Since arriving at the city house for kid- and dog related activities, a bunch of appointments and a fun outing with Sonja, I haven’t done a stitch of work on any of my income streams.
It’s been rather pleasant. I don’t think I’ve taken a break like this in years.
While the still packed laptop taunts me from the kitchen island counter, I’ve been mentally strategizing what to cull and what to keep.
This has been an ongoing preoccupation since March. 😐
Being disconnected from the laptop has been helpful in directing my strategy, if for no other reason than to miss it. Whatever *it* represents.
Here’s what I’ve discovered during the disconnect:
I missed my Tarot and Oracle cards
Usually I travel with at least some of my cards. This time, however, I left them at the house in the subburbs.
But.
Not only do I enjoy playing with them to guide me in my internal thought processes, I also enjoy creating short videos and/or slide shows for other people sharing my energy readings. Much like prayer for the pious among us, these cards have given me an ability to tap into my spiritual, ever evolving intuition which until recently I was unaware existed within me.
When my mom came by to celebrate Tucker’s birthday, I asked her to bring me one deck from my room. She did and I happily read energies now, for myself and others, on TikTok and personally.
I miss writing but not publishing
This is a problem. If I don’t find a way to get comfortable with the publishing side of writing I may as well quit. And by publishing I don’t mean posts like this on a blog, I mean anthologies, books and collections of short stories. And maybe the memoir. Perhaps even the erotica. 😇
I don’t miss Medium
That platform has been an on-again-off-again pain in the ass, and although the followers come, I find a lot of the engagement there forced and insincere. I have met a couple of authors I really like but mostly, the platform bores me to tears so I’m culling that income stream.
Yes, I made some fluctuating coin over there. No, I won’t be buying a new car at this time with said coin. Maybe a cup holder for the car… Ha. 😛
I’ll keep the account as a non-income-stream option so I can tap into the few authors I enjoy, but I am no longer investing time into that platform.
TikTok and YouTube
I have begun a list of reasons why I enjoy these apps, what their potential is in terms of income stream, and whether or not they are sustainable.
This topic deserves a post of its own and when I’m ready, I’ll share more.
Blog
WordPress told me my capacity for images is at 70%. I was under the impression when I renew my platform I will gain new space for images.
Wrong.
Once you max out, the only way to get more space is to upgrade. I don’t see any benefit to upgrade from Premium, so that pisses me off a tad. What’s the benefit for me to pay more for features I don’t want or need just to get more space for selfies and Tucker pictures?
No more pictures in my blog posts, or at least not as many. If you want to see pictures, you’ll have to check Instagram (where I go in spurts with long breaks) or… I don’t know yet. I deleted twitter which sometimes features photos, and I may reactivate it back at some point. We’ll see.
Jewelry business
On break. Reinvention in progress. More later. I wanted to thank all of you for helping me brainstorm a new name. I think I’ve made a decision, finally, but I will hold off on sharing at the moment. Stay tuned.
Back to the disconnect
As is true for many of us, there isn’t ever really a true disconnect from screens, especially not when there’s kids in your orbit. Every single thing ever connected to them is electronically directed.
Take, for instance, a simple dentist appointment, which both my son and I had yesterday. There were emails and text messages confirming and requesting signatures and covid declarations, appointment changes and updates for further treatments (the kid, not me), consultations with insurance, communication with the dad about scheduling, and follow-up surveys about “how did we do today” which irritates me but I understand and grungingly fill them out.
Still, I’ve had a disconnect, of sorts, from my usual constant electronic push and propell forward. I’ve spent less time working, more time reading, and occasionally creating something fun on TikTok. I’m not on socials as much as I was before, I never check dating apps for fodder, I dropped the erotica blog (temporarily), and I don’t even spend a lot of time here, either.
But I did renew the blog for another year and the streamlining, and blogging, will continue in some capacity. I’ll share things here regularly as you know I do, but perhaps not as often as previously.
Thank you for sticking with me, for reading, and for enduring my wordy words. 🥰
See you in the comments.
Writer of Words etc 
Thank you for the update. It’s helpful writing your projects all over one page. You motivated me to do the same. I discovered I’m currently working on 9 different projects. No wonder I’m overwhelmed. I brainstormed on pen and paper, but soon I’ll organize them in a newsletter that will only be available for members who support me via buymeacoffee. Then I will choose 3 of those 10 to focus on during the coming month of August. The rest will go on the backburner until September when I will choose another 3 to focus on. My projects are somewhat interconnected to it may be hard to choose the top 3.
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Good on you for doing a digital clean up! It’s amazing how much we amass with the advent on the internet.
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Meh. Seriously. I started a list and I’m 4 pages in. Gonna purge most of it. 😉
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💗
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WP is a bit outdated in terms of how it does things. I don’t understand why you/we wouldn’t be able to pay for more storage for photos, as opposed to a whole nother package. That’s insane.
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That’s what many people want. I have zero desire to upgrade the entire platform, I just want more photo storage.
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I pay premium just for the extra image space (and even that is rapidly filling up). You might have noticed I have a tendency to post photos on my blog!
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Yes. And it’s such a nice supplement to the story telling…
We gotta make the effort to scale the pics. Ashley shows how in the comments.
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I’m glad to hear you plan on continuing your blog as I look forward to your posts, thoughts, musings. I just started a Medium account at the beginning of the year and have had little success? I thought it was me. Good to know I’m not the only one. Enjoy your weekend Claudette and your break from electronics. Hugs, C
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Thank you Cheryl.
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I’ve deleted old posts and images to keep the opportunity to post new images. It sucks but it is what it is.
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I read deleting old posts and images doesn’t free up space, but deleting drafts does. I think Ashley did a whole post on that to. Which makes zero sense but I’ve lost the will to investigate. 🤷♀️
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Freed up space for me, because I had no clue that you could resize in wp
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Very cool to know.
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The whole media thing with WP is aggravating. It’s why I started making the slide shows of all my pictures on YouTube. I just post the slide shows generally🤷🏼♀️
Our lives NEED to include some disconnected time. I’m glad you’re taking some🥰
My life has been wonkier than usual lately🤪 nothing major, but it gets ridiculous after a while and I have to laugh. It also keeps me away from rabbit holes on the interwebs.
The Universe doesn’t need to be keep throwing banana peels in my path… I get it… I get it🤦🏼♀️🤣🤣🤣🤣
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I put my banana peel in a mason jar with water. 😀. Supposed to be really good plant food.
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You can save a lot of storage space if you resize image files. Pics I take with my phone are 4000×3000 pixels, I resize them down to 800 pixels wide, and the file size drops from a few MB down to a few hundred KB.
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Do you do this with a specific app?
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I sometimes use the Preview app in MacOS, but you can also do it in the browser version of WordPress.
If you go to My Sites > Media, in the top right corner there’s a “View” drop-down menu, and you can switch to “classic view.” From there:
-Find and open the image you want to resize
-Beneath where the image is displayed, click the button that says “Edit Image”
-There will be a box that says “Scale Image”; you can enter the width you want, and it will auto-generate the height to keep the same width:height ratio
-Click the button that says “Scale”
-Click the “Update” button over on the right side of the screen.
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So helpful. Thank you very much! 💖
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💕
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I’m also done with Medium. What a waste of time!
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It was less than inspiring with a few rare, delightful surprises. 🤷♀️
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I have reached the max on my blog and can no longer post pictures. Just remember to scale down your pictures (size and quality) before you add them to the blog to save space. This will work wonders.
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Yes I read that. Thank you for the tip and reminder.
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