Waking Up from Winter

Hello friends,
I figured I’d do one of those rare written updates regarding the travels (or lack thereof) as well as the drop in videos. So many thoughts and ideas have come and gone yet nothing really happened. But THAT is about to change. Or I guess, more accurately is about to resume as it was.

Being more or less stuck here in Nova Scotia for the winter while Covid ran rampant throughout Canada and the US allowed for many thoughts and ideas of shifting gears to creep in and establish roots. Thoughts of selling the trailer and settling down, finding and renovating a house, or is it just a home base, buying land to “camp on”, buying a building and creating a gallery/studio/apartment, selling everything and trying to travel abroad more etc. Hey look a squirrel!

Well as absent as I’ve been from this blog, the Youtube channel, life in general (haven’t taken much for photos in 6 months) I’ve decided that I’m NOT done with this crazy RV life, with travels and seeing what I can find to photograph. As winter crested here I was already going stir crazy. Snow, cold, a bit of melting, snow, cold and repeat and I’m done. Rollins is going nuts, I’m going nuts it’s time to focus and move forward. As I was looking into other directions and paths to steer my life I got more confused. I tried a couple of things to see if they would “take off” and give me some sort of sign that I should follow that particular path and nothing happen. A few of these ideas flopped so bad out of the gate it was a blatant “well that’s a no!”.

Then one day, in my email inbox was a mail from Youtube. I have finally passed the 1000 subscriber mark AND already had the required watch hours also needed to monetize my channel. Granted, it’s been 4 years coming, mostly of my own fault, dropping out of posting regularly doesn’t help. Usually those dropouts were finance based but this last time was actually more due to Covid and the lack of travels. So I took a good look at where I’m at, and what I really wanted to do and decided that I’m not about to settle down anywhere yet. I started to stretch my brain on the way I thought of what would make a good video and what I didn’t want to bother with. I started to realize that some of the best Youtubers (albeit younger, cooler and more professional) really do share more, they step out of their boundaries often, switching gears to see what happens. So I have some new ideas to add to my channel and keep things going. More on that later.

The downside to this 1000 Subscriber milestone is that my videos will now have ads. As much as I’m happy to at least be a position to potentially start making a few dollars I feel bad. That said, I think most of you realize that many of us Youtubers put a lot of work into our videos and rely on those ad dollars to keep us going. It’s a catch 22. If I had the followers of some of these bigger channels I’d never have to stop because of finances, I could travel, shoot and explore MORE. But alas, I’m still dedicating a lot of my time to building websites and graphics “for the man” to keep my head about the surface, but maybe that will change with a change of mindset. So here we are.

What’s next? Well I have a few videos started, some are going to be a little techy/nerdy as I’m going to delve into the camera gear I use etc etc but there’s also a few surprises coming and I’m happy to say the quality of my videos should get better as this year progresses. I’ll be touching on all this in more depth in my videos coming soon.

Anyway. Was just updating the video posts here as there was a dozen that hadn’t been added yet, all from last year (bad monkey) and I decided to write a little note to let you all know I’m still here.

Rollins is well, I’m good. New things are coming and thank you all for being here.

W&R