Another update of supreme quality

After yesterday's update I went out on a photgraphic expedition to capture some spring greens and get some shots of mountain runoff waterfalls that I return to now and then. At one point I took my Canon S3IS off the tripod because it was a little awkward(awkward is a rather awkwardly spelled word I think) and in doing so dropped it and it proceeded to bounce a ways down the basaltic rock formations of Mt Tom. The battery compartment flew open and the batteries flew out, I found three out of four of them. I thought the camera had had it but when I got home I put four new batteries in it and it worked, which blew my mind, although the rocker switch is kind of messed up. Fortunately the lens surface didn't take any of the impacts.

So I was in a bit of a sulk sitting there on mountainside, debating whether to finally get a DSLR or just go for medium format color this year. The latter course would haven entailed considerably less up front investment, but I keep seeing lots of images here on SG and elsewhere that can only be taken with DSLRs, so today I finally broke down and got myself a sony a350. It does take better pictures than my llittle canon.

Earlier today I was thinking "art is worth it", with reference to enduring various things in life, my job for example. Doesn't make it too much easier to deal with work. Now that I've got my body and mind back in order having to get up at 345 am again tomorrow to use them to deliver soda is a slap in the face. The thing about it is that you've got to maintain an awareness that things move and change. Night and day and rain and sun and summer and winter are all going to come and pass and come and pass again. Work will not suck one iota less this week than it ever did before, but it will pass, and come, and pass again. Hopefully I can keep enough of my brain juices flowing through it that I'll go out and get some good pictures, and hopefully eventually make some actual good decisions about what to do with my life. But when you're really in the pit of work it's reallly hard to keep a broad perspective. I actually admonish myself to maintain a narrow perspective and think I'm stuck where I am, by way of reverse psychology, or whatever the actual term would be.

Some things I don't know include whether I shall ultimately prove physically capable of holding onto this coke job for the few months I'm thinking to. I find myself in markedly better physical condition because of it, climbing mountains hardly makes me breathe hard nowadays. I'm not sure if my idea to go into home heating oil or propane would comprise a a great improvement over what I'm doing, but I'd like something that doesn't have me getting up quite so ass-early and driving an hour. I know from stories of what my boss expects of his workers, that when winter rolls around, and on some particular day it's a major blizzard with a foot of snow on the ground, he's going to expect me to get up a 3am and take two hours to get up to greenfield to deliver that soda. And that isn't at all cool. Driving a tank truck on bad roads could get pretty hairy too, but I might not be so bad if I'm not doing it all so terribly early, and if I get stuck by the roadside I won't be so terribly far away from home. Or commuting so far in blizzards. Trucking companies tend to be completely ruthless with their drivers with respect to expecting them to arrive for work and/or drive in any and all weather conditions, and I've seen a number of trucks rolled over or stuck and I don't want to put myself between a boss and a blizzard ever again. Like I said a tanker truck could also be really hairy in bad road conditions, but I can accept that people need heating fuel rather more urgently than they need soda. I don't know if the hours would be better or worse in terms of fitting a life around them, but you can't really tell about such things. Actually I can certainly see them being worse, in the autumn, working all day, maybe 6 days a week when the cold weather is coming. But on the other hand I don't think that uncoiling the hose from the back of an oil truck would be as physically brutal and draining as hauling the soda up and down stairs on a two wheeler, so I would have more of myself left for my own use at the end of a day.

Well whatever. It's also possible that if all the independent truckers get wiped out by the high cost of fuel there won't be too many jobs available with those guys looking for positions, but I still hope to escape coke come fall.