Console Training In Austin, Texas

I have never been to Texas before, aside from many layovers in Dallas-Ft Worth airport (I'm starting to recognize locations of food courts--that's pretty familiar). I am now in Austin for a couple days, down at High End System's headquarters, learning to program the Whole Hog 3.

Princess Cruise Lines, which has recently hired me, is flying me down, putting me up in a hotel, and providing most of my meals, just so that I can learn a new programming language. Pretty sweet gig. And I don't even have a contract with them yet.

So all of my paperwork is in, and everything is in line, but still no start date. My life is still on hold as I await, with bated breath, the inevitable job offer. But I dislike my life being on hold. In fact, I'm recently coming off of a life-holding experience (college, anyone?), and wish to avoid it. Well, the cruise gig is worth waiting for, and I have confidence that I'll make the most of the hold.

Here at fixture training, I've met up with 3 other Princess employees, who are all terrific fun, and two have already completed contracts on boats. There are great stories being exchanged, as me and the other guy without cruise experience hungrily soak up all the details of ship life, and we all relate our past paths and future career trajectories. We're an international bunch, coming from Philly, Florida, New Zealand and the UK. I leave after console training, but there's fixture training next week, when more international hires arrive. They say that there won't be too many Americans on the boat. I'll probably be the only one in Production.

Awesome.

So I get a taste of my upcoming job, right in the middle of the Philly Fringe festival. Monday was a whirlwind day, starting with a work call at 9am in a theater in Philly and ending with a company-arranged van dropping me at a hotel in Austin. And I'll be back in Philly Thursday afternoon, just in time to resume house managing, and probably pick up more work calls.

Regular week.

News vs Not News

My life is nicely organized, well-planned and stable. Until September 20th. After that, no plans.

That's the extreme version.

The real version is that I have a long list of things that I could do. And plenty of time to do it. I have some pretty exciting finalists, and a couple weeks to figure something out.

What I could be doing after September 20th, realistically:
1. Work on a cruise ship (I was hired by Princess Cruises as a lighting supervisor to travel with one of their ships)
2. Attend training for a troubled teen wilderness therapy program, to become one of their counselors (I'm currently in the hiring process)
3. Hit the trail (I have maps and plans for the Pennsylvania Mid State Trail, stretching from Maryland to New York)
4. Work at a dog sledding kennel in Alaska (I have a phone interview today to check out a position)

So while my life is in flux, and I have no sure future, I know that I will do something fun. I have confidence that I will end up not only doing something, but doing something interesting.

But while all of these paths are well-thought-out, not all of them will come to pass. If I almost worked at a dog sledding kennel in Alaska, that's not news. That's hype, not worth mentioning. Just talk. I like to follow through on things that I said I would do. So if I say it, I do it.

So until I know what I'm doing, I'm not saying anything.

A Retrospective: 10 of the more interesting places I've slept; part I

Everyone sleeps, and usually the hardest part about traveling is finding a good place to do it. Housing is expensive, and comfort is important. This series of posts shares some of my solutions to finding a cozy place to spend the night:

-In a tent in the middle of a cow pasture right outside of a small town in Northern England. I'm sure the town had a name, but after over a week on the trail, they all ran together. I was hiking England's Coast To Coast, a path first tramped by the fellwalker Alfred Wainwright. It was my first multi-night backpacking trip, my first solo trip and my first self-planned trip. I would walk all day, then find a convenient campsite (read: minuscule patch of ground, moderately flat, near the trail) when it got dark. At the end of this day, I was just entering a small town, and couldn't get through it before dark. So instead of seeking lodgings in the town like a normal person (England is very expensive, especially with the exchange rate at the time), I plopped down in a nice field right across from a school. There was an abandoned barn on the fence line, but when I pushed in and looked around, I found needles littering the ground. Oops. Backpedal. So it was into the middle of the field with my white tent for me. I spent the night, woke up with the dawn, packed up, and was on my way through the town. No one bothered me.

