year in review part 1

I dont know why i felt like i wanted to do this, I assume because it feels like ive done alot of random jobs and grown in alot of different ways in this past year. A year is a funny think to look back at, ill start last september.
So after camp I took a pretty long break which was good and bad, I think I had a month of doing nothing, and most of really was spent doing nothing which was probably detrimental in quite a few ways. I started a job at the beginning of september at Nutri- lawn, I started off mowing lawns but within a week i was driving a truck around and spraying liquid fertilizer, this was actually one of my funner jobs, i enjoyed the driving around and mapwork, and spraying fertilizer was pretty easy ( except for environmental implication) i stayed there for about a month but winter was coming so i started a new job at iron mountain working with pinnacle staffing solutions with the help of my brother-inlaw. This was a job that made me insane, boxes boxes boxes boxes boxes, go there find a box go there find another box my job was finding boxes and since it was all in a very easy system it required no thought. no running, no stepping on boxes, no free thought, ok it wasnt that bad but it was boring, at least i had by brother in law steve to entertain me with his antics. ok so we terrorized through three months of box destruction(sucky part was that i had no part in this destruction) in a couple weeks, and within a month of it I was out of a job, there were 4 of us and they cut 2, i saw it coming for a week and then they told me they had no more work for me, i was sad for some reason, i dont know why.

I was unemployed from mid november to january, I was teaching pioneer clubs on wednesday nights( which is starting again soon) but wasnt really putting my whole heart into it, which is something I have to remember to work on when I start teaching it again. I was grasping for answers about God probably trying to put him in a box I could understand on my own, really was in a downward spiral, usually found sitting around doing nothing, im all for being unemployed to take some time to figure stuff out but I think I should have kept myself busy, it seemed like a downward spiral, which was the opposite of what I wanted from this time off. God wanted to teach me but I was too busy trying to figure it out on my own. in december sometime, I think I broke down and finally stopped trying to build a safe God.

January came and I started a new job at Vita Health Products, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, not a health food store. So I was a coating machine operator(coated pills with various substances, my machine was in a ten by 12ish room and i had little to none social interaction), pretty much I had three standard operations(which include about 20-30 processes) that I had to remember Operating/ Product Safety/ Cleaning. This wasn't a bad job, it was perpetually boring sometimes, and perpetually annoying other times, i was sick for the first month it seemed. I coated about 3 million pills a day usually depending on whether it took 1 hour or 7 hours to do one batch(when it takes 7 hours to do one batch, you sit and watch the machine for about 3/4 of your shift) everything had to be completely clean and sterilized, surgical mask, hair net, white uniform(mine always got dirty with pill residue somehow or dirty when i cleaned stuff. ive always known how to get dirty, doesnt really matter what im doing. all this in the box work drove me crazy, if you want stories of how crazy it made me i will tell you, i had some very random thoughs going through my mind when I sat for hours and hours most of them illegal.

February 26 a day that all of us would probably rather have never happened, My cousin Renee passed away from organ failure due to her luekemia. It was(is) very hard on alot of people, including me, i was questioning God and why he would take away someone so alive in him, I mean as tragic as it is, death is inevitable, but that doesnt really ease the pain of loss. God has conquered death, giving us hope, and renee would have remind us of that when we question God.

all this in the box work made me want to get out into the bush, that job was the bane of my existence. so i thought tree planting would be a great fit, in the bush, suposivly great money, did I mention in the bush. so I found a company and then I quit my job. so I had about a month inbetween vita health and treeplanting so I was thinking about jobs that I could do for a month and I started a job at red river soils taking bags of soil (30 40 lbs) off a conveyor belt and putting them on to pallets in susquensial order and packing them flat. my brother worked this job a few years before me and lasted all of 4 hours before he quit. I already was starting to feel sick within the first couple days of starting this job, the 10- 12 hour days didnt help very much, i pretty much slept, ate and worked, but I continued to run my body down, I thought it was cold and it would go away, I remember one night where I fell asleep sometime after my dad woke up, I mean he wakes up at 4:30ish but I still went to work, I really have no clue why I did, no one else there worked the full month I was there, most of them just showed up when they felt like it. I think I quit about a week before tree planting because I wanted to get rid of this "cold" which drained the life out of me, gave me a sore throat, made breathing a little harder, gave me a fever, chills, made my mucus greener than green. I ended up working monday and tuesday for my friendly neighborhood strawberry farmer henry epp laying irrigation pipe and planting strawberries, wednesday I power raked for some people from my church, i got home and pretty much passed out for the rest of the day, could really move because of the lack of energy, I went to the doctor on thursday and he told me I had pneumonia, i avoided telling him that i was leaving to go tree planting in 3 days because i knew he would tell me not to go, so I left feeling a little better because of anti biotics.

I left for ontario may 10th I believe, drove the 1100 kms to a small town called nakina, stoping in thunder bay for night. I set up my tent in the rain, met some fairly nice people. started learning tree planting the next day, it took a few days to get the tree depth and spacing down pat and i didnt really excel at anything, I was scarily close to lowballing( least production) our group, the first few days i felt decent but as the week was going on my body was detiriating. I didnt find any Christians within the camp which made me feel lonely in that regard, it was minus 5 during most of the nights, i experienced some cold sweats, alot of blowing my nose, the days were very random weather youd go from snow to rain to sun within a hour it seemed. i got through 1 4 day shift, and would have made more money at mcdonalds. it was "night off" so everyone(besides me, and possibly a couple other people i didnt know) got drunk, i went to my tent and slept through most of it, i was pretty dead. woke up the next day not really feeling any better, had a day off, pretty much asked God to help me not drag this out if it wasnt meant to be. woke up and got on the bus the next day, the bible verses someone before me wrote on the bus roof screamed at me in some ways romans 5:3-4 rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. I dont think God had this suffering in mind for me though. i planted trees for maybe 2 hours, each step harder than the last until i could no longer do it, i just went to the cache(place where you leave the boxes of trees)i basically told everyone that I was done and everyone pretty much couldnt argue with me. long story short the boss (probably the only person in the camp who didnt know i had pneumonia) tells me he doesnt want me there, mostly because he doesnt want me spreading anything. i pack up and go home i planned on leaving in the morning but he seemed to want me out of there . I try to sleep in a walmart parking lot in dryden, fail at doing so, so i keep on trucking, up for more than 24 hours with maybe a hour of sleep, arrive home safe and sound, even though i should have probably hit a couple deer on the way home, i definatly drove by alot of them.


lotss of writing, i dont know how many people will read through this all but it is sort of a way for me to learn more about myself by putting this all in words.
part two should be soon..