Today’s the last full day of summer. And what a summer it was! I never would have ever – like, ever – imagined spending a summer doing pool supply retail work. But the summer’s over, and with it my pool supply gig. In fact, this week is the first seek since early May I’m not scheduled for any hours. It feels great. Strange, but great.

Not that I mind – I have this depressing image in my mind of what it would be like come, say, the second week of December, the clouds gray and thick overhead, a cool spitting rain outside, and me sitting on the counter of the pool supply place waiting for a customer to come in, my only company being the dumb music they play overhead. Because that’s the way it is around here in the deep off-season according to my store manager: you can get whole days where you might see two customers all day. That to me would be a complete waste of valuable time simply in order to make minimum wage dough-re-mi.

Don’t get me wrong: if it were something I had to do in order to put bread on the table and a roof over my head I’d do and do it willingly. But the fact is, I don’t. Technically, I’m still employed as a pool supply guy, but my time going forward will be only to cover if the manager or the assistant want to take some vacation time. How bad-ass is the pool supply business? You can’t take any vacation whatsoever between May and mid-September. Imagine that? So if the guys need me to work a weekend or a few days during a week so they can enjoy some vacation I’ll gladly fill in for them. They deserve it. But that will be about it going forward. They’ve already asked me to come back to work next May on the same schedule I had this year, but it’s not really something I want to do. As I’ve said before: this gig was the right thing to do at the right time. I’m glad I did it, but enough is enough.

Besides, I’ve got enough to keep me busy for the next couple of weeks. We just bought a new laptop to replace the one presently running on fumes. And that’s a lot of work getting everything swapped over. And with the weather not quite as hot as it has been I’ve started taking daily bike rides around the neighborhood. I may be in shape for the pool supply gig, but I’m not in bike riding shape! Lifting tubs of chlorine tabs doesn’t get you in shape for bike riding, so I’m going to enjoy getting myself in shape that way. And I am dragging the golf clubs out of quarantine this Friday as an official first step to reducing my handicap six strokes (from 26 to 20) by the time the heat comes back in next year.

I’ve also got a LinkedIn profile I need to get up to date to see what kind of nibbles there might be out there from a IT gig perspective. I’m still not sure I want to go back to it: some days I feel ready to dip my toes back in, other days I start feeling all PTSD-y about it. We’ll see: I’ll do all the “due diligence” and see where it goes from there.

There’s something sadly sweet and sentimental about the end of summer, but here in the Valley of the Sun – and most especially this year – we’ve still got plenty of warm weather before (and if) the heat gods choose to “swip the flitch” and set our weather to “Arizona winter”. That would be nice.

Summer’s gone.