Category: Journal

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IOGT Camp aftermath

Yesterday, I finally got home after a week and a half at camp. It’s always a little tough getting back into the swing of things at home, which is probably why I haven’t tried posting anything until tonight.

Incidentally, there were several times when I thought yesterday was Tuesday. I don’t know why, especially since I’ve had classes on Tuesday nights for the last three months. I ended up having to take an Accounting exam on the Tuesday of camp, too, which made the first half of camp more interesting.

For one thing, it was a lot easier to get the kids to be quiet the first night. Last year, they kept whispering to each other until about 2:00 in the morning. This year, I told them all that I needed to study for my exam and I wouldn’t be able to focus if they were making noise. I got some ridiculous protests like “But I talk in my sleep!” That’s when I busted out an angry (and truthful) “These are not a good few days to be testing my patience!” They got quiet a lot faster than last time.

As it turned out, all the nighttime studying and lack of naps paid off: I scored a 95% on the exam. Along with e-mailing me my score, the professor added a note of thanks for taking the class seriously. Mind you, he was the second instructor—he taught managerial accounting, whereas the first guy taught financial accounting—so he doesn’t know that the 95% should help compensate for the two exams I took earlier in the course.

I know that you (and the campers) may be wondering about the “lack of naps” comment. It’s true, I like to take naps during my free time there. Part of that is because I don’t sleep very well (me + cot + not-long-enough sleeping bag ? restful nights). Another part is because I’m the lifeguard and sitting on the dock in the hot sun for big chunks of time saps a lot of energy out of my body. When they start asking to go swimming half an hour early… HA HA HA! No.

Ironically, we always go to a waterslide on Thursday, which was the day it was cold and drizzly. That’s good for keeping lines short for the slides. Hell, it kept the lifeguard staff short—we outnumbered them 5-to-1 when we got there and they eventually abandoned the rapids ride completely (a bunch of short curving slides between splash pools). However, the cold and drizzle chased us inside for lunch and eventually led us to leave a couple hours early.

Lessee… there was one night I was glad I have some movies on my laptop. We had some nasty weather coming our way, so everyone headed for shelter to wait out the storm. I’m sure a lot of parents can confirm this: getting a bunch of kids together can get noisy. Trust me, they get noisier when they’re in a room where there’s very little space to move (and the enclosed walls probably didn’t help). Thankfully, I had brought my laptop to the shelter and we all started watching the movie “Up” until the weather let up a little. That’s when everyone left the building, started getting ready for bed and then the power went out.

I guess a couple branches fell down on a nearby power line, so we had electricity again early the next afternoon, but camp is a lot more interesting when you have to take measures like putting road cones on top of toilet lids as a reminder to not use them because there’s no power for the water pump. It turns out that pouring a whole bunch of water into a toilet bowl really quickly will make it flush itself, so we filled a large barrel with lake water and put it next to the outdoor bathrooms (vs. the ones in the cabins).

I’m sure there’s plenty more to write about, but I’m a little rusty after so much time away from writing. I suppose I could have written something while I was there, but seriously, that would have cut a big chunk out of my nap time.
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Okay, a couple more notes: thanks to aloe and occasionally wearing a t-shirt while sitting on the dock or teaching swimming lessons, I’m only peeling a little bit on the top of my left ear, my nose and the back of my neck/shoulders. Given that I didn’t put on any suntan lotion while setting up camp—putting out buoys and the swim area rope—that’s a lot of thanks.

And setting up the swim area was an adventure. We had about an hour to put out the buoys, which was a snap since Brent had made anchors for all four of them that stay in the water year-round. He attached a line to three of them, so after finding the first, we followed the line and then approximated the location of the fourth compared to the other three. Before Brent made his anchors and everything, putting out buoys could take an hour or two—this year, it was closer to twenty minutes.

When working that evening, the water was really smooth. Not so much when trying to put out the rope. It’s a small lake, but we had… three foot swells with white caps? When you’re trying to loop a rope over the top of a high-floating buoy to mark the swim area, that doesn’t help much. There were a few times when I wrapped my legs around the buoy and reached up to tilt it toward me—the waves were still going over my head. At some point, a wave rocked one of the buoys hard enough to give me a bruise on the inside of my right thigh. And at another point, a wave hit me smack in the side of the head and it took six hours to get the water out of my ear. Needless to say, that morning was an adventure.

