We decided to stay another day. Shannon's idea. I thought about it and liked it. I'm in no hurry.
Took a cold plunge in the river yesterday. Three minutes at 56 degrees. Good medicine. I always feel better afterwards. Simple as that. Love having it right out my door. Used my new hiking poles to steady myself on the rocks.
Woke up at 7am this morning, my body said no, and I slept until 10. Unusual for me. I felt like I'd had alcohol or something, but of course I hadn't. I wonder if it was the chicken.
Yesterday I took care of the subscribers from my old Ghost blog. Paid subscribers to the original now have a free lifetime membership to this one. I feel much better having that resolved.
What's clearly on my plate today is a pile of video editing. That's the big bottleneck. Someone once told me you learn to shoot by editing, and that's been true. Every time I edit I'm not only getting better at the software, I'm getting a clearer picture of how to shoot. One of my favorite videos I've made is Jed and the Splinter. A little slice of life, real, beginning middle and end. I just turned on the camera and the video happened. I want to make more like that. I think the one I made yesterday might be in that family.
I was going to jump in the river and went looking for my water shoes, the perfect ones for wild cold plunging, gripping and secure. I looked through the entire van. Waited a while and looked again. No luck. This is what I consider the number one worst thing about van life: the fishing expedition. Something I know is in here has disappeared into a black hole of time and energy. So after the second search I turned on the camera and documented the whole thing. The Dreaded Fishing Expedition. I won't spoil the ending. But it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. All on one camera. Should be an easy edit, a simple quick video. Exactly the kind I want to be making.
This time tomorrow I'll be at some of my favorite hot springs. The kind where, as Steven says, you can go nudie boots. Seventy dollars to camp overnight, which gets you a 36 hour soaking window, 9am check-in to 9pm the following day. I intend to use about a third of that. Then it's on to Telluride.
It's an interesting moment for this little operation I'm building. The basic structure is there now. It's just time to keep filling it in with my life. I've poured a lot of love into all of this and I believe in what I'm doing. Sometimes I look around and think, what the hell? I'm putting in all this effort and I'm lucky if one person likes a post. Am I crazy? But then it passes. I built this to withstand all that. I built something I love doing. I'll keep it going as long as I can bankroll it.
I think I should make a video showing all my analytics across every account, just to document how tiny the audience is at this particular moment in time. It feels like the right thing to capture.