Before and After

This is Spring Work Week at Holden. We have 40 some volunteers here this week to get the village ready for summer. They have been hard at work cleaning lodges, making repairs, and finishing projects that need to be done before summer. Tomorrow (Wednesday) is BLITZ DAY. It is the day that completely "changes" Holden from winter to summer. The Dining Hall, Village Center, Snack Bar, Pool Hall and Bowling Alley all get a good cleaning in anticipation of opening for the summer. The biggest change for the long term staff is the changeover of the Dining Hall. During the winter, half of the Dining Hall is turned into a living/game room. It's where we hang out during the long winter, knit, read, play pool or pingpong, or just visit with each other. By tomorrow afternoon all that will be gone and will once again be changed into one huge dining room ready to feed hundreds of people. Tomorrow night we have our "transition dinner." It is, of course, a dress up dinner. "Dress up" at Holden means going to the costume shop and picking out something weird to wear!
We still have about 4 feet of snow on the ground and it snows a little every day. Yesterday it got quite cold again and I brought out the long underwear that I had put away a week and a half ago. We are operating the whole village on 53 watts of electricity. (Last year at this time we had 150.) So our Utilities folks are scrambling to keep things going for the workers. We have had to turn off the large coffee urns and go to small pots, put away our commercial toaster and have a regular small one obtained at a thrift store somewhere. Lights in the dining hall are hardly ever turned on--thank goodness for daylight savings time! At times there is no hot water for showers so it's either a lukewarm one or none at all. But it's par for the course here in the winter and we are used to it. As soon as it warms up more and the snow starts melting for real, we will have a good amount of power again.
By the end of this week we will be ready for the infiltration of the high school students of the three Washington synods as they have their gatherings here every weekend in May. It actually helps get us psychologically prepared for the multitudes of people who come during the summer.