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.
________________________________________________________________
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.
