Fair warning: this is not near the fun read the others were, because for me his was not a fun day. Well, let's get to it.
My alarm woke me at 5:30 this morning, although I had no reason to wake up at that hour. I tried to get back to sleep, but only slept in fits and starts until 7, when I had to wake up. At this point, I should have realized that this would not be my day.
After a quick breakfast, it was time to set up for the big activity of the day, a small Renaissance Faire on the camp grounds. We had rented a jumping castle, dunk tank, and inflatible climbing pyramid, all of which needed to be set up and staffed. In addition, there were photo booths, jousting suits, and stations for making daisy chains. Lunch this day would also consist of chicken drumsticks, as opposed to the traditional turkey legs, so girlls needed to be staffed and about 150 drumsticks needed to be grilled.
Before camp had started, I had been asked to sit in the dunk tank. Early in the morning, this didn't look so fun, but by 10AM, the sun was shining bright and warm, and the water looked inviting. I went and changed into swim clothes, but all the other men had been asked to man the climbing pyramid, so I was handed charcoal and asked to grill the chicken.
Let me stop here and declare that I love to cook, it's one of my favorite hobbies. Ask the Coachella gang if you don't believe that. However, my least favorite method of cooking is grilling. Yes, I assure you that I'm actually a red-blooded American male, but my Y chromosome must be slightly malformed. Anyway ...
So away I went, to grill and grill and grill. While the other adults got to interact with the girls, get wet in the dunk tank, and do whatever else. I grilled. For four hours. That entire time, I was either wrestling with coals, grabbing bags of drumsticks from the kitchen, or delivering the finished drumsticks to the oven to make sure they weren't bloody. Or singeing my arm hairs reaching across the grill to flip the legs. I tried to put on a happy face when people asked me how it was going, but I'm pretty sure I failed miserably.
Next up, I had been asked to teach the third-year campers how to navigate using a compass. It's become a tradition, something I've done for four years of camp, and I enjoy it greatly. Part of the process is teaching the girls how to calculate their pace by having them walk 50 feet and divide by the number of steps. The previous night, I had placed two rebar poles out to mark the beginning and end of the course. As I took the first group to the starting point, I saw that they had been removed. I asked if anyone knew what had happened to them, and found out that an adult had been driving along in a golf cart and scratched her leg by brushing one of them. She found them and threw them away in a rage. So, there's that mystery explained. I ran and found my tape measure and we made do, but the first group was put off at that point. Several of them whined their way through the (short and simple) orienteering couse, and I got them through it as fast as possible, just to be done with them. Thank goodness, the second group actually enjoyed the process, and we laughed and joked through the entire course.
Next, it was off to the waterfront for canoeing. Usually, this is very well-attended, but this year, the third-year girls were taken to go tubing at an adjoining lake, and that made the canoeing lose a lot of its luster. In previous years, I've had six or seven canoes in the water at a time. This year, three sufficed.. I finally got to play in the water, at least, as I helped the girls get in and out of the canoes and watched to make sure they didn't get too far away. After two enjoyable hours, it was time to head back to camp, so I put away the three canoes and made sure everything was cleaned up before heading back.
Dinner was short, as I needed to help tear down everything from the Renaissance Faire and get it stowed away. Frankly, I don't really remember the rest of teh day, which is just as well. I was essentially shoved off to bed at 10PM by Gale, which figured out that I had reached the end of my tether. After a few blissful minutes of music, I was long gone, but not before fixing the alarm so it would wake me at a much more proper 7AM.
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