Progress is Messy

As you have figured out, I’m a self-employed, freelancer-type person. That means I’m not bound to a rigid schedule. That’s usually pretty cool. But it also means that when urgent matters or deadlines come up, things like holidays and weekends mean jack shit. More on that in a moment.

First, a preface

Since this blog is one cog in the wheel of my self-employment gig, it has to work well, right? Well it hasn’t been. I won’t bore you with too many of the behind-the-scenes mechanics and bullshit of how all this works. I’ll simply summarize by saying I’ve been needing to fix problems with my website’s outward appearance and backend guts for several years.

Well, I haven’t. I kept putting bandaids on it to keep it sort-of functional because I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the overhaul that was truly needed. But by doing that, I kept digging myself deeper and deeper into a pit of blogger despair. I was about as far from being deliberate about my blogging life as I could be.

That “learning-how-blogging-works” curve is part of the failure equation. I made a lot of mistakes in my early days that have lingered and propagated. The other half of the equation is that the tools and interfaces have evolved rapidly, leaving me completely in the dust. So after over the eight years of Val in Real Life’s existence, I found myself with a mind-blowing-cluster-of-a-mess of a blog without a clue how to start fixing it in earnest.

Which brings me to New Years Day and that whole “holidays don’t mean shit” scenario.

Into the fire on Day 1 of 2019

My mental paralysis ended in spectacular fashion on New Years Day. That’s when I realized the new WordPress Block Editor update and the back-end guts of my pathetic WordPress theme decided to part ways, leaving me with the smoldering ruins of a broken site. (WordPress is the content management system I use to publish this site, for you non-bloggery folks.)

Our houshold’s plans for a New Year’s Day sidecar ride went flying out the window. It was code red damage control time. The further I got into it, the more I realized how much was broken. The reality of all the details and bits that were completely fucked, not working, and sending my visitors bouncing on their merry way came crashing down. So instead of sticking around to bask in all things Val in Real Life, click on affiliate links, and visit my online storefronts, my readers were just slipping by.

Basically I’d been slowly closing for business as the site functionality deteriorated. I knew my traffic was off—like really off and getting worse—but I didn’t know why or how to fix it exactly. Then the puzzle pieces came together on New Year’s Day, forming a horrific picture.

Smell that fire? That's my blog. - val in real life — What’s that smell? Oh yeah, Val, that would be your website going up in flames.

Paying the piper

Mere triage was no longer viable. It was time to start from scratch. That meant breaking the entire site further in order to rebuild it.

Fortunately my dear man is basically a saint. In a tangle of cables, computers, hard drives, and enough coffee to cause cardiac arrest—not to mention a big ball of Val stress—we busted ass to put it back together as quickly as possible. We dropped everything else for two days while we resuscitated my site with a pretty new theme that works seamlessly with the current version of WordPress.

I’m still sifting through the debris, though. There are infinite little bits that need fixing and structure to refine as I learn the new block editor and this new theme. But I’m functional again and Google is slowly reindexing the site. Painful as it is, I’m better off for the crisis that helped bring it all to light. It was dumpster-fire light—but light nonetheless.

Rebuilding

This blog has been a labor of love for ten years. It’s gone through a bunch of iterations in that time, as you can imagine. I only now feel like it’s been given it’s due. I think the new site looks great. This is the first time I truly like how my site looks and works.

That being said, all of the little broken bits will likely take me the bulk of this year to clean up. I’m taking the slow-and-steady approach. More than anything, I’m exceedingly grateful for my dear man. His patience and ability to help keep me from being crushed by the enormity of the project have kept me from simply riding my motorcycle off into the blogger sunset.

The glamorous life

So there you have it. A look into the trenches of my “glamorous” life.

I hope you like the all-new Val in Real Life. And do your chick a solid, will you? If you find something that’s broken, give me a shout. This is needle-in-a-haystack work that will go much faster with my fabulous readers helping me find everything.

Adventure on, friends!

January 29, 2019

I began geocaching on my birthday in 2009. That means in a few short weeks, I’ll celebrate eight years of geocaching. I need to confess, however, that I’m not a rabid geocacher. I go through ups and downs with being engaged. In spite of those waves, I’ve always enjoyed the unexpected places geocaching takes me, the people I meet, and what I discover in the process.

stone mountain geocache - val in real life — My very first geocache, an easy find at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia—using paper no less, since I didn’t have a GPS yet.

