Afterglow 2008 - Day 6 Thursday

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At awards night, Mom and I were presented with our horseshoe championship ribbons. To be quite honest with you, we didn't deserve them because we lost our game to Scott and Gail, but I accepted the award because I don't come out a winner much in life. You may laugh and make fun of me for putting so much stock in a stupid blue ribbon, but when you go through life as a loser, every victory no matter how big or small, is a chance to celebrate being a winner. So at that moment in time, we were the best at one thing, even if that one thing was a small horseshoes tournament at a tiny lake resort in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. But that moment I felt like a winner, and it felt great.

The table is normally reserved for the adults during dining functions, and the kids ether need to sit at a makeshift table or on the ground. Not at Afterglow. Even though our parents pay for our week up here, we make the rules. Up here the kids rule the world.

Kevin has been deemed an honorary family member by the Reck/Kurutz clan and is welcome to every event and gathering that we have, but every now and then he does have to spend time with his own family. So tonight he sat with Uncle Dan by his cabin.

We chose this evening to get our "family" picture out of the way. At the time Janelle and Faith were a part of our family, so we didn't think to take a picture without them. So now that they aren't in our family anymore, I'm stuck without a picture of my family from Afterglow 2008. This whole thing really screwed us all over.

When it was time for the Sandcastle awards to be handed out, our family was rewarded for their intriguing castle with the 1st place award. Did they have the best castle out there? Yes, but look at the competition. The judges might have just gave them 1st place award because they felt sorry for them for coveting it so much. I think that they got 1st place because they were the best team.

There's only 1 person that I know who takes as many pictures that I do, and that's my Mom. She's all about preserving memories on film and compiling them to look at on a later date. I'm all about digitizing them and writing humorous captions about them. We have different goals, but go about our business the same way.

From the pictures it looks like all we did after the campfire was go back to our cabin and watch movies. As much as I love fire and raging it up on Kurutz's Kourt, night time really does kinda suck up here at Afterglow because we have to be quiet and courteous of other people. That's tough, because I'm not really the quiet and courteous type, especially when I'm drinking.

The end of day 6 (Thursday) is always kind of a depressing because I know that when I wake up I will only have 1 more day of Afterglow before having to wait 365 more days until another one. So then I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that the last day is a good one, and it usually ends up falling short of my expectations. Plus I'm so partied out from the other 6 days to really go all out for Day 7 so I usually just end up lounging around and swimming all day. But that's not really a bad thing, as you'll see from the pictures on the next page.