Giving Thanks: I am thankful for royalty checks!

My first royalty check came today! (This is from Values Stories for a Young Woman. Please see right sidebar.) I won't be booking a Caribbean cruise any time soon. Just by my rough calculations of the check amount divided by how much time I put into the book, I made somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cents an hour. But my publisher is still in business and the book is still selling. So, yeah, I'm kind of doing the Snoopy dance today.