I had the kids this weekend for basically five days, starting Thursday and going through Monday afternoon because they had a school holiday and I was actually off this time. The past few times they’ve had a longer break I’ve been in PD, something my school district decided was a good use of teacher time rather than a fucking day off. Thursday I picked up the boy since he was the only one in town. My daughter was off at Pine Cove with her 5th grade class as some kind of camping experience for the kids. Its pretty interesting that they would choose Pine Cove given my history with that place.

In between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college I spent a summer working as a cook out there with my friend Jon. Jon and I had a weird history where while he was off at college in Tennessee, I met his much younger girlfriend through church and we started hanging out. One thing led to another and I was in the position of essentially being a surrogate boyfriend while he was away at school. Things were pretty complicated anyway, I had just moved to town and didn’t know him at all but I did know her. My brother and I would go hang out with her at her place, her mom was older and her sister was also older and didn’t live at home anymore so we had a whole wing of the house to ourselves. We would sit in her computer room with my brother dorking around on the computer and fool around a little bit, we were both “good Christian kids” and I was the worship leader so there wasn’t anything serious happening but it was enough for me to feel bad about it. When her boyfriend came back into town for the Thanksgiving break this girl and I were infatuated with each other and I gave her an ultimatum: she had to choose one of us because I didn’t want to be anyone’s surrogate anything. Well…she chose him. I was devastated. Almost immediately, like New Year’s Eve, I started dating one of her good friends and a couple of weeks after that she came back to me and said she made a mistake. I was not receptive to that at all because of how hurt I was through the whole thing.

Flash forward to the following summer when I started hanging out with her now ex-boyfriend and working at Pine Cove. I was still the worship leader only I was transitioning into the college group and leading things for them too. Jon was a Jeep guy, knew everything there was to know about everything and liked people to know it. We would tear around town and into the hills in his Jeep, slaloming down hills in the dark because he “really knew this one like the back of his hand” all over the Pine Cove properties. I was working in a bagel shop on weekends and in the PC kitchens during the week making $10/hr. which was much more than the counselors were making. I had a camp name, Frenchy, because I wore a golfer’s hat and had the beginnings of a goatee that I guess made me look French, at least to the older Asian camp maintenance guy. We weren’t allowed to be seen by the campers because we didn’t fit the Abercrombie Jesus look that the camp was going for with their employees and it was pretty bizarre to have to sneak in and out of camp each day to cook/reheat food for the hundreds of campers that came through each week. When I left I swore I would never go back.

My daughter had a great time. She did archery, zip lines, rode horses and told scary stories at night with her friends. I mentioned to her that I worked there a while ago and she was pretty amazed. The camp they were at with school wasn’t religious, it was just a getaway weekend and nothing weird happened.

Saturday we timed a race in Plano and as I was driving down with the kids I realized that the start/finish was right near the place we lived for about 9 months before I couldn’t handle being isolated from everyone that I knew. I told my daughter that we used to live nearby and that I took care of her for two and half years as a stay at home parent. She of course asked where her mother was at that time and the answer was just, “working.” And she was. Anyway, another story for another day.

I’ve got a race this weekend at Spider Mountain, looking to do 40 miles or 12 hours, whichever comes first. It’ll be a grind but I need to bang this one out since Screaming Monkey is about 5 weeks away. I’ll go more into training stuff here soon but it is safe to say that I’m trying to go in uninjured and fresh. I’ve been climbing/working out/running consistently and pushing when I can, we shall see how that goes.