So, after having my stay at the Holiday Inn cut short a few weeks before we closed on the new house, we were forced to find alternative digs. Initially we were going to stay with my brother in Baton Rouge, but after looking at the logistics of getting to and from work (work being over an hour away), we settled on my aunt's camp in Springfield, a scant fifteen minutes away from the office.

The trade-off in the situation is the quality of accommodations; the Ritz it's not. If you're not well versed in what a "camp" is (no, not that kind of camp), it's basically little more than a shack on some rural land (or sometimes raised on pilings over a body of water) that people stay in on the weekend to go fishing or hunting or snipe catching.

I have many fond memories of coming to the camp on weekends as a kid, memories that have been all but obliterated by the last two weeks trying to live day to day in a place that is uncomfortable if you're only there for a weekend. To add insult to injury, we had no hot water for the first three days we were there. On the third day, when I was right on the cusp of being called "Pig Pen" at work, we broke down and heated up water on the stove and showered each other with a perforated garbage bag.

During Brenda's lunch break on the forth day she swung by the camp to pick something up to find my cousin fiddling inside the fuse box using a light bulb duct taped to a frayed wire to test the different circuits in an attempt to resolve the hot water issue (he's from the other side of the family). Amazingly he fixed it and we felt as if we were living in the lap of luxury after that.

Of course that didn't stop me from getting a nasty case of athlete's foot from the rusty ass shower stall.