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Farewell - 2006-03-15 |
2003-09-30 - 5:22 p.m. Here it is, Tuesday already! I meant to update this on Sunday. Time seems to float by me up here. This weekend was the PC retreat at Camp Barton (a local boy scout camp) it went really well despite the fact that 3 out of the 4 leaders were sick. I've been fighting a cold that I suspect I caught from Schwang. That's what I get for being nice and making him dinner when he wasn't feeling well, I guess. =P On Wednesday I was sick enough that I didn't go to Evensong. It should be noted, however, that Schwang returned the dinner favor and brought my Chicken Diablo - a recipe I supplied him with a week or so ago. In the directions it says to "sprinkle chicken with pepper." Apparently there are different levels of which to sprinkle pepper and Schwang did so with an intensity of a Virginia snowstorm. It smelled really good with the artichoke hearts, mushrooms and salsa, but tasted completely like pepper. It was nice of him though. By Friday morning, when I got up at 5am to go to work, I wasn't feeling much better and had developed a rather nasty cough. My boss, Phil (who's a complete jerk, by the way), has a habit of not ever letting people off of work. I went in, sneezed on some muffins, proclaimed in my sick and shaky voice that I wasn't going to be working that day and left. No one said anything. They just all kind of starred. I went back to bed. I felt much better when I got up and managed to go to two of my classes before collapsing again and sleeping until it was time to go lead the retreat. As soon as I got down to the chapel I immediately started hassling Larry to give me drugs. His father is a pharmisist and as Larry is sick (he was one of the retreat leaders) he had a slew of medications with him. He told me he would let me know when my DayQuil had worn off (which hadn't done jack for any of my symptoms) and would give me some then. Over the next few hours people would randomly hassle him for me. "Can you give Gibson drugs yet? Look how pathetic she looks." When we got out to the camp I was the only leader there. The others were coming at later times. This was not planned and so I was in a bit of a panic as to what to do. Or at least, I would have been in a panic if I had been conscience enough to know completely what was going on. I've never lead anything religious and I had a feeling I would have to do some group prayer. Very scary. I managed though. I got everyone into a circle, said the prayer for dinner and we all dug in. I was pleased! After pizza had been eaten and soda and had been consumed when headed in from the lakeside to continue activities in the mess hall where we would be sleeping as well. The first activity was a trust walk involving three people per group. Since there was an odd man out I volunteered not to participate since I could barely walk anyway. It was fun to watch though. There were objects (which I hid for the groups) and one person was blindfolded (the one who had to pick up the object), one person was deaf (the one who told the blind person where to go) and the last person was mute (which was the person who told the deaf person where to tell the blind person where to go). It got to be pretty interesting. After that was done it was my turn - trust falls. I set up a picnic table in the middle of the room (in between rafters so tall people wouldn't hit their heads). We nicely had one person who had never done a trust fall. I made her go first. She was scared to death but it was an amazing experience! I stood on the table and coached her as she fell back into a sea of loving hands! She laughed when she got up. I was the last person to go and after I fell and they caught me (I was so comfortable that I wanted to just use them as a bed and go to sleep!) Sean (also a television major, though a senior) said "Hey Gibson, when are you going to fall?!" I laughed, smiled, and gave him a big hug. It's nice when a guy tells you that you're tiny! =) I quite like it! Next it was Schwang's activity. In his we all made balloons that represented ourselves. We then made a circle and tossed yarn back and forth telling something about ourselves as we went until we had formed a rather impressive net of yarn. We then threw our balloons on top and Schwang instructed us to do certain things "all the sick people kneel down." Of course, when you do this, the net shifts and the balloons will fall off if the other people don't compensate for the move. We then had to move about the room and as balloons fell, Schwang ran around picking them up and placing them back on the net. This was to demonstrate that while we support each other, we still need God to pick us up when we fall. Then there was Larry, who did what we do during Time Apart for Prayer on Sundays. We read some Bible passages and meditated on it. This was followed by a session of Jar Full of Questions. Some were serious. Some were funny. And we talked until it was time to go to bed. Larry did give me drugs around 8:30 or so. As a direct result, when it was time to go to bed my heart rate was still increased. I laid there until three in the morning listening to Schwang randomly wander around the cabin until he went to bed at two. Schwang and I were the first ones up in the morning. We got breakfast ready. Then Larry, Allison (our chaplain), Schwang and I got everyone up by singing "Rise and Shine" when Schwang strumming out the chords on mandalin. I'm sure I sounded terrible cause I was sick and couldn't even talk normally. *shrugs* So it goes. A lot of people left after breakfast but some of us stayed behind (me included) and went on a hike. I must say that hiking up the gorges when you're sick probably isn't the best idea, but the clean air did me some good. Plus it forced me to cough up a lot of junk. When we got to the top of the waterfall, Schwang and I went down into the water and peered over the edge. The water was nice and cold and the algea squishy! It was great fun! The hike was also my first experience with soft and fluffy moss. I had never walked on moss that felt like carpet before! It was great fun! When we were finally all back down by the cars, we went to lunch at Gleenwood Pines - the place where I got a footlong hot dog this summer when I came to orientation! Most of the group, including myself, order the Gleenwood Pine hamburger which the resteraunt claims is "the best in Ithaca!" After eating it, I have no disputes! It was marvelous! I did some homework and showered when I got back from campus. At five I went down to the Ithaca Pregnancy Center to pick Schwang up from work. We then went back to his apartment where I raided his kitchen and made mass amounts of cookies. My plan was to make no-bake cookies for James (his request) and some glutton-free cookies for Kathy. Well, the no-bake cookies, I'm sure, would have gone fine.... if I had read the directions correctly. Oops. It probably didn't help that Schwang and his roommate Joe don't have actual measuring utensil. Which explains why when you bite into one of these fabulous cookies you can feel the grains of sugar grinding against your teeth. To make Kathy's cookies I subsitituted regular flour with rice flour. Apparently, this does something to the way the cookies bake. Instead of baking normally, the batter liquifies and spreads out across the entire pan, leaving pockets of chocolate chip cookies where they sunk to the bottom of the puddle. Then, the batter commenses to burn. Seeing as this was the case we tried different ways of baking them: make one hug pile and putting them in a muffin pan (bad idea). Though I did do the entire batch... none were in actual cookie form. They're uh... chucks... crums... I'm not quite sure what they are, but they taste alright. After Schwang and I had stopped laughing at my cookie disaster, we noticed we were hungry. We improved a chicken pot pie... with no chicken. We were rather afraid that it would come out much like the cookies, but to our pleasant surprize it was REALLY good and incrediably filling! That was our cooking victory for the day. Sunday was the typical fun Sunday that it always is! I love Sundays! Church was awesome! We had a guest speaker who was equiped with an 18 foot long snake (stuffed animal) named Seymore as well as a bag fool of toys that he passed out to represent our problems! It was fun! During brunch I discovered that he use to work in public television and now works as the chaplain at Wells College, the all girls school up the road. So he and I had some not comparing to do. Other than that, the day was pretty much dedicated to reading and praying - just as it should be. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my weekend. Oh! And I'm feeling much better now!
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