Halfway There

Today marks the halfway point of our work here.  Three weeks total, halfway through the second week.  I always get to a point like this and it seems like our time here is just flying by.  On the other hand, looking through past journal entries, it seems like we’ve been on the road forever.  The first day here seems like ages ago.  And that was after nearly three weeks on the road already.

Today it was more of the same.  Deb did a lot of touch up painting, and I attacked the shower again.  It took several more hours of pounding, with each shard being a small hard-won victory.  By noon I had it down to a small corner, and then by about 2pm the last shard went flying.

The lesson from all this: never use Bondo to fix a shower.  This will be your “Con” (consequence).   Or somebody’s Con.  Like mine?

Tomorrow I get to sand the surface down and prepare it for reglazing.  I almost hate to ask but I have to: since we’re reglazing the floor of the shower, do we need to do the entire shower?  A reglazed floor will make the rest of the shower look bad.  But that’s a question for tomorrow.  We serve at the pleasure of our host and will do whatever he tells us to as long as it isn’t immoral or illegal.  Even work that looks and feels like a Con.

We’ve enjoyed lunches served by the ranch and shared with the staff and the boys.  And we can observe the personality of each of the boys, from the quiet, sullen looking one to the one bouncing off the walls.  And we’ve observed some of the discipline that goes on.  One young man has been on Con almost continually and I learned another term: NFT, which stands for No Free Time.    He has been on NFT for a while.  We’ve seen him sawing logs by the door to the lunch room when we came in for the last few days.  He spends half his lunch hour sawing logs in half as a Con.  Another youngster didn’t scoot his chair in when he left the table, so he had to scoot his chair in and out five times before sitting down again.

I tried to meet the quiet sullen young man on his terms at lunch.  I observed out loud that he was a man of few words and that I also was a man of few words.  I told him, “I have to conserve what few words that I have, so I don’t use them all up before the end of the day.”  The staff member sitting next to me laughed, but he just grunted.  Must be he has already used his up.  Not sure how to get through to that one.  Others will talk freely about hunting, about cars, about video games, we just have to figure out how to get them started.  It’s not hard with some of them.