Chapter 50: Saturday Night

Saturday is supposed to be a fun day. For some reason that never happens; too many chores to do, too much maintenance to catch up on, and far too much cleaning for my taste.

We cleaned the camp.

The women took over and we were simply slave labor at their beck and call while every single tent, camper, stall, and anything else they could think of was thoroughly cleaned. Poor Holder got stuck on washing detail, he spent the day at the wash bin scrubbing things they had us bring to him. It started with all of the clothing, Michelle supervised and helped him. Everything was hung out until the lines were full. I was then told to run more lines, so I did.

We moved everything out of tents and swept them and then moved everything back in. All of the windows were opened and every domicile was allowed to air out.

We brought up a load of gravel from the stream and spread it where we told to keep down the mud around the camp. We scythed back fast growing spring weeds from the edges of the camp and even trimmed a few aggressive tree limbs.

Lunch was a quick meal of pickle sandwiches with fruit and some of our remaining potato chips; we then got back to it.

By 2pm I’d had enough and put my foot down. There were Saturday chores the guys needed to do also, they got their one-time burst out of us and it was time for us guys to move on.

We turned to maintenance, I had both Amos and Holder carefully cleaning the solar panels while I checked and ran the sewage dumping the septic tank into our pit. I then ran some water down the line to pick up odd bits left behind.

I ran maintenance on all the vehicles and filled any fluids that needed topping off; no real leaks so far but that wouldn’t last forever. Full operational checks were run on everything, we even ran maintenance on the dog cart.

I showed Amos and Holder where the fresh water intake was and we cleaned out any debis that had caught in the filters. We checked our bridge for impending problems and walked the creek to spot any looming issues there. That was it, time to do evening chores.

The camp did look much better when we got back although I did see a suspicious pile or two of things that I was quite sure we’d be tasked with handling later on. Somethings just never change forwards or backwards in time.

Supper was almost ready and the night was surprisingly warm portending rain on the horizon for later tonight or tomorrow. I put on a disney movie and we enjoyed BBQ chicken with roasted bok-choi and onions for supper. I guess we were cleaning out the last of our store-bought veggies, better now than letting them go bad.

I brought out ice cream for the second half of the movie, that was a big hit as well. One of the things about store bought ice cream is once you open that container you have to eat it all, trying to save ice cream never really worked. So I picked one of our remaining ice cream flavors at random, it didn’t really matter what flavor it was. I told them it all had to be eaten tonight, naturally it turned out that wasn’t really a problem with the young people around.