I Will Stop Talking About Camping Any Minute Now

We are going to our friends' cottage for Labour Day weekend, which is obviously wonderful, but it's also giving me a tiny bit of camping PTSD. For most of the weekend it will be camping numbers of people, with one bathroom, and we're bringing the tent, although I might not end up sleeping in it - it's just getting so confusing trying to Tetris all the sleepers into a viable arrangement that we're bringing it just in case.

I have an unreasonable need to wash my hands and face several times a day. I mean sure, good hand hygiene is important, and my skin is oily so face washing needs to happen too, but there is a disturbing element of compulsion. I can touch something that I anticipate being oily and find that it is not oily, and still have to wash my hands. At bar night last week Collette didn't finish her chicken wings so she offered them to the table and three people each took one, but there were no wet naps left so I found one in my purse to offer them and none of them used it! They ate a chicken wing and just sat there with chicken wing hands for the rest of the night!

Anyway, at camp I have a basin at the end of the picnic table with water that I change several times a day, plus a big water jug with a spigot and liquid soap so I can wash my hands and face the same stupid number of times a day I do at home. Before I get in the tent to sleep, I basically do a comprehensive sponge bath before changing into my pajamas (it's generally two a.m. and very dark, so I am not traumatizing the campground), but I have to just be in denial about the fact that I have feet and lower shins for the entire time, because there is just no way for your feet to be clean unless you're actively in the water. 

Earlier this year Matt made some noises, as group members sometimes do, about finding a way for us all to do something together in the summer that doesn't involve quite so much heavy labour. Collette told him to go ahead and organize it and she would be in. A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine posted some gorgeous pictures from a rental cottage in Quebec where they saw whales and it looked beautiful. I did a bit of investigating and at bar night told people that we could rent a cottage there that slept ten for a few days for not that much more than camping ends of costing. People were very interested, and then we talked about it some more and it seems to have ended up as this being something we could add in to our regular calendar of annual events, which includes a Robbie Burns dinner in January, a Guys Cook Valentine's Day dinner in February, some kind of St Patrick's Day party in March, birthday barbecues in April and June, brisket at Tony's for Canada Day in July, A Halloween party in October, Christmas and New Year's parties in December, AND CAMPING. *weeps* 

There is running water at the cottage, but twenty people presents a not inconsiderable threat to the septic system, so .... *packs basin, water jug and wipes*

It was Tony's birthday earlier in August, but we were all recovering from camping still, so we celebrated this past weekend by confirming what was a pretty solid suspicion that we are, as a group, remarkably accomplished at drinking cocktails on tiki boats and really really bad at solving escape rooms.

Birthday boy!

Espresso martinis, which were supposed to help them focus for the escape room.
They did not. 

In our defense, the more we talk about it the more we think the escape room was really badly designed, and even if we had tried it before all the drinking on the tiki boat we probably wouldn't have been successful in escaping. One crucial difficulty was that there were almost a dozen combination locks that had to be solved to open drawers or doors that contained clues. We actually managed to figure out many of the combinations, but we were a group of fifty-somethings, and no one could see any of the fucking numbers. We weren't allowed to have our phones, which, fair enough, but we told the perky twenty-somethings running the place that they needed to provide flashlights. But I might just be bitter because there was a cabinet we never got open that apparently had six heads in it, and that would have been cool.

At the end of the night we went back to Tony's because why wouldn't he want to end his birthday night making complicated and labour-intensive drinks for all your friends? 

Also, we took drugs. 

I was back in the library starting a couple of weeks ago. Everything is still quiet and neat, awaiting the onslaught. There are new autism classes at my Wednesday school, and they are both in my library time slot, which I am happy about because I used to have the autism unit at the very first school I worked in, and I really enjoyed working on the simple, concrete goals like getting each child to say their name and learn the procedure for borrowing books. There was one little girl who would only cry every time she approached the desk at the beginning of the year and by the end she would say "Emily!" happily when I asked her name, and it was unspeakably gratifying. This made up for the fact that there were two blonde teachers with that class who were almost identical and one really liked me and one seemed to dislike me strongly and I was extremely confused until I figured out they weren't the same person.