The Master of Ceremonies for The First Annual Festival of Mayhem, Disruption, Anxiety and Odd Problems, picked my name from the thousands of unsuspecting entrants that didn’t want to be entered but had no choice. This Festival took place after I reached the campground in Northern Idaho.

It began with cell service from T-Mobile…as in NONE. Sure, you’re thinking, What the heck? you’re on holidays, camping out. Right? There’s just a little more to it than that. I had people to pick up at an airport, 70 miles away, on two different days, and I really wanted to know if they were on their flight and on time. Plus, I left a friend, Vivienne, with keys to my house and the responsibility of watering a few potted plants. I had to drive five miles out to the highway to pick up cell service. A few family members did have service on their phones so it helped.

But the first blast of Disruption came when I received a phone message from Vivienne. One of the station heads in my back yard was on ‘terminal run’ and I had a small pool forming around two trees and a vine. She had no idea how to fix it and if I instructed her to turn the water off to the whole property, the rest of my trees and vines would suffer in the desert heat…hello pool of water. (I do my own yard work, irrigation, and station heads so I wasn’t about to pay someone else to fix it when I could fix it for around $20).

The Mayhem started when I picked my son, Josh, up from the airport and he brought his computer and cell phone but didn’t bring a charger for the cell phone. He couldn’t ‘unplug’ from the rest of the world and had to have his computer on and a way to charge it all the time. He seemed to be totally out of sorts with settling into the campground atmosphere and we clashed more than once.

The night that I picked Stacy up at the airport, I called my son, Darian, or tried to. I planned to have him check out the leaking station head and fix it. Huge problem and worry after I found out he was in the hospital. It’s all history now and he’s improving but I called him at least once a day and sometimes twice a day to see what was going on and how he was doing.

Other family members had problems develop and it just wasn’t the happy, sweet group I remember from the last few years.

The woods had plenty of water this season and we had campfires, along with extra wasps, yellow jackets, black hornets, bald faced hornets (how about that name…do they shave or what?) and they were after meat, everything on our plates. We had old fashioned wasp/hornet traps that caught 100’s of them a day but still they fought for our food on our plates. And mosquitos. These mosquitos failed to note that we had ‘bug spray’ on us or they were wearing gas masks.

The zipper to my tent door blew it’s threads and I ended up hand stitching the whole damn thing shut and cutting out the screen to use it for a door…the condo has lost its appeal.

The young adults seemed to ‘cooler hop’ everyone’s campsite and I felt mine was hit the hardest…the worst of it was they didn’t drink the drink, they took a few sips and left the remains for someone else to pick up. They dug through the ice, marauding and mauling the food and beverages. I had a slight fit with all of them, more than once, but it didn’t seem to change anything.

It just wasn’t the event I looked forward to all year long but I did have a lot of fun with some of the young adults that wanted to play poker. My Great Nephew, Justin, found me first when his family hit camp. He was ecstactic and jumping with the news that he’d watched me deal poker on TV. We set up the poker game for later in the day and ran through a few hands just so they would know how the game of Holdem was played. Justin made a straight flush on the first ‘pretend’ hand. He hardly made a hand after that. I had a sympathy tug in my heart when I watched his young face look at hand after hand and throw them away. He wanted to play so bad but he listened to my advice…I started out by telling him that winning at poker wasn’t about the hands you won, it was about the bets you save. We got into that statement and a few others before we finished our continued playing sessions.

We played for a single 25c blind and the max bet was 25c. Last year we told the young adults they had to buy chips to play…this year they arrived with their small poker stakes and jumped right into the game. It was an experience that I would never give up and even the Master of Ceremonies knew better than to mess with that deal. All in all, the trip was good, life is good. My beauty queen, Kayanna, went home today after spending a month with me.

Time to plug back in to the Vegas lifestyle and the world of poker…see you there!