Long days

Well, it has almost been a week since we arrived in Rapid City and frankly it feels like it has been a lot longer. Our days have been long and a bit up in the air. We have a schedule now, but our days end up being chopped up into bits and pieces. This is really no ones fault, but rather how it has to be with 4 cooks and the size crowd of people we have to feed.

My “typical” day consists of waking up around 6 and getting to the kitchen by 6:30 (no shower in the morning for me as I like my sleep so much more than being clean). We work on the meals for the day and serve breakfast (7:30am)/clean until about 9 then we take a break until 10:30. At this point we head back over and begin the lunch shift. This shift ends around 1:30 or 2 and we have an afternoon break until about 4. Dinner is served at 6 and we can get out of there by 7:30 (although this will be earlier as the student workers become more efficient in their tasks and we don’t need to be there to supervise). So yeah, my day is a bit choppy. We get one full day off a week and then 3 meals off at random throughout the week. The bad part is that Neile and I do NOT get time off together. We are trying to think of ways where we can at least get a dinner off together, but that could be hard as that is the biggest meal of the day. We’ll see.

I’ve struggled with being here on and off and I am not sure why. I don’t know if it is because of the unknown that lies ahead (am doubtful of this as I haven’t had time to even think about that yet) or the lack of schedule until this point or the feeling of being trapped on campus because everyone depends on you for food (or perhaps it is more just the loss of independence) or the loss of feeling of connected to people or even that my life has been so crazy for the past 2 months and it is just now hitting me hard. Neile and I have worked on this some by taking short hikes or at least getting some kind of physical activity each day. This has helped, but I am at a loss for what the cause is…probably a combination of everything.

There are also challenges to working with your spouse that I knew would be there, but have still been challenges we are working to overcome. Our life has been so filled with work lately that it is hard to not only talk about that. You know the whole - leave work at work thing. Yeah, we’re working on that one.

On a much lighter note here is the amazing view we have each day from our apartment. These were taking from our balcony.

And here is Montezuma. He is located on the back wall of our cafeteria. Any guesses as to why the staff has dubbed him with this name? hee hee hee