I'm sure all the taxpayers I know will be glad to hear that I earned 4 hours of overtime pay today, in addition to the 1/2 hour I earned yesterday. Yeah, I bet they'll be happy to hear they're paying me time-and-a-half, too.

It's a little surreal to find myself suddenly working for the very gov't I despise. At least it's not the Department of Defense or something like that. And at least I agree (more or less) with the end goal of the Forest Service, if not all of its actual practices. I think the idea of "managing" forests is pretty arrogant, but I like the idea of being a caretaker of all the little living things. My boss has already been suggesting pretty hard that I stay on Forest and work for the FS the rest of my life. Unfortunately, every suggestion is followed up with the realization that there are no jobs for me on the Hoosier (nor anywhere else). I'm betting IT will be outsourced if not next year, five years after that--not that I want to spend the rest of my life in IT, god no--and engineering tech jobs, where my real qualifications are, are hard to get.

Anyway, I'd love to stay on Forest, but I'd rather be doing trailbuilding and construction work than IT work, and that's definitely a seasonal kind of gig. And I'm getting old. And I hate the gov't. Just a few stumbling blocks.