17 hours later, I'm winding down to go to bed. Hopefully I'll fall asleep by midnight, so I can manage 5 1/2 hours. It's gonna be hard though, so there's so much to process, so much I'm still thinking about. It was full, but it was GOOD. Honestly, I usually go into the first Thursday of staff training, treading it, and honestly, I'm usually still there about half way through, but something happens, ALWAYS (and I don't use superlatives lightly), that changes my mind. Today it was pizza night.

We have a new tradition here at Big Lake, and by new, I mean that we've only been doing it for 4 or 5 years. On the first night of staff training, for dinner, we break up into groups and "make your own pizzas". A group of 3 or 4 people get crusts and construct their own dinner. As I said tonight, when I was explaining the process, you can learn a lot about someone by what they eat, and pizza specifically can be very telling. There are a lot of crucial choices to make: which sauce (marinara, Alfredo, pesto), cheese or no cheese, (and the very telling) whether or not to pineapple -- which, just so you know, I am firmly against.

Then after the pizzas are created, pizza teams "name" their pizza by writing a short phrase or witty word on the pan liner, which I then scream out to indicate that their pizza is done baking. People are getting brave with what they write. . .

But it was nice to be forced to not take myself too seriously, to be able to have a laugh at my own expense, and to, frankly, look a little foolish for a change.

There's a way we see stuff in our head, what Christmas is supposed to look like, how we want the world to view us, what goes on a pizza. And it was good to remember that at camp, people get to be who they actually are instead of who they're "supposed to be". We GET TO be silly and look through glasses that we don't normally get to see though, and have others see us in ways that wouldn't be possible anywhere else.

Pizza, rope swings, singing, the first softball game of the summer, now some sleep (if I can manage with Hank, my dog, snoring at the foot of my bed) -- all in all a good, no, a GREAT day.

-Baker John