I don’t sell bullets and I don’t sell crack
It’s an excited free man coming to you from the bottom of the globe today. I’ve been racking my brain since my undeserved windfall yesterday to come up with the best use of a year of sponsored free time. I’m leaning towards adding some tools to me personal toolbox. My university isn’t the best academic institution in South Australia, but it’s definitely the most vocationally oriented. They offer a wide range of one year graduate certificates that are targeted to people like me. What I’m trying to work out is what would be my best bet for enhancing my career opportunities - a certificate in secondary education to give me more teaching opportunities? Should I learn to write properly and do some communications course work? What about a business certificate so I can put that suit to good use? Or should I consider my geography and get some environmental engineering or water management know how?
A lot of you, my readers, are clever people. If you were given a chance to retool your career, what would you focus on? What careers are going to be in demand in the next decade or so? Any economic Nostradami out there? Australian opinions are particularly welcome.
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Speaking of paying the bills, you may have noticed some changes up at the top of my sidebar. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of advertising or sponsored posting or any of the money making ploys that some folks employ. But a self-hosted site isn’t free and while I’m not blogging to be a millionaire, I’d like to at least not lose money in this gig. So, I’m grateful to BlogHer (and Nichole for pointing me there), the community for women who blog, for taking me on despite being demonstrably not a woman. Says so on the box, in fact. Once we get the code sorted out, there will be a likely pretty garish ad dominating the top of my side bar. Beyond having to scroll a bit further down the page to get to recent comments (which Dr. O’C has already given me an earful about) nothing else will change here at A Free Man. So don’t call me an ad whore or I’ll put my dog on you.
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Now, I typically don’t get into the whole blog award game, but having just gotten a golden egg laid on my lap I figure it’s time to start paying back some of that karmic debt. I found this present from Bluestreak this morning on her site. I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m pretty sure that this means I am now queen of butterflies that land on toilet paper rolls. My first order of business as Lepidoptera Queen is to secure some knights of the loo roll realm. So, here are eight bloggers who have written posts recently that earned them a tap with our royal scepter:
- Bobbie at The Right Blue for her post on photosynthetic nudibranches.
- Maggie at Okay, Fine, Dammit on her encounter with a 10 year old me.
- Boyhowdy at Cover Lay Down for his most recent edition of kidfolk. If you’ve got kids and like music, this is for you.
- Doug at Hey Jenny Slater for outstanding college football coverage.
- Matthew at Pop Songs 07-08 who managed to score a series of guest posts by Michael Stipe.
- Strange Scottish Girl at Wake Up It’s Tuesday has been on lately.
- I’ve been stalking Breaking The Ice lately and it’s time to out myself.
- Finally, appropriate to the karmic theme, fellow expat Ian from Letters Home posted a bit of Buddhism for bloggers.
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The Beastie Boys’ “The Sounds of Science” is available from 
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Image credits:
Popularity: 69% [?]
“Not on your arm
Excellence? Wow, after I just shifted all of my writing responsibility for the day to other bloggers? Well, fellow expat blogger (and fan of alliteration) Kathy at 
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OK, maybe not entirely an accurate title but I’m working on my catchy tabloid-esque headlines. My blogging hero 
“Hoodoo voodoo, seven twenty one two