Questioning the status quo

I've been slowly getting moved in to the place I'm staying in Philly, eventually getting the car unpacked, finding the grocery store, setting up a desk to work at, etc.

I've gotten a few things off of Craigslist, too. That's a first for me. I've always known and perused Craigslist, but never actually used it successfully. Now I have gotten some awesome upgrades from it. I upgraded from the air mattress that was lent with the room to a real mattress (still on the floor, but who needs box springs). And recently I switched from a fan to an air conditioner. That's a big one, which I'm really looking forward to.

Where I stayed in Chicago had very strong air conditioning, and Chicago's summer was much more mild than Philly's this year (must have something to do with that huge lake nearby). Due to the temperate climate and the strong presence of air conditioning, coupled with the nature of my job (sit in a cool theater all afternoon), I never got used to the heat of summer. In previous walks of life, I get used to the heat and never get adversely affected by it. But there were no barns in sight, no horses to ride this summer. So I got to Philly and it was hot. Dreadfully, stifflingly and depressingly hot. After a week of sweating and swearing off summer for the rest of my life (and altering my life plan to get me to Maine or Alaska every June), I got used to it. A couple days after I started my Craigslist quest for an air conditioner, though.

So I have an air conditioner.

And I suspect that I will be utilizing Craigslist later, when I pack up my life and my belongings and move along again. I don't think my own air conditioner is necessary where I'm going, and I don't think a mattress fits well in my car.

Things I get to have once I settle down

I've started making a list for myself of things that I want, and would use, but can't have until I move around quite a bit less.

One of those things is a bike, which is not on my meager list of possessions merely for the lack of space as I'm toting myself and all of my worldly belongings around the country. A bike would be supremely useful, especially since I find myself landing in city after city (what happened to the farm girl?), where cars are just not the best idea. But all the room I have is a moderately-sized trunk and backseat (which I try to keep clear, since it doubles as my bed half the time I'm traveling).

Maybe I'll look into one of those little foldy bikes... Ha.

Another thing is a dog. Dogs don't do so well incorporated into lifestyles where one lives in one's car for a couple days, is put up at friends' houses, flies from one end of the country to the other (or across an ocean), and works a significant portion of each day.

But I really want a dog.

Not enough to give up the nomadic lifestyle. I'll wait, and look forward to the day I get a dog.

Meteor Shower

Chicago has a lot of light pollution. This picture was taken around 1am.


But luckily I'm in Evanston now, which looks out at Chicago. Granted, it's not very far:


But far enough so that Evanston's northern sky gets mildly dark. As one of my co-workers pointed out, there is a huge, dark lake stretching to our east.

Luckily, the meteor shower tonight is visible in the northeast sky. So I went out to the lakefront, (on the beach with waves [even though it's a lake, not an ocean or a sea...]) to watch the meteors fall. I only stayed for about 20 minutes, but I saw a few shooting stars.

It was interesting to think about the thousands of miles between each meteors entry point into the atmosphere, but there on the ground, it was only a few degrees in my field of vision. That small turn of the head can translate into vast distances when magnified to the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere. Pretty cool that huge, inconceivable distances are as close as our own planet's metaphorical doorstep.

But what is an inconceivable distance? A hundred miles? A thousand miles? Ten thousand miles? When was the last time you traveled that far? By land? By car?

By foot?

Will you ever?

Facing the Music

At the time of my last post, I had packed all my possessions into my car and headed west. I had a job for 7 weeks, and a place to stay. And after that job, life.

Well, 7 weeks is more or less over, and life is staring me in the face. It was another nerve-wracking game of chicken to find something to do next. What would happen first: would I get a job, or would my current living situation expire?

I was at the brink of reconsidering my nomadic lifestyle, of having to stop this romantic game of hobo-ing and consider where I was actually going to sleep at night once I got sick of the cramped conditions of my car (and needed a shower). Then a couple things fell into place, another month sorted itself out, and just like that, the crevasse of uncertainty was pushed back another few weeks.

Life as usual. Apparently. It'll take some getting used to, but I suspect that my nerves will be solid steel after a couple years of this. Game on.