Going to be drinking a lot of root beer in the coming months

The cafeteria in my Hundred-Acre Sandbox has a phenomenal amount of options. With some restrictions, it’s all-you-can-eat-and-take, and wise advice given to me early on was to never leave without something. As safe as it feels here, it’s possible something hits the fan and we wind up hunkered down for a bit, so it’s a good idea to pack out a couple of Magnum bars here and there, right?

Most times I leave, I slip a thing of yogurt, a pack of those Crystal Light water enhancers, chocolate chip cookies, stevia packets or soft drinks into my pockets or bag. When I return to America, y’all might want to remind me that this would not be a welcome behavior in convenience stores.

Occasionally, the supply, wherever that comes from, runs short. People hoard things that are coveted, like soda water. (Yeech!) When I arrived, there was a selection of soft drinks, but they didn’t have root beer. Suddenly, root beer appeared and I started doing the five-finger thing two cans at a time (we do have a drinks-from-the-cooler limit, and I abide by it) at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Getting root beer before it ran out became an obsession, but all of a sudden, I realized that I had an entire shelf of A&W root beer. This is not in itself a bad thing, of course, but the thing that didn’t happen was running out of root beer. Apparently the maybe six weeks I was here with no root beer was unusual, not the presence of it.

It wasn’t until I had an entire shelf full of root beer that I realized that I was pretty much set, even if the root beer disappeared as quickly as it appeared. I drink one a week – it’s my reward on the weekend – and essentially, there’s a tour’s worth of it there. I’ve told people that if everything really does hit the fan, come to my place with vanilla ice cream.

   

With all the root beer I need to last through my May 2020 tour, I thought I was set. Well, yesterday I got a call that’s forcing me to start drinking root beer.

The DC office called and, due to shifting priorities of the administration, my job’s being eliminated. Yes, it’s not just journalism! As of this summer, my position and two similar ones are among a bunch more being eliminated. Normally, the tours are 12 months but I’d extended to 19, so basically what’s happened is the extension is being taken away.

People seem to think I should be up on a rooftop somewhere, but this is what happens in this job so I’m rolling with it. Since normally we know our new posts about a year out, I’m a behind the curve but there’s nothing I can do about it so there’s no point in worrying about it.

No matter what happens, I have a job; it’s an assignment I need to find. Right now, the pickins are really, really slim, but something will come up. I’m going to try to not think about it for a couple weeks anyway. There are some other work deadlines I should focus on because they come due earlier anyway.

Besides that, I have some root beer I need to get working on.

On the Far Side of the world

Still getting back into the rhythm after a long stretch away over here. For some reason this week in particular has knocked me. I’m exhausted.

As a morning person (don’t hate me), I usually get up at 6:10, go to breakfast, go back to apartment and hang out until 7:45, at which time my phone sounds this “get your motor running”-type alarm that jolts me into brushing my teeth, filling my Nalgene with tea, grabbing my latchkey lanyard and running out the door.

For whatever reason, I’ve had a hard, hard time getting up. I’m not one to hit the snooze button, but I’ve basically gotten out of bed at 6:30 daily. I really don’t know what’s up, although I’m taking a typhoid vaccine over seven days and wondered if that might be it. Fatigue isn’t listed as one of the effects, but who knows.

Friday’s my Saturday, and usually over weekends I still wake up at the same time, run for an hour and then go back to bed. In the evening, I do tae kwon do, albeit badly. This morning, I could only bring myself to do half an hour running. I just couldn’t. Tonight, I’ll go in early and do the other half, but today, it wasn’t happening.

Good job!

Maybe it’s because I redid my fitness routine post R&R and now instead of step class three times a week, I’ve cut that to two and added boxing. I also am trying to opt for the pool more and did that last night before boxing.

Today I can barely lift my arms. I try to do a lot of the shoulder rehab in the pool and it hurt even before boxing, where I totally did the punching thing. That might be tied to the fatigue more so than the typhoid, I suppose.

I’m also on a new assignment and even though it’s not physically exerting, I work a little late every night, which puts everything after leaving on an accelerated schedule. I’m getting into a routine at lunch a couple days a week where I take home an extra cup of soup and a piece of cornbread for dinner rather than going to the cafeteria in the evenings because there’s little time.

This place really really is like a cruise ship. There’s so much stuff to do that work gets in the way!

Last Sunday, our community rah-rah person (there’s a title, but it means nothing to people outside the job) put together a “Kindness Rocks” event, where we painted cheery rocks, thus channeling Leila and Riley. This was extremely hard to squeeze into my social calendar since Sunday is a work day and I’m super busy, but I cut half of salsa class to paint some.

The rock-painting event was several hours and people cranked out some really pretty ones, but mine were not among those. It was kind of amusing because Rah-Rah, who’s extremely sweet, would come along and talk about other people’s in detail, like, “Oh, this looks just like the Pinterest one you copied!” and her encouragement to me was more like, “Good job!”

I’m no artist. It was fun, but I did learn that rushing through rock painting doesn’t work well, especially when you need layers of paint. There just wasn’t time to dry. And painting little designs, or words, on small rocks is ridiculously hard. I made a cute little boat (if I do say so myself) but when I tried to write “Life is a Beach” on the back, it didn’t turn out so well. And, when I thought about the sentiment later, it didn’t make a lot of sense. If you’re on the boat, you’re probably not on the beach.  And I tried to paint a little eyeball followed by “Rock” but it when it was done – and I was out of time – it wound up looking like an “O.”

Merry Christmas to me

The next arty day will be making little hearts for Valentine’s Day. I think I will skip that because I really needed the salsa refresher. At Latin night, which was pretty dead, I drug some guy out to dance and promptly stepped on his feet. It was still fun.

But as busy as I am on weekdays, I pretty much chill out of weekends. Yes, I get up and work out for an hour, but really, after that, there’s no much. This morning I was so tired I came back from that half hour and put in a load of laundry. I set the timer to remind me it’s in there – the laundry room is down two hallways – and promptly fell back asleep. That rarely happens; sometimes I manage to sleep for 20 minutes, but I was gone the whole hour. The alarm woke me up from some weird dream. Then I stuck the stuff in the driver, set the timer for 45 minutes and same thing.

I’ve no idea what’s going on but decided to do little else this weekend but tackle my Christmas present to myself, The Far Side collection. Way back when, I had all the books but sold them after Peace Corps when I needed money. Now, they’re in a three-volume collection with lots of commentary from Gary Larson. It’s been so much fun to re-read these, although somehow I’m not getting ones that I thought I got before. Others I’m seeing things that I’m pretty sure I never noticed before and am cracking up. Man, they’re funny. Sure, sick and twisted, too, but what worthwhile isn’t?