Seamus is really hooked on this trapshooting thing. He gets a little antsy when he hasn’t been able to shoot for a while. I think he gets that from his step-father, who has the same syndrome. And since I don’t care all that much for competing and he’s better than I am anyway, I decided to throw my discretionary ammunition fund his way instead of using it for myself. While he’s at it, he’s also using my gun and my shooting glasses. He’s really quite good with the shotgun and if he puts his time in practicing, he may be able to go pretty far with it.

A couple of friends of mine have sons his age who are big duck hunters, so they know how to handle a shotgun too. When the trap league didn’t have enough kids interested to round out a junior team of five, I asked these other two boys if they wanted to join in on the fun. They were thrilled to be asked, and very much interested in shooting with Seamus this year. I discussed this back and forth several times with the league secretary, who promised me that they’d have a spot and she would help find a fifth kid to round out the team (there was already another boy on it.)  The club associated with the league was even offering to sponsor the team. While I was at the New Year’s Eve party, I got a call from another parent who couldn’t commit her son to the team unless she had help driving him now and then, due to her work schedule. I told her that I’d help her, and just like that, we had a junior team!

Or so I thought.

On Friday, barely 24 hours before the first shoot, I got a text from the league secretary, the one who’d committed to these five kids that they could shoot this season. She said that she now had to fill one of the spots on the team with a member’s kid (we are not members at the moment, due to some shenanigans she pulled on our family a few years back) and that only two of my kids could shoot, and that I would have to pick which one couldn’t. So I called her up to try to find out what was going on.

She said that another league board member had promised another kid a spot on the team, and that the girl was dying to shoot, and she had to hold up that promise. Now, mind you, this is fully a week after she’s committed to the team we thought we had in place. She’d already promised these five kids that they could shoot together, but was willing to go back on that word.

Oh no. I don’t think so.

I promised my three boys that they could shoot, and I sure wasn’t going to kick one of them off because someone else was weaseling. So instead, I did something that she completely didn’t expect. I told her that these three boys were shooting together no matter what, and if she didn’t have room for all of them, then they were all off the team. I’d find a team for them and sponsor them myself. If I had to stand up there and shoot with them, then that’s what I would do, fronting a regular league team that just happened to have four junior members instead of a junior team. She was not prepared for that, but at that point I was done with her nonsense.

So after a little calling to some friends, we had a junior team put together again, this time under my name. One of the kids is the son of a long-time friend of Junior’s, and the other one is a friend of the first kid, who happened to shoot with Seamus last year but had walked away from that trap club due to the politics. The same politics that I was experiencing first hand, as it happens. But however we found them, within half an hour, we had another team.

I felt bad for the original two kids on the other team. It wasn’t their fault, that’s for sure, nor the fault of the one trying to squeeze in. I called the friend to whom I had promised driving help, and told her what was going on so she would be aware of it, reiterating my promise to help her transport her son if she needed it. I didn’t have the other kid’s phone number, but I did see his father at practice the next day and apologized to him personally. He understood that I had to stand up for my own kids and didn’t hold it against me. As of Saturday afternoon, those kids still didn’t have a team set up, but it was no longer my problem. My boys were taken care of, and now the woman who’d failed to uphold her own commitments could do the scrambling.

Things came to light a little more clearly on Sunday morning. I saw that the other kids had a team, and the final two members were two girls who shoot very well but are starting to become interested in other activities. They’d had to be talked into shooting. The father of our last team member let it slip that he’d talked to the father of the original girl that the secretary was trying to slip onto the team. And that they hadn’t gone begging to the league at all, but it was the other way around. The league secretary had come calling to him recruiting his daughter on Thursday evening. I see what happened there; that woman is so interested in winning that she wanted a team with a known shooter in place of an unknown. After all, who knows how well my two friends’ sons could shoot? And that’s why she was so bent out of shape when I pulled Seamus from the team. He’s a pretty good shot for his age.

