It has been quite a week! We began our new shift assignments tis past week; I am now on swing shift. It will certainly be better than graveyard! I admire the people who can do graveyard shift, I really do. Because I am not one of those people. I suppose I could do graveyard if I HAD to – if that was the only shift that was available to me, and I had to work that or my family would starve. But by choice? No. Way. Please.
So I am now swing shift, which still involves a couple of late night/early morning end-of-shifts for me. But it’s not nearly as much of a body-clock-changer as graveyard was for me. So I am pleased with that – because it certainly could have been worse. I (and my other 3 newbies) have no seniority, so we pretty much get the leftovers when it comes to the shifts we get assigned.
The only drawback to this past week was that I was not only starting a new shift at work, but also trying to help run a county fair at the same time. Yup, I am the beef superintendent at the local county fair, and our county fair was this past week. Stress much? Bring it on!
It actually went very well – thanks to a lot of prayer, and some pre-planning. And the fact that I have a great group of kids and parents in my 4H club, and in the beef section overall. But my days pretty much went like this for most of the week: in the barn at the fairgrounds by 6 a.m., morning exhibitor meeting at 8 a.m. then kids started showing their cattle around 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. (depending on the day), superintendent stuff right up until it was time to leave for work at 1:30 p.m., start work at 2 p.m. then either an 8 hour shift or 12 hour shift – so some days I was done around 10:30 p.m. (totally do-able) or 2:30 a.m. (ugh!). Then it would all start up again the next morning.
But I survived it! And the kids had a great time at the fair, from what I could tell. So we will do it all again next year. But next year – without the shift work that week. I have vowed that, when we bid for shifts and vacations for 2015 this coming October, I am bidding for fair week off FIRST THING! Work AND fair was fine once, but not something I want to do again.