Out of office, somewhere in Canada.

Readers: I'm leaving tomorrow morning to go on my very first BWCAW canoe trip! Since the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is basically what Ely is famous ("famous") for, this is very exciting. My boss planned an eight day trip for me, her family, and two of their 50+ friends. We're going to paddle north across the Canadian border many, many, many miles and cross several portages. There will be no other humans and millions of mosquitoes. I will probably return seven pounds heavier because of my bug bites. Definitely not because of eating too much though, because I just laid out all the food I bought for myself for the trip and realized it's probably not enough. No teacher like experience, right? Also, snow is forecasted for the next three days.
Everyone else on the trip has acknowledged that I am woefully unprepared for it. I actually have a fair bit of camping experience, but in contrast to five people who live off the grid and cut ice out of frozen lakes with chainsaws for their refrigeration, I'm hopeless. I have no idea how to set up a camping stove, I had to be lent every single piece of equipment necessary (even Ziploc bags), I've never portaged a canoe, and I had to buy watershoes today because I haven't owned a pair in years. I will be the token City Girl on the trip, the girl who has never been seen without a hair ribbon and cardigan, the one who was naive enough to ask if I should bring toilet paper. (The answer is no.) Expectations are pretty low for me. But they are underestimating one thing about me, and that is how happy I will be not bathing or changing my clothes for eight days.
Wish me luck! I will be untraceable and probably hungry for the next week.

Also, this is completely unrelated, but I can't resist. Tonight I attended the graduation ceremony for the local community college. It was way longer and more arduous than it should have been, but one thing lightened my spirits. A very large male graduate sitting in the back row of chairs didn't notice that he had ripped an eighteen-inch hole in the butt of his graduation gown when he sat down, and whatever he was wearing underneath it was hiked down too far to be seen. So throughout the two hour ceremony there was a pasty pyramid of flesh smiling out at the crowd. I noticed that I wasn't the only one who took a close-up picture.