I just noticed it’s been
almost 2 months since I last posted on my blog.
I have been busy quilting and doing other things, but nothing I felt
needed blogging. However, my life has
changed and it will take time to digest the fact that I am no longer gainfully employed.
On June 22nd,
I retired from teaching forestry at a community college. When I started my career, I had not ever
thought I would teach, although some people early on thought I should. I first worked as a forester: I fought fires,
surveyed lines, cruised and marked timber, supervised logging sales. All the normal stuff us foresters do. However, the timber industry is a fickle
one. Recessions hit it harder than other
professions and the growing anti-logging sentiment by the public didn’t help
either. (Just wait, however, when you
run out of toilet paper…). In 1979 I was
working for a private company that was slowly circling the drain. An adjunct teaching position came open and I
took it to fill the gap until I could find something different. However, I found that I loved teaching and
the department liked me – so when the position came open as full time and
tenured, I applied and got the job. That
was 33 years ago!
But even the teaching
environment has changed. Students come
less prepared for higher education, budgets have gotten continually tighter and
decisions are made by administrators with no or extremely limited teaching experience,
so that their decisions usually make the job harder without real benefits to
students. It was the growing feeling of
frustration that told me it was time to go.
While I will miss the students and my colleagues, I will NOT miss the low
morale and lousy atmosphere that has grown the past few years.
At 60, I am on the young
side of retirement age, but there are some things I still want to do, that
require a reasonably sound body. My blog
name is the Quilting Climber. It’s the
climbing part that I see as most perishable.
My hips and knees remind me of that every morning. But it feeds my soul and provides the inspiration for my art quilts. My husband is 3 years older and we still have
trips we want to take and climbs we want to complete. The weird part is that I
have had summers off these past 33 years: our students are off doing their
internships, so we do not offer summer courses.
It’s in the fall, when the teaching year starts again, that I will
realize that I am truly gone.
However, I am already making adjustments. I hope to finally not only get into shape,
but I hope to quit the up and downs of it: I get into shape during summer, only
to lose it slowly over the school year.
Even though we teach field classes that require a lot of bush travel, it’s
just not the same. I spent way too much
time at my desk writing lesson plans, grading papers and dealing with the daily
BS of administration. I was a ski
patroller and patrolling helped somewhat during winter, but I retired from that
as well and have not skied nearly as much since (that will change, too!) So now I am trying to build a regular workout
schedule. I also have a long list of
things to do on the house and garden. Of
course, there’s all those quilts that need finishing or need to come out of my
head and into fabric.
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| Where we camped last week - hope to have many more such mornings. We climbed the mountain in the background. Daughter of the Sun, Mission Mountains, Montana. Photo by Fred Spicker July 26, 2012. |
It is said that
retirement is a stressful, life changing event akin to a death, marriage or
similar. While I am happy to finish
that chapter in my life, I realize I am now much closer to the end than
the beginning. That’s the thing that has
me pondering the most. I intend to make
the most of it!
“Life should NOT be a
journey to the grave with the intention
of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand,
martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming
WOO HOO what a ride!”
(Attributed to various
people with various versions – I like this one best, apparently a Maxine
cartoon.)