Yeah. It felt like Death was poking my stomach with his scythe and then he put me in his washing machine with his laundry on 'SUPER DOOM SPIN'. Have you ever noticed how stomach pain trumps all other sicknesses? Ear infection? Can still work. Cold? Lame. Stomach? OH GOD. Nothing gets done and it seems like no one ever believes you.
There's a place called McCormick Day Camp where I've volunteered for the past four years. I could have been paid this year, but that didn't work out. So every so often I pop in and put on my peppy face so that I might get a chance to be hired next year. Today was one of those days. I thought it was going to be relaxing--We were going to a nature preserve, how hard could it be??
I was wrong.
First off, it took us 45 minutes to get there. That made me realize we were officially in the boondocks. Nothing around for miles. I kept expecting to see my hillbilly family pop out from under the sparsely-seen bushes or something. When we got there, it was acres and acres of this-could-end-badly. 22 kids under my watch, and all of them were bored and wanted to buy stuff at the consession stand which clearly nature preserves do not have.
Luckily, there was a magical museum in the parking lot!!! Praise the Lord!!! Of course, we could have just gone to a museum in the first place, but no one sees this logic. McCormick's a wilderness camp, so the kids were just going to have to suck it up and eat leaves instead of buying consessions. (The kids usually have between 10-20dollars on them. It's sad to see a little girl buy a Spongebob ice cream cone with a 20.) But the museum plan diverted them from their hunger, so we took them in.
This museum was obviously booming. It had had 90 visitors (proclaimed proudly) in the past month, and it had three exhibits. A Civil War room, The History of Postcards, and Illustrated Children's Books of the 20th Century. WTF? I wonder if the nice old lady ('nice' at this point) had been a child once, sitting and thinking, 'hmm, when I grow up, I want to take a small, whitewashed building in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of a nature preserve in the middle of nowhere and make it into a museum on the Civil War, postcards, and watercolour pictures of kitties.' But the kids liked it all and all, especially the 'play room' for the children's books, which looked like one of those recurring nightmares you have with carosel music and the creepy brightly-coloured clowns.
There was literally an old, worn down anamatronic moving puppy that looked like it could use a bath, and its head would slowly move toward you as it talked in a high, feminine voice. It was on top of a plastic green hill with happy caterpillers and centipedes that wriggled. Also, if you tired of that, there were forest creature puppets that smelled like old people and failure.
Apparently the museum thought it wasn't teaching enough, because there was also a room with a sad-looking wilted teepee in it and that's it. Maybe it was where the forest puppets slept at night.
As we left this high-quality museum, the once-thought kindly old woman reminded me there was an entrance fee of 30 dollars for the eight 5 year olds I brought with me, so I waited to pay with a credit card that wasn't mine while I listened to the creepy children's music, and I wondered what I was doing there if I didn't even work there.
On the way home, I fell asleep. I drove home in a children's-museum daze, only to have an old guy run out in front of me in the street, waving his arms at me wildly. He had a newspaper in them. I couldn't tell if he was trying to flag me down, kill himself, or sell me something. I left him flailing sadly at me as I drove home, not ready to tackle more weirdness from this day that I still had yet another non-paid job full of phenomenons I had yet to see.
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