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.