Camp Bob

Meat Puppets--"Lost" (mp3)
Meat Puppets--"We're Here" (mp3)
Meat Puppets--"I'm A Mindless Idiot" (mp3)
Meat Puppets--"Plateau" (mp3)

Last night I slept on the living room couch. The night before I slept in the den. I had been sleeping down in the basement, but a few nights ago when I walked down there to go to sleep, I found that the bed had been disassembled and its parts leaning against the wall. My beds have been makeshift conglomerations of couch pillows and smelly comforters sometimes too short to cover my feet.

The wrath of my wife? Nope. She slept on a bed half-filled with the largest pile of clothing imaginable. Welcome to Camp Bob. We have been living at Camp Bob for the past three weeks with its fairly Spartan conditions and odd choices.

It's a place where you wash dishes in the shower, where you run an extension cord between stories of the house so that someone can have a light or watch tv, where you choose between a light in the bathroom and wireless Internet. It's a place where you unplug the refrigerator in order to have power for the microwave for your morning tea or for the iron to try to get the wrinkles out of a shirt that you have worn four times in the last two weeks. It's a place where you hope that you remember to switch that plug back to your refrigerator; otherwise, you will come home to warm eggs, sour milk, and rivulets of melted ice on your floor.

It's a place where when you come home, everything has been moved from where it was when you left, moved to the center of the room so that the guys rewiring the house can get to every outlet they need to get to. It's a place where when the last guy leaves on Friday, he says, "Oh, yeah, you won't have any air conditioning this weekend." It is a place where that Sunday, the temperature hits 88 degrees. And then the choice--fan or light? fan or television?

The basement door does not lock, barely stays on its hinges after all of the demolition. Each night, I lean another door against it so that at least someone breaking in might make enough noise that I'll wake up. I don't have a key to the house myself; I gave both my front door and deck keys to a guy I've met four or five times.

But it's camp, right? I mean, what did you expect? You signed up for life outside of civilization. You wanted to "rough it."

Plus, the activities? Well, we've got 'em! You already know about "Dumpster Toss." That's right, anything you don't want or maybe just don't feel like dealing with, just chuck it in there. Well, how about the "Attic Purge?" It's fun. You go into your stifling attic on the hottest day of the spring and sort through old Christmas ornaments, children's toys you were saving for your children who didn't want them so you were saving them for them to give to their children, and other essentials. My favorite game, though, is called "No Straight Line." It's when you turn your house into a kind of maze where you can never walk straight from point A to point B anywhere, can't even make it halfway across a room without having to sidestep, step over, turn sideways or backtrack.

And the food? Well, here at Camp Bob, we promise to take it a notch above your average camp fair. Tonight I made "Beer-and-Onion Braised Chicken Carbonnade," Zuchinni and Corn Frittata, salad with Ranch dressing, wheat rolls. Even though I've set up my little kitchen outpost on the sun porch, I had to go into six different rooms for the ingredients, the utensils, the dishes, the spices I needed. I have made a coffee cake in the toaster oven, boiled pasta in an electric skillet, corn on the cob in the microwave, chicken pot pie's sauce in a pan heated over a flat griddle, so much heat lost in the transference that it took forever. But it's better than a campfire, and it wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to wash the dishes that didn't involve the shower.

And, by the way, the goal here is not to elicit sympathy. I think we all know that it takes a certain economic level to undertake a significant home improvement of any kind, so no, these minor indignities and relatively-brief inconveniences are not the material for sympathy. Plus, if you know me, you know that, in the weirdest of ways, I enjoy the challenge of it all, especially the cooking challenge of people asking if we're eating out every night and being able to say, "No, we eat at home much of the time. We've got a place set up. We're making do."

Because that's the motto of Camp Bob: "Make do with what you have." If we can do this with so much upheaval, imagine what you can do in normal circumstances. Make a good meal at home tonight and if you have a dishwasher, give thanks to God.