Back to School for Bob

Bob is on his second week of school at Sac City College. He is taking classes to be a Mechanical Electrical Technician. We have lots of electrical problems around this old house that he can practice on, and a fairly new freezer that conked a couple of years ago. I've been using it to store things in the garage. Things like my drip system parts, my hammer, and other things that would otherwise be hard to find in a garage full of John's junk. (It's been at least a week since I complained about that, had to get it in.)

When he has his schedule stabilized, Bob plans to be look for a part time job. Until then he has a small unemployment check. Because he's very frugal and saved most of his money the past year, he's doing OK.

I envy him for having somewhere to go 3 days a week. But I wouldn't go back to school for anything. I love to read and do research and learn things, but I don't like someone else telling me to do it. I WILL do it, in fact I'd probably do twice as much work as they asked, because I'm an overachiever, but I'd be grumpy about it.

I perused an online list of volunteer jobs this morning. These days some non-profits are passing off work that requires quite a few hours and a lot of responsibility..."be in charge of all our fund-raising activities." Sure, lots of people want to do THAT for free. There were several openings for homework enforcers, volunteers who will work one-on-one with kids and force them to complete their homework. Once I saw how well the Waldorf school and Visions worked without it, I've been against homework. I'm afraid I'd be tempted to write on the top of a child's homework paper: "The student and I won't be doing this assignment, we're out learning REAL stuff. Ta da!"

Wildlife Care has some openings. Bob and I worked there for 3 years when he was small. We learned a lot, and I still enjoy taking care of an injured bird or two. But not dozens at a time. When you're working the intake desk and the choice at the end of the day is to either euthanize everything you can't place with a volunteer or take it home yourself, you can imagine how stressful that is. I don't want to work at cat or dog rescue places for the same reason. We'd soon have a houseful.

One thing that did tickle my fancy was library assistant in Kaiser's medical library. I would love reading that stuff myself. So much of what's on the internet is only available if you pay big bucks for it. As a side benefit maybe I could drive my podiatrist nuts with new questions.

What I should probably do is leave the poor people in the working world alone and find a way to stay busy at home. It's just so hard when there's no one around to annoy once in a while.