You know how you suddenly have that one weekend literally filled with way too many things to talk about, and you wish you could more easily spread it across other more boring weeks?
Besides going to a baseball game for the first time in over a decade, I have other fun stories to tell. This weekend was our official Nerd Camp; I've been experimenting with various locations and sites, and tried something a little new this year by choosing a site out of cell service, no electricity, and up in the woods by a lake. Before I tell any more, full disclosure, it was a good camping event. Now for the amusing part.
It all began when we were departing. I had tied a couple of gravity chairs to my car's roof luggage rack, and strapped them on with bungees; I'd done it a hundred times, big whoop. But this time, I apparently did something wrong... apparently, I had previously lucked out on getting right every time, and this time, I put the chairs on backwards... meaning they were a little more easy to catch the wind. We hit the freeway and my brother, driving the other car behind us, radioed me that it looked like it was not well secured. I told him I'd pull off at our next exit in like 5 miles and resecure it there. I made it about 4 when I felt a disturbance in the force, looked at my mirror, and saw, to my horror, one of the chairs go flying back, as my brother swerved to avoid it. Like a brave idiot, I pulled off, and began a mad dash backwards to make sure it wasn't going to cause a problem for other drivers. SOMEHOW, it had managed to fly across all 4 lanes of traffic, and landed on the offramp, thankfully leaving some area for the cars exiting there to swerve around. I somehow managed to cross all 4 lanes at 6 PM on a Friday, and got the chair out of the way, crossing another 4 getting back to the car. The chair... was no longer anything even close to resembling a chair... the closest approximation to anything would have been a Picasso painting. Thankfully, we were near a camping goods store (and a dumpster), so that wasn't too out of the way to amend that problem.
When we got to camp at dusk, our site, however beautiful and tucked away, was seriously SWARMING with mosquitoes. I've never seen them so thick. It was a fortunate thing I brought my bug zapper racket. I'm not one much for hunting, I think (never really gave it the old college try, I guess), but I 100% don't mind decimating the mosquito population. It felt so therapeutic, just hearing that thing go zapping nonstop. The next day, we decided to go out on the lake. We got to the waterfront and inflated the tubes just in time for a storm to roll in, and we had to wait it out, briefly. Then, despite me being able to run a projector off of a 12V car battery with an inverter the previous night, it decided not to work the next. So, we had to compromise and use my laptop's screen. But the best part, for me, was being able to go out at night, go walking down the quiet campground roads, and just watch the stars. In fact, I think I caught a glimpse of one of the reported "skyscraper-sized" comets that was reported to arrive this past weekend. And BOY was it BRIGHT!
And when we took down camp, I discovered my stubborn attitude had caused problems. When we setup the tent, one of the stakes just wasn't going anywhere. But it was slowly sinking into something, so I kept inching it further and further into the ground. When we went to retrieve it, not only did we have to pry and pry at it, no- we had to use not one but TWO ratchet straps, tied to two opposite trees above it, to help pull it out- and even THAT didn't fully work, as we still had to do a lot of prying in tandem. I guess it hails back to the good old proverb- how many nerds does it take to remove a tent stake?
I recount these experiences partially because some were fairly entertaining, and also to show perspective. Some of these events were easily seen as "bad luck", while others seemed like a good experience. Think about, if rather than telling about my experience of being able to see the stars in the night sky, and see that passing comet, I went on grieving about how that comet came THAT CLOSE to killing me! (kind of a silly example...) Or, if rather than talk about how fun it was to kill hundreds of mosquitoes, I went on talking about how sappy and dumb it was that those mosquitoes just so happened to be swarming at our site, of all places.
I don't want to just go on to playing naive and saying "as long as you have a good attitude life won't be hard"- that's a pretty far throw from the truth. There are SO many factors than just having a good perspective on things- and that's assuming other factors, such as traumatic events or depression don't play a huge role, which they so often do. So, what am I saying?
Well, I'm not good at phrasing it very well, but I guess, in short, trying to find the good in a bad situation is at least a stone's throw in the right direction. It won't always be the thing to keep you going on your merry way- for example, I'm still upset at myself about how many ways I could've prevented the chair on the freeway scenario. But if I think less on what has already transpired, and think about the fact that, hey- at least that was the lesser of those two chairs, was having problems, and was kind of heavy- and this new one I bought is way easier to transport- well, there's like 5 good things that came of this, already! I'm still sour, sure- but at least I'm not stuck in the puddle I found myself in.
I can't believe August is already here. What happened to the summer full of plans I had? I guess I'd better get to replanning here, pretty fast. Until next week, have a good one!