Let The Seasons Begin!

Happy Fall Equinox! The beginning of Fall is my favorite time of year, mainly because the weather in September is so nice, football season is back, baseball is getting interesting, and the basketball and hockey seasons are right around the corner. This is “cooking season” for me as well; I frequently begin my Sunday morning in the kitchen, working on something that will slow cook all day and make the house smell so good.

There’s a big rumor going around that the NBA will soon be announcing an expansion to the league by adding two teams, and the lucky cities are Seattle and Las Vegas! I’d love to see Seattle get the Sonics back, and having our own pro basketball team here in Vegas would be awesome. We’re already the fight capital of the world, we have pro football and hockey, and Formula One will start doing a Las Vegas street race, part of which is on the strip, in November 2023. Rumors about the Oakland A’s moving here have also been circulating for years, so I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

Family Update

Regarding our family, everyone is doing well, and as the name of this post implies, the lazy days of Summer are behind us, and we’re back to having full schedules. Ava has decided not to return to hockey, and we respected her decision. She is now part of a Volleyball class that meets every Tuesday evening and seems to be enjoying it. She’s tall for her age, so volleyball would be a great sport for her to stick with, but I expect her to join another softball team in the Spring as well.

School has also been going very well for Ava. She is now in Jessica’s class and is thriving for the first time in her academic career. Although she is brand new to the school, she became the most popular kid in her class on day 1. People are naturally attracted to Ava, and seeing her thrive at school is so nice. She just went on the 5th-grade camping trip to Pali Adventures in Southern California; it was a great time for her and a chance to meet more kids from the new school. Obviously, Ava deserves a ton of credit for her newfound success at school, but so does Jessica. She worked very hard to make this happen, and seeing it all start to pay off makes me happy.

Elise is also doing well at her new school. She makes friends so quickly and easily that it seems like every week, we’re taking her to another birthday party. One of the areas she has improved in the most is spelling. This was a subject that she struggled with in previous years, but now she is regularly getting A’s on her spelling tests and has set a goal of winning the class spelling bee.

As far as activities for Elise go, she is very excited to be joining an all-girls running club, which is put on by the school. There are several runners on Jessica’s Mom’s side of the family, so it appears Elise (and Enzo, I think) has gotten those genes. She is surprisingly fast and can run longer distances than any of her friends. I recently took her out to get a nice pair of running shoes, which is no easy task because Elise has wide feet and is very particular about how they fit. Luckily, she can wear a women’s size now, so I was able to find a pair of Asics that worked perfectly for her. I’m really excited for her to get started and can’t wait to come to watch her run!

Enzo is also doing very well at his new school. He’s our little math wiz and regularly scores around the 90th percentile nationally for his age group in math. He takes after Grandpa Elmer and myself in that sense. He’s doing well in other subjects too, but it’s clear that math is his strongest subject, so we want to cultivate that as much as possible. He says he wants to be a software engineer when he grows up so he can “work a lot and make a lot of money.” I wonder where he gets that from…

A few weeks ago, Enzo joined a new swimming program through the city of Henderson. We were lucky enough to get a spot at the Green Valley community center, which is less than 10 minutes from our house. At this point, he has already surpassed me in formal swimming instruction. Although he has expressed an interest in running when he gets older, for now, it seems to be all about swimming. I always assumed it would be BMX racing for Enzo, but I love that he’s so into swimming.

At this point, all three of the kids are strong swimmers. Between all the lessons they have taken, and all the time we spend swimming at home, I have little to worry about them in the water. We still take water safety very seriously, though; the kids know about my good friend Spencer who drowned in Lake Washington many years ago. Swimming was a life skill that Jessica and I insisted on, and I love the fact that it has become the activity that the kids and I do together the most.

Things have also been going well for Jessica. Summer flew by, but she loves her job, especially now that the kids are with her all day. Her dedication to her job has impressed me; it’s not uncommon for her to work on school-related things at home during her free time. The school is extremely lucky to have her in this position, and they know it too. They keep asking her if she wants to move up into another role, but at least for now, she is quite happy where she is.

