It's Not 'Shifting Gears' It's Breaking Them

There are changes in the winds of life as the year, decade and month have all changed in the past week. I hope that you have had a beautiful holiday season filled with prosperity and joy. As the year was winding down an opportunity came knocking and I answered the door. It was very unexpected and most certainly does not aid in the goals I have for the things I do on social media, the podcast, or anything else really. What it does is provide my family with a most fortuitous income.

The family over the holidays (right to left Carter, Devin, Odin, Keira, Andy )

The fact of the matter is that I have been most fortunate to be home for the better part of the last 2.5 years. Being an Albertan it is rare to have good-paying employment near the place you call home with the oil and gas industry an often reclusive prospect. The year prior to that I was unemployed, with the preceding years to that, from 2015-2017, I did work near home and even had a great shift (4-10's); the environment was socially and mentally toxic though. Alcoholism was abounding in the management, I was punished for the amount of time off my rather messy divorce required of me by them promoting a gambling-alcoholic to be my boss and then have me train him on how to do the job. The list goes on, however, the rest of it I don't hold a grudge about so I'll keep it to myself for now.

The money isn't quite what it was back in the hay-day of the booms that once befell the economy but compared to the employment I recently left I'm still set to make much better money; nearly 5x the amount I was. Sadly this leaves the entirety of the house-ly duties in the hands of my spouse who will be continuing her fulltime employment, so long as it is manageable to do so, because honestly we still need her income to reach the goals we have for our family. Part of why I make the kind of money I do with this line of work is because it is temporary and fleeting by nature. So I may go from here in a few months (or weeks) and have just as long of time off, or longer. If that happens we would be better off to have her still established with employment instead of us both being out of work. The distance is another part of it if you expect me to leave my adorable little demons 6 hours away I had better be well compensated for all the things I'm missing out on.

A Simple Suspended Scaffold

To understand the aspect of risk involved with what I do guess I should tell y'all what my work scope is! To the left is a photo of a simple Scaffold built as part of my training back in 2011. I, by trade, am an Industrial Scaffolder or Scaffold Erector (but I'm 12 at heart and can't say that with a straight face). My job is to build (erect), modify and dismantle temporary working platforms, commonly at heights, inside confined spaces, as required by other trades and industries to ensure the safest possible working conditions for them. In the example photo, this scaffold is built about 20-24' in the air and was built mostly from the beams it hangs from. The song that goes "I'm not as good as I once was" comes to mind here, let's face it I haven't gotten younger in the last few years.

Not the highest I've been

I have lots of excellent training under my belt and my desire to ever grow as a person keeps me open to learning new things even from classes I've done in the past. So there is a level of confidence that this will be more like riding a bike than falling off of one, however, returning to an industry/area that you have ignored for several years does leave you open to, seemingly, drastic changes. From what I have seen the changes thus far have been towards a positive side with great focus on safety, inclusion and even mental health awareness. all good things, the latter of them the biggest one for me, they never use to care about such things on a corporate level and I know for myself that when I was on medication for depression it was treated in jest first and with seriousness second; by the same company (though different branch) that I am with now.

So the question becomes "What does this mean for my projects?" in all honesty, I don't know. One of the things about life at Camp is that you don't want to have to much stuff in case you have to leave suddenly, you are also limited on space. While I would love to spend money on improving my vlogging equipment and that could be used to generate some content for the podcast my laptop can't handle editing software anymore. So there is a fear of "Upgrade-Snowballing" where I'm going to end up spending the extra money I'm making on 'this' that needs 'that' to work and 'these' because of 'those'. I will also have a very limited amount of time off the next while so I'm going to be sure to spend as much of it as I can with the children.

In the end, I will have money to invest in improving the services that I provide the different online communities that I am apart of and that will be nice, more importantly I will have money to invest in the future of my children.