I am still not sure how this happened. When my wife and I were in college, we got roped into being counselors for a weekend youth retreat. It went like this.
Staff: “Hey, do you guys want to go up to the camp for the weekend?”
Us: “I don’t know, will there be free food?” (which is still a main criteria for me)
Staff: “Yeah, there is a big youth get together.”
Us: “OK”
Then when we got there.
Staff: “Oh, by the way, pick one of these cabins full of smelly teenagers. You’re in charge of them for several days.”
Us: “Huh??? There had better be free food.”
I was not happy. The second night that we were there, we went to the cafeteria for dinner, and, if I remember correctly, I was not a pleasure to be around. I grumbled through the meal and when we were done, I grabbed our trays and tossed the leftovers into the trash.
At this time in her life, my adorable future wife had a retainer. When she ate, she would take it out and put it in a napkin next to her plate. Now you may get where this is going. When I threw out the trash that was on those trays, I also threw out her retainer. She was already not happy with me for being grumpy. Now she was really not happy with me. By the time we realized what had happened, they had already changed the bags in the trash cans and thrown the full bags in a pile with a bunch of other full bags (it was like the opening scenes of Wall-E). We did the only thing we could do. We dove into those bags and started sorting. Dental stuff is expensive. After about half an hour and several full bags of trash, we still hadn’t found anything. I was getting desperate, because this was my fault. We prayed. Not a normal, “Hey God, it would be nice if you could help us find this thing.” No, we we said, “God, please help us find this thing within the next ten minutes.” The very next bag that we looked in, there it was. We gave it a bleach bath and that thing was good as almost new.
The last night of that youth retreat, it snowed. There was a big snowball fight in the common area of the camp. The one thing I remember about that snowball fight was hitting a girl square in the face by accident, and then trying to blend in quickly with everyone else so she wouldn’t figure out who threw it.
The next day we went home. I never trusted the staff again.
LINKS
- It looks like our friends north of the demilitarized zone have found the cures for MERS, ebola, and AIDS.
- The Travel Channel’s list of the top ten Caribbean beaches. I’ve only been to two. Time to get cracking.
- The Simpsons predicted the Cardinals scandal years ago. Here is the proof.
- We took the kids to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. (One item off of this summer’s attainable bucket list.) This was my first time to Ellis Island, and it was cool to stand somewhere that was part of the “largest mass human migration in the history of the world.”
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