Category: Thoughts

Posted in brain games, life, spot the odd, Thoughts, Videos

Spot the Odd Stuffed Animals in the Garden

Posted on by katherinebrianneparilli

I really enjoyed making this video, except for one thing, it made me miss our house with our little garden and handful of fruit trees. When rising cost made it impossible for my mother, sister, and I to afford our home after my father passed away, we hoped that it would only be a few months or at wort a year and a half before we found a new place to live. Sadly, last month was the 2 year mark there is no end in sight.

Finding a permeant home where we can have a little garden, fruit trees, grape vines, and some chickens now feels like an impossible dream. Sometimes at night, when I am struggling to find a comfortable corner on the rock-hard sofa, I find myself asking God why? Why, when I have tried so hard, when I have used every ounce of my feeble power to do what little I can to earn my own bread, has success been withheld from me. Why, when there were many in my class who were blessed with health, yet who did half the work I did, were blessed with nearly everything that they desired, while I pushed until my muscles failed me and I could not rise from bed, yet not one dream has been granted me.

It was hard enough when my father was alive. And we had his strong arm to lean upon. But now, when we have been deprived of his aid and comfort, and the only reason that we are not on the street is due to the kindness of my uncle, it has become a tearing thorn in the side.

It would be one thing if due to my poor health I had folded up my hands and rested upon my painful laurels and turned my back upon any and every effort of life. Comforting myself with the thought that because I was sick and weak, I need not try but satisfy my soul with watching the flickering screen.

But that is not what I did. Despite the pain, the fatigue, and allergies that caused me to go all day without food I pushed myself to go to school. Sometimes the pain got so bad that I had to drop a class, sometimes I got so weak that I had to be wheeled from class to class, and sadly there were times that I could not even climb out of bed and had to skip a semester. But in spite of the struggle, I pushed myself until I could push no more. But not before I received my hard-won AA degree. Satisfying, but hardly a door opener for a job that my pain ridden body could handle.

When I could no longer go to school I started on KDP and Etsy. And even though I have given it my 110 percent, it has gone nowhere. Yes, I have managed to sell a few books, activity packs, and even some t-shirts and stickers. But even though I have made some sells, most months I do not sell enough to buy a pizza, never mind a house with a garden.

It has been like a knife in the heart, twisting and tearing as I think about how much my parents gave up trying to get me on my feet. Willingly spending thousands of dollars on medicine and doctors hoping to find out what was wrong so I could have a life. Paying for much of my school because I could not qualify for aid because being sick did not qualify for getting aid like being an unwed mother.

And now, when I should be a source of relief and comfort to my mother. Repaying her years of sacrifice with a secure roof and warm bed, I can do nothing. Sadly, while I enjoyed making this video, it reminded me that despite in spite of spending years using every ounce of strength I had to strive to stand upon my own two feet so that I might at last earn my own bread, I have gotten nowhere. I am still 100 percent dependent upon the kindness of others to keep me off the street.

Sometimes in the quiet of the night, when no one is around, I ask the Lord why. Why is that nothing I try works? Why can I not be the source of comfort that I long to be for my hard-working mother by giving her the secure shelter that she needs and deserves.

While I do not have the full answer for why almost all of my hopes and dreams have failed, why all the dearest hopes and dreams of life have been allowed to pass me by, one thing has become clearer and clearer. And that is that God is preparing us for something. Whether it is to stand for Him in the final moments of this earth’s history, I do not know. But every trial, every heart ache, has been a tool to pull out this weed or to soften this hard edge. Little by little He is teaching us patience, softening our tempers, and showing us that no matter what, he has not left us to fight alone.

Posted in brain games, spot the odd, Thoughts, Trying to build a business

Spot The Odd Cute And Colorful Animals and Thoughts about Being the Stubborn Frog

Posted on by katherinebrianneparilli

I am doing my best to consistently post videos so that I can build my You Tube audience, get monetized, and hopefully get some cross over sales in my Etsy shop. But my iron has been doing its best to make that impossible. In one month, my ferritin dropped nearly a hundred points taking my energy with it. Suddenly a task that took me 20 minutes, required 5 hours and a hundred rest breaks. Thanks to low iron levels, creating the shortest of videos feels like a 500-mile marathon.

Thanks to my ongoing battle with iron, I have found myself staring through fatigue and pain glazed eyes, asking myself why I insist on trying to accomplish anything. Questioning why this stubborn frog determinedly hits its head against the wall when it would be far more pleasant to sink into a comfy corner and let the world pass by.

