I have been keeping pretty busy since my last post. This whole "married life" thing is great, but it does not lend itself well to blogging. (Or staying in contact with friends, or...) But I don't want to totally abandon this endeavor yet. So besides working in Vegas, buying a backhoe, and planting a garden, I have been taking a long trip across the country with my wife.
We are staying at a Baptist summer camp for a few weeks as volunteers. While I have done this numerous times in the past, this has been different for a number of reasons. For one, I am no longer a single man in need of a wife. So that shifts your interactions with the staff of the opposite gender a bit, although the continually increasing age difference has been doing that for a while. As a married couple with our own space, we have a bit of liberty for recreation, which is nice. But this is my wife's first experience dealing with conservative Baptists, and that causes me to see things through her eyes, which can be a bit amusing at times, and she has had to adjust to some things. We also do all of our work together, which allows us to get things done faster, but I have to dial back the intensity a bit so that she can keep up.
I am a pretty intense worker, even at home, and she knows that. But in the camp environment, with no distractions, and clear objectives and visible progressive steps in front of me, I can get a bit too focused on the task at hand. Because of that, we will get finished and home sooner than we anticipated, but we still have to take breaks occasionally for the sake of our relationship. And the most significant contribution from some of our "help" from the camp has been just to give her some social interaction outside of myself. (When you send two girls in skirts out to help the people building the ropes course, what are you expecting them to do?) But the trip has been a good adventure to have together, early in our marriage.
Once we get back, I suppose we will have to settle into "real life" together. Pretty soon we will probably have chickens, then maybe a cat or dog. And then kids eventually. And probably not so many two month trips and time working at camp. But we will see what the Lord has in store for us.
