What happened to @leifasaur? Can I make posting and curation a habit again?

It has been about 9 months since I have been active on Blurt. It has been a busy 9 months full of ups and downs. It looks like it has been that way for Blurt also and now I have a lot to catch up on and learn and see how to incorporate communities into my Blurt practice. Above is a picture from this past weekend from a family funeral we visited for one of my wife's aunties.

Why I did not have time for Blurt
Last year I was still managing a beach resort and things got very busy and stressful there. I was also burning the midnight oil and trying to work as much as I could on a side gig doing AI model training. We also took a vacation to Italy and Germany for a month from June to July. My boy was also growing and needing more attention and time. It was not only blurted that was neglected by this lack of time. I really did not grow much on my farm last year either.

So what has changed will I have more time for Blurt now?
Last year my work at the beach resort got increasingly toxic with owners having a very different agenda than management and a lot of cash flow issues. By November I decided to put in 2 months' notice for my resignation from the job. My plan was to have more time with my family and work close to full-time doing the AI model training. Those last 2 months were very hectic trying to hand over management of the hotel and dealing with the owners during that process.

In mid-December, my father came to visit as we were moving to a new house we rented about 30 minutes from the beach resort. We were so close to having a clean break and a new lease on life then another bomb dropped. The work I was doing for AI training was on a platform called Remotask, and on the 20th of December, I received an email from them that my account had been suspended for violation of their terms of service agreement.

This email came as such a blow because that was going to be my bread and butter after leaving the resort. I was making $27.5 an hour as a reviewer and had excellent quality in my work and continued to get recognition and bonuses for it. While working a the resort I was able to do about 10 hours of work a week and pull down about $1000 a month which goes a long way here in Ghana and I was able to keep most of that in savings. The first week of December before the bomb dropped I made $1000 in one week with bonuses and incentives. My plan was to work full-time for a few months and put down at least $4000 a month. But this all evaporated so fast.

A few weeks before this incident Remotasks removed me from my projects. Luckily I contacted the managers on Slack and they said it was an automated thing because the system detected I was outside of the US. I explained my situation and that I would be happy to verify that I am a US citizen and that there was no indication on these projects that workers could not be outside of the US. The managers were able to add me back to the project and it seemed as if was not an issue. I guess this was my first red flag or strike. About a week after that, I received an email from Remotasks recognizing my good quality work and that they would like me to apply to be a full-time Task Success Manager at $30-50 hours. I jumped on this opportunity and applied and did the video interview. A week after that my laptop had a charger issue and I logged onto remotasks from my Wife's laptop. The next day, I got an email saying my account was suspended. This must have been my final red flag or strike in the systems, logging on with another IP address and I am sure my location being Ghana did not help.

There was a note in the email that I could try to appeal this decision by writing an email which I immediately did. Here I was a week away from leaving my job with all of that stress and now it looked like the work I had lined up had vanished. I did not hear back from Remotasks for well over 2 weeks leaving me guessing and worried through the holidays and into the new year. When they did respond it was only a nail in the coffin. They said the decision for the suspension was irreversible and there was nothing that could be done. They could not even provide me with a reason why I was suspended. The manager on Slack is for the specific project I worked on and they also said that their hands are tied and there is nothing they can do. I was left out in the wind like that.

I then spent a couple of weeks in January looking for other remote work. There seems to be a big difference between remote work when based in the US and what you can get living outside of the US and I still have not been able to get anything promising. Even other platforms that provide similar AI training work seem to blacklist me being in Ghana.

In the meantime, I have picked up some website design projects. This will temporarily help financially but I will still have to figure out something else as time goes by. I will probably work on getting a good Upwork profile and get some experience there. I am very hesitant to work for another local employer though as each time I have gone down that road it has been very toxic.

So now I have more time on my hands between some website projects, and looking for additional work. I hope to make some time each week to spend on Blurt posting and curating again. I will probably spend a couple of weeks studying the new community features and then decide how I want to proceed with curation or even if I would like to start a community. I am sure it will even take some time for me to rebuild a following to be able to even get much of a response from posting.

I look forward to reconnecting with many of you and learning about the new blurt.