Oh, it's been a while! I apologize for the lack of articles, but this year has been very hectic. I have been self-employed for the last fourteen years as a drafsman. But because of our (tongue firmly planted in cheek) booming economy, new construction dried up in my area last September. Even some of the other drafters I have occasion to work with who have been in this field for more than 45 years and have contacts galore couldn't find work. Needless to say, I found myself in the unfamiliar positition of having to go outside the home to work— something I've been fortunate enough not to have to do since October, 1986.My wife had started working as a CNA (certified nurse aide) about a year earlier and said how much she enjoyed her job. So I looked into going into the same field. Late in 2005, I began working in home health care, visiting homes of those needing assistance and doing light housekeeping, laundry, running errands and personal care. I found I really enjoyed working with "my people", but the mileage was killing me, especially with the rising cost of gas. I ended up using almost a third of my paycheck on gas for my car. So I took the plunge and enrolled in a CNA course as well. That was in late February.
Until the middle of March, I was not only taking classes from 8:00 AM until noon or one, I was also then doing my home health care, which on most days was a minimum of five hours. At the same time, I got one or two small drafting jobs, which meant coming home after doing home health and taking care of those jobs as well. (What I do, I do on the computer and can do it any time of the day or night.) Then as the end of March, I went to work full time in a nursing home and had to give up my home health people, although I was still drafting as well.
Also in March, my son came home and told me he had signed up for the Air Force. There were some health issues and personal issues amongst various family members at this time as well that cut into what little free time I had left. And my boot-camp-bound son began hinting that he was going to get engaged before he left. My youngest son turned sixteen in mid-May and not only began learning to drive, but began taking flying lessons as well. He received a total of five hours of lessons for his sixteenth birthday, so in order to continue taking lessons, he went out and got a job. He starts working at four, which means I get off work, pick him up and take him to work and then pick him up again, usually at eleven. (Now that school has started, he won't be working until eleven unless its on the weekends.) This meant I had to stay up until at least 11:30 every night then get up at 5:30 the next morning for work.
About the same time my son started working, I received three more drafting jobs. Anyone in the drafting field (well, at least in structural steel drafting) knows that when you get design drawings to work from, the engineer or architect wants approval drawings yesterday, despite the fact that the drawings they gave you to work with don't have enough information to do what you need to do. Then you have to send out RFIs and wait for answers (or take a chance and detail it the way you think it should be and hope you didn't just waste your time.) All the while they're screaming at you for completed steel details. I'd often get home from dropping my son off at work (my wife works second shift and goes to school full time (even in the summer) so she can't take him to work or pick him up) and still be detailing when I had to go get him at eleven. I'd come home and work some more, often not getting to bed until after 1:00AM. And somewhere into this hectic schedule, we had to find time for flying lessons. Needless to say, I was physically exhausted.
In mid-June, my son left for boot-camp after becoming engaged to the most wonderful girl in the world. (I told my son (jokingly of course) that if they split up before the wedding, I'm going to keep his fiancee and her mother wants to keep him.) It was a very emotionally draining experience because on one level, I think the military will be good for my son. In fact, I know it already has been. Yet at the same time, I am so dead set against supporting this current misadministrations empirialistic fear-mongering in any way, shape or form. I'm proud my son is in the US Air Force, but I'm not proud of how Bush is misuing the military.
Six weeks later, we went to San Antonio, Texas for his graduation. We drove straight through (more than 24 hours) both there and back. And when I got back, I came down with a horrible chest cold that required I sit up to sleep. Trust me, that's not a way to induce a good night's rest. I still have the vestiges of the cough four weeks later, but I have finished all my drafting jobs right now, so I finally have some free time with which to get back to writing. So look for a bunch of articles in the next couple weeks to make up for my lack of articles so far this year.
I know the above is probably much more detail than you ever wanted to know, but to simply say "real life got in the way" seemed a bit lame and not quite enough for a satisfactory explanation of why I haven't posted an article in so long.
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