Some Free Time At Last

We are finally coming up for air, but only because we got out of making dinner tonight. We probably won't be working in the cafe anymore because Debbie has started working the register and I will start doing tours next week. The pay is a lot better and it is something I enjoy doing. It's sort of like teaching a class, which I love doing and really miss since losing my teaching job at the church.

We are done with our workshops. I am now a paid Arcosanti employee working 40 hours a week in maintenance. It's pretty brainless work, but that's what I really want at this point. There are several other jobs open that are a closer match to what I used to do, but I'm just not interested in sitting at a desk. At least not yet. I'm sure that at some point, assuming we stick around much past our one-year commitment, that I won't be able to crawl around under buildings and climb up and down ladders, but I'm no where near that point yet. Debbie is now working full-time as an outside travel agent for North Village Travel, plus working the odd shift cooking with me or running the cash register in the cafe. We have moved to our third temporary residence since being here. This one will be available until the next workshop comes in the first of February. It's not a bad place, but there is no heat as this part of the building is not finished. We didn't have heat in our last room either, but the difference there was that we got a lot of sun every day to heat up all the concrete. This room gets exactly no direct sunlight this time of year. Worse, because we are on the second story, the concrete floor is over a storage area that is unheated and not really all that wind-proof. That means that no matter what the temperature of the air in our room is, we are standing on a 40-degree concrete slab. We've got a couple small area rugs, which help a little, but not if you are in one place for any length of time. The worse place is the shower; bare feet in direct contact with wet, ice cold tile. Brrrrr.

It could be worse, of course. We could be stuck in Michigan plowing snow.

One side benefit of being on my feet all day is that I'm actually losing weight. I'm down to 233 pounds; lower than I've been in a decade. For the first time in a long, long time, the idea of being south of 200 seems realistic. I've been able to back off on my insulin a touch, but I haven't managed to get rid of any of my meds completely. That may not be possible even if I do get back down to 185 pounds, but I can certainly reduce what I'm taking. That will certainly help us out financially now that we have no health insurance. As things currently stand, every dime I make will go straight to Walgreen pharmacy.

On a completely different subject, I've sorted and cleaned up all our photos from 2005 and will start dumping them onto our Flickr account sometime soon. It may be as soon as tonight, if nothing else is going on. I don't think there is anything that we need to leave the room for other than dinner, so it's looking good that I can get several hundred photos on-line. One nice thing about our new room is that we have hard-wired network connections instead of wireless, meaning that our connections are more reliable, and that I can have both laptops connected to the internet at the same time. That way, one machine can just be dumping photos onto the internet, and the other one can be used for other stuff (like blogging). I was never able to get that working in our last room because of issues with my laptop, the shaky wireless connection, and the limited number of "slots" being shared by everyone else in the guest house.

Our Christmas cards and letters are out, so everyone should start getting those in the next couple days. They have our address here at Arcosanti, so everyone can send us lots of loot in the mail. Just joking; our space is so limited that anything we are sent would have to be stored in the back of the Durango anyway. But we have a nice, wide windowsill to set Christmas cards on, so please put us on your list. It's really the only Christmas we are having this year as we won't be able to get back to Michigan. This will be the first Christmas for both of us that we won't be with family. It's going to be a little strange. It is already strange as this place starts emptying out knowing that we will be one of the dozen or so people "stuck" here for Christmas day. One of the ladies here has everyone over for Christmas dinner, so we won't just be sitting in our room by ourselves, but it is going to be a very different Christmas for us.

Anyway, I need to try to get caught up with all the stuff I normally read on the internet. I haven't had much time to read blogs, news, or even Dilbert comics. More later if I find anything blog-able.