Lunchlady Doris

It's Sunday again and I'm headed back to camp.

Oh my, camp is brutal. And the first week, inchallah, wasn't like things to come.

Essentially, I was hired to oversee the girls' leaders, who are kids age 17-23 acting as counselors. They are a great group of people.

There are four of us in these supervisory positions, and none of us have been performing the jobs for which we were hired -- at least yet.

My circumstance is basically I wound up being Lunchlady Doris from the Simpsons. What happened was the really awesome kitchen lady, Pocahontas, had two people who were supposed to work for her. One is Scooby, who is awesome but she can't get there until 9 a.m., which is after the 8 a.m. breakfast, for which you need to prepare at 7 a.m.

The other, who is nameless to me, got bad information from the Y: she thought she was making $9 an *hour,* as opposed to the $33 a *day* she's making. So she left, and I stepped in. And was essentially on my feet for 13 hours a day. Non-stop.

Now, I like the rush of it and getting to see all the kids, which includes the boys and day camp kids. But I missed bonding with the girls themselves. I had hoped to go canoeing or horseback riding and stuff like that.

So what I've been doing is spending the day in the kitchen and then joining the evening activity, then assisting Lilo in taking her littlest camper for night meds, then heading off to the two girls' cabins to have devotions and talks then.

Basically, I get up at 6:30 and then don't return to my own roach-infested cabin until 10:30 p.m. Then I try to do laundry, read, decompress, bathe and talk to the two girl leaders who are working with day camps this past week. I'm there to support them, so I need to be available to listen to them.

So basically I'm exhausted by about Tuesday. Fortunately, in the kitchen, there are few of the flying bugs and I didn't get stung or bitten too much this past week. There was also AC, at least after Monday. It, like the ice machine, was broken then.

I missed Friday because I went out to Amarillo for a job interview. The people out there were really, really nice but I have no idea when I will hear about the job.

The American Quarter Horse Association is headquartered out there, right next to the little hotel I stayed at (you cannot get from Tallahassee to Amarillo and back in one day). I tried to get Wendy something but the store closed at 5 p.m. and I missed by 10 minutes.

Flights went fine. I hadn't been to the Tallahassee airport since September of 2006.

I managed to do what's next to impossible: I flew out of Tally and back and didn't pass through Atlanta! I flew Delta/NW on the way out and went to Memphis and took American back and went through Dallas.

On the AMA-DFW flight, I was in the very last seat next to a 20-year-old soldier heading back to Ft. Campbell and then Afghanistan. He was going through a rough time but was just so sweet. I had a lot of fun talking to him, and it made sitting in the very back seat of a bumpy plane less scary.