Don't own a car, just borrow one for an afternoon of shopping or a weekend away. Pick it up in your area and drop it off for someone else to pick up. "Drive Zipcars by the hour or day. Gas, parking, insurance and 150 free kilometers are included with every reservation. No monthly membership fees. No deposits. (Sweet, huh?)"
Susan Ward writes the Small Business in Canada topic at About.com She has posted an article listing the top ten home businesses. I think she bit off a bit much by calling it 'Now and Tomorrow'. Tomorrow can change pretty fast while that article is going to be pretty dated in no time at all.
Here is the list: (squished, if you want to read it in full click the link back).
- Home Renovation Services\
- Pet-Based Products\
- Catering Services\
- Cleaning Services\
- Fall Prevention Products\
- Wedding Consultant/Planner Services (Event Planner for short)\
- Dietary Consultant Services\
- In-Home Beauty Services (Personal Trainer included here?)\
- Sewing and Alteration Services\
- Life/Business Coaching Services
I would add Personal Shopper/ Concierge Services and Image/ Etiquette Consultants and Personal Organizers to this list. That's one I thought of while reading it. Maybe Virtual Assistants too, that covers a lot but it's often work outside of the home while the others focus on home life for the client.
Interesting how almost all of these are personal services. Things a housewife used to do when it was still traditional for women to stay at home keeping the house clean, kids fed and so on. Women have changed the world in a lot of ways. I wonder if anyone ever saw this coming? It's ironic that women are the ones who start up most of these kind of small businesses.
Should it enter your mind, I am not saying women should stay at home or all start small businesses.
Not all that long ago, in the olden days someone began rules for email etiquette. Someone else renamed the rules Netiquette. One of the old rules was for email signatures - the few lines of text at the end of the emails you send out. Email signatures used to include links, favourite quotes and even ASCII art.
The netiquette rule was that an email signature should be 4 or 5 lines or less. As an ASCII artist who loved having my own art in my email sig, this was tough, but do-able. I miss seeing the old fashioned email sigs. They were replaced with fancier, bandwidth sucking HTML signatures and now they seem to be replaced (in a way) with social bookmarking which comes at the end of a blog post.
Someone has set the netiquette rule for that too. It’s a limit of five, someone says. It made me feel sentimental for the old email signatures, those 5 lines or less. You can pack a lot of ASCII into five lines, a lot of creativity. Social bookmarking is just another image file. Don’t they seem kind of dull when compared to the old signatures we put so much thought into?
I’m late again this year. This was going to be the year I started NaNoWriMo on time and actually finished my 50,000 words by the end of November. Instead I’m still in the final stages of moving jetlag. Not that I had a jet, that would have been nice, a whole moving crew too.
Here I am nearly a week after the start of November and I have not even begun. So much for my great plan to be part of it all this year. I don’t really like to put it off till next year, again. I did that last year after a slow, late start. Is anyone else joined up and trying?