Thanks! I recently just got a new lens for my camera after all of the income from last month came in. It's a very used 35mm lens for my D3300 and the autofocus is a bit broken, meaning that I'm forced to do the focus manually (which is something I want to get better at anyways).
That combined with Patreon does! I'm likely going to spin up a small corporation so that I can funnel my side income through there and avoid having to go through the logistical nightmare of double income tax because of imperialist IRS policies. Sometimes I justify fun purchases that I could afford anyways (eg: very used camera lens or that Anbernic Win600 that I ended up liking for 2D games but couldn't hold comfortably enough to use the sticks) with ad/Patreon income. Sometimes it ends up on the blog anyways. Stay tuned!
Speaking of the ad-block message, perhaps it is worth adding who/what ethicalads.io is. I too un-blocked them on yours site, partially because their approach seems more justifiable than others I've run across. I wouldn't even mind un-blocking ads that are self-hosted by a site I like, but nobody does that any more. Anything that smells of surveillance capitalism can stay on my shit list though.
Ethical Ads (https://www.ethicalads.io/) looks interesting, wish there were more ad-tech companies like this. Would love one focused on the travel niche.