Thinking Outside The Box

How a simple Amazon project taught me so much.

Back in March of 2024, we were in Boston and I decided it was time to try something completely outside my comfort zone: the Amazon Affiliate Program.

First, I needed a new laptop.

We weren't leaving the country until the middle of June, so I knew I had all of April and May to get this up and running. That was my goal. I wanted to learn the process, get accepted into the program and then just hit it hard.

We were pet sitting, so I had lots of time on my hands—and lots of things around me to review.

So I did it.

And it worked.

What I quickly learned was that the Amazon Affiliate Program opened up a whole new way of looking at the things around me. If something was sold on Amazon, there was a possibility I could review it. It didn't necessarily mean I had purchased that particular item from Amazon.

That's when I came up with something really silly.

Road Trip Taste Tests.

I would go to the dollar store—although, of course, it's $1.25 now—and buy a bunch of little food items. Then I'd sit in the car and make videos tasting them.

We were traveling anyway. I was in the car anyway. Why not?

I turned it into a little series and probably made about 50 Road Trip Taste Test videos.

And I had fun doing it.

In May, there was a contest for who could post the most videos. I went whole hog and ended up winning third place. My prize was a $100 Amazon gift card.

So what did I do with my $100 Amazon gift card?

I bought ten $10 items.

There was another promotion involving videos for products that cost around $10, so I turned that $100 gift card into more things I could review. I think I ended up earning another $450 from those videos.

It became a game for me.

Then we left the country and started traveling overseas again, so naturally I slowed down. But Amazon turned out to fit surprisingly well with our strange full-time-traveling, pet-sitting life.

When we're pet sitting and staying somewhere for a while, I can have things shipped to me and make my reviews while we're there.

Even better, a distributor eventually reached out to me and offered to send me free products to review. That relationship has now been on going for about two years. Whenever we're going to be in one place long enough, she can ship things to me, I can make the videos and post my reviews. And if we are in a hotel or AirBnB I can easily find an Amazon drop box nearby and pick up the items there.

A free car vacuum seems an appropriate item to review for full-time travelers 

And sometimes the homeowners get the products when we leave.

We're full-time travelers. I'm not carrying a cat bed, a pet fountain or a litter box from one house sit to another!

So I've left all kinds of things behind for the homeowners whose pets we're watching. I get something to review and the opportunity to earn commissions. They sometimes get something useful for themselves or their pets.

It's a win-win.

Now that we're staying in one place for an extended period again, the distributor has been sending me products and I've been making more reviews.

At this point, I have 425 review videos on Amazon from the last two and a half years.

But some of my favorite commissions haven't come from anything exciting at all.

I've reviewed a towel rack in a hotel room.

Seriously.

I noticed the towel rack happened to be sold on Amazon, so I reviewed it. I sold a bunch of them and earned commissions.

Sometimes it's the strangest, simplest things that continue earning commissions over and over again.

A bottle of nail polish.

These are things that are already in the houses, hotels and other places we visit. It's actually unusual for me to walk into a place and not find something I could potentially review.

Meanwhile, we carry our own things that we've actually bought on Amazon—and sometimes I get lazy and don't even review those.

Go figure.

But the money isn't really the biggest thing I've gotten from doing this.

When I started, I had to teach myself how to edit videos.

Amazon also has guidelines about what you can put into a video, including things like music and the language you use, and what you can and cannot say. I had to learn all of that.

And it was a great learning experience.

I've always loved making travel videos, but Amazon gave me another reason to learn how to make videos better. It tested me. It taught me new skills. It made me more comfortable creating videos, and eventually I was able to take those skills and use them for my travel videos and other things I'm creating today.

I think that's especially important in retirement.

We need things that keep our minds active. We need to stay engaged with what's going on in the world. We need things that challenge us and give us opportunities to learn something new.

For us, being full-time travelers makes that a little different.

We're not tourists. We're travelers. We just happen to live out in the world.

Traveling is our lifestyle. And when we're staying in one place for an extended period, I like having something that grounds me and gives me a purpose.

Amazon has done that.

I really enjoy it. I love making videos. I've always made travel videos and posted them simply because I enjoyed doing it, but I thought it would be fun to turn something I already liked doing into something a little more lucrative.

And I've been able to use the money I've earned to pay my Medicare premiums each month. Back in March 2024, before turning 65, that was one of the incentives for finding a successful side hustle. 

