Day #27

Despite last night’s late bedtime, I managed to start today off on a particularly cheerful note. I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think that I’m slipping nicely into the role of being the ‘morning person’ of the house. It’s probably one of the things that irritates my housemates the most about me. I am consistently the first one up, and have settled nicely into my morning porridge and a good book by the time they stir themselves from their slumbers. It puts me in a good place at the start of the day and for some reason makes me feel like I have already accomplished something. I suppose part of this sense of accomplishment comes from the fact that I end up doing the dishes from the night before while I wait for my water to boil…

Anyway, this morning I had a wonderful conversation with my friend Holly at the Northern Store. Some of our snack order seems to have been lost in transit, so we’re working to try and figure that out. I’m beginning to realize that ‘lost in transit’ is a rather frequent occurrence when one is receiving food via airplane delivery. Such is life…

The morning of camp was rather slow. Most kids stayed home today as many were up late at the Pow Wow last night. Our 4-6  numbers were again really low (2 kids) so we made up some posters and went around promoting the camp. We are also officially starting our walking school bus tomorrow morning. We’ll see how it goes…

In the afternoon we finally made a concrete decision to go ahead with our scavenger hunt. Unfortunately we had a small number of kids in the afternoon as well, but the kids that were there really loved the hunt. We’re hoping that these kids will help us to draw back the ones that we may have lost over the last week or so. In addition to the scavenger hunt, we took a big chance with our 10 & 11 year olds. In general these kids are even more averse to speaking in public then what I’m used to seeing. To that end we have not attempted too many drama activities. With this week’s activity, we are going to do our level best to draw them out of their shells. The challenge for this week is to create an entry for the Fort Hope Video Awards. We have obtained the use of a video camera from the local cable office, and are set to film. The only catch is that we are relying on the kids to write scripts. It took a lot of hard work on my part to get our main group of boys interested in this idea, but by the end of the planning session we had deviated from the planned ‘news broadcast’ toward a new concept of blood, zombies, vampires and mad scientists. The storyline will loosely follow something like this:

– 2 guys get locked in the basement of the school portable and can’t escape, they have run out of food and water

– the only way of escape is up the stairs past the mad scientist and his zombie

– luckily the two guys are friends with a vegetarian vampire named ‘Collins’ who saves humans

– Collins flies through the walls of the portable and offers to help the guys escape

What happens next will be decided tomorrow…Whatever it takes to get them writing!

At the end of the day I was still actually in a pretty decent mood. I had drained a diet Coke at lunch, so I was probably still feeling the caffeine high. So with my caffeine induced optimism I decided to take a great risk…I decided that, due to my full evening schedule, I would go for a before dinner run. This meant that I would, for the first time, miss the household dinner! It was a historic event let me tell you, and I really had to gauge the reaction to my plan before I stepped out the door. As much as I love our ‘everyone eats at once’ meals, it was kind of nice to break the pattern for one night and have control over my own food! We did end up eating the same thing (Spaghetti), but nevertheless, I still felt a sense of freedom when cooking my own pasta!

After dinner I went on a painfully expensive grocery run to Corny’s and picked up bread for the three of us (there was some suggestion that we would replace bread with bannock, but I quickly cut off this line of thinking. Nothing against bannock, because it is quite delicious, but it has zero nutritional value, and really, are we that cheap that we can’t even bring ourselves to buy bread? It’s the principle of the thing…) and my weekly supply of fruit. I managed to find two nice looking oranges (if they are actually nice inside I will have struck gold), 3 great looking apples (1 of which I can say tasted just as good as it looked) and four cans of fruit. This amount of food set me back about $30…I’m pretty sure that I heard my debit card cry out as it was being swiped through the machine!

I then spent the rest of my evening ‘coming to you live from the Fort Hope radio studio, on 100.0 FM Fort Hope radio’. It was a wonderful evening of me talking, and no one interrupting! Just kidding…well kind of…I played some good tunes, gave Cofield it’s Fort Hope debut (I played Wasted) and did my best to pump up camp without boring people to tears.I also avoided making any of those stupid radio host jokes that you here on half-witted morning radio shows across Canadian cities. In general I would say that the only truly articulate radio hosts are found on CBC. I know that there are some exceptions to this sweeping generalization, but not many…(I am currently downloading ‘Q’ podcasts…they are downloading very slowly…)

Anyway, that’s about it for me for tonight, so I shall bid you adieu and wish you well in whatever Tuesday brings!

–Be kind to each other and don’t fall down…