January 16, 2020

What Happened To The Wise Sloth?

By wise sloth

Thewisesloth.com has been down since July 2018, and I’d like to explain why that happened, what I’ve been up to, and what my plans are for the future.

In the spring of 2018 my blog was getting 3,000 views per day, and I started getting offers from ad agencies asking if they could put advertisements on my site. I ignored them for a while because I didn’t want to sell my soul, but I was living in Houston working part time as a massage therapist, which gave me enough free time to write, but I was breaking my body and only making enough money to cover living expenses.

So I decided to sell my soul and put ads on my site. However, WordPress only allows you to use their ad service, which you have to apply for. I applied and never heard back from them. After the next ad agency contacted me, I accepted their offer and moved my site to BlueHost.com, which would allow me to put the necessary coding into my blog. This required me to spend a month frantically copying, pasting, editing my blogs, and optimizing my SEO on the new platform. Then, after all that work, the agency told me their advertisers didn’t want to be associated with a site that gives sex advice and talks about controversial topics. So they withdrew their offer.

A month later the SSL security certificates on my site expired, and I found out that (unless I paid more money) I would have to manually renew them every month otherwise my viewers would get a security warning that my site wasn’t safe. That turned out to be all too true, because two months later my site got infected with malware. To make matters worse, Bluehost only allows you to use their malware removal service, which costs $50 per month on top of what I was already paying them for a site that doesn’t make any money.

At the same time all this was going on, I was preparing to quit my job and move to Oregon to escape the big city life and get back to nature. I was planning on vlogging the adventure and waxing philosophically about following your dreams and yadayada, but I couldn’t afford to keep my site active, and I was overwhelmed with anxiety from the trip anyway. So I left the site down and focused on my real life.

I wish I could/would have shared my adventure, because it was pretty wacky. I drove aimlessly around Oregon for 2 months living out of my SUV and staying at free camp sites in the mountains that were choked with smoke from forest fires.

After traveling all over Oregon, I finally decided I liked Southwest Oregon best. I found a cafe with free wifi and used https://wwoof.net/ to find an internship at a farm that “paid” room and board in exchange for part time work. I stayed in a 100 year old farm house that used to be a gift shop and spent the next month and a half picking vegetables, taking care of animals, chopping down blackberry bushes, making animal skin parchment paper, and watching Youtube videos about homesteading.

After feeling out Southwest Oregon, I decided I really wasn’t impressed with it. Don’t get me wrong. The mountains were beautiful, but the civilization was frankly trashy. I decided if I was going to have to live in a ghetto behind a strip mall, I could do that for a fraction of the price back in Houston. So I drove back to Texas and resumed my suburban life exactly where I left off. My old job even gave me a $1 raise to come back.

I could have reactivated The Wise Sloth at that time, but I still needed money in general. So I used my time to focus on building a tool that helps writers plot stories. Over the next six months I put hundreds of hours into the project, and it’s still hundreds of hours away from being finished.

In the summer of 2019, I was already fed up with Houston traffic again. So I decided to give the Pacific Northwest another shot and see what Washington had to offer. I left my job again, packed up my SUV, and headed North. This time I immediately found a farming internship North of Seattle at Baker’s Acres Family Farm. I lived out of their old RV and spent the next month and a half weeding, composting, pruning tomato plants, planting/picking vegetables, and dead-heading Fuchsias.

On the weekends I drove aimlessly around Washington searching for Utopia… or at least the closest thing in my price range. I finally found a place that came near enough to what I was looking for, but the cost of rent outpaced the wages I could make as a massage therapist.

During my trip I randomly reconnected with an old friend who inspects offshore oil pipelines using remote controlled submarines. He works part time and makes three times more money than a massage therapist without breaking his body. After talking to him about his career field, it didn’t take long to change my plans.

I packed up my SUV, bid farewell to Baker’s Acres Farm and drove literally all the way across America to the International Diving Institute in South Carolina. There, I got an apartment so deep in the ghetto that Pizza Hut wouldn’t deliver, and I spent the next month learning about remote controlled submarines.

Now I’m back in Houston looking for offshore work. As long as I only have to spend 6 months out of each year in Houston, I can cope with that. In the meantime, I’ll be saving every penny I can for my retirement homestead in the mountains where I can one day open a writer’s retreat for aspiring authors.

Now that I’m at a place in my life where I can take a breath and deal with my website, I decided to move it back to WordPress and just accept that I won’t be able to monetize it or give it a really flashy theme layout. So be it. I’m just going to let the website be basic and share wisdom for the sake of it like I originally intended 10 years ago.

I’m still planning on spending most of my upcoming free time focusing on building my plot structure tool, but I’ll still write blogs when I need to get something off my chest. I won’t be stressing over getting a post out every week though. I wish I could just devote my life to cataloging wisdom, but without a trust fund, that’s just not financially possible.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m still open to taking request for blog topics, but I’ll be spending half a year out on the ocean for the foreseeable future. So it may take a month for me to respond to E-mails.

If you liked this post, you may like these too:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 16th, 2020 at 2:11 pm and tagged with and posted in My life stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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