For me, that's a win-win.

I had no idea where it would lead.

Two and a half years and 425 videos later, I'm still learning, still making videos and still finding ridiculous things like hotel towel racks to review.

So I guess it's time for me to get back on the Amazon box and keep doing my reviews.

If you have the time and the energy to learn something new, I highly recommend stepping outside your own box once in a while.

You never know where it might take you.

It's never too late to learn something new.

There's always a story.

THE FRIENDS WE FIND ALONG THE WAY

Our Friends Are The Gifts That Keep on Giving

This morning I was coming down the stairs thinking about what I wanted to write about today. 

I was getting ready to put on my sneakers and get on the treadmill, which has become one of my favorite places to think and dictate stories.

And then a text came through from my friend Sue. She wanted to buy my book. My birthday is on Tuesday and honestly, that may be the best early birthday present I have received in a very, very long time. Not because of the price of the book, or because I made a sale, but because it was Sue. She wanted to support something I had created simply because she is my friend. And as I read her message, I thought, of course she does. Because that is who Sue has always been. 

Sue and I met because of Disney. We are both big fans of the theme parks in Florida and have spent days at Universal, as well as Sea World.

Back in 2013, we were both part of a Disney chat group, and somehow the two of us connected. We had a lot in common. We were both moms, done with the child raising years, and we had both lived enough life to know that things don’t always go according to plan. At that point, I had not yet become a grandmother, while Sue already was.

From day one, she was simply one of those people who was easy to know, and more importantly, easy to talk to no matter the subject matter. She has a quiet way of taking care of people. Sue is just a kind soul. 

The first thing we ever did together was about as Disney as you can get. We went with our husbands on a horse-drawn carriage ride through Fort Wilderness at Christmastime to look at all the decorations throughout the campground. I still have the picture from that night. That was the beginning of a friendship that has now lasted more than a decade. 

One thing I have always loved about our friendship is that it has never seemed to matter how much time passed between visits. We could go for quite a while without seeing each other, and then reconnect as though very little time had passed at all. Sue is retired and spends her summers at her home in Lake Geneva and her winters in Florida. Then I retired too, and because I was spending some of my winters in Florida, we suddenly had opportunities to see each other in a completely different way. 

And then along came Mr. P. 

Sue and Sterling had adopted the sweetest Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. She knew we were pet sitting, so she asked if we would watch him when she and her husband traveled. Somewhere along the way, watching Mr. P brought us even closer. 

Everyone loves Mr. P. I still call him a puppy even though he is a grown dog, because apparently in my mind anything small and adorable is permanently a puppy. He is an absolute doll baby. 

We have watched him in Florida and at Sue's home in Lake Geneva, and now when they are thinking about planning a trip, Sue will reach out to see if we are available, before they finalize plans. We already have two more Mr. P dates on our calendar this winter, one in December and another in February, and we are genuinely looking forward to both of them. There is something about the kind of trust that becomes part of a friendship. She knows that Mr. P will be loved when he is with us, and we know how much she appreciates knowing he is with people who already adore him. 

Over the years, Sue and I have discovered just how many pieces of life we have in common. We are mothers and grandmothers. We love Disney. We love to travel. We both spent our lives working hard. We have also shared the kinds of conversations that happen when family members are going through health issues. We understand the worry, the concern, and the care that comes with loving people through medical challenges. 

Those are the kinds of things that deepen a friendship. When we are in Chicago visiting Brian, I make time to see Sue too. In fact, the last three times we have been in Chicago, I have gotten on the train and traveled north to Lake Geneva to see her. She picks me up at the station, and every time we visit, she tells me how much she appreciates that I took the time to travel north to see her. 

To me it is very simple. She is my friend, and I love her. 

Our life is a little different now because we are full-time travelers. 

We do not live in a neighborhood where we see the same people every week. 

We do not have co-workers anymore. 

We move from one place to another, sometimes staying for a few days and sometimes for a few months. 

That makes me appreciate the real friendships in my life even more. When you meet a good friend, you hold on to them. Sue is one of those people whose kindness doesn't feel like something she tries to do. It seems to come from her very core. I don't know anyone who has spent time with her who doesn't feel that. She includes people. She checks in. She responds when I send a message. She supports the things I do. And maybe that is why her little text message this morning affected me so much. It made me think about the strange ways people enter our lives. Sue and I didn't meet through work. 

