Remember the old comedy routine, where the patient tells the doctor, "It hurts when I do this," and the doctor bonks him on the head with a rubber chicken and says, "Well, don't do that!" ?

Well, it hurts when I cook.  Especially when I cook a huge holiday dinner for the family.  Nobody has ever said to me, "don't do that," so I keep doing it and I have the scars to prove it.

I can never make it through the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays without getting several third degree burns and even some fourth degree ones, if there is such a thing. It seems like I just washed off the *mustard poultice from last year's wounds, and now it's time to do it again.

This year there's another threat to our safety. We could all die from eating the turkey! Now that's scary, I don't care who said it. All this talk about bird flu almost makes me go vegan. But dinner just wouldn't be the same without the turkey. Somehow you just don't get that holiday feeling when you carve a baked tofu.

I think it may be a conspiracy, though. I believe the turkeys made it all up in an attempt to escape the holiday hatchet. It started with George W. Gobbler, president of the STA. (Stuffed Turkey Association). He was seen, strutting around the barnyard spreading rumors about some strange avian illness called bird flu.

Or is this simply another ploy by the food police? 

Remember during the eighties, when a group of hogs started the scare of Swine Flu?  How many hams do you think were prepared that year? And did you notice at the beginning of Spring, when we all were planning our weekend cook outs and back yard barbecues, how the cows claimed to have gone mad? huh? remember that? It's bound to be a conspiracy, I tell ya. Now even the spinach and the lettuce have jumped on the disease wagon.

The only reason I prepare a big meal during the holidays is because hubby likes leftovers; he likes them better than the actual meal. When we eat at someone else's house, the leftovers get left with the host and he gets left with a bologna sandwich.  

And while we're on the subject of dinner at someone else's house, why is it that, around the holidays, relatives seem to spring up like Kudzu? What starts out to be a sit down dinner for the family, turns out to be a grab-a-plate-and-find-a-corner hoedown, starring forty two cousins and their in laws.

I'm not complaining though. I love large family gatherings. This is about the only time  we get to see some of our relatives. I usually begin cooking around October 31st and don't stop until January.  It's such a magical season.

This year I am being extremely cautious. I've stocked the pantry with extra mustard for all the anticipated burns and blisters, and first thing tomorrow, I'm taking my turkeys to get their flu shots...

 

 

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*The best treatment for a burn is yellow mustard straight from the jar applied to the burned area. This is not a joke.

Hi Blogstream Friends, I just dropped in to say "Hi" I hope y'all are well and happy. I'm so busy I think I passed myself going in the other direction.

Hope everybody has a great weekend

Love ya
LadyLee

Hi Blogstreamers Sorry I've been absent so long. Just had to pop in and say a great big Happy Halloween to everybody so...

Leeuna Foster Interviews Chris Knight on Article Writing & Marketing
(Book Marketing Perspective)

1. How long have you been writing Chris?

While I don’t consider myself a ‘writer’ by trade, I have been authoring articles for more than a decade. For me, writing is a high return activity because my articles can help thousands of people giving me a low cost, high impact vehicle to educate, train, and market myself and our business.

2. What are the three most important aspects of writing an article that will be used as a marketing tool?

First, the article should never come off as a ‘marketing article’ or ‘sales promotional piece’ – Your goal is to educate and train your reader; not sell them until you get a chance to build demand and trust from your expertise. The body of the article must not have any sales pitches or calls to action; save the pitch for the resource box located directly below the article body.

Second, keep your articles short (250-700 words) and make them easy to digest in a 5-30 second reading time-frame.

Third, optimize your article title and the body content based on what your market is searching for – and not what you want them to read. In the old days, we’d write articles about what we thought the market wanted to read relating to our niche or expertise. Today, thanks to keyword and keyphrase research tools, you can research what your ideal profile of reader wants to read based on what they are searching for in relation to your niche.

3. I know that EzineArticles has been around for a while. What led you to build a website strictly for article marketing?

EzineArticles.com has been around since 1999. We never set out to create a site about ‘article marketing’ but that’s what happened along the way. The original intention was for the project to be a trading exchange to match expert authors and writers with ezine publishers who needed supplemental quality content to add value to their email newsletter audience.

I’m not even sure we called it “article marketing” until about 2004. Some have called it “article distribution” or “article syndication” – both which accurately describe the activity and marketing strategy.

4. What one marketing venue do you consider to have brought you the most visitors/sales/exposure?

EzineArticles.com is the ‘venue.’ Seriously, our website’s purpose is to be the vehicle that serves tens of thousands of expert authors, publishers, and millions of monthly users who come to read the content.

From a traffic source perspective, our traffic largely comes from the major search engines, our tens of thousands of RSS feeds, the hundreds of thousands of permission-based targeted emails we send for more than 300 different niche topics and thousands of monthly ‘forwards to a friend’ by our registered members and guest userbase.

5. What marketing tip or advice would you give to a writer who is promoting their books?

Do a virtual book tour over a 4-14 month period starting 2 full months before the book is released by writing (or having written) 50-200 articles per month that you put into distribution to generate demand and qualified visitors to your website and book sales letter or landing page.

Never rely on your book publisher to market your book for you alone. You must be highly active and take the initiative to build demand for your works.

Article marketing is the perfect vehicle to build long-term demand for yourself, your book(s), and your website; but it doesn’t have the immediate impact that can be generated with a permission-based email newsletter. Consider starting yours, if you haven’t yet, as every business (writing books is a business) must have at least one email newsletter (sometimes known as an ‘ezine’) to educate, inform, announce, and build a relationship with your ideal prospective buyers.

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Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/directory. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links intact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a free membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

For Ezine Publishers, Chris produces a weekly free email newsletter on strategies for helping you grow your email lists, improve your email deliverability, and manage your ezine. To subscribe, surf on over to: http://Ezine-Tips.com/