Blogging from A to Z: Jobs

During April, I'm participating in the Blogging from A to Z challenge -- one alphabet-themed post per day, starting with A is for Aruba Aftermath and ending with Z is for ... I don't know yet what Z is for, I'll figure it out when I get there.

How it feels to be working 5 days a week again (image from here)

I'm not exactly sure how we got to this state of affairs, but suddenly we looked around and realized that in addition to our mornings running the VHF net for boaters here, our volunteer historic tourguide time had increased to 5 days per week -- Tuesdays and Wednesdays as Spanish soldados (soldiers) at the Castillo, and Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays as pirates or sailors on the tall ship El Galeon Andalucia here at the marina.  And we absolutely love what we do, time flies while we're helping interested people understand day-to-day life for ordinary soldiers and sailors in the late 1600s or early 1700s, and our respective supervisors have indicated that we're pretty good at it.  It's incredibly rewarding to have this platform to help folks understand how we got to be the society we are today, to help them "connect the dots," as a recent visitor described it, even explaining how some of our modern phrases have a military or maritime origin.  Although our voices and feet are tired at the end of the day, our brains are energized after chatting with people all day.  And of course there's no "commute" except a pleasant 15-minute walk.  And yet ...

I can't believe how tiring it is to devote so many waking hours to something, and how frazzling life feels when we have only 2 days in which to cram in all our errands and the ordinary tasks of lifestyle maintenance, laundry and grocery shopping and bill paying.  Boat maintenance has been a distant memory, we haven't done a drop of it recently.  The rushed feeling spilled over until I found myself less patient than I would have liked with some of the visitors, distracted during the day thinking about the tasks that awaited us in the evening, and distracted during the evening thinking about the conversations during the day that could have gone better.  How did we juggle all this while we had careers? The contrast gives me new sympathy for our working friends.

We agreed to cut back to only three half-days per week for two weeks to regroup.  Mondays were normally our day off, this one was spent catching up on errands.  In the evening we looked forward to a day of few demands except the radio net.  But that relaxed feeling was short-lived as we went to turn on the air conditioner and got ... nothing.  Looks like tomorrow will be maintenance day.  Remind me again, how did we do this while we had careers?

We love everything about our lives here ... except that there are too many cool things to do. So many that we don't kick back very often.  I know that partly it's just because enthusiasm is part of our personalities, but still. That's the whole point of having a boat and being retired, right?  To feel no rhythms but those of nature, and no time but that of the sun and moon?  Maybe we have to get underway again for a while, go sailing and maybe anchor out in a pristine location.

I'm ready to spend some time in a place like this! (Bahamas, 2009)