Accountability/Where Are We Going: September 2020

Somehow another month has come and gone and it is time for this post. While I technically got a whole lot done this month (including climbing on several roofs… go figure), they weren’t necessarily things that were on my list. On the ship I seemed to do pretty well with these accountability goals, but on land other things seem to take precedence. I haven’t read two books, haven’t studied French, haven’t posted on here on a consistent schedule (albeit more than I did in August). This has left me asking myself: do I need to reset my goals or reset how I use my time?

It might be a little bit of both. Use my time differently but maybe also think about some different goals. It’s may also be a bit of pandemic fatigue/ underemployment fatigue. My job hunt thus far has relied on someone else deciding if I’m good enough/experienced enough/educated enough and it’s tiring. I think I want to set out on a dream that I can work towards that I am solely in charge of it’s outcome. I can study and take courses and tests and do the best I can do to improve my resume to try to get hired onboard, but the outcome of that is still out of my control – it’s up to some random person in the head office. I want to find some dream that the only thing that would hold me back is me. Is that empowering or accepting failure on the outside job hunt? And, if I was going to go for something, what would it be? When you’re younger dreams never seem too big or too crazy, but as you get older reality sets in. How do I get back some of that ability to dream big?

On the less philosophical side of things it is fall foliage in Vermont. It has been pretty enough I have seriously considered buying a nice camera just so I could capture some of it. If you’ve never been to Vermont during fall foliage you are missing out. It’s incredible.

Onto the travel bit of things – Where Are We Going? The most pressing question everyone asks is “Where is Stuart going? What ship is he going to? When is he going?” and the answer to all of those questions are, “we don’t know.” What we do know is that we are going to Scotland in about a week and a half. The working theory is we will go there to wait out until Stuart goes back to work. Normally he works three months on three months off, and while he worked nearly 6 months last time, he is nearing having been home for three months now, and as we don’t know when he will go back to work (or which ship, or where) we figure we will be in Scotland to wait it out until he gets that email. COVID restrictions in Scotland have tightened a bit so we’ll see how it all goes, but alas that is the plan we’ve come up with for now. In the month of September my most popular post was about our Roadtrip to England, so maybe we will come up with a road-trip around (wherever we are allowed to based on local COVID travel restrictions) Scotland.