What a Day!

What a terrible day. I'm usually a silver lining kinda girl, but today was pretty miserable overall.

A few days ago, some of the staff casually mentioned that they felt sick when they were in the basement of the staff house (which has the laundry room and tv/couches). Four years ago, every building at camp got a brand new roof, except the staff house. The staff house needs MAJOR structural work on the roof (estimated cost $30,000) and in the capital campaign plans, that building will be torn down, so the board decided not to waste money on a building that needs major work and is coming down eventually.

I've known all along that the roof is sort of leaky and that the basement is always humid and damp. But I rarely go into the staff house, so it's one of those, "out of sight, out of mind" situations. It's an old, pretty run down house, but with 20 staff in an out all day, it's probably better that it's not super nice. 19 year olds aren't picky about the condition of the place they "crash" during their breaks. And so I haven't given much thought to that building. Until they mentioned they were feeling sick. And I went in the basement and saw the long lines of mold. I saw the damp floors and visibly wet walls.

A year before I started here, a group had put beautiful tongue and groove siding all along the walls. My dad started pulling it apart yesterday and found soaking wet insulation. Tomorrow we are going to tear apart the whole basement and try to determine the extent of the problem. We have to determine if it is something we can clean up or if the house is so bad it is un-usable. I'm not sure how to make that determination, but hopefully it's not as bad as I am imagining.

After the mold discovery, I received an interesting email from Business Manager J. She found another job and is resigning from camp. J has been working on her Masters degree in music education and we'd talked about her student teaching next Spring. This summer has been difficult with her, and I've been talking with my mom about how much J needs to move on but what a difficult discussion that would be. So this is actually a really positive thing. But it's earlier than I'd expected and I feel a little panicky.

I also woke up with a sore neck, and I felt overall really worn out and achy all day. We have only 31 kids this week and the energy is low, and I'm struggling to feel excited or interested in activities. Mostly, I've been wandering around aimlessly all day, unable to focus or be productive, feeling bad about my lack of focus (on top of all the stress I'm feeling about everything else), and overall just feeling bad for myself. Ugh. Not a great day at all.