Update 20:

I woke up thinking about the Tragically Hip song, 38 Years Old. Until a few seconds ago when I turned on my computer I thought that it was 28 Years Old. 28 years old, never kissed a girl. For those of you that read this and aren’t familiar with one of the most popular (within Canada) Canadian bands this reference is lost on you. I apologize for that.

Regardless, I turned 28 years old today; I can’t say that I haven’t kissed a girl. In fact as far as that song goes I have nothing in common with it. My 28th year was a stark opposite, being a whirlwind tour of 3 continents, a pile of countries, close to half a million km’s travelled, friends made, unfriendly’s left behind….

From the way things are looking at this point in time, my life, as a transient will continue. The first month of my 29th year takes me back to Vancouver after being in New Brunswick with family, off to Europe (UK, Italy, Greece, Croatia and Turkey) to help celebrate one of my uncle’s milestone birthdays. Then back to North America for a little while.

I had a completely different idea of how my return to Vancouver would be. I had assumed that I had more than enough skills that would help me find employment even if I couldn’t find something in the engineering domain. I hadn’t counted on this little thing called a recession, hopefully not to become a depression.

After sending out about 40 or 50 job applications to everything from engineering, to driving truck, to operating equipment, to carpentry I had to give up on Vancouver and look for work in another domain, another local. That’s when I decided to go back to “farming,” and back to the prairies.

70-80 years ago Eastern Canadians, many from my community and surrounding areas had to leave home to earn a living to support their families, they headed west to Motown, Detroit City to work in the American motor plants. They headed further west to the prairies to find temp work on the wheat and barley grain threshers. 70-80 years ago.
I don’t think that it is accurate to say that today is anywhere even close to the dirty thirties. I think it is accurate to say that it set off some alarm bells in my head when I couldn’t find work in a once booming economy such as Vancouver. But, I am sure that there could be some similarities made.

Granted I won’t be swinging a pitchfork of barley stems into a thresher, instead I will be sitting in the air conditioned and 6 speaker stereo comfort of one of the most technologically advanced combines yet produced, a 9770 STS John Deere. When I am not harvesting the grains I will be hauling them in an equally luxurious 379 or 378 Peterbuilt semi. No, a comparison between now and then is not accurate at all.

The job is essentially that. I drive to Northern Saskatchewan following my return from Europe. There I will help to finish the spring planting on the farmers 18,000 acre grain farm, then load up a two trailer semi with a combine on the first and a grain trailer behind along with 6 or so other truck-combine combos and head to Oklahoma or Texas.

Basically from June until September I will be combining my way through the Midwest, South to North. Post-Canadian harvest I will be heading back down to South Dakota and Kansas for the corn, with the season ending in November. I will be taking my computer to keep looking for work, with the hope that the recession will be over, with the hope that I can return to an engineering job.

I guess that after spending the last year working for a humanitarian organization I needed to get back some balance in my life, a process that I call re-rednecktifying. I was too hippie and not enough redneck, to still be a rippie. So I’ll redneck it up for a while to restore that fine balance...

I have to admit that I am a bit tired of the transient lifestyle. Meeting awesome people and knowing that we will be saying goodbye shortly is not something that I especially like. And although I have been super fortunate to have met some absolutely fantastic ladies and been able to spend some time getting to know them, the transiency has built a wall between us that I am not yet prepared to scale again.

On the other hand, like I mentioned earlier in this post, I turned 28 years old today. I don’t feel different than I did when I was 27. Other than I am not in the Congo and am with my family for the first time in many years. But I turned 28 years old. It’s not old, but it isn’t exactly too young to be thinking about thinking about settling down a bit, whatever that means...