Part of the deal of staying at Camp Critter is trade labour. We (Steve and I) trade our labour for things like food, hot showers, laundry facility, electricity, water and Internet. In exchange our keepers provide us with a “to do” list of various chores related to farm work. Last year there was only one item on the list (the keepers claimed one of the dogs ate the list) which was to get the remaining bales of hay off the field and into the barn. We did do other things that weren’t technically on the list but are all part of running a small livestock farm such as hide out among the sheep, be a play toy for the newest Pyre puppy, try to reassemble a deer skeleton with 8 dogs around and round up wayward cattle.

This year our keepers put the list where the dogs couldn’t get it so there is more than one item on the list. Sadly the weather here in Ontario has not been conducive to bringing in the hay. There hasn’t been 3 straight days without rain so cutting, raking, drying and baling have not been possible and many farmers have lost entire fields because they cut one day and it pours for the next 3 days. Bringing in the hay from one of the fields is numero uno on the to do list but alas……the weather. Today it will rain.

Hey, maybe today would be a good day to go off to the field and pretend to be a lamb or become one with the flock of Pyres or maybe it would be a great day to pretend to be a fish and just flop about. Ah the beauty of being on holiday……what to do when it rains.

Well we’ve finally arrived at Camp Critter and the trip was almost a typical road trip. We laughed tons, sang off key as much as possible, had a few hmmm sort of minutes and crept along for 700 kms at 80 kph for the towing break in period for our truck. We unfortunately came up a little bit short of where we would have liked to have gotten to on Thursday so we began our quest for a local campground for a short night of sleep.

Normally when we stay overnight in the city where we stopped we stay at Wal*Mart, not because we’re cheap or because we think an overnight at Wal*Mart IS camping but you have to appreciate why we do it. We arrived at a very large campground around 9ish only to get shuffled into an overflow lot at the “you’re joking right” fee of $23 for absolutely nothing. For $23 we did not get a water hook up, a level parking pad or electricity. Nope for $23 we have to drive down a very step hill and try to fit over 40 feet of trailer and truck onto a site that was on 35 feet long. Normally this isn’t that big of a deal except we really needed that extra 5 feet to keep our rig out of the river once the firetrucks left. Oh ya, there was a fire on one of the nearby Islands and the fire crew were using the overflow sites as their staging area for their equipment.

We went back to the gatehouse to point out the fact that our equipment will not fit on the site they gave us and we wouldn’t mind staying in the parking lot, if that was OK with them. Who knew that staying in the parking lot would cost us $23. I guess if we had demanded all or some of our money back they may have given it to us but all we wanted to do was get something to eat and get off the road for the night.

Think about it…….do you really want a tired driver out on the road in a 2000 lb truck with 7500 lbs in tow? No I didn’t think so, it’s just not safe. Why do people camp at Wal*Mart you ask? First off only rednecks actually “camp” at Wal*Mart, the rest of the folks you see there overnighting are simply folks who are tired and need to get off the road for some rest without being robbed by a campground for fees and no services. We aren’t cheap freaks trying to rip off the local campgrounds, we’re just folks who are tired of being ripped off by the local campgrounds.

We would rather support the local campgrounds by giving them money for a site for the night but $23 for nothing, well that’s just loonie, 23 of them. The one benefit we recieved while staying at the campground was the 6 am wake up we got when the street cleaning machine began his morning route.

As much as that is a real catchy phrase it’s also a philosophy that I live my life by. For so many people “living in the moment” is a foreign concept, an unachievable goal, something that just can’t be done given the life we live in the times we are living it. But is it really, unachievable? It doesn’t require any super powers or even conscious effort. All it requires is making the choice to do it.

Although there have been and will probably be countless other moments just like this one where I’ll be sitting on the couch blogging there will never again be this moment. Never again will this moment be exactly the same, it will be very similar but not exactly the same. Right at this moment I have way too many things on my mind that have to get done by Wednesday night. I can still smell work, either it’s on my skin or it’s stuck deep inside my sinuses. This is only the 3rd time today that I have not been on my feet and my not so young body is keenly aware of it’s age. Right now is right now and as similar as tomorrow will be it still will be tomorrow.

How can you live in the moment you ask? First you have to appreciate that this moment will never come again. There will be eerily similar moments like this one but something will be different. Tomorrow, as much as it will look like today, will be different. It may only be slight little nuances like the time, the weather, the sounds from outside but it won’t be this moment.