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Stop, go, stop, go, stop, go…

It’s almost time for summer camp and I think I’ve got everything packed that I need. (Thankfully, I have a safety net—commonly known as my parents—so if I’ve left anything important behind, they can bring it when they come to visit in a couple days.)

Note that I may or may not have internet access there, which means there probably won’t be any new blog entries until next weekend. (It also means a shitload of e-mails to delete when I get home, grumble grumble grumble…)

There’s also a distinct likelihood that without much time in the sun this summer, I could hold a yellow pepper and a cabbage in my hands and look like a beet salad. Or if I stack them up under my chin, a stoplight. If I cover up most of my face, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer! You get the idea.

But those are minor details. The truth is that I’m about to spend the next week and a half at camp as the waterfront director (note the discussion about turning red above) and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. With that said, I better go through my stuff again. Not that I’ll be able to find anything at this point since I just threw a lot of it into a couple bags, but I’d rather not call home tonight with a plea to bring clean underwear.

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Feels like a swift kick to the e-balls

I went outside to watch the fireworks earlier tonight. I can’t see anything in the sky around our house because of all the trees.

I was writing a blog entry, then tried opening another website for reference. My laptop couldn’t access the site.

I went into the office and tried to print out a health form for my physical exam tomorrow. It couldn’t access my e-mail account to open the file.

I sat there being upset at the lack of Internet access when the ceiling light burned out. We don’t have a replacement bulb.

I fixed the problem with the Internet and opened the saved draft of the blog entry I was writing (over 800 words with plenty to go). It was 1 1/2 paragraphs long.

CRAP.

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Methinks we need a new garbage can

The old one has worked perfectly fine in the past. On Tuesday nights, we’ll gather trash from all around the house, get it into one big bag, put it in the can and set it out next to the driveway so it gets picked up in the morning.

There’s just one problem: it’s made of plastic. That in itself isn’t a problem, but the hole that’s been gnawed into the lid is. That’s right, gnawed into the lid.

I headed down the driveway this morning to get the trash can and the recyclable bin and bring them back to the house. The recyclables had been collected already, but when I looked at the trash can, it hadn’t been opened yet. It has handles that you pull up, which hold down the lid and help you carry it. The handles were locked into place, but I decided to take a look in case the garbage person had taken the trash, then closed the handles again.

I peeked through the gnawed hole in the lid and the bag was still in there, but I saw something odd: I’d tied the garbage bag shut, but the bag was currently sitting open. Like I said, that was odd. What was more odd was when I opened the lid and reached down to grab the bag, it moved. The instant I made contact with the bag, something shifted inside of it. I pulled my hand back, then reached down again and the same thing happened: made contact and it moved. When I looked through where the bag had opened up, that’s when I saw a big fuzzy tail.

And that’s when a big squirrel head popped up and looked me right in the eyes.

The squirrel tried to leap out of the can away from me, but it was too deep, so it basically made a big arcing skid around the far side of the can. Once it skidded down, I could hear it rustling around, but I had no idea what it was doing—I had already taken a few steps back.

The thought had already crossed my mind: “If I try to touch it with my hand, it will eat my fingers.” Thus, moving my fingers (and other eatable parts of my body) away from the can seemed like a good idea.

Instead of doing something stupid like reaching inside to grab the squirrel, I slowly tilted the garbage can away from me. Think about it like a circus cannon: I would love to shoot the squirrel across the yard and down the block, but looking into the cannon could result in getting my face eaten. I kept lowering the can further and further, wondering what the hell was taking so long, and then the squirrel came shooting out and bolted toward the nearest tree.

After that, it was just a matter of cleaning up. I put all the trash back into the bag that the squirrel had pulled out, tied it shut again, replaced the lid and latched the handles down. (In the back of my mind, I was reeeeeeally hoping that the garbage person hadn’t felt the can moving around, saw the squirrel and just said “Screw it” and left.)