Taking on a challenge

Beyond the intangible aspects of the sport, geocaching is also a numbers game. It comes with a lot of statistics you can obsess about—how many caches you’ve found, when you’ve found them, where you’ve found them, the types, the difficulty, how many miles your trackables have logged, your streaks, your find rate, your best month, best year, etc. There are a lot of different ways to track your geocaching numbers. Which means there are a variety of ways to challenge yourself in geocaching. You can fill the calendar grid, fill the difficulty/terrain grid, get caches in all states/provinces/countries, complete power trails, clear various radius distances from home, complete local municipal challenges, find a cache in all counties in a state, get all the different types of caches—the list goes on and on.

As my eighth anniversary approached, I was mulling over my calendar statistics—the grid that shows what days of the year I’ve logged geocache finds. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was only about 60 finds away from completing my calendar. And thus, a personal challenge was born.

But what’s an adventurer to do when she wants to take on a challenge but isn’t certain she can deliver on it with other demands in life her at the moment? Well, in my case, I didn’t make a big announcement about what I was trying to accomplish! That way if I didn’t make it, no one would be the wiser, right?

So I quietly pecked away at my needed dates. There were many times I thought I wouldn’t make make it and several times I nearly didn’t. The logistics of grabbing smilies during hectic travels, including being in Atlanta for Dragon Con, proved supremely challenging on some days. Even from home, sometimes a simple smiley turned into an adventure getting a stalled sidecar rig back home. And sometimes getting out to grab a geocache was a forgotten task in the midst of work and life. That is, until I’d have an “Oh shit” moment late in the day and race out. One of the saving graces in my quest is that my Nevada HQ has a power trail that runs, quite literally, right behind it. Sure, they’re easy and often not terribly interesting, but in this context, they were my best geocaching friends the past few months.

Finally, with a decided lack of fanfare, I filled in my last date in October. On a busy day, it didn’t feel that epic. Looking back at my full grid now though, I get a big smile on my face and a sense of satisfaction. Especially knowing it didn’t come easy but it did come with lots of fond memories of the adventures I had in achieving the goal. From the daunting efforts to the silly ones and everything in between, they’ve all been worth it. Filling the calendar felt contrived at times but it did motivate me to get out and explore, even in micro-increments. And in the course of filling the grid, I did find discover cool places, as is almost always the case in this sport.

geocaching calendar - val in real life — It’s so very pretty when it’s all filled in! I don’t know that I can articulate the depth of what this represents in terms of my adventures in the last eight years.

geocaching atlanta - val in real life — One of the challenges in filling my calendar? Being in Atlanta during Dragon Con. Kind of hard to get to the geocache when muggles are doing a photo shoot on top of the container.

sidecar geocaching - val in real life — Geocaching by sidecar with a large dog can be a challenge when your rig stalls and you can’t get it restarted. A quick, easy smiley turned into a not-so-quick one. That’s where the adventure lies though, never knowing what’s ahead.

Memory lane

As I was reviewing images for this post, sifting back through eight years of geocaching adventures left me slightly speechless. Processing everything geocaching has brought to my life in one fell swoop and realizing how much ground I’ve covered in pursuit of geocaches is kind of amazing. In the course of all of this, I’ve gotten geocaches in all of the lower 48 states, nine Canadian provinces, and one little smiley in Baja.

My oldest trackable that visits all my finds, has logged almost 75,000 miles. My best streak (finding a geocache on consecutive days) is 170 days, spurred on by George’s desire to see how long we could go. Sadly, my streak without a geocache is almost as long at 158 days. Oopsie. There’s that lack of engagement rearing its head.

Oftentimes my geocaching efforts involved dragging Fred and George on weeks-long road trips across North America. We’ve done CITO (Cache In Trash Out) events, geocached the E.T. Highway, attended Geowoodstock 10, multiple Going Caching events, and completed the Georgia State Parks Challenge, among many other accomplishments.

