Rediscovering Weekends

Ah, to socialize on a Sunday! I forgot what it was like to have my days off overlap with my friend’s days off. Going a year working on Saturdays and Sundays has profoundly affected how I socialize, though it is not all bad.
Nowadays, I usually spend half of my first day off working at the Tuna Research and Conservation Center, doing water quality, prepping food, and maintaining the place (siphoning tuna shit, scrubbing bio-growth from the sides of the tanks, and scraping rancid anchovy fat from Weir boxes is time consuming and labor intensive). The next half of the day is usually spend doing chores and errands.
My second day is either dedicated to other chores, but sometimes I get a day that I get to spend how I really want to. On these rare occasions, I try to find cool places around here to hike on the cheap. It seems like every park wants to charge people money to use the trails. I’m happy to contribute money to help protect our natural resources, but I can’t afford to pay as much as they ask. Like many others, I am more than happy to hike a bit longer to avoid the fees, and this is one benefit of having Tuesday and Wednesday as days off – I usually have the trails all to myself.
On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, I work. After work, I am usually not up for much more than a movie, or hanging out for a few hours, and then it’s bedtime. Living in a small town, once again, has made me want to go to bed early every night.
For about a year, I had been intending to visit Joy and Eric, up in Los Gatos, but our schedules never overlapped, so I was never able to make the trip. I ended up going today, and we tried out a new restaurant, went hiking in the hills, had a Wii bowling tournament, and had a nice dinner together. I used to do things like this with friends on a regular basis, but since starting this job, these days spent with other people have been few and far between.
The drive out to Los Gatos, via the 17, was like driving through the Japanese mountainsides, except the roads were wider and there was more traffic. Clouds drifted right over the roads, and the dense foliage was rich and had a green usually reserved for the beginning of the Spring months. It reminded me of some of the roads that I drove down in Kagoshima.
On a sad note, it looks like the auto-focus on my D50 might be broken. I hope that I am wrong, but we shall see… Cleaning and testing equipment is something I will add to the ever-changing list of things to do.
Also, it doesn’t look like I will make it up to the powder this Tuesday or Wednesday. Boarding, it seems, will have to wait for another time…
For all of you that have regular weekends off, enjoy them! For if they ever shift to non-standard days off, your social life will almost certainly be a little lonelier.