That’s not supposed to be what the junior shooting events are about. Sure, winning is nice, and some other clubs have some really good junior teams. But my three boys are there to have fun, not to dominate the event. And they simply wouldn’t have fun with one of them missing, or split up into two teams. It wouldn’t be fair to them. So even though she didn’t stick to her word, I sure did, and now I’m extremely proud to be sponsoring both a junior team and a regular league team.

Junior had told me about the politics of the place, and I believed him, but I hadn’t seen them in action before.  Now it’s clear that there’s a bad apple in that barrel. They’ve lost all three of these kids for the scholastics program they are trying to start, as well as the fifth kid on our team who had already walked away from that club. If Seamus chooses to shoot for scholastics later in the year, it’ll be at the competing club. They’ve been trying to recruit him for years anyway, as his 4-H leader is a part of the coaching team. And I was pushing for us to become members of this club, but that’s completely off the table now. They may need our help, but they aren’t going to get it.

All of this nonsense and strife was vindicated when the boys shot their first league shoot on Sunday. They had an absolute ball. They may not be the best team out there yet, but they sure seem to have the biggest cheering section. You can see the light bulbs going off over their heads when they suddenly understand something and start pulverizing targets. To see them figure things out is so satisfying, and they’re having so much fun. These boys are going to be a good team, and learn a lot, and enjoy themselves, and that’s the point of the whole sport.

I knew when Grey Fox died that things would be all shaken up within our little hunting group. The interpersonal relationships did take a hit, and the season had some awkward moments, but all in all, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The same group of us are still hunting together at the end of the season, so that’s a good thing.

The bad thing this year has been the actual hunting. I’ve never seen a year so bad, and most of the houndsmen I run with say the same thing, and they have a lot more time on the ground for comparison. So many weekends have been spent driving around looking for tracks or scents for absolutely nothing that it’s got me pretty well burnt out on the whole thing for a while. So much money and time invested, and I only got to see three bears taken. What a terrible year for training dogs this was too, as it’s really hard to teach them what to hunt if we never actually find what they’re supposed to be hunting.

I didn’t want to put my green dogs in on cold tracks for fear that they’d mess up someone’s paid-for hunt, and it’s not as good for training as hot tracks are anyway. They have a hard time figuring out what to do if the smell is too faint. So Jane got in on three hunts, and only made it to the tree on two of them. I never did manage to walk the pups in to a tree, since I was busy messing with Jane and only have so many hands. It’s next to impossible to train young dogs without a lead dog of your own, and I don’t have one.

The dogs are driving me nuts at home too, always barking, like hounds do. I’ve had a lot of animal drama going on lately with Angus killing poultry and me having to take one of the hound kennels for him. Add to that the job insecurity and the irrationality of spending one to two hundred bucks in fuel each weekend to hunt these dogs, besides the costs to feed them and keep them healthy, and it starts to overwhelm me. I’m losing sight of the joy in hunting; it’s all work and no fun any more. I’m working hard on simplifying my life to ease stress levels, and the dog pack is a huge part of my stress.

So after a great deal more thought than I spent acquiring the pack (and that was a lot,) they are now for sale. I have someone coming over tonight who likes Cara a lot and used to own her grandmother. He may take the other two as well, for another friend who’s down a few dogs. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this but rationality says that it’s the right thing to do. It’s just not the right time for me, and getting a green houndsman involved with a green pack was a poor decision. If the financial things shape up, I can get back into it at any time, but next time, I’ll buy some trained dogs to start with. Puppies are just more headache than they’re worth.

I’m having a problem with feeling like a failure and I definitely got more attached to these little hooligans than I should have, but I do think that my life will be easier without them. The box will come out of the truck so I can use the bed, but I’ll keep all of my equipment. I liked being a houndsman, but I think I will like lowering my blood pressure just as much. I’ll miss them but my poultry and the neighbors won’t. At least I’m in good company; more than half of the houndsmen that I know have sold off all of their dogs at one point or another. Grey Fox himself used to sell dogs left and right, and completely got out of it more than once. But if I get back into it, it’ll have to be from another angle. I’m not a dog trainer, at least not at this stage.

