A trip back in time: so what happened to 2020? And 2019 as well?!

HOLD ON, it's not going to be one of those virus posts!

I'm trying to do a little recap before making an attempt to continue forward.

Let's quickly backtrack to mid-2018. About then I wrote that post: Why I've stopped posting and what's next - the questions in there are still valid and still there's not an answer to them.

In late 2018 my wife, @bghandmade, took over the blogging part, thanks to a new phone and a Steem app. She did great and persisted for quite some time before giving up. The posts are still all up, if anyone is up for nice photos from our garden and general life.

In the mean time, we became members of the Homesteaders Co-op and even opened up shop in an online shop platform developed by @sagescrub. That platform and the discord server are now gone (just as Homesteaders Online before and other Steem communities).

Mid-2019 I posted another large question that bugged me for almost two years, namely How does anyone use Steem as an income source?. That, too, remains an open question with no satisfactory answers.

In early 2020, the Patriko app we used for posting basically died and the wife gave up the blogging part. So I discovered a new app, eSteem (now Ecency but it works with Hive, not Steem) and started using that. And it worked great up until the end of March.

When all hell broke loose.

No, wait, I didn't mean the fact I had my 40th birthday!

Nor the joyful occasion of our third child being born!

You know what I mean :) We got locked down hard and with 0 warning. On the day before the lockdown I was with some friends putting up a chainlink fence for a pal, so we can protect his baby plants nursery from rogue sheep (I know how that sounds!). On the actual first day of the lockdown, the wife started her labor - the baby was on the way!

So yeah, from there it was a roller-coaster.

First the lockdown was so severe that we were not allowed to even visit our garden nearby, which is our property. At some point we decided to fake it till we make it and just piled 3 kids and dry food for 2 weeks and somehow passed the checkpoint and we ended up in our unfinished house! With a month-old baby! And no running indoor water! And no indoor toilet or a bath!

And the really funny part is... we were not allowed back in the city!

So we improvised - "furniture" out of scrap pallets, indoor compost toilet, recycled trashed sink, outdoor shower with sprinkler hose, inflatable mattresses and so on, and so on. We were thinking - we'll survive somehow. But something different happened...

WE THRIVED!

The kids became wild and free and calm, we spent our days out in the garden and often fell asleep in front of the fire, talking about the future, all of us were healthy and happy, the garden got some love, friends started to jealously talk about the good live we're living while the world was ablaze with the virus.

We don't have a TV, we don't read the papers, we don't listen to the radio. So we're in a bubble of happiness.

Of course that did not leave much room for blogging or online social life other than sporadic chats in the @naturalmedicine discord but the gardening crowd over there is very thin. And when I tried to re-start blogging, I dropped my phone and the camera module cracked. And with jobs being closed and savings running low, a new phone had to wait.

On top of that, the whole Steem<>Hive thing happened, it was really hard to keep tabs on it with the pandemic and the move and the baby and everything. So basically I just retreated to a more offline life.

Fast forward a few months. It's now 2021 and spring is around the corner. It's about the same time I stopped blogging last year. Armed with a new phone and new app and new computer, just in case, I'm ready to try again.

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Hat tip @nateonsteemit for the pro advice of cross posting content on Steem and Hive and monetizing the higher value Steem/SBD; Steem up from 15c to 50c+ and SBD up to almost 10USD from 1-2USD. I sure can use the income, as we busted through all our savings by making the house livable to a certain extent.

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I'll probably intermix 2020 and 2021 photos, as the cyclical nature of... well, Nature, allows it. So you'll get a sense of two years at the same time. Starting with spring very soon. But first, snow.

We've had a fresh dumping last week and a bit more is expected in the next couple of days.

It's a good thing, but why - I'll let you ponder and will probably explain in a future post!

Thank you all for reading and if anyone feels inclined to repost or recommend the post to a curation initiative, you have my thanks in advance! I promise I'll write shorter posts further on ;)

Cheers!