Open’s an eye and looks around– is summer over yet?
Almost. Time officially got away from me. Most of that is due to taking on a temporary promotion at work and having more duties as assigned. It’s starting to slow done but the ride isn’t over yet.
Other than job related training and a week off in Missouri (to stave off burnout– which didn’t work) I really haven’t done much. I put my weight loss/fitness stuff on the backburner. Grad school on the backburner, writing on the backburner, all my hobbies– back burner.
This blog– the grill out back…
Which is sad because I was posting pretty regularly up until I took on more duties because of how short staffed we were. On top of the IT stuff I had already taken on I honestly didn’t want to stare at a computer all day and then another couple hours on top of that. So I avoided screens and neglected the blog, social media, etc.
What’s even sadder? I took on management level duties. I haven’t been outside, on the river, all summer except for a handful of days. Four days out of an entire summer.
I don’t want to be in management– maybe in another five-ten years but not right now. I like being in the field, I like being only slightly in the office. My office, as far as I’m concerned, is in a canoe.
This led to a slight argument with my husband– who thinks I’m capable and should be in the management position. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the paycheck and ability to shape programming would be fun but I would rather be outside.
You don’t get outside all that much if you’re management.
However, I will say the experience taught me well and I know I can, in fact, do the job.
The other sliver lining– I finally got to travel for work again. I did two work trips that led to a few day hikes. The first one was SWIM (Swiftwater Incident Management training), which was hard but rewarding and the other was Dark Sky Academy. I can now save people in swiftwater incidents and give them a star program later that night. I did get to go to two new places, New River Gorge National Park and Glacier National Park.
I didn’t have a lot of free time at New River– I spent the evenings recovering from the days almost drownings– it was a part of the training and totally controlled. At Glacier I did have a little more downtime and not as much exertion, so I did a lot of day hikes. I’ll do a little post about those day hikes in the near future. I did make some videos and posted some photos already on my Instagram and TikTok from GNP because that was easy and didn’t require me staring at a blank page internally screaming “write something, dammit!” and then procrastinating since this is for fun and not work/school related.
The really good news is that we now are only short one full time staff member and we once again have a management team (that I am not on— thank you universe). I will be sliding back into my normal tour of duty and hopefully *soon* I will turn over IT to someone else.
Then I won’t be staring, troubleshooting, or contemplating destroying computers all day and I might actually write more for my blog and a few other writing projects I’ve been working on.
Aside from work, Hunter is now a whirlwind of activity and isn’t afraid of nature, urban surroundings, or snakes… this child is chaos and while I’m exhausted I’m having the best time of my life watching him learn new things.
As I mentioned, I will be posting about day hikes in Glacier– I will also make a post about my Missouri trip where I took my husband down the Current River for is first ever Ozark’s float trip… no there were not banjos playing in the bank…
Here’s to fighting burnout, surviving the summer, and new beginnings!
Keep wandering,
BJ
P.S. Go for a walk it helps with stress.
The Wannabe Backpacker 