Way back in 1988, when I was a pup, I went on a sailing trip to Catalina Island with my boyfriend at the time and his uncle, on said uncle’s tiny sail boat. All I remember of the trip is the interior of the tiny cabin, where my innards did their best to evert themselves both on the trip there and the trip back. This was the occasion on which I learned that it’s really best not to try to be on the ocean with a head cold; the motion sickness will make you wish that you were dead.

I’ve been on the ocean a number of times since then, in rough weather and smooth. I’ve been on roller coasters. I’ve been in airplanes and helicopters. I’ve repelled off of freakin’ buildings. I’ve never had more than a twinge of motion sickness since. I thought that I was immune. I even lost sympathy for those poor souls afflicted by it, one of whom is my dear husband. I would never laugh, mind you, but I also didn’t quite get it any more.

Oh, have I been humbled.

One of my favorite bloggers and authors,  Hank Shaw, has put together a most interesting and unusual book tour. Instead of sitting in a chair behind a desk signing books in a store, he developed events that highlighted what the book is actually about. And since Hunt, Gather, Cook is about doing just what the title suggests, he has some really neat things going. This was not the only fishing trip that he has planned, and there are dinners featuring wild foods and I believe some foraging events too. I was really looking forward to it, and to meeting both him and his girlfriend, Holly Heyser, who I also find a very interesting read.

I even made this one of the first girls’ events that I’ve had anything to do with in a long time. My friend Shelley is interested in lots of the same things, and has been ocean fishing for many years. And since we rarely get away from our men, this looked like the perfect opportunity.

And we were all set up to have a ball. I swung through her town and picked her up on Friday night – a good idea since we live farther away from Half Moon Bay than just about anyone on the trip, possibly excluding Holly and Hank. We got to yammering so much on the road that I actually missed our turn, and we ended up almost at the Berkeley marina before we got turned around and headed in the right direction, which took us through massive traffic. I think it took us four hours to get there, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was enjoying the company.

We had a nice evening but kept it low-key due to the early morning planned. It would be an early alarm even for me, and I get to work at 6 AM. But we got to the dock on time the next morning and found our boat, the Huli-Cat. It was only two slips down from the last boat I took out of there, which isn’t all that small of a coincidence in a marina that small.

The trip started off nicely. The people seemed interesting. I’d expected that we’d be in the minority as country folk, and I was right, but for once there wasn’t the usual prejudice against hunters that one tends to find in a group of city people. On the contrary, some of these people seemed to be on the forefront of a new wave of young urban hunters, so we had more in common than I might have thought. As we motored out of the harbor, I was having an interesting conversation with one couple, a mushroom hunter and a large game hunter. But then I noticed that it was really best if I kept my eyes on the horizon. I told them that I was listening and just feeling a little odd, but it’s really challenging to have a conversation with someone who simply will not look at you, and is turning slightly green.

Getting to the fishing spot was a little rough, but I was hoping that once the boat slowed down, I would recover somewhat. And I did, a little. Enough to drop my line in the water after rockfish. The first time I hauled it back up, it had two fish on it, one on each hook! I was mighty pleased, but getting sicker by the minute. It was really hard to find any joy in catching the biggest fish of my life when I was a little more worried that I might not make it to the stern rail to chum. I’m really not even sure what color that fish was.

So for the next lifetime, or possibly eight hours or so, I alternated sitting in the back of the boat clenching my jaw, willing my stomach to stay where it belonged and staring at the horizon like it was my job with stumbling my way to my rod at the bow. I’d drop the line in, catch two more fish, and stumble my way back. I did this often enough to get five nice fish into the boat (a couple slipped off the hooks) before I had just had it. And yes, we’d each taken anti-nausea medicine the night before and again when it started to hit me. It wasn’t even rough weather, and my ears weren’t clogged up, but I sure had a hard time. I wasn’t the only one, either. Two other women were having at least as hard a time of it as I was. Shelley made the curious observation that we’d all seem to feel a little better in cycles, and then it would hit us all again at roughly the same time. Eventually, the medicine did kick in a little bit, and I no longer wanted to die. Things weren’t great and I still couldn’t look down or focus on small things (such as my camera) but hurling wasn’t such an immediate proposition.