But for some reason, even though that would be the easiest choice, it is not one I want to make. Even if my shop never takes off, even if no one ever watches my videos, I cannot imagine spending my life melted into the sofa with nothing but a flickering TV screen to show for my life. Sure, there are days, weeks, and even at times, months when the pain gets so strong that I have no choice but to limp along like a half-drowned snail. Unfortunately, there are days and weeks where the weakness and pain become so intense that the only thing I can do is open my computer and stare at the sales page for a few minutes wishing for a sale or watching the subscriber count hoping that the needle will move even one space higher, before closing the lid and comforting myself with the hopes that tomorrow will be a better day.

I am not sure why, when budget and health issues have seemingly conspired so perfectly that for every step forward it seems like I fall 10 steps backward, something inside of me refuses to give up. There are times, when I see how a You tube channel that was started only a few days before or even a couple of months after mine have thousands of subscribers and over a million views, or I watch a video talking about an Etsy shop that is only a couple of months old and already making hundreds of sales that I become so disappointed that a few times I have come close to throwing in the towel. But a day or two later, thanks to an unexpected like on one of listings or a new subscriber, and I am right back in the ring trying to fight that invisible Spector of chronic illness.

Even though it makes no sense, there is something inside those refuses to give up. Something inside that hopes that someday, somehow, something will change. And to my complete surprise, at last my determined effort to be as consistent as my never-ending battle with the giant anemia, the monsters pain and fatigue, will at last become a distant memory as I finally grasp my humble reward of earning my own bread.

Posted in Finding a Drream, Fun Puzzles, life, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Update on New You Tube Channel: Fighting Self-Pity: Spot the Difference Teddy Bear Romance Edition

Posted on by katherinebrianneparilli

It has now been 3 months since I started my You Tube game channel with the hopes of building an audience that would not only allow me to become monetized on You Tube but might also cross over and purchase some items from my Etsy shop. I wish I could say that at the 3 month mark I have thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of views. Having come across a course about creating a You Tube brain game channel where the person gained 1,600 subscribers and 200,000 views in only a month, I would love to be able to say that I at least got the 500 subs and 3000 watch hours required to start monetizing my channel.

Sadly, I am still a far away from that goal. But amazingly, in spite of having a severe flare up of my autoimmune that I am still recovering from and that put at least a 3 week pause on my iron infusions, I somehow managed to get 120 subscribers. This might not be a big deal for a healthy person, but when I consider that my poetry channel which I have had for a good 8 years only has 270 subscribers, getting 120 subs in 3 months suddenly feels like a really big deal. So finally, in spite of enduring a major setback, I actually managed to take a small step forward.

Hopefully, by the grace of God who has blessed me with a much-needed extra large portion of determination, I will reach not only the first level of monetization, but push through and not only get fully monetized, but maybe even earn a You Tube plaque.

Today my dream of making my You Tube channel and Etsy shop a success seems impossible, but for the longest time the idea of getting 120 subs in 3 months seemed like an impossible dream too. At least now I have a little bit of hope that if I keep trying, I might be able to make something of my dream finally come true.

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Posted in brain games, My Etsy journedy, Thoughts

Thoughts on Etsy and a Symbol Math Addition Quiz

Posted on by katherinebrianneparilli

My experiment with creating a brain game channel continues. My hope is that I will not only build an audience that will eventually allow me to qualify for You Tube monetization but will also lead to increase sales of my brain games in my Etsy shop and activity books on Amazon.

The first challenge will be to gain an audience. I am doing my best to be consistent in posting in spite of my chronic health issues. And thankfully I have enjoyed a little blimp of modest growth. Over the course of 2 weeks, I went from 15 subscribers to over 50. Those few days were really encouraging, but for the past few days that growth has slowed down and stalled out. Thankfully I am still enjoying a small bump in views, but the amount is probably 1/4 of what it was a week ago which is very disheartening.

Still, I am trying to keep up hope. I have taken a look at some of the game channels out there and I know that there is an audience for brain games. I mean some videos are only 11 months old and have over 664,000 views. There are even some videos that are less than a year old with over a million views. Then of course there some channels like mine where most long form videos are lucky to reach 50 views and a breakaway short gets four or five hundred views.

But at least since some channels in my niche are getting hundreds, thousands, and even millions of views there is some hope that over time my channel might grow and at least get a few thousand views here and there, even if it never reaches the dream of being one of the fortunate ones to get millions of views.