We didn't grow up together. 

We weren't neighbors. 

We met because we both happened to belong to a Disney chat group in 2013. 

One shared interest, one connection. 

And all these years later, she is still here. There are people who pass through our lives, and there are people who belong to a particular season. Then there are the people who somehow become part of the fabric of our lives, even though we never could have predicted it when we first met them. 

Sue is one of those people for me. And I hope she always knows just how much I value having her in my life. 

There's always a story.

 I SEE PICTURES AND MY MIND TELLS A STORY

Monday morning I got up at seven.

By almost noon, I was still in my jammies.

I had not washed my face. I had not gone downstairs to get on the treadmill. I had not dictated a story. I had literally spent almost five hours going through old photo albums on my phone and in the cloud.

And wow.

What a walk down memory lane.

Opening up the blog again somehow connected me with all of those photographs that have just been sitting out there in my Google Photos and iCloud storage. For most people, maybe that's not a particularly big deal. But for me, right now, it is.

I don't have a big trunk of photographs sitting in the next room.

That trunk is in storage.

I don't have all of my old scrapbook albums here with me. They're in storage too. Fifty years' worth of photographs, albums, little pieces of our lives — all packed away somewhere while we're out here living this nomadic life.

So Monday morning, the cloud became my photo album.

And I went through at least ten years of pictures.

I could look at a photograph and almost instantly know where I was, what was happening in our lives, what came before it and what happened afterward.

There were places I hadn't thought about in years. People who have come in and out of our lives. People who have changed. People we've lost. Children who aren't children anymore. Versions of ourselves that don't exist anymore either.

A lot has happened since I stopped writing my blog in 2011.

Times have changed.

We've all changed.

And somehow looking at those photographs brought all of it back into focus.

Where I've been.

Where we've all been.

How much life has happened in between.

At first, I thought I'd wasted my morning.

After all, it was nearly noon and I was still in my pajamas. The treadmill hadn't seen me. My face hadn't seen a washcloth. The story I was supposed to dictate hadn't been dictated.

But I wasn't really doing nothing.

I was remembering.

And this morning I realized something else about myself.

I see pictures and my mind tells a story.

That's just what happens.

This morning it was a picture from the trail camera here at our Kentucky house sit.

A bobcat.

That's all it was. One picture of a bobcat walking across the property.

Except my brain doesn't seem to know how to leave a picture alone.

Suddenly I was thinking about all the other pictures and videos I've taken during this house sit.

The deer that wander onto the lawn.

The spotted young deer that come so close I can photograph them from the house.

The turkeys that casually eat on the front lawn — until I open the front door and startle them and suddenly discover that, yes, turkeys can FLY.

The coyote caught wandering around at night.

And now the bobcat.

Being on 50 acres doesn't mean you don't have neighbors.

There's the story.

Then my brain added Old MacDonald Had a Farm as background music.

There's the Reel.

Then I found the trail-camera pictures of the other local wildlife.

Me.

Roger.

🤣🤣🤣

Apparently the trail cameras don't discriminate between the four-legged and two-legged residents.

Roger has even been caught on camera working around the property with power equipment. I've been caught strolling across the lawn.

Local footage brought to you by...the neighborhood watch.

And after seeing that bobcat wandering around in broad daylight?

I'm thinking my afternoon strolls may have been canceled.

Here kitty, kitty. 😳

This is how my mind works.

One picture becomes a thought.

The thought becomes a sentence.

The sentence connects to another picture.

That picture reminds me of something that happened twenty years ago.

And somewhere along the way, there's a story.

Maybe that's why I lost almost five hours Monday morning going through old photographs. I wasn't simply looking at them.

Every picture was opening another little door.

A place.

A person.

A memory.

A moment I'd forgotten.

A story I hadn't told yet.

I've always taken a lot of pictures. Sunrises. Sunsets. Trips. Houses. Animals. Food. Ordinary moments that probably didn't seem particularly important when I photographed them.

Maybe this is why.

Pictures help me remember not just what something looked like, but what life felt like when I took them.

My photographs aren't just a record of where I've been.

They're prompts.

And apparently I have thousands and thousands of them waiting for me.

I see pictures.

And my mind tells a story.

There's always a story