Of course, twenty minutes before we got back to the dock, the medicine kicked in good and well, and I started to come alive again. By then it was too late. I never got to talk to some of these really interesting people like I wanted to do, and I didn’t even get to catch my limit. I did sit and watch a lot, and did a lot of listening, and got clued in a little bit to a whole different world than I’m used to, and that was interesting. The life of the urban forager is very different from mine. The lengths they have to go to to get freshly-grown produce is interesting to someone who really should walk out back and collect my own eggs and vegetables. They don’t have that luxury. I do, and I’m sure glad I do.

But even though I’m still a little urpy at home tonight, I’m glad I went. It was interesting. I had a great time with Shelley and we have plans to do some more things on our own. It’s good to have girlfriends who like to do non-traditional girlfriend stuff.I enjoyed meeting Hank and Holly, and the other people on the boat. And I may not entirely be put off of the ocean fishing thing, but you can bet that next time, I’m going to drug myself to the gills just in case.

While I’m over the pneumonia incident from this winter, it’s taking me longer to bounce back than it used to. I’d like to be hiking all over the mountains, but I’m just not capable of the strenuous stuff yet. We went to Vernal Falls last month and there was no way I could go on to Nevada Falls. So this time, on Junior’s last free Saturday with me for months, we picked an easier hike that we’ve done before.

The water is still massively flowing in Yosemite, so we went to Hetch Hetchy to see the waterfalls. I can’t believe the difference between this piece of Yosemite and the Valley. No busloads of tourists, no massive traffic problems once you turn off of the main entrance road (which was backed up for miles), and no hassles. The weather was absolutely perfect, cool enough that we could sleep in, take a leisurely breakfast, and ease our way up to the park. We didn’t start hiking until after noon, which is usually a really bad idea in the Sierras.

But we knew the hike to Wapama Falls and Tueeulala Falls would only take us a few hours. This time, I didn’t carry a pack. Junior did, both because he wants to carry more weight to get more work out of our hikes and also so he could bring along his new spotting scope and tripod to try them out.

The last time we were on this trail, a couple of years ago, Tueeulala Falls wasn’t even flowing. This time, it was prudent to take one’s shoes and socks off to cross the creek below it.

And Wapama Falls was absolutely thundering, drenching the bridge, which was a “cross at your own risk” situation. It may have been foolish, but we both went out onto the bridge and cooled off in that massively powerful water. Then we had to hike back with squelching socks anyway, as we got so wet so fast that there hadn’t actually been any point in worrying about it earlier.

I felt so good coming back that I even picked up speed on the downhills, which is not normal for me. It’s very rare that I can say, “Hey, this exercise isn’t doing enough for me and I must make it harder!” But mostly it felt good to get away from work stress and crap building up at home. I don’t know how we’re going to do it with Junior working on Saturdays now, but I need more of it.

edited to add: five days after our hike, two hikers were swept to their deaths across that very same bridge. A storm had rolled in earlier in the week, raising the water levels even further.

A lot of sports have been in the news lately for the poor conduct of some of their members. Football and baseball seem to be rife with abusers and drug addicts. While I’m quite sure that you can find rotten people doing rotten things in almost any sort of activity, I’ve sure been lucky in associating myself with some sports embraced by some really good people.

Hunting’s kind of a touchy sport with a lot of people, and yes, there are abusers. We call them poachers, not hunters, but the general non-hunting public fails to make that distinction. So those of us who do it honorably tend to get painted with that same broad brush, and that’s not exactly fair. We responsible hunters usually dislike the poachers even more than the Average Joe does, as we’re a little more knowledgeable about just exactly what they’re taking away from us.

The show Wild Justice is doing sort of a horrible job of depicting hunters as poachers. I’m sure it’s all for ratings, as a whole show of wardens stopping people and having them be perfectly in compliance wouldn’t make for a very dramatic television show. My friends and I are on really good terms with the wardens who patrol our hunting areas. I hear the wardens on the show mention now and then that 90% of the people that they encounter are upright sportsmen. That 10% makes the rest of us look bad, and I tend to chew on the corners of the TV when they call those poachers by our good name, hunters. They are not hunters, they are outlaws.

