Day 290 of 1827: Changing Things Up

I’ve got a new roommate! For the next couple of months, anyway.

In preparation for his arrival, we hired a woman to give the apartment a good cleaning. She did a thorough job — she even put that little thing into the toilet tank that makes the water turn blue.

Huh. It looks kind of like mouthwash now.

I wonder….

Nope.

As day 300 approaches, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how much Five Years Abroad has evolved… and in such a short time.

What started out as a (relatively) simple 5-year journey has turned into a pretty significant undertaking. I’ve got a serious blog, a Facebook following, a podcast series, I’ve been doing interviews… and by all accounts, we’re just getting started!

And I absolutely love how both the project and myself have grown beyond anything I could have predicted! I am doing things now that I never thought I would ever do in a million years back when I was living in my country of origin… and it is awesome!

But all of that has come at a cost.

Coming up with a blog post for every single day is a monumental challenge — and it’s difficult to stay motivated when every morning I wake up “behind” on my blog and can’t “queue up” posts for future days (after all, I can’t write about adventures that I haven’t had yet!).

Plus, it’s gotten quite a bit more difficult to have adventures lately. I’m working on growing my freelance development business right now, and that means long hours at the office pretty much every single day.

Let’s be honest; as much as I enjoy staring at a 17″ computer screen for 10-12 hours a day… it’s rather challenging to write about that experience in an entertaining and educational way.

Well, it might be a little educational; there would be one lesson: Don’t spend 10-12 hours a day staring at a 17″ computer screen!

But I digress. Frequently. There I go again.

To keep things interesting (and to keep me sane), I’m going to take a short break from the Five Years Abroad blog, and when I return, I’m going to change things up a little bit:

Coming up with something to write about every day is simply too much work. Instead, I’m only going to post when I actually have something fun/interesting/useful/amazing/etc. to write about. I expect that will be 2-3 times per week.
I enjoy writing about my adventures, but I also want to start adding some articles and more “actionable information” posts into the mix. Yes, I know I am totally contradicting what I said in Five Years AbroadCAST Episode 0. What can I say; it’s good to be the king (warning: NSFW-ish).

I’m still continuing with Five Years AbroadCAST, and there’s a couple more projects coming up that I think you’re really going to like (:

See you on day 300!