Life Update + North American Travels

Excuse the generic, boring title of my first post here in 5.5 months, but it best sums up this post. In the past six months life has taken several twists and turns which has me currently sitting in Edmonton, Canada. It has also been one of the hardest and most difficult times of my life.

Last I posted I believe I had just returned to Australia from Thailand. I had planned to stay in Bangkok for about 12 months and learn the language, culture and Muay Thai (kick boxing). I spent a four nights in Phuket, and then my buddy and I flew to Bangkok. We stayed in a hotel for two nights while we looked for a condo to rent. He was always going home after a month, but I was staying on. I ended up getting a 2 bedroom condo for about $850 AUD a month. The complex had a pool, gym, sauna, and restaurant with room delivery, laundry and mini mart.

I met up with Bill Rini several times and he was super nice and made the transition to living in Bangkok easier on me. I was also living in the same complex as a member on his Thailand website, who worked online as well for a Turkish travel agency.

Three weeks into the trip I found out that my Dad is dying of Bowel Cancer. I flew back to Brisbane a week later and my Sister flew back from London, and my brother up from Sydney. A lot of this time is now a blur to me, and I don’t want to go into too much detail here. But I’ll give a quick rundown of the events during these months.

My Sister and brother both went home and I stayed and looked after my Dad. He ended up going to hospital for about a month and things got rough, real rough. He was close to the end, and wanted it all to be over. He was in excruciating pain and didn’t sleep for six days. The tumor was pushing up against his sciatic nerve, which was sending pain signals down his leg. He described it as electricity and fire burning down his leg. Apparently it is the worst kind of pain you can get.

At this time they were forced to move house because the council had resumed their property to widen a main road. So I was waking up and doing some jobs around the house, driving in and visiting him at the hospital all day and then going home to help out around the house some more. It was these four weeks that were the toughest in my life, and wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.

Dad eventually got out of hospital against the advice of Doctors. Basically if he stayed there he was going to die. He was in terrible shape and we were told he had less than six months. Initial evaluation was 6-12 months, and then it changed to 12-24 months before he went to hospital.

I helped move them into their new house while he was in hospital, so when he came out he was at the new house. There was a lot of work to be done to clean up the yard, chopping down trees and all that fun stuff. During this time I was looking after him from Sunday-Wednesday and my Sister-in-law was looking after him the rest of the time. His partner had to work during the week so someone needed to be with him during the day.

My Sister came back from London on the advice of the specialist, who told her in his last days at the hospital that he didn’t have much time left and he recommended she come home sooner rather than later. She works for a private equity firm and she ended up taking the rest of the year off without pay.

After a few weeks of doing this I ended up meeting with Jess from Sports Betting Lines. I got to show him around for a couple of nights and get him shit faced beyond all recognition (ask him about the stripper).

After he left I decided I needed to get a kick on with my affiliate stuff. I basically hadn’t worked in six months, and needed to kick on now that my father was doing relatively OK. It didn’t take me long until I came up with a solution, I sold my Online Craps website. It was a great deal for both of us and I was able to pay off all the debt I accumulated from the Thailand trip that was cut short (lost two months rent for breaking lease etc). Now I’m debt free.

As my Dad’s condition remained steady it became obvious that having both my Sister and myself there wasn’t a great system. I had begun studying online to finish my degree, but now that things had calmed down I began increasingly edgy to get on with my life. I know this sounds kind of harsh, but I spent more time with my Dad in those months than I had in the last decade and we were on good terms for the first time in a long time.

Not long after I had my ticket booked to the US for 90 days. The Visa waiver program only lets me stay for 90 days and that seems perfect. I’ll be back in Australia on the 30th of December for New Years and my Sister will be back in London. Before I left I got to have a great weekend in Sydney with my best friend Carly. My Rugby League team was playing hers in the semi-finals and we went to the match and stayed in a hotel at Darling Harbour. My team ended up winning the Grand Final which is an added bonus.

The trip started by hanging out with Jess and NickM from Poker Websites. Nick was on a road trip around America and I had an absolute blast the time that he was there. Jess was kind enough to let me stay at his place and showed us around. We took a trip to the foot of the mountains in Denver, which was simply amazing. We went to a river and a fishing hole where the water was clean, fresh and pristine. It was great to feel alive again.

The second night I met Wes from Beat No Limit and TJ from Gambling 666. These guys showed me around “lodo” which is down town Denver. It was great to meet these guys and we had a ton of fun chewin’ the fat and having plenty of drinks.

