WAY too much time in the van
I really wish our project sponsors had more consistent work for us to do. I like the variety of the change of locations and projects, but at this point, it's getting frustrating because we spend so much gorramn time driving!
Today was definitely the extreme example of how much time we can waste in the van. We literally circled the freaking county. First we spent about a half an our cleaning out the seed storage room at the POS building (that stands for Parks and Open Space, not the other thing), which I guess needed to be done but was this random task that was not on our original schedule (yeah don't even get me started on the sponsors changing the project on me). At around 9:30 we finally left Longmont to go up by Nederland to get the logs we needed for our fence. That was easily a 90 minute drive.
From there we loaded about 60 longs onto a trailer which took about an hour. Then we had to drive from Nederland to Superior, which was about another hour and a half, so we finally hit Superior around 2ish. The team FINALLY started working well as we unloaded the logs and started building the fence, but of course we had to leave at 3:15 to get BACK to Longmont from Superior by 4.
I should also mention that during this whole time the kids were restless, antsy, rowdy, and very bad at doing what I wanted them to do. They drove Ted and myself absolutely insane.
And while they do need to grow up and learn to not be so crazy, it's really not their fault. If we could spend the entire day at one work site, doing a project that really engaged them and made them work, instead of having all this down time and driving around time where I have to figure out how the hell to keep them occupied, then things would be a lot better.
At least tonight allowed me to unwind. I had a picnic in Chataqua with Meevs, Lisa, Adam, Lisa's current man, and a couple of other folks. Eating picnic food, drinking wine in public, playing frisbee and shooting the breeze...'twas a good evening.
Today was definitely the extreme example of how much time we can waste in the van. We literally circled the freaking county. First we spent about a half an our cleaning out the seed storage room at the POS building (that stands for Parks and Open Space, not the other thing), which I guess needed to be done but was this random task that was not on our original schedule (yeah don't even get me started on the sponsors changing the project on me). At around 9:30 we finally left Longmont to go up by Nederland to get the logs we needed for our fence. That was easily a 90 minute drive.
From there we loaded about 60 longs onto a trailer which took about an hour. Then we had to drive from Nederland to Superior, which was about another hour and a half, so we finally hit Superior around 2ish. The team FINALLY started working well as we unloaded the logs and started building the fence, but of course we had to leave at 3:15 to get BACK to Longmont from Superior by 4.
I should also mention that during this whole time the kids were restless, antsy, rowdy, and very bad at doing what I wanted them to do. They drove Ted and myself absolutely insane.
And while they do need to grow up and learn to not be so crazy, it's really not their fault. If we could spend the entire day at one work site, doing a project that really engaged them and made them work, instead of having all this down time and driving around time where I have to figure out how the hell to keep them occupied, then things would be a lot better.
At least tonight allowed me to unwind. I had a picnic in Chataqua with Meevs, Lisa, Adam, Lisa's current man, and a couple of other folks. Eating picnic food, drinking wine in public, playing frisbee and shooting the breeze...'twas a good evening.