Been thinking....

OK,so Tomorrow is my 40th birthday....and as much as I dislike that number,at the same time I welcome it too.

I've accomplished a lot,especially in the past few years,that I can be proud of.

Not all that long ago we were living in an old leaky mobile home in a run down trailer park,hoping the next storm didn't tear the place down.We were over 40k in debt,and it was nearly all credit card debt.We had been struggling to keep up with people we thought were our friends,and trying to live a lifestyle like they did.Then one day it all came tumbling down.

As happens to most people in our situation,there came a day when the bill collectors wouldn't stop calling,they were even calling me at work.We couldn't pay our bills,we couldn't even pay our utility bills.We were contemplating moving in with my parents until we got things sorted out.Our marriage was in trouble,money stresses are one of the largest reasons couples get divorced.

THEN...we took a step back,realized what we were doing to ourselves and our future,and took a drastically different path....

We could have thrown up our hands,filed for bankruptcy like most people in our situation would have,and walked away from everything to start over somewhere.

What we did instead was,pay down all that debt,every single penny of it..yep,we paid it all back,slowly,and with the help of a credit counseling agency,but it got paid back,we didn't trash our credit and kept that leaky roof over our heads for a few more years until the day we finally bought a house.

We've purchased our home,we have a really good start on being very self sufficient here with all the gardens and fruits trees,berry bushes,and the rabbits.

I have had some of my ramblings published in the past.Maybe now is a good time to finish some of those fiction stories I started and never got around to trying to get published?

I can see where my attempts here are progressing,and hopefully by next year I will be hosting teaching classes here at home to help local area residents learn to be more self sufficient and self reliant.I'd like to be able to teach people one on one how to do a lot of the things that I do here.

I've made some new goals this year that I want to reach,one of those is being able to work less hours at my full time job so that I can spend more time at home working around here.I'm not sure how I'll do it,but I'll find a way.

So I'm not sitting around feeling sorry for myself,pondering where all the time has gone,wishing this day had never come.Instead,I'm reaching out,grabbing it by the horns and going for the next ride....