to explain) each page dripped with magic and mystery.

The blank spaces dancing between the words and lurking in the margins called to me from across the universe. “Come,” they said. “Come follow me.”

And I guess I kind of did.

One of the poems in that book was called, “Acrostic”. As a kid, I didn’t know what Acrostic meant. I just liked the way the poem sounded. Here it is, pulled from memory:
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A story coming out of Orlando, Florida today outlines with broad strokes how Middle School teacher, Kasey Goodin, was suspended for her recent creative use of duct tape in the classroom. Here is the actual lead for that story:

A middle school teacher accused of using duct tape to bind a student to his desk was suspended for more than a week without pay for the alleged incident.

Quick experiment: Do this right now. On a scale of 1-10, how outraged are you by that headline and lead?

1 = “I think this is funny.”

5 = “I couldn’t care less one way or the other.”

10= “The thought that a teacher would do this pisses me off big time.”

Just humor me and jot your answer down somewhere next to the letter “A”.

Great, now let’s move on by filling in some of the blanks with some text I selected from the story.

[Read more →]

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Is this motivational, or just mean?

Teacher Tools: Suddenly Grammar is Fun? C’mon. No Way.

Football: A Metaphor for Spit Wads

Palindrome: A word, phrase or sentence (or even series of sentences) that can be read the same from left to right and right to left. (forward and backward)

In 1992 John Jensen, of Carlton University posted a request for original palindromes on an internet writing forum. Here is just a sampling of the better ones. I’m sorry I don’t know the authors. If you have any more information about their origins I’d appreciate it.

Enjoy!

A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda.

Rats live on no evil star.

Straw, no, too stupid a fad, I put soot on warts.

I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori.

A man, a plan, a canal; Panama?
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Welcome to The Belly of the Whale: Playground for the rich and successful

Peter Answers and Igod: Artificial Intelligence Logs In to the Spirit World

Is Wal Mart Destroying This Family Value?