Paw Prints in the Sand

"I'm going to get rich," announced my boyfriend. "I'm going to learn wordpress, and start a webpage about dogs on the beach. It's the perfect subject."

"Why?" I asked.

He stared at me, and then spoke very slowly. "Freedom. No responsibilites. Playing with your dog on the beach is the very opposite of nine-to-five in a suit and tie."

I thought about it. He hated his job in a bank. I hated my job in an advertising agency. "So the idea is that we start the website, and when it makes enough money, we dump the day job and write the posts from the beach?"

"Any beach! Anywhere in the world."

It sounded good to me. As it turned out, it sounded good to plenty of other people. We wrote for hours every week, and soon we hit 10,000 subscribers.

The trouble was, dog-on-the-beach people are happy, but not rich, so advertisers aren't interested. We had 10,000 subscribers and no money.

One evening I showed my boyfriend the statistics. "Stuff this," I said. "Let's dump the webpage and go down the beach with the dog."