Friday evening: A friend of ours from colgaffneyis came over for dinner. It was a little rushed–she and mia_mcdavid had to go to a meeting of the staff of that body. I cleaned up after dinner, then did a little woodworking until Mia came home. Afterwards we watched some television, during which I worked on labelling envelopes for colgaffneyis newsletter then went to bed.

We slept late Saturday morning. I got up a little before 9 AM to start taping The Woodwright’s Shop on PBS, but went right back to bed rather than watch the show.

After we finally got up and had breakfast, I went out to mail the hard copy version of colgaffneyis newsletter, then drove south to the Woodcraft store in Bloomington to see if they were participating in a plane sale. I am becoming more interested in wooden planes to improve my period woodworking for colgaffneyis. Alas, this store did not have any in stock.

In the afternoon I spent some time in the shop pursuing another aspect of the same quest: I replaced the plastic handle on a chisel with a wooden one, thereby making it more appropriate for public use in camp(“…adding an appearance of verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative”). Rather contrary to most human activities, the destructive part (removing the plastic) was harder and took longer than the constructive side of putting on the new handle. Afterwards Mia and I went out to run a few errands, then loaded our station wagon with our tent for colgaffneyis events. This is a fairly substantial wall tent with two segmented center poles and 14 wall poles, each 6 ft. tall. Also canvas, ropes, stakes, groundcloth, etc. to match. The station wagon is a ’95 Ford Escort so loading all of this, while straightforward, is non-trivial.

Sunday morning Mia and I drove to Southwest Minneapolis in the other car to pick up Tom from his group home, and then took him to church. He was in good spirits and did quite well. We then took him back to his home and returned to ours.

Once we got there we switched cars and drove the wagon to Albert Lea. There we joined a work party from colgaffneyis, which included twolodge, 3stitches, and mairi2. We set up the corporate canvas and our personal tents to be ready for the Big Island Rendezvous next weekend. A lot of other tents were already up. I fell in love with the event at my first visit a few years ago and we have been back every years since then. Already I could sense the anticipation on the site.

Despite this I was feeling a little tired and somewhat jumpy. It took a while to figure out why. Still, I was able to do my part in the work, and when we left just before 6 PM our camp looked quite good..

Today (Monday) I finally figured out what had been bothering me. Mia will be going down to Albert Lea on Wednesday. I will follow with James on Friday after he gets out of school.

That is the theory. The problem is that James has a sinus infection which is, by the best possible interpretation, only slowly responding to antibiotics. So, if he insists that he is too sick to go (likely, since he is not enthusiastic about the event), then I am the one stuck at home with him. It is particularly serious since Mia is acting Head Campfollower for the whole long weekend–she cannot get away to relieve me. Similar incidents occurred three times with Tom last Spring. It got really old then.