Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Firstly, I apologize to anyone who has been reading my blog, even if that is mostly family right now. Hi Mom. If I want to be a writer, and I do, I need to write. Every day. Which, for an activity that I profess to love so dearly, is really hard. I'm not sure why, because I do enjoy writing, but it's so very hard to get myself to do it. I think it's the starting that's the big issue. It's so much easier to just go to youtube or netflix, throw on a video and just zone out watching it. It requires actual effort to sit myself down in front of the computer with a cup of coffee, some nice music, and write down my thoughts and feelings for anyone to read, ever. It's a little bit intimate, if you think about it.
But I digress. I'm sure most of you who are reading this right now already know where I am and what I'm doing, but for those who don't I will give a quick update. Also it looks good for archiving purposes.
I'm back in Canada. The whole Au Pair gig just wasn't for me, and even though I found Germany to be utterly brilliant, along with the rest of Europe, it just wasn't a lifestyle that fit my needs or wants. It sucks, because I kind of feel like I wasted 3 months of not only my time, but my host families time, but in the end it was an amazing experience and I will remember it forever. That's mostly what matters, right?
So for pretty much the whole month of August, after I decided I wouldn't become an Au Pair for a year, I travelled around Europe. I went to 9 countries, 10 if you count my starting point of Germany, over the course of 26 days. It was hectic, and amazing, and stressful, and relaxing, and left my completely and utterly broke. Barely a cent to my name. My sister seems to think that I got to live out the "broke traveller" experience, but to be honest it adds a lot of stress when you need to watch every spent dollar like a hawk to make sure you'll have enough money to make it home. Luckily I didn't run into any disasters of a costly nature, or I may have been utterly boned.
But I made it back alright, and luckily there is work at home for me to make some money, pay off my mountainous credit card debts, and get my life back on track. What that track is or where it leads is still yet to be discovered, but I've always been a more of a play it by ear type of person anyway.
So what does that mean for my writing? And for the blog? Well, driving a truck is unpredictable work. I could have several day long stretches of absolutely nothing, and then I could have stretches of working 6 am until midnight. Both of these have already happened in the short time I've been back, so it doesn't look like the oil patch has gotten any more organized over the summer of 2016. Wishful thinking I suppose.
What I do have going for me is that I'm on shift work now. 8 days on and 6 days off as of right now. So if I go 8 full days without updating the blog, fear not, I've probably just had a shitty week at work. This means though that every 8 days I will reliably have 6 days off to work on my writing, the blog, and plenty of other stuff.
As for the future of the blog, I want to do lot's of things with it. I'm going to be reviewing the backpack I used while I was in Europe, sometime in the future. I want to do list posts, philosophical, complaint posts, happy posts, etc. Plus there will always be the good ol' fallback post of what I did that day or just whatever is on my mind at the moment.
This post was a tad chaotic, without much substance I suppose, but at least I got one up after several months of unplanned hiatus, and have laid out the plans for the future. Expect more to come. And I'll be getting pictures up at some point, I promise!