Our days are extremely busy, but we have a nice routine going. Every morning I help prepare the kids for school, then I start my workday once they head out the door. I usually wrap up my workday an hour or two after they get home from school, then Jessica and I team up to help the kids with homework and make dinner. The school they went to last year assigned literally zero homework, but now at this new school, homework is a daily thing. It seems strange considering that both schools are part of the same district and teach the same grades, but it’s clear that the kids are doing better in school because of the homework.

By the time homework and dinner are finished, we’re all pretty spent. We tend to hang out and watch a little TV at night, then we’re off to bed early and ready to do it all over again the next day.

Vegas Showbiz Update

If you follow the Vegas Showbiz YouTube channel, you may have noticed that our video production volume has recently slowed down. This is by design, but it’s only a temporary thing. Allow me to explain.

When I started Vegas Showbiz last October, my original plan was based on a website allowing you to search for Las Vegas events and shows. I worked extremely hard on it for three months and still consider it my crowning achievement as a software engineer, but the problem was that I quickly realized a couple of things:

1. Running a site like that is expensive due to all the background operations running to gather event data.
2. It was too much work for one person to handle as a side hustle, and I wasn’t in a position to hire employees.
3. It’s nearly impossible to compete with Google when it comes to any kind of web search business.

Based on this, I switched gears and started focusing on content production. I built a new website for VegasShow.biz that would be much more focused on blog articles and search engine optimization and created the YouTube channel. 

At first, I was pulling double duty by writing blog articles and making videos, but it soon became too much work to keep up with, especially considering how busy I already am with work and family commitments. I was enjoying the process of making YouTube videos more than writing blog articles, so I made a conscious decision to take a break from the blog and focus entirely on YouTube videos.

About four months went by, and I was so focused on video production that I basically forgot all about the website. Then, one day in August, I randomly decided to log in to the back end of the website and was surprised to see that even though I had done zero work on the site for four months, the site had made a little money due to the Google advertisements that run all over it. It was less than $10, so we’re not talking about anything significant here, but it was enough for me to realize how profitable a blog can be.

The site was (and still is) getting very few hits, but this article I wrote about the Rio Hotel was getting most of the traffic. Soon enough, I realized that if you search for something similar to “is Rio Las Vegas closing,” my article is the number one search result on Google! This was exciting to see and somewhat reinvigorated me to start writing more Las Vegas blog posts. I have since written three new blog posts for VegasShow.biz and will soon be starting another one.

On the YouTube side of things, we have now produced 65 videos, 15 of which have over 1,000 views. Not bad for a channel that’s only six or seven months old. When you look at those 15 most-watched videos, it becomes clear that our most successful videos fall into one of the following categories:

• Las Vegas Shows
• Las Vegas Concerts
• Las Vegas Hotels
• Las Vegas Restaurants

Everything else we do seems to get minimal views, so it’s clear to me that I’m wasting my time producing a video unrelated to those four categories. There’s one small problem, though; to make a video about any of those things means you have to spend money to do the thing first. It was getting a little expensive going to all these shows, concerts, hotels, and restaurants. Luckily, however, I think I have found the perfect solution. Enter HouseSeats.com.

My Mom and friend Devin had both told me about HouseSeats a while ago, but I didn’t get serious about it until recently. The idea is that HouseSeats runs in a handful of cities throughout the country; you pay a relatively small fee to sign up for a membership, then you monitor their site to see what tickets are available. As Devin put it, the Vegas B-rate shows always offer free tickets on HouseSeats, and at least once a year, you will score free tickets to a show or concert that you would have gladly paid to see anyway.

It seems to me that Las Vegas would be the best city to have a HouseSeats membership in due to all the ticketed shows that are constantly happening. I really want to see those b-rate shows, too, because people search for things like that when planning their vacation. I haven’t yet signed up for a HouseSeats membership, only because it’s good for one year, and I already have things planned for Vegas Showbiz videos during the next two weekends. After that, however, I’m definitely going to sign up and can’t wait to start attending more shows!

