Upon returning to the camp after our Spring Break, I was once again overwhelmed and consumed with preparing worksheets, teaching, grading, and the many other school activities. Before Spring Break the camp had begun constructing a store, which upon our return, had been completed, so we could then actually purchase some food items, unfortunately, so could my students, and they filled themselves with sugar fueled energy from candy and pop.
The camp’s maintenance men did not have a stellar reputation for their work. They had once "fixed" a leak in a sewage pipe by wrapping the pipe with duct tape--which of course didn't hold, causing a flow of sewage across the floor in a bunkhouse.
One of the carpenters bragged to me about when he was putting plywood skirting around the base of a mobile home, he saved himself a lot of time by just putting in enough nails to hold the plywood to the two-by-four supports, then instead of driving in more nails to adequately secure the plywood to the supports, he just drew little dots on the plywood with a pencil, that looked like the heads of additional nails.
The camp maintenance crew did come through for us though, and got the small stove in the old travel trailer that was our home, functional. Although we still ate our meals in the camp cook house, getting the teacherage stove fixed did enabled my wife, who was always a skilled cook, to renew her culinary skills.
However, the refrigerator in our kitchen still didn't work, but fortunately, we could now buy things "fresh" (not really an accurate word in describing the produce) from the newly completed camp store and we just stored left overs and items needing to be kept cool, in the snow on our roof. This, naturally, provided a motivation to a few of my mischievous students, to scheme about to swiping our juice off of the roof.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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