Unfortunately, outside of the struggle to grow made far worse by the interruptions caused by chronic health issues like anemia, there is one thing that I did not consider. And that is how will I know if my efforts are paying off?

Thanks to You Tube metrics I can see if my videos are getting likes and views. I can see if my channel is growing and getting new subscribers. Thankfully at least for now I have that bit of information. But what I did not consider is how will I be able to tell if after watching one of my videos, someone decides to buy a book or activity pack. With KDP you can tell which keyword brough in a sale using their paid add. But outside of using their add platform you have no way of knowing what led to a sale. They do not share any of that data with you so you have no way of knowing if that sudden bump in sales was due to the video you put on you tube, the post you created on Word Press, or just mere coincidence.

And unfortunately, it is not so easy to tell in Etsy what brought you a sale either. Over the past couple of years since I started on Etsy they have cut down the amount of information that they share with you. You can go to their metrics and see if someone came over from Facebook or Pinterest. If you want to know if someone came from a link on your Word Press or You Tube channel you can go to a spot and see if the web address appears. If you find the web address you can see how many views you got from there, but if they tell you any more than that, they have done a good job hiding that information.

Which I think is a big mistake. While I know that they want to encourage you to stay on their platform and not move over to your own platform the moment you make a few sales. But still, it is a bit short sided to hide all the information on what key words are working, which links from sites like You Tube and Pinterest are bringing in sales, because it prevents shops from knowing what is working and what is not working. They might wrongly think that the sudden boost in sales was due to the post they made on Pinterest and put all their effort into increasing their Pinterest presence, when instead it might be that a video talking about some of their products that are perfect for Mother’s Day got some traction and the boost came from that. Sadly, without easy to access stats, it makes it really hard to know if what you are doing is working, or it is just as useful as moving a pile of rocks from spot A to spot B, and back again.

Posted in brain games, Find the Difference, Fun Puzzles, life, spot the odd, Thoughts

Spot The Odd Bird Challenge Your Brain🦢🐔🐦 Find the Difference Quiz: Can You Find Them?

Posted on by katherinebrianneparilli

It has been well over a year since I have actively posted something to this blog, because of the uncertainty created by having to sell our home thanks to the sky rocketing cost of living. I figured that it would be a while before I would have a chance to post again, so I set up about six months of articles that would automatically post. Hoping that by that time we would have found a stable place to live. Was I ever wrong.

In less than a year we moved 7 different times, going from one AirBNB to another. Until thankfully, my Uncle recognized that we were in danger of ending up on the street and invited us into his home. And true to the saying, no act of kindness goes unpunished, one health disaster after another has resulted in my mother and I being unable to drive for the last 8 months. Instead of enjoying leisurely days, he has had to ferry us from one doctor appointment to another, take us to pick up meds, and even drive us to the grocery store.

It is sad but true that stress is the word of the day and has been for the past few years. And it certainly has not been reduced by looking at the price of housing. Ouch! It is hard to believe that a moldy, hole ridden, major fixer upper, now cost as much as a two story, 5-6 bedroom, 4 bath home, with pool did only a few months after we moved into the house we had to sell in 2008, never mind what it would have been able to get when I was a kid.

Needless to say, I needed something to get my mind off of the intense stress of wondering if we would ever be able to have our own home again, and what will happen next if my health keeps slipping. 24 iron infusions in a year triggering major fibromyalgia flare ups hardly establishes confidences in one’s future. We are definitely giving our trust muscles a major workout as we do our best to cast our burdens on Jesus.

I knew that I needed some type of down time as we try to regroup and figure out what is going on and what we should do next. Yet I also wanted a way to advertise my books on Amazon and activity packs on Etsy. Thankfully the Lord opened a door to an inexpensive course about creating quiz videos for You Tube. I was already making Bible games, but it had never occurred to me to try and make quiz videos using some of the games in my activity packs.

I do not know if my little quiz channel will take off. Nothing I do seems to work. I certainly give it my hundred percent, but sometimes I think that my hundred percent is equal to -1000. It really is frustrating, but as long as I have reason to believe this is the path I am supposed to be walking in right now, by the grace of God I will plug along like a determined turtle trusting that one day He will help me to win the race.

It might never take off and grant me the hundreds of sales that I need or even reach the mark for getting monetized (although I wish it would and that is my goal), but at least it has been fun to make. And maybe if I am lucky, it will at least bring me an extra sell or two. I hope that you enjoy this video. It was the very first one that I released for my new quiz channel.