From: EC92@AOL.COM
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 11:05:14 CST
For the record:
I acquired a very good coffee pot for camping. At the time we were attending
the far north Wisconsin camp in Ron Fox's Council (which has been kind enough
to allow #2 son to enroll in their JLTC course, thank you, only a half hour
from my home and doesn't interfere with his new "job" for the summer of
little league umpire at the ripe age of 13, and a campground where he can
find his way around in the dark, since I already ran one JLTC course there
and he was manual labor for a couple OA things no one else knows about), full
of birch and pine and the troop adults saw this as the IDEAL opportunity.
We would go there every year and we were the resident pros at taking camp
cooking gear issued on arrival and turning it back in shiny and clean (Ron,
the secret is a wet/dry emery paper generously applied to years of cooked on
grease and such) just to get on the camp staff's nerves. But we had decided
it was time for the perfect ADULT COFFEE POT to be developed, since....
1. Sometimes the kids tried to be nice and make the coffee for us. Figured
they could learn how to do it right and help break in the new pot since...
2. We did not plan to wash it. Remove coffee grounds from time to time, but
never, ever was it to hit the water when there was soap within a mile of
camp. (OK, so the leaders were a bunch of coffee fanatics. That camp had a
coffee pot in the staff area for the leaders almost 24/7 but these guys
wanted it "perfect".)
All week we did well. One morning the second pot of the day got a little too
warm allowing us to dump the pile of developing grounds and build a new one.
Time came to leave and we didn't know what to do (what would be the best
method to transport a carbon-covered pot?).
Solution, It came home with me in the back of my station wagon in a garbage
bag. I was stopping at a summer home halfway back to home and could unload
the stuff and haul it home in smaller loads. I arrived with #1 son and we
started unpacking and left the pot sitting around to dry out a bit while we
hit the bedrooms for some rest after a week of fun and chasing kids around.
We awoke to find that a female related to me had arrived with the rest of my
family and had proceeded to try to help us get things stashed away. First
thing she held up was that pot, no black on the outside, no grounds left in
the bottom, proud that she had been able to get it clean and amazed we had
not done such an easy cleaning job ourselves, given that we left for camp
prepared with our usual products to clean the site up (some of which would
make the Camp Director scream had he known how we did it, however all of
which was carefully chosen for its ability to get latrines, cook gear, or
youth's hands clean).
We never did start over on the "perfect adult coffee pot". We'd been defeated
once and we just KNEW that something similar would happen again.
Tom Petrik
