Game Night

Looking back on the day I am realizing I should have taken more pictures.  For most of the day, I was so busy trying to get stuff done that I didn’t think to take pictures.

Started out the day taking down a tree limb that was blocking one of the lights on the basketball court.  Since the lift was already parked there, this would be a quick job.  I served as the ground crew while Denny did the deed and soon the limb was down.

We then moved on to the girls’ dormitory buildings.  Very few of the lights over the outside doors worked.  Instead of testing each one of them, we just replaced them all with LED fixtures. Most of them were the older compact fluorescent fixtures, and just the replacement bulbs are more expensive than an entire new LED fixture.  The local Ace hardware store has been very good to this camp and often supplies materials at a substantial discount, including lots of lights.

The women were cleaning inside these buildings during this time and we were warned to keep our grubby feet out of the buildings.  So when we needed to turn the breaker off for a light, we would just take the connections apart and touch the wires together, tripping the breaker.  This worked well until the last fixture, where the resulting spark was considerably hotter, the bang was deafening, and it vaporized a section of the wire.  I tried this three times with the same result and I finally had to enter the building to flip the breaker.  I took my shoes off to keep the floor clean.

When attempting to move the lift, I discovered that the controls in the platform no longer worked.  The lift was stuck in front of the last door of the girls’ dormitories, unable to move.  Fortunately, the boom was in the lowered position, and I was able to just jump out of the basket onto the ground. I removed the panel in the basket and poked around the rat’s nest of wires for a while before giving up, abandoning the lift where it was, and moving on to the next project.

Next task was to replace a door in the storage room behind the kitchen.  The camp received several doors that were donated from a church remodel, and some of the other guys replaced a door in the chapel that sustained damage from the last hurricane, and Denny and I started replacing the storage room door.  As usual things don’t quite fit.  We had to adjust the door with a belt sander to make it fit in the frame. We got the door hung but ran out of time to get the hardware on and the fitment just right so we screwed the door shut.  The rest will be finished on Monday.  It’s quittin’ time.

Deb made a rice chicken dish for dinner.  Since we don’t have an oven in the RV, she used our newly acquired Omnia stovetop oven.  The lack of an oven means that meals usually are prepared on a skillet or in the microwave, which really limits the choices. The Omnia solves that to some extent with an oven-like pan.  It took a little dialing in--she toasted some dollar-store croissants a bit too much yesterday, but today’s fare was done just right and it was delicious.

After dinner, as it was starting to get dark, we heard the owls hooting.  I heard them yesterday and actually spotted one at the top of a tree, so today we grabbed the camera and went looking for it.  We actually saw two of them in the same tree, a couple of Great Horned owls looking at us with their big eyes from far above us.  It was really cool to see.

Thursday is game night and we gathered in the pavilion for some games.  We played Five Crowns.  Fun game, but a crowd of 13 people is probably a bit much for Five Crowns.   One game lasted just over three hours. Lots of conversation and laughs, so it was a good night for some fun and fellowship, but Five Crowns is best played with smaller groups.