Making a little time for the funny

Work has officially and totally kicked my butt. My legs and feet (and hips and back and arms and neck and toes) hurt like I have been working in a coal mine for decades. I think most of that is due to the fact that I managed to go 8 years with little more than flip-flops for my every day footwear. Shoes is heavy!

Everything is going as smoothly as I hoped (and much more smoothly than I expected.) The students are getting used to me and I am quickly hitting my stride and getting back into the game. We have had no major problems. Yet. I am sure things will settle in and trouble will pop up. But the tone for any decent class is set early in the year and I think that we have things going pretty well for now.

This past Friday the AtHomeFam hit the road right after work. We headed up to a summer camp where I worked and The Boss Lady volunteered while we were in college. This was a weekend dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of the opening of Camp John Marc, a camp for chronically ill and severely physically disabled kids. The weekend was great fun.

Those of us who were lucky enough to have been on camp staff for the first couple of years haven't had the chance to spend much time together since we left. 18 years is a long time to go without seeing some of your closest friends. But as soon as we got together the laughs and smiles came easily and quickly.

I am now convinced that it is possible to pull a muscle from laughing too hard!

We told stories and we swapped a few lies. We shared a lot of hugs, a few tears and we poured over old photos. And each of us got to introduce our own families to the other crew members.

I planned to pull out all of my old camp treasures, from t-shirts to arts and crafts projects, so that I could show them off again. Last week was so busy at work that I didn't get that done. Sitting around, checking out all of the treasures that the others had dug up made me really wish I had taken the time to haul my own things out of storage.

And finally, in one of those "I must really be getting older AND wiser" type moments, Kath and I, the first two people to ever make a camp golf cart fly - and subsequently the first two to ever endure a LIFETIME camp vehicle driving ban, found an unattended John Deere Gator. With the keys sitting in it!

The two of us laughed like crazy about how those keys must have been a divine sign that our driving privileges have been miraculously restored after 19 years. And we laughed more about the look the camp director would have on his face if we were to drive that Gator around camp. Then we decided that it looked like a lot of hassle to climb up on that big ol' thing. And besides, neither of us were totally sure that WE would survive making that thing fly, much less having to suffer the embarrassment of losing our driving privileges for all eternity twice in the same lifetime.

So we walked across camp, laughing the whole way. Just like old times.