I'm allowed to feel drippy, though. I've just been out on the trails for an hour or so, it's a hot day, and I'm wearing a brown uniform t-shirt and jeans.
Drippy indeed.
It's not that bad of a drippy, though. A good day to be out on the trails, if a person can put up with the mosquitoes.
It's one of the weirder parts of my job that if I feel like going out for a walk, I go out for a walk. Now, admittedly there was a method to it today (I'm leading a walk tomorrow and was doing a bit of planning for it), but even when there's no reason we're encouraged to go out, check the state of the trails, talk to the visitors, and I suppose just generally be a presence out there. We probably don't do it often enough, but we're meant to.
Not your normal workplace, no.
I guess I've been reflecting on it a bit more than I usually do lately, because the end of September marks somewhat of a milestone for Yours Blatheringly. Yep, as of September 30th I will have been here for twenty years.
Sigh. I'm not old enough to have been anywhere for twenty years, if you ask me.
I've spent twenty years as a professional naturalist, and I'm still not entirely sure how it happened. I mean, obviously I interviewed and was hired; I do know that part. What I don't really understand is how I got here and why I've stayed at it so long. I like it, guess. And it would be pretty hard at this point to move on to a nine-to-five office job where a person does the same thing every single day. I'm not sure I'd last long at something like that. At the very least you could say that this place is rarely if ever boring, and that's always a good thing for those of us of the short attention span brigade.
I've hit the point in my accidental profession where a certain amount of mentoring is expected, and that's where I run into trouble. Suppose I went to some school's career fair and the kids asked me how to become a naturalist, for example. Should I tell them the way I did it -- that I was the nerdy kid who always had to take field guides on nature walks so I could know what I was seeing? That I went to university pretty much just to go to university (not exactly a luxury most people can afford nowadays, sadly)? That when I was done my undergrad degree I didn't see any research opportunities that grabbed me, and had half a mind to take my environmental assessment ticket but never bothered because the oil patch tanked right about that time and there wouldn't have been jobs? That I sent my resume to just about anyone I could think of and ended up being hired here almost more for my three summers of working at a small-town museum than for my freshly-minted Zoology degree?
Doesn't sound like sound career planning strategy to me, somehow.
Yeah, I fell into this job, and I've stayed here.
That's ok, though. The job's changed somewhat over the years, and I'm still learning things. Maybe that's the big reason behind everything, in the end. I'm still learning. I'm not bored. Sometimes I get the chance to share my knowledge with other enthusiastic people, and sometimes I pick up things from them. And the job is never really routine, which has to be a good thing, right? It's kept me here for twenty years, at any rate.
And if I feel like it I can go out for a walk.
Definitely a good thing.
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