One of the benefits of being in isolation due to Covid is that I've had plenty of time to rediscover the things I use to love to do. I know I haven't written here in a long time but I've been around. In my last post I mentioned I finally graduated with my Ph.D. after 15 years of being in college. After that I basically shut my computer and went off to have fun for a bit. Now that I have finished such a huge achievement I can relax and live again.
Rediscovering Television
It's been years since I've binge watched an entire TV series. I use to love movies and TV but the past three years I haven't had time with my dissertation always looming over me. I watched an entire movie for the first time in a year and a half. Since August, I finally got to watch Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Schitt's Creek, The Haunting of Bly Manner, and The 100. Being in isolation, I've watched more television that I have in years. It's been really nice to lose myself in a story.
I Dyed My Hair Purple
I got tired of seeing those gray hairs popping up everywhere. One of the benefits of being in social isolation is I could experiment a little. I went purple for a few weeks using a temporary dye. Then, I went blue. At the moment I am enjoying black. My hair in naturally brown but over the years as I get more gray the brown looks very light. It's nice having super dark hair with no gray for a while.
This Years Garden Was A Flop
I had no idea Tennessee could get so much rain in summer. We had so much rain it destroyed most of my crops by causing lots of rot on leaves. I got only one tomato out of 20 plants, extremely small potatoes, and my corn grew short and the corn cobs grew only a few inches long.
Little Rabbit Turned 4!!!
I'm still in denial my baby turned 4 in September. She's so much fun to be around. I've spent my time in isolation enjoying her and how cute she is at this age. Right now she's very into princess dresses and her toy dump truck. She's both a girly girl and a tomboy.
Still Have 14 Ducks
I'm still tending to my feathered friends. Back in March I hatched my first ducklings and my flock grew from 6 to 14. My two blind ducks Pip and Puddles are both in the house right now. They somehow caught upper respiratory infections and are enjoying the warmth of the house. They will be fine and are taking their medicine. I really enjoy my ducks and am glad to spend time with them.
I've been working really hard trying to build a brand for my homestead revolving around my ducks. Since March, with all the Covid shutdowns and now just staying home in self-isolation I'm focusing my energy on building something with our homestead. Back in March I actually had a waiting list for hatching eggs and ducklings because people thought my ducks were so beautiful. Next spring I'll be hatching ducklings again and hope to sell hatching eggs online. I figured marketing my homestead on FB, Pinterest, etc was a good start to building something. I've written a lot of blog articles, DIY posts, etc all tied to my homesteading pages.
Puddles Is All Grown Up
Writing Again For Fun and Work
Now that I'm done with school I am writing again because I want to and for fun. I've mainly been over on Hubpages these days. Pretty much every article I post gets featured and I'm getting a lot of traffic so hopefully that translates into a nice passive income. I've been doing the freelance writing thing as well trying to earn some type of income while Covid is ruining the job market. It stinks I got my Ph.D. right after Covid started. Local colleges have all experienced financial cutbacks and aren't hiring but downsizing. So at the moment my degree I worked so hard on is useless. In the meantime I check the job boards everyday and do as much freelancing as I can.
Well, that's a brief update on life. 2020 has been a crazy year and there is so much I could write about. Maybe I will at some point now that I can have fun as a writer again.
Sounds like it's been the perfect time for some time off for you!
Plenty of time to put that qualification to use later on.
I just checked out hub pages, looks interesting.
I'm mainly thinking FFS why hasn't Hive got marketing like this?
I also note that if those authors featured are the highest earners (which they probably are) then they're getting a pretty crap cut from the ads).
Hubpages is working for me slowly. I wrote so many good articles for steemit that are going to waste now I'm actually just transferring those so not a lot of work. I'm also using old college papers that are wasting away on my laptop. Hubpages you get terrible ad revenue rates but if you write an article popular enough you'll earn a passive income for years off of it. I have 2 articles I've earned $50 every 2 to 3 months for five years now because they get a lot of views. One is a copycat recipe to a restaurant that goes viral on facebook around when the Super Bowl happens every year because it's a popular food then so I earn even more around that time.
In the past month I'd added 30 old steemit articles and they are all getting fairly good traffic to start off with so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They also allow amazon affiliate links in your articles and I've had some people buy high priced tablets so I've gotten a good amount of product placement money at times. I don't have my own blog so hubpages is kind of a good starting place while I teach myself how to make money blogging.
Well it sounds like you've got the potential to up that to a couple of hundred dollars which is well worth it.
If you're going to set up you're own blog I'd recommend making it very focused, say on one academic area - or subject rather and stick with that, Google likes concentrated topics.
I uses WP.com and just pay the annual subscription which is around $250 a year, worth it for me.
I sell my own resources off the back of it.
Wow so glad to find a post from you - long time. Glad all is going well - sometimes we just need to take a breath and find the good
Hello! Nice to see you. It's been a nice break. I'm glad to be having fun again.
OMG the lil Rabbit is 4! That is shocking lol. Hey congrats Dr Marxrab!