Thankful? Support Ken Steinhoff and Cape Central

Buy From Amazon.com to Support Ken Steinhoff

Howdy, all. Special guest post today by me, Matthew Steinhoff.

If you like Ken Steinhoff, the CapeCentralHigh web site and want to support them both, please click the above magical button and go about your regular, online holiday shopping business.

How Does This Amazon Thing Work?

Malcolm Lee and Kenneth Lee Steinhoff, Circa Chistmas 2005
When you click the button, Dad gets a 6% referral fee from Amazon based on your purchases made in the few hours after the click. Spend $100, Dad gets $6. Amazon doesn’t mark up your bill. The products aren’t more expensive using the link. I really like Amazon because it typically has the lowest prices; if your bill is more than $35, shipping is free and, in most states, there is no sales tax.

(Of note, if you have a local business you want to support, please do so. My cousin owns a really great antique shop in downtown Cape and I’d much rather you do your shopping at Annie Laurie’s than Amazon. But, if you’re anything like most of America, you’re probably going to do $400 worth of online shopping anyway. When you do that shopping, I’d love for you to click the above link and shop Amazon.)

Why You Should Click

Malcolm and Matt enjoy good pie at the Pie Bird Cafe.Mostly, this blog is a giant money pit. Which, more or less, is fine because Dad is retired and would drive Mom absolutely nuts if he didn’t have some venture to keep him busy. Plus, this blog entertains far more people than if he took up golf and chased a little ball into the gator-infested ponds of Palm Beach County.

That said, creating the content is very time consuming and pretty darn costly. Dad has spent at least a third of the year outside the state of Florida and has driven several thousand miles. There are the raw materials (cameras, disk space, computers), services (online backups, mobile data plans, travel expenses and web hosting (bandwidth, power, storage). And then there’s the pie. Pie doesn’t grow on trees.

How You Can Support the Site

1. Purchase a 2014 Cape calendar. Get more than a year’s worth of Cape Girardeau photos! Simple and easy.

2. Buy from Amazon. Dad gets about six-percent of your total. We have no way to knowing it was you who bought the 11-pound jar of Nutella.

3. Click the yellow ‘Donate‘ button in the upper left-hand corner of the web site. This is my least favorite option because it doesn’t get you anything but a warm feeling deep in your soul. At least with the first two items you get a little something for yourself.

What You Should Buy From Amazon

1. Gift Cards Trust me: this is what your kids and grand kids want. Probably your spouse, too. Gift cards are tacky, require little thought and lack creativity. Still, they are easy to buy, easy to mail and are always welcome. You didn’t really want to spend the next few weeks knitting that sweater anyway, right?

2. Digital SLR-Style Cameras Everyone has an iPhone they take a bazillion pictures a day. But those photos aren’t real photos. If you or someone you love is ready to take a step up from a smart phone, a dSLR is the way to go. Dad shoots with a Nikon D7000 but the camera I’m lusting after is a throw-back to simpler days. The Nikon Df has all the new whiz-bang digital guts but the look and feel of Nikon cameras from the late-1970s and early 1980s. Everyone who absolutely loved the Nikon FA, FE or FM is going nuts trying to get the Nikon Df.

3. Apple iPad If you don’t already have an iPad, get one. So sweet! Once you have one, you’ll never be without one again. Worried about not being able to figure it out? No problem! Gran is 92 and uses hers every day. Got questions, call Gran. Need an endorsement? Call Gran. Still don’t have a smart phone? You don’t need one. Get an iPad instead. That way you still have a small cell phone you can take everywhere but still have all the smart phone features in the easily-readable format of an iPad.

Black Friday ~ Cyber Monday ~ Overspend Wednesday

Don’t worry. This is just the annual fund drive. We’ll sprinkle in a few Amazon links (Haunted Cape Girardeau: Where the River Turns a Thousand Chilling Tales) on our way up to Christmas then I’ll take my hand out of your pocket for another year.

Thank You, Readers!

Loudmouth-Golf-PantsFinally, a word of thanks from me to all you… Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing. Thank you for sharing your stories and memories. And thank you for giving Dad an outlet to tell old stories and a reason to make up new ones. As long as you’re a willing audience, I don’t have to see Dad in golf pants.

Cheers,
Matt

[Editor’s note]

You can tell when your kids are getting worried that your outgo is getting bigger than your income. Sons Matt and Adam are so sure there won’t be anything left that they’ve stopped jockeying for top spot in the will.

Here’s a bunch of suggestions I made last year. If you click on the links there, you may find that newer versions of the product have come out. At least the links aren’t broken.

16 Replies to “Thankful? Support Ken Steinhoff and Cape Central”

  1. Thank you so much, Matthew! I couldn’t have been reminded of this at a better time! (Pre-Black Friday Black Friday) And I was all set to write a thank you note to your dad anyway. I love reading this site, sometimes contributing to it and being entertained by the Steinhoff family, especially your father’s writings and ramblings.
    THANK YOU all so much for all you do. (Especially Ken.) This is one of the few emails I actually look forward to! This one and the ‘1960s Tigers’.
    Happy Thanksgiving to all who read here. 🙂

  2. OMG! I just looked at the link for those ‘Shagadelic Pink’ hideous golf pants. $73+ on sale! Who’d a thunk it?!! 😮

  3. They kind of look like a pair of bell bottom pants we wore in the early 70s. Glad they are coming back in style. 🙂

  4. Matt, Nice tup-thumping for your DOD.

    That being said, now why don’t you redesign that block of copy at the upper right hand corner that silently asks everyone to donate by simply going through his site when they shop at Amazon? Please put a button there to make it more visible and easy for folks to feed the pie eating machine. I always go through his site on my way to Amazon to buy things, but I have to remind myself to do it. It needs a bright icon to remind people that it’s a FREE way to donate some coins to the site.

    Currently it’s about as effective as a peanut butter jar with the words tips written on it.

    Your dad will grouse at what appear to be a commercial plug, but he will smile bigger when the transmission goes out of his van on the way back to Florida knowing that more dogeared dollars from readers will help to rebuild it.

    1. Is there a way to get a hold of Ken Steinhoff? I have self published a children’s book about my Great great-grandmother who raised her kids and grand kids in the Smelterville area. They lived right across from the Pentecostal church in 1922. Do you have any photos of the churches in that area? I have placed my book at Annie Laurie’s and Past time antiques as well. I purchased one of your books. I was delighted to see the details I laid out in my book were very close to your pictures. I would love to talk with Ken sometime. Is that possible?

      1. If you have my book, it has pretty much all I have on churches in the Smelterville area. I’ll be sure to pick up a copy of your book to see how closely we remember the area.
        I spend most of my time in Cape, but I’m going to be on the road for a few days. Send me an email at ken@steinhoff.net. We’ll try to hook up.

  5. Yes! I think I had a pair of bell bottom pants like that, too! Mine were huge paisleys. A home ec project. Wore them when I had my walking cast after I broke my ankle. Split them up the middle trying to ride a pony bareback, in my walking cast. Ahhhh the good old days….

  6. (Pause)

    Now that everyone has looked at the upper right hand corner for the Amazon link, perhaps they will search the left hand corner and find it there.

  7. Mark, you might tell users that if they log into Amazon via Ken’s link, then bookmark that entry page (save in their favorites) they can use the bookmark to re-enter Amazon at the Capecentral-20 page to benefit Ken. It saves logging into Ken’s blog to find the link every time you want to go to Amazon.

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