Road to Steemfest 3 (6): Funding my trip to Krakow

The sixth installment in my #roadtosteemfest series, and the brain-child of @anomadsoul as he encourages Steem Fest 3 attendees, and those trying their hardest to get to there, to write about their journey along the way.

If you missed the first five posts, you can catch up here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, if you wish.

And now that you have totally not clicked any of the links above, let's begin...

_{Only 2356 km to go...}

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I really hope this post doesn't turn out like another sob-story effort, I feel I've moaned too much about being pretty broke over the past couple of months. It's my choice though, so please don't feel like you have to send me STEEM or beer money, just ramp it up to a SF3 ticket and let's leave it at that 😛 In case i don't receive random gifts, I have been doing a few things to bridge the gap to Krakow in November, and these are:

Posting most days

This should really be headed, 'Posting Every Day', shouldn't it? The honest trust is that I can get bogged down in discord, spend hours thinking about what would be interesting, and end up with absolutely nothing added as a top level post. Today was one of those days actually, I managed a few paragraphs on a #iamutopian post I'm working on (I know you cant wait!), and that was all. I've been curating a bit more the past week for @pifc mainly, and have been consuming (not just cats and twerk videos) content more than recently. That doesn't pay the bills though does it? I should try to get to a post a day.

Self-voting like a mo-fo

Nope. That would help a little I guess. I decided to seek out more of the potential attendees and vote for them more often.

Got a job!

But you know this already of course, being keen watchers of my feed.... Yes, I finally caved in and took a friend up on the offer to work in her bar to serve drinks to other friends and my mum. And actually, it's not all that bad. I'm out of the house and socialising a bit more, and the break from the screen (while I'm not writing posts on my phone) is probably a good thing. You listening @janton? 😛

So yeah, some euros in my pocket at the end of the week will slow the drain on the already pretty drained bank account, and hopefully I'll not need to pull out any more STEEM at these 'low' prices. Of course the current price of around .7$ might not look low in a month or so's time, but I'm not going to think about that right now 🙈

Entering contests

This year I've entered two contests to try to win a ticket to the event, one of which is still underway and will require another video, the other is in the process of being judged.

@smooth asked:

Tell me about yourself, what you have done for Steem, and why you would like a free ticket. The two best answers will win. Votes don't determine the winner but may influence the judging. The judge is me. My decisions are final and arbitrary.

And so I gave that a good go here: https://steemit.com/steemfest/@smooth/steemfest-ticket-contest

Hopefully he will decide before ticket prices go up on the 22nd September.

The second contest is the on-going @openmic contest. My entry for the first round was a ten minute video (ouch) in which I had to talk about myself, and what I do here with regards to engagement. And I made it through to the next round!

The remit for the final round is community engagement. And well, I'm going to need some help from you guys there as one of the points includes:

... we want the community to speak in your behalf. We want the different communities you are engaged with, to tell us about you and, in their own words, tell us why you should go to Steem Fest.

Don't worry, I'll be sure to remind you again! And I guess that if @smooth were to pick me in his contest, I would take myself out of the running here.

Being a tight-arse

To myself though mainly. This involves little beer, no meals out, basic foods at home, and a limit of 3 pieces of paper per toilet visit. OK, maybe not the last one, but budgeting at home is another thing I've been doing to help out. And this is felt pretty good actually, with less crap food consumed and less general waste.

And finally, I've been putting off buying a new phone cover. The current effort is a pretty busted Otter-box with the rubber being loose, split, and barely hanging on to the plastic cover which itself is scratched and was massacred due to the requirement to push a larger lead into the earplug socket. This purchase though is going to have to be made, but that does mean I have a secondhand iPhone (5?) case for sale, anyone?

See some of you in November with any luck, and the rest of you on the Steem blockchain.

Cheers

Asher