Eye of the Tornado

Yes, I am aware that the usual phrase is “eye of the hurricane” but it seems to me that tornados and hurricanes have a common ancestor, and thus must have other aspects that conjoin. Somewhere, buried in the hundred-plus mile an hour winds, there must be a tiny eye, so small and so quick as to be over in, well, the blink of an eye. Still, in that tiny valley, there is a moment of peace. That seems to be where we are right now.

Not that I’m complaining; it’s been a fantastic week, there’s just a lot going on. As it turns out, Dan Beard Council was scheduled to be here at the same time as the Ranch Committee, and of course, hilarity ensued. I’ve discovered that the individual members of the Ranch Committee are quite pleasant, even fun. Their organization, on the other hand, scares the hell out of everyone here. These are the people that decide who gets money and for what, and more potently, who doesn’t. Essentially, when they say jump, we’ve got to strap on our rocket boots as we ask how high.

Then again, I didn’t really see much of the Ranch Committee. We served them dinner a couple of times, but I was contentedly washing dishes while that was going on. They used our classrooms, but I was out taking care of Dan Beard, and that itself was a story. The reason for this scheduling difficulty was that the Dan Beard Council was not using our housing facilities, just our staff, so they didn’t show up on our calendar. They definitely made my life interesting in a good way: we gave them a Villa Tour, drove them to Baldy Town and French Henry, and hiked them through Hidden Valley. Much better than what everyone else was doing: moving tables and chairs.

The big difficulty was that we really didn’t get any time off. Usually when somebody complains about not getting time off, it means that they’re miffed about working nine days straight without a day off, but we really didn’t get any time off. I was up at six to serve breakfast and worked through lunch for two days straight, and the first of those had me working until nine. I was too tired to realize that I needed sleep.

Yesterday deserves its own section of this text. Yeah, we worked a half day; cleaning classrooms and picking up tables. I took my afternoon off to do laundry and bake cookies (short break while I eat one) then went to dinner, expecting my evening to involve nothing more exciting than playing video games until I fell asleep, probably before nine. It was then that Sarah from the dining hall informed me that it was “international talk like a pirate day” and that there was a Celtic punk band playing in Colorado. I knew that this would keep me up late, but Celtic music, especially with a punk beat is more than a weakness for me, it’s a near obsession.

Of course, the band would be playing in a bar, so I drove. We got there around nine and had to wait almost an hour for the band to come on, but there was a lot to see in the bar. This being “talk like a pirate day” most of the patrons were dressed as pirates, and this was very much a local bar. Everyone seemed to know each other, and we were strange visitors allowed to join in, though only one of us dressed up for the occasion (any guesses as to who?)

When the band came on, it was worth the wait. They were a very local band, and knew half the people in the room (they addressed a few by name) but their music was phenomenal. They played some traditional Irish and Scottish pieces, and a couple of originals with a spirit that could make you think that they were playing for thirty thousand people instead of thirty. For those that know them, think of the Dropkick Murphys, without the profanity and with a fiddle player that played almost ineffably well. Though, in many circles this would be considered heresy, this band was better than the Murphys and Flogging Molly combined. For once, I was the last to want to leave, and regretfully tore myself away around one thirty.

So who was this wonderful band? Did I get a CD? Sadly, since the band was selling their own CDs and we left before they were done, I didn’t get one. Worse, I’m a bit shaky on the name of the band; the only person who could read it off the base drum had the kind of Alabama accent that made him sound like he had been chewing on marbles. My interpretation of his garbled words gave me the name “The Poitin Punk Band”, but an internet search this morning has turned up nothing. Rest assured, I’ll keep looking.

Update: Five minutes later, I got it. The band's name is "Potcheen".

Missing out

This has been a week of missing out on things. There really isn’t anyone to blame, and I wouldn’t say that I was bitter about it, but a kind of loneliness has settled over the past week that I will be quite happy to leave behind.

You see, Nancy and Caitlyn were both gone this week, leaving the Villa in my care. Normally it would just be Nancy in charge of the Villa anyway, but this year we have another Villa guide with us who happened to need that week off. I was vaguely excited at the prospect of giving all of those tours; I really do enjoy it. It was only when I realized what everyone else would be doing that things turned a little sour in my mind. Hikes went to Cito reservoir and Lovers’ Leap, tours drove out to different parts of the ranch and I sat in the office waiting for ten o’clock to come around so I could call and see if I even had a tour. Several times I found myself pitying Nancy, after all, she did this for nine months out of the year.

Caitlyn came back on Friday afternoon and poached my last tour. I say “poached” but by then I was really okay with it. The rest of the staff had been put on a schedule that put one person in the office in the morning and another in the afternoon. Of course, I still had to work the Villa on Friday. Missing out again.

My assigned afternoon was Sunday, and by then I was a bit thankful to have missed out on a full day off. Philmont is full of places to hike and rock climb and have glorious adventures, just not alone and not in the off season. When Brian asked me to come in at ten (in case of surprise Villa tours, no less), I was quite willing.