Every moment of every day has it’s unique signature that will separate it from all the other moments of our life. The trick is to learn to appreciate that nothing is every exactly the same. This philosophy helps me get through days like today where it looks just like yesterday and yet…………….not quite. Living in the moment, grabbing onto the nuances that make it different is what makes up a lifetime of freshness. As old as things can get there will always be something new if we just look for it and live in it creating a moment. Life itself will get old whether we like it or not so why not embrace that little nuance that made it different from the last moment just like it? Too many people fix their eyes and their lives on tomorrow but is there a really going to be a tomorrow? How sad would it be if their wasn’t one and we missed today?

So there I was at work today having myself an OK kind of day, doing my stuff, staying out of trouble and severely limiting my interactions with the customers when………

I was teasing a woman who is very used to seeing me about her charging her lunch to her department’s account. She had every intention of paying for her lunch until she came up short by about $6.00, I offered to wait for her to get more money and she said “hum, actually, just put it on _________’s tab and I’ll pay it later”. Now let me be perfectly clear, I honestly don’t care who pays for whose lunch, I am painfully aware most account charges comes out of the pockets of the tax payers from that department’s operating costs and still I don’t care. So the woman and I carried on teasing each other about who was going to pay for her lunch when another customer stepped in behind her. He jokingly said that he would like to put his lunch on the woman’s account and the 3 of us sort of smiled about it.

I looked at the woman and said that one day I would be asking her for some I.D. as proof that she actually worked in that particular Ministers office because I thought she was pulling a fast one. She laughed, I laughed and the man behind her scowled at me. “Don’t you know who I am” was how this spiralled to “no, and I don’t care either”.

Apparently the man is a Minister of a Provincial Department. OH, WELL EX CUSE MEEEE!!! Wait a minute here, our Premier was just here and he didn’t act all snotty so what is your problem. The only reason I know who our Premier is is due to his ontourage of papparatzi who insist on making him front page news on a regular basis. As far as the rest of the departmental minsters are concerned, well I don’t even know their names never mind what they look like.

I wonder what makes a person think that what they do for a living makes them somehow more important than the next person. Why in the world would I be impressed by a job title? A bunch of years ago I met each and every Premier in Canada as well as the Prime Minister and the only person who impressed me was liaison for Ralph Kline’s office simply because they were real. “John” got the Minister’s version of our conversation via telephone and all he said to me was “I wish I had been there to hear what you said”.

Maybe tomorrow I can totally P.O. someone of higher importance and get my ass fired so I can start my holidays sooner. The next time someone sneers at me the phrase “don’t you know who I am” I will try harder to resist offering to help them look for their I.D. Apparently that was not what they meant by the question, who knew!

“When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover that they are not it”–Bernard Bailey–

This is truly the final chapter from the continuing tales of the lunch room lady. After 5 months of waffling back and forth between leaving and staying at my job I have decided to not go back. It didn’t take me the entire 5 months to make my decision but it did take me that long to make sure it was the right decision for the right reasons. The decision by our head office to close our main cafeteria was certainly a factor but it wasn’t the only factor, more like the final missing piece of the puzzle. Although the closing at the Sullivan has no direct effect on my employment it will effect the work environment where I belong.

We get all our baked goods, meats and fresh produce from the Sullivan, which means more than 80% of our edible stock is now going to have to come from somewhere else, exactly where, I do not know. What I do know is that every item that we sell is readily available within a 5 minute walk of our shop and people will be less willing to buy from us what they can buy elsewhere. Loyalty is something that needs to be nurtured in a coffee shop and sadly Twist and Spin’s attitude nurtures only hostility and she is becoming more hostile by the day given the news from the Sullivan.

So for the next 4 days I will be down at the Sullivan filling in for someone while they take their final holiday from our employer then at 3:00 Thursday I too will take that extended holiday. I’m not sure how to feel about their closure other than sad. The two women who have been there for years and have threatened almost daily that they will leave if things don’t change have had their bluff called in the cruelest of ways, this is no bluff. I actually considered last week calling them and telling them that I wouldn’t be covering for the holiday shifts simply because I am fed up. But what would that accomplish other than to compromise my integrity and just to stick it to our head office is not worth it.

I won’t be going back to my own shop in October because all my Grace and the extra Grace that has been poured into me has finally run dry. I can’t keep going back to a place where there is constant comparison of my boss and I and my boss comes out on the short end. She is who she is and I am who I am, I don’t see much changing there without acknowledging that change is needed. My time spent covering for my boss has taught me a lot about myself and how people see me, I will leave there richly blessed and at peace knowing that I did what I was sent there to do.

I have a hope of where I’ll pop up next but it’s not my plan and much like how I landed this job in the first place I am positive that I will reappear exactly where I need to.

Every exit is an entry somewhere–Tom Stoppard–