I expect the Vegas Showbiz YouTube channel to be back in high gear very soon. My goal is to qualify for the YouTube partner program by the middle of 2023. In the meantime, another goal of mine is to write a VegasShow.biz blog article for every successful video we have produced so far. It’s clear to me that I need more balance between Vegas Showbiz videos and blog articles going forward, so that’s how I plan to operate from now on.

Pellegrini Guitar

Since I thrive on being busy and love the content creation process, I recently decided to start another blog and YouTube channel. This time, it’s all dedicated to my love of the guitar. Since then, I have been writing blog articles on PellegriniGuitar.com and adding videos to the Pellegrini Guitar YouTube channel. If you could help me out by subscribing to the YouTube channel, I would greatly appreciate it!

My love of the guitar is much older than my love for content creation, and I still practice daily, but over the past few years, I have found myself trying to figure out what’s next for me musically. Playing in a band doesn’t suit my lifestyle these days, so I had mainly been focusing on recording my own songs and posting them to my SoundCloud account. The problem is that practically no one was hearing my songs, so I frequently questioned why I still practice every day. I’ve always loved playing, but that alone wasn’t enough.

I needed a new sense of musical purpose, which is exactly what this blog and channel provided. Now I know what I’m practicing for; the next video! Playing on camera can be a little bit nerve-wracking, and I still don’t think I’ve played my best on any of the videos, but I’m getting better. Most importantly, though, I’m enjoying it so much! I have a passion for the instrument, which I hope shines through in my videos and articles, even when my playing isn’t quite up to par.

Based on all the guitar gear I’ve been collecting over the years, my main video focus for Pellegrini Guitar so far has been doing demos of different guitars. Once those are out of the way, I will probably demo some of my amplifiers and effects pedals, but I also want to start creating my own guitar lesson series. I’m still working out the details, but I plan to provide free lessons on YouTube as my little way of giving back to the guitar community. 

While there is certainly no shortage of free guitar lessons on YouTube, I still think I have something to offer. I’m trying to develop a unique approach to teaching the instrument to beginners and look forward to actually creating the lessons. For now, it’s all conceptual, but I’m getting more comfortable playing on video, plus learning how to create the best possible sound quality in my videos.

It’s become clear to me that content creation can be a very lucrative business model if you’re willing to put in the work. Assuming you’re not already famous or well-known for a particular thing, it’s going to take a lot of time to build up the kind of traffic you need to be profitable. It’s not the kind of thing I would recommend to someone trying to figure out how they’re going to pay the bills next month, but if you’re patient and you have a passion for the content you’re creating, success can happen.

I’m in it for the long haul and am not particularly worried about how much traffic I’m getting in this first year. My goal is to do another 10-15 years in the tech industry while building up Vegas Showbiz and Pellegrini Guitar. Hopefully, I can retire from tech in my early to mid-50s and then focus on my content platforms. 

It’s possible that one platform will take off and require all of my attention, but we’ll see. I could see either (or both) of them doing really well; E-Learning is one of the hottest industries in the world now, raking in billions of dollars annually. Based on this, I could see Pellegrini Guitar taking off, but on the other hand, Las Vegas is quickly transforming into Hollywood 2.0. Tons of people from Hollywood are moving here regularly. Even A-List stars like Mark Whalberg are relocating here. As more and more people flock to Las Vegas and the entertainment scene here jumps up to the next level, it seems very possible that Vegas Showbiz could ride that wave to success.

I have no concerns at all because I know that as long as I keep putting in the work with these platforms and my day job, everything will be fine. Probably more than fine. I think there’s going to be even more exciting news coming up over the next few months, but we’ll have to wait and see how things play out. For now, we couldn’t be better. Everyone is thriving and happy, which is all I care about.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for sticking with me on this long post. Here are a few recent photos.