As it turned out, Will came rushing back to the duplex to find me at nine-fifteen, stating that the Philmont Leadership Challenge course needed a tour to be completed by ten. With fifteen minutes turning on all of the lights, that would be a tight tour, but I came along. What followed was a mass of confusion: the tour wasn’t to end at ten, it was to start at ten, Caitlyn was already assigned to the tour but had been told that she had all the time in the world, they wanted the whole thing over with in half an hour anyway and they expected to be taught how to do it themselves for next week. In the end it all came together and I found myself sitting in the office waiting for lunchtime. Lunchtime would be yet another thing I missed out on.

I honestly don’t even remember who came in at eleven thirty to inform me that someone wanted a tour, but I went up, unlocked the doors and started it. It was just two people looking to tour the Villa, but within a minute of starting the history, five more people had showed up. Their last name was Hoover, and it wasn’t a coincidental relationship to the name of the vacuum cleaner- these were the inheritors of that fortune. The tour ground to a halt in the New Mexico room when they found a photograph signed by their great-grandfather.

I cleaned a couple of the duplexes that afternoon and went home early to find that my roommate was gone. In fact, the whole staff was gone. It seems that they went up to Colorado to visit a bar and go to a movie. Again, I missed out.

On the writing front, I suddenly seem to have developed a fever for sending things out to be published. I’ve begun to see my desire to be a published author and a screenwriter in much the same way as a video game quest: just because you know what you want to do in the end doesn’t mean that you’re anywhere close to it. There are other little things- sometimes difficult, frequently infuriating, but necessary things that have to be done first. To that end, I’ve been sending out the short stories that I’ve been writing for the last year to different small publishers. It’s not writing the great American novel, but it builds up a portfolio that could eventually impress an agent, and an agent can connect me with a publisher. So, I’ve gone to different sites, read what they have available and then hand picked a story that I think that they will enjoy. In theory, my first responses will come in at the end of the month.

The doldrums

Sometimes it's difficult maintaining a blog. The fact of the matter is that my life (and I believe most lives) doesn't really entail much most of the time. Most people will get up in the morning, have the same thing for breakfast, do the same thing at work, talk about the same things with their spouse and go to bed at the same time. Perhaps this is why television is so important to our society: there's something different everyday, but overall it's always the same.

My life has a little more variation than most. My job is to do what other people want to do or what needs doing. Thus if a group comes in wanting to hike, that's what we do. If we have no group, we might end up painting or cleaning something. It means that I don't necesarily know what's coming next, and that is a godsend.

Unfortunately, it also means that I don't really know what to do with time off, and neither does anybody else. Throw, say, a four day weekend our way and what you end up with is a lot of guys sitting around playing a lot of video games. I did manage to do a little writing, but not until yesterday when I was so fed up with wandering in 3D rendered towns that I couldn't stand to push the CD eject button. It kind of makes me wonder: with so many people hating their jobs and living for the weekend, could it be that I, who love my job, have taken the opposite approach? I bore myself on my time off.

This week I seem to be in charge of the Villa. Two tours a day and I have to turn on the lights at night so people can find their way back to their guest rooms. Okay, it's not complicated, but at least it's work.

A new journey

The summer is over and the fall has begun. Normally the way that this works for me is that everyone goes home (including most of the fall staff) and I sit around for a week doing whatever we can find that needs doing. The reason for this is the week of vacation that we are all offered, but that I have never actually taken before. I don't have anything against it in particular, it's just that going a thousand miles home, hanging out with my parents for a few days and turning around to come back simply doesn't outweigh the idea of staying out here for the week in my mind. I love my parents dearly, but we don't actually do a whole lot together.

This year I decided to do things a little differently and took my vacation; I'm still a little unclear as to why. My computer was still in California, which made a convenient excuse for the whole endevor, but I could have had it shipped to me with far less effort and a third the expense. It gave me a great opportunity to see not only my family but my second family: the Halters in Arizona. That may have been a reason, but what I really suspect is that I just got the idea into my head and had to follow it up.

Sometimes I wonder how truckers can do their job, and sometimes I completely understand. I don't think that these are different sometimes. Driving down the highway is easy: you lose yourself in the music on the radio or whatever you happen to be thinking at the time, you give yourself short term goals to make the long term seem a little more bearable and you stare at the highway. This last part is the most important, and not because of the turns and other cars. The road almost speaks to you; it goes on forever right now, and then suddenly ends. It is your life made barren and empty and it makes you wonder what you most want to fill it with.

Hanging out with the Halters was pretty much what you'd expect if you know me and the Halters. We played video games, played with the baby, talked about the ranch, played more video games, watched some TV, and probably played more video games. Sara introduced me to the horror that is Farm Town on Facebook: it's a miniature game in which every individual element is boring, but the combination is incredibly addictive. Hanging out at home was about what you'd expect as well: I spent a lot of time talking with my mom, reorganized my room a little, ate fish and left. Well, yeah, I also picked up a burrito at Mexico Viejo, but that's just tradition.

I've been back at Philmont for one day and routine has already settled in. I got up in the morning, used my exercise ball, went to breakfast, went to work, etc. I've decided to start excersising at the little gym in the staff lounge regularly, skipping Wednesdays for yoga. Some call routine the mind killer, but I find it pretty comforting, and with work as unpredictable as it tends to be, there's no reason to complain. We went to Fish Camp today, have an unnamed backcountry tour tomorrow and a barbeque in the evening.

Life is good. Always.