My Spanish language is bad, really bad. Several hours of podcasts while biking to dog-clients doesn’t exactly make the best formula for effective adult learning. It comes out in days such as this when four of the seven folks working on various things around the house speak English as a second language; a couple of them virtually no English at all.
Moving and job change routinely make their way toward the top of many major life events lists. In fact, marriage does as well. I’m sure a marriage, 2.5 moves and two job changes in a little more than 18 months would be enough to send some people slipping off the edge if not completely jumping off it. Yet I sit on the patio staring out at the sun-drenched mountains and valley, more worried about one arm being more in the sun than the other (as a result of a furniture crammed patio due to the floor-polish guys doing their thing) and feeling slightly sorry for myself for failing to pick up Spanish the way I’d hoped.
Entering the fifth week (or so) of this current relocation process it feels we’ve hit the pinnacle of the bad and may have started the gradual decent toward a smooth landing. By my count this is my sixth employment related move—paltry by standards of military folks, coaches and senior executives; yet a number with impact. Each different in as many ways as similar. This one’s been particularly difficult; some things related to our love of our current location and some related to somewhat unique (and not cheap!) fixes needed to our property to satisfy a relocation company.
Everyone gets hot in the desert, native or not, especially in the middle of a dozen consecutive triple digit days. As I was shuffling around the house between different groups of service folks I repeated my bad Spanglish, particularly the part about plenty of Coke and water in both inside and patio refrigerators. I know I was getting things across when a couple of the guys repeated, ‘Ok, Thank You’