For the next twelve years I was a house husband, raising kids, cooking, cleaning and stuff. I also built a few boats and did some sailing, built an addition to our house and helped my Mom and Dad out around the place.
In 1988 we purchased the land that was to become Bufflehead Manor and I decided to work for wages to help pay for the place.
I sort of fell into a job as a maintenance man, seasonal, with a definite end date that suited me fine, (March 30) at Camp He-Ho-Ha, Seba Beach. This was a camp for disabled children and adults and had to be kept at a wheelchair accessible level all year round. There was plenty of snow to shovel and ice to chip that year but we also had time to do some painting and maintenance carpentry, build a garage, move an old building and maintain the swimming pool. We also fibreglassed and painted the boats for the summer season and did repair work on other equipment.
Spring rolled around, as Spring will, and I was looking for something else to do. I had an offer of a job at a commercial summer camp but I heard that Wabamun Lake Provincial Park wanted summer people so I looked into that and got hired as a Landscape/Horticulture Technician. This was a classy name for a job in maintenance again, mainly knocking down dangerous trees and cleaning up deadfall trees, and learning that a chainsaw is not the ideal tool for pruning a spirea. We also washed vehicles, disced the beach and pumped a lot of water from the camping areas, it was a wet year.
At the end of the season I was asked to apply for the job of Equipment Operator 1 for the next season. The job mainly involved driving tractors, loaders, trucks and lawn mowers, running pumps and doing vehicle preventative maintenance for Parks. I worked for three seasons at this, until there was a budget cut and staff reduction and I became a Maintenance Service Worker 1, doing the same things but getting paid less, and with less help.
One year the parks were all privatized and I wasn't called back for the season. By then Bufflehead Manor was long paid for so I didn't care too much.
Since then I've been semi, hemi, demi retired, and happy as a clam.
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