I pop my head off the pillow at 7:30 AM and my lacrimal sacs are the size of limes.  It appears my ascetic camp lifestyle has collided with my mold laden house to remind me that no degree of egotism can fend off mold allergies.  I’m sneezing twice a minute and I do the most reasonable thing to stop my allergies: Take Actuarial Exam M now rather than after four hours of studying and sacrifice any chance at passage to stop the stupid sneezing.  I arrive at the Thompson Learning Center and am nearly strip searched to verify that I’m not bringing in a blacklisted calculator or crib sheet and escort to the cell block/test-taking area where I begin to attack the three-hour juggernaut that’s about to crush me.  And crush me it did as I just barely escaped breaking the colobus barrier.  For the initiated, the colobus barrier is grade that random guessing would yield on an exam or equivalently if a colobus monkey took it.  For this, a four choice exam of 30 questions, the colobus barrier would be passed at about 7 or 8 questions.  I’m confident I got 10, sticking it to our genetic cousins.  Actuarial Exams are odd in that the higher they go in progression the more infantile the questions.  Exam P, the first one, involves risk calculations on hurricanes destroying small nations whereas Exam FM, the second, revolves around investment instruments for pools of people.  Exam M involves questions about septuagenarian mall walkers picking up coins with a certain distribution.  The 9th exam must consist of successfully completing a choose your own adventure with the 10th and final exam including a coloring book.

Today was my last day at work (well, Saturday technically is but nyeh) and as I broach the door of the building I am immediately stopped by the receptionist who says “Are you (dramatic pause) Terry?”, “yes” I said.  Man sitting in chair “they told me you would come to help!” WTF.  Everyone else was apparently out and a repairman came and needed to sign in and somehow he remembers me from a conversation three years ago at a coffee machine which included the statement “hm… I had no idea that the quality control for sex toys was so rigorous”.  On my last day someone decides to make me the fucking emissary of lab technicians and I now have the magical power to sign-in outsiders and give them parking passes.  This is the camp equivalent of a CIT changing a unit roster so I wrote it off as a side effect of wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  The guy’s now in and he leans real close to me and with a face you expect from someone who’s about to punch or kiss you says “I don’t have ladder… *pause* can I borrow your step stool” then he raises an eyebrow.  I give him a kick stool and all is fine until the final moment of weirdness upon his departure where he says “I hear it’s your last day, see you next time”.

Three times in the last 24 hours my gender has been spontaneously changed on me:
1) I received a renewal to the FPRI addressed to Ms. Terry Robinson.  I receive mail of this kind on a certain basis but this blew my mind as I’ve been a member for almost 5 years and none of the previous ones included Ms. on them.
2) I submitted a question about fletching atlatl darts to National Archery Supply and despite the form asking me for my God-damn name, the reply was addressed to Ms. Terri Robinson
3) Temple University sent an informational package addressed to my parents about graduation rings.  All well and good but every design was for women’s rings.

On of my co-workers from the Indian Subcontinent was out yesterday to take the citizenship test and returned today and described the sections of the test and what parts were hard and what weren’t and the penalties if you had to retake the exam and finally what she thought she was losing by no longer being a foreign national.  I then thought about my citizenship test, escaping the birth canal, and if you fuck up at that you’ve got a team of trained medical professionals to assist.

I had to create a webpage for the Duty to God program and thinking about the outline, I copied the page from the Duty to God page and everything was fine until I realized I’d missed a line resulting in the bottom line reading: “Do your duty to God” immediately followed by “Don’t stop a rockin’.”

Cut and paste error, Photography Lab to Horseback Riding Lab.  That would be stinky.

While filling out the deposit form for the pen-ultimate camp check that’ll keep me flush with moon pies and Moxie tonic until next season, I used the pen chained to the counter.  It was a reasonably nice pen that included the name of the bank and contact information; nothing to write home about and reasoned that the bank probably didn’t want people to walk off with this reasonably nice pen.  That was until I looked down the length of the table on which I was writing and saw a plastic bin containing easily 200 more of these reasonably nice pens.  I removed the joining piece from the ball-chain and claimed myself a new pen.  I felt a tinge of guilt on stealing the pen effectively marked “don’t steal me” until the teller ended the transaction with “thanks, Terence”.  Fuck you, bank teller, if you’re going to refer to me in a way that my parents didn’t even do when I broke something, I’m going to steal your God-damn pen.  And these thieveries will continue as my silent protest to your first name usage policy.

Pat Toye and I called all the units coming week 3 that the norovirus had hit.  Pat leaves a message on a machine to the following effect as the tape runs out: “Good afternoon, Scoutmaster.  My name’s Pat Toye and I’m the health officer at Ockanickon calling to inform you of what’s happened at OSR this week.  As you may have heard, Ockanickon has sent many Scouts home and closed early due to *BEEP* End of Tape.  Well, that’s a bit of cliffhanger.

After a morning of bleaching, I gun out of camp preparing for TJ’s wedding lacking a suit, gift, and directions.  I arrive at home to do an emergency load of wash and walking into the kitchen I am greeted by a duck, an honest to God duck.  I look at it, the duck looks at me and waddles back into the rec room.  Next, I put on my clothing to facilitate an emergency visit to the Men’s Warehouse, my shoes aren’t tied, I have no belt, and I’m wearing shorts with suspicious white bleach stains that look like I was wanking up on the car ride over.  I pass by the duck again, drive to Men’s Warehouse and turbo-stumble through a door where Harvey Fierstein’s illegitimate tailor brother greets me and with a slow crescendo that makes the whole thing more melodramatic brings his hand to his forehead to tell me “Sir, I am a tailor, and there is no greater sorrow to a tailor than saying this: I cannot fit you”.  I drive to the local Big and Tall and luck strikes.  A man of my approximate build recently returned an entire set of coordinated suit parts and had the courtesy to dry clean them before returning them thus ensuring their cleanliness and wrinkle-freeness, w00t.  I have 9 minutes to get to Arcadia and the final 12 seconds before being officially late involved parallel parking that would have challenged the driver of a Matchbox car.

The wedding itself was wonderful and was officiated by TJ’s brother.  The odd part was the music: the pre-wedding tunes alternated between classic wedding music like Pachabel’s Canon and the soundtrack to Guys and Dolls.  The cocktail hour saw classic folk and Negro spirituals. The dinner included such wedding classics as Lola and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.