NickM soon went home and Jess and myself began hanging out, working and I was studying. I had a couple of assignments due so I spent the majority of the time studying. This became too tedious when I was getting the second one done, and I decided to delay my studies because I found myself not enjoying my holiday as much as I thought I could. Ideally I would have been able to do both, because I really want to finish my degree, but it got the better of me.

I spent some days chilling with Jess, going to the gym and eating out a lot. We had some good days here, and we shared some great conversations about both work and life, some of which I’ll never forget.

I decided that now that I wasn’t studying I should get out and take advantage of the situation I’m in. I organised a road trip with my friend who is finishing up work in America as a racehorse trainer. He used to be my best friend up until the age of about 13, but he moved away and I haven’t seen him since. We’re going to do a road trip from New York City to Miami on the 1st November till the 21st. Then we’ll get on a cruise and go around Mexico and the Caribbean for 7 nights. He goes back home and I’m going back up to Denver to enjoy the Christmas festivities with Jess and have my first white Christmas.

After planning the road trip on the East Coast of the US, I had a couple of weeks to kill in between. My buddy Aidan suggested I come visit him, and a couple of days later I was all booked. I was super excited to come here because we had made plans a couple of times in the past for me to come visit him in Canada.

I had a fair bit of trouble getting into Canada though. Customs did not like the fact that I came from the US and that I worked online at all. They went through my laptop and iPhone and started questioning SMS’s. After about an hour of this I was allowed into the country for my holiday. It was kind of funny because I said I knew Aidan from online, we joke that we know each other from a ghey online dating website.

The first night Aidan, his friend and me went out to the bars and got hammered. Can’t remember much of this night, but it was a good time. Earlier in the day I hung out with Aidan’s family who were visiting and had some nice beers, Moose Head.

Yesterday I went shopping to by some new clothes. I haven’t bought new clothes in a long time, plus I was super cold being a silly Aussie with Summer clothes. The added benefit of this is that Aidan is quite the little fashion designer, so now I’m super cool just like him.

Today I woke up and was going to drop mid x,xxx on a domain but I decided against it in the end. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, I’m now in a situation where I can work on thing I’m passionate about in life. It was also a fair bit of money to invest in something I don’t have any experience in.

I’m all for still using my skills to leverage this cash to a new level. But I didn’t think this was the right opportunity. I’ve decided that I’m going to develop IntenseGambling.com, an all-in-one gambling site that I will have full ownership of, along with my Australian gambling website that I have a partner in. This is going to get fully redeveloped and become a massive website, we’re struggling at the moment to find the right people for what we need done though.

So with those two sites, that’ll be all the gambling I’ll be doing. It’s my bread and butter and I’ll be able to make a comfortable living just from them if all else goes pear shaped.

That opens myself up to do what I’m passionate about. The first thing I’m going to do is to develop this blog that I’m writing on right now. I see it as a great website that will cover travel and working from home. The life of an affiliate is something I find interesting and I think others will too. It will cover Internet Marketing and all those types of topics like residual income, but will also focus on living life as an affiliate. It opens up doors like living in any country in the world. A site like this allows me to express myself and to find great ways to travel the world doing what we love.

Now that I have the freedom to travel and the cash to do what I want in life, I have interesting things to write about. That was one of my main problems in the past; I didn’t have anything worth writing about.

My next project is something that I’ve always had in the back of my mind as what I want to do in the future, the end goal. I’m going to be making a website about self development for men. It’ll cover topics like dating, self help, health and fitness for males. I haven’t seen any great websites that do this, that aren’t men’s magazine websites. This is what I’m passionate about and I feel I’ll get a lot of value out of not only developing myself, but also being able to help and positively affect people’s lives. At the moment I have an income stream, not a business and definitely not something I’m passionate about. I think this will fill a massive void in my life and go a long way to making me proud of what I do for a living. The domain I’m going to develop for this is UberMen.com.

I have been on the lookout for premium domains in just about any niche. I will need to develop new websites so that I can get my monthly revenue to a level that I’m comfortable at, and not dig into my savings consistently.

Moving forward with Successful Affiliate

I can really see this website taking off. I have some great ideas for posts and will be able to post plenty of pics, stories and tips of traveling and online marketing. One of my dream jobs has always been to be a traveling journalist, similar to the guys from National Geographic Adventure.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over recent months it’s that life is short. My father is only 53 and I’m already 24. It’s time to take life head on and take control and design a lifestyle that I’m excited to live.

This post was a much needed update and recap of the last six months. I would have loved to have written some great entries while I was in Thailand but it didn’t quite work out that way.

There’ll be some big changes around here, so make sure you leave a comment and tell me what you think and any ideas you have!