Officially Unemployed…Let the Traveling Begin

Unemployed

So as of Thursday I was told I will no longer be working for my company.  It was not a huge surprise, but still somewhat unsettling.  I do not quite have the amount of money I would like to have to be able to travel without worrying about money and my student loans.

Things to Think About

Tomorrow I am heading for Michigan to see my family and visit my grandmother who is sick.  While I am there I will think about what my next step is.  I am thinking in July or August I will head to  south America.  July would be preferable time wise because that gives me a July and August and part of September to get through Colombia and Ecuador and then I can be in Peru at Machu Picchu at the end of September for my birthday.  However, August would give me more time to save up money (if I can find a source of income, I guess there is always unemployment but that is not a lot of money).  Plus flights are dirt cheap to Cartagena in August, $240 one way from Detroit and $115 one way from Miami from Spirit.

Also, I need to grieve the ending of one passage and celebrate the beginning of another.  I forgot how the much power grieving can give to the celebration of new.  I was not previously celebrating the end of where I was in life so I was not being reborn into my new life. That is why I felt I was not moving on i think.

So I have things to think about.

Maps

In order to visualizing my thinking process, I am putting together a Google Map of places I want to visit.  I just started so it only has a few pages, but you can add suggestions to it!  This map is open to suggestions.  Places I want to go or I am thinking of going are in green.  If you could add in suggested sites, transportation, hostels, etc in colors OTHER than green, that would be great!  I will make another map of my final destinations and projected path once I get going!

I added a few pages to the website for Maps.  On the top Menu under Travel you can access my Maps page and under the Maps page is my South America Suggestions Map Page.  Also, I am looking for help trying to figure out how to embed the Google Map to my blog page.  Google’s instructions are here, however, when I try to follow them WordPress does not accept the HTML and just changes it to a click-able URL link.  Am I just not allowed to do that on WordPress?

Loose Ends

One of the things I am doing now is tying up all those loose ends I should have taken care of long ago. This includes getting shots and doctors visits in before my insurance ends, visiting friends, cleaning out my car and doing one last downgrade of all my “stuff” that i have left, getting rid of my cell phone and getting a cheaper pay as you go plan (anyone have suggestions on where to find an unlocked gsm phone?), deciding what to do about a computer (mine is so heavy), and setting up my house sitting profiles.

I have not joined a site yet.  An article written by Nora Dunn, the Professional Hobo, has a discount to Trusted House Sitter. I did, however, put up the recommendations I got a long time ago from friends and family I have house sat for in the past (well I have two of them).

House Sitting Profile

So, if you need someone to stay in your house while you travel and watch your puppy or kitty, here are:

My house sitting profile

Sarah H. Recommendation

Kathy M. Recommendation

You can also find a link to those pages at the top menu on the right hand side!

So Many Changes

I hope you can all keep up with all the changes to the blog and my life, because I am having trouble with it!

 

Using what you have

(You will have to excuse the long wait between posts.  I have written this pose 4 times and it keeps getting eaten by WordPress.  After which I got mad at WordPress and stopped posting. I however have a few posts written.)

One man’s trash s another man’s treasure

I have been upcycling physical items for a while: repurposing other people’s old clothes into bags and malfunction electronics into something useful.  however, when i started a dedicated yoga practice and deciding to take tome off for travel that I realized the concept can translate to more than stuff in your life.  The concept can apply to any emotion or circumstance you encounter.

If you do not attach yourself to the emotion or circumstance you encounter, you can turn anything around to what you want.  You can turn your anger into a passion for change.  you can turn a horrible job into opportunity for w better job.

Turn your own trash into your own treasure

if yo turn the concept of one object having different meanings to different people to the concept that you can change your own perspective of anything, you really can do anything.  it’s not the same as don’t take no as an answer, its making that no work in a way that aids you.

Why the sudden epiphany?  I have been trying to figure out a way to add cohesion to my blog, my travel goals, and my professional goals.  I don’t like travel blogs that are just geared towards telling about travel tips or a certain type of travel who expect people to want to help fund there travel or slog through all of their affiliate ads.  I like a focused blog that is entertaining and easy to traverse without opening twenty windows of ads.  Nora at The Professional Hobo is one of my favorites.

How to do that with my background, experience and education and focus it on what I want to add to my life Is a completely different angle though.  I work in water and wastewater engineering with a little environmental engineering on the side.  But then it hit me that green buildings, water resources, ecotourism, etc. are all very chic and I am qualified to at least enter the field except I have no portfolio.  In the next thought I also realized that my company is always looking for people to write articles for local magazines and papers about projects we build and anything industry related.  So here i have written my first article and had the abstract accepted about green building (the one i work in).

So I am taking a job that has continued way past its prime and turning it into an opportunity for growth.  It was strange, the day I realized this a friend told me she was reading a book titled “When Everything Changes, Change Everything.”  I have only read the first few pages but it has a lot of the same concepts in it.  It’s beyond not seeing life as a challenge but seeing the solutions in what is presented to you, they are not good or bad but they just are.

So here I have added a few more tools to my traveling tool belt.  And in addition to traveling I might be posting about environmental and water issues where ever it is that I am.