Camp cooking and yearbooks

This is what is left of the kitchen after the cabinets and cooking island were removed.  The rugs are gone now as well, shaken, vacuumed and put away.  We are waiting for the sheetrock, plumbing, and electrical people to start.  Removal of the cabinets was a long process.  I worked with the handyman who helps out around here, and we got them off the wall, labeled each door and cabinet, and put them onto a truck to be shipped to a lady who is buying them.  It was a lot of work!

The adventure of camp cooking has begun.  The first night we had Chinese takeout.  Last night, we grilled vegetables and salmon on the outdoor gas grill.  Thankfully, we still have the refrigerator and the freezer as well as a microwave. And we actually enjoying this interlude of simple cooking.  

The cold that I had is gone. Must have been a mild one, thankfully.  Between feeling under the weather and doing the demolition work here, I haven't been to the boat in a few days.  So I'm going to check up on things there and maybe we will spend the night at the marina.  I don't think that the workmen will start until Monday at the earliest. 

I did spend a few hours yesterday morning with a fellow I sponsor.  It was good to get out of the house and take a drive to meet up with him.  He is so grateful to have someone to share his story with, and I'm grateful that he is so willing to do the work in recovery.  He is going to the convention this winter and wants to help me with one of the workshops that our district is doing. I know that I'll need his help.  I need to get through this remodeling before I can give much thought to anything else. 

Last night, I stayed up late reading what people had written in my high school year books.  I went through the writings from Sophomore through Senior year.  Aside from the usual stuff about having a good summer,  I was struck by how many people who wrote what a great friend I had been and how much I helped them with their studies.  Some wrote that I had the best sense of humor. Teachers wrote that I would be a good scientist one day.  I frankly don't remember much that was good from those days, but obviously others had a different take.  Perhaps my memories are just selective or skewed,  and I have chosen to focus on the pain and not the joy or the friendship.  I honestly don't know what is real or not from back then.  But I am warmed by the idea that so many did like me and call me friend. 

And the importance that writing in a year book took on was obvious.  There were reserved pages and lots of angst poured out on those pages.  I thought that this captured that by-gone era pretty well. It's from an article in New Yorker magazine:

"When you wrote in someone’s yearbook, you only had one shot. The message could be clever or sappy or crass, but you couldn’t spend all day on it and you couldn’t revise. As a teen-ager, I was obsessed with this idea—the yearbook-signing as a work of art. I knew what I didn’t like: vagaries (“we had some fun times”); empty promises (“let’s hang out this summer”); clichés (“stay sweet”). I prepared a mental list of friends and acquaintances, and drafted elaborate messages in my head. Just what I was after with all of this is hard to say. Did I think of myself as a writer? As a shy kid, I may have hoped that people who didn’t seem to notice me in real life would find me charming on the page.

These days I don’t thumb through my old yearbooks very often. The pages themselves seem to smell of adolescent angst, and trips down memory lane, while sometimes pleasant, are often embarrassing. But then again, isn’t that what yearbooks are all about? They’re time capsules, not live feeds. The foolish things that we wore, loved, wrote, and worried over are all there, preserved for us to cringe over later. We can’t edit them out, or bury them in a flurry of tweets."