Thankfully, the trash did get picked up later on, but now we’re stuck with the question of how to fix the problem. I should probably clarify one thing first: squirrels are very determined and methodical creatures. This one couldn’t jump from the bottom of the can up to the edge, right? So how did it get to the hole in the lid so it could squeeze itself inside?

Simple: it jumped from a tree. Mind you, we’re not talking about a sapling here. This is an old tree. It’s the kind that tree huggers love because you can’t get your arms all the way around it. And there are no low-hanging branches. The shortest jump it could have made was maybe ten feet in a straight line, but it jumped anyway. If it missed, get up and try again. And again. And again. (We stopped putting bird feeders in our backyard for the exact same reason—if something looks and smells tasty, those little bastards find a way to get inside.)

So now what? Buy a new garbage can? Buy a new lid and hope the handles will still close and hold it down? Use duct tape? Honestly, I like the last one, but I’m not sure how effective it would be. There are some contours on the lid, so it might be hard for duct tape to stick. Moreover, if they can gnaw through plastic, I’m pretty sure they’d be able to gnaw through duct tape eventually. It might leave a nasty glue-like taste in their mouths, but given that they enjoy eating garbage, that’s probably not much of a deterrent.

All I know is we have to figure something out before next Tuesday night. If we try to put the trash bag by the curb without putting it inside a can… we might as well hand-feed it to the squirrels. And hope they don’t eat our hands while we do it.

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Massages can be bad for you

Yeah, I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but I honestly think that’s part of the reason why I haven’t written anything in the last week or so.

My right shoulder hasn’t completely recovered from when I rolled the Explorer down the embankment, so I’ve been getting massages to try to loosen up the muscles in that area. Thankfully, it’s making progress, but the masseuse usually works on some other areas during each session, too. I don’t know how it happens, but muscle tightness migrates on my body. “If you think your shoulder hurts now, just imagine how your lower back will feel by this weekend!”

Unfortunately, sometimes it hurts while she’s working. If any of you have ever had a deep-tissue massage, it basically involves finding tight lumps in your muscles, then pushing down on it reeeeeally hard to get that spot to relax. (I don’t think she’s ever used a steak tenderizer on my back, but I’m not always sure I’d notice.)

“Can you feel this?”
“A little, yeah.”
“I’m putting a lot of pressure on it.”
“… Oh.”

She told me that if there’s a spot that starts to hurt, breathe deeply. This last time, she finished on my shoulder, started working on my neck and that’s what I was doing. In retrospect, I think part of the reason I didn’t tell her to ease off was because I was exhausted and half-asleep—she thought I was asleep—but the jolts in my neck kept me from drifting off completely.

I got through the rest of the evening, went to class for a couple hours (and stayed awake, no less) and everything seemed fine. Everything was not fine when I woke up the next morning.

Nope, when I woke up, I could barely turn my head in either direction. Incidentally, for those of you who have never tried it before, it makes driving way more interesting. Same thing the next couple mornings. It’s getting better, but one problem with having a really sore neck is that there’s not much motivation to lift my head off the pillow (using my neck muscles or pulling it up with my hands) when it’s a lot more comfortable not moving.

Now I’m up and about and feeling much more mobile, but I’ve learned my lesson: no more deep tissue massages for my neck. And along those lines, I should probably watch out for the steak tenderizer, too.

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Don’t expect to get much spare change there for a while.

Yesterday, I drove up to the north part of Minneapolis to visit some friends whose house got hit by the tornado over the weekend. You could tell they’d already done a lot of cleaning up because there was a huge pile of branches and random pieces of trash at the edge of the road where the city will eventually pick it up.

I’ve had very limited experience when it comes to natural disasters, so what I saw was… wow. I can only imagine what it was like for people who’d been living there for years. I was driving down the street toward their house and about a block north, everything looked fine. I mean fine. There were a couple pieces of junk that had been scattered around—probably blown there from someplace else—but the trees still had leaves on them. Hell, they still had branches on them. Not so much when I got to the Porter house. Continue reading “Don’t expect to get much spare change there for a while.”