Much of the time these days, I go solo. There are times though that I ask patient friends to wait while I “just grab a quick smiley” which is not always as quick as I plan. (Thanks for bearing with me, peeps!) I go by car, foot, motorcycle, and sidecar. Regardless of the context, geocaching has taken me to a lot of places I wouldn’t have otherwise visited. And it has added depth to places I already planned to be, particularly when you consider earthcaches and historic site geocaches.

cito in atlanta - val in real life — Geocaching has helped us get involved in community clean-ups, know as CITO events.

geocaching education - val in real life — Many of our geocaches were tied to **experiential education** for Fred and George. We learned a lot by including geocaching in our homeschooling!

The Nevada irony

Most of the time, geocachers have the most finds in their home state. Makes sense, right? Closer to home is where we usually have the most frequent and accessible opportunities. When I started geocaching, that meant Georgia for me. But completing the E.T. Highway power trail in 2012 threw my statistics out of whack. Because of the nature of power trails, you amass big numbers quickly. In my case, the E.T. Highway made Nevada the dominant state on my geocache map even though in reality I lived on the other side of the country. That always struck me as amusing until it became ironic when I ended up moving to Nevada last year, something I would have never predicted back in 2012. That’s one way to put your map back in sync, I suppose.

geocaching map - Val in real life — My map was skewed to Nevada for several years until I ended up moving here.

Geocaching e.t. highway - val in real life — I didn’t know when we did the E.T. Highway in 2012 that I’d eventually call Nevada my home state.

The next challenge?

With my renewed enthusiasm for giving myself geocaching challenges, my next efforts will be to use geocaching to become intensely familiar with my new stomping grounds near Carson City by clearing an increasing radius. In tandem, the next obvious challenge to tackle is my difficulty/terrain grid. It’s heavily skewed towards easier finds because of power trail finds. I’d like to expand my geocaching cred by diving into the more difficult geocaches. This sport takes you unexpected places and I know I will discover amazing things by pursuing harder-earned smilies.

It’s been a fabulous eight years of geocaching. I don’t know exactly where the next eight will take me but I do know it will be memorable.

geocaching grid - val in real life — Clearly I have some work ahead of me to get my D/T grid filled!

See you on the hunt, friends! Here are a few more random memories from the geocaching archives.

georgia state parks geocaching challenge - val in real life

Setbacks and Denial

So you know how I was feeling triumphant for having returned from The Pacific Northwest Tour sans major travel catastrophes for once. Other than feeling a little worse for wear, things went pretty smoothly considering the undertaking.

The bad news is that I was wrong. I’ve been basking in a healthy dose of survival-denial in that I’ve been ignoring the hand issue that plagued me since Salt Lake City because I knew if acknowledged the complications that I’d be hard-pressed to keep plowing forward. That denial stage got me through the remainder of the Pacific Northwest Tour… setting camp, breaking camp, cooking, lifting, shooting, and hauling for another four weeks.

But now that I’m past that and I have to face reality, I find myself giving way to a torn ligament that is very painful and terribly limiting with the only real solution being surgery. This means I’ll have to switch things up in terms of how I operate day-to-day as well as shifting adventures to more low-key efforts that don’t strain the hand until I get through surgery and recovery. Camping trips are going on the back burner since the physical demands of setting up camp are too much but there’s still a lot I can do to keep the adventure flowing. It will certainly cramp my style on the Hell Hike and Raft but with the help of my fabulous crew-mates, I’ll be fine.

In light of all of the potential physical challenges a person can face, this falls in the minor category. It is, however, a major hassle and makes daily tasks cumbersome but like my friend Petunia, it isn’t going to kill me. And while there are no guarantees, it is likely a recoverable and temporary setback and it just means making some adjustments in the meantime.

Anyway, the point of this being and that we all have our setbacks, big and small, emotional and physical. I think the key is knowing yourself well enough to be able to tap into the things that keep you in your happy place even when you’re struggling and keep pursuing them even if you have to change the process a little to accommodate your challenges.

Which brings me to a quote that always make me laugh and keep things in perspective…

Any idiot can face a crisis; it it this day-to-day living that wears you out. ~Anton Chekov

Cheers!

oregon sunset — It was painful, but continuing to plow through the Pacific Northwest Tour meant not missing the opportunity to see eye-popping sunsets in Oregon.