I wouldn’t be a hunter today if it weren’t for the kindness of some of my friends. They took me in as a cold rookie, and spent a lot of years teaching me how to hunt, where to go, and what to do if you got something. It took a number of years before I felt comfortable enough to go off on my own, and I owe all of that teaching to them. Complete strangers I’ve run into while hunting have typically been very good people as well. Somehow, based on a friend’s reference, I inserted myself into a tight-knit group of bear hunters and became part of their camp. Even better, they knew other people, and one of them became my husband. I would never have met him but for the kindnesses of strangers.

Roping was an interesting sport also. The structure of roping is such that people of any skill level or age could enter a team roping and be competitive within their handicap level. It’s filled with generous people too; it wasn’t unusual to see someone lend a $10,000 horse to someone else whose horse came up lame. There are a lot of good people in those arenas across the country. Hardly anyone makes any money at the sport, but they all do it for the love of it.

The shooting sports reminded me so much of roping when I was introduced to it. So many people are willing to help a newcomer; lending guns, ammo, and teaching isn’t at all unusual. There are so many different disciplines with the general shooting sports cap that a person would be hard-pressed to be exposed to all of them, but the people within the branches mostly all seem to have a kindness in common. They’re usually mild proselytizers, hoping to bring someone new into the fold of their shooting religion, but they don’t seem to take it personally if you don’t want to jump right in.

I hung around the edges of trapshooting for a couple of years. I did some photography, which was fun and let me participate a little bit. I mostly just watched and learned how things went before I jumped in. I am fortunate to have an excellent teacher; Junior’s father is a master at the sport and endlessly (so far) patient with those of us who don’t quite get it. Junior says he can teach you all you need to know about trapshooting in five minutes, but it’ll take you a lifetime to master the sport. I’ve definitely found that to be true. This was the year that I jumped in, after fiddling around with little meat shoots and practice days. This year, my friend and I started a Winter League team. Three women in their forties, one in her twenties, and an almost-teenage boy make up our team. A couple of the women are much better than the rest of us, but they’re in it for the fun of it, not to be competitive. The rest of us are learning, and have a great series of coaches bringing us along. You’d pay a lot of money for this kind of training, but this is given to us by people who love us, and you can’t beat that.

While we were practicing today, I happened to run across another branch of the shooting sports, which I hadn’t ever seen before. Another section of the range had a group doing Fast Draw, a cowboy-type timed sport where they shoot metal targets with wax bullets out of old-fashioned single-action pistols. I was standing there watching and someone noticed me. He came over and asked if I had any questions. It turns out that I did, and this very generous man spent quite a bit of time explaining the intricacies of the sport to me. I went and got Seamus and Shelley and Junior to see it too. Here was another sport with the same tone as some of my favorites; not in what it did, but in who the people supporting it seemed to be.

This man didn’t have to explain things three times to spectators. He didn’t have to introduce his son to Seamus to show him that kids his age could do it. He didn’t have to be our personal announcer, but he did, clearly because he loves the sport and wanted to spread the joy around. I could see enjoying it myself, if it weren’t for all of the other hobbies draining my time. I can certainly see why he likes it. That kind of enthusiasm is contagious; had we been run off for being in the way, that sport would never appeal to me. But now it does, and like the other things I’ve been exposed to, it’s because of the people involved. I applaud that whatever the activity. That kind of passion and interest demands respect. That seems to be there very definition of sportsmanship, and with exposure to this kind of sportsman, it’s no wonder that professional baseball and football isn’t worth my attention. I’d rather root for the good people, and they’re all around us, quietly doing their thing.

The rock was a slide across the road on Thanksgiving night.

The hard place was snow piling up on the trailer during storm after storm.

Judgmental City of San Francisco employees provided a little extra hindrance. No, we are not poachers, and yes, we do have the legal right to use these forests.

