Hello and welcome to another monthly installment of PellegriniPage.com! It seems like all we do is create content these days, but more on that in a bit. What’s been on my mind the most lately is the fact that it has been exactly a year since my trip to visit my Mom in Las Vegas.
During that trip, I “realized” we should be living down here, then started working on how I was going to phrase that to my wife. I remember being nervous when bringing it up, mainly because we had talked about it years earlier, and she was against it. I don’t know what’s more surprising – her saying yes or how quickly we sold our house and moved. It may have been a year ago that this idea came to life, but we’ve already been in southern Nevada for nine months!
Time has flown by since finding our home in Henderson, but I can say with all honesty that we all love it here. The kids have made many friends, they love all the time they spend with Nana, and we’re constantly going out to do fun new things! Sometimes the heat can be a little extreme but having the option to go out back and jump in the pool is pretty nice. I’ve been cleaning and maintaining it all winter, so I’m looking forward to reopening it for the season in about a month.
Jessica’s new job
Jessica has been working at her new job for over a month and loves it. It was a little bit of an adjustment for everyone but nothing major. We have a nice weekday routine going where we’re all together for a bit in the morning, then Jessica heads to work 15 minutes before I walk the kids to school.
I leave the house at 3:00 pm to pick them up from school each day, and by the time we get home Jessica is already there. Time flies by each day, and before I know it, the house is full of commotion again. In between, it’s just the cats and me.
Most importantly, of course, Jessica is enjoying her new job. She cares deeply about these kids, and the role has given her a new sense of satisfaction.
Solar panels installed
It may have taken longer than we were led to believe, but our roof repairs are complete, our solar panels have been fully installed, and we are now producing our very own energy! It’s been a process, but I’m glad to have all the roof repairs taken care of because a complete roof inspection was not conducted when we purchased the house. As it turned out, it needed some love up there, so it was nice to get everything taken care of at once.
These days I enjoy geeking out on all of our solar energy stats. In the two weeks since it started running, we have saved over 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and reached an equivalent of 11.5 trees planted! In just two weeks!
I love seeing what positive changes/impacts we’re making, mainly because I think it’s common as an individual to doubt your ability to make a difference in a global problem. Our energy generation is only going up too. As I wrote this on March 21, this was our highest energy production date yet.
Softball and Swimming
The kids have been staying busy in their activities. At first, all three of them were doing swimming lessons on Saturday mornings; then Ava wrapped things up with swimming so she could join her first softball team. Elise and Enzo continue to take “stroke school” lessons, which I always enjoy watching, and Ava loves softball so far.
The weather has been getting nice here for the past month, and it’s just now getting to be perfect baseball weather. I’m looking forward to watching Ava’s games this season and hoping she enjoys herself. We landed on a tournament hockey team this year, and it was way too intense for her. So far, softball looks a lot more laid back but hopefully just as much fun as we’ve had in previous years of hockey. Once the next hockey season comes around, we can look at some house teams and see what she wants to do.
I’m hoping that Enzo and Elise will stick with swimming, at least for a little while. It’s excellent exercise and activity for them, plus it’s an important life skill. I could see them working as a lifeguard during their teenage years, but I don’t want to force it on them. I can tell they’re a little intimidated by some of the other kids at the pool, but I keep telling them to focus on enjoying themselves and doing their best for that day. They’re progressing nicely, so hopefully, we’ll just keep going.
Vegas Showbiz is keeping us busy!
It’s been fun and interesting seeing how this business concept has evolved over the past couple of months. The original concept was much more rooted in search and ticket sales, but I soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to scale the business to where it would need to be on my own.
One of my core tenets when deciding to start a “side hustle” was that it needed to be something I could run entirely independently. Certainly, I would accept help when it was available, but I was not interested in hiring employees, and it needed to be something that I could do entirely online.
After researching how I could get an online business like this going without selling any products or services, I landed on content creation. I soon realized that I’d been a content creator my whole life; I just never thought of it in the terms we do now.
For example, blogging on PellegriniPage.com for the past 11 years is content creation, and so is all the music recording I’ve been doing for half my life. Likewise, doing different forms of acting before that (stage, camera) was related to the content creation stuff I’m doing now. So I feel like it all ties together nicely, and consequently, we’re having a blast doing all these fun new things.
Sometimes it feels like work, but it’s enjoyable work, so it’s never that bad. I really enjoy making videos for the Vegas Showbiz YouTube channel, mainly because it satisfies the same creative aspirations that I always used to tackle with music. It’s a chance to make something out of nothing and put your own creative stamp on it. Like anything else, the more you do it, the better you become.
The blogging aspect is a little less enjoyable, in all honesty, because blogging as a business isn’t as creative and freeing as blogging on a personal website like this. When you’re blogging as a business, you have to do a lot of keyword research and SEO (search engine optimization) analysis of your content. It’s not like PellegriniPage.com where I can write whatever comes to mind without preparation. This type of blogging requires more research, but I’ve found some AI tools like Grammarly and WordHero to help speed things up.
All that said, I still firmly believe that you won’t catch on as a content creator unless people become attracted, for lack of a better term, to you as a person. You can read AI-generated content all day, but you will care more if you like me or my style as a writer/YouTuber. So you’ve got to find a way to add your personality and style to your content. One recent article like this that comes to mind is about Enzo and I having a big night out on the Las Vegas strip.
The goal, for now, is to create as much content as possible over the next six months, then see where we are. I hope to have 35 YouTube videos and 100 blog articles by then, but we’ll see. The silver lining for all of this is that even if it never goes anywhere, we’re still having so much fun doing these new things. No one can take away the memories we’re making as a family, and having it all documented is great. You just have to be willing to put the work in, and at this point, it’s become such a lifestyle thing for us that I couldn’t see us stopping anytime soon.
Based on that, I will skip photos this month and instead direct you to some of our recent videos on the Vegas Showbiz YouTube channel. So please subscribe to our channel and watch our content if you want to support us. The other big thing you can do to help us out is to read our blog articles on VegasShow.biz. Jessica and I regularly write articles about Las Vegas shows, hotels, concerts, and restaurants for the Vegas Showbiz blog. The more traffic we get on the site, the better we do.
One last thing before I sign off – although we’re going to be creating content on other platforms more than PellegriniPage, I’m still committed to writing a monthly update here. This website is an important part of our family history, and I’m not going to ignore it just because there are other articles to write for my business. This site will always be #1!
We hope you enjoy the videos. Feel free to leave comments too!