This may look like a ghost wearing a lampshade, but it's actually Willow bouncing on the couch, something she does incessantly, giggling all the while.

(Short break while we scramble around trying to find all of the various paperwork and keys for the van so one of the 7 million people who responded within 20 minutes or so to the ad Jen just posted on Craigslist can buy it when he gets here)

I'm tired this week. We've still been staying up too late watching Six Feet Under. I participated in another rehearsal on Saturday, and worked half a day on Sunday, moving shade structures and lugging stuff around. When I got home, Jen went to her friend's birthday party and I hung out with Willow, who stayed up until eleven or so. The weekend passed like a half-seen insect darting past a porchlight.

Today, before we got down to the business of sorting out the summer camp stuff from the outdoor school stuff, the facilities manager took me up to the old Pick estate, which is where our school got it's name. It's been fifty years since the old geologist Vernon Pick occupied it, although I hear tell that the government had some secret doings on the site afterwards. Sounds like a tall-tale, and maybe it is, but it does lend the site a certain mystique. Mysterious past or not, I really love poking around inside dilapidated buildings. The estate is up on a hillside, with stone courtyards and stairways, now overgrown with juniper bushes and littered with leaves. Most of the original stonework is under a healthy layer of duff now, so one can only imagine what it must have looked like when it was in use for something other than a place for park rangers to dump broken or unneeded stuff. The roofs are bowed under half a century of pine needles, and the windows gape blackly. Inside is a darkened jumble of shattered glass, broken wood, and other unidentifiable detritus. Somewhere out back there is a bomb shelter, which is apparently walled off inside, hiding deeper and darker recesses. Lovely. I bet it's full of bats too. I'll have to hike up there with a camera sometime. Trees hide many details. Stone and rotted wood peeks out here and there. Beautiful.

(Oh, and by the way, a guy just stopped by and handed us $500 for our old van. He's picking it up tomorrow. I get to park in the driveway again! We can buy groceries too!)

We also stopped by the water tank, which is fed by a well. The pump was off, indicating that for once it was full. We climbed up on to to see for ourselves. I don't get to do that when I hike up there with kids, so I enjoyed the view from the top for the first time. The tank is important to us because it's where we get all of our water. We share it with the hostel and the ranger station, but their total use amounts to around 15%.
The rest of the day was less interesting, with more cleaning and lugging and sorting. Oh, and helping campers from previous weeks sort through mountains of lost and found items. After some fruitful searching, one mom bought five of our little fundraising packets (for the construction of a new lodge and general site overhaul) for $200. It's great to be appreciated. I'm proud to be a part of something that has this kind of grass roots support (okay, so it also has non-grass roots support, but the little individual gestures are more pure somehow).