Longest post ever...

Ah Sunday evening. I'd love you so much more, were it not for your proximity to Monday morning.

I was hoping that Jane would have blogged by now, so that I'd only have to tell you about half my weekend, and then link to her blog for the other half. Come on, woman. Where were you on that one?

Ok, I thought I'd blogged about these guys before, and I just spent twenty minutes reading over old blog entries when I thought I might have hung out with them and then blogged about it so that I could spare you all the bother of reading (and me the bother of writing) about them again. But I didn't and I couldn't so I can't and you will. Ok. So, every summer, Stillwood has what's called an 'Advance Team' or 'the A-Team,' if you're rad like we were, and they come up in May and spend two months pulling weeds and tearing down old sheds and boring holes for new belaying posts (and is that ever a funny story, hey man, if I ever run out of things to tell you, I'll bring out that old chestnut. It involves me falling off a stack of tires and accidentally slitting my wrist, true story) and running activities for guest groups and eating way better food than they do during the camp season, and all in all it's pretty awesome. So there's me and three guys, Jon, Mike, and Paul, and since I brought my camera on Friday night but the batteries were dead, you'll just have to make due with this picture from that summer of us at Coneheads (yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!)

and we're up at camp pulling weeds together for hours and digging out stumps from under the new zip line and playing Teach Rachel To Drive (I hit 2 trees and dented the new office building before they gave up) and having all sorts of adventures in our off time. Like the time we watched Tombstone in the hot tub (Tombstone is freakin' two and a half hours long, and by the end we were all lying by the side of the tub and groaning, but refusing to turn it off even though we'd all seen it before) and the time we rigged the harnesses up backwards so that we could 'Superman' off the zip line, and the time we camped out at the Boy Scouts camp and got woken up by a troup of Boy Scouts (whoops), and all those times we tortured that damned cat, just because we hated it so much, and got yelled at by the camp cleaning lady even though by 'tortured' I mean 'chased' and 'occasionally threw in the dumpster,' and Two Towers Tuesday and X-Men 2 Tuesday and that time we found the rifles up in the boat shed, and shot cans off of a pile of branches up at the Top 40, and how our allergies were all so bad, but we all went off our meds for a week to see what would happen and WHO'S GOOD IDEA WAS THAT? and we all had nicknames and would use them on our 2-way radio, and the time we went skydiving (here's us looking particularly badass before our jump)

and I had just broken up with my then-boyfriend the day before, so I hadn't eaten in a good 24 hours because that's what a hearty break-up will do to you, and so when we hit ground after the jump I almost passed out, but you will notice that my jumpsuit is pink, and again, yeeeeeeeeeeah! and also that Mike (white shirt) looks like he should have a pack of cigarettes rolled into his sleeve there. ANYways, there have been many A-Teams before us, and many afterwards, but NONE of them have their own soundtrack (a mix of all the songs that we put on repeat and blasted while we were weeding, as well as clips from the zillions of movies that we watches that we repeated over and over and over all summer), nor do any of them hang out on a semi-annual basis. So. Mike's getting married next weekend, and we figured we needed a good old fashioned hang out before then, and Jon just got a firepit for his back yard, and since our gatherings either involve the Halloween train or cigars and a fire and usually us looking for a good place to have a fire (remind me to tell you about the time we built a fire on a construction site and got chased...maybe) we figured this would be a nice, legal way to hang out and smoke a nice cheroot. So we did. That's about it, sorry if it was anti-climactic after all that build-up. Sometimes you just order your Chinese food and watch a movie, and don't get chased by a bobbing flashlight through the bushes and onto a golf course.

And THEN I went to Jane's cabin on the lake with my lovely writing-ladies, and we had some time set aside for chatting and some time set aside for writing, but everyone else cheated and chatted during their writing time, but I'm the only one who's going to get a big fat F in life if I don't get this paper done. And I'd brought my camera because we have this wee darling camera now and I thought I'd capture our serenity in all it's glory, because the cabin was GORGEOUS and in my mind, cabins on the lake are like this cabin that my family used to go to in the summer sometimes, on Bridge Lake, and it was rustic but Jane's cabin is nicer than any house I ever hope to set foot in. The whole bottom floor is just one big open space and the kitchen is massive and there's this giant coffee table with nine legs, NINE LEGS, people, and there's a secret passageway behind a bookshelf that really only leads to a storage space, but again, A SECRET PASSAGEWAY! Do you understand? RAD! And there's couches and couches and couches and loads of room for sitting and relaxing and it's lovely and neat and pretty, but not in the way where you're afraid to breathe for fear it'll crumble. This place encourages breathing. Anyways, I brought my camera, but all I actually took a picture of was this:

That was the bulletin board up in the room I slept in, and those notes? The ones that say 'To Chad, you are great. Thanks for a fun day.' and 'To Chad, you are a sweet boy. I had fun swimming with you today'? Those are from Reader Radish, who, incidentally, is me. The VeggieTown Values is from my cohort, Detective Dill. My very first summer at camp, seven years ago, I did the VeggieTales Day Camp and Chad, with his saucy eyes and impish smile, was in my group. He'd tell me he had a secret for me, and then when I bent down to hear it, he'd kiss me on the cheek. He told his mom he was going to marry me. He was five years old. He's also Jane's...nephew? Small world. We'd write those notes at the start of every day, before the kids got there, and put them in their mailboxes. Then, at the end of the day, the kids would go to their mailbox to see if they had any mail, and they always did. At five, it never occurs to you that the person you are getting mail from hasn't been out of your sight, except to go to the bathroom, for the entire day. That they would have had to have scrawled the note beforehand, and then just hope that nothing horrible happened to you in swimming, because then what a rotten note. Ah, childhood. When good things just happen to you, and you don't ask why or how.

Chad, I'm glad you had fun that week. I hope you're still going to camp, although I hope you've stopped kissing your counselors on the cheek, since you've got to be at least twelve by now, and your counselors are probably boys. Jane, thanks for a fabulous weekend, for herding us all together, for feeding us and cleaning up after us, for making available your amazing cabin. You have the gift of hospitality like I've never seen. Jon, Mike, and Paul, thanks for trying to teach me to drive, and always letting me have more cinnamon buns than I was entitled to. Mike, I'm sorry I grazed that tree with your car.

Friends, thanks for reading. Longest post ever, over and out.

*whew*