Since I signed up to help cook breakfast, I had to report to Sid in the kitchen by 5:00, along with the 3 others who had signed up. Sid is a former Navy cook (in fact, he reminds me a lot of Uncle Charlie on My Three Sons – he was a Navy cook, wasn't he?), so our breakfast menu was S.O.S., although in this case it was to be on biscuits rather than on toast. One of the women was set to work heating up a huge pot of creamed chipped beef (from cans, so I don't know what all was in it). Another woman and I arranged 200 frozen biscuits on large baking sheets and started them baking. I was also shown how to brew tea in the tea machine, since they always have 2 dispensers of iced tea sitting out – one sweet and one not. I also made sure the plasticware, napkins, sugar, etc, were refilled. We had to count out plates before beginning to serve, so we would know how many were served – they have to keep close count at each meal, I think for the various reporting the camp has to do for its funding sources.
The biscuits took a little longer than planned, but breakfast was still ready shortly after 6. (Lights come on at 6:00 every morning; some people wait till then to wake up and stumble in to breakfast, and some set their alarms earlier and get ready in the dark.) Then I helped serve by splitting and placing a biscuit on each plate, while one of the other women glopped the S. on top. Sid hadn't wanted to put out any alternative breakfast items, but I noticed that it didn't take long for the dry cereal and milk to appear on the tables – as I suspected, there were a fair number of people who weren't very interested in creamed chipped beef. There were also apples and oranges set out to pack in lunches, so people had a lot of those for breakfast too. And there's always coffee, tea, and juices available 24/7 in the dining hall.
After the line died down, I served myself, and went out to join my group for breakfast. Alex seemed a good bit better this morning, sick-wise, so that's good. Pastor Sandy and some of the youth from Greensburg (I think) had decided to make up a variety of sandwiches for lunch for our SWPA group, so all we had to do was choose a bag with the sandwich we wanted in it, and then add our own fruit and snacks. Each morning, each work crew makes up a cooler to take to the jobsite with drinks (the camp had huge bottles of water and sourmelon PowerAde, which I imagine was donated because no one liked the flavor, heh), and with a lunch for each person. Since our crew was so big, we used 2 coolers.
Then after going back to the dorm to finish changing into work clothes (i.e. boots rather than sneakers), we all made our way to the warehouse at the back of the camp to select our tools and supplies. It was all rearranged since last year, but the aisles were well labelled, so it didn't take us long to find what we needed… exterior primer for the siding, interior primer for the walls that weren't done yet, a tile cutter because the paper said the floor tile was to arrive today, paint brushes, rollers, trays, drywalling tools and tape. All tools and supplies have to be checked out in the warehouse office, and then we loaded everything into one of the two 15-passenger vans that the synod rented for the week. Then we loaded into the van, too, though we could only fit 12 since we took out the back seat to fit in the gear. So the rest of our group went in the other van, which also was carrying a small crew of 4 to another job out in the same general direction. There was a GPS in each van, so we used that to get us to the jobsite ("Turn left. Turn left." OK – OK)
