Change Of Plans: Farewell, Colorado

Steamboat Springs is not the right place for me. I had in my head images of a majestic mountain landscape and a wonderland of snow, and highly motivated, intelligent, and well-mannered people. The landscape of my dreams is literally right outside my window; any time of day I can look out and see the sun or the street lamps reflecting off of the snowy mountain where I could spend the entire winter skiing. But what makes a place special is the people, and I have had an extremely hard time making friends here. Those who are my friends know it, and am very thankful to them for the happiness they brought into what was otherwise honestly quite a depressing month. There is too much of a nothing-matters, lets smoke weed and drink and speak in slang that doesn’t even sound like English, lack of emphasis on tending to your appearance and using good manners type of attitude that I really cant wrap my head around, and it makes me feel very uncomfortable. As my good friend Bill once said to me in Germany (I get to see Bill today after not seeing him for 3 years! He is in Denver!) I don’t want to waste any time hanging out with people I don’t like. I second that, Bill. Life is too short, and I’m getting out of here sooner than later.

So that is that, but on the upside I am extremely excited about all of the projects I have lined up in the next few months. My ultimate goal is to have a fully mobile online income by April, so that I am free to travel when and where I want without necessarily needing to search for a new job.

I have mentioned before that I want to be making $500 per month from my blog by April; my blog income has been rapidly increasing and I think that I can achieve even more than that. I am going to completely re-do my eBook and create an updated and improved 2013 edition.

I plan to get an online writing job to supplement what I make from my blog. One of my lovely best friends has helped get through parts 1 and 2 of the interview process for a writing job within the company she works for, so I am crossing my fingers that that turns out well. If not, I still wont be discouraged. It will be harder to find a job on my own than to secure one I when I have an employee recommendation, but it is an important goal to me and I will do it.

I also would like to finally work on publishing a children’s book I wrote, called Seafrost. Another wonderful best friend of mine took the time to edit it for me (a job she is professionally trained to do), and I have avoided working on it since then because the task of finding a publisher seemed extremely daunting and difficult. However, I finally decided that I would prefer to self-publish this book, so I have a lot of work to do illustrating it and figuring out how to create a digital children’s picture eBook.

There are plenty of more little things on my to-do list but they are mostly blog maintenance and promotion so I wont bore you with them. But it is such a long list that I am finding it difficult to motivate myself to start. I have tried many things to try to motivate myself in the past, including writing things down on calendars, creating a picture-frame white board, trying to form consistent work habits, following schedules, allowing myself a break to do something fun between every task- and nothing really helps for more than a few days or so. So I’m going to try a new method: the reward system. I’m going to try to think of a few things I can do or buy for myself that would make me really happy and give them to myself as gifts when I’ve accomplished a certain goal. Hopefully this turns out well; I imagine it will because I’m already excited to get these rewards even though I have no idea what they are yet.

So I’m not sure what my next travel adventure will be; I know I will be back in Alabama often to visit my boyfriend and my friends there, but to be honest I am getting a little tired. Traveling is a lot of work and it is constant change, and if you want to travel you need to re-adjust and learn constantly. There is always a huge influx of new information, and that is a good thing- that is why I and so many people travel, but I want old information for a while. I want to be in a familiar and comfortable place with my family and friends to recharge and reach my income goals. Once I do that, I’m not sure what I will do. It is possible I will want to find more jobs in exotic places, or I might stick to shorter trips like the one I took with my Poppy to Africa. If that were the case, I could see some wonderful places like the Amazon rainforest, Machu Picchu, Lake Tahoe, and the US National Parks without having to become employed at these places.

That’s my plan. I feel like this is a turning point in my life adventure, and if I can accomplish all the tasks I set out to within the next few months, I will be well set up to travel in the future and at some point, if I can make a good passive income, I will be well set up to spend a whole lot of time with my future family.

Wish me luck. Although I think I made the right choice leaving, I am still sad to leave behind the mountain and the few friends I’ve made, and to miss the opportunity to learn how to snowboard. Alas, there will be another time for that.