I found the ceiling

Today is a rainy, miserably day... so I had some time on my hands for turking. 

But after a couple of hours, I found myself cut off:

There are no HITs available for you at this time. Please try again tomorrow.

When I got the message, I had submitted 93 HITs. Seemed like an odd number. So, I poked around and here's what I found: During your first 10 days on mturk (and today is Day 5 for me), you can attempt no more than 100 HITs per day. Unfortunately, sometimes the HIT you think you're accepting isn't the one you wind up getting -- or you get one that is particularly tricky and you're just not confident enough to send in an answer. In that case, you "return" the HIT. That doesn't count against you technically (it does not have any impact on your approval number), but they do keep track of that. So apparently I submitted 93 HITs today and returned 7 to hit my daily probationary limit.

Since I am just kinda feeling my way through this process, I didn't know how that worked. Until today. So now that I know that, for the next 5 days I can focus on getting as close as possible to that 100 mark, and fill it up either with short, easy HITs (on days when I'm just filling in dead space between projects) or spend a little more time on more involved (but higher paying) HITs on days when I have more time on my hands. 

So, as of this writing, today I submitted 93, had 92 approved, for $3.93. A couple more HITs from previous days were also approved, so now I have 266 total approved HITs and a total for this (partial) week of $13.11. Keep in mind, that's for a "casual" turker who was trying to figure things out on her own and not really trying to do it seriously for a living. The way I see it, I didn't "lose" any time to turking since I did it all during short gaps in my day (waiting for a big job to finish printing, a video to render, uploading large files, on hold with someone on the phone, etc) or, for today, to fill time I would have otherwise spent playing games. 

And since I couldn't spend the rest of this rainy afternoon turking, did a little searching and read a few blogs with suggestions for beginning turkers. One really nice tool that I wish I had installed from day one is Turkopticon, https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/. It gives you quick access to reviews of requesters to help you avoid turking for bad employers. I'll definitely be making use of it in the future.