A few days ago on this site, I posted the following line, just on a whim…
Is the economy really on a rebound? I'll believe that when more people start using Paypal to donate money to this site.
Posted it. Didn't think much of it. Thought it might net a few more bucks which I could use to pay the costs of maintaining this site and buy cat food for the Back Yard Menagerie. If there's any left after I do that, I sometimes snag a few oddments from the land of eBay. The spots on this and my other site that ask for donations (or for you to use our links when you buy from Amazon) provide a steady trickle of loot that I view as applause. I sure didn't expect my best 3-day period ever in donations.
Actually, I got about the same number of "tips" I usually get but the amounts jumped way up, including one for $200 (thank you), one for $300 (thank you, thank you) and one for $500 (thank you, thank you, thank you). And thank you to the folks who sent ten or twenty dollars, too. I know when people say "it isn't the money, it's the principle," they usually mean, "it's the money." But in this case, it's the principle. If nothing else, these donors have erased for now the occasional guilt twinge I have when I stop doing paying work and spend an hour or three fixing up my sites, writing stuff and tweaking HTML codes. I shall continue to do these things.