This post is a bit more personal. It’s not particularly easy to share, but it’s an essential part of our story. As time has passed, the pain and embarrassment have faded to a distant memory of the tribulations that come with transition.
Back in Santa Fe, Maggie and I were settling in to our casita, leaving the dirtbag life behind us. Well, not entirely. We did forego a couch for a couple months, instead opting to sit on yoga mats and camp pads on the floor.
We spent a couple weeks unpacking and buying junk to fill the house. Shelving. Spices. An air fryer… While it is seriously convenient and comfortable to live in a house with a boat load of belongings, I will definitely miss the simplicity of having one suitcase of clothes and just a car load of adventure gear, or better yet, only a backpack. I will miss having a rough plan for the day, but not knowing where the day will take me. Se la vie…
I was still burning through savings – over four grand to get on a lease, and the expenses of new crap were adding up too. I was anticipating some decent pay checks in the near future, but I still didn’t have a start date for my new job at Los Alamos National Lab.
After several weeks, I hadn’t heard anything back, so I sent an email saying I was ready to start work. Two days later, I got a call from an HR rep. She sounded a bit nervous as she explained that I was not eligible for the job. This was shocking, but in some ways not a surprise. There are certain requirements for working in a government nuclear facility. I made choices and reported that honestly, as I didn’t believe it would affect my chances for getting hired. Well, I was wrong, and now back to square one – jobless with no prospects on the horizon. I wasn’t broke yet, and Maggie was starting work at a local ski shop, so the situation wasn’t dire. Although, one stroke of bad luck would have been all it took to end up back at mom and dad’s house.
Frankly, I was freaking out for a few days. Soon thereafter, I applied to Whole Foods. I got in to the grocery department the day before Thanksgiving, stocking shelves and facing products on the closing shift, 1:30-9:30 pm. The pay was $17/hr, 36 hours per week, barely enough to cover rent.
The first couple weeks at Whole Foods, I was having an existential crisis. How could I, an experienced nuclear engineer, be shuffling groceries around. I felt like my worth was tied to my wage. I wondered how everyone else working there was getting by…
Maggie was not loving the ski shop. Staffed exclusively by 20-something year old dudes, she did not fit in, and some of the working conditions were questionable. Cramped quarters and minimal ventilation made the ski work unbearable, and verging on unsafe. Thankfully, she had the opportunity to shift gears and work as a ski patroller at the local mountain, Ski Santa Fe, which turned out to be a great decision.
I eventually calmed down and accepted the stocking job for what it was, even enjoying it to a point. I could sleep in and have time to run in the morning. I could wake up early and ski before work. My commute was a short walk or bike ride. I was hardly drinking any alcohol, since I would go straight to bed after work and my days off were rarely on weekends. The work was quite active – I easily walked ~4 miles per day around the store, and lifting boxes was some low key weight training. Helping customers find random items was fun and it always brightened their day. In general, it was very low stress, and I didn’t think much about work on my down time.
Other than the poverty wage, there were some downsides. Maggie and I didn’t see each other much, since she was up early to get to the ski basin, and I got home by the time she was in bed. I didn’t get to see my friends very much. My schedule was somewhat random, so I couldn’t make plans more than a week or two in advance. On balance, I would say I was neither happy nor unhappy with my situation, somewhere between ambivalent and content, going through the motions to stay afloat.
I applied to more engineering jobs. By mid-January, I had a few interviews, and a week later I had my first offer. I was so relieved! I accepted that offer, but a couple more follow-up interviews happened for jobs I thought I might like more. Two more offers came in soon after, one back at Los Alamos (lacking special requirements), and another remote job with a smaller lab complex subcontractor.
I hemmed and hawed, but Maggie, in her infinite wisdom guided me to the right choice. “Remember how happy you were during the pandemic, working from home and not commuting to Los Alamos?” She was right. The remote job was a little more of a risk, an unknown quantity, but avoiding 1.5 hours a day in the car was a huge plus. It was settled.
Some of my co-workers at Whole Foods were surprised to learn their local grocery stocker was a nuclear engineer, but everyone was happy for me that I had found a new job commensurate with my skill set. I quit towards the end of February and started my new gig a week later. Everything worked out for the best…
Now for fun stuff! Throughout all of this, we did manage to get out for some local adventures. Warm weather lingered into mid-November. Maggie and I tried a new route up Santa Fe Baldy, which included a little off trail ridge scrambling. It was a beautiful 15 mile hike. True to form, New Mexico provided plenty of solitude.
A couple weeks later, it looked like winter was finally coming, but only after 12pm or so. I went out with my friends, Ryan and Amber, to hike the standard route up Santa Fe Baldy. It was a crisp fall morning when we got started.
Atop Santa Fe Baldy, we could see the incoming storm. Rather than retreating on the easy trail down, we hiked over the neighboring peaks back to the ski basin as snow started to fall. It was an epic day, braving the storm at 12,000 feet!
Once ski season was in full swing, Maggie was out on the mountain four days a week, and I chased the pow as much as possible! We got out for a few back country days. We nailed the timing on a group ski trip to Wolf Creek – over two feet of fresh pow dumped all weekend! And of course, I snuck in a full moon skin up the local ski hill.
Consider this my “yadda-yadda-yadda” for winter 23-24. While most things in life have come easy for me, this transition period was definitely a challenge. Maggie and I had a lot of fun on our journeys, but I think we both gained a lot of resilience from the tough times we encountered, even if those tough times were both optional and self-inflicted. We often learn more from failure than from success, and boy did I learn at lot from this one. Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with how this little rollercoaster ride ended…
Distance Over Time 