Welcome to the latest edition of the SoCal Steemit Visiting Hour post!

Every tuesday at 8pm @socalsteemit is doing a weekly voice and text chat for the members in our Discord server! Here we'll be giving a short summary of our previous chat and bring up potential topics for the next upcoming chat.

Last Nights Visiting Hour

• In the last SoCal Visiting Hour we had @creationofcare, @mattlovell, @mariannewest, @csusbgeochem1, and me @derekrichardson, all join in the conversation! We talked a lot about @mattlovell and @creationofcare's recent canoe trip in the Colorado river. They had a group of 30 people and 15 canoes! They explored canyons with hot springs and camped on beaches along the river. It sounded like so much fun!

• We also talked a bunch about gardening, and writing gardening posts. @mariannewest recommended we check out @gogreenbuddy's 'daily green give away' and @simplymike's 'last call steemit community garden journal challenge' to get more exposure and support for our gardening posts. @csusbgeochem1's post where he built a wood burning stove from two old wheels got us talking about the many surpising uses for old tires including using them in the garden! @creationofcare shared a photo of a huge Jerusalem Cricket she found in her garden which you can see more of here. And since everyone at the chat besides me raises chickens there was some talk about chickens.

• Then we got to some of the more serious business. We talked about the budget for @socalsteemit and discussed the prize amounts for our contests. We talked about how we've joined @qurator and @steembasicincome, and have started using @qustodian and @alliedforces to help boost our payouts so we can eventually get it to be a financially self sustaining operation. Using Busy.org was also brought up as a posting tool we could use that would gain us another upvote. (This was posted from Busy)

• We talked about using comments and direct messages more to spread the word about the Tuesday Visiting Hour, and to make people aware of our weekly contests.

• @mariannewest brought up the new #dtubesnap and we talked about trying to do a daily snap. @csusbgeochem1 is working part time as the caretaker for the Cerro Gordo ghost town and when he's up there he's offered to do some fun snaps showing us all about the town and the amazing history there! If anyone else has ideas for a daily snaps let us know!
  

  
  
  

• Next @csusbgeochem1 shared a new service called mysteemx.com which provides easy conversion of Steem or SBD into fiat. I checked it out and gave it a try. I still think there are plenty of improvements that need to be made, especially lowering the high fees. But it's a good tool to know about if you're looking for a functioning and fairly easy and convenient way to cash out some Steem.
  

  
  
  

• Marianne and I also talked briefly about Steempeak.com and all the awesome tools available on there. As well as encouraging our members to apply to the @steemitbloggers community.

Thank you everyone who participated in this weeks discussion it was fun as always!!

Next Tuesday

In next Tuesdays SoCal Visiting Hour we'll go over everything that happens at the meetup this friday. And @creationofcare had recommended "some kind of "introduce yourself " or "teambuilding" exercise" and I remembered one @improv had us do at the San Diego meetup. Two truths, one lie. So each person tells two truths and one lie about themselves and then everyone guesses which one is the lie. It's a fun way to get to learn new things about each other. So come ready with your truths and lie! Also if you have a post of yours you'd like to share with the group we'd love to have you bring it and tell us all about it! Beyond that the floor is open to anything else any members would like to bring up and discuss!

So again, it's tuesday at 8pm in the SoCal Steemit Discord server. If you are not equipped to voice chat or are a bit intimidated to get on a mic, feel free to come listen to the chat and communicate with the group through the corresponding text channel. We'd love to have everyone come join the conversation!!

Steemit Meetup

Come meetup with your fellow SoCal Steemians! Our next meetup is Friday Nov. 2nd at the Taco Surf in Surfside, CA. You can find all details in this post. Everyone who comes will get some of our cool SoCal Steemit stickers!!

Would you like to help us support the SoCal Steemit community?

Consider joining the SoCalSteemit curation trail

or giving a delegation

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#SoCalSteemit is building and supporting the Steemit community of Southern California. If you are from SoCal and are into creating quality content here on Steemit, we'd love for you to follow us @SoCalSteemit and join our group on Discord