But finally, on the third trip up there, we got the trailer out and home. We had to chain up the Ford and the trailer, but not the Dodge. And it wasn’t lined up very well with the campground driveway, and the driveway itself has a really tight turn onto the road, so getting that monstrosity moving in a safe direction was a challenge.

When we left camp, it had at least a foot of snow on the roof. It had all melted off but a snowball in the lee of the air conditioner by the time we got in home, mostly safe and sound. One of the roof vents is broken, is all, which is really lucky considering that the slide-out was out. That’s a fragile bit, and expensive to fix.

It’s a good thing we got it when we did too, as this latest series of storms is expected to drop upwards of five feet at camp. I don’t think Jeff will be getting to his until spring.

We gambled this year, and we might have lost.

See, we leave the trailer up at camp every year until mid-December. Several of us do it, and it’s always been fine. Camp’s at around 5,000 feet, and doesn’t usually get snow that sticks more than a day or two until January. But it’s been a weird year. Two weeks before, Seamus and I were up there in shirt sleeves. Last week, there were two snow storms that dumped several feet on us. We hadn’t been up since Seamus and I were hunting – we banged up the truck and then I had a test, and two weeks got away from us. Weeks that we really should have used to break camp and bring everything home.

So when a friend who works in the area posted some icy and snowy pictures, I got worried. Jeff said that the main road in is plowed, but that the snowplow is dumping piles right across the road that camp’s on. He didn’t think that we’d be able to get in, and that there was probably at least three feet of snow on the trailers. His is in there too, along with a couple of others. All of the trailers are at risk of having their roofs collapse, but since ours has a slide-out that I left out (having no particular reason to roll it in,) it’s got the biggest chance of being totalled.

So we spent Wednesday night preparing for the rescue. We were going to go get it whatever Jeff said. We packed up shovels and tire chains and come-alongs and what winter clothes we have that aren’t in the trailer itself. Junior made an extra set of chains for his truck. We’d have to take both of them, as his is the one with the gooseneck hitch to pull the trailer but mine is the one with the winch to get us out of sticky situations. It’s safer to have two trucks in a potentially dangerous situation anyway.

Thanksgiving was sort of low-key, but this Friday trip was hanging over our heads the whole time. We got up early and set out, and the roads sure were icy. Once we got halfway down the main road, we started seeing barricades and “road closed” signs. We went around, alarming some of the water workers who own the road.

But finally we came to a barricade that we couldn’t go around, and which explained all of the other ones. There’d been a landslide the night before, and a boulder the size of a truck cab was parked right in the middle of the road. Dirt was spilled all over the road, with several more enormous boulders hanging over our heads waiting to come down.

The water worker who’d seen us go in pulled up shortly after we did. We told him what was going on, and he sympathized. That was nice, as he totally could have written us a ticket. A couple more guys pulled up to evaluate the situation with an eye towards clearing the road, and they made it plain that it wouldn’t be that day. We may have been able to squeeze a truck around the blockage, but there’s no way the trailer would fit coming back out. And the instability of that slide really made me nervous.  I didn’t even like standing there looking at it.

So we couldn’t even get close enough to walk in and roll the slide-out back. It’s too bad, because the snow on the roads wasn’t as bad as Jeff had said, and I feel sure that we’d have been able to pull it out if we could have gone through that road. But now we have to go back up another time, taking another chance that it’ll be stranded there until March, risking a roof collapse.

We’ll try again next weekend, but it’s storming up there right now. We might get through; we might not. I hate that it’s in this situation, but there’s nothing that we can do about it for now.

Well, it seems that I’ve got another fairly severe food allergy, and I don’t yet know to what.

We went out to pizza Thursday night. I had a combo sort of thing, with nothing on it (that I knew of) that I’m allergic to. Fifteen minutes after I left, I started having trouble breathing, but wrote it off to a reaction to the overly-perfumed lady that invaded our space. When I got home, Benadryl took care of it in about half an hour.

So what did I do for breakfast the next morning? I ate the leftover pizza. And fifteen minutes later, bang. Trouble breathing, and worse than the night before. I told work I was going home, and when the Benadryl didn’t make a dent in it, bullied my way into the doctor’s office. I was very aware of where my Epi-pen was by now, and my inhaler. And I was worried because I was alone – Junior was in the mountains hunting.