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Forty: Getting Real

After much deliberation, I’ve finally decided to hit the publish button on this post. Given my inclination to over-analyze just about everything in my life, this entry is no exception.

The problem

My indecision lies in that Val in Real Life has morphed into a family-nature-travel kind of blog and I’m hesitant to step outside of that since I’m quite happy rattling on about all of this stuff. So this is a bit outside of that arena and it might just be too much information.

But I’m going to risk it because one of the things I’ve always intended to do here was to be real. I wanted to show that there’s value in pursuing the life you want in spite of the obstacles we all face. I also want to accentuate the positive but if I make it sound like it’s all unicorns and rainbows here then I have no credibility.

The reality

So getting to the point, the reality is that today marks my 40th birthday. It’s one of those artificial milestones we can’t seem to escape in life but there it is. On the one hand it’s just a number, on the other it definitely signifies a certain maturity.

Unfortunately, I’m really feeling the “40” because I’ve been at odds with Petunia. “Who is Petunia?” you ask. Petunia is my pituitary tumor. Yes, that’s right—Petunia the Pituitary Tumor. She’s small and, more importantly, benign so I get to be flippant about it.

To summarize the crap-fest that has been my health and state-of-mind this year, basically I’ve been fatigued, waking up in sudden sweat-soaked jolts, packing on weight, losing my hair, sleepless, and mentally flaky along with a whole host of other vague ailments that have been dragging me down physically and emotionally. In hindsight, the symptoms have been building for a couple of years but reached a noticeable apex this summer when I finally put the pieces together. Granted, I thought it was an entirely different problem but that’s why we have doctors to sort this stuff out for us.

Once you reconcile the notion that you have a lump growing in your head but that it’s not going to kill you, you just have to get on with how to deal with it. In my case I get to embrace better living through chemistry. So with a magic little pill from my fabulous endocrinologist I’m on the mend and getting back to myself. After all of the personal drama surrounding this, it comes down to a simple solution that should mean the demise of Petunia over the next few years.

At any rate, in order to keep moving forward the past year or so amidst feeling like crap and not understanding why, I’ve taken to practicing a little healthy denial about how bad it’s really been. Not to hide it from the people around me but to keep myself from going into an unrecoverable tailspin. With the light at the end of the tunnel growing brighter by the day, I can finally acknowledge the strain it’s been on the crew here. It has definitely not been all fun and games lately.

Small beans

In the big scheme of things, Petunia is small beans in terms of all of the health problems we can potentially face in our lifetimes. In the end, I’ll probably eventually simply consider her a nuisance in spite of the grief she’s caused.

Until now it’s really only been close family that’s been in on the news. Again, not because it’s a big secret but because of mental self-preservation on my part. Not only did I need to keep myself going, but when issues like this crop up, it seems that every conversation and interaction with the people around you revolves around it. And while it is a bit of a big deal, sometimes you just need a break from talking about it every minute of every day with every person you come in contact with.

The take-away

The point of finally publishing this post is to show the very real side of Val in Real Life. I’m pushing forward towards the life I want in spite of the obstacles. Continuing to travel, explore, and homeschool isn’t easy when you feel like crap but we did. Otherwise, Petunia wins. We can’t have that.

In truth, I’m better off for having kept up with the things that bring me happiness even though it would have been easier to stay at home. And certainly, not all of the adventures were fantastic. Petunia made her presence well-known throughout the Cumberland Gap trip but I’m glad we went. (Of course, now you have the behind-the-scenes insight as to why it was riddled with problems.)

We all encounter Petunia-like events in our lives. She’s not the first and certainly won’t be the last. I’ve simply got to keep moving forward and keep it in perspective. There’s nothing particularly special about how I managed to stay true to myself other than simply recognizing that it was a necessity in order to not get lost in the ordeal.

With all of this now said, I promise Val in Real Life won’t become Tumor Watch 2012. In fact, I hope I never have to mention it again. So on my 40th birthday I hope you’ll join me in giving the Petunias in your life an enthusiastic middle finger salute and start planning the next adventure in your life.

Cheers, friends! Adventure on.