Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Last time I wrote, I said the week had been tough. I posted it early and said there was more to come about Saturday. Saturday I thought the project was over and I thought that was the message I had to post next. It’s been a rough two weeks, and this post is late because it was hard to write.
In the back of my head, there’s a part of me that still thinks, maybe the project should be cancelled and I just refuse to see it. The odds of making our financial goals are long because we don’t have a following. That makes our slim advertising budget a more decisive part of the picture, and from what I’ve experienced, most advertising is directed at getting clicks that produce advertising revenue rather that the clicks that potentially lead to sales.
What do I mean by that? I follow the National Park Service. The other day I logged on to FB and there were over 20 different ads for the same NPS event lined up consecutively in my feed. I went away and came back three times before that stopped happening. Maybe it was a glitch, but I’m sure every one of those ads counted as a view or impression, and while I am an interested potential customer, showing me the event 60 times is not going to make me able to cross 4 states to be there. I’m more than a little worried that I could blow through what is a lot of money to me and have my advertisements dispersed just as uselessly. Our budget doesn’t have that space in it. Or worse, they could focus on sending ads to my friends on FB. My FB friends are friends, they aren’t a following, and while I will post about the project and appreciate any support they give, how would they feel about me if running FB ads puts me in front of them the way they put the Park Service in front of me?
On top of that, the job market is still hiring big time and I’ve been out of work on family leave far too long. Unless we more than beat the odds and are hugely overfunded, this project isn’t going to be a paying gig for me. When I first planned it and started writing here, I expected to be done before now, and before I felt the level of pressure to earn income that I now have. But that isn’t what my body and life were up to. It took longer for me to be ready to make it a success.
The computer breaking was a last straw. I’m not sure I even mentioned that the crank on Russ’s bike finally gave it up. We bought a refurbed vintage Schwinn last night for Russ to ride while he teaches himself to rebuild his Giant (incidentally we learned last night that Giant built the Schwinn too, just before going out on their own to become the worlds largest maker of bicycles). We were inching toward needing to update/re-script the video before all of this happened, these things happening all together got us there.
I got a bit of a reset when I went in to have the computer looked at. The date of a warranty repair made me realize I hadn’t been working this as long as it felt. I’ve worked at this harder than was practical to the rest of my life for almost two years now, but the Blitzkrieg of personal, national and world level events really stretched the sense of time and it felt like so much longer. Instead of the old normal “OMG I can’t believe that was ten years ago, it feels like yesterday!” the new norm is “That was last year? It feels like a lifetime ago.”
So, because we’ve worked long and hard, but have not yet put this out in front of people to promote it in any way other than just writing the blog we decided not to just end the project before it got it’s chance. We’re going to rework the video as soon as one of us has a computer that will do the job and actually see if we can make this happen. Reworking the video will go faster on this side of the learning curve with more of the images sorted out and the end result will be better. I feel a lot of pressure to get this out there and move forward, but many of the delays have improved our ability to run the project well and produce a better result.
Training
It was a terrible training week. There were weather and other problems. That “other” category is taking time off the back end of our lives. It’s been pilling up higher and deeper for some time. Occasionally, I allude to a problem that I don’t explain. I never know how to handle that here. This is where I talk about project progress and challenges. There is a big problem presenting challenges that impact every week, and I say little or nothing about it. I don’t want to miss a target without saying why. I don’t want to be mysterious or vague book it and I don’t want to go too far down the “TMI” road either. So, I wrote a bit about how that problem effected us this week with the intent of making it a one time event. It took 13 paragraphs without mentioning any feelings.
And then I deleted it.
A neighbor I had in my 20s went to marriage counseling and said that they told her that the grass always does look greener… but, if all the problems that existed were clipped to a rope like laundry and people could choose which problems would be their own, everyone would run for the problems they already had because those were the ones they had learned to deal with. That’s really been helpful for me to think about through the years. I’m not so sure it’s true about the current problem though. I don’t know that we’ve learned to deal with this or that there is any good solution. I’ve always found it easier, emotionally, to deal with acts of chance than with some acts of human nature. I think what I can say is this. Single working Moms need help when they find themselves on the other end of an acrimonious litigious custody arrangement with someone who relentlessly stretches personal and parental rights so far that they harm the child and her family.
So, we’re just going to keep trying to learn to deal with this and rise above as best we can.
Until next time, we’ll see you on the trail, and have a glorious day!