After sitting in the waiting room for half an hour getting worse, I finally got in. There was only the NP there. She gave me a steroid shot, a steroid prescription, and instructions on over the counter antihistamines to support that stuff. Oh, and based on a friend’s recommendation, I asked for a referral to an allergist – can’t imagine why the doctor hadn’t suggested that to me before.

I dragged myself to the pharmacy. I called my in-laws because they were going up to the mountains later that day to see if they could send Junior home, but I also successfully got him on the radio. I’m glad we upgraded those! I was afraid to go to sleep alone, since last time this happened, I quit breathing an awful lot all night. He came home to take care of me.

I’ve never had a reaction linger this long. Once the initial breathing difficulties were dealt with, I still had a lot of inflammation in my lungs. It’s like they’ve been scarred, and I have no endurance at all. Walking through Target was a chore today. I’m trying to sit still and heal, because I have to work on Tuesday.

What a waste of a three-day weekend. Since the kids are minors, they couldn’t go hunting without us, and it’s Seamus’ first season. I hated to make him lose one of those weekends. And I had plans for myextra day off too. I was going to clean out the chicken coop, but getting all of that stuff in my lungs sounds like a spectacularly bad idea right now, not to mention that I doubt I could handle the exertion. I feel like an emphysemic 80-year-old.

I’m bored to death and I can’t even nap it off, as the Benadryl isn’t making me sleepy like it usually does, despite the unusually high doses. And now I’m sort of afraid to eat things, especially that I haven’t cooked myself. I have no idea what was on that pizza. I don’t usually react that badly to anything but walnuts and pecans – is it possible that some damn creative cook drizzled walnut oil on it? I’ll never know, but it makes eating out kind of a risky proposition. Which makes me sad; I’m an adventurous eater and don’t want to be bound to a life of boring predictability in the food department.

I don’t know what to expect from the allergist either. I assume there’ll be some sort of scratch test that might specify what things I really have to avoid. I’m a little afraid to have a reaction to whatever they use to test with. But mostly I’m afraid of not knowing. Since these reactions are getting worse each time, I may have to employ the Epi-pen next time, and that’s frightening. And recovering from it is scary too. This isn’t fun. I don’t want to live in fear, but I see that I’m going to have to amp that up a little. Pot lucks may be off-limits to me now too, come to think of it. It has me worried.

Over the last ten years that I’ve held these assorted professional certifications, I’ve also had to collect continuing education hours with which to renew them. Now, that’s not really hard to do. A two-day manufacturer’s class and tour filled my requirements for one renewal cycle. And the professional organizations give quickie classes to fill in an hour or two.

But I’d like to pick up two more licenses, just to keep myself well-rounded. I’ve taken the correspondence course for one of them twice, and passed it both times, as well as taking a refresher course, but life kept getting in the way of taking the actual State test. So by the time I can schedule the test, most of the math required to pass it has flown out of my head. And correspondence courses are not easy to do when you have things pulling you in fifteen different directions.

So I decided to take a class in person. Fortunately, the local community college holds these classes, and of course, they’re at night. It’s something us working stiffs are usually more interested in than the regular nine-to-five college students, after all.

I found myself back down at a school with checkbook in hand for the first time in almost twenty years. It was a little weird, but being a community college, I’m not all that out of the ordinary at my age. I may feel strange, but I probably don’t stick out too much.

The first day in class, I found myself wondering when the desks got that small? There’s no room for anything; you can’t negotiate your notes, your book, and your calculator at the same time. I guess years of working at an actual desk have spoiled me. And I’m not sure when the calculator buttons got so tiny. Considering it’s the same one I had when I was twenty, I think that might just be me. But it still works, and I’m brushing the dust off myself too.

The students are all the same, if a little older. You’ve got your teacher’s pet wannabes; I’ve pegged at least two of them in this class so far. These are the career students, who aren’t going to do anything with this class in particular, but seem to have to tell everyone how much they know about everything, related or not.

