In my 53 years, I have had many jobs, careers and down-right cooky adventures! I love to try different things and although this has made my friends and especially my family question my sanity, I prefer to take the road less traveled.

I started off in college taking computer programming as that was a hobby of mine as a teenager but dropped out after the first semester to set up a database for a mutual funds company (enter my time selling mutual funds as well). I then decided to move from the tiny community I was living in, to the "big city" - Calgary, Alberta where after many temp jobs to test the waters became a corporate paralegal. This took me to become a freelance paralegal and then to start my own rural blue-box recycling program.

After getting tired of the rat race, I decided to try out the homesteading thing. Yep, I packed up what was necessary and moved across the country to my own piece of land and started building a cordwood (or stack wall) house only to find that I had much more interest in actually working (at ANYTHING) than my husband did. End of marriage #1.

After marrying husband #2 (a criminal defense lawyer) in a nearby town, we both decided that there were many more opportunities in the newly created northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. I went back to my beginnings as a paralegal but soon moved on to become a program administrator in community informatics and international diplomacy and a leader in the North American region (NARALO) of ICANN, attending 3 international conferences a year and promoting community needs withing the ICANN architecture. After about 5 years of that harried and extremely dog-eat-dog, confrontational milieu I faced total burnout and my life went into a downward spiral. I needed to de-stress and slow things down.

After living in Canada's Great White North for nearly 15 years, I decided to move back down south to Nova Scotia. To the middle of NOWHERE in Nova Scotia, in fact, where I now have a small farm, raise Highland cattle, chickens and various other critters and work from home. Although Husband #2 decided the location in Nova Scotia as he had to live near water (I'm on an island with a total population of less than 500) he decided he preferred to stay in the rat race of Nunavut and wanted no part of it. Start the worst part of my life where my self-worth was taken down to negative numbers. End of marriage #2.

So, here I am, back to the bucolic life and ENJOYING EVERY BIT OF IT! It is wonderful to be back to my roots and back to nature. Wealthy Affiliates has provided me with the support I needed in its wonderful community and a way to provide for myself and be FREE! I absolutely love what I am doing, love the local community as well as the supportive community in WA. I think I have finally found my niche and certainly a heaping teaspoon of happiness!

Life is a journey and I am going to savor every little bit of it!

Darlene Thompson

https://myindoorgrowsystems.com/
https://scambustersonline.com/