Hey everybody, I'm super excited to be a part of the Steemit/Dtube community! - #introduceyourself

I go by the name Arky and I'm a 50 year old single woman. Since the early 2000's, I have been obsessed with the dream of living a simple life in the mountains. Over the years, it seemed that life just kept getting in the way of me being able to move forward towards my dream. I made enough money at my job to get by, but not enough to do a lot of saving, though I did manage to become completely debt free in early 2013. Another big obstacle was fear. The thought of giving up my job and moving out to the mountains alone with zero income and very little savings was rather terrifying honestly.

I never gave up though, I'm pretty stubborn that way. Back in 2013, I met someone online that owned a piece of property in the area that I wanted to live and he was looking for someone to live there for free in exchange for upkeeping things because he was moving to Florida. On the property was a very primitive, rustic cabin that I absolutely fell in love with. It was perfect! I decided to take the leap and was living in the cabin full-time by August 2013.

I lived there a few years until he decided to sell the property and I didn't have the cash to buy it, so I had to look for somewhere else to live. While it was disappointing, I always knew that eventually I would have to relocate and it was an amazing experience so I have no regrets. I learned so much from it. Not only about living off grid and being more self-sufficient, but I also learned a lot about myself. There is just nothing like spending long periods of time alone communing with nature without all the distractions of modern society getting in the way!

Good news though, I was able to buy a small piece of property in the same area that is even better and it's mine so I never have to move again! It's more secluded and borders the National Forest in the back and I just love it. The new property is just raw, undeveloped forest land with no structures or anything. I camped out there most of last year clearing a driveway into the property and cleaning out sticker bushes & vines, cutting down dead standing trees, clearing the underbrush & forest debris, etc.

Once the cold weather came around Thanksgiving, I've been staying with family and friends just waiting for Spring to get here so I can get back to work on the property again full-time. I have a ton of projects planned for this year, but the main project will be building a small cob cabin so I can live there year round. If you aren't familiar with cob, you can click this DuckDuckGo search link to get an idea what it is.

I've been sporadicly sharing my off grid living experience on Youtube the last few years, but had decided that this year I was going to get fully committed to doing regular videos a few times a week and see if I could finally build it into a steady income. This would allow me to stop spending so much time hunting down odd jobs to earn money and allow me to work full-time on building my cob cabin and other homestead projects. Now, I have zero faith in the Youtube platform and no idea if my videos will be de-monetized at any time like has been happening to so many other homesteaders.

So here I am! I really love the whole concept behind Steemit and I think it will be a much more stable platform than Youtube for the long term. I just don't know if there is a real audience for homesteading type videos here yet or not, but I guess we'll see. I will also be doing what I can to get my 4k+ Youtube subscribers to join us here on Steemit.

Looking forward to being a part of this community :)