You’ve got the boys in the back of the class; there are quite a few in this one. There are a few of us who sit near the front so we can either hear or pay attention over the boys in the back of the class.

There are some people who really shouldn’t have passed High School, and aren’t going to do well at all.

There are a couple of ringers; I’m quite sure I’m one of them. Besides having taken the class before, I’m an actual working operator, if in a slightly different designation. So are a lot of those boys in the back, I suspect. Some of them might look dumb, but they’re probably ringers too. I’m trying not to be obnoxious about it, but I already see two people looking to me for help, and one of the career students has started arguing with me. Whatever, chick, I don’t care how you solve the problem.

I’ve made a friend already, besides the one kid I already knew. I’m not here to make friends, but this might be a pool of potential employees and it’s always good to know the other locals in your field.

I have a whole different attitude about college this go-around. The last time, I was really into cramming as much into my head as possible. I was probably that career student, although I don’t remember boinging my hand in the air every time a teach asked a question. This time, though, I really couldn’t give a shit what grade I get in this class. Grade point average is irrelevant; I already have a degree that I don’t use. I’m here specifically to brush up my math so I can pass this test. And I don’t think I’ll have any problem doing that; the pace of this class seems to be geared more towards the flunkies, and I’m going to find myself rather bored most of the time. But it makes me sit down and practice equations, and that’s what I need. Fortunately, that’s the teacher’s goal too. And since the State test comes before the class final, I don’t have to worry about that too much either. The one that counts will already be behind me; the final will solely exist so I can count these continuing education credits toward my next license renewal.

I think I’ll keep on with it though. There’s another license that I could get next fall, and I could take a class to get a higher license of the variety that I use in the spring. It wold be good for my resume, and for my flexibility should my contract fall through. And that’s what got me into this career in the first place; collecting licenses before I needed them.

I’m still going to grumble about having to go on Tuesday nights, but it’s good for me. Keeps my brain somewhat active.

We’ve been going through some major crap in the family, mostly dealing with lawyers and custody and psychopathic ex-wives. It’s really been getting to both of us. I simply have never been exposed to the level of evil that I now have to deal with on a regular basis.

But Karma’s name seems to be Irene. My grandma felt bad that we were being unjustly beat down so much, so she decided to do something nice for us. Initially, she offered to bring us with her on a cruise over the winter holidays through the Panama Canal. That would have been incredible, but I just can’t take two weeks off of work. So I sadly turned her down.

Grandma had an elegant solution though. Since I couldn’t do that, how about a shorter cruise? She let me pick the destination, and I picked Alaska, as Junior’s always wanted to be there. My backup operator was available to cover for me this summer, so I scheduled it with work, Grandma bought the tickets and the flight to Seattle, and we got Junior a passport.

We’ve been planning our getaway for six weeks. It was the only good thing in life lately that I had to focus on. I so desperately needed to get away, not just from the current bullshit, but from the stress of being on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It wears on you. Even if I have a backup operator cover the system on a weekend, it’s never far from my mind. I was hoping that a week completely away from it, with an operator that I trust running things, that I could let it go.

But the backup operator emailed me last night. His day job is sending him out of state that very week with only a week’s notice. He can’t work for me. And there’s no one else who can. Every operator that I know has a day job, and they can’t risk losing that. I don’t blame them. I found one who would be willing to cover for me as a consultant over the phone if something happened, but I can’t take that risk. If something did happen, which is unlikely but possible, it would look so bad for me not to be there and not to have an operator present, that if I didn’t lose my contract immediately, I’d surely lose it when it comes up for renewal in February. And if I lose my contract, there goes my house.

So all that bullshit about how things always happen for a reason? Yeah, I don’t think so. I think that’s just something people say when they don’t know what else to say. I think good people get shit on for no reason often enough and it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no greater purpose to it. There’s no getting away from it. If that kind of thing made sense, then why don’t assholes get shit on too? I always see them getting away with murder scot-free. It seems like the responsible people, the ones who actually care about consequences, are the ones always getting stepped on.

So while I desperately need a vacation, I need a job more. It’s a no-brainer when the stakes are this high.