Gone West

So I won the listserve lottery just after moving across the country. Here is a short version of the story. This summer my husband and I quit our jobs and moved from the Midwest to the Northwest. I'd been missing mountains something terrible during my 16 year tenure in the flatlands, and this year the time was right for us to make the move. In some ways the plan was taking shape over the last several years, but really came into focus the last 12-18 months.

We did not have jobs waiting for us, at least not in the traditional sense. But we no longer want to have jobs be the primary driver in deciding where we live and when we could travel. Our goal is to cultivate location independent sources of income (we do still need income.. there is no trust fund we can fall back on). Before we quit our jobs we cultivated freelance consulting work that would give us a foundation to build on and we worked to have at least a years worth of comfortable living expenses in our savings account.

Our longer term goal is to have a home base but to be able to spend 3, 6, 12 months in other locations learning and working with different people in different environments.

My work focuses on community engagement and helping groups develop collective decision making practices. My husband is a technology writer, though his first love is radio. You can find one of his projects by searching for Radio Survivor.

I'm interested in hearing from people who have experiences with working freelance or as a contingent worker (by choice); and from people who have made decisions that some considered risky but just felt right to you.

Also, tell me about where you live (or where you have lived) and what is great about it, or why it should be avoided... I'm always looking for the next place for a new adventure.

Thanks to the folks at The Listserve for running this great experiment, and thanks to Jenny B for turning me on to it!

all the best,

Ellen K.
radicallibrarian[AT]gmail.com
Portland, OR

Comments

Post a Comment

Favorites

This is a puzzle.

Beyond this message a challenge awaits; In the listserve, no links are allowed, what a cruel fate! The first clue must be deciphered by ROT 8. . Let me know and just email if your brain needs a spark Your first clue is just after this punctuation mark / dsoqwj vwxwfvafy lge jgtafkgf af lg cadd s egucafytajv Listserve Puzzle listservepuzzle[AT]gmail.com
Read more

21,612 is a lot

Hi, everyone. I'm a teenaged girl. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I know much about the world. I'm 18, a freshman in college, and I struggle every day trying to see into the future: into what might be, where I might go. Recently I've decided that my destiny in life is to be a high-school biology teacher, but ask me again later and perhaps that will have changed. One thing I feel passionate about is body modification. Somehow my standards of beauty have developed in a way that put piercings, tattoos, implants and scarification at the forefront. However, my parents have threatened to cut off their funding for my education if I modify myself in any way. I already have piercings, and though my family will never see them due to their private locations, I would love to be able to share this important part of my life with them and express myself through modification in a more public way. Essentially, they have rejected my lifestyle, and through this, they have ...
Read more

Tiny wings

Hi all, I want to write about a subject that is very close to my heart - bees! I started bee keeping last year, and have two colonies right now. These two already managed to supply my family and my friends with more than enough honey, and keeping the bees is a tremendously satisfying activity. They smell so good, and are very tidy animals, and are just very, very interesting overall. The insects' way of dealing with the world is just so very different from how we as mammals approach it - it seems almost alien. Anyways, what is probably most impressive is the workload these little animals deal with. For one kilo of honey, they visit 4 million flowers, and fly a distance equivalent of more than 4 times around the earth. Think about that for a second. And then, if you start to think about how they "furniture" their housing themselves by the wax they sweat out, how they can control temperature inside the hive to the tenth of a degree, how they collectively make decisions i...
Read more