By Lucy

What day is it? It’s easy to lose track of the day on a midnight shift. I’m not doing any carpentry currently. I took a job doing Christmas overflow at the post office. As you might imagine, Christmas is the busiest time of year for post, so they hire temps. It’s on-call work, but it’s a union job and pays 22 dollars an hour. Everyone wants day shift except for me. I would be more unhappy with midnights if I had more time off, but I’ve been getting 6 hour shifts, five days a week, which is almost full time. Since I go to sleep when I get home, I wake up just as everyone gets off work, so I’m not missing out on any socialization. Half of my friends are in different time zones anyway.

The post office job is straightforward, which everyone else also complains about. It’s exactly what I like – something very physically demanding, but not very mentally taxing. I realized early on in college that I prefer a job I can do by rote, so I have the mental freedom to focus on my hobbies after work, like this blog. The truck disgorges packages onto a conveyor belt, and you just grab a package, read the postal code (not the city – they often lie), and drop it into the appropriate bin. I walk ten kilometres a day, minimum, plus I’ve been making every effort to grab every box labelled “50 lbs or more – team lift”. I started work this year with weak arms from having not worked for 6 months. I’m not repeating that. I’ve been getting better at curating my mental list of short term jobs – any work is better than no work at all, especially during winter.

There’s been some drama in the SIBs group. They’re still hiring apprentices to the union, despite us being short on work. I should be getting first dibs on Barrie jobs, since I’m the only one I know of actually in Barrie, but some of the Torontonians have signed up for every list and have been getting in on my work. It’s stupid, but it’s not my problem anymore. This job will last me into January, and then I’ll be finishing up packing and transferring and I’ll be on a plane to the UK January 30^th. When I come back at the end of February, I’ll rest a few days in Barrie before heading up to Thunder Bay, permanently.

I got the notification for my divorce order, finally. That was the last thing I was waiting on before I legally changed my name, although I can’t change it now because it would mean applying for a new passport. I’ll be starting off in Thunder Bay with a shiny new identity and no baggage.

I’m transferring what frozen foods I have left to the homeowner’s freezer and putting mine up for sale. I’m not taking anything with me that can’t fit in my car, which means no furniture. I could do it in January and save myself the headache of doing this while working full-time, but I’d rather get everything sorted sooner so I’m not rushing last minute. Plus, moving furniture in the winter is a bitch.

The worst part of this is letting go of things I no longer have the luxury of holding on to. I had two bags of frozen cranberries, because my dad loves fresh cranberry sauce. I hadn’t seen him for almost two years when Oma died in August, and even then they didn’t invite me to the funeral. I googled it and showed up on my own prerogative, and they all decided to twist the knife by saying they didn’t think I was interested in going. People wonder why I don’t talk to my family! I doubt I will see him again before I leave, although I have hope that he might drive up to visit me in Thunder Bay.

Me and Rich were watching Gran Turismo recently (great movie, highly recommend. Not enough Orlando Bloom). At the point when the dad says he’s proud of his son, Rich choked up and said ‘neither of us are going to hear that’. True for him, but not true for me. I actually screenshotted the long message my dad wrote me telling me he’s proud of me for being a carpenter.

Last time I was in Thunder Bay, the Vagabond took me to his buddy’s woodshop – after hours, so we were the only ones there. It’s one of the multiple layers of our relationship – the apprentice and the old master. Showed me the tools, the different kinds of wood, and the custom woodwork he personally did in the office, absolutely the most gorgeous office I have ever seen. I wish I could show you pictures, but I wouldn’t have felt comfortable taking any without asking the owner, so I didn’t. It’s affirming when he’s always teasing me that I’m ‘not’ a carpenter yet, ‘just’ an apprentice, that he still knows I’m interested in everything he has to teach me.

The Vagabond is in Italy now, until the end of January. Assuming he’s in Thunder Bay when I get there in March, it’ll have been five months since we’ve seen each other last and even that isn’t guaranteed. He hinted he might head off to South America after and I don’t know if or when he will actually tell me what he’s decided. I will have to reach out to him before March because I want to know if there’s work in Terrace Bay when I get back, but other than that he’s got his plans and I’ve got mine.

I’ve gotten rid of my bookcase, my two display cabinets, my 50 inch tv, my beloved ottoman, three boxes of clothes, and assorted tchotchkes. The shelves only took up one foot in a ten foot room, but it’s surprising how much their absence makes the room feel big and empty. I rented a storage locker up in Thunder Bay and took a carload of stuff there already.

It’s deceptive, deciding what to keep. It’s hard to gauge how much space is available in my car. I do have to leave room in the backseat for the summer tires. I asked the guy how much life he thought was left in them, and he said easily another year, probably two or three. I debated selling them, but I decided good tires on rims are better to have than some of my other stuff. Who knows how much money I’ll have next year, one less headache for me.

I’ve got an appointment to get the rest of the red bleached out of my hair this week. It was a whim I’ve been justifying in different ways to different people. The first and most important reason is work. As much as I love the red, it’s a lot of work to maintain, when I don’t know how long I’ll be between appointments. The length is problematic too, too short to tie back and it gets in my face on jobs, but going any shorter and I’m basically a crew cut, even more effort to maintain a colour. I could have gone back to my natural brown, which Julia tried desperately to convince me of because it would be easier, but I wasn’t ready to be boring. Trying to get my hair as light a blonde as possible has the additional effect of making me look older. I’ve applied to join the Soroptimists, I’m going to start a local SIB if there isn’t one, and I plan on volunteering as much as I can for the Indigenous community. Even last week people at work were guessing I was closer to 20 than 30. I need to look older to be taken seriously. Lastly, and not that the Vagabond has ever suggested I change a thing about myself, but I figured that if I look closer in age to him, it would be easier for him. Not that anything short of drawing lines on my face and dying my hair grey would make me look like I was even in spitting distance of his age, but anything more than looking like I’m fresh out of high school is better.

There are two Italians at my work, Fabiola and Nunzio. I had a thought that Nunzio might be able to teach me to speak Italian better, because he’s a nicer teacher than the old man, or maybe I could ask Fabiola. The rolled ‘R’ continues to elude me. It’s funny, how people are – Fabiola speaks with a thick Central accent, but when I asked her if she was Italian, she corrected me, “My father was,” implying she doesn’t think of herself as Italian. Nunzio speaks with a perfect North American accent, but calls himself Italian, said pasta is his favourite food, and had no problem switching to dialetto to insult us when it was obvious we both understand Standard.

There’s a female at work I talk to regularly. You can keep your 30^th birthday nonsense – I noticed I’m old when I realized she somewhat looks up to me as an example of what she wants. She bought a plane ticket for Portugal on January 15^th and her plan is to figure it out from there. When some people at work expressed concern, I interjected that I’d be in England around the same time and it’s a simple thing to hop across the Chanel and help her. I told her about the Working Holiday visa and she was interested enough to look it up, so maybe we’ll be travel buddies. Talk is cheap, and I’m not sure we have anything in common besides a shared interest in hitting the road, but I’m learning that part of this vagabond lark is keeping a laundry list of people you might be able to rely on, on the off-chance one of them turns out.

The union steward is a loud, chatty man, although I had to impress upon everyone that being friendly is his job – he’s supposed to be approachable so we can tell him problems we’re having. He’s a Seahawks fan and a few of us gadflies enjoy looking up the score before work so we can tease him about it when we get in. Any Seahawks jokes you have would be appreciated in the comments section!