The effects of having a job

As I keep forgetting to inform whatever segment of the population who reads this blog but not my twitter, and also that I don't ever see in person or email or chat with, my job search is at an end (at least until Autumn). I'm now a seasonal employee at the Cleveland Metroparks, member of the invasive plant strike team, which means I get to spend my days in the woods killing weeds. (I would be doing that right now, except it's raining. Outdoor work is like that sometimes.) Midway through my third week, I still believe that I have the best job ever.

Not having had a regular job before, I'm noticing some interesting effects. One is that the blog entry I had intended to write yesterday never got written, because I came up with the idea right before leaving for work and by the end of the day was too tired to write more than a few paragraphs. By the time I started working on it today, I had lost interest in what I was going to say, which is understandable because it wasn't terribly important anyway. So I deleted what I had written and started writing about my job instead.

This is fascinating to me, because for the first time I'm having to make an effort to manage my time. Trying to predict when I will be hungry, when I will be tired, when I will be home, when I will be able to put gas in the car - all this was much less complicated when my schedule consisted of "eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and just try to get out of the house at least once a day so you don't go crazy." It's an adjustment I'm glad to make, since with it comes the joy of occupying my time with something worthwhile, getting plenty of exercise in the course of my regular workday, and meeting new people who share some of my values and interests. All this and I get paid too.

The jury's still out on how much this will affect my various writing projects, but so far they're still progressing, just a bit more slowly. I'll tentatively say that my sci-fi novel, Voyage to Earth, is going to start going online in late May/early June, updating with one chapter a week, probably Tuesdays. In the meantime I might be working on some short stories, which I may post here.

More later on subjects such as poetry, philosophy, art, and alien invasions. Peace out y'all.