Long Overdue

Life in the village has been fairly insane the last few weeks. I apologize for not keeping you updated, but I frankly don't know when I would have found time!
What has happened:
1) we survived work week.
The village is now "winterized" with big wooden grates over windows in potential danger to protect them from "roof-alanches" and snow drifts which might otherwise break them in. Monday of work week, we moved all of the bookshelves and books from our store to a new location over in the Koinonia building... a room called "Creek Side". This is due to some big plans for giving the old/usual store some much needed TLC with paint, floor buffing, new carpet, new lighting, and added display space.
Tuesday of work week, we took a break from moving all of the books as everyone in the village was a maverick for the day. We moved out most of the dining hall tables and moved in living room furniture, a fooseball table, ping-pong table, and pool table. I was also on a crew that cleaned the pool hall and prepared it to be closed up all winter. It was a really dirty job, but it was pleasant enough with so many hands. Later in the day, we chained about 6 chords of wood into the basement of Lodge 6 to be used to power the boiler throughout the winter.
Wednesday was back to the store. We moved nearly everything else from the "Old Store" to the "Creekside Store" and had it all in a semi-organized (albeit a little squished) display and the store was open for shopping by 3 in the afternoon! We never thought the work would go so quickly and so well. I spent the rest of the week reorganizing all of the bookshelves, cleaning, etc. during the day and opening for a while in the afternoon for customers.
The village was huge and energetic for the week and we accomplished more than I believe most of us anticipated. Yippee!
2) The store, now moved, went through inventory these past few days. Again, many hands made the work lighter. Although, the added complication to the normal mess of organizing everything prior to inventory, organizing people to do the work, and all of the generally tedious counting/recording/multiplying/totaling... was that we didn't have power. There has been a crew in the village this week burying overhead power lines to protect them from snow, falling trees, and all of the other things that can happen to a power line strung out alone in the wilderness. This has meant that, during most daylight hours, the power has had to be turned off for the crews to do the work. It made all of our normal jobs and daily tasks a little different (as one would expect), but nobody complained. Loss of power is just a fact of life up here sometimes. However, this work coincided perfectly (or not-so-perfectly) with the end of our fiscal year. This means that all of the inventories in the village, all of the final addition of income and expenses... EVERYTHING that is normally a pain at the end of a business' fiscal year... had to be either done without power or done late at night. The crews counting off items on the shelves of the bookstore wore headlamps and carried flashlights. It was gloomy and rainy, so we didn't have much light coming in the windows. We did all of the adding machine tape totals when we did have power, but most of the work was done (literally) in the dark. If you happen to know one of these brave souls (everyone in the village who wasn't already occupied with a more pressing task like feeding us or fixing the power lines), feel free to give them praise.
3) Today was Halloween. I started celebration at 12:20pm as I crunched the last of the numbers and was left with the bookstore's grand total of inventory to be given to the bookkeeper (out of our hands now). Steph and I sang a little of the Hallelujah Chorus and waved of the bus and then I settled down to lunch, a congratulatory nap, and costume finalizing. This year, I was Raggedy Ann for Halloween. I tried several different methods of dying a mop head red. Did you know that they have so much nylon in them that they won't accept regular fabric dyes?? I do now! We sang Haunted Vespers '87 (Holden Evening Prayer) which was so silly! We were all in costume with several people sneaking in late, having taken longer to get into costume/character than expected. The "haunted" aspect of vespers consisted of Tom's marvelous piano skills transposing the music into more dramatic or spooky keys... adding in random key changes at the ends of verses so we all belted out a note terribly off key with what he and the leader had decided to trick us with... and putting oompa-loompa type beats into songs making them seem a little Frankenstein worthy. We laughed our way through after a little pre-sermon from Eric reminding us that there are enough things we fear and worry about in our everyday lives... that Halloween is a time to laugh at what scares us and continue moving on in the knowledge that our fear is temporary.
After Vespers, we trick-or-treated as a village to the homes on Chalet Hill and Agape. Those who wanted to open their homes to share treats left lights on their porch and ran ahead of the crowd to hand out candy before re-joining the line as it went to the next home. We all trickled into the dining hall after our sweet-toothed adventures. It had been wonderfully decorated with lights, pumpkins we carved at dinner that had been lit, and small aspen trees that had been selected out of the forest (already deceased) and carried in. We had more treats and a dance party. Following the party, we had several different movie options:
Legend of Sleepy Hollow for the kids in Chalet 5
Poltergeist for the grown-ups in Koinonia Fireside
Night Watch for 20-somethings and anyone else in Chalet 1
I went for good company knowing that any of the movies would probably scare me and joined the Chalet 1 crowd. I was feeling bad for having delayed writing so long, so now that the movie is over and my friends in bed, I wanted to write quickly before heading off to dreamland... visions of next year's potential costumes